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Authors: Clare Curzon

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BOOK: Last to Leave
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‘In which case a written statement shouldn't be needed,' Railton protested, bolder once he knew the questioning was over.
Salmon smiled nastily. ‘They still prefer it in writing,' he said, ‘once it gets to court.'
They let Gus go. He was passed in the corridor by his son looking apprehensive.
‘Horsy, keep yer tail up,' Gus quoted and got a blank stare in return.
Jake had had more than enough of policemen in the last two days. He faced this new DI with a sulky scowl. DS Beaumont, familiar enough by now, didn't actually make him puke but he was filth all the same.
Salmon's disgust with Jake's use of the Met for his alibi translated itself into disagreeable quibbling over all details of the young man's statement and prolonging an interview that wasn't of first importance. Since by then Jake was wise to this, the DI's manoeuvre succeeded only in increasing his bad humour. He retaliated by adopting an upper-class drawl and a vocabulary which he judged, sometimes rightly, would be foreign to a mere detective inspector. As a result the atmosphere in the small, enclosed room became increasingly tense and heated.
Beaumont, however, accustomed to teenager-at-bay strategy, happily collected some choice phrases to pass later to his own occasionally errant son.
Eventually the mental jousting ceased, from exhaustion of material to fling at each other. Jake was entrusted to Beaumont to write his punitive lines and Salmon, uptight with frustration, retired to pass on his spleen elsewhere.
It pleased Jake to make an involved mess of his written statement. Beaumont, unmoved, scanned the first few lines over his shoulder and binned the paper. ‘Can you manage a computer keyboard?' he asked mildly, knowing
pride wouldn't permit making a hash of IT literacy Jake gave a lopsided grin and gave in.
 
Robert Dellar had been in the West Country chasing the story of a rumoured supermarket takeover when news came through of the accident at Woodside roundabout. It took a few hours to find a substitute to pacify the city desk and he reached the hospital the next day only in time for Gus to inform him of Maddie's death. His fiancée arrived shortly afterwards and they had sat together by Sir Matthew's bedside for about twenty minutes waiting in vain for him to come fully awake.
The double shock had brought on an asthma attack, which Robert was subject to on occasions of sudden stress, and he retired to an outside stairway to use his inhaler, while Marion continued to keep watch. Their visit was duly recorded by the constable on duty outside the ICU. Yeadings, working through a mass of paperwork later, noted this and entered both names in his logbook with the times given.
It still worried him that no valid sightings of Jessica Dellar had come in. The photographs released to the media had drawn the usual outbreak of reports, both rational and fantastic. All had been investigated and proved mistaken. By now it seemed most unlikely that she would be deliberately ignoring requests to get in touch. Both her mother and Stone had been adamant that although impulsive she was responsible enough to avoid causing alarm. ‘Especially,' Kate had said, ‘since once she knew Eddie was injured she would have rushed to his side.'
Yeadings was impressed by the alliance struck up by Stone and the girl's mother. Kate was still staying at the man's house and they appeared to have pooled resources in trying to follow up possible lines of inquiry. Each appeared to be bolstering the other's courage in facing the total blackout of information.
He rang through to ask if he might drop in and discuss
the ground covered, but was told by the housekeeper that they had just left, following an urgent summons from Wycombe hospital. It appeared that Eddie had twice shown signs of waking from coma. He had even muttered his sister's name.
This was too important to miss out on. Yeadings' Rover was parked close in the police yard. He left a message for Salmon and prepared to drive himself. There was the usual rush-hour clogging of traffic, with gridlock at the complex roundabout system when he reached central Wycombe. He fumed in a three-deep traffic queue while a fire tender and set of ladders were rushed out to head towards the Cressex estate.
In the hospital grounds he found he hadn't the right change for parking and cursed that he hadn't waited for a marked police car. It would be just his luck to have the Rover clamped or towed away.
Slightly out of breath, he reached the Intensive Care Unit in time to catch Kate binning her protective mask and apron. She looked neither dejected nor elated, but confused, and he hesitated to ask after her injured son.
‘They say he's fallen into a natural sleep now,' Kate volunteered. ‘Just for a moment it seemed he was going to come properly awake. He said something, but his eyes were still closed.'
‘What was it he said?' Yeadings ventured.
‘He was calling for someone called Nicola. She must be a girlfriend, I suppose, but I've never heard of her.'
‘Where's Stone?'
‘He went outside in a hurry. To phone, I think. He won't have gone far.'
They found him at the end of the corridor. He put away his mobile and turned to Yeadings with quiet urgency. ‘We need to talk, Superintendent. Kate will have told you what he said. But it wasn't Nicola he called for. I believe it was Nicholas. He's an employee of mine and he's failed to report in.'
They all sat in Stone's car while he explained that he had employed a junior assistant called Nicholas Dukakis. In fact he still paid his salary although the young man currently worked in London for his wife Giulia as an accountant, facilitating her control of finances being transferred as part of the separation settlement.
‘Normally,' Stone said, ‘he contacts me twice weekly to ensure matters go smoothly, but since I left for Washington he has left no messages. I had assumed he was held up by some complex legal point and would get in touch when he had dealt with it.
‘My ex-wife is a very devious and demanding woman, superintendent. Which is why I chose young Nicholas. He is discreet and utterly trustworthy. If he found it necessary to get in touch with Eddie Dellar, then I suspect it was somehow in connection with Jessica.'
‘Why? What has he to do with Jess? And why Eddie?' Kate demanded sharply. ‘Haven't you other employees he could have spoken to?'
Yeadings watched the other man hesitate, choosing how to reply. ‘Nicholas and Eddie had met before, at my office. You understand, Eddie is young, but he has already gone some way in the Department. We have had dealings together over various licences for import and export. Also, Nicholas would have been aware of Jessica's relationship to us both.'
‘I'm not quite with you,' Yeadings cautioned. ‘The Department: am I to understand you mean the Department of Trade and Industry?'
‘That's where Eddie works,' Kate put in. ‘He's a civil servant.'
Yeadings turned back to Stone who held his gaze with a challenging stare. No comment, Yeadings warned himself.
Civil Servant was a term that covered a multitude of occupations. He was one himself, for that matter. It struck him then that both Stone and young Dellar could have interests allied to his own, but possibly on an international basis. This was spooktalk, or else serious bluff; and Stone relied on him to keep the young man's mother in the dark.
‘I see,' he granted, not really convinced that he did. ‘Go on.'
‘There's not much I can offer,' Stone said sombrely, ‘since Nicholas has failed to report back. I am seriously concerned that he's been prevented.'
Prevented. Like being dead, Yeadings supposed with a flash of intuition. Dead, strangled and left to burn in a house fire? The implication was there to be picked up. Jessica Dellar missing; the young man too; and Eddie seriously injured after an apparent attack. What the hell had the three of them been up to?
‘It's puzzling. Kate, the answer rests with your son,' Stone said, laying a hand on her arm. ‘Already he's showing signs of coming round. Soon he'll be able to tell us what happened and it can all be cleared up.'
Never so simple as that, Yeadings thought. How could it ever be cleared up for that poor woman if her daughter was dead?
‘You said …' Kate faltered. ‘This Nicholas works for your wife. And Jess works for you.' She made it sound a question, full of apprehension.
‘Nicholas works for me too, but on loan to Giulia's financial manager.'
‘She … your wife. I imagine she knows your intentions regarding my daughter?'
Yes, the possibilities were getting through to Kate. Yeadings said nothing, folded away in his corner of the car's interior. How would the man deal with her now?
Kate drew a deep breath to steady herself. Deliberately she chose words that denied the panic inside. ‘She wouldn' t feel very kindly towards Jess. What would she be likely to do?'
Stone was holding her hand now. Yeadings watched closely.
‘Giulia's a hard woman. She can be malicious, but she'd draw the line at real viciousness, too afraid of the consequences. She has a great instinct for self-preservation.' His voice was level, but under it Yeadings detected a note of some emotion. Exasperation? Anger?
No, he decided: it was bitterness. This man knew the woman he was speaking of. He'd been time and time again on the receiving end of her malice.
‘Has she got Jessica?' Yeadings asked quietly.
‘That's what I'm trying to find out,' Stone said. ‘She'll have no direct dealings with me. Which is why I'm trying to contact my son.'
 
There was a great deal more Yeadings needed to know. He found it difficult to remove Kate Dellar so that he could talk to the man alone. She was too aware of his intention and determined to hang on. Stone, after all, had been her protector. But the mention of a son had sent a ripple of new apprehension through her: a recollection that there was so much about him that she was ignorant of, and it might go against all her held principles.
Yeadings wished he had Rosemary Zyczynski with him but, without warning, Kate surrendered. ‘Superintendent,' she said almost tearfully, ‘you'll do all you can, won't you? I must stay with Eddie and find out what happened.'
 
Franco felt the phone vibrate in his jeans pocket. Automatically his hand went to it, but Giulia had seen. He had to carry on with pulling it out and reading the text message.
‘Is that Stefano?' his mother demanded sharply.
‘My new jacket's ready. I have to pick it up,' he lied.
‘That can wait. For God's sake what has happened to the girl? She couldn't have got far.'
Franco wasn't so sure of that. ‘It was a mistake to send Stefano packing.'
‘
Turdo
!
Bastardo
!' She was outraged at the reminder of where they'd found her young lover and the condition he was in, but Franco had more to worry about. Somehow his father had picked up on what Giulia had done. Not surprising perhaps, because his spies were everywhere. His message had been bald enough:
Where is Jessica Dellar?
‘He will have gone after her,' Giulia decided.
It took Franco an instant to realize she meant Stefano. ‘Then maybe he'll bring her back as a trophy, with his tail wagging and be ready for you to throw him a biscuit!'
She glared at him. He was getting too big for his trousers. That was no way to speak to one's mother. Sometimes there was a touch of his father about him. She was reminded he was growing up. It was time to find a wife for him as a distraction. Perhaps she should have allowed him to go and study at Perugia, but it was too international. There would have been outside influences. And Carlo Massimo could reach him too easily there, if he wanted to claim him. Not that he'd bother picking up family if he was bent on cultivating that English hussy.
The very reminder of Jessica, so deceptively meek and malleable yet scoring the final point, enraged her further. ‘He's welcome to her,' she said, almost spitting at the thought of her husband. ‘She's a filthy little whore, enticing Stefano as she did. Under my roof!'
‘He never needed encouraging. He was all over her,' Franco dared to claim. Habitual courtesy forbade his suggesting that Stefano had a nostalgic taste for younger flesh than he was recently allowed.
‘If he finds her,' he warned his mother, ‘there's no knowing what he'll do to her, after the way she left him. Then how will you excuse that to Father? We'd do best to contact him in London or wherever he is and explain that she's been a guest with us and now she's moved on.'
‘He's in the States,' she snapped back. ‘You know we don't speak together. And how can you explain her coming here anyway? No, she must be found before he returns
to England or there will be almighty trouble. Mortimer must come out here and take her back.'
‘If she hasn't found some way to get back on her own,' Franco considered. ‘She's enterprising enough. Maybe she'll simply go to the British Consul and say who she is; plead she's lost her passport. They'll send her home, a Distressed British Subject.
Finito
!'
‘Imbecile!' Giulia stormed. ‘You are useless. Go away!'
‘Yes, Mama.' He withdrew, no way so calm as he sounded, went up to his room on the third floor and booted up his computer. Anything could happen to Jessica, a runaway on her own. He was anxious for her. Whatever his father's likely wrath, he must be informed. He'd be the one to find her if anyone could.
 
Yeadings heard the other man out. There were still unexplained elements in the story, such as the connection between himself and Eddie Dellar. It smacked too much of how young undergraduates were trawled at university and enlisted in political or intelligence organizations.
So much depended on what Stone stood for. His interests were widespread. He spent as much time in America as here. Grandson of an Armenian refugee; he was British-born, but then so were a number of suspected terrorists. As a capitalist he was assumed to be politically right of centre, but again that was no guarantee of loyalty: look at that ambivalent spy, Anthony Blunt.
If it was through Stone's influence or agency that Eddie had been accepted for the DTI, it could make that young man a suspect cuckoo in the Whitehall nest. On the other hand, it could prove Stone an SIS recruiting agent.
Yeadings himself had once stood at a crossroads in his career, and he still was in touch with the senior spook who had urged him to move across into the alternative service. He needed now to ring a given number and request a check on young Dellar's provenance. During vetting, his link with Stone must surely have come up. There would be
confidential files on them both. Not that he'd get to see them.
Quite apart from this question there was what Kate Dellar saw as the family being ‘picked off, one by one'. ‘Do you believe,' he asked Stone, ‘that the recent deaths of Sir Matthew and his daughter, and the earlier mugging of Eddie's father, were in any way connected with Jessica's disappearance?'
Stone answered without pause. This had been uppermost in his mind. ‘I don't. They would be of no interest to Giulia. But I do think that the break-in on the canal was the work of whoever abducted Jessica from Larchmoor Place. It was a first attempt that failed because he didn't have updated information on her.'
‘And the dead man found after the fire?' Yeadings pursued.
‘We shall find, I think, that it was Nicholas, and he did all he could to prevent her being taken.'
So, Yeadings reckoned, that is the real crime we have to tackle. The others are a maybe. There was still a slender hope that the spilt oil and the car crash were accidental.
‘There's another thing,' he told Stone. ‘I think you and I should take a look at where Eddie lives. Would you ask Mrs Dellar if she has a key? We'll go in my car, if you don't mind. I'll be waiting in it when you come back.'
Stone hurried into the hospital and reappeared shortly. From his face Yeadings could pick up nothing. It was immaterial whether they had a key or not. He wouldn't hesitate to call in an enforcer to deal with the lock.
Stone dangled a keyring with a Pooh Bear tag.
‘Did she say if she'd visited there lately?' Yeadings demanded.
‘Apparently she hasn't. She seemed a little guilty that she hadn't looked in to check on the flat.'
‘I take it you've been there before?'
Stone smiled. ‘I have. I even know where to lay my hand on the coffee.'
Yeadings let the other man open the outer door of the little mews. It seemed to take some fiddling in the thick wisteria foliage beside it. They entered on ancient quarry tiles and went straight through to the kitchen. The superintendent noted red glows high in the corners that denoted a security system. He waited but nothing went off. ‘I thought the house was alarmed,' he prompted the other.
‘I de-activated it as we came in.'
Nul points
for observation, Yeadings awarded himself. The man certainly appeared at home in here.
‘What are you particularly interested in, Superintendent?'
‘What do you suggest?'
‘That we unload the cameras.'
Something else he'd missed as they passed quickly through, but they were cunningly concealed. Yeadings put out a hand to stop the other. ‘Unless you've new film to reload, don't bother. I'll send someone down to see to it. We don't want to make a break in his recording. ‘I must say I'm impressed. Are these just boys' toys, or is there some significance in these precautions?'
‘I could say it's a neighbourhood known for break-ins, or Eddie has a technical streak, but you have already picked up on the truth, superintendent.
‘As soon as he was reported injured Eddie's boss ran a check on who would be Senior Investigating Officer for the case. We learned your background.'
‘I'm not exactly reassured by the security services keeping a file on a police officer,' Yeadings said sourly.
‘It does mean I can be open with you. Or as open as I have been so far.'
BOOK: Last to Leave
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