Norman Potting raised his hand. ‘Chief, if they’d gone to try to recover the watch, and anything else, what would be the gain in killing those two?’
‘My thoughts precisely, Norman,’ Grace said. ‘The chance to check the boat out, perhaps? Hopefully you’ll find out more than Interpol have given us so far when you get out there.’
‘Why didn’t they just tie the two of them up, in that case?’ Guy Batchelor said.
‘Because Krasniki’s a psycho?’ Potting said. ‘We’ve just heard about his past form.’
Grace was thinking about the bruises he had seen on Sarah Courteney’s chest, when her dressing gown had slipped open, and then again in Dupont’s bedroom. ‘We know that Daly was arrested two years ago for assaulting his wife, Sarah Courteney, and then released when she wouldn’t press charges. He’s a thug. Could be that he and Krasniki went too far.’ He held up a sheaf of printed papers. ‘I have the post-mortem report on the two men from the Marbella Coroner. It makes interesting reading.’
He paused, the bit of bacon stuck in his teeth nagging him, but he couldn’t be seen picking his teeth in front of his team, so did his best to ignore it. ‘Summarizing the report,’ he said, ‘Macario had two broken bones in his foot, and bruising right across it, consistent with it being crushed. He also had severe bruising across the back of his neck, and Barnes had severe bruising around the front of his. Not injuries I would consider consistent with capsizing a small rubber dinghy.’
‘So if Daly and Krasniki killed these two, chief,’ Guy Batchelor said, ‘was it because they had got the information they wanted, or because they hadn’t?’
‘This kind of killing tends to be done to silence people,’ Grace said.
‘Silence them from what, in this instance?’ Batchelor asked.
It was a good question. The bacon in his teeth was really distracting him now, and Grace desperately wanted a toothpick. He tried to dislodge it with his tongue, for the twentieth time, without success. ‘Possibly to stop them from telling their paymaster who was on his trail. Possibly because, as Norman so succinctly put it, they’re both a couple of psychos and Daly lost his temper with them over his aunt’s death.’
‘Should we bring old man Daly in for questioning?’ Glenn Branson asked.
Grace shook his head. ‘I think Daly could be ahead of us. We should put surveillance on his son. I’ve a feeling he’ll lead us to the watch. If we find the watch, I suspect we’ll find who’s really behind this.’
‘Eamonn Pollock?’ Branson quizzed.
‘I’d put him as our prime suspect,’ Roy Grace replied. ‘We have Gareth Dupont in custody and we’ll have to try to make him talk. In his early interviews he gave his first account, and we developed a strategy for the interviews this morning. His detention has been extended. It’s a shame we’re not allowed to offer murder suspects a deal on sentence. But I think our interview strategy might be to offer him another kind of deal.’
‘What do you have in mind?’ Potting said.
‘Let’s recap on what we know about Lucas Daly. This is just my hypothesis – nothing proven yet. The knocker-boy, Ricky Moore, who Lucas Daly considers responsible for his aunt’s robbery and murder, ends up in Intensive Care with severe burns. Lucas Daly goes to Marbella, and lo and behold, Macario and Barnes end up as floaters.’ He gave Norman Potting a quizzical stare.
‘I’m on your bus, chief.’
‘Now, with Lucas Daly’s record for vengeance, if I was shagging his wife, I think I’d want to keep it quiet. In particular, I wouldn’t like hubby to find out. Would you?’
‘No.’
‘Murder suspects don’t get bail. If we can bang Dupont up in the remand wing, and let him know we’re going to tell Lucas Daly about him and his wife, I think he’d talk. You don’t have many places to hide in prison. But we have one problem to overcome. We haven’t got enough to charge Dupont yet; we need something that puts him at the house. He lied to us when we went to see him at his office, and we asked him what car he drove. He told us he owned a Golf GTI. There was a black Porsche parked outside his block of flats. The registration plate gave the owner as a leasing company in London.’ He turned to Bella Moy. ‘Which is why your search did not reveal anything. I’ve been in touch with the company, and they tell me it’s leased to one Gareth Dupont. At his address. But that still doesn’t put Dupont in Aileen McWhirter’s house.’ He looked around at his team.
‘We have his dab on a bronze statuette and the call made from his mobile phone, and now we know he drives a black Porsche, similar to one spotted at the scene exactly a week before the attack,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’
Grace shook his head. ‘The triangulation report on his mobile phone isn’t helpful enough. He could have been anywhere within a quarter-of-a-mile radius of the house at the time of his call. It’s too circumstantial. On the fingerprint, his brief would argue that he might have handled the statuette at Lester Stork’s house. It’s not going to fly – we need something more.’
‘Sir,’ asked researcher Jacqueline Twamley, ‘do we know any more about Lester Stork’s death?’
‘Yes, I’ve heard from one of the Coroner’s Officers, Philip Keay, that it was natural causes – a heart attack.’
‘Probably the excitement of handling all that stolen loot!’ Norman Potting said.
‘Isn’t it a bit too cosy that Dupont was shagging Lucas Daly’s wife, chief?’ Potting said. ‘Doesn’t that smack of collusion?’
‘I can’t rule out that she’s involved and we need to talk to her. I’m pretty sure Daly beats her, so she’d have a motive. But when Guy and I talked to her, I got the feeling she was genuinely fond of the old woman.’ He looked at the DS.
Batchelor nodded. ‘I agree, chief. I’d say it’s more likely she was unwittingly targeted by Dupont.’ He shrugged. ‘Unhappy marriage. Dupont’s a fit guy, a charmer. More likely they met somewhere and he pulled. I’m going to talk to her and see what she says.’
The youngest and newest member of his team, DC Jack Alexander, raised his hand. ‘I’ve found out something regarding that Porsche, sir.’
‘What’s that, Jack?’
The young DC told him. When he had finished, the whole atmosphere in the room had changed.
‘That, young man,’ Roy Grace said, ‘is pure bloody genius!’
72
Like most interview rooms used by Sussex Police, the one at the Custody Suite immediately behind Sussex House had a fitted CCTV camera, perched high up on a wall. By watching and filming arrested suspects, police officers were able to study their body language and generally assess their credibility.
It was a square, featureless room containing a fixed metal table and hard chairs; its internal window overlooked the central area, dominated by a futuristic-looking circular pod made of a dark-green marble-like material that always made Roy Grace think must have been designed by a Star Trek fan.
The suspect, unshaven, his shirt crumpled, was seated on one side of the table next to his solicitor, Leighton Lloyd, even more sharply dressed than when he was at the football. A wiry man with close-cropped hair, he had a formidable track record at getting Brighton’s villains off the hook.
Grace had chosen his team carefully. Bella Moy and Guy Batchelor were both trained cognitive suspect interviewers. Batchelor, he hoped, would put Gareth Dupont on edge, from having previously visited him at his office. Bella would seem softer, perhaps Dupont’s friend, and he clearly had an eye for the ladies.
A narrow, windowless viewing room, where Grace sat in front of a monitor, adjoined the interview room. It comprised two mismatched chairs, which were pulled up against a work surface, and on which sat the squat metal housing of the video recording machinery and the colour monitor in front of him, giving a dreary colour picture of the proceedings.