‘I told you at my flat about the auction on the dark web?’
‘The Anne of Cleves miniature — by Hans Holbein.’
‘Hans Holbein the Younger,’ she corrected.
He smiled. She said it like a teacher correcting an errant pupil. ‘The Younger,’ he repeated.
‘OK, I’ve still not got to the bottom of whoever is actually running the auction, but I have made inroads. Someone very tech savvy is behind the way it’s set up, but they’ve made one small mistake, through an IP — Internet Protocol — address. You’d have to be looking extremely hard to find it. And I mean extremely. It’s buried deep beneath several firewall layers — which I’ve navigated through. That’s part of what I do. Which not many people can.’
Grace listened intently.
‘That IP address is for an internet account with an email address for someone called Gisella Standing. Gisella Standing is a real person, German-born from Dusseldorf, married to an Englishman and they live in Reigate in Surrey. She’s a dentist and her husband is a maxillofacial surgeon. But Gisella Standing, almost certainly unaware of it, is an internet alias for Rose Cadoret, Deputy Director of the Royal Collection. Gisella might get the occasional email that makes no sense and she’d just bin it, assuming it was spam.’
‘For what reason would Rose Cadoret use an alias?’ Grace asked.
‘There could be a number of reasons. A lot of people use aliases when surfing the net — particularly people looking at porn sites who don’t want to take the risk of being entrapped by blackmailers. Or simply because they are well known and they want to be anonymous. That’s a very plausible scenario for Rose Cadoret and nothing sinister about it. Her position as Deputy Director of the Royal Collection makes her a high-profile individual in the art world. If she wanted to make an acquisition on behalf of the Royal Collection, the moment she gives her name, the dealer’s eyes are going to light up with pound signs. Kerchinggggggg! The price has gone up twenty per cent before she opens negotiations.’
‘I get that.’
‘So far so good for Rose Cadoret. But then I went a little off-piste, and that’s where it gets more interesting. I thought I’d take a look at her personal finances.’
‘You hacked her bank account?’
‘I didn’t need to. I found out who she banks with — easy enough. OK, I told a bit of a fib — a white lie, right — to my lovely police Financial Investigator I was assigned to — Emily. I told her that Rose Cadoret was now a suspect in a major internet fraud scam, involving her bank and it was time critical. She spoke to her bank and, what do you know, I got all her account details through late last night.’
Grace smiled. ‘Good work!’ It had taken him a great deal of persuading the authorities to get Shannon released from prison, and there was a lot riding, reputational-wise, for him — on her delivering. His instincts had been right, and what he had just heard from Shannon was helping to confirm them. This information, together with Cadoret’s name in the diary, felt like they were getting closer.
Shannon continued. ‘Rose Cadoret’s on a salary of £78k. She has an apartment in south-west London, in Putney, with a mortgage that costs her £24k per annum as well as an annual service charge of £6k. She gives her mother an annual £5k top-up on her state pension. She has an HP payment of £8k per annum on her Fiat 500 Abarth car. A raft of standing orders — a gym membership, magazines, a vitamin supplement supplier called Foodstate. All of these tot up to almost £3k per annum. She has total fixed outgoings, without food, travel, holidays, of around £40k. After tax of around £12k, her income is now down to below £20k. So she’s not likely to be saving much, right?’
‘Doesn’t sound like it, no,’ Grace replied. ‘If anything at all.’
‘She doesn’t have a deposit account. Nor does she have any account with a stockbroker or wealth manager or IFA. What I’m saying by that is that she doesn’t have a savings stash anywhere — at least not that I’ve been able to find, so far.’
‘OK.’
‘But unless she won on the lottery or won big at gambling somewhere — and nothing I’ve found so far indicates to me that she is a gambler — there’s something I can’t explain, and it needs explaining.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Five weeks ago an amount of £180k was deposited into her bank account. The source of the money has been well concealed.’
Grace considered this for a moment. Sir Jason Finch, as Keeper of the Privy Purse, had access to all the Royal Household’s finances. A Bird in the Hand? ‘Could the source of this be Sir Jason Finch, Shannon?’
‘Not that I’ve been able to find so far. Not a trace of any activity on the dark web, nor on the internet at all. He features in the Royal Household social media posts, but that’s all — he’s totally under the radar.’
‘So he’s either innocent,’ Grace mused.
‘Or very clever,’ Shannon jumped in.
90
Wednesday 29 November 2023
At 9 a.m., Roy Grace stood in front of his Operation Asset team of fifty officers and civilian support staff, in the sectioned-off part of the room that had become his enquiry team’s temporary domain. It was also where he would hold his next press conference in two hours’ time, flanked by ACC Downing and one of the Comms team.
The only people in the room who knew about Shannon Kendall’s findings were Glenn Branson, Emily Denyer and Luke Stanstead. All three were sworn to silence. At Grace’s instigation, Emily had already spoken to Shannon this morning and would be taking a quiet, deep and secret dive into Sir Jason Finch’s assets immediately.
Grace was well aware that among the faces in front of him were DCI Jacqueline Crawley from the Scotland Yard Counter Terrorism Unit, and Security Coordinator DS Russ Lewis from the RaSP unit. They would relay everything they heard that was of any significance directly back to Detective Superintendent Greg Mosse. If he announced Shannon’s findings to the team, Mosse would be informed and would immediately want to take over questioning Rose Cadoret.
Grace knew what Mosse’s argument would be. That Rose Cadoret was on his manor and there was no evidence to link her to the Op Asset enquiry. Grace felt otherwise, and had no confidence the Met Detective Superintendent would do anything other than make a total fist of handling someone who could be a crucial lead. It needed both a subtle approach and a highly tactical one.
Not only that, this was the first real lead they had. He wasn’t going to squander it on that lightweight and let him take any glory that came from it. And Grace’s gut instincts told him that a great deal of glory might come from it. Instead he made the briefing a short one. He gave a quick recap of where they were and asked if anyone had anything significant to report.
Only the British Transport Police detective had something. The CCTV cameras covering both Hassocks Station, to the north of Clayton Tunnel, and Preston Park Station, to the south, had only recorded up to 8 p.m. on Sunday 19 November, the night before the derailment. Their software had been tampered with — the system having been hacked was their best guess at this stage. This information didn’t take the enquiry any further forward, but it was added confirmation to Grace of a conspiracy rather than a lone offender.
Grace hinted to the team that there were some promising developments through work being done by the Digital Investigation Support Unit and also at Digital Forensics, which was why neither Aiden Gilbert nor Jason Quigley were present, but beyond that he had nothing to report. He answered a number of questions about the murder of the footman, and an update on this was provided by DS Lewis from the RaSP unit, who said his team were looking closely for links between Geoffrey Bailey and Sir Peregrine.