The old lag nodded. ‘Yeah. I have my dreams, sir,’ he said with a sad expression.
‘What are they?’
‘I’d like to be married again. Live in a nice house. Have kids. Have a nice car. But it ain’t going to happen.’
‘Why not? You’re only fifty-five. I’m sure you could start over.’
He shrugged yet again, a forlorn look on his face. ‘I’m fifty-five, with one hundred and seventy previous. No one wants to know me outside of here, except other crims. And you know what, sir? I don’t mind it inside. I’ve got me telly; the electricity’s paid for; the grub’s all right; I’ve got me mates here.’
‘Can’t I help you?’ Grace asked.
‘Yeah, you could give me the keys to a Ferrari 458. Not driven one of them yet.’ He grinned. ‘So what do you want from me?’
‘You’re not doing this stretch just for nicking cars – it’s for nicking antiques also, right?’
Loncrane nodded. ‘Yeah, well, the thing is, like I said, the easiest way to nick a fancy motor these days to break into the house where it’s parked. And if you’re inside, you might as well take some stuff while you’re there.’
‘Of course.’ Grace couldn’t help grinning at the man’s warped logic.
Loncrane looked at him hard for some moments. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, if you hadn’t chosen to be a copper, I think you’d have made a good burglar, sir.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘No, I’m serious. You’re a good detail man. Burglary’s all about planning and detail. Anyhow, you ain’t come here for career counselling. How can I help you?’
‘There was a nasty tie-up robbery, just under a fortnight ago, in Withdean Road, Brighton. Ten million quid’s worth of antiques taken and the house owner, an old lady called Aileen McWhirter, was tortured and died subsequently. Ten million is a lot of stuff by anyone’s reckoning. I was curious if you’d heard any word in here?’
Loncrane was silent for some moments. ‘And if I had?’
‘Two hundred quid, Donny – and the possibility of a good word to your governor.’
‘I thought the going rate was ten per cent of value?’
Grace smiled. ‘That was in the days before our budget was slashed to ribbons.’
There was a time when informants could receive as much as a tenth of the value of the stolen goods they helped recover; the payment was good because being an informant was a highly risky business, particularly in a prison. Loncrane would have had to have given a very plausible reason to his fellow prisoners why he was going through to the Governor’s office area – and would undoubtedly be getting a lot of suspicious questions about it afterwards from his fellow inmates.
The prisoner shot him a wary glance. ‘Know what happens to grasses in here?’
‘I’ve a fair idea.’
‘Boiling water thrown in your face. Razor blades in your food. It’s not clever.’
Loncrane fell silent, and for a moment Roy Grace worried that he was going to clam up on him. But then the prisoner held up his hand, showing three fingers.
‘Okay, three hundred, we have a deal. Who do you want the money paid to, Donny?’
‘I’ll give you the number of my Swiss bank account,’ he said with such a deadpan look that Grace believed he really might have one.
‘Dicky bird tells me that if I were you, Detective Superintendent, sir, I’d be looking hard at an expat called Eamonn Pollock who might be behind this.’
Roy Grace stared back at him; in the overall scheme of things, three hundred pounds was neither here nor there, but he would still have to justify the expenditure to his seniors. He hoped it was money well spent. ‘Pollock rings a faint bell,’ he said, frowning in thought.
‘Used to be involved with Amis Smallbone going back some years.’
‘Amis Smallbone?’ Grace said.
‘Yeah. They were pretty thick at one time.’
‘Tell me more about Pollock.’
‘A fat bastard who stitches up everyone he deals with. Lives abroad, Marbella. Used to live in Brighton. He’s flash, likes expensive watches. High-end fence; wouldn’t touch anything below ten grand value. Also got a loan-sharking business with extortionate interest rates. Always kept under the police radar, somehow, but made a lot of enemies. I’m told he lives on a boat in Marbella, surrounded by henchmen. Only people who are desperate do business with him.’
‘Sounds a nice man.’
‘He’s a regular sweetheart.’
Grace’s first action, after recovering his mobile phone, and walking out through the prison gates, was to phone Emma-Jane Boutwood at the Incident Room, and instruct her to drop everything and start working on an Association Chart for Eamonn Pollock.
Then he turned right and walked down the slope towards the visitors’ car park, thinking hard. Pollock. The name was very definitely ringing a bell, but he could not immediately place it.
57
PC Susi Holiday took the call on her radio as they were driving west along Portland Road in Hove, approaching the spot where they had attended a fatal accident earlier this year, where a cyclist had gone under a lorry. Her colleague Dave Roberts, who was driving the response car this morning, could hear the conversation on his, too. ‘Old Rectory, Ovingdean. Know that?’ she asked.
He frowned. ‘No.’
‘Sounds like another potential G5.’ She punched the address into the satnav. ‘Spin her round.’
‘Thought we’d had our quota for this year,’ Roberts replied.
‘Dead people can’t count,’ she retorted, cynically.
As he indicated left, then turned down towards the seafront, her radio crackled again with the voice of the Controller. She inclined her head, listening, then said to Roberts, ‘Been called in by a lady called Carol Morgan. She has a tenant in a cottage and is worried about him.’
Ovingdean, a village to the east of Brighton’s Kemp Town, just a mile north of the sea, behind Roedean Girls’ School, surrounded by stunning rolling farmland, was a place that Dave Roberts had often thought he would like to retire to, if he could afford it. ‘Do we have his name?’
‘Lester Stork.’ She grinned. ‘Funny name.’
‘Lester Stork? He’s a shitbag.’
‘Oh?’
‘Small-time fence. He was one of the first people I ever nicked when I first started on the force. Must be as old as God, I’m surprised he’s still alive.’
‘Sounds like he might not be.’
They turned left on the seafront and headed east, passing the marina, Roedean, and made another left just before St Dunstan’s, the famous home for blind ex-servicemen, and threaded round uphill, into the village. A short distance on, the satnav told them they had arrived.
Almost immediately on their left was an imposing Sussex flint farmhouse, with a large paddock behind it. ‘This is it!’ Susi said, reading the name, THE OLD RECTORY, smartly sign-written.
He turned the car into the circular drive and pulled up in front of the porch. As they got out, into a strong wind, an extremely attractive woman in her mid-forties, with long, wavy blonde hair, dressed in jodhpurs, riding boots and a sleeveless puffa, appeared from around the side of the house, leading a horse, which was pulling reluctantly against its reins.
‘Henry!’ she remonstrated, in one of those naturally posh voices that Susi secretly envied. Then she saw the police car and the two uniformed officers climbing out of it, pulling on their hats, raised a hand, turned to the horse again, spoke sternly to it, then waited for the officers. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s in a bit of a strop this morning, that’s all.’
‘Mrs Carol Morgan?’ Susi Holiday asked.
‘Yes, that’s me. Thank you for coming. Gosh, you’re jolly prompt. I had visions of you taking a couple of days!’
‘We’d hope not,’ Dave Roberts said. ‘We had a report that you are concerned about a tenant.’