Хилари Боннер - Death Comes First

‘You didn’t consider that he could have staged his own disappearance?’

‘Actually no, it didn’t occur to me. That’s the stuff of fiction, isn’t it?’

Vogel persevered. ‘Who exactly is this “we” you keep referring to?’

‘Me and Stephen Hardcastle,’ said Henry.

‘So Stephen also knew about the illicit arms dealing?’

‘Yes. He was as shocked as I was. Charlie was Stephen’s closest friend, but he hadn’t confided any of it to him.’

‘I see. And how did you break into Charlie’s email?’

‘He’d left a laptop locked in his safe in the office. He had a brand-new one, which he must’ve taken with him, but when we looked in the safe we found the old one.’

‘His personal safe?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you and Stephen Hardcastle had access to it.’

‘Janet kept a spare key.’

Vogel nodded. He glanced at Nobby Clarke. She seemed content to let him lead the questioning.

‘Wasn’t it password protected?’ he asked. ‘His email would have been, surely?’

‘Yes. But we have a chap who does IT for us, sets up our accounts. I contacted him. Charlie had never bothered to change the passwords this chap used to set the whole thing up for him in the beginning.’

‘Didn’t you think that was sloppy for a man involved in illicit arms deals? I mean, wouldn’t you have expected him to destroy an old laptop? He doesn’t even ensure that he has a password nobody else knew about, and he leaves a laptop containing incriminating information in a safe to which other people have access. Didn’t you think that was unbelievably sloppy?’

Henry shrugged. ‘It wasn’t out of character, given the way Charlie had been behaving. Besides, if he was planning to kill himself, what would it matter? Even if he were planning to stage his own disappearance and create a new life for himself, as you now seem to think might have been the case, it wouldn’t have had any impact on his plans. Besides, Charlie was hopeless at computer stuff. One way or another, it didn’t strike us as odd that he had left his old laptop in a safe.’

‘And you used the email addresses Charlie had on his machine to contact these people and cancel all arms deals, is that correct?’

Henry agreed that it was.

Vogel was still looking at the screen on Henry’s iPhone. He did some quick mental arithmetic, using the fingers of both hands. Suddenly he got it.

‘Mr Tanner, didn’t you think that the Marlon email address was a little... prosaic?’

Henry looked blank.

‘Marlon, as in Marlon Brando, The Godfather ,’ said Vogel. ‘Numbers 8, 9 and 20. They represent the letters of the alphabet: H, I and T. HIT. As in hitman, perhaps?’

Henry still looked blank.

‘Maybe, but what difference does it make?’

‘It could be an implied threat,’ said Vogel. ‘You were maybe supposed to work out that the email address was telling you it was from a hitman of some sort.’

‘I didn’t even come close,’ said Tanner. ‘I can’t see how you worked it out so quickly, either.’

‘He has that sort of mind,’ remarked Clarke.

She didn’t make it sound as if she was paying Vogel a compliment.

Vogel paid her no attention.

‘Mr Tanner, did you at any stage have dealings with “Marlon” or any of these people through any other means than email?’ Vogel asked.

Henry said that he hadn’t.

‘So you’ve never met any of these people, you’ve never spoken to them on the telephone?’

‘No,’ said Henry. ‘I tried to when Fred went missing. I gave them my phone number. I told them to phone me any time day or night. I told them I was prepared to do anything, give them anything, even the arms they wanted so much, anything to get my grandson back. I wasn’t entirely convinced, you see, by their denials. I still reckoned it was possible they were holding him to ransom. I kept thinking they would call sooner or later. I kept waiting for them to call. Nobody called.’

Vogel had more questions but was interrupted by the arrival of a uniformed constable, PC Mick Perkins, who had been instructed to keep a watching brief on Joyce Mildmay.

‘They told me you were here, ma’am,’ he said, addressing DCI Clarke. ‘And they wouldn’t let me use my phone in intensive care. There’s something I thought you should know straight away.’

He leaned closer to Nobby Clarke, speaking into her ear in little more than a whisper. Vogel could not hear what the PC was saying. He looked at Clarke questioningly.

Henry Tanner took the opportunity to reach out again to his sobbing wife. A glutton for punishment, thought Vogel. He had rarely seen anyone as angry as Felicity Tanner. Again she leaned away, rejecting him. And tough, strong Henry looked about to break down himself.

Clarke touched Vogel on the arm.

‘C’mon,’ she said.

Turning back to the bed, she addressed Henry and Felicity: ‘Mr and Mrs Tanner, we’re going to leave you now. Although I am afraid we will need to speak to you again later. Meanwhile, I would like to say again how sorry we are for your loss.’

The Tanners, both overwhelmed now by their own misery, seemed not to hear her.

‘If there is anything we can do to help, please tell PC Saslow,’ Clarke urged them as she opened the door. ‘That’s what she’s here for.’

Clarke then led Vogel from the room, with Perkins following.

‘PC Perkins says Joyce Mildmay’s wide awake now and the medics have given us the go-ahead to question her,’ said the DCI, as soon as she had closed the door to Henry’s room. ‘But it’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure.’

Joyce had been in a merciful daze ever since her admission to Southmead Hospital. Following her brief moment of dreadful lucidity on the Floating Harbour quayside after being pulled from the water, she had become hysterical. In the ambulance, en route to the hospital, she’d had to be restrained after banging her head repeatedly against the metal frame of her stretcher, and grabbing pieces of the paramedics’ medical equipment, including an inadequately secured oxygen tank, which she had proceeded to pound against the sides of the ambulance. She had also attacked the paramedics, scratching and kicking out at them.

She continued to repeatedly bang her own head against any adjacent hard surface in A & E, and to attack staff who tried to remonstrate with her. Ultimately one of the duty doctors had prescribed a heavy sedative, partly for her own protection, and partly for the protection of hospital staff and property.

She had been checked out as much as possible then moved to intensive care, because she was still considered to be at risk, and possibly to be a risk, although she did not know that.

The effects of the sedative were only now beginning to wear off. And she could remember little of the last few hours.

She knew that both her younger son and her only daughter were dead. Of course she knew that. She had seen their poor dead faces. But her brain had not quite accepted it. She also knew that their own father had killed them. Her children had been murdered by their father. There was a name for it. Patricide. Charlie had committed patricide.

It couldn’t have happened, though, could it?

She thought maybe she was going mad. Like Charlie. Even madder than Charlie. She didn’t mind. If she was mad then it could mean that Fred and Molly might still be alive. Couldn’t it?

She knew better.

And what about Charlie? How mad had he become to do what he did, to deliberately drive the wife and children he purported to love so much into the deep water of the harbour? And the young woman who’d been duped into believing that he wanted to start a new life with her, she’d been in the car too. Monika, whom Joyce had considered part of her household. Not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered.