‘I contacted the officer in the New York District Attorney’s
Office you suggested, Roy. He sent me an email an hour ago, saying that prior to 9/11 all immigration was handled by the Immigration and Naturalization Agency. It’s different since. They’re merged with US Customs and are now called Immigration Customs Enforcement. He says that unless she had gone in on a visa for an extended stay, there would be no records. He’s checked back through those for the 1990s and she doesn’t show up as having gone in on a visa, but he says there’s no way of finding out whether she ever went there or not.’
‘OK, thanks. E-J, how are you progressing with the family tree. Did you track down any of Joanna Wilson’s relatives?’
‘Well, she doesn’t seem to have had many. I’ve found a gay stepbrother – who’s a piece of work. He goes under the name of Mitzi Dufors, is nudging sixty, wears studded leather hot-pants and is covered in piercings. He does some kind of a drag act in a Brighton gay club. Didn’t have many flattering words to say about his late stepsister.’
‘You can’t trust middle-aged men in leather hot-pants,’ Norman Potting interjected.
‘Norman!’ Grace said, firing a warning shot across his bows.
‘You’re not exactly a fashion guru yourself, Norman,’ Bella retorted.
‘OK, both of you, enough!’ Grace said.
Potting shrugged like a petulant child.
‘Anything else from her stepbrother.’
‘He said Joanna inherited a small house in Brentwood from her mother, about a year before she went to America. He reckoned she took the sale proceeds to fund her acting career there.’
‘We should try to find how much money was involved and what happened to it. Good work, E-J.’
Grace made some notes, then moved on to Branson. ‘Glenn, did you and Bella get hold of the Klingers?’
Branson grinned. ‘I think we got Stephen Klinger at a good time, after lunch – pissed as a fart and well chatty. Told us that no one liked Joanna Wilson much – she sounds like she was a real slapper. She gave Ronnie a right old song and dance, and no one cared too much when she ditched him – or so it seemed – and went off to the States. He confirmed that Ronnie had married again, after dutifully waiting out the legal period for desertion, to Lorraine. When Ronnie died she was inconsolable. What made it worse for her, if that’s possible, is that he left her up shit creek financially.’
Grace made a note.
‘Her car got repossessed, then her house. Sounds like Wilson was a man of straw. Had nothing, no assets at all. His widow ended up getting evicted from her posh house in Hove and moved into a rented flat. Just over a year later, in November 2002, she left a suicide note and jumped off the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry.’ He paused. ‘We went and saw Mrs Klinger as well, but she more or less confirmed what her husband told us.’
‘Any of her relatives able to verify her state of mind?’ Grace asked.
‘Yeah, she’s got a sister who works as a hostess for British Airways. I just spoke to her. She was at work and couldn’t really speak. I’ve got an appointment to see her tomorrow. But she also pretty well confirmed what Klinger said. Oh, yeah, and she said she took Lorraine to New York as soon as flights were running again. They spent a week traipsing around the city with a big photograph of Ronnie. Them and a million others.’
‘So she’s convinced Ronnie died in 9/11.’
‘No question,’ Glenn said. ‘He was at a meeting in the South Tower with a guy called Donald Hatcook. Everyone on the floor Donald Hatcook was on perished – almost certainly instantly.’ Then he looked at his notes. ‘You asked me about this geezer Chad Skeggs?’
‘Yes, what did you find out?’
‘He’s wanted for questioning by Brighton CID regarding an allegation of indecent assault on a young woman back in 1990. The girl’s story is that they left the club and went back together, and then she was badly beaten up by him. It could be linked to an S &M scenario. Possible that she initially went along with it and then he wouldn’t stop. It was a very nasty assault, together with an allegation of rape. But it was decided at the time that it wasn’t in the public interest to go to Australia and bring him back. I don’t think we’ll be seeing him in England again, not unless he’s very stupid.’
Grace turned to DC Nicholl. ‘Nick, what do you have to report?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s actually quite interesting. After I did a nationwide search on Wilson, which didn’t come up with anything we didn’t already know, I decided that a businessman like him, with his smart house in Hove 4, was likely to have some life insurance. I did some digging and discovered Ronnie Wilson had a life insurance policy of just over one and a half million quid with the Norwich Union, taken out in 1999.’
‘Presumably his widow didn’t know this?’ Grace said.
‘I think she did,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘They paid out to her in full in March 2002.’
‘When she was in a rented flat, in distress?’ Grace asked.
‘There’s more,’ the DC said. ‘In July 2002, ten months after her husband died, Lorraine Wilson received a payment of two and a half million dollars from the 9/11 compensation fund.’
‘Three months before she jumped off the ferry,’ Lizzie Mantle said.
‘Allegedly jumped off the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘She is still officially recorded as a Sussex Police missing person. I’ve checked the file and the investigators at that time were not entirely convinced that she had killed herself. But the trail went cold.’ Then he added, ‘The insurance investigator assigned to the claim on Ronnie Wilson’s policy wasn’t happy either. But there was a lot of political pressure to pay out quickly to the survivors of 9/11 victims.’
‘Two million five hundred thousand dollars – with the exchange rate back in those days, that would have been worth close to one and three-quarter million quid,’ Norman Potting said.
‘So she died in abject poverty, with over three million in the bank?’ Bella said.
‘That amount of moolah would buy you a lot of Maltesers,’ Norman Potting said to her.
‘Except the money wasn’t in the bank,’ Nick Nicholl said. He held up two folders. ‘Managed to get these a bit quicker than we should have done, thanks to Steve.’
He waved a hand in acknowledgement to thirty-year-old DC Mackie, seated further down the table, dressed in jeans and an open-neck white shirt.
Mackie spoke with quiet authority and had a tidy, efficient air about him, which Grace liked. ‘My brother works for HSBC. He fast-tracked my request.’
Nick Nicholl then removed a sheaf of documents from one folder. ‘These are all the joint-account statements of Ronnie and Lorraine Wilson going back to 2000. They show an ever-increasing overdraft, with just occasional small amounts coming in.’ He put them back in the folder and raised the second one. ‘This is much more interesting. It’s a bank account opened in Lorraine Wilson’s sole name in December 2001.’
‘For the life insurance money, presumably?’ Lizzie Mantle said.
Nick Nicholl nodded and Grace was impressed. Normally the young man lacked self-confidence, but at this moment he seemed really together.
‘Yes, that was deposited in March 2002.’
‘I don’t understand how it was paid out that fast,’ Lizzie Mantle queried. ‘I thought if there was no body found, there was a seven-year-wait before a missing person could be declared dead.’ As she spoke she deliberately avoided Roy Grace’s eyes, knowing what a sensitive issue this was for him personally.
‘There was an international agreement, thanks to an initiative from Mayor Giuliani,’ Steve Mackie said, ‘to waive this period for the families of victims 9/11 and fast-track payments.’
Nick Nicholl laid out several of the bank statements in front of him, like a dealer in a card game. ‘But this is where it gets interesting. The entire amount of that payment of one and a half million pounds was withdrawn in different-sized chunks, in cash, over the next three months.’