Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery) (7 page)

Amos slid open the desk drawers in Jones's room. The one at the bottom had runners for taking files. There were no more than half a dozen. Amos took the three bulkiest ones and handed the rest to Swift.

"What are we looking for?" she asked.

Amos shrugged his shoulders.

"Anything," he replied simply.

Amos studied the first file in his batch. It was Scott Warren's. He read it carefully, despite having scrutinised it on his first visit.

Swift was already closing her third file long before he had finished. She pulled the two unopened files next to Amos’s elbow across to her side of the desk and looked up at the higher ranking officer.

He nodded and she opened the first one. Swift had finished the other two files by the time Amos had completed his probe of the Warren dossier.

“I wonder who Jim was,” Amos commented as he closed the folder. “Jones seems to have paid someone of that name pocket money to check on how much mail Warren got each day and how often the express couriers called.

“That’ll be Jim Berry.” Swift responded promptly. “He’s in all these files as well. He seems to do all Jones’s leg work for him. All the menial jobs and running about. Jones paid him peanuts but he seems to have been a willing worker nevertheless. Anything Jones wanted was always done within a couple of days.

“Jones has written notes on the file every time Berry reported back. Sometimes he is referred to as Berry, sometimes as Jim, occasionally by his full name but it’s clearly all the same person. He has a real gift for finding out all sorts of information.”

Amos glanced at the entries in turn. On each note a payment was recorded, £5, £10, once £20, all trivial amounts for what was usually a vital piece of information. Jones apparently placed great store by what Jim Berry dug up, for he always acted on the basis of what Berry provided, as witnessed by the final note on each sheet that bore the informant’s name.

“Berry must have had a lot of friends in a lot of places,” Swift ventured.

Amos thought for a while and the two sat for a couple of minutes in silence. Then the chief inspector rose from his chair, pushed the Warren file across to Swift with the words “Take a look through this for a moment,” and sauntered to the door, out into the main office and without asking, made his way to the filing cabinets containing records of deals gone by. The office minions watched him, bored but mildly amused.

Amos pulled the top drawer. It clanked metal on metal but it would not budge.

“It’s locked,” Miss Nolan remarked coldly and unnecessarily. “Those are confidential documents.”

“The key?” Amos asked, more as a demand than a question.

The head-by-default of the Jones empire produced the required item reluctantly. She unlocked the cabinets.

Amos pulled out the top drawer, keeping his body between it and Nolan to stop her seeing what he was looking at.  Nolan sniffed and walked slowly back to her desk. Left to his own devices, Amos glanced along the row of files. Each was clearly labelled, mostly with the name of a company on a Perspex tab.

Amos flicked them forward one by one. The As were sparse but quite a number were deposited among the Bs: Baines & Stokes, Barker and Sons, Bailey Contractors, Beswick George but no Berry, no Berry and something. Amos proceeded methodically through the top three drawers. Finally, towards the back of the bottom batch, he discovered: Wardle & Berry.

It rang a bell with him. Amos followed the business world very little except when it impinged on his work, but Wardle & Berry had been quite a well known electrical wholesaler in its day. You never heard of it now.

Amos extracted the file and straightened up. Miss Nolan was not pleased and coughed a phoney “ahem” but the officer wandered back into Jones’s inner sanctuary and closed the door behind him. Swift was still ploughing through the Warren file but she was getting on faster than Amos had done.

Wardle & Berry was another thick dossier. Amos skimmed through, stopping to study certain pages in greater detail. Soon Swift had finished with Warren and Amos passed selected documents from Wardle & Berry across to her. Swift whistled.

“So Jones destroyed Berry’s business,” she commented.

“It gets better,” Amos returned. “When Jones financed the rival business that drummed Berry’s lot out, it looks as if Wardle was in cahoots with Jones. Look at this’” he went on, passing more pages to Swift. “Jones paid Wardle off rather handsomely while Berry ended up with nothing.

“In fact,” Amos picked up excitedly as he turned more pages in the folder, “Berry went bankrupt and Jones got all the stock and the vans for peanuts. Then he sold them at a profit to the rival wholesaler he was backing. So Jones won twice over, Wardle got out comfortably, and Berry went bust.”

“It’s enough of a motive for murder,” Swift said, reading what Amos was obviously thinking, “but how long ago was this?”

Amos shuffled through the papers again. “About five years ago,” he answered.

“So why did he wait so long for his revenge?” Swift posed. “If he was working for Jones he must have had lots of opportunities to settle the score before now. And why wait,” she added suddenly as the thought struck her, “until there was a security guard installed outside Jones’s home? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I think it’s time we asked Berry himself,” Amos said. He ambled to the door and opened it.

“Do you mind if we use the phone?” he called across to Nolan.

“I’m surprised you bother to ask,” she replied frostily. “You seem to have helped yourself to everything else.”

Amos closed the door and muttered “I’ll take that as a yes” to Swift, who giggled. He picked up the handset, rang the office and asked to be put through to Sgt Burke.

“Listen carefully,” Amos told the seargeant. “I want three officers down here at Jones’s office pronto with a van and cardboard boxes, and I want a search warrant for Jim Berry’s home ready for me when I get back to the station, plus a team standing by to tear his home apart. Move it.”

Amos replaced the receiver and went back to the Wardle & Berry file while he awaited the arrival of the three officers. When they duly pulled up outside, he went out to the pavement to greet them.

Amos dropped the filing cabinet key into Sgt Burke’s hand. “You stay inside to make sure no-one tries to remove any files behind your backs,” Amos instructed him. “The other two load the entire contents of the drawer in Jones’s desk and the two filing cabinets in the main office.”

As the three arrivals marched in, Amos signalled to Swift to join him outside. They stayed only long enough to see Nolan watch open-mouthed as the ransacking of the precious documents began.

“I think it is also time to take Berry apart,” Amos said. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow morning.”

However, it so happened that Amos was distracted from this intended action for another 36 hours.

Chapter 14

"There's a woman waiting to see you, sir," a uniformed policewoman remarked as Amos walked into the police station next morning.

Amos was later than usual. The past few days had been gruelling and it was hard to see a way forward in the inquiry - hence his sluggish start to the morning.

“It’s in connection with the murder inquiry,” the obliging young officer continued. “It’s Mrs Jones. She’s in interview room one with Sgt Swift.”

Amos was completely taken aback. Inquiries so far had revealed the existence of a wife but not of her whereabouts. Now she had appeared from nowhere.

Cursing his tardiness, whatever the excuse, he bustled into the interview room just in time to hear Swift asking: "Is there any chance, Mrs Jones, that you can give us some clue as to where your husband might have been intending to go on Sunday afternoon?"

Amos was not hopeful. After all, the couple had been living apart, probably miles apart, for the past few years.

"I don't know where he might have been going." There was a slight pause. Something about the gentle stress on the word "might" caused the inspector to raise his eyebrows,

"But I do know where he should have been," Mrs Jones continued archly. "He was supposed to visit me."

Amos dropped his pencil on the table.

 "You?" he asked in a startled tone.

"Me."

Amos eyed her as she paused for effect. She was striking rather than beautiful, tall, blonde and dressed in sharp but not gaudy colours. Her clothes were good quality and although they did not boast the cut of designer labels they were Marks & Spencer rather than Primark.

Mrs Jones sat calmly and spoke in a matter-of-fact way, clearly relishing the stir she was causing.

 Recovering his own composure and belatedly introducing himself, Amos said: "I think you'd better tell me all about it. Shall we start with when you arranged to see your husband and why."

Mrs Jones sat up, leaned forward over the desk and began.

"The arrangement was made the previous Sunday evening. Ray had rung me and asked if we could try to get back together again. I told him I was willing to talk things over but I wasn't prepared to commit myself."

"Were you in regular contact?" Amos interposed.

"Frequent, but not regular," Mrs Jones replied. "We talked on the phone from time to time but there was no set arrangement."

"So you were still on good terms with your husband despite the separation?"

"Yes. There was no bitterness when we broke up. It was more in sadness than in anger. Ray got completely absorbed in his work. It got to the point where he was wheeling and dealing six, even seven, days a week.

"He couldn't bear to go on holiday in case he missed out. I started to go away for the odd week to the Isle of Wight or the Lake District and he would join me at the weekend. Or not as the case may be.

"Finally he had a heart attack. I thought this would be a lesson to him. Not a bit of it. Even from his hospital bed he was organising his investments. As soon as he was well again he was back in the thick of things. Only now he had religion as well.

"Looking death in the face had certainly shaken him. He started going to church every Sunday evening. He'd never been in the place before in his life. I gave him an ultimatum. The church I could stand - at least it was only once a week. But either he cut back on work or I left him.

"He eased up a bit but it wasn't much more than a gesture. Then came the final straw:  The night of the ice cream chimes."

Mrs Jones was clearly enjoying her role centre stage. She paused for effect once again. If she was hoping that Amos would indulge her with a prompt, however, she was doomed to disappointment. He simply stared her down, watching her every facial expression.

Finally Mrs Jones looked away.

"The ice cream chimes," she picked up the thread again. "I didn't always go to church with him - I'm not a believer, any more than Ray was before he realised he might face the Almighty sooner rather than later. But I was there that Sunday evening, I'm sorry to say.

"Well, in the middle of prayers an ice cream van arrived across the road and started playing How much is that doggie in the window?  It was quite funny, really. Several people couldn't stop themselves tittering. It certainly made me giggle. Not Ray. He got up pompously and ostentatiously and left the pew. He had to get past two or three people to do so.

"He walked imperiously out of the church and a few moments later the chimes stopped abruptly. It was a hot evening - hence the ice cream van - and the doors and the top windows were open. We could hear the ice cream van driver shouting at Ray as he walked back to the church: 'You're not a police inspector. You're Ray Jones. I'll report you for impersonation.'

“Then the van revved up and drove off. I've never heard screeching from an ice cream van's tyres before or since.

"Everyone was sniggering behind their clasped hands. No-one dared to look at Ray in case they burst out laughing. I felt completely humiliated. Talking about it now, it all sounds very trivial but for me it was the last straw. It was typical of the way he expected other people to suit him. Next day I carried out my threat and left him.

"I went to Nottingham because I had friends there. I took a job back in teaching and bought a small flat. I asked Ray for as little money as possible - just a few hundred for the deposit and to live on until my first month's salary was through. I didn't want anyone to say I'd been sponging off him."

Mrs Jones stopped again. "Can I have a drink, please?" she asked.

"Tea ... coffee ... orange squash?" Amos asked as he rose to his feet. He was not sorry for a short break at this point while he digested the insight that the woman across the table had given him into the life and times of her dead husband.

Chapter 15

Amos wandered out of the interview room and was relieved to see his friend Sgt Mark Jenkins at the desk.

"It's getting interesting," Amos remarked. "Any chance you could spare someone to get tea?"

"Do I get a mention in dispatches?" Jenkins asked with a grin.

"Happen," Amos replied noncommittally. He was glad of the diversion created by this banal conversation. He needed a few moments’ break to digest the unexpected appearance of Jones's wife and to put the many questions he wanted to ask into some semblance of order. Nor did he want to sound too eager to hear what Mrs Jones had to say. He did not want to put her off or to put her on her guard.

A constable whom Amos had never seen before was despatched to the canteen for refreshments.

 A couple of minutes was enough. Two beakers of tea duly appeared - real tea, Amos noted with approval, not the brown stuff out of the machine down the corridor. Amos always selected white coffee on the rare occasions that he used the machine because that tasted passably like tea. The tea tasted like nothing in particular.