Even though he’d had a long shower, a shave, a change of clothes, a hearty breakfast and two large Americanos, Diane Daniels looked across the dining table at Henry in the restaurant area of The Tawny Owl and could not help thinking he looked like one of those dogs with skin that was four sizes too big for him.
He looked a sullen mess.
Other than seeing him the previous day at the fishing lake, she had last seen Henry about a month before when he had sailed off into the sunset, leading a mob of villagers up to the moors to dig out a firebreak in order to hold back the spreading wildfires that were closing dangerously in on Kendleton itself. Since then she had neither seen nor heard from him.
Even though she’d been full-time busy with the murder investigation and its many strands, for some unaccountable reason she felt miffed that Henry had not been in contact with her at all, not even a voicemail or text. She had wondered why she felt aggrieved by this lack of contact and was annoyed with herself for even feeling this way.
She hoped it was a ‘friend’ thing rather than anything else.
And looking at him now, his face like a crumpled pillow, she was pretty sure it couldn’t have been anything else – not least because of the age difference between them.
She allowed her lips to purse and twist.
Then, after a few brief words of foreplay, ‘I’m saying this because I consider us to be friends.’ She laid into him good and proper and said, ‘You literally do look like a bag of shit, Henry. You look like a cat’s slept on your face.’
He was sipping his second coffee and raised his eyes over the rim of the mug, took a gulp then put the mug on the table.
‘Thanks for that.’
‘That said, how are you?’
‘I’m OK. Thanks for asking.’
Diane tilted her head and scrutinized him critically.
Henry said, ‘What?’ with a sneer.
She shook her head in exasperation. ‘Never mind.’
‘So what can I do for you? What’s so all-fired important you came raiding my bedroom en masse?’
‘I need to get a statement from you about yesterday.’
‘Jake could have done that.’ He turned and saw said Jake emerging from the kitchen with a fat breakfast sandwich in his mitts. ‘I hope you’ve paid for that,’ Henry called, stopping the PC in his tracks.
‘Uh, I can do,’ Jake said guiltily.
‘Forget it,’ Henry said and turned back to Diane. ‘So?’
‘Yes, he could have done,’ she said, giving her shoulders a little shrug. ‘But I wanted to see you, catch up with you, have a friendly chat and all that.’
‘OK,’ he said, unimpressed and wary. ‘I found a body, phoned it in, handed it over. Pretty short statement. I could’ve texted it in.’
‘Henry!’ She leaned across and whispered, ‘What the hell is up with you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said brusquely, then stood up and left the room, shouldering his way past Jake without even looking at him.
Diane watched Henry turn towards the front door of the pub. She spun in her chair and a moment later saw him walk out of the door, across the paved area and sit on the low front wall.
She glanced at Jake who had come over to her, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
‘What’s eating him?’ Jake asked. ‘Moody sod.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Wouldn’t mind,’ Jake said, adopting a knowing, mock-confidential tone, ‘but he’s succumbed to Maude Crichton’s charms – and money, if he has any sense.’
‘Really? The millionairess?’ Diane’s surprise wasn’t feigned. She’d encountered Maude when working on the Yorks’ murders, had been aware of Henry’s discomfort at Maude’s obvious interest in him.
‘Clocked him coming out of her house yesterday morning. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was there last night, too. If he plays his cards right, this place could get a mega facelift.’
‘Maybe that’s his problem.’
‘All I know is that if he’s expecting me to pay for a bacon bap, he really does have a problem.’
Diane went outside and sat next to Henry.
‘Don’t,’ he warned her instantly. He didn’t even look at her.
She held up the palms of her hands. ‘I won’t.’
‘So – what, then?’
She sidled right up alongside him, hip to hip, leaned in front of him and drew his face around with the tips of her fingers so their eyes were only inches apart and the only way he could avoid looking at her was to close his own eyes.
‘Henry,’ she said softly. ‘Yes, you do look a mess; yes, you’re probably going through something I don’t understand; and, yes, because I consider us to be friends, I am concerned about you. But I’m not going to pry and I’m not going to make you say anything you don’t want to, OK?’
He swallowed visibly and audibly. ‘OK.’
‘That said, it doesn’t mean I’m going to give you any space to avoid me. I’m here to take a statement, that’s true enough – but there is something else.’ She stopped, seemed to prepare herself to say something. Then: ‘As a friend and former colleague, although you mightily outranked me … and to paraphrase some dialogue in a slushy film … I’m just a detective standing – well, sitting – next to a former detective who used to be, probably, the best detective in Lancashire, asking that former detective to help me track down a killer.’ She paused. ‘What do you say?’
Henry was about to respond when his mobile phone rang.
Detective Superintendent Rik Dean said, ‘Well?’
Henry held the phone slightly away from his head and scowled at it, then put it back to his ear and said, ‘Well, what?’
‘Well, have you said yes?’
‘Have I said yes to what?’
‘To what the soon-to-be DS Daniels has asked you … She has asked you, hasn’t she?’
Henry eyed Diane suspiciously and spoke while looking at her. ‘It might be on the tip of her tongue.’
He thumbed the end-call button and now faced her squarely.
‘He told me to tell you there’s still seventeen grand left in the pot allocated to paying you as a consultant. He said I should offer it to you to come back for a month.’ Her explanation was cautious.
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘You know something, Henry – up until me seeing you yesterday and now today, I would have asked the same question.
‘And now?’
Henry and Diane were walking across the village green towards the stream. Not many weeks before, the air would have been clogged with the smoke from the wildfires, but now it was clear and pleasant, more or less back to normal. Even the smell of the flowing, fresh water of the stream could be inhaled.
‘The timing’s right. You need it. I need it too, don’t get me wrong, but you definitely need it.’
‘So have you become a psychologist?’
‘You need it because it’s what you do best; I need it because I want to pick your brains. I want you to guide me through this maze of an investigation that seems to have so many threads but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.’
‘Like a thousand-pound-a-day mentor?’
‘If you want to put it that way.’
Henry walked to the edge of the stream, picked up a small stone from the bank and lobbed it downstream where it disappeared with a plop.
Inside he was fighting this. He’d helped the police over the deaths of the Yorks, having demanded an outrageous fee for his services (and getting it, much to his surprise), but he had quit as soon as the arrests had been made, desperate to get back to The Tawny Owl because he wanted that to be everything for him – his life, his whole raison d’être. But it wasn’t playing ball with him.
He knew if Alison had been there, all would be great.
But she wasn’t.
He turned back to Diane who was standing a few feet behind him with her arms folded. ‘DS Daniels? Did I hear right? Soon to be detective sergeant?’
‘Temporary. My inducement to continue on FMIT for a few months and look into various aspects of the York murders. Sergeant’s pay helps towards the car and mortgage,’ she admitted, ‘though I’m still flat broke.’ Henry knew she had been on her knees financially since the break-up of her marriage and the purchase of her flat in Lancaster.
‘Rik does have a tendency to dangle money in front of people’s noses to get what he wants,’ Henry observed.
‘So why not be quids in for a couple of weeks?’
‘I’ll need to speak to Ginny. She’ll have to be fine with this … not least because I’ve hardly been pulling my weight around here for the last few weeks.’
‘She’ll be fine with it. She loves you,’ Diane said. Henry frowned. ‘Don’t ask – I just know these things. Look, Henry’ – her voice went to persuasive and she angled her head as she spoke – ‘this investigation – it’s massive, as you probably guessed. It’s not just about the murders of the Yorks; it’s about even more murders, about money laundering on a pretty huge scale … it’ll be about gangsters and organized crime, and a couple who maybe got in too deep. Those kind of things you love. And not just that – the body you found yesterday …’ Henry waited. Diane sighed. ‘We didn’t realize it at the time, but it became apparent to me there was someone else in the farmhouse at the time of the murders, and I think the person you found up by the lake was the one. We’ve been trying to trace the Yorks’ daughter, Bethany, since the murders and now I’m certain we’ve found her.’
Henry was nodding along to this.
‘It seems she managed to escape from the scene, but finding her body has thrown up even more questions,’ Diane said.
‘Like why did she have tape on her wrists and ankles?’ Henry ventured.
‘You noticed, I know. But that’s not all. I managed to arrange a post-mortem late last night. Thing is, her injuries are consistent with a fall, but what pushed her off the edge of Rushbed Crag were the two bullets in her back. You wouldn’t have been able to see that from the position she was in down the split in the rocks. She was shot, yet the whole thing doesn’t tie in with what went on at the farmhouse in relation to her parents – seems a whole separate thing.’
Diane paused and let Henry process this information.
Then she said, ‘So there you are … meaty, complex stuff.’
‘OK.’ Henry looked her in the eye. ‘I’m just a knackered old ex-detective standing in front of a younger, talented detective who doesn’t yet know how good she is and probably doesn’t need my help at all … where was I? Oh, yeah, so this knackered old ex-jack knows that acceding to this request might just be the tonic he needs to get a wayward life back on track.’
Diane was standing tensely as Henry made his little speech, and her shoulders fell in relief.
‘But,’ Henry warned, ‘I’m not doing it just for the Queen’s shilling, I’m doing it because it suits me, OK?’
Diane could not resist grabbing and hugging him tight, but while she was in the middle of this display of affection and relief, Henry’s phone rang again.
Rik Dean.
Henry answered it. ‘I’ve said yes, OK?’ Then he hung up abruptly.
Henry felt as if he needed another shower, as if he needed to start his day again, but he held back. The fact was he did have a glug of excitement in his belly as he walked with Diane to the rear of her snazzy new sports car and opened the boot to reveal two sturdy supermarket carrier bags in which she had brought a selection of documents relating to the investigation into the other two bodies found by her and Henry at the farm a month ago – the two young men in the garage wall space – plus the enormous amounts of money and the weapons also found secreted there.
Henry looked over her shoulder into the boot.
‘I’m not supposed to have done this,’ she admitted. ‘But needs must.’
‘Bait?’ Henry guessed.
‘Just like fishing.’
Henry put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Tell you what, leave that stuff in there for the time being. We’ll come back to it later. I know I need to read it thoroughly, but it will take some time.’
She stood up. ‘What then?’
‘Crime scene – and you can feed me some snippets along the way.’
He slid into the passenger seat alongside her and she fired up the car. He was impressed by it, but being so low-slung it wasn’t a car he would have chosen for himself. He already knew he would have to haul himself out by grabbing the door frame.
He complimented her, though. ‘Nice: a bit different from the old Peugeot.’
‘It wouldn’t have been financially viable to get it repaired,’ she said sadly. She had inherited the Peugeot from her late father, and although it was ancient, she had been reluctant to part with it, but when it had been smashed up in a frenzied attack on her and Henry on a Blackpool housing estate, its days were numbered. ‘I get some car allowance for this from FMIT, so I can just about manage it.’
She spun the wheels for Henry’s benefit as she drove off The Tawny Owl car park and then out of Kendleton, travelling up on to the moors on tight, sometimes single-track roads, until she turned into the long driveway leading up to Hawkshead Farm.
It looked a sad place now. The tarmac at the front was still charred black in five distinct areas where the classic cars belonging to the Yorks had been set alight, along with Henry’s own restored Land Rover. All the windows were boarded up, and the side door, which was used as the main entrance, had been covered by a lockable steel over-door, for which Diane had the key.
The whole property was still an ongoing crime scene, although she told him its eventual disposal was now in the hands of solicitors.
Although the memory of the murder scene was still vivid for Henry – one of the worst he’d ever visited – he wanted to reacquaint himself with it, so he did a slow walk-through again, listening to Diane’s up-to-date commentary as she led him around the house and up on to the first floor where he had initially discovered Isobel York’s butchered body in the bath; then, one floor up in the attic, where he’d found John York, similarly hacked to pieces, although his head and limbs had been left out for display on the full-size snooker table there.
He stood there, remembering it all.
‘It looks like the Yorks may have been going to do a runner,’ Diane told him. ‘I think they might have been coppering up, if you will – getting the money they had ready to run with it. We found ferry tickets when we searched the place, plus a series of overnight Airbnb bookings right across Europe – France to Italy and down into Greece. I think they realized they were in too deep – but that’s only a theory. Whatever’ – she shrugged – ‘we’ll never know for certain.’
She took him back downstairs to the first floor, explaining as she went, ‘Obviously this place has an agricultural history, and what we didn’t spot at the time but discovered in a subsequent and more detailed search of the property was this …’
By the time she’d said this, she had moved along the hallway and was pointing up to a loft door. It was inset in a wooden frame, but the whole thing was flush with the ceiling and painted the same colour, white, so was relatively well camouflaged. ‘It could once have been a hayloft, but it’s actually another bedroom, and I’m pretty certain the daughter, full name Bethany Jane York, was in it when her parents were being murdered by our two travelling friends working on behalf of the lovely Costain family in order to give some London gangster we don’t even know yet a very bloody nose.’
She was referring to the perpetrators, one of whom was on remand, the other dead.
They opened the drop-down hatch using the button on the wall and clambered up the extending ladder that formed the stairway into the bedroom above.
There wasn’t much headroom for a tall person, so both Henry and Diane had to dip their heads: he was six foot two and she wasn’t much less. The bedroom was quite large, though: an ideal space for a growing youngster.
Diane said, ‘There was an empty bottle of vodka down by the side of the bed which suggests Beth could possibly have been drunk and asleep when the killers came in and they simply didn’t know she was here. A blood sample from her body will tell us if she had alcohol in her.’
‘So, at some point in the evening she wakes up and flees into the field, terrified, panicking at what she’s seen … found,’ Henry mused out loud. ‘In terms of identifying the body, have we found any fingerprints to make a comparison?’
‘We’re comparing prints from the vodka bottle with prints we managed to take from the body and also prints from her flat in Manchester, where she went to uni. Those results should be with me later today and we’ll know for certain if the body you found is Beth – but I’m one hundred per cent it is, even now.’
Henry listened, looking around as Diane spoke. When she finished, he said, ‘So when she fled, which is a good hypothesis, how she got shot remains a mystery – unless her parents chased and shot her before their own deaths.’
Henry screwed up his face at that, as did Diane. Unlikely.
‘Obviously, we haven’t had time to make any ballistic comparisons yet, but I spoke to a guy on firearms this morning who had a quick look for me – nothing official – and he said the slugs taken out of her did not match any of the weapons we took from her parents’ killers.’
‘And there is that tape on her wrists and ankles, too,’ Henry said.
‘Which is a puzzle.’
‘So, she’s run away, ended up with two bullets in her back and tape around her limbs?’ Henry had stooped around the bedroom as he talked and picked up a photograph of John and Isobel York standing, grinning, on either side of an attractive teenage girl. The daughter, Bethany. A nice family photograph. He looked at it for a while. Just a normal-looking family – whatever ‘normal’ was these days – happy and proud. It was the kind of picture that had often inspired Henry as a murder squad detective.
And he got that same old feeling again. The stirring in his chest, the tightness in his throat … the anger in his veins.
And he knew that whatever the background to this whole affair, whatever circumstances had brought brutal killers to the Yorks’ doorstep and whatever the reason that Beth York had had her whole future taken away from her, he would ruthlessly hunt down her killer.
He showed the photo to Diane, who said, ‘I’m sure it’s her in the mortuary.’
‘Where are you up to with this? What was your next move going to be?’ he asked her.
‘To follow the money,’ she said. ‘Kinda.’
It was something she had already started to do. Kinda.
One of the obvious threads of the investigation, a good starting point, was to dig into the background of the Yorks’ business dealings. To begin with, there was nothing very spectacular or interesting, and it was quite tedious to investigate.
John York had been a qualified accountant who had diversified into financial management. It was a small enterprise with just himself and a secretary, and it seemed to generate a decent enough income for a good lifestyle. He looked after the business accounts for a number of small and medium-sized businesses in North Yorkshire, in the Kirkby Lonsdale area, and also in Lancashire around Lancaster and Morecambe. This had been his basic business until he moved into investing money for individuals – mainly older, retired folk.
But that changed about four years ago when the secretary he had employed for ten years was suddenly let go and his wife, Isobel, stepped into her shoes. At the same time, the contracts with the businesses for which he had done the accounts for many years were also terminated, with the exception of a few individual clients.
Diane was explaining these findings as she drove Henry back through the countryside in the direction of Kendleton and then through the village towards Lancaster.
‘So the nature of the business changed,’ he summed up.
‘Would seem so. A lot of long-standing clients were dumped, but some individuals kept on. I’ve spoken to a few of the companies he threw over, and none understood why; he gave them no reasons, yet all of them say their relationship with him was good, no money owed in either direction. I’ve spoken to a few of the individuals he did keep on, but none report any issues and none knew anything about him ditching the other businesses. None cared, to be honest.’
‘You wouldn’t, would you?’
‘Suppose not. Anyway, our financial people have had a quick sift through John York’s accounts – the ones we’ve managed to uncover – and they tell me the volume of business he was generating wasn’t commensurate with the lifestyle he and Isobel were leading. The fancy cars, the fancy home, multiple trips abroad. We haven’t managed to find many bank accounts yet, though, and the ones we have don’t have much cash in them, TBH.’
‘TBH?’
‘To be honest.’ Diane scowled at him. ‘Modern speak. Keep up, Mister Dinosaur.’
Henry shrugged. He was happy to be a dinosaur. ‘So where are we going now?’ he asked.
‘I’ve tracked down the secretary he got rid of, and there is one client still on his books who was a business client first and then an individual client. I’ve been after speaking to him for a while about this, but he’s been uncontactable. I thought we’d knock on his door on spec.’
‘Name?’
‘Jack Carter.’
‘Oooh,’ Henry said, ‘the gangster?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing … I didn’t expect you to understand a cultural reference from the early seventies, TBH.’
Henry sat back, and even though he felt as if his backside was skimming the road in the low-slung car, he enjoyed the ride. Diane drove to the M6 at junction thirty-four, then looped around on to the new link road from the motorway which sliced across through Morecambe to the port of Heysham, from which ferries crossed the Irish Sea.
But before reaching Heysham, she came off at the Morecambe exit, drove into the resort, down to the seafront, and parked on the promenade in an area called Bare, opposite a pleasant-looking café on the corner of a side road.
‘She works here,’ Diane said, pointing to the café named Fell View in celebration of the magnificent panorama across Morecambe Bay towards the mountains of the Lake District.
In fact, Jenny Peel, a smart lady in her mid-fifties, owned the establishment, and a few minutes after introducing themselves, Diane and Henry were sitting with her in the large bow window of the café, sipping good Americanos.
Henry listened in as Diane did the probing.
‘Yes, it was a shock,’ Jenny answered. ‘I’d been his secretary for ten years, did a good job; relations were good, too …’ She paused, then added, ‘I think.’
‘So what happened?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘Not sure. I remember lots of closed-door discussions and hushed conversations between John and Isobel. Maybe the business was going down the pan. I never officially had access to the accounts.’
Diane picked up on the crucial word and asked, ‘Officially?’
Jenny squirmed slightly uncomfortably. ‘I could access John’s computer. It was part of my admin role, although going into the accounts wasn’t; those files were password-protected but it was easy enough to get into them if I wanted to.’
‘Did you?’
Jenny gave a quirky smile. ‘Up to the point of those hushed discussions I just mentioned, which is the point where things changed and the whole feel of the place altered – the short-notice trips to the Canary Islands, Cyprus – I never even thought of looking.’
‘Hey, it’s OK,’ Diane reassured her. ‘We just want to know anything that could help us with this very serious investigation …’
Jenny Peel shuddered at that thought. She looked at them, her eyes hovering on Henry a moment or two too long, then she looked pensively out of the window across the bay. The mountains were clearly defined. She turned back to the detectives.
‘I mean, I can’t complain really,’ she said. ‘He did dump me and it was a shock, but I got almost thirty grand from him in severance pay, which he didn’t have to do, and it went on the deposit for this place.’ She waved her hand at the café. ‘It’s a bit oldie-worldie, but it makes money all year round and the coffee’s good. I guess he felt guilty … Anyway, the point where things changed came first with the sale of one client’s business and then John being asked to invest the money from that sale on the QT, out of the way of the taxman. That’s when the trips abroad started happening, which were, I think, to stash the money in property.’
‘Who was the client?’
‘A haulier called Jack Carter.’
Diane pursed her lips and looked at Henry, arching her eyebrows.
‘How much are we talking about?’ Henry asked Jenny.
‘One and a half, maybe two million.’
Henry was impressed. ‘And neither John nor Isobel talked to you about this?’
Jenny shook her head.
Diane said, ‘So when they started doing this work for Mr Carter, that was when they let you go?’
‘Well, not quite then … it was a bit later, actually … not long after Mr Carter introduced them to a new client – a woman. God, she was dripping gold and diamonds, she was. Came up in a fancy Rolls-Royce, one of the sporty ones with a convertible roof, y’know? And she had a driver who, if you don’t mind me saying, was a bit phwoar!’
Diane chuckled.
Henry blinked.
‘Anyhow,’ Jenny continued after a brief pause for reflection, ‘John treated this woman like royalty, got me scurrying around making brews and getting fairy cakes. Upshot was more closed-door meetings, with Jack Carter in and out all the bleeding time – and then I got the brown envelope, and I was gone and bought this place which, to be fair, was always on my to-do list.’
‘What was this woman’s name?’ Diane asked.
‘I don’t know. Far as I can tell, her name never got written down anywhere.’
‘And how long ago would this be?’
‘Four years,’ Jenny guessed. ‘If you gave me some time, I’d probably be able to be more precise. As for her name, I actually vaguely remember writing it down in an appointments diary, now I think about it. Not sure, but I might possibly have it somewhere.’
‘Well, if you could find it, that would be great. If not, no problem. You’ve been a big help, so thanks.’
Henry said, ‘Could I just have your mobile number in case we need to contact you again?’
‘Sure.’ She told him and he entered it into his phone. ‘I take it you think John and Isobel were in something they couldn’t control?’
‘You might have hit the nail on the head,’ Diane said, ‘but it’s still early days in what looks like being a complex investigation.’
They took their leave, strolled across the promenade to Diane’s car, but walked past it up to the sea wall and leaned against the railings to look across the bay which, with the sea so far out and the sun up, was the colour of silver and gold.
‘Jack Carter next?’ Henry asked.
‘Jack Carter,’ Diane confirmed.