Michael Barrow ushered the two detectives into the spacious sitting room of his flat and invited them to sit.
“I assume this is about my car,” he said, settling himself on the sofa opposite them.
“Your car, sir?” asked Fielding.
“Well…yes, my car,” said Barrow, a bewildered expression on his face. “Don’t you know it was stolen?”
“We…er…” Stuart fumbled for words, feeling a complete fool.
“I’d been abroad, you see,” Barrow went on, “and I reported the car missing as soon as I got home last Thursday. They called me yesterday afternoon with the news they’d found it in a field near Peterborough, burnt to a crisp.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Stuart, nonplussed to say the least. “Robbery isn’t actually my department, but I’m sure the theft is being competently investigated.”
“Then what’s going on?” asked Barrow, still looking confused. “Don’t you people read your emails anymore?”
I’ll murder Fielding, Stuart fumed. Why the hell hadn’t he run Barrow’s name through the current case files and got this background, instead of making us look like clowns on their day off from the circus?
“We’re here on another matter entirely, sir,” Fielding put in, no doubt seeing Stuart’s face red with embarrassment and fury.
“What other matter?” asked Barrow. “I was hoping you’d come to tell me you’d arrested whoever stole the car. My insurance company isn’t being overly cooperative, you know.”
“I’m sure the theft is being competently investigated, sir,” Stuart repeated, and it sounded just as lame to him as it had the first time. “I trust there’ll be a result very soon. But, in fact, we’re here about your friend, Mr. Terence Preston.”
“Terry?” asked Barrow, eyebrows raised. “What about him? Has something happened?”
Fielding cleared his throat in preparation for taking over the conversation. He knew Stuart found it difficult to frame the words to break this sort of bad news, and tended either to sound too emotional, or, more usually, simply uncaring. He seemed never to be able to find an appropriate approach to what was, after all, a difficult situation.
“We’re very sorry to have to tell you Mr. Preston was found shot to death twelve days ago.”
“What?” Barrow stared at Fielding, looking stunned. “You’re saying Terry was murdered?”
“We’re treating it as a homicide, yes, sir,” said Fielding, “and we’re here because we’ve reason to believe you might well be the last person to have seen Mr. Preston alive.”
“Me?” Barrow sat up straight on the sofa, wide-eyed.
“Yes, sir,” said Stuart, now on firmer ground. “Was Mr. Preston not here for dinner with you on the evening of the eighteenth of this month? A week ago, Wednesday?”
“Yes, he was,” said Barrow, nodding. “But…look…I’m having a lot of trouble with this. Are you sure it was Terry? He was one of my best friends.”
“There’s no mistake, sir,” said Fielding. “I’m sorry.”
“What time did he leave here that night?” asked Stuart.
“Oh…about seven, I think,” said Barrow. “It was a lousy night, so I said I’d drive him home, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Said he’d get a bus. There’s a stop just around the corner from here, and he often goes…or went…home that way. I just saw him out of the flat, and that was it.”
“Do you know of anyone Mr. Preston was having any sort of disagreement or dispute with?” asked Fielding, taking notes. “Did he ever mention any sort of problems like that?”
“Not to me,” answered Barrow. “He was a very easy-going chap, and a bit of a loner, I’d have to say. Didn’t have a lot of friends, kept himself busy with work on his doctorate at Oxford. I’d almost say he was obsessed with it, in fact.”
“I don’t suppose you own a gun, sir, do you?” Stuart asked, and Barrow’s head jerked up.
“No, Superintendent, I bloody well don’t. I don’t know the first thing about guns.”
“Then I think that’s all for now, sir,” said Stuart, rising. Pausing at the door, however, he asked, “When, exactly, did you go abroad, sir?”
“A week last Thursday morning. The day after Terry was here.”
“The nineteenth?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Mr. Barrow,” said Stuart. “If there’s anything further we need, we’ll be in touch.”
“Please don’t hesitate,” said Barrow. “Poor old Terry. He’d never have hurt a living soul. I hope you get the bastard who killed him.”
* * *
Upon hearing Professor Willard had returned to Oxford, Fielding telephoned him, but the professor, although appalled at Preston’s death, could offer no assistance.
“I’ve not heard from him for some time,” he said, “but Terry was due back to continue his research on certain events which took place during the Bronze Age in China. In fact, I was beginning to wonder why he hadn’t yet come to see me. He knew when I was returning from America.”
“I see,” said Fielding, who knew slightly less about the Chinese Bronze Age than he did about nuclear fission and sub-particle physics, “but we saw a good deal of correspondence between yourself and Preston in Preston’s email.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Willard, “we were in touch often, but I’ve been away, as I say.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, come to think about it, I hadn’t received anything from him recently.”
“But Professor Willard,” Fielding put in, “the phone records show Preston sent you a message on the eighteenth of this month, the night he died. It also showed up on his home computer. There was an attachment with it.”
“My goodness,” said Willard, “I’m sure I don’t remember anything like that. Just a moment, please.”
Fielding heard Willard keyboarding, and muttering, “Preston…Preston…” before saying, “No, I’m afraid not. I always save all the emails I receive from my students. There’s nothing from Terry Preston on the night you specify.”
Damn and blast, Fielding thought. We’re screwed because of an email glitch.
“You’re quite certain, sir?”
“Absolutely. I assure you I keep most meticulous records.”
Dead end again, at least for now, Fielding told himself.
“Well, thank you, sir,” he said. “If we require anything further, we’ll be in touch. Thanks again.”
* * *
Three days after Fielding’s call to Professor Willard, the twins, Richard and Graham, travelled to Norfolk on separate trains. Then, soberly dressed in suits and ties, and declaring themselves to be disciples of the Christian Congregation of the Resurrected Lord, they called at the sprawling country house owned by the Robertson-Hyde family.
Ignoring the sign at the front door addressing the kinds of people who should use the back one, they rang the doorbell, and waited. Somewhere in the depths of the old house they heard a faint, sonorous chime. It was a raw day, and they stood with their hands in their overcoat pockets, their shoulders hunched against the wind, until a tall woman of about fifty, presumably Mrs. Robertson-Hyde, opened the heavy wooden door. She was a little on the corpulent side with iron-gray hair and wore a plain white skirt with a red woolen sweater.
“Are you selling something?” she demanded peremptorily, her expression hostile and her tone supercilious.
“We are selling nothing, madam,” answered Graham, with a warm smile. “What we have to offer is available free of any charge, yet it is precious beyond any price. We offer the kingdom of hea—”
“Go away,” said the woman, in a manner suggesting she was not used to being disobeyed. “I’m not in the least bit interested.”
She started to close the door, but Richard spoke up, his voice full of self-deprecation.
“Madam, we won’t trouble you further, if that’s how you truly feel, but would you be kind enough to allow us to make use of your bathroom, please? We’ve been out all morning, you see. We’d be ever so grateful.”
The woman hesitated. Richard and Graham did their best to look cold and in desperate need. The woman glared at them before sighing loudly.
“Oh, all right then, come in. There’s a bathroom just through here.”
She preceded them across the large, tiled foyer where a wide staircase curved upwards in a great sweep of polished oak and thick, red carpet, before leading the way down a short corridor whose walls were decorated with framed prints of eighteenth-century foxhunting scenes.
“First on the left. Please don’t be long. And just so you’re aware, my husband is upstairs.”
The two men went into the bathroom in turn, came back to the foyer, thanked the woman who did not acknowledge their existence any further, and left the house.
“What a charming old boot she was,” muttered Richard, as the door closed behind them with a dismissive thump. “She probably wishes slavery was still legal.”
Walking back to where they had hidden their hired car behind a high yew hedge at the edge of a field, they compared notes.
“Simple front door,” said Richard, with satisfaction, as he pulled off the dark wig he had been wearing. “Lock’s a breeze. Five minutes work at the most. Windows are even easier if we want to try one of them instead.”
“The alarm system’s as old as the hills,” added Graham, wincing a little as he tore off his false moustache. “No surveillance cameras. Candy from a baby, this one. People like them never learn, thank Christ. They’re too busy counting their money to know anything about the rest of the world. They look down their noses at it, but they don’t see it.”
“Yes. We can tell Sylvia this one’s pure routine,” said Richard, grinning, while he stuffed his disguise into a plastic bag.
“God, it’s freezing,” said Graham, as he moved the car out onto the narrow lane and accelerated away. “Let’s find a pub.”
Richard sent a coded text message to Sylvia that evening and she cleared the operation to proceed. Forty-eight hours later, therefore, Mr. and Mrs. Robertson-Hyde were found in their bedroom by their astonished housekeeper, bound, gagged, terrified, but otherwise unharmed, with nothing whatever disturbed in the house apart from the removal of a small, bronze statue from its stand in Mr. Robertson-Hyde’s oak-paneled study. Investigations by the Norfolk constabulary revealed not a single fingerprint or fragment of evidence, and Mrs. Robertson-Hyde made no mention of the two itinerant evangelists who had needed to use the bathroom, because she had forgotten them entirely.
The twins, using new identities as employees of a non-existent firm of auctioneers in Chichester and with false license plates on their vehicles handed the crated statue over to Mike Barrow, the ostensible purchaser, complete with papers and receipt in case anyone ever asked. The transfer took place at a pre-arranged drop-off in the rear parking lot of a warehouse just outside the city of Norwich owned by a man well paid to look the other way. The exchange was made in broad daylight on the theory that skulking about doing it in the dark could easily look suspicious.
“No need to tempt fate,” said Richard.
Two days after the acquisition, as such thefts were called by the syndicate, Barrow stood on a narrow metal catwalk above the bilges of a Polish container ship at anchor off Felixstowe, the largest container port in the United Kingdom, on the North Sea coast of Suffolk. The stale air reeked of bilge water and rusty steel, and, situated as it was below the waterline, the space was clammy and cold. On the bulkhead to his right was a maze of pipes and conduit carrying the fluids and electrical cables which gave life to the ship, and as he looked at it in the harsh yellow glare of the overhead lights, Barrow wondered how the hell anyone could keep track of it all. The cold steel around him hummed and reverberated with the distant throb of the ship’s diesel generators, and the sound increased the claustrophobia that was beginning to oppress him. He wanted to get out. The steel walls encased him like a coffin, and the vibrating air itself seemed to press in on him, making it difficult to breathe.
With an effort, he forced his attention back to the thing which had brought him there in the first place, and he stood with his hands in his pockets watching three sailors unscrew a panel on the front of a large metal cabinet into which many of the conduits disappeared. As the panel was removed, Barrow saw the interior of the cabinet was filled with smaller junction boxes and intertwined electrical cable.
“There’s room at the bottom,” said the officer in heavily accented English.
“Okay,” said Barrow, nodding. “Just tell them to make sure it isn’t able to bang around in there with the motion of the ship. It’s bronze, but it’s not indestructible. It has to be delivered to its new owner in Shanghai in good condition.”
The officer spoke to the men in rapid Polish as they placed the sculpture, tightly wrapped and padded, into its hiding place. Barrow was glad to see it go. He had driven to Felixstowe with the sculpture in the back seat of his car, nervous every inch of the way that he would be stopped for some bizarre reason and his car searched. The rational portion of his mind told him there was no cause whatever for such a thing to happen, but that did nothing to lessen his apprehension. He had never driven so carefully in all his life.
“The inspectors don’t usually come down here,” the officer said, as the panel was being replaced, “and even if they do, they don’t start taking things apart, especially electrical boxes with big red warnings signs on them. But when we get to Shanghai, you better be there to take this thing off our hands. If you’re not, it goes over the side. We take no unnecessary risks.”
“I’ll be there,” said Barrow, “but if something comes up and I can’t meet you myself, someone else will take care of it, don’t worry. Now can we get out of here, please? I feel as if I’m being buried alive.”
Laughing, the officer led the way back along the catwalk, their shoes clanging and echoing on the steel floor, to a metal ladder which took them into the hold, and then to a lift which whisked them all up into that part of the ship used as living quarters. Barrow paid the officer ten thousand American dollars, promising the remaining ten thousand upon delivery in Shanghai, and was then conveyed back to Felixstowe by the same launch that brought him. Sitting in the stern sheets of the small motorboat feeling the wind in his hair and inhaling the salty smells of the sea, Barrow had never been so happy to be out in the fresh air.
* * *
Over the ensuing weeks, Stuart and Fielding followed up what few lines of inquiry they had. They spoke to Preston’s Oxford landlady, interviewed his fellow graduate students, but all to no avail. There also seemed no connection between Preston’s death and Michael Barrow’s burned-out car, although the squad investigating the theft never actually identified a suspect, let alone made an arrest. Stuart ordered the re-canvas of the neighborhood, but the results were the same. No one saw or heard anything on the night of the eighteenth of February, apart from a very elderly gentleman who, on being questioned a second time, thought, he perhaps remembered hearing a car door slam late that night, or the night before…or perhaps the one after, although that was when his sister, Iris, was visiting from Bournemouth…but, no, she left on February the nineteenth, or was it the thirteenth? The gentleman admitted to being rather deaf, and his hearing aid was being repaired at the time…he thought, anyway.
“Oh, God,” muttered Stuart, as he read the interview report, feeling the case going colder by the minute.
As time passed, the death of Terence Preston receded in importance as other cases took precedence. The investigation was not actually closed — murder investigations never were — but less and less attention was paid to it until it came eventually to reside on a list of unsolved murders that most people at Scotland Yard tried not to think about.
One day in October, Stuart received the latest in a series of telephone calls from Bill Foy.
“What the hell’s going on, Harry?” Foy demanded. “It’s been eight months.”
“What can I tell you, Bill? The well’s dry. You know what that’s like. I wish there was something else we could do, but just now, there isn’t.”
“You could kick a few backsides for one thing,” said Foy, his voice harsh. “Get them moving.”
“That kind of talk doesn’t help, Bill,” said Stuart, striving for patience. “I know you’re upset. I would be as well, but—”
“Just get the finger out,” Foy interrupted, and hung up.
As Stuart replaced the receiver, he had an uncomfortable feeling Bill Foy was going to cause him a lot of trouble before too much longer.