His heart sank, but anger rose inside him.
‘Bastards,’ he said, quietly. He shook his head, stared again, just to be quite certain. ‘Bastards.’
Then he walked back into the hall, followed by the Detective. There was a pile of mail sitting on top of a Victorian table, one he had never particularly cared for. Ignoring Branson’s caution not to touch it without his gloves on, he began sifting through it. Halfway through the pile was a single A4 sheet of paper with a form letter.
It was headed: R. C. MOORE.
Below was an address in Brighton’s Kemp Town. And beneath that the wording:
Dear Sir or Madam
In the many years that I have been visiting this area, I have never ceased to take satisfaction from the pleasure people gain from realizing money from some unwanted, often forgotten item. Funds that you can put to good use – items that I, in turn, can sell.
I am always interested in buying items such as:
Old leather and crocodile suitcases
Children’s books
Old jewellery
Scrap silver and gold
‘Looks like a knocker-boy leaflet,’ Glenn Branson said, bagging it to get it fingerprinted later.
Brighton’s knocker-boys hailed back to the post-war days of the rag and bone men, and they had been a scourge of the elderly and vulnerable for decades, using leaflets like these to get inside houses and then either rip off the owners or pass on tips about valuable items to professional burglars.
Daly nodded. He knew. He’d been one himself, years back. Then suddenly his phone rang. Excusing himself, he stared at the display. There was no name showing.
‘Gavin Daly,’ he answered.
‘It’s Nurse Wilson, Mr Daly. Your sister is weakening. I think you should come back quickly.’
18
Roy Grace, in protective clothing like everyone else in Aileen McWhirter’s house, stood alone in her ground-floor study, at the rear of the property, on his phone, with a map of the area in front of him. He paused from his task of putting together his enquiry team, and issuing instructions to each person he called, to text Cleo and warn her he would be very late home tonight.
The only information Aileen McWhirter had been able to give was that two of the men who attacked her were in brown uniforms, saying they were from the Water Board. He needed to cocoon an area around the property, and arrange for a house-to-house enquiry team to approach neighbours to see if any of them had had similar visits. But the officers carrying out this task needed to make these into reassurance visits at the same time so they did not frighten people, and to dispense crime-prevention advice. They needed to see if there were any CCTV cameras in the area that might have picked up anything. Unfortunately Withdean Road and its environs were not covered by the city’s police CCTV network, although plenty of the homes had their own. He needed to establish whether there had been any similar crimes in the city, or in the county, recently. And he needed to set up an ‘anniversary visit’ check, placing Sussex Police billboards on the street, either side and to the front of the property, asking if anyone had seen unfamiliar vehicles in the area either on the night of the attack, or the previous Tuesday evening.
When villains cased a property, he knew from experience, they would often carry this out a week before, checking the movement patterns of the occupants for the same day.
Something felt wrong about this devastating attack on the old lady, but he could not put his finger on it. This kind of brutal tie-up robbery had, sadly, a long history. But all his instincts told him there was something more going on here.
The contents of the bookshelves had been the first thing to catch his eye in here. Then a movement outside distracted him. Through the leaded-light window he saw a sparrow washing itself in an ornamental fountain, totally unaware of the horror that had recently taken place here.
Grace had never been particularly interested in poetry, but there was one poem he remembered from his schooldays, because he’d had to learn it by heart and recite it during an English class. It was by W. H. Auden, and the first two lines seemed so apt here, he thought suddenly.
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read
The hunter’s waking thoughts . . .
He stared beyond the bathing sparrow across the terrace of lawns and over to the far side of the valley, a mile distant. This time of the year much of the view of the eastern side of the city was obscured by greenery, but he could still make out the large rectangle of Varndean School, where he had been a pupil, before becoming a police cadet.
On the victim’s walnut bureau was a large leather diary, some framed photos of children and adults, all discoloured with age, an old-fashioned red leather address book, a Parker pen lying on a blotter pad, her blue headed notepaper, and a birthday card with a blank page inside and a blank envelope that she had obviously been planning to send to someone. The clue might be in the diary, he thought, flicking backwards and forwards through a few pages with his gloved fingers. But at a cursory glance the pages were blank except for an appointment note, in three days’ time, written with a fountain pen in a sloping, spidery hand: Dr Parish. 11.30.
Above the bureau, surrounded by a dark rectangle where a painting had probably hung, there was a safe, with a combination lock, and the door to it open. He peered inside but it was empty. At the back was what looked like a panel on its side, and a second door, as if to a secret chamber in the safe, which was also open.
He turned his attention back to the bookshelves, and ran his eyes over some of the titles again. The First 100 Years of the American Mafia. Young Capone. Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City. Irish Organized Crime. King of the Brooklyn Waterfront.
There was shelf after shelf of them.
Why?
The collection was like an obsession.
Why had this lady got all these books on the early gang history of New York?
Aileen McWhirter. That was an Irish name. Did Gavin Daly’s sister have some historic link with American organized crime? Did they both?
From what little he had gleaned about Aileen McWhirter since being called out here, she had been married to a stockbroker, and widowed for the past fifteen years. Her own children had predeceased her, but there was a granddaughter and her husband, Nicki and Matt Spiers, and their two children, Jamie and Isobel – Aileen McWhirter’s great-grandchildren – whom the police were currently trying to contact. She had no record, other than a traffic offence three years ago, when she had collided with a bollard for no apparent reason, which had resulted in her licence being revoked.
Perhaps she had once written a thesis on the subject? A book? Was trying to learn something about her family history?
Suddenly his phone rang. ‘Roy Grace.’
It was Glenn Branson, outside. ‘Boss, Gavin Daly has just been. I was going to get you to meet him, but he’s been called up to the hospital urgently.’
‘What’s the latest on Mrs McWhirter?’
‘We’ve got an officer there, guarding the ward. He’s keeping me in the loop. It’s not sounding good.’
‘It never was,’ Grace replied grimly.
‘Something I want to show you in the hall.’
‘I’ll be right there.’
Branson was standing on a SOCO board on top of a frayed Persian rug by a hall table, tapping an A4 leaflet, in a bag, headed with an ornate typeface that was, no doubt, intended to convey an air of class, but which, in Grace’s view, made it look even more like the work of a spiv.