Хилари Боннер - Death Comes First

‘My God, he has some explaining to do,’ muttered Felicity, turning back to Henry.

‘As do you, Henry,’ she continued. ‘And why don’t you start by explaining why you thought Charlie was a likely candidate for suicide? Come on, Henry, break the habit of a lifetime. Try being honest.’

Neither Clarke nor Vogel said anything. They were both happy for the moment to let Felicity do the questioning. They just stood at the foot of the bed looking at Henry.

The older man sighed and then, as if resigned to his fate, began with the same question he had asked on their previous visit:

‘DCI Clarke, you and DI Vogel know all about the, uh, covert activities of Tanner-Max, do you not?’

‘More or less,’ replied the DCI.

Vogel grunted. Rather more less than more, he thought, but he supposed he knew enough. He’d grasped the gist of it.

Felicity frowned. ‘I bloody don’t,’ she snapped.

‘You must have picked up some idea over the years,’ said Henry.

‘Not enough to think that it might lead my son-in-law to want to kill himself. Or to come up with some elaborate scam which has led us to believe all these months that he is dead. Not enough to think that it might end with two of my grandchildren dying so horrifically. Two of my grandchildren being murdered, Henry. My daughter lying in a hospital bed still fighting for a life she isn’t going to want now. And what about William? Maybe his death wasn’t an accident, either. Oh, Henry, Henry. What have you done?’

Felicity shouted the words then seemed to collapse. She sat slouched forward, holding her head in her hands. Her shoulders began to heave. Vogel could no longer see her face. He didn’t need to in order to realize the state she was in.

‘It wasn’t the business, it wasn’t anything we did at Tanner-Max that made me think Charlie had killed himself,’ said Henry quietly, addressing no one in particular. ‘I found out that Charlie had gone independent. It seems that what the family and our business provided for him was not enough. He was doing deals with gangsters, for God’s sake. I discovered that he had diverted stock from a number of the international deals we brokered and he’d been selling weapons destined for our overseas clients to a London gang. He was involved in organized crime—’

‘Henry, are you saying you are an arms dealer?’ Felicity cried. ‘You deal in arms? I always knew there was something going on at Tanner-Max, something more than sending whisky all over the world. But not this. Is it true?’

Henry inclined his head slightly.

‘In the service of the British government,’ he said rather pompously. ‘And we are brokers, not dealers.’

‘You are monsters,’ responded Felicity, horrified.

‘Would you go on, please, Mr Tanner,’ interjected Clarke. ‘You were telling us about the criminal activities you believed your son-in-law to be involved in.

‘Yes.’

Henry glanced anxiously at his wife before continuing. She was not looking at him.

‘I found out about it the day after he disappeared off his boat. I think he was afraid of the people he was dealing with. I still think that, even if he staged his death rather than killing himself. Maybe he knew he hadn’t covered his tracks well enough. He would certainly have known that I would be furious. But I don’t think for one moment he was afraid of me. No, he was out of his depth. He was afraid of the criminals he’d got himself mixed up with. It seems he had good reason to be. After he was gone, they started to put pressure on me. I believe they were behind the shooting. Who else would send a gunman to kill me?’

‘You said yourself that the work that you have done over the years could have made you a target,’ responded DCI Clarke. ‘Is it not possible that you were shot by members of some terrorist organization, for example?’

Henry shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Mr Smith has been looking into that side of things since Fred disappeared. He and his people hadn’t come up with any evidence to suggest—’

Felicity interrupted again.

‘Who the heck is Mr Smith?’ she asked.

Henry made no attempt to reply.

Vogel too stared at the older man. A rooftop sniper was likely to be a professional, that was for sure. But Henry was only wounded, shot in the right shoulder, away from the heart. A professional with a sniper’s rifle did not often mess up. If the intention had been to kill Henry, then Vogel would not expect him to be still alive. So maybe that hadn’t been the intention.

Tanner continued to ignore his wife.

‘Here, take a look at my email,’ he said suddenly.

Henry reached for his iPhone on the bedside table and tossed it across the room towards the two police officers.

Nobby Clarke’s physical reactions were better and quicker than Vogel’s. But then so were almost anybody’s. She caught the phone with one hand and brought up Henry Tanner’s email account.

Vogel studied the screen over her shoulder.

Third on the list was an email from an innocent enough hotmail address, Marlon8920@hotmail.com.

Vogel was a crossword freak. There was something about that email address that was crying out to him. But, for the moment at any rate, he couldn’t quite get it.

The message was simple and to the point: You have been warned. Please reinstate our order .

‘So what do you believe this to mean, Mr Tanner?’ enquired Clarke.

Henry leaned back in the pillows. Again he seemed to be willing the whole scenario to disappear.

‘For fuck’s sake, will you answer their bloody questions before we have any more deaths?’ barked Felicity.

Henry did so.

‘When I found out what Charlie had been doing I put a stop to it at once. I let the people he was dealing with know they would receive no more arms from us. They didn’t take it well. They were in the middle of a transaction with Charlie and there was money outstanding. Not a fortune — about £10,000. I offered straight away to repay it. But that wasn’t good enough.

‘They said a deal had been done. They didn’t want the money, they wanted the goods. As arranged. They kept insisting, and I kept saying no. I suppose I was calling their bluff. I mean, I couldn’t believe they would do anything. Then when Fred disappeared...’

Felicity screamed. She actually screamed. Once. At the top of her voice. Stopping Henry in his tracks. It was a shrill, sharp sound cutting through the claustrophobic atmosphere of the hospital room.

Yet when she spoke her voice was quiet. Dangerously quiet.

‘Are you saying that when Fred disappeared you thought he had been taken by these people, these evil, dangerous people, that you thought they would use him to threaten you?’ she asked. ‘And yet you told nobody about any of this. Not the police or your family. Henry, you are despicable.’

Henry flinched. ‘Look, I asked them if they had taken Fred,’ he said. ‘They replied that they weren’t child molesters. That’s all. They weren’t child molesters.’

‘Mr Tanner,’ said Vogel. ‘How did you find out that Charlie had been dealing with criminals?’

‘From his email. After he disappeared from his boat it seemed a good idea to check out his email account. At first we didn’t have any idea what might have happened to him. We thought his email might give us some sort of clue. And it did. As soon as we read all this stuff it seemed obvious that Charlie had reason to kill himself. I knew he lived on a knife’s edge. I knew he relied far too much on prescription drugs. Of course I knew. But as long as he held himself together I wasn’t going to do anything about it. When I came to believe that he’d ended his own life, naturally I wished I had.’