In the end, both of my children refused the detective’s request to give any further voluntary statements anyway, exercising their right to remain silent.
I suppose you couldn’t blame them.
While all the talking was going on — or not — a forensic team measured, photographed, and swabbed everything in the sitting room, as well as the drops of Darren’s blood that had dripped from the knife as Gary had run across the hall as he’d made his escape.
‘Why do you bother?’ I asked DS Royle, ‘when you’ve got everything that happened recorded on video?’
‘Protocol,’ she answered. ‘And also because the defence might claim that the footage is inadmissible as evidence because it was made without Gary Shipman’s express permission. So it’s best to get everything else done properly at the beginning.’
‘Does it require his permission? You surely don’t need a person’s consent to capture their image on a security camera. And it’s my house, so I should decide.’
‘You or I might think that was a reasonable argument, but you never know what his lawyers are going to say in court. They can be slimy bastards.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Patrick, who had been listening to the exchange.
‘Present company excluded.’ She almost smiled.
There were two significant pieces of news that were reported to us during the evening.
The first was that Darren Williamson had managed to cling to life during the seventeen-mile journey to the Royal Berkshire Hospital, and also that he’d survived emergency surgery to stop the internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen.
Although he was still in a serious condition, the doctors were now expecting him to make a full recovery.
And the second piece of news was that a team of firearms officers from the Avon and Somerset Police had detained Gary Shipman as he tried to leave the flat in Bristol with a bag containing his passport, some clothes, and the hidden cash, together with two burner phones.
Patrick Hogg, KC, went home to Upper Basildon.
I went out with him to his car.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry you got more than you bargained for.’
‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ he said with a smile. ‘Not often a criminal barrister gets to witness such a serious crime firsthand. Most of the time, in court, we have to rely on what other people say to try and work out what really happened. And I don’t suppose we get it right even half the time.’
‘Well, thanks to your video, everyone will know the true facts of this one.’
‘Yes, and I’m glad Darren is going to be all right and that the police have caught Gary. But I would advise your son to get a good fraud solicitor, and quickly. He could be in a lot of trouble.’
‘Can you recommend one?’
‘I’ll send you an email.’
We shook hands, and then he climbed into his car and drove away.
Amanda wanted to go to Reading to see Darren, but she was told by the hospital that, after his surgery, he would be spending the night in the intensive care unit, and visitors were not allowed.
Consequently, we all went upstairs to our own home beds, and I wondered if it might be for the last time that we were together only as our nuclear family of four.
I lay awake for a while, going over and over in my mind everything that had occurred earlier that evening.
‘Are you still awake?’ Georgina asked quietly into the darkness.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Do you really want a divorce?’
Four Months Later
On Wednesday, I checked in early at Heathrow Terminal 5 for my British Airways flight, and made my way through airport security.
I was so excited that I could hardly stop myself from skipping along the terminal concourse towards the business-class lounge.
Much had happened over the preceding four months.
Gary Shipman had pleaded guilty at his first opportunity in the Magistrates Court, to unlawful wounding with an offensive weapon, occasioning grievous bodily harm, and also to threatening an individual with a knife such that the said individual was in fear for their life.
He was full of remorse and regret, and the Crown Prosecution Service accepted his plea that he had not intended to injure anyone. He claimed the stabbing had simply been a defensive reflex action when Darren had leapt towards him.
Three weeks later he was sent to the Crown Court, where a judge handed down a sentence of two years in custody for each offence, but to run concurrently rather than consecutively, for which Patrick Hogg thought he was a very lucky boy.
But that was only the start of his problems.
Following the seizure of Patrick’s video by the police, both Gary and James had been arrested on suspicion of fraud, and over the following month the whole sorry business of the Bristol University Gambling Society had been fully exposed, and it was a much bigger mess than I had expected.
Basically, it had developed into a Ponzi scheme.
Initially, with only the cash from a small handful of their closest friends, Gary and James had used the free bets and other promotions provided by the bookmakers to make a healthy return using the matched-betting technique.
They had distributed the winnings to their ‘investors,’ which in turn had encouraged them to invest more, and by word of mouth, more and more students had then joined, such that Gary and James suddenly found they had thousands of pounds each week to bet with.
And that number soon became even bigger as the apparent returns kept coming and word spread throughout the university student population. But in reality, the boys had resorted to paying out ‘winnings’ that didn’t actually exist, in order to further increase the number of members joining.
By now, most of the local Bristol and online bookmakers had gubbed their accounts, which meant they had excluded the society from receiving any more free bets and other promotions, and some had limited the amount they could stake. A few bookmakers had even closed their accounts altogether.
So the ‘payouts’ were in fact now being made straight from the money new society members were bringing in, rather than from any actual winnings.
At one point, they’d had more than two thousand members, some ‘investing’ a hundred pounds or more at a time, and all was fine for a while, as long as the flow of new members kept bringing in more cash to fund everything.
However, it all started to go wrong when the ex — University of Bristol student Mike Mercer had gone to the local newspaper, claiming it was all a con. Suddenly, the supply of new members joining began to slow, and even to dry up, and those already in wanted to cash out from their accounts.
But the society didn’t have enough money to pay them what they’d been promised.
So, in a last-ditch effort to turn around their fortunes, Gary hatched the plan to kidnap Amanda in order to force me to make Victrix horses lose races so he and James could lay them for huge amounts on the exchanges.
Although James claimed he was reluctant to do it, he had gone along with the plan because they were desperate, and he had set up the filming of Darren selling cocaine to force Amanda into agreeing.
When Dream Filler has been disqualified at Lingfield, and Hameed had then been beaten at Newbury, they had managed to recoup some of their losses. But Potassium’s win at Ascot had cost them dearly, so they had decided to give me a ‘reminder’ that they could kidnap Amanda anytime they liked, and I’d better do what they told me.
It had also been James who had suggested calling his mother’s phone several times before hanging up without speaking. He reckoned, correctly, that she would tell me about the calls, and that would add further pressure for me to do what they wanted.