Death Trap (36 page)

‘No chance.’ He saw the look of annoyance on her face. ‘Front companies are fronts for a reason, Ms Wray. It’s hard to trace who is the real person behind them. Even I couldn’t do it.’

There was a long silence. But that was something Rio had noticed about Stephen Foster. He never used ten words where one would do and he never engaged in small talk. Like most lawyers he knew words were power. But then Rio was surprised that he was answering any questions at all. He usually didn’t do so unless he was paid or had the opportunity to trip up the police. But Rio decided to take advantage while she could. ‘What do you make of the two Bell kids?’

‘You think they’re suspects?’ That was the great thing about Foster; he always cut to the chase. ‘Two spoilt little rich kids I’m afraid. Shame that Cornelius committed suicide. I don’t think either of those two is – was in his case – capable of tying their own shoelaces, never mind organising a murder. Although,’ Foster flicked ash into the ashtray, ‘my dealings with young Cornelius suggested that when he was under the influence of narcotics he’d be capable of anything. So perhaps . . .’

‘You think he was capable of murder?’

‘Maybe. He was a deeply troubled young man. The other one, the girl, I don’t know her so well. She doesn’t like me for some reason. But, of course, she’s entitled to her opinion – however badly informed. But having seen her act on the TV, I’d say she can’t even play a murderer properly, never mind actually be one. So no, I don’t think they’re your culprits.’ He stubbed his cigar out on an ashtray. ‘But then again, your source – this other member of the gang – might be lying and sending you on some wild goose chase.’

Abruptly Foster rose and checked his watch. ‘I’ve got another client arriving soon.’

Knowing the interview was at an end, Rio got to her feet as well, but she had one more statement to make before leaving. ‘I’m rather surprised actually.’

‘About what?’

‘You’re not noted for helping the police, so why are you giving me a helping hand?’

There was a glint in Foster’s eye. ‘But you’re not the police anymore, are you, Ms Wray? They’ve suspended you. I’m willing to bet your superiors don’t want you poking your nose into a case they’ve decided has no loose ends. You need to watch your back, Ms Wray. If you poke the authorities in this country with a stick, they don’t like it and they turn nasty. They’re ruthless people. Believe me, I know.’

fifty

4:53 p.m.

‘I’ll let myself out,’ Rio told Foster’s PA.

They were both on the staircase – Rio going down, the other woman going up. Foster’s PA carried a tray filled with the coffee he’d requested earlier.

‘Sorry,’ the woman apologised, ‘the espresso machine was playing up – again.’

‘No matter.’ Rio smiled in an off-hand way as she passed her and was soon letting herself out of Foster’s world, her mind preoccupied by what the lawyer had told her.

Or not told her. He hadn’t told her anything really; his answers and talk full of mights and maybes. Typical lawyer – the act of spewing hot air down to an art form. Even the part about Maurice Bell was a maybe-maybe not scenario. But as Rio picked up her pace, she decided to go over their conversation, picking over everything . . .

Maurice Bell might have an enemy . . . but all businessmen had those.

The Greenbelt Gang didn’t do the sixth raid . . . but was Samson Larkin telling the truth?

Cornelius Bell committed suicide, left a note with Nikki’s name all over it blaming himself, was a troubled junkie . . .

All roads seemed to lead back to Connie Bell. But who was his accomplice? And how was she going to find out? What about . . .?

‘Ms Wray! Ms Wray!’

Hearing the frantic yelling of her name Rio turned around. Foster’s PA stood just outside the house, her arms gesticulating wildly at Rio.

‘What’s the problem?’ Rio asked quickly as she rushed over.

The woman’s face was pale. ‘There’s someone in Mr Foster’s private bathroom with him . . . I couldn’t open the door . . . there’s a lot of noise.’ She grabbed Rio’s arm tight. ‘I think something very bad is happening . . .’

Rio rushed back into the house, remembering that Foster had an en-suite bathroom attached to his office. She took the stairs quickly and entered the office, reached the bathroom door to hear Foster shout out, ‘Get off me!’

Then there was a loud bang as something inside the room hit the floor. A groan of pain rippled through the air. Rio slammed her shoulder against the door. The wood bowed, but not enough to free it from the prison of the lock. So she barrelled her body into it a second time. The door flew open.

Rio noticed two things at once: Stephen Foster lay on his knees on the floor and the frosted window was open.

‘What happened?’ She dropped to one knee by the injured lawyer, as her gaze cased the room; she couldn’t see anyone else.

When her eyes snapped back to Foster she saw the blood streaming from his hand. He looked up at her, his face creased with pain. ‘He got out through the window.’

Rio shot to her feet, rushed to the window, peered outside. She looked left, right, straight ahead . . . no one in sight. Whoever had been here would be long gone by the time she got outside. She turned to find Foster trying to struggle to his feet.

‘Don’t move,’ Rio cautioned, as she knelt by him again. This time she saw the palm of his bleeding hand had two deep slash wounds across it.

‘Take a deep breath and then tell me what happened.’

Stephen Foster made a scoffing sound. ‘Being attacked is a hazard in my line of work.’

‘Did you recognise your assailant?’

He shook his head. ‘But I think I know who it was.’ He looked deeply into her eyes. ‘He asked me where Nicola Bell was.’

The hitman. So she was right: the gun for hire was still out there trying to get the job done.

‘He was going to stab me, so I reached out to defend myself . . .’ He looked down at his hand. ‘Managed to grab the knife, but he cut me.’ He looked back up at her. ‘But when you arrived he hightailed it out of here.’

‘Did you see his face?’

Once again he shook his head. ‘I can’t be certain, but he was wearing the same style of raincoat zipped over the lower half of his face as the man who tried to harm Nicola in the hospital.’

‘Oh, Mr Foster,’ his PA said fretfully from the doorway. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure I just need a few stitches, so can you contact Doctor Purcell.’ He turned back to Rio. ‘An ambulance means being taken to a hospital and this unfortunate incident will become public news. I don’t need that at the moment. You should go.’

Rio knew he was right. The last thing she needed was the top brass finding her footprints still all over this case.

5:45 p.m.

‘Can you trust Samson Larkin?’

Rio let Calum’s question soak in as she sat opposite him in his office above the butcher’s shop in Brixton. Nikki was in the room next door, doing whatever it was teenage girls did when they had time on their hands.

‘Trust him? Hell no,’ Rio replied. ‘Do I believe what he’s telling me? Yes. There are just too many inconsistencies between the other raids and number six, including the gang having the money for a hitman. Someone is paying that hitter and we need to find out who that is. If he came gunning for Foster, he’s still out to get Nikki too.’

Calum leaned forwards and pressed the space bar on his laptop. ‘I think Foster had a point when he said he couldn’t understand why you hadn’t looked into Maurice Bell’s background—’

‘Come on, why would we have needed to do that? We believed that we were looking for a gang that had perpetrated crimes long before the Bell murders. The MO’s were the same . . . Well, almost the same.’

‘It’s when you realised the “almost” part that you should have started to investigate other angles.’

Rio should have felt slightly irritated that he was chewing her up over her strategy, but all she felt was a wave of sadness. This man had been one of the best officers she’d ever known; really knew how to work a case.

‘Don’t go there, Ray Gun,’ he said, reading her thoughts. ‘I’m not in the mood for the razzamatazz of the good ole days.’ He turned to his laptop. ‘Come over here.’

Rio joined him, perching on the edge of the desk. ‘I know you didn’t ask me to, but I’d already started making enquiries into Maurice Bell’s business dealings.’ He typed away at the keyboard until Maurice Bell’s photo came on screen. ‘I checked him out: he was a respected businessman, no particular enemies. Actually for a businessman he did seem to be quite respected – none of the usual sociopathic, ruthless tendencies some of these guys use to forge their way to the top. Then I started wondering, how did he make his money?’

‘His daughter, Ophelia, said that he was involved in all types of businesses, that diversification was the root of his success.’

‘That still doesn’t answer how he got his start-up.’ Rio looked at him confused, so Calum explained, ‘How he got his leg-up into the word of business. Was he from a well-to-do family who could send their son into the world with enough cash to prove himself? Or did he inherit a business? If he was neither one of those things, where did his start-up money come from? Poor boy makes good: there’s always a story there. So I checked back and that’s when I hit a brick wall. I couldn’t find any mention of a Maurice Bell fitting his description before his thirtieth birthday.’

Calum pressed another button. Another photograph came up. Rio peered closer. ‘Is that a young Maurice Bell?’

‘No. That is Maurice Cloud.’

Rio caught on immediately. ‘Why would Maurice Bell have changed his name . . .?’ Abruptly she stopped. There was something familiar about that name.

Cloud. Cloud.

Clou.

Rio realised where she’d seen it before, or partially before. ‘When Frank Bell filled in Nikki’s adoption papers I think he mistakenly started writing Cloud and then scratched it out and put Bell instead.’

Calum shook his head as he tutted. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’

That pissed her off; since when did she have to answer to him?

But Calum didn’t give her an opportunity to vent her feelings as he carried on. ‘People change their names for all kinds of reasons without there being anything suspicious going on. I had a mate who’d been abused by her father as a child and the first thing she did when she was eighteen was change her surname. Carrying her dad’s name made her feel dirty. But our Maurice didn’t have such an honourable reason for changing his. Your mother – if she was still with us – might have recognised him.’

Rio was baffled. ‘What’s this got to do with my mum?’

‘Cloud and his partner were one of Notting Hill’s notorious slum landlords back in the early 1970s. He was clever and managed to keep his face out of the press – like his partner, unlike some of the other landlords. I reckon he sold up and used the money to invest in other property and changed his ID at the same time. He must’ve persuaded his brother Frank to change his name as well, to ensure his new life looked legit. I couldn’t track down any details about his partner, except for the nickname Slim. But Cloud and this Slim were implicated in the murder of a business rival, John MaCarry, in 1965—’

Rio threaded her fingers through her ’fro. ‘John MaCarry? I’m sure he was the landlord who my mum told me about. A really nasty piece of work. When she first came to England she lived with a cousin in another house in Notting Hill. They shared a room on the ground floor. The landlord, John MaCarry, wanted them to leave, but they refused. You know what he did? He sent some heavies around to take off all of their windows and their front door. But they were tough ladies. Refused to budge, unlike the other residents. I don’t know how they withstood the weather blowing into their room because it was a cold winter. In the end he shelled out some cash – they took it and got out of there; that’s how mum got the deposit on her house.’

Rio stared hard at Calum. ‘But what’s this got to do with case? So the man changed his name – so what? He started his work life as a scum landlord, but appears to have redeemed himself with his cleaner-than-clean business dealings for the last couple of decades.’

Calum twisted his swingback chair away from the computer to fully face her. ‘I’m not saying this has got anything to do with anything. Probably hasn’t. But in my line of work I’ve seen how a man’s past can come back to haunt him when he least expects it.’

Rio frowned. ‘No. I think this is all about Cornelius Bell, not his dad’s past.’ Her frown deepened. ‘When I described what the killers were wearing, Samson Larkin said it sounded like a gas mask, although the baggy cloth didn’t fit . . .’

‘Want me to Yahoo it?’ Calum asked

He didn’t wait for her response as he tapped a search on his computer.

Gas masks

Images

Eight photographs came up. The plastic eyeholes fit, but there was no baggy cloth or hose.

‘Want me to use a different search engine?’ Calum asked seeing the disappointed look on Rio’s face.

She shook her head. ‘No point wasting your time. But thanks for the info on Maurice Bell.’