Now both of them looked genuinely shocked.
‘Shit!’ Sue said.
‘Is that the one that was in the Argus on Monday?’ Stephen wondered.
Bella nodded at him.
‘Are you saying that – that – Ronnie had something to do with it?’ he asked.
‘If I may continue for a moment, sir,’ Branson pressed, ‘we learned yesterday that Lorraine Wilson’s body has also been found.’
Sue Klinger blanched. ‘In the Channel?’
‘No, in a river outside Melbourne, in Australia.’
Both Klingers sat looking at him in stunned silence. Somewhere in the house a phone started ringing. No one made any move to answer it. Glenn drank some of his coffee.
‘Melbourne?’ Sue Klinger said eventually. ‘Australia?’
‘How on earth did she get there from the English Channel?’ Stephen asked, looking totally astonished.
The ringing stopped. ‘The post-mortem has shown that she has only been dead for two years, sir – so it doesn’t look as if she did commit suicide by jumping into the Channel back in 2002.’
‘So she did it by jumping into a river in Australia instead?’ Stephen said.
‘I don’t think so,’ Glenn replied. ‘Her neck was broken and she was in the boot of a car.’ He held back the rest of the information he had.
Both the Klingers sat very still, absorbing the impact of what they had just heard. Finally Stephen broke the silence. ‘By whom? Why? Are you saying the same person killed Joanna and Lorraine?’
‘We can’t tell at this stage. But there are some similarities in the way they both appear to have been killed.’
‘Who – who would have killed Joanna – and then Lorraine?’ Sue asked. She began twisting a gold bracelet on her wrist round and round nervously.
‘Were either of you aware that Joanna Wilson inherited a house from her mother, which she sold shortly before her death?’ Glenn asked. ‘It netted an amount of approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. We are now trying to track down what happened to that money.’
‘Probably went to pay off Ronnie’s debts the moment it came into her account,’ Stephen said. ‘I liked the old bugger but he wasn’t too clever with money, if you know what I mean. Always wheeling and dealing, but never getting it quite right. He wanted to be a much bigger player than he had the ability for.’
‘That’s a bit harsh, Steve,’ Sue commented, turning to face her husband. ‘Ronnie had good ideas.’ She looked at the two detectives and tapped her head. ‘He had an inventive mind. He once invented a gizmo for extracting air from wine bottles that had been opened. He was in the process of patenting it when that – what’s it called? – Vacu Vin came out and cleaned up in the market.’
‘Yeah, but the Vacu Vin was plastic,’ Stephen said. ‘Ronnie made his out of brass, the stupid sod. Anybody could have told him that metals react with wine.’
‘You said yourself at the time you thought it was smart, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, but I wouldn’t invest in any business Ronnie was running. Done it twice before and both went down the toilet.’ He shrugged. ‘You need more than a good idea to make a business work.’ He glanced at his watch and looked a little agitated.
‘Mr and Mrs Klinger,’ Bella said, ‘did you have any idea that Lorraine had come into a substantial amount of money in the months before she – seemingly – ended her life?’
Sue shook her head vigorously. ‘No way. I’d have been the first to know. Ronnie left her in a terrible mess, poor thing. She had to go back to work at Gatwick. She couldn’t get any credit because of all the judgements against Ronnie. She couldn’t even scrape enough cash together to buy a car. I even lent her a few hundred quid to tide her over at one point.’
‘Well, this may come as a surprise to you both,’ Glenn said, ‘but Ronnie Wilson had a life insurance policy with the Norwich Union which paid out just over one and a half million pounds to Lorraine Wilson in March 2002.’
Their shock was palpable. Then he added to it.
‘Further, in July 2002, Mrs Wilson received a payment of nearly two and a half million dollars from the 9/11 compensation fund. About one and three-quarter million pounds at the exchange rate at that time.’
There was a long silence.
‘I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe-’ Sue shook her head. ‘I know at the time she disappeared the police officers we spoke to didn’t seem entirely convinced that she had committed suicide by jumping off the boat. They didn’t say why. Perhaps they knew something then that we didn’t. But Stephen and I, and all her friends, were convinced she was dead, and none of us has heard a single word from her since.’
‘If what you are saying is true, that’s-’ Stephen Klinger broke off in mid-sentence.
‘She withdrew all of it, in cash, in different amounts, between the time she received the money and her disappearance in November 2002,’ Bella said.
‘Cash?’ Stephen Klinger echoed.
‘Would either of you have any idea if the Wilsons – or more likely Ronnie – was being blackmailed by anyone?’ Glenn asked.
‘Lorraine and I were very close,’ Sue said. ‘I think she’d have told me – you know – confided in me.’
The way she confided in you about the three and a quarter million quid! Glenn thought.
Stephen Klinger suddenly stabbed a finger in the air. ‘There’s one thing – could be that Ronnie had taught her this. He liked to trade stamps.’
‘Stamps?’ Glenn said. ‘Like postage stamps, you mean?’
He nodded. ‘Big-ticket ones. He always traded them for cash. Reckoned it was harder for the Revenue to keep tabs on him.’
‘Three million plus pounds would be an awful lot of stamps,’ Bella said.
Stephen shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. I remember Ronnie opening his wallet one night in a pub and showing me this one stamp, all in tissue paper, just one stamp he’d paid fifty grand for. Reckoned he had a buyer who would pay sixty for it. But knowing his luck, he probably ended up getting forty.’
‘Would you have any idea where Mr Wilson did his stamp trading?’
‘There’s a few local dealers he told me he used, for smaller stuff. I know he dealt with a place called Hawkes down Queen’s Road sometimes. And with one or two places in London, and in New York, as well. Oh yeah, and he used to talk about some big player who deals from home – can’t remember his name – he’s just around the corner in Dyke Road. Someone at Hawkes would be able to tell you.’
Glenn noted the name down.
‘He did say that at the top end of the market it’s a very small world. If any dealer made a large sale, everyone in the business would know about it. So if she spent that kind of money on stamps, someone’s going to remember.’
‘And presumably,’ Bella said, ‘someone would also remember if she sold them.’
84
It was Duncan Troutt’s first day on patrol as a fully fledged police officer. He felt rather proud, rather self-conscious and, in truth, a little nervous of screwing up.
At five feet nine inches tall and just under ten stone, he cut a slight figure, but he knew how to look after himself. A long-time fan of martial arts, he had attained a whole raft of certificates in kickboxing, taekwondo and kung fu.
His girlfriend, Sonia, had given him a framed poster which read:
YEA, THOUGH I WALK ALONE THROUGH THE SHADOW OF
THE VALLEY OF DEATH, I FEAR NO EVIL, FOR I AM
THE MEANEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE VALLEY.
Right now, at 10 a.m., the Meanest Son of a Bitch in the Valley was at the junction of Marine Parade and Arundel Road, at the eastern extremity of Brighton and Hove. Not exactly a valley. Not even a small dip, really. The streets were calm at the moment. In another hour or so the drug addicts would be starting to surface. One statistic that the local tourist board did not like to advertise was that the city had the second largest number of injecting drug users – and drug deaths – per capita in the UK. Troutt had been warned that a disproportionately large share of them appeared to live on his beat.