TWENTY

On a sunny September afternoon some thirty-odd years ago, León de Bruin’s grandfather Ronnie had gone for a ride on his old boneshaker, only to be clipped by a delivery van. The fall had shattered his right hip, leaving him in a wheelchair for months, unable to manage the five apartments he’d owned and rented out around Skegness, and which had provided him with his income.

By a happy coincidence, de Bruin had just left school and had been in search of work. It had suited them both, therefore, for him to take over the day-to-day running of the business. Ronnie had been a cheerful and kind-hearted man. He’d valued the good opinion of his tenants and so had been understanding of arrears, swift to undertake repairs and generous in returning deposits. Not de Bruin. His years of being bullied at school had drained him of compassion. He’d welcomed his power to squeeze those tenants dry. What was more, his grandfather had soon discovered that he liked the extra income, now that he didn’t have to face his tenants personally.

The hip had duly healed, but the partnership had continued, with Ronnie giving de Bruin ten percent of the business on his twenty-first birthday, in recognition of his efforts, along with an option to buy the rest in the event of his death. Tragically, that had happened less than a month afterwards, with Ronnie breaking his neck when falling down his stairs. The timing had been such that de Bruin might have had awkward questions to answer had he not been on a rare holiday in Corfu at the time.

Ronnie had left everything to be shared equally between his two daughters, de Bruin’s mum Alice and his aunt Diane. Neither of them were worldly, so they’d gladly accepted de Bruin’s offer to handle everything. A friendly solicitor had helped him undervalue the apartments, allowing him to get them on the cheap. He’d mortgaged them to the hilt in order to buy three more, then had ploughed his rental income back into the market. Within twelve years, he’d acquired a portfolio of nearly a hundred properties this way, making himself a paper millionaire many times over.

He’d thought himself set for life.

The global financial crisis had put an end to that. House values had crashed, plunging him underwater just as mass redundancies had meant his tenants couldn’t make their rent. Eviction had been no use. There’d been no one to take their places, and no buyers for his properties. He’d duly fallen behind on his payments. His banks had lost patience and had started to foreclose. Just like that, he’d been facing ruin.

In the good times, he’d used a local biker gang to scare out deadbeat tenants. But their main business had always been drugs. Two of them had approached him one evening with a proposition. Their previous supplier had done a bunk with all their money, leaving them with neither funds nor product. They’d found a potential replacement, but they were demanding cash upfront, and they didn’t have any left. Would he be interested in staking them for half the profit? They’d been a hapless lot, in dire need of the kind of organisation de Bruin could bring, but too lazy and ill-disciplined to be trusted. It had been a chance to save his empire, however. He’d somehow scraped together enough cash for that first buy, only for the new supplier – perhaps inevitably – to turn out to be an undercover detective with the East Midlands Special Operations Unit. The gods had been smiling on him for once, however, for the detective had proved almost comically corrupt. For a large yet acceptable cut, they’d not only put him in touch with an authentic Dutch supplier, they’d advised him on the best ways to bring the product in. They’d also been alerting him to investigations and raids ever since, and had even helped take down rival gangs on his behalf, allowing him and his biker friends to expand across the county.

The cash had started flooding in, astonishing great waves of it that had put his more honest endeavours to shame. He’d kept it going, therefore, even after the property market had recovered and he’d become rich again in his own right. It had seemed safe enough, after all, what with the pipeline now running itself, and his source still in place, feeding him information in virtual real time via a secure Dark Web address that he normally checked maybe once a day, but which he’d been visiting compulsively since learning of Dunstan Warne’s murder.

It was the first thing he did on returning home that evening. Several new documents had been posted, including a witness statement by Anna Warne. He saved that as a treat for later, and started instead with Elias’s latest case report. It was a jolt to read that Oliver Merchant had been at the farm. There were few people in this world who de Bruin disliked more. But it seemed to be a genuine coincidence, so he put it from his mind. More worrying, by far, was that Elias had discovered the vault beneath the barn.

He sat there brooding. He and Andrei had cleared the place out and scrubbed it with bleach. They’d double checked it last night too, so he was confident there was nothing there to put Elias on his trail. It was unfortunate, certainly, but he was used to dealing with the police, thanks to his grandfather’s untimely death and the woes his more troublesome tenants kept suffering. They’d not pinned anything on him yet, and they wouldn’t this time either.

He pushed himself to his feet, went over to his drinks cabinet. He chunked a couple of cubes from his ice maker into a crystal tumbler, less for their chill than for the pleasant crackle they made when he glugged his favourite Laphroaig over them. He took a small sip then set the tumbler down on a coaster before settling back into his armchair. Then he opened Anna Warne’s witness statement, trying not to let himself get too excited by the possibility of photographs.