Bound, page 12
‘That you’ll find out who did this. And I don’t mean you, the police, I mean you, personally. I think I can trust you, you seem okay.’ A compliment? ‘I need you to clear my husband’s name, and find out who killed him.’ A primer.
I looked at this woman, eroded by the weight of grief – grief for someone I considered to be a monster, on the lowest rung of humanity – and realised with a lurch that this was a pledge I couldn’t refuse.
36
‘Who the hell are you and how did you get into my house?’
‘Funny, ha, ha, ha.’ I reached down and grabbed the nearest cushion off the sofa and hiffed it at Maggie, who was ensconced on the other sofa, reading what looked like a textbook. She’d turned into a girly swot. She deflected the cushion with the ease of someone who had years of practice. ‘I haven’t been that AWOL,’ I said, which was a bit of a porky really.
‘Oh yes you have. You were supposed to cook dinner tonight, but I guess you forgot.’ She put on a mock stern look.
‘Shit, sorry.’ I looked at the coffee table and saw a breakfast bowl with what looked like traces of Weet-Bix in it. ‘But I see you’ve dined anyway.’
She smiled. ‘Breakfast of champions, for when only the best will do.’ Maggs had lived with me long enough to know my turns on dinner duty occasionally resulted in an impromptu scavenge-for-yourself night. Fortunately she was the kind of girl who thought breakfast was fine dining at any time of day. In fact, sometimes she’d even get all fancy and cook herself porridge, with lashings of brown sugar and, if truly decadent, some cream. The thought made me salivate.
Maggie had put her book on her lap and was looking at me funny. I looked down to make sure I didn’t have anything stuck to my front and had done my fly up.
‘What?’
‘What, what?’
‘You’re looking at me like I’ve done something.’
‘Am I?’ she said. ‘Well I think you owe me a mug of Milo at least, seeing as you failed in your duties as chef du jour. I need something to wash the stodge down with.’
‘Fair enough.’ I wandered across to the kitchen, filled up the jug and flipped it on. ‘Do you want Toffee Pops with that?’ She didn’t reply. I heard a heavy clomp on the floor that I recognised as the textbook crash-landing, and then footsteps approaching me.
‘What now?’ I asked, and turned around. Maggie was standing there, smiling at me, looking sheepish. ‘Something’s up. Is it Rudy? He’s proposed, hasn’t he? Has he asked you to marry him?’
I saw a little flicker cross her eyes, but she was shaking her head. ‘No, no, don’t be silly. He wouldn’t do a thing like that.’ She blushed an elegant shade of red.
Oh yes, he would, and it was only a matter of time. I didn’t want to think about the changes to our lives that event would bring, but knew it was a certainty, because the two of them were happy and perfect together. Mr Tall and Handsome French Aristocrat and Ms Tall and Gorgeous Queen of Serenity. Of course I’d be thrilled for them, but I still experienced a little pang of jealousy at the thought of some guy stealing my best friend away.
‘Well, what then?’
She was hedging, and stalling. Maggie never hedged and stalled. She always shot from the hip, albeit in a friendly and loving kind of a way. My suspicion-o-meter cranked up to full alert.
‘You’re moving out, is that it? You’re abandoning me and moving in with Rudy!’
‘No, no, no,’ she said, and laughed. ‘It’s nothing to do with Rudy, or me.’
‘Well, what is it then?’
She took a big breath. She looked at me with her head cocked to the side, then straightened up and smiled. ‘I don’t quite know how to tell you this, and I don’t know that you’re going to like it.’
‘But?’
‘But, you’re pregnant.’
I gave her a look that seriously questioned her sanity. ‘Don’t be so bloody daft. Me? Pregnant?’
‘Yup. Pregnant.’
‘Are you sure?’ Maggie was one of those women who could tell from a sideways glance across a crowded room that a woman was in the family way. She’d never been wrong. Her track record was one hundred per cent bang on, banged-up accurate.
‘Certain.’
I felt the blood drain out of my face. ‘Oh shit.’
37
I was trying to keep my mind on the job but was suffering a severe lack of sleep due to churning over everything going on with Dad, and the bombshell Maggie had dropped on me the night before, confirmed emphatically by a do-it-yourself pregnancy test kit hurriedly bought from the urgent pharmacy. All in all it meant my mind was in la-la land and it was very much a case of lights on but no one home. Unfortunately, my lack of concentration had been noted by some of my colleagues.
‘Shephard.’ My head snapped to attention as DI Johns’ voice cut through the air. ‘Are you going to bother to listen to this, or is there something else more important you’d like to share?’ I felt every set of eyes in the room zero in on my face. Well it was important, but nothing I was about to share.
‘No, sir,’ I mumbled, and looked down at the floor. I felt my eyes well up, and blinked hard. God knew I didn’t need that kind of attention right now. And morning briefing wasn’t the time or place for a girly breakdown.
‘Well, keep up then. That goes for all of you. We have two murder investigations on the go, people, and a lot of public scrutiny. We can’t have anyone dropping the ball. I expect everyone’s A-game, nothing less.’ Would he continue with the Sunday sermon or would he relinquish the pulpit so we could actually get on with our work? ‘The media is already all over it. This is fine fodder for them – a warrant issued for Powell’s arrest, and then he turns up dead. No one, but no one…’ he paused and I didn’t have to glance up to know he was looking at me; ‘…is to talk to the media, understood? Media liaison officer only. Right.’ He clapped his hands twice, just like Miss McAllister in standard one. ‘First up, Detective Frost. What is there to report on the Henderson case?’
Paul moved from his desk into the centre of the room. The burden I was carrying meant I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye. God, what would he think? What did I think, for that matter? My thought processes were swinging wildly from total bewilderment, to vague wonderment, to outright terror.
‘At present all of our energies are targeted on locating and arresting Jacob Sandhurst. We’ve put out an alert nationwide and informed border control. We are also talking with all of his known associates in an effort to find him, and are checking all properties he has a connection with. So far there has been no word as to his whereabouts and we haven’t located his vehicle, a late-model BMW X5 SUV, black.’
‘What about news from the drug squad, organised crime? Have there been any whispers in the criminal underworld?’ the DI asked.
‘Not as to his location. There is speculation that he was responsible for the murder of Gideon Powell, and also speculation that the reason we can’t locate him is because he has been murdered too and hasn’t turned up yet. None of it is backed up by an ounce of proof, so none of it is helpful. We have had more forensic evidence results back from the crime scene at Seacliff. Hairs found inside the hood of the bloodied disposable boiler suit recovered from the township provided DNA that matched Gideon Powell. With that and his fingerprints recovered from the latex gloves, and Sandhurst’s fingerprints, it gives conclusive evidence that Powell and Sandhurst were responsible for the murder of John Henderson. We also have eyewitness evidence from Declan Henderson that both Powell and Sandhurst had in fact been to the Henderson home in the month prior to the attack, something they both denied during questioning.’
‘Thank you, Detective.’ Paul caught my eye as he returned to his spot. I could see the question, ‘you okay?’ I gave a barely discernible nod. The fact was I was far from okay. Funny how easy it was to lie.
‘Right, Detective Van Rij, the Powell case.’
Otto took centre stage. His South African accent had been diluted enough by years of living in New Zealand to be soft and mildly lyrical.
‘Gideon Powell’s body was discovered by a dog walker yesterday morning, down at the Otago Yacht Club on Magnet Street, in among the parked and stored boats. Preliminary post-mortem results show cause of death was gunshot wounds to the neck and head, most likely fired at a distance of one to two metres from the victim. It was a nine-millimetre calibre weapon, a pistol. Blood evidence indicates he died several metres from where he was found and was dragged feet first to where he could be hidden from easy view. The killer kicked dirt over the trail of blood and ripped up and threw grass over the scene. Time of death is estimated to have been around Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. Bear in mind, Powell had been here at the station until mid-afternoon on Wednesday for questioning.’
That fit with his wife’s testimony about when she last saw him. It also meant the police may have been among the last people to see him alive. I bet the media would have something to say about that, too.
‘No one from the general public has reported hearing gunshots, but there is a construction site nearby that is doing a lot of riveting at the moment, which could have disguised any noise; also, the quarry had been blasting around that time. Also the killer could have used a silencer.’
That made sense. The murder scene was also in an industrial area, with no residences nearby. There was a cycleway in the vicinity, so perhaps some cyclists or walkers would come forward now the case was in the media.
‘One interesting thing from the post-mortem: there appears to have been a struggle – this wasn’t a straight-out execution. Powell had some bruising to his face and torso. He didn’t appear to have any defensive wounds on his hands, though. Also, we found the sheath of a knife in his right coat pocket. The blade would have been fifteen centimetres long, a hunting knife, but there was no sign of a knife at the scene. We have to assume the killer took the weapon. Powell may have stabbed at his killer, and even wounded him. We’ve taken blood samples from everywhere at the scene and from the body, in the hope of finding evidence of the other person, but as you can imagine, there was quite a lot of it. Also, the way he was dragged, his hands through his own blood, any other contributing blood evidence would have been masked. But you never know, we might get lucky.’
‘Luck will have nothing to do with it. We can’t afford to rely on luck. Thank you, Detective.’
Otto shot the DI a dark look, and then returned to his place next to Smithy, who was looking just as dark.
‘Right, people. You all know what you’ve got to do. Get busy.’
Sermon was over. Church was out.
38
It was Sunday afternoon. I was supposed to be working, but was only managing a poor impression of it. My concentration levels had bottomed out and I was having fond thoughts of caffeine. I had spent the last hour looking over Gideon Powell’s telephone and cellphone records on his last Wednesday as a living and breathing citizen of planet Earth. The long lists of numbers had phased in and out, with the digits seeming to move around on the page like one of those freaky optical illusions, evading my focus and blurring just as I thought I had a grasp on them. Thus, a job that should have taken half an hour took at least twice that.
Powell’s home phone had received several calls, including one from a number that belonged to his mother. I couldn’t get my head around such a despicable specimen actually having a mother. But I supposed, like all of us, he had been born, not somehow spawned. When imagining the kind of woman who would breed something like him, the words battle-axe jumped to mind, rather than an image of someone in the ‘little old lady from Tweety Pie and Sylvester’ mould. But I could have been wrong.
His mother might be a perfectly lovely woman. Yeah, right.
More significant was a call from the home phone number of a Mr Jacob Sandhurst. Mr Sandhurst who was still at large. What had they discussed? Damage control? An appointment with fate? Somehow I didn’t think they had been swapping casserole recipes. We had no direct evidence to say that Sandhurst had killed Powell, but this piece of information added to the overall picture of his actions on the night in question.
Powell’s cellphone reflected the level of paranoia required to survive as a criminal. It was some android thing, as gadgety as you could get, and he had it loaded with every application known to man: games, weather, currency converter, this funny little thing that was like flicking a cigarette lighter, even a spirit level. What it was lacking was phone numbers. His cellphone logs only went back to the day before. It would appear that he cleared them all daily, in case of theft or seizure, I imagined. We could get all of his previous call numbers from his service provider; that was no problem. His contacts list was minimal: his wife, mother, children, children’s school, what turned out to be immediate family, his lawyer, and Jacob Sandhurst. Considering my contacts list had at least fifty people on it, and I didn’t consider myself to be flush with acquaintances, that was pretty spartan. Of the five calls logged that night, none was from those in his address book. Most were from unidentified pre-paid numbers. What a surprise. Powell probably owned a couple of those himself, for those little occasions where you didn’t want to leave a trace. There was one exception to the pre-paid epidemic, and that was from an unlisted landline that, with some digging, turned out to belong to a public telephone on Hanover Street. As far as I was aware there weren’t any surveillance cameras in the area that could be used to try and identify the caller – Dunedin wasn’t that Big Brotherish, thank God – but in the day of cellphones, it was decidedly dodgy for someone to call from a public payphone at nine o’clock at night. Especially when a few hours later the recipient was rather dead.
As I struggled to process this information, while simultaneously trying to cope with the Dad situation, the surprise Paul and progeny situation, and the lack of sleep situation, I came to realise my brain had actually frozen; it was doing the human equivalent to the computer blue screen of death, or the funny little spinning beachball if you were a Mac girl. It was a case of information overload, you have too many windows open, the system is not responding, please shut down. It was time to force quit.
39
It was Monday morning and I was feeling a tiny bit more human after an evening at home with Maggs and a date with the DVD player. Maggs had chosen a movie about some drop-dead gorgeous chick who got knocked up by some slovenly dweeb. Was she trying to tell me something? Whatever her motive, it backfired, because on that front I was just as confused as ever.
One of the fun things The Boss had instructed me to do today was have another little chat with that king of the paper shredder, Blair Harvey-Boyd. I didn’t really mind as I would have taken on any task, no matter how menial, if only it would help take my mind off life, the universe and everything. Hell, I would have even cleaned the toilets if he’d asked me, and thanked him for the opportunity.
The forensic accountants had been busy doing their thing, going over the books of Eros Global, and had found one or two major discrepancies, and several hundred minor ones. The upshot of it was that Mr Harvey-Boyd had been a very bad boy and had been biting the hand that fed him. In fact, not only had he bitten the hand, he had eaten halfway up the arm. It also explained his behaviour when Smithy and I found him busy destroying documents at an alarming rate when we first visited John Henderson’s offices. Documents that had all been re-pieced together. It was the behaviour of someone with something to hide, and Blair Harvey-Boyd most certainly did. So far the tally was at three hundred thousand dollars, and rising. If there had been any question as to the perpetrators of John Henderson’s murder, we would have been having a very serious look at Blair Harvey-Boyd. Nevertheless, I suspected we’d still need to investigate the possibility of him being in cahoots with Powell and Sandhurst, though I doubted that was likely, going by Astrid’s testimony.
The kind of greed that could lead a man to embezzle funds could also make him kill. His motive factor had just shot up. But that was all by the by, seeing as all the evidence pointed to Gideon Powell and Jacob Sandhurst – one of whom was safely under refrigeration at the morgue and was no loss to the world, the other of whom was at large. I felt a twinge of unease, the image of Angela Powell delivering her impassioned plea heavy in my mind.
Blair Harvey-Boyd was attired in his sartorial best. A three-piece suit, silk cravat and shoes that screamed expensive. At least we knew how he managed to fund his wardrobe and taste in footwear. He also knew we knew. At least he had the grace to look uncomfortable. The décor of the interrogation room didn’t do anything to flatter the green of his suit.
‘How long have you been stealing from John Henderson, Mr Harvey-Boyd?’
‘Well I wouldn’t call it stealing, as such,’ he said.
I had to cover my scepticism with a cough. ‘What precisely would you call it then?’ I asked.
There was no reply. At least he didn’t try to talk it away as creative accounting, or collecting what was due, or – my personal favourite – just borrowing it and intending to pay it back. As often happened with someone who had no reasonable defence, he mounted an offensive.
‘Was it Astrid who dobbed me in? I bet it was. She always was a bit jealous, you know.’
I couldn’t imagine a woman like Astrid feeling remotely jealous about any aspect of Blair Harvey-Boyd’s life, except for maybe some of his jewellery. It appeared she had been just as deceived as John Henderson by this thief’s charms.
‘Jealous of what?’
‘Oh, the fact that I earned more than she did, that I had a more active role in the business, whereas she was just the secretary.’ I could think of some very hardworking, knowledgeable and highly esteemed women downstairs here at the station who would have gladly clubbed the man across the lug-hole if they’d heard that comment. I was tempted to give him one on their behalf. ‘And I had a better relationship with John than she did.’
