His fourth mistake, Nick Fox thought, very happily, had been to hire him as his trusted solicitor, and to confide in him over these many years. Fox knew where all the bodies were buried — or rather, in this case, where all the cash was stashed. And Gready had given him unique access to it.
With Gready now dead, there was no one standing in his way. He held all the bank account numbers, and the equally important codes to them, to access over £35 million that Terence Gready had carefully squirrelled away around the world.
All it had needed for that money to become his was one piece of luck. And that had come in the form of Mickey Starr’s love for his brother, Stuie.
When Gready had told him to find someone to ‘rough Stuie up a little’, as a warning to Mickey not to attempt to grass him up for a sentence reduction, Fox had seen his chance. All he needed to do was find a couple of thugs from his client base and offer them a massive financial incentive to kill Stuie, while making it look like a roughing-up gone too far.
He tapped on his keyboard, entering a serial number, followed by the password for one of Terence Gready’s accounts — at a bank in the Cayman Islands.
$750,578.02 on deposit.
All his now.
Luck had smiled on him. Not that luck was chance, it was something you worked at. Like his golf pro once told him after holing-in-one at a pro-am tournament, ‘Nick, I find the harder I practise, the luckier I get!’
That was kind of how he felt right now. Subtly feeding the information to Mickey Starr that it had been Terence Gready who had ordered Stuie’s death had done the trick. Producing a better result than he could have imagined!
Shame about the kid brother, but shit happened.
He smiled, cynically.
He was now rich. Properly rich. Beyond what would once have been his wildest dreams. All he needed to do, publicly, was to continue playing the long game. Be just like Terence Gready had always been, Mr Respectable. Just until everything died down. And then, a quickie divorce and vamoose! Off shore and out of sight. With his new girlfriend — well, not so new, three years and counting — not that Marion, his wife, suspected a thing.
His reveries were interrupted by a knock on his door, and his loyal secretary entered.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, Nick. There are two police officers — detectives — asking if they could have a word with you?’
‘Police — where from?’
‘I believe they are from Sussex.’
‘Show them in,’ he said, confidently.
A stocky, suited man in his mid-fifties with a shaven head and a smart tie entered his office, holding out a sheet of paper in one hand and his warrant card in the other. He was followed by a tall, equally sharp-suited younger man.
‘Acting Detective Inspector Norman Potting and Detective Sergeant Jack Alexander from Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team,’ he announced. ‘You are Nicholas Fox?’
‘I am,’ he said, pleasantly. ‘How can I help you, officers?’
‘Nicholas Gordon Fox, I have a warrant for your arrest on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder.’
Fox stared at them in sudden, utter panic, bewildered. What the hell was going on? For an instant, he wondered if he should make a dash for it. But Alexander, behind the DI, was blocking the doorway. ‘Arrest?’ he said, instead. ‘What do you mean?’
Potting started to caution him.
Fox held up his hand, interrupting him. ‘Yadda, yadda, yadda. I’m a solicitor, OK? Spare me the fucking pre-take-off crap. I know how to put on a life vest and blow the whistle.’
Ignoring him, the DI continued with the caution.
‘Which way exactly do the straps go around my chest?’ Fox asked, facetiously. ‘And you haven’t pointed out the emergency exits.’
111
Saturday 1 June
Roy Grace let himself and Humphrey into the garden after a morning walk, went over to the hen house and lifted the lid of the first of the three nesting boxes, trying to ignore the sour reek. Two eggs of different sizes, one brown and one blue, nestled in the straw.
‘Good girls! I’ll tell your keeper, Bruno!’ he called out to them, gently lifting each egg out and placing them in a bowl. He retrieved a further three from the next two boxes and headed back towards the house with the triumph of a crusader returning home laden with booty.
Strolling in shorts and flip-flops across the freshly mown lawn, he felt, suddenly, an almost intoxicating happiness. It was moments like this when he wished he could freeze time and hold them in his mind forever. He stopped and stood, looking at their cottage and the hill, dotted with sheep, that rose up behind. It was coming up to 9 a.m. and the clear, cobalt sky looked set to deliver the forecaster’s promise of a fine weekend. There was just one major cloud and it wasn’t in the sky.
Cassian Pewe.
Even when he’d given the ACC the news that poor Stuie Starr’s murder was pretty much cleared up, there was no thank you, simply an admonishment that two murders in Sussex within such a short period of time did not make good headlines. A litany of anger from him then followed, blaming Grace for failing his team by not anticipating Starr’s attack on Gready.
Maybe Pewe was right, he reflected, perhaps as the leader he should have done. But how? Police officers had been described by a former Met Commissioner as ‘ordinary people doing extraordinary things’. True sometimes, Grace thought. But we’re not superhuman.
He was at a loss how to deal with Pewe. The ACC had welcomed him back from his secondment to the Met with open arms, only to immediately stab him in the back and return to his former hostile attitude. A few years ago, when they’d been on equal rank, Grace had risked his life to save Pewe’s, when the front of his car had gone over the edge of a cliff and the vehicle hung precariously. There had been little more than grudging gratitude afterwards.
Was there something in psychology, he wondered, some innate pride perhaps, that could turn people against those who had saved their lives?
It hadn’t helped their relationship that he subsequently found a discrepancy that nearly resulted in Pewe being investigated by Professional Standards, and which had sent him fleeing back to the Met, from where he had originated, with his tail between his legs.
Grace had scarcely been able to believe it when he was told by the Chief Constable less than a year later that Pewe was returning, and in a senior rank. The Chief told Roy that Pewe had assured him he felt no animosity towards him. How wrong that had turned out to be.
He decided to try to put Pewe from his mind for now and enjoy the weekend with his family. Bruno had asked him to cook French toast today and that’s what he planned to do. Then they were going to take a picnic to the beach.
A sudden squawking and clucking behind him made him turn and look at the chicken enclosure. Anna was pecking Isobel furiously, before strutting off in what looked like a huff. He smiled, fascinated by their little world. He loved watching how busy they were, rushing around in short bursts, eyeing the ground beadily for a speck of corn or mixed seed they might have missed.
After the endless daily horrors of human violence, in the papers, on television and, all too often, like poor Stuie Starr, on a tray in the mortuary, the simple act of walking Humphrey over fields, or picking an egg out of a nesting box, he found incredibly grounding and calming.
Not that he was starry-eyed or naive about hens, or any other aspects of Mother Nature. Chickens could be as vicious as any humans, with domestic violence — as he had just witnessed — an almost daily occurrence in the enclosure. People said violence was just human nature, but it wasn’t, it was all nature — and you didn’t have to go far to see it. The local wood half a mile away was, in its densest part, a war zone of plants and trees trying to strangle each other.