I went round to Jan’s drawer once more and took out her working notes on the Gantry project. There were several pages, quite a thick bundle of manuscript; I went through them one by one.They began with a summary of the financial position of the development division, then moved on to look over the construction business. The bulk of the pile of notes reflected Jan’s detailed analysis of the profitability of the public houses, with a summary page listing them all together and stating her opinion that all of the licensed premises were being operated properly.
And that was all there was. There were no notes on the health care division. None at all. Yet when I had left on that damnable Friday morning to catch the flight to Barcelona with GWA, they had been all over the place. Christ, I even remembered chiding her, in fun: ‘That’s supposed to be a partners’ desk,’ I said to her, less than five minutes before I kissed her goodbye. . without knowing that’s what it was. ‘How much of it do you need?’
The thing looked huge now, as I put the pages back into their original order and replaced them in the filing drawer. I sat down once more in my captain’s chair, staring blankly at the remains of my muesli, my heart pounding as I fought in vain against facing up to a frightening truth.
If Jan hadn’t put those papers back into The Gantry Group filing system — and I was sure she hadn’t — then, sure as God made wee sour apples, someone else had.
There was only one answer to that, of course: someone had broken in and retrieved them. But when? I reached across and picked up Jan’s lap-top — we each had one — and switched it on. It was powerful and booted up quickly. I selected her electronic diary and opened it at the date in question.
The only entry for Friday read, ‘Work at home’. Saturday’s listed priorities were ‘Hairdresser’, ten am, and ‘Watch BattleGround’ at nine-thirty pm. From the Sunday entry, she’d decided to go to Anstruther; only for her, Sunday had never happened.
As I looked at the page, the thing that had been working its way through my cluttered brain finally broke surface; my wife spoke to me again, inside my head. Our last conversation, the last time I had ever heard her voice: on the mobile phone, me in the chaotic restaurant in bloody Barcelona, Jan sitting opposite where I sat now, working.
‘I suppose so,’ she had said. ‘I’ve got the hairdresser in the morning, and I’m shopping in the afternoon, but I can always work in the evening, before your show.’ I strained to remember what she had said after that, as I had strained to hear her words against the Spanish shouts all around me. ‘I’m getting there, Oz. I’ll let you see what I’ve found when you get home.’
Of course she hadn’t taken those papers back to The Gantry Group office. She’d been keeping them to show to me.
There could only be one answer to the riddle: someone had been watching the flat on Saturday morning, had seen her drive away, and had made an unnoticed entry to recover the files, which I knew would have been tidied away by then. Jan and I had a strict rule; we never allowed our jobs to mess up our home, outside working hours.
Of course, this led on to a further conclusion. Whoever broke into our flat would have had ample time to roll out the washing machine and fit a booby-trap device, just as the manufacturer’s ‘impartial’ experts had suggested.
And who, apart from me, knew that Jan was working on those papers, and about the thing which she had been anxious not to discuss across the dinner table under the ears of Detective Inspector Mike Dylan? Only Miss Susie Gantry, that’s all.
Chapter 48
When I sat down and thought about the situation rationally, Susie Gantry made no sense at all as a suspect. She had hired Jan in the first place and had asked her to research the profitability of the business.
Unless of course my wife had been a far better accountant than she expected. What if, I asked myself, Susie had simply expected Jan to give the business a clean bill of health then pick up the reins from old Joseph Donn? What if Jan had stumbled on something that was buried really deep, something that she was never meant to find?
What if she had signed her own death warrant by dropping that hint to Susie across our dinner table?
‘No way, Oz!’ I said aloud, as Jan would have. ‘Trust your judgement on this. Susie Gantry is not the sort of person who sends people to break into houses and rig deadly devices. No fucking way!’
‘But someone did,’ I shot back at myself. ‘Even if the accident was just that, a fatal one in a million fault, someone took those papers and put them back in the Gantry files. Somewhere in the Gantry office there’s someone who didn’t want Jan to find whatever was hidden in those records.’
It was as if she was there with me; the other half of my brain, as she had become, slipping in points to the argument. ‘So why did that someone take the chance of putting those papers back into the files, having taken them, and the notes, from our place?’
‘Because if they knew that you were dead, Jan,’ I whispered, ‘there would be no threat. The Gantry Group is a private company, but the records of the business have to be kept for Inland Revenue purposes. There would have been an element of danger in simply throwing those files away. So whatever this deadly secret is, it must be there still, buried deep in the books, where only a clever girl like you could work it out.
‘But now that Mr Joseph Donn and his nephew are back in control of the company accounts, there won’t be any more clever girls looking them over, will there.’
I felt my eyes narrow as the cold anger which had overwhelmed me in Barcelona took hold of me once more.
‘Time to talk to the police, Osbert Blackstone,’ I said, in that voice of someone else’s. ‘Even though you’ll be putting the policeman in question right on the spot.’
Chapter 49
I had arranged with Everett that I would meet him at midday on Monday to discuss how to protect the pay-per-view event, but before I left home, I called Greg McPhillips.
‘Hi Oz,’ he greeted me, affable as ever. ‘Have you had a chance to think rationally about taking action against the Germans? I’ll tell you now; you don’t need the money.
‘I’ve sorted out all Jan’s insurance policies: your mortgage, such as it was, is paid off automatically, there’s an additional endowment policy that pays eighty grand in the event of accidental death, a death in service arrangement as part of her pension plan, the fund value itself, and a straight life policy. There’s a lot of cash there — I’m not going to say how much over the phone — but the tax planning was done very well, so you should be exempt from estate duty.’
It went straight over my head. ‘You’re not going to give me back my wife though, are you, Greg?’
‘No, pal. That I can’t do.’
‘Well in that case you just sort everything out, pay all the funeral expenses, take your own fee, and put the balance in some sort of account. Tell me when it’s all done, ’cause right now, I don’t give a shit.
‘As for the Germans, I want another week to think about that. If I do take action against them, it won’t be about money, believe me.’
‘No, of course it won’t, Oz. I shouldn’t have said that.’
I couldn’t help but laugh at his contrition, since I’d heard it so often before. ‘Greg, my dear old friend, a list of all the things you shouldn’t have said would stretch from here to Edinburgh and back.’
I hung up and headed across the river to the GWA headquarters, where Everett was waiting for me with fresh coffee in the pot. I welcomed it; I was still cold with anger from the aftermath of my conversation with Susie, and was having trouble switching my attention to my client’s business.