Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery) (3 page)

Warren was clearly amused at her discomfort.

“It concerns our mutual friend,” he went on.

There was no flicker of understanding in Stevens’ face.

“Whatever you have to discuss, I’m sure you can manage perfectly well without me,” she said, flustered. The woman began backing out of the door.

“You left your flat early this morning, I take it?” Amos asked.

Stevens nodded.

“Perhaps you had better sit down. We have rather a shock for you.”

Warren pushed forward his own chair with a slightly exaggerated gesture of gallantry that allowed him to take possession of the doorway, as if he were preparing to make a run for it. Stevens, however, remained standing, although she leaned against the wall for support.

Swift took up the explanation: “It concerns your neighbour and, we take it, business associate Raymond Jones. I’m sorry to have to tell you that he is dead. His body was found this morning. He had been murdered.”

Stevens gasped audibly. Amos was torn between which of the two possible suspects to pursue first. Although annoyed that the flow of his interview with Warren had been interrupted, he decided it might be best at this stage to make a preliminary interrogation of Stevens, especially as she might throw some light on Warren’s activities.

So he said: “Perhaps there is a spare room where we could have a quiet chat. As you know, Mr Jones lived in the same block of flats as yourself and you may have important evidence that could help us.”

Stevens had recovered her composure.

“Do I take it, then,” she asked, “that you don’t yet know who killed him?”

“I keep an open mind.”

Warren, ever eager to oblige in deflecting attention to Stevens, butted in again: “You can use my interview room. It’s small but there’s a table and a few chairs. Can I send you some coffee?” he asked sweetly of the other occupants of his room.

“This way,” said Steven curtly. “I know where it is. Let’s get this done quickly.”

Then to Warren: “No coffee for me.”

Amos and Swift also declined.

Ensconced in the interview room, Amos asked Stevens when she had last seen the dead man.

“On Friday. It must have been just before 5 pm. Maybe a bit later. I drove into Killiney Court – as you apparently already know, I live there – and Ray and Warren were making their way to the lift. Ray broke off when he saw me and came over for a few words as I parked.”

“Did you get the impression that Jones and Warren were falling out over something?”

“Not at all. Ray gets a bit flushed in the face when he is angry. He was perfectly calm.”

“What did he say to you?”

“It was just some work he wanted me to do,” Stevens said unhelpfully.

“Not personal?” Amos persisted.

“Are you trying to imply something?” Stevens asked coldly.

“You call Mr Jones ‘Ray’ and Mr Warren ‘Warren’. I am bound to enquire, therefore, if your relationship with Mr Jones went beyond work.”

“No it didn’t. I just knew Ray – Mr Jones – better. I’d known him longer. And he was altogether a pleasanter person than Warren.”

Apparently the video wizard was not going to get a handle to his name.

Amos felt inclined to push the personal angle: “Perhaps Mr Jones felt otherwise. Perhaps he pressed his attentions.”

The colour was rising in Joanna Stevens’ face but she was visibly controlling her anger. She’s a cool customer, Amos thought.

“Ray was a business contact. I did a lot of work for him. He was also a not particularly close friend. And I mean, not particularly close.”

“But he was on his own, his wife had left him, he was fancy free.”

Stevens laughed.

“Ray didn’t fancy his chances with me. I suppose Warren has been telling you this to take attention away from himself.”

“And did the work Jones wanted doing have any bearing on your visit today?” Amos ventured with the benefit of the messages on Jones’s answering machine.

“This is just a routine check of the books for the quarterly VAT return.”

“I think it’s rather more than that,” Amos persisted. “You think Warren is cooking the books, don’t you?”

Stevens was visibly taken aback to discover how well informed Amos clearly was so early in the investigation.

Then it dawned on her: “I take it Ray did not hear the message I left for him on his answer machine. Or if he did, he didn’t erase it. Well, I don’t assume anything without evidence. I’m here at Ray’s request to check if everything is in order.”

Something she had seen through the window in the door of the room caused her to say suddenly: “Does it occur to you that while we are talking here Warren is covering his tracks?”

She rose as she uttered these words and her voice rose, too. “The sooner I get hold of the books, the better.”

Stevens swept out of the room in search of the errant Warren.

“She’s probably right,” Amos conceded to Swift with a shrug of his shoulders. “We’d better have the crime squad look at his books as well.”

The two officers followed Stevens. They found her back in Warren’s private office surveying the cause of her disquiet.

A shredding machine that had been standing unnoticed in a corner of the main office had been moved into the boss’s sanctuary and Warren was standing with a smirk over a pile of shredded papers cascading onto his feet.

Chapter 6

Amos determined to discover as soon as possible what evidence if any Jones had for suspecting Warren was up to no good. It was just a 10 minute drive to Jones’s office, where Amos and Swift found the office manageress, Jade Nolan, attempting to keep the wheels of business rolling.

She produced Warren’s file with some reluctance and allowed the police officers to take possession of Jones’s personal office with even less enthusiasm. The fact that they were not, apparently, about to remover the documents partly assuaged her.

Amos opened the file and saw immediately that Jones had put £500,000 into the venture.

He looked for Nolan. She was slipping out back to the main office quietly but he caught her before the door closed.

"Tell me," he asked, "what sort of sums did Mr Jones usually invested in businesses?"

Nolan hesitated.

"It varied," she finally said. "Some businesses were bigger than others. It could be £20,000, it could be £100,000. It depended on how much the business needed and how much Mr Jones had available for new investments at the time.

"He turned a lot of people down, you know. Mr Jones had a shrewd business brain. He didn't just invest in anything."

She was evidently fiercely proud off her late employer. She stopped short.

"Oh," she said looking at the file in Amos's hands.

"Yes, oh," replied the officer. "Mr Jones seems to have put rather more into this one. £500,000 worth, in fact."

Amos raised his eyebrows to indicate that he expected an answer.

"Certainly that was more than Mr Jones usually invested but Mr Warren managed to persuade him that his business had great potential. You can see that he produced correspondence from business contacts in London interested in using its services. His bank references were very good. So were his references from former employers.

“There are copies of everything in there. I'll leave you to it," she concluded and exited abruptly.

Amos ploughed on through the file. The references were certainly good – a bit too good if anything. It was as if people were giving Warren references just to get rid of him.

These business contacts, too. Their letters seemed to be offering work to Warren’s studio but when you looked at them carefully they really amounted to very little. No-one was committed to anything. Surely Jones, hard-headed businessman that he was, had not committed so much money to such a risky venture.

“Perhaps Jones was just like the rest of us,” Amos remarked out loud as he passed papers to Swift. “Perhaps there were times when he chose to believe what he wanted to believe.”

It was fascinating reading, containing as it did Jones’s intermittent notes to himself detailing his increasing doubts about the business. Jones had become almost paranoid about the case.

Sure enough, the last comment indicated his intention to get Joanna Stevens to check the books - and the right set of books at that. It had become clear as Amos progressed through the file that Jones felt Warren was not above keeping a set of bogus accounts to satisfy Jones’s growing suspicions.

Chapter 7

Sarah Miles, the frightened little mouse whom Amos had seen at Jones's flat on the fateful Tuesday morning, had recovered much of her composure by the time Amos interviewed her. She still reminded him of a small timid creature, though, even in the safe retreat of her own modest home near the church.

She seemed to have gathered comforting bits and pieces around her like a hamster in its cage. Odd pages of newspaper littered a coffee table and the floor around her chair. Most pages contained news items of a religious nature or features on serious music. Amos expected her at any minute to start chewing them up and building a nest in her corner.

She eyed Amos coldly and with suspicion as they sat facing each other, cup and saucer in hand.

"You left four messages on Mr Jones's answering machine," Amos said to her. "Why was that?" he asked simply.

"Why do you think?" Miles retorted. "Ray never missed Sunday evensong. Not without telling me. I'd spoken to him only on Friday and he said he would be there."

"But you were not sufficiently concerned to go round to his flat to see if his car was there and if he was all right?"

"Don't point the finger at me," Miles came back with surprising vehemence. "The vicar wouldn’t listen. Ray’s own office wasn’t bothered. His housekeeper wouldn’t put herself out. I rang the police and no one took any notice. If you had done your duty and gone round to his flat you might have saved him."

A sob interrupted Miles's flow.

"No one could have saved him," Amos interrupted. "Why didn't you go to his flat on the Monday, then?"

"I went to his office and they hadn't seen him. They wouldn't take matters seriously, either. And that useless housekeeper of his who didn't look after him properly wouldn't stir herself. No one cared about Raymond except me."

"So you didn't have a key, then?"

"What are you implying?" Miles’s angry, defensive tone was edging back.

"I'm implying that as a friend you might have had a key," Amos said quietly.

"Well I didn't," Miles snapped. "Who Ray gave a key to his own home to was entirely up to him."

Others whom Amos had thought would be angry accepted the circumstances and the questioning better than he had expected; Miles had a sharp tongue that belied her mousy nature.

"I simply find it hard to understand, Miss Miles, why you raised the issue with the vicar, the police, with Mr Jones's office and with his housekeeper - even with his answering machine - and yet you did not take the simple precaution of checking if his car was at Killiney Court or of going up to his flat and knocking on the front door."

"I didn't see why I should go chasing after him," Miles said truculently. "He told me he would be at church on Sunday. I don't have a key to his flat."

Amos was slightly flummoxed by these non-sequiteurs that did not answer his question. It appeared that Miles did not intend to account for her lack of action.

"Did you know where he was going on Sunday afternoon?"

"He didn't tell me. I asked him but he wouldn't say. He was hiding something. He couldn't bring himself to tell me. Anyway, it was none of my business."

I'm sure you wanted to make it your business, Amos thought to himself.

"Whoever he saw," Miles went on, "she's got something to account for" and, as Amos raised his eyebrows, "or him," she added hastily.

"Do you know where his wife is?" Amos asked.

Miles looked startled and a reddened a little. She could not meet Amos's eyes.

"How should I know where his wife is? I haven't seen her since she left him. I don't know why he didn't just divorce her and get on with a new life."

"You were close to Mr Jones?" Amos asked. "Close ... friends?" He hesitated deliberately between the two words. Miles went slightly redder and stared down at the floor.

"Mr Jones was a fine man. Everybody liked him. He was a staunch supporter of the church - and he stood by his friends."

Miles managed to look up briefly.

"Forgive me, Miss Miles," Amos said gently, "but in my experience no-one is universally liked. Surely Mr Jones would make enemies in his business dealings. It would be virtually impossible to do otherwise. Do know of anyone who would bear a grudge against him."

"Certainly not. No-one would want to kill Mr Jones. They must have got the wrong person. And no-one," she stressed, "would kill Raymond."

"Was he popular among the other churchgoers?" Swift interceded.

Miles looked at her with some scorn.

"Church is not a popularity poll," she said disdainfully. "You go to church to worship and praise your maker, not to score points with your fellow human beings. Mr Jones was a good Christian who respected and helped his fellow men and women," she went on proudly. "It was a privilege to know him."

"Did you see much of Mr Jones outside the church?"

"Not particularly," Miles snapped. She shuffled her feet uneasily. "I saw him occasionally in town, just like a lot of other people. Churchgoers have to shop, you know. We have to buy our loaves and fishes."

“And you saw Mr Jones on the Friday afternoon before he died?"

"You seem to know an awful lot," Miles commented, forgetting that she had herself referred indirectly to the meeting. "I saw him briefly in the market square. We exchanged a few words, that's all."

"And was that the last time you saw him?" Amos inquired. "Before you went to his flat this morning."

"Yes," Miles managed after a slight pause. There was again the trace of a sob in her voice. Her eyes, which had finally managed to meet his again, looked back to the floor but Amos could see genuine tears brimming. He did not fancy a stint as comforter.