Fifty-Seven

Despite the fact that the tip had come from Kevan de Vries and was therefore slightly suspect, Tim was convinced that he’d been correct in suggesting that both Sentance and Harry Briggs were headed for Hull. He believed they were almost certain to try to leave the country and that getting on a ferry from Hull was their best option; they might well be travelling, hidden by the driver, in one of the de Vries lorries, which took the North Sea crossing on a daily basis. The alternatives would be to risk going further to another port or airport, or holing themselves up in the Fens somewhere. Given what he knew of both men, he thought that their choosing either of these possible courses of action was unlikely. Sentance, in particular, would want to escape with the money. No doubt Harry Briggs had made sure of his own hefty cut and, as Sentance was physically afraid of him, Harry was probably calling the shots.

Tim thought that they’d try to meet, either en route somewhere or once they’d boarded a ferry. He made a number of phone calls to the Humberside police and the transport police who patrolled the docks at Hull. He asked Ricky MacFadyen to get a photograph of Harry from Jackie Briggs and had it scanned and emailed to the police at Boston and Hull. Ricky had established that Harry had a passport which Jackie could not find. Although she’d said she didn’t know where to look for it, the fact that she couldn’t lay hands on it only served to confirm Tim’s suspicions.

Tim felt restless. He couldn’t decide whether to go to Hull himself, purely on a hunch, or drive back to Spalding to take part in interrogating the supervisors. He realised with a pang of guilt that he’d barely seen Katrin during the past forty-eight hours and gave her a call. She seemed quite calm.

“How are you feeling?”

“A bit better, at last. Juliet came out of hospital a couple of days ago. She thinks she’s made some kind of breakthrough with Florence Jacobs’ diaries. She needs to talk to you about it.”

“Great. But it’s going to have to wait until tomorrow. We’ve just made some arrests and I’ve got another suspect on the run. Could you call her and say I’ll be in touch tomorrow? And I’ll catch you later. I’ll come home for dinner, but it might be late. Don’t wait for me.”

“OK. I love you.”

But Tim had already gone.

 

On balance, he decided not to go to Hull, much as he enjoyed the thrill of a chase. Given the levels of vigilance that he’d now instigated, he knew it was unlikely that Sentance and Briggs would be able to embark unnoticed on one of the ferries from Hull. Interviewing the eight staff from the Sutton Bridge plant would be a much trickier operation than hanging around in Hull. He was certain that they’d all instruct solicitors before they agreed to say anything at all. The evidence against them was still only circumstantial. He’d had the Sutton Bridge plant shut down and police from Boston and Spalding were combing it for clues.

His decision to return to Spalding was timely, because, when he arrived, Superintendent Thornton, whose normal demeanour exhibited reasonable but impatient testiness, was indulging in one of his rare out-and-out rages. On approaching his office, Tim could hear him storming at Andy Carstairs.

“You’d better speak up, DC Carstairs! Why have you arrested all these people? And what’s happening about Kevan de Vries? I hope that you haven’t been troubling him with your enquiries . . .”

Tim tapped at the door and walked in.

“Yates! Would you kindly tell me what is going on?”

As soon as Tim had explained that another murder had taken place on the Lincolnshire side of the county boundary and that it was probably linked to the Norfolk murder, the superintendent quietened down. He shot Andy a baleful look.

“You could have told me that, Carstairs,” he said. “It would have saved a lot of trouble. Well, get on with it, both of you. I’m still dubious about bringing in so many suspects all at once. I hope you know what you’re doing. Just make sure you handle it carefully. Give them legal help if they ask for it. And, Yates, I still expect you to debrief me later about what is going on in the de Vries household.”

 

In the event, the interviews went even more smoothly than Tim could have wished. The supervisors were terrified of being charged with murder and opened up without too much difficulty when they were interrogated separately and under caution. Some even said more than advised by the solicitors appointed to safeguard their interests. Only Molly held out for a while before giving her own, sparser, account, but all their stories tallied and this time Tim knew they had not been able to collaborate in advance; on the last occasion they’d met alone they’d had no intention of admitting their guilt.

When all their accounts had been pieced together, Tim realised that the police already held much of the information they disclosed. It had been given to them in snippets by Sentance and by Kevan de Vries himself. Whether or not with de Vries’ permission – and Tim suspected that he would never know the truth on that point – Sentance had pursued his idea of recruiting young women from Eastern Europe to work in the ever-expanding de Vries plants. He’d encountered much more red tape than he’d expected. The solution that he’d come up with was to supply them with bogus British passports.

When they’d arrived in the UK, the girls were vulnerable and completely dependent on the company. Some of them were very young and few could speak English. Most were also pretty in a waif-like, underfed sort of way. They were clearly attractive to men and Sentance had shelved his original plan to board them with any employees who were willing to take them and had instead boarded some with specially-selected employees, others in the caravan park on the edge of the town. None of the girls was officially employed by the company. They were treated as casuals, like gang women, and paid much lower rates than ‘real’ employees. They were offered the option of earning extra money ‘in other ways’. The supervisors had to have been in on it, of course, and probably Margaret Nugent as well. The extent to which the other employees realised what was going on was open to question. They were used to working alongside gang women and other casuals, so their innocence may have been genuine. What was not in doubt was that Sentance had set up a syndicate with the supervisors to enable them to make money from the girls’ immoral earnings.

Although no-one was identified, the supervisors said that some of the clients were wealthy, influential local people. A few of the most promising girls were groomed for ‘special services’, which were usually supplied at the container ‘village’ that Andy Carstairs had stumbled upon. There was some talk of a more exclusive location that catered for the wealthiest and most privileged clients, but the supervisors were vague about this. They said that only Sentance knew about it. It flashed through Tim’s mind that the ‘special location’ could have been the cellar at Laurieston House. He thought of the vicious-looking hook on which Giash had injured himself. The hooks had been there for many years, perhaps since the time of the bankrupt butcher, but the furniture in front of them had been disturbed quite recently.

The young woman who’d died had been one of the ‘special’ ones. None of the supervisors would admit to knowing how or why she’d died. On balance, Tim felt inclined to believe them. Thinking about Stuart Salkeld’s conjectures, Tim suspected that her death had been the result of a rough sex game that had gone wrong. The client had probably called Sentance in a panic and Sentance had more than likely told Harry Briggs to get rid of the body. Although the supervisors didn’t know the details, Harry was clearly in up to his neck and getting a substantial cut of the proceeds.

There were many questions still to be answered. Most important and most urgent was the need to understand what happened to the women when they grew too old to be useful. The supervisors were unanimous in asserting that all those who’d been exploited were in their teens and twenties, yet this racket had been going on for at least ten years. There must have been a constant exodus of spent prostitutes, their numbers roughly matching the influx of new young women. Tim fervently hoped that when the girls grew ‘too old’ they’d been sent back to Eastern Europe, perhaps with some kind of gratuity to keep them quiet. The alternative would be too horrific to contemplate.

Tim had yet to understand the nature or extent of Margaret Nugent’s role. It was unclear whether she, too, was making money out of Sentance’s exploits, though somehow Tim doubted it. He thought it more likely that she had some ‘extra’ covert relationship with Sentance, or alternatively was hoping for one. He guessed that Molly was in a similar position: it would explain the animosity of the two women towards each other.

Finally, there were the passports. The supervisors claimed to have no detailed knowledge of how Sentance had forged the passports for the girls; they just knew that he’d done it. Tim was inclined to believe this, too, but it didn’t explain why the five partially-completed passports had been found in the cellar at Laurieston. Why would Sentance be concocting passports there, unless Kevan de Vries was involved in some way? Or Joanna de Vries, of course. Tim thought back to de Vries’ story about Archie and how he thought that Joanna might have continued to help other childless parents. If she and Sentance were working together to ‘import’ orphans, that could explain why the passports were being forged in her cellar. And Joanna de Vries had not wanted to go to St Lucia. Kevan de Vries had suggested, and Tim had accepted, that this was because she was reluctant to leave Archie, even though she didn’t want him to see her in the last stages of her illness, a reluctance that she’d overcome because the desire to hold him again had been stronger. But perhaps she’d had a further reason for returning. It would take many hours of police time to delve into all the illegal immigrant stuff. He suspected that if Sentance were not apprehended they would never get to the bottom of it.

There was another question nagging away at him. How guilty was Kevan de Vries? As things stood, he could be accused only of bringing a child into the country without the correct papers: a venial sin, especially if he could produce evidence that that child was an orphan rescued from very disadvantaged circumstances. Tim had warmed a little to Kevan de Vries as he’d seen more of him and he certainly pitied the man for the loss of his wife and the many years of bearing the trauma of her illness that had preceded it. Something about him still didn’t quite ring true, even so. All of the crimes, from the break-in and discovery of the passports to the murder of Dulcie Wharton, had been played out against the backdrop of the de Vries empire and Kevan de Vries, its boss, was surely too shrewd an operator to have let all that happen unnoticed under his very nose. Several of the key events had actually happened in his house. Could he really be as innocent as he claimed? If the answer was yes, despite not usually having truck with superstition, Tim would be forced to conclude that ‘Sausage Hall’ was indeed jinxed.

 

Harry Briggs’ van was apprehended by a police car on the A15, near Horncastle. A search of the van produced two holdalls, one packed with clothing and the other with £100,000 in twenties. He was carrying a one-way ticket for a foot-passenger on the Hull to Rotterdam overnight ferry. He was arrested, cautioned and taken to Spalding police station to be interviewed.

Briggs demanded to be provided with a solicitor and would speak only when the latter had arrived. He denied any involvement in the deaths either of the woman whose body had been found in Sandringham woods or of Dulcie Wharton. He said that the money that he’d been carrying was to pay for materials for a ‘back pocket’ construction job that he’d been offered in the Netherlands. He refused to provide contacts to corroborate his story. He denied that he’d failed to tell his wife about his departure, saying that ‘she must have got confused’. When asked if he knew the whereabouts of Tony Sentance, he appeared to be extremely agitated, but would only answer: ‘No comment.’ Thereafter, this was his standard response to all of the questions that he was asked.

Police road blocks on all the routes to all East coast ports and extensive searches carried out on vehicles and foot passengers at the ports themselves failed to reveal any trace of Tony Sentance.