Blood Never Dies (28 page)

‘Sorry about that,’ Wilson said, giving Swilley another flash of the teeth. They were so white he’d have been useful to have around on a rocky shore in the fog. ‘How can I help you? I’ve got a lot more press coming, and I have to be there when the girls arrive, so it’ll have to be quick.’

Swilley detached her mind from the problem of whether he was wearing make-up and took his mind back to the distant time two years ago when he had persuaded the AS’s management to take on Jesse Guthrie as a gofer.

His frown of thought was so exaggerated he might have been demonstrating it to an acting class. ‘Jesse Guthrie?’ he pondered.

Swilley didn’t want her allotted time to run out into the sands of prevarication. ‘Died a few months back of an overdose. Surely you haven’t forgotten him already?’ she said nastily.

He snapped out of it. ‘Oh, I remember him all right,’ he said hastily. ‘I just wondered why you were asking about him. It’s not about the overdose business, surely, because you can’t think that has anything to do with me. We at Modern—’

‘Modern?’

‘That’s our record label. We’re a subsidiary of UniDigital,’ he informed her kindly. ‘And all of us at Modern
and
Digital are very anti drugs. Digital contributes extremely handsomely every year to various programmes, and we are zero tolerance of any employees who—’

‘But Guthrie wasn’t your employee,’ Swilley interrupted, in the interests of not falling unconscious from the boredom of the corporate homily. ‘So no one could hold you accountable for his death, could they? What I want to know is, why did you get him the job?’

‘It was a favour for an old friend,’ he said warily.

‘What old friend?’

He licked his lips. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t know the kid was going to overdose, did I? It’s the last thing I’d want, bad publicity like that.’

‘Just tell me everything,’ Swilley invited, almost motherly.

A smartphone with a girl stuck to it came through the door, and he said sharply, ‘Not now, Tiffany. In fact, I can’t see
anyone
for ten minutes. Make sure I’m not disturbed.’

When they were alone, he perched himself on the edge of a table, folded his arms defensively across his chest, and said, ‘All right. I got Jesse put on as a favour to an old friend. Well, I say friend – he and I were at school together, and I never much liked him then, but I bumped into him again by chance years later in Canary Wharf and, you know how it is, we went for a drink, got chatting, and he said there was this young friend of his needed a job, and could I get him something. So I did. End of.’

‘That’s not half a story,’ Swilley said. ‘Who was this old friend, for a start?’

‘His name’s David Regal.’

‘The solicitor?’ Swilley said calmly.

‘You know him?’

‘I know of him,’ she said, as if indifferently. ‘And what was his interest in Guthrie?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’ She stared him down. ‘All right, look, I
don’t
know, but I gathered that David butters his bread the other side, all right? And I suppose Jesse was his –
friend
. Jesse was over age, it was his business –
their
business – nothing to do with me. It’s not illegal, is it?’

Swilley kept up the stare. ‘What is it you’re not telling me? Come on, it’s better to get it off your chest, otherwise I’ll keep asking and you’ll never get rid of me. Why did you do a favour for this bloke you hadn’t seen for years and didn’t like anyway?’

Wilson hugged his arms closer, his feet fidgeted on the floor, his face looked drawn. ‘It’s . . . I don’t want . . .’ He dithered. ‘If it got out . . .’

‘It’s not you I’m interested in, if that helps,’ Swilley said. ‘Just tell me everything and I’ll go away and you’ll never see me again. C’mon, what did you do? It can’t be that bad.’

‘It would be if it got out. Look, the fact is, I
had
to do David a favour.’

‘He blackmailed you?’

‘Sort of.’

‘How did he manage that if you hadn’t seen him since schooldays?’

He blushed. ‘Well, that wasn’t quite true. I’d met him a few times. He had an office not far from mine. I was just out of my first divorce, I was at a loose end. David seemed to have a pass to all the clubs. It was better than sitting at home being miserable. Then one night after work he invited me to this party at a private flat, one of those converted warehouses. It was hot stuff. Shedloads of booze and charlie. Everyone got pretty spaced. There were girls – and boys.’

‘Are you into boys as well?’

‘
No
! I told you, I was married. Twice. But I had a thing that night with a couple of the girls. And then there was a raid.’ He looked at Swilley resentfully. ‘I don’t know why you lot can’t leave people alone. We weren’t doing anyone any harm.’

She ignored the bait. ‘Go on. What happened?’

‘David got me out. There was a fire escape at the back. The police were down the bottom, in the back yard, but he took me up the stairs, and we hid at the top until they’d gone. Damn near froze to death, but it was better than getting arrested. In my business, that would have been curtains for me. It was in the papers the next day, and a couple of businessmen got photographed coming out still in bondage gear. UniDigital would have had my guts for garters if it’d been me.’

‘So you were grateful to him?’

‘Yeah, kind of. But I’d learnt my lesson. I stopped meeting him, made excuses when he rang, and after a bit he stopped asking. I didn’t see him for about a year. Then I bumped into him, like I said. Except, looking back, it may not have been accidental. Anyway, he said come for a drink, so I did, reluctantly, and then he said he wanted to ask me a favour. Get a job for this young man. When I hesitated – because I didn’t want to get involved – he said I owed him, and it would have been easy to get out himself that night and let me take the rap. And he said he could still tell the story if he wanted to. I said he had no proof, but he said on the contrary, he had photographs, and my employers might be interested.’

He looked at her in a drawn way.

‘So it was blackmail,’ she said.

‘He didn’t put it like that. When I got angry with him, he said it was just a favour for a favour, and I’d never hear from him again if I did this one thing. He said he wanted the boy in the Asset Strippers team, but it could be something lowly, like a gofer. He wanted him to have plenty of spare time, he said. Well, you can never have enough gofers, but when you’ve got plenty of them, they can take time off. Not that any of them usually want to – they do it for the bands, not the money. Anyway, I did it – got him the job. I can tell you, I felt sick about it – it’s horrible being manipulated – and I kept thinking, what’s coming next? Because I couldn’t believe that was all he’d ask. But in fact I haven’t heard from him since.’ He shuddered. ‘But it hangs over you, you know. Like a shadow. Waiting for the blow to fall. And every time I saw Jesse, it was like it was David watching me, like a death’s-head saying,
I’ll be coming for you – today, tomorrow, sometime
.’

Too much imagination, Swilley thought dispassionately. It made him easy to work on. And even yet she was sure she hadn’t heard the all of what he had done that was blackmailable. But it didn’t matter. ‘What do you know about Jesse?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Never met him before, don’t remember ever speaking to him afterwards. Saw him around, that was all. I’d got him the job, that was all I wanted to know. Then I heard he was dead. End of.’

Swilley hated that expression. ‘And what do you know about David Regal?’

‘More than I want to.’

‘What sort of solicitor is he?’

‘I don’t know. He never really talked about it. But I imagine its commercial or corporate law, not your high-street wills and conveyancing because he makes a shedload of money. Fabulous suits. Big house in Highgate, Bentley convertible. He backs shows, owns a couple of racehorses. I know where it goes, all right, but not where it comes from.’ He laughed, and then heard how inappropriate it sounded, and stopped. ‘Look, is that all? Because the girls will be here any second and if I’m not on hand it could be my job.’

Swilley nodded. ‘All right. That will do for now. I might have to come back, so don’t go anywhere.’

‘Where would I go? Unless you get me sacked.’

‘I don’t mean to do that. I’d like you where you are.’

She had reached the door when he said, ‘Bit late, asking about Jesse now, aren’t you? It was months ago he died. What gives?’

‘Just clearing up a few details,’ she said.

She was half way out of the door when he added, ‘He’s married, you know. David. Lovely woman. I’ve seen her in the glossies at premieres and so on. So the boy thing can’t be exclusive.’

‘Regal’s office is in Leadenhall Street,’ Swilley said.

‘So, not notably close to Canary Wharf,’ Slider said.

‘Which sounds as if the meeting was engineered,’ said Atherton.

‘Or he was in Canary Wharf for some other reason,’ Slider concluded.

‘Yes, boss,’ Swilley said. ‘I did a bit of digging, and it looks most likely the party that Wilson was at, that got raided, was the one in Royal Victoria Docks a bit over three years ago. The flat was one of those luxury warehouse conversions, done out regardless, but no one lived there. It was a corporate hospitality flat, owned by the Marylebone Group. And that
is
just round the corner from Wilson’s office. So maybe that’s what Regal was doing in the area – using it for his own purposes.’

‘Sounds likely,’ Slider said. ‘How did you find out about the raid?’

‘Oh, worked out the rough date, looked through the newspapers online, then I rang the Newham police. Spoke to a sergeant who was on the raid – it was a bit of a highlight for them so they still remember it. Copped a few celebrities, and quite a lot of high-up businessmen doing naughty things. They had porn films, S and M, rent boys and girls, booze and drugs. Funny thing is, he said they had an anonymous tip-off about it, and he’s convinced in his own mind it came from inside.’

‘Inside what?’

‘Inside the corporation.’ She looked at him levelly. ‘So what if it was a put-up job?’

Slider followed her drift. ‘You mean what if all those people were invited there to compromise them? What for?’

‘Blackmail.’

‘But that’s blown out of the water if it’s all over the papers,’ Atherton objected. ‘You can’t blackmail people over stuff that’s already in the public domain.’

‘Yes, but Ed Wilson wasn’t the only one who was saved that night. My sergeant said when they went in, the inspector in charge told them which people to arrest and which to leave alone. There were about half a dozen players, he says, who were sent into another room while the rest were taken out. He thought at the time they were maybe foreign diplomats, or high-ups they’d been told to leave out of it, because prosecuting ’em would embarrass the government. But what if they weren’t? You could get a nice double-whammy that way, ruin people who were in your way, and make some others grateful, or blackmailable in the future.’

‘Put them on ice, for when you needed them,’ Atherton said. ‘Clever.’

Slider frowned. ‘But something like that would have required a degree of cooperation from the police. Who was the officer in charge?’

‘It was an Inspector Stuart Mellon, boss. And I asked: he left the Job soon afterwards. Voluntarily. Went to live in Florida. Apparently he inherited a lot of money from an old auntie. Brought in champagne and a cake and everything to celebrate his good fortune.’

‘That’s so lame,’ Atherton said. ‘Inheritance from an old aunt? Couldn’t he have thought of something a bit more original?’

‘It could have been true,’ Slider said, putting on the brakes. ‘But it is suggestive.’

‘Marylebone don’t still own the flat, by the way,’ Swilley added. ‘They sold it soon after the raid. Made a big profit, so maybe that was just good business.’

There was a silence. Then Slider said, ‘I wonder if Corley had any idea before he died what he was getting himself into?’

‘What’re we going to do, boss?’ Swilley asked.

‘All this about the party being rigged is speculation,’ Slider said.

‘Though very nice speculation,’ Atherton urged.

‘But it seems to bear out Wilson’s story, and that means Regal had some very good reason for wanting to get Jesse Guthrie that job.’

‘It could just be that Guthrie was one of his young men, like Corley – or like he thought Corley was – and he was setting him up for himself,’ Atherton said in fairness. ‘It might well be difficult to carry on an affair with someone who’s doing seven shows a week singing and dancing. Limited spare time and even more limited energy.’

‘Yeah, and Regal did ask Wilson to get him something that wasn’t too much work,’ Swilley said.

‘Whatever the reason, I think it’s time to pay a little visit to Regal.’ He looked at his watch. ‘There’s just about time to get down to his office before closing. I can’t go – I’ve got a meeting set up. It’ll have to be you,’ he said to Atherton.

‘Shouldn’t I ring first?’ Atherton said. ‘He might not be there.’

‘No, I don’t want him alerted. Even if he isn’t there, you can get a good look at the office itself before they’re prepared – see who else works there, maybe get a squint at some papers that tell you what they do. And try to find out about that answering machine Regal’s number went to. Where is it, who monitors it, who else uses the number.’

‘Anything else you want to know?’ Atherton asked in a pained manner. ‘The postman’s shoe size? No use in making it too easy.’

‘That’s why I’m sending you,’ Slider said, with the nearest he could manage to an insincere smile.

Atherton drew himself up. ‘In that case, I shall sift the evidence down to the last atom and quark.’

‘You don’t know what a quark is,’ Slider challenged.

‘I do. It’s the sound made by a posh duck,’ said Atherton.

Slider felt a reprehensible little quiver of Schadenfreude to discover that John Lillicrap, who was the same age as him, looked a lot older and was bald right over the top of his head, with the bit left round the sides and the back quite grey. It made up for the fact that Lillicrap, starting from the same place, had made superintendent in an SO squad – until ill health brought on by the strain had forced him to step down and sideways to an administrative post in a quieter backwater.