Killing With Confidence (7 page)



Martin Seth
was calmness personified as he sat by himself in Maryhill nick,
sipping coffee from a plastic cup and flicking through a copy of
Metro
. It was an old one – no mention of his dead wife.
He looked at the date at the top of the page: 5 September. That was
just three days ago. Before his world had been turned upside down.
Before Selina’s death. Before he’d become a prime suspect. He’d
like to think that on 5 September life had been comparatively
normal, but that wasn’t true.

Being married to
Selina these past few years could never have been described as
normal. She hadn’t bothered covering up her affairs or, to be more
accurate, her one night stands. Arriving home at dawn, drunk,
underwear in her handbag, had almost become the norm. Martin had
even learned to accept it. With his self-esteem at rock bottom he
hadn’t even felt humiliated any more. It was trying the keep the
business afloat that had really taken its toll.

A picture in his
study at home showed him posing with his five-a-side football side.
He looked at least ten years younger. But the photograph had been
taken less than two years ago. Now his hair and skin were greying,
his face heavily lined from worry and a permanent frown. He no
longer played football, he just didn’t have the energy, and his sex
drive was in his boots, which might have explained why his wife
played away.

Every waking minute
of every day was spent with his head in the company’s books. They
were actually making money thanks to Martin’s hard work, but
jewellery is an expensive game with a lot of overheads. Cash flow
was the main problem. The retailers would take an age to pay and
gold traders don’t take IOUs.

Then there was
Selina. The businesswoman who lived like a pop star. Although she
was barred from making the company’s most crucial decisions on her
own, she was still the face of Seth International and refused point
blank to rein in her spending. She’d taunt Martin during their many
furious rows that he was ‘just an accountant’ and she was the
‘creative one’ in the partnership. She did have a point. And it was
also true that she had to entertain department store head buyers,
but Selina’s ‘entertaining’ usually moved quickly from bottles of
Bollinger to the bedroom.

Lately, she’d spent a
lot of time romancing a big player at Tesco. Her credit card bills
for expensive London restaurants and hotels had been mind-boggling,
but Martin knew only too well that the account could have been the
answers to their prayers.

It’d been close, too,
before she died.



DCI Crosbie
entered the room having come straight from his second murder scene
in two days. He sat down wearily and looked at the widower and his
female lawyer. Crosbie was the first to speak. ‘Hello, Martin, I’m
Detective Chief Inspector Crosbie, but if you’re a good lad, you
can call me Bing. Now listen, I’m very tired, and I can’t be arsed
trying to coax information out of you. You’re an intelligent man,
so how about you just tell me the truth and nothing but the
truth?’

14

The Suspects

April and
Connor had agreed to go for a coffee in Starbucks after they’d
finished filing their copy. As Martin Seth had been arrested,
April’s interview could not be used as it was sub judice. Events
had overtaken her exclusive chat with murder suspect number one,
anyway, after the discovery of Jackie McIvor, a well-known street
worker whose neck had been broken and her body dumped in a
ditch.

Connor had been sent
to the crime scene where yet again his friendly copper on police
line duties had managed to slip him a few more nuggets of
information that would keep the
Daily Herald
ahead of the
pack.

April and Connor had
left the office as the splash was being designed on screen –
Woman No. 2 murdered, Seth’s husband arrested. It was certainly
striking, but both felt uneasy about it.

‘I don’t think Martin
could kill anyone, never mind two women in two days,’ April said,
emptying her fourth sugar sachet into her latte and taking a bite
out of her Danish pastry.

Connor looked at the
empty sachets with disdain. ‘Do you know what? I don’t think I’ve
met anyone who eats as much as you do.’

April let out a
raucous laugh. ‘I know – wherever do I put it all?’ She patted
her wide hips.

They were silent for
a moment, stirring their coffees absent-mindedly.

Connor was the first
to speak. ‘Well, I’ve never met him, but it’d take a special kind
of psychopath to kill twice in two days – it’s almost unheard
of.’

‘He honestly doesn’t
have it in him. He looks fairly fit but he’s not strong enough to
have snapped someone’s neck,’ April mused.

‘Don’t be so sure.
Look at Peter Tobin, a right wee insignificant guy, yet the
brutality he inflicted on his victims was horrific.’

Tobin was a small,
wiry man who had kept his emotions in check throughout his police
interviews and the search for three separate murder victims. The
facade had only slipped once when he was being led from the High
Court in Glasgow to a prison van where he’d kicked a kneeling
Daily Herald
photographer Paul Kielty in the neck. Before
the snapper had passed out, he’d managed to fire off one frame of
Tobin’s evil face twisted and contorted with rage – so
obviously the real Tobin his poor victims had seen before he
sadistically took their lives.

‘I still can’t
believe Paul Kielty didn’t win a press award for that picture,’
spat Connor. ‘And who did they give it to? Some twat who’d taken a
picture of a Highland cow in the snow. That sums up this bloody
industry. Do you know what the biggest problem is with newspapers
today? Tyrants. There aren’t enough tyrants who want to be
proprietors any more. It’s all shareholders wanting their slice of
the profits now. But newspapers are about gut instinct – not
playing the market.’

‘And what,’
interrupted April, ‘does that have to do with Selina and
Martin?’

‘Well, they’re in the
fashion business. Again, something you need to have a feel for.
That needs a tyrant at the top, too. So who was the tyrant of the
duo – Martin? I don’t think so. It was Selina. Tyrants make
great captains of industry but they also make great enemies. Find
Selina’s enemies and we’ll find who snapped her neck.’

April sighed. ‘But
where do we begin? I remember a wee lassie from Selina’s office
came to see me a few years back. Charelle or Chantal or
something?’

‘Chantal Cameron. She
was the office dog’s body. Like Selina’s shadow for a while. Went
everywhere with her,’ Connor replied.

‘That’s the one.
Selina fired her and she came into see me bumping her gums, hinting
at all sorts. But she wanted £10,000 up front to tell her story and
the same again on publication.

‘Well, we weren’t
going to pay that sort of money. I managed to haggle her down to a
grand. Then she changed her mind and that was the end of that.

‘But Chantal was just
one of several. Selina’s sacked so many staff she needed to fit a
revolving door. They’ll all be bearing grudges.’ April
reckoned.

‘‘Nah, too obvious.
The ones who were still working for her bear even bigger grudges.
She was a total nightmare. But they’re all women and there’s no way
a woman killed Selina.

‘Maybe there’s
someone who sees himself as Selina’s equal but who’s been crossed
by her. A previous lover? Although I don’t think even the
Daily
Herald
has enough resources to track them all down. You should
trawl through cutts, mainly the business papers, and see if there
were any lawsuits against Seth International that may have slipped
under the radar.’

‘Oh no,’ screeched
April, ‘you know I’m useless with Factiva.’ Factiva was the new
online newspaper archive system – known as ‘cutts’ – that
had replaced the old Telnet system which had been in place for
fifteen years. ‘The bastards only went and changed Telnet just as
I’d learned to master it,’ she added with no hint of a joke.

Connor laughed. ‘They
can upgrade the system but they can’t upgrade our April
Lavender.’



Apart from
establishing a timeline of Martin Seth’s movements on the day of
his wife’s murder, the formal interview had been unproductive.
Crosbie had asked him directly if he’d killed his wife. Martin had
replied with a firm ‘No’ before his lawyer had intervened. He was
still a suspect, but as this was such a high-profile active case,
Crosbie would have to pursue all other lines of inquiry.

Crosbie was thinking
along the same lines as Connor. He reckoned that Selina Seth’s
sacked office junior was unlikely to have been involved in murder,
but he still had to send a couple of detectives to interview the
former staff member about her whereabouts when her ex-boss was
brutally killed. Crosbie knew it would be a dead end.

He also wanted to
find another disgruntled business associate with a major grudge. He
could take his pick. Then there was the second case of the murdered
prostitute Jackie McIvor, which Crosbie was determined to keep
separate from the Selina investigation. The man who’d killed Jackie
was likely to be a known user of street workers. He’d most likely
have previous for assault and possibly had killed before.

Crosbie hoped that by
morning forensics would confirm that he was indeed after two
different murders, even if the newspapers were determined there was
only one. He afforded himself a wry smile. ‘Print and be cunting
damned. I wish my life was so pissing easy.’ That reminded him, he
needed to see his psychiatrist sooner rather than later.



April was
one step ahead of DCI Crosbie and his team.

She was sitting in a
Starbucks having an 8 a.m. meeting with Selina’s former employee.
Chantal Cameron had threatened to spill the beans on her time
working for Selina, before she had suddenly clamed up. No cheque
she’d subsequently been offered from a string of April’s tabloid
rivals to reveal all about her rich and famous employer could break
her silence.

But now Selina was
dead, Chantal had agreed to meet April once more. The reporter had
ordered two lattes and the pair sat outside so they could smoke.
Chantal was in the mood to get a lot off her fake chest. It
transpired that she had been more than just Selina’s dog’s body.
She’d also procured illegal drugs for her.

Chantal explained: ‘I
used to talk to Selina when I brought her coffee in the morning. We
got quite close. She was like a big sister to me.

‘Then one day she
said she was feeling really down and tired and asked if I could
think of anything to help her out.

‘I’d do a bit of
speed and the likes out clubbing at the weekends and actually had
some on me. She said she’d never tried drugs before but was well up
for it. She paid me out of petty cash. Then the next day she asked
me for some more.

‘Within a few weeks I
was running errands left, right and centre on so-called company
business, when all I was doing was picking up stuff from my dealer.
She was into everything. Speed. MDMA. Blues, you name it.

‘The speed was to get
her hyped up before meetings, diazepam to bring her back down
again. She also liked a bit of hash to get her off to sleep. She
even asked me to get her crystal meth once.

‘But then she sacked
me.’

‘Why?’ April
asked.

‘‘Cos I was doing a
bit of skimming,’ Chantal replied nonchalantly.

‘Skimming?’ April
enquired.

‘I could skim around
five hundred pounds a week for myself, plus what I needed for
personal use,’ Chantal replied, before deciding she needed to
justify her stealing, ‘but you have to remember it was my neck on
the line. If I’d been busted then I would have taken the full rap –
Selina had made that very clear. She was paranoid about being
caught. But then paranoia and drugs kind of go hand in hand.’

‘Who was your
dealer?’ April asked.

‘I’m not at liberty
to say,’ Chantal replied coolly, ‘but he’s into drugs in a big way
and not the sort you cross.’

‘How much was Selina
spending on drugs every week?’ April asked.

‘By the end? Up to
two grand,’ Chantal replied from behind her oversized shades.

‘How much was your
salary?’ April asked.

‘I was on buttons as
a junior - twelve grand a year,’ Chantal snorted.

‘But you were earning
another twenty-five on the side tax-free. You’re quite the little
entrepreneur,’ April said.

‘Look, I didn’t come
here for you to look down your nose at me. That bitch fired me
after all the risks I took on her behalf. So what if she discovered
I was ripping her off? What she was doing was illegal, too. I told
her I’d expose her drug habit if she didn’t pay me off.’

‘Is that what
happened. Did Selina buy your silence?’ April asked.

‘Er, no. I ended up
getting another job,’ Chantal added shiftily.

April knew she was
lying. But as far as she was concerned Chantal was a symbol of
everything that was wrong with today’s generation: all me, me, me.
Drugs and extortion came so easily to Chantal. It was just another
bargaining tool. She was clearly a girl with issues and a massive
chip on her shoulder. When April had been in her mid-twenties she
would have been delighted to be worked for a rich and famous
company boss. But that didn’t appear to be enough any more. Chantal
wanted to live the high life, too, having done nothing to deserve
it.

April picked up the
bill, thanked Chantal for her time and left with the excuse that
she had another meeting to go to. Really, she was desperate to head
to her favourite café, the Peccadillo.