48 Hours - A City of London Thriller (19 page)

“
I remember the rant, as you call it, but possibly because
I’ve seen it so many times on TV since. I don’t remember
interrupting anyone, but I wasn’t entirely lucid at the time. I did
that after I’d taken a little something to keep me awake. It had
been a long and stressful couple of days.”

“
So, you and Josh are going to get payback, but not by
attacking anyone. This man is powerful and well connected; he
enjoys his position and the power it brings. The best punishment
would be his fall from grace, imprisonment, loss of freedom and the
removal of his title. If you want to help, tell us what happened to
you and we’ll explain what we know.”

We listened as the angry father in Fisher came to the fore,
and he described how he had been in bed reading a book when a text
came through on his business iPhone. He almost ignored it because
that was the number used by the media and his business contacts,
and he didn’t want to be bothered at that time of night.
Nevertheless, he did look at it, and the picture that followed, and
he had been shocked beyond words. There on his screen, looking
glamorous in a long, low cut dress, Lavender Mali Fisher smiled for
the camera. Crosshairs had been added to her forehead.

Jim the blackmailer had allowed Don Fisher forty eight hours
to raise one million pounds, but realistically it would have to be
paid before the bank closed and so he had around forty hours in
reality. Twenty four hours out of those forty, the banks would not
be open. Nonetheless, he raised the cash – his personal fortune has
been estimated at over a hundred million pounds, after all - and
arranged to have it picked up. Until the payment had been
confirmed, Angel, Lavender and Tawny were told to stay either in
their flats or at home. Seemingly, Lavender got bored with being
stuck indoors with nothing to do, and went out to a nightclub which
had sent her an invitation to attend the reopening of their
refurbished electro pop dance room. She was advised by a guy in a
tuxedo to leave by the back door, as the press were waiting for her
at the front. She complied, and got paint balled. It was just one
shot, but a painful one, on her bare back.

Don Fisher had one of his men drop off the bag with the guest
at table nineteen at Cosmo’s Seafood Restaurant, on the Strand, as
instructed. The man at the table was little more than a boy. He
appeared to be Arabic, and this was confirmed when he thanked the
man for bringing his bag with the words:

“
Tell Don that Jim is grateful for his
cooperation.”

Don’s man waited in a shop doorway across the street and
watched the restaurant, but the boy with the bag never emerged. Don
never heard from Jim again, and had been surprised when he found
out that the police knew he had been blackmailed.

We told the rocker what we knew, and he concluded that it was
a slam dunk that it was Hickstead. I agreed with him, but noted
that the police needed an iron clad case.

To my surprise, Fisher told us that the police were going to
pick up Hickstead for questioning and perhaps get a warrant to
search his accommodation. The problem was that no-one knew where he
was staying. His credit card had not been used since he had used it
to buy rail tickets to and from Leeds on Friday.

Chapter 39

City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London. Wednesday
8am.

DS Fellowes tapped on Inspector Boniface’s door before
entering. As soon as he was in the room he was sharing his good
news.

“
Inspector, we were checking Hickstead’s credit card purchases
to see if we could find out where he was staying and we came across
this item. I’ve highlighted it in yellow.” Boniface took the
printout and read that the card had been charged two hundred and
eighty six pounds by VLM Ticketing.

“
Who are VLM?” Boniface asked.

“
They fly daily from London City Airport to Rotterdam, and it
seems that Lord Hickstead has a flight booked at five this evening,
with a return flight early tomorrow morning.”

“
He must be selling the diamonds,” Boniface said, thinking out
loud.

“
That’s what we think, sir.”

“
OK, Fellowes, this is what we do.”

The inspector laid out a plan to track and find the diamonds,
a plan which he was optimistic would produce results.

***

Dee was concerned at how tired both of us were feeling and so
she reset my alarm without me knowing. As a result, I slept until
almost eight, whereas I was often up before six.

We ate a relaxed breakfast and neither of us were city ready,
still in our lounging clothes. Dee suggested that we head in mid
morning, and I agreed. As we sat and chatted, she asked about my
family. I told her about my parents up in the Midlands, and my
brother, all of whom felt responsible for me because I was the
youngest and had no wife to take care of me. Dee thought that was
amusing, given the perils I had faced this past week. She then
asked if she could see pictures of them, and so, for ease, I went
to www.webshots.com on my laptop and opened my account. My albums
were all listed. I opened the one which I had ingeniously named
Family Album.

“
Do your worst,” I said as I turned the laptop to face her.
She spent a lot of time grinning and laughing out loud at the
photos of me from childhood to the present day. Many of the older
photos had been scanned by my parents, but most had been taken with
a digital camera.

Having scrolled through the photos, she alighted on a picture
of me dressed as Charlie Chaplin at a fancy dress party.

“
When was this taken?” she asked. To be honest I could barely
remember the event. I think I might have been helped home by my
friends that night.

Underneath the photo was a button headed ‘more info’, and I
pressed it. A new panel opened up and we could see that the photo
had been taken on February 14th 2004. We could also see that it had
been taken with a Canon Eos, for a 60th of a second at f16, and
that the flash had fired.

Dee looked closely at the data before asking a question. “Do
all digital cameras do this? I mean, do they all record this type
of data?”

“
Yes,” I answered. “Well, at least all of mine have. The
information is stored on the memory card automatically.”

“
In that case we’ve almost certainly been missing some crucial
evidence linking Hickstead to the deaths and the blackmail
attempts,” she stated.

I realised that she was right. The Peer had taken pictures of
Lavender Fisher, myself, and Richard Wolsey Keen, and we had access
to all of the emailed photos. If His Lordship had not removed the
data before sending the pictures, we could hopefully extricate some
valuable evidence from them.

I spun the laptop around and closed the open windows before
clicking on My Photos and opening the two photos of me that had
been sent by the blackmailer to my BlackBerry. I right clicked on
the thumbnail of the photo that showed me with crosshairs on my
head, and clicked ‘properties’.

There it was in front of me;

DSC100145

Saved by: Photopaint XII 10:08

Taken: 11/08/2010, 9:12

Nikon Coolpix P100

Autoflash on. Not used.

1/125th sec

F5.6

This was picture number 145 taken on the Nikon Coolpix on the
day my first threat had been received. It had been manipulated
using Corel Photopaint, image editing software.

Whilst I found out what I could about the camera on the
internet, Dee called DS Fellowes. She was becoming closer to him
than I would have liked.

“
DS Fellowes is emailing the other photos to your email
account now,” she said as she hung up.

It appeared that the Nikon Coolpix P100 was a new model which
had only recently been released by the manufacturer, and that as it
was a ‘bridge camera’, a camera that comes somewhere between a
compact and a full sized Digital SLR camera, and as such it had a
limited market. Nonetheless, I guessed that they had probably sold
thousands of them.

A voice that sounded just like Joanna Lumley announced that I
had email.

For the next ten minutes Dee and I looked at all of the
photos, printed them with their details and assembled the print
outs. We were both excited about our findings.

Each photo was numbered in chronological order. The first
photo was of Lavender, numbered DSC100131, and the last was of
Richard in the park and was numbered DSC100153. They had all been
taken with a Nikon Coolpix P100 and most had been edited by
Photopaint.

Dee summarised the value of the evidence we had uncovered, but
I had already worked out for myself what it meant.

“
If Hickstead owns a Coolpix P100, a quick look at it would
tell us whether the camera numbering sequence matched the photos we
have from the blackmailer. If he has a laptop loaded with Corel
Photopaint XII, that would be even more convincing. And, with any
luck, a forensic examination of the hard drive will confirm that
those pictures have been on his computer.”

She paused and breathed in deeply. “Josh, we might have
him.”

Chapter
40

City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London. Wednesday,
Noon.

Inspector Boniface was grinning from ear to ear as he read
from a note which had just been passed to him. He then pressed the
intercom.

“
You can send DS Fellowes in now.”

We had been so elated by our find that we immediately
contacted the police and emailed them all of our data. They
promised to act on it straight away, and asked us to call in for an
update.

“
You two are regular Miss Marples. I guess that someone would
have come up with this information, given time, but you were there
first. What’s more, I think our follow up research will cheer you
up no end.”

DS Fellowes came in and shook our hands. Everyone in the room
was smiling. It was contagious. The Detective Sergeant gave us a
rundown of what he had discovered.

“
Somehow, we need to link Lord Hickstead to these photos, and
if we can’t do that, we need to be able to link him to the camera
that took the photos. So, when you sent me the information on the
Nikon Coolpix P100 my first thought was, who stocks them and have
they sold many? The bad news is that they are stocked all over the
UK in their thousands. Nevertheless, I called Nikon UK, who are
based at Kingston on Thames, who confirmed that it could take
months to check the retailers’ records. But then I got a call back
ten minutes later.”

He paused for effect, and grinned even more widely than
before. “Bad luck for Hickstead but good luck for us. Nikon are
running a launch promotion that gives purchasers of the camera a
second year’s full warranty free of charge if they register online
or by phone. They estimate that around ninety five per cent of
owners are taking advantage of this offer, but that is still over
eleven hundred people so far. They couldn’t supply us with the
details of everyone who registered. However, they said if I gave
them a name they would be able to tell me whether that person had
registered a Nikon Coolpix P100 with them. It turned out that
Arthur Hickstead registered for the two year warranty on a Coolpix
P100 in July this year. We know from his registration that he
bought it at the camera shop in Heathrow Airport Terminal Four. I
contacted the shop directly, and from their records they were able
to confirm that he bought it using a credit card and, for duty free
purposes, his boarding card. The boarding card was for a
Johannesburg flight just before the World Cup.”

He beamed at all of us, and punched the air as if he had won
the World Cup all by himself. Boniface brought us all back down to
earth.

“
Before we all get carried away, there are eleven hundred
people with this type of camera. It isn’t quite a slam dunk yet,
but we are getting close. Let me tell you about our plans for later
today.”

Inspector Boniface then explained his strategy for Hickstead’s
visit to the Netherlands.

If all went according to plan, His Lordship could be in
custody by tonight.

Chapter
41

London City Airport, London. Wednesday, 4:30pm.

Lord Hickstead stood beside his carryon luggage and checked
his travel documents. There wasn’t a seat to be had in the
overcrowded lounge; even standing room was at a premium. He had
travelled this route hundreds of times in the last decade and the
lounge was busier each time. The success of the airport owners to
attract new flights was commendable, but they needed to make some
changes to the facilities to accommodate the growing number of
passengers.

There was a garbled public announcement directing him to the
gate ready for his flight to Rotterdam. As he walked through the
narrow passageway he noticed two plain clothes customs officers
taking people to one side. He looked straight ahead, making every
effort to avoid being selected.

The woman two places ahead of him was stopped and taken to a
cubicle. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, too.