Death Trap (46 page)

‘But it is a crime if you used that association to plan his murder. You were younger than him – his sidekick; he took advantage of you in a big property deal and never paid you your cut. It was hard to find people to talk to because people were either already now long dead or too frightened. But we found one person who would talk. And they gave you up – identified you.’

Foster smoothed back his mane of black-grey hair with one hand. ‘If that’s true why would Maurice Bell have employed me as his lawyer?’

‘Because you duped him into thinking that the past was long gone, but it wasn’t. The only thing you had in your heart was raging revenge. And what was the best and most twisted way of doing that? Getting his two, poor, deluded rich kid-children to do it for you. You organised the murder of Maurice and Linda Bell in cahoots with Cornelius and Ophelia, who wanted their parents’ estate. You got the details of the Greenbelt raids and made the Bell murders look like a Greenbelt job. Except you never counted on them taking shortcuts and using gas mask props from Ophelia’s show rather than clown masks.’

He made no comment so she pressed on. ‘It was you who organised a killer to take care of Nikki Bell when you discovered, to your horror, that she was a witness. You even represented Gary Larkin and organised for him to take his gang to a secret hideout. Once you had them where you wanted them, you got your hired gun to wipe them out. No more gang alive meant they couldn’t tell the tale of not committing the raid on the Bells’ home. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Mr Foster?’

Foster sat back, examined his cigar and then took another puff. ‘Wow, that’s quite a speech, detective – you do say the funniest things . . .’

‘We’ll see if you’re still laughing when you’re on trial for murder.’

Foster carefully tapped ash into the remnants of a cup of coffee before looking up again. This time it wasn’t a look of hate but a smile. ‘I assume you’ve got some proof for these outlandish assertions? You’re going to be in quite deep water if you haven’t.’ He sucked on his cigar. ‘I expect you’re looking for some evidence at the moment aren’t you? I expect your team are trawling though my bank and phone records, interviewing my staff, colleagues and friends, ransacking my office and checking any CCTV footage you can get your hands on . . .’

He looked upwards and imagined the scene. ‘Yes, I can see it now. Find me something on Foster – anything - so we can nail these crimes on him . . .’ He looked back down and over at Rio. He shook his head and whispered, ‘You naive girl . . .’

Rio stopped the interview and left the room. Exhausted, she fell back against the wall in the corridor. The wily bastard was dodging her every move; not giving an inch. They needed to find something on him – quickly.

Rio’s mobile rang. As she pulled it out she walked further down the corridor.

‘Did he kill everyone, including Ade? It’s all over the news.’ Nikki said.

Rio didn’t answer immediately. What the hell was she going to say to this girl – that all her loved ones had been killed at the order of the man who was meant to be helping keep her safe?

‘I’m sorry, Nikki, but I believe that Mr Foster was behind everything.’

‘Why?’ she cried.

‘I can’t discuss that with you.’

‘You will get him won’t you?’

‘I promise you that when he leaves here, the only place he will be going is to face a jury in a court of law.’

Rio ended the call. Determined to nail this scumbag she took some more heavy-duty painkillers and then went back into the room and restarted the interview.

sixty-six

40 Hours

At first Rio was confident. But as the hours ticked away, she began to regret her rash promise to Nikki. Foster had answers for everything. He cheerfully admitted what couldn’t do him any harm.

Yes, of course he’d once been an ‘associate’ of Maurice Bell; he’d never denied it.

‘I took care of Maurice’s legal issues for him in those days. But I don’t think that constitutes a crime, Detective Inspector Wray . . .’

Perhaps Maurice and he had once ‘had words’ but that was a long time ago and long forgotten. Foster even had the effrontery to claim that he didn’t bare grudges. To Rio’s other questions, he either denied her accusations or claimed he ‘couldn’t recall’ the occasions she was asking about.

The team didn’t come up with anything that would stick. After four solid hours of questioning, Foster claimed he was too exhausted to go on. Rio saw what his tactic was – make sure that most of the forty-eight hours were spent out of the interview room. He knew the law inside out; he knew that she wouldn’t be able to interview him anymore that day without facing the accusation of unreasonable physical and mental pressure during an interview. If they got him to trial he would use any legal loophole to shut the case down. So Rio played it safe and banged him up in a cell for the rest of the day.

sixty-seven

24 Hours

By the second day, Foster seemed to be enjoying himself. The protective wall he’d built around himself was setting and hardening. Every time Rio closed the interview and went to check on what her team had uncovered, her people avoided her eyes or shrugged their shoulders. But Strong discovered that there was no CCTV evidence of any fugitive fleeing the scene of the supposed attack on Foster. Rio suggested to Foster the attack never happened. He’d faked it. Her suspect took it in his stride. ‘I would imagine a professional assailant would know how to avoid CCTV, Ms Wray. He wouldn’t get any commissions otherwise. Not that I know about these things, of course . . .’

Rio played another new piece of evidence. ‘Our search of Ophelia Bell’s property has turned up a call on her phone where you had a conversation with her. Now that’s strange because you both claimed to dislike each other. It was all an act, wasn’t it? A smokescreen to make the world think you would never have contact with each other.’

‘I never claimed to dislike anybody. If you recall all I ever said about my relationship to that young woman was that she appeared not to like me. Why that was, I – and you – will never know. Did my conversation with her say anything incriminating about us planning to murder her parents?’

Rio knew she was caught in her own trap; the telephone conversation revealed nothing.

There was a knock on the door. It opened and Strong walked in.

‘DI, can I have a word?’

Rio terminated the interview and left the room.

‘I found something interesting,’ Strong said, opening up the folder in his hand.

Rio held back the curse forming in her mouth. ‘I don’t need interesting, I need something that’s going to take Foster down permanently.’

‘Read this.’

Strong passed her a piece of paper. A renewed energy grew in Rio as she read.

Face grim she looked at Strong. ‘Thank you.’

Back in the interview room, Rio sat down and placed the paper in front of her. Then she flicked her gaze up at the man opposite her, hoping to find his eyes glued to the paper. They weren’t. She wasn’t surprised. Foster knew all the tricks of the interview room. Instead his gaze was steady on her face.

‘Do you know a Ronald Miller?’

Foster eased back slightly in his chair. ‘Can’t say that the name means anything.’

‘This paper,’ Rio jabbed a finger against it, ‘says that you represented Ronald Miller and four other soldiers in a case against the Ministry of Defence. Got them a good out-of-court settlement by all accounts.’

‘I’ve represented many clients.’ He added sarcastically, ‘That’s what I’m paid to do.’

Rio’s finger stopped moving. ‘Can’t be many of your clients who also have a second job as a hitman. You paid Ronald Miller to try to murder Nicola Bell. You paid him to kill the very sad Gary Larkin and his doomed gang.’

Foster stretched his shoulders and leg like he was getting ready to do a relaxing Tai Chi move to centre his karma. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Detective Inspector. What my clients do in their spare time is none of my business.’ His shoulders eased back down. ‘Check my bank accounts if I’m meant to have paid this Ronald Miller.’

Rio checked his financial accounts again: a money trail that ended nowhere.

sixty-eight

18 Hours

Rio knew it was slipping away. She could even guess what Foster’s response would be to her questions. When she raised the subject of the initial attack on Nikki in the hospital, she reminded him that he’d insisted no one could talk to the teenager without him being present, and suggested he’d arranged the attack. She almost whispered his reply under her breath as he made it – he had also been a victim of the first assault on Nikki. Strange behaviour for someone who’d arranged her murder. As for her accusations that he had been the one to set up the murders of Nikki’s parents by insisting they have no police protection – he had merely given them a range of legal advice and they had freely made their choice.

Every which way Rio turned he blocked her.

sixty-nine

10 Hours

Desperately Rio went back over old ground with Foster.

‘Can you tell me why you decided to represent Gary Larkin when you heard he’d been arrested? And it was you who arranged for Gary Larkin and his gang to hide in that oast house in Kent, wasn’t it? Once you had the gang cornered you arranged for them to be murdered so it would look like they were killed in our raid. Dead men tell no tales. That’s what happened, isn’t it, Mr Foster?’

Foster was smoking cigars that his secretary had brought in and left at the front desk. He looked pensive before replying, ‘How’s it going, DI Wray?’

‘How’s what going?’

‘Your inquiry? Have your officers uncovered any actual evidence against me yet?’

‘I’ve seen defendants convicted on less circumstantial evidence than I’ve got against you . . .’

Foster nodded with approval. ‘Yes indeed. But that would be ordinary defendants, wouldn’t it, Detective Inspector Wray?’

Rio refused to respond.

Foster sighed. ‘As to your questions, of course there’s the issue of client confidentiality but as the unfortunate Mr Larkin is dead, I can tell you that I advised Gary to go back to his flat and sit it out. I don’t know anything about any oast houses in Kent . . . Unless of course you can prove otherwise?’

The door opened. It was Strong. Rio punched the tape off and left the room. She was surprised to see the Assistant Commissioner waiting in the corridor. Strong left them alone.

‘Let him go.’

Rio was furious. ‘He’s a murderer. Worse than a murderer, he got other people to do his dirty work for him. We’ve still got at least nine hours—’

‘If you haven’t got anything by now he isn’t going to crack. This man has been practising law for decades, so he knows which strings to pull and how to pull them. I’ve already had his friends on the phone complaining and you know how powerful they are . . .’

But Rio wasn’t listening. Her superior’s comment about Foster being a lawyer with years behind him took her mind to one of Foster’s self-satisfied lines in the interview room.

‘I took care of Maurice’s legal issues for him in those days. But I don’t think that constitutes a crime, Detective Inspector Wray . . .’

Foster. Maurice Bell. Suddenly Rio realised that she’d been looking in all the wrong places.

‘Two hours. That’s all I’m asking for,’ Rio butted it over AC Tripple.

The older woman’s eyes squinted as she gazed deeply at Rio. ‘Am I going to regret saying yes?’

‘No, ma’am. Two hours. Please.’

‘You’ve got one hour.’

seventy

‘Is the archive of evidence from London’s cold cases still in the basement?’ Rio urgently asked the desk sergeant. The blood flowed hot and hard through her body pumping a sheen of sweat to her face. This was the longest shot she’d ever played in her career. And the odds against her coming out on top were not strong.

‘In the bunker,’ the sergeant answered, using the name everyone who worked inside The Fort called the basement, since it had once been set up as a potential bunker during the paranoid days of the Cold War. ‘Yes. Most of the stuff was left to rot down there after the new computer system was installed last year. It’s going to be moved out to a storage facility but I think it’s still there.’

‘How far does it go back?’

‘I think there’s stuff going back to the Second World War and up until the mid-1960s. Later records – where there’s still a slim chance that a case might get solved – have been logged and stored properly off-site. But most of the things in the basement are over fifty years old—’

‘Have you got the key?’

‘No. But I know a man who has.’

As Rio impatiently waited she couldn’t help but look at the large, plain white clock on the wall. Time was counting down against her.

Fifty-nine minutes.

Fifty-seven minutes.

Fifty-six minutes.

The key was in her hand on the fifty-third minute. She took the stairs with the speed of an army cadet on a take-no-prisoners training course. Rio punched in the access code on the keypad, flicked the light switch and entered an underground world of harsh, fluorescent lighting, long corridors and blue doors. She followed the directions the Sergeant had given and soon found the padlock door of the archive, undid the lock and stepped inside. The door swung open, squeaking in protest.