Hard Going (33 page)

‘How's that?' Slider frowned, still far off in thought.

‘Your hunch,' Atherton said. ‘Which seems to be getting more pronounced, by the way. It's the lack of ergonomic chairs. Stamford,' he elucidated, seeing Slider was still only halfway back. ‘You guessed right. He had lunch at the George in Stamford. Waiter remembers him from his large tip, description matches, and he said Bygod mentioned in a chatty way that he'd lived in the area as a lad and had many fond memories of the place.'

‘Oh,' said Slider.

‘You don't sound pleased at being proved right,' said Atherton.

‘I can't see that it helps,' Slider complained. ‘Unless he met someone there – and that's a whole lot more things to check.'

‘Well, he lunched alone,' Atherton said. ‘And from the timing of the meal he must have gone straight there, but of course he may have gone visiting afterwards.'

‘Or was just driving about, looking.'

‘There is that. But if he visited someone, it might have stirred up an old enmity. Someone he knew an old secret about, who later decided old Li was better off out of it.'

‘I suppose we'll have to get the local police to make enquiries about his movements,' Slider said with a sigh. He didn't like it when a case went out of his area. Foreign police couldn't be chivvied like your own firm. ‘But it does open up a whole new area of possibilities.' He looked across as McLaren sidled up to the door and tapped tentatively on the frame for attention. ‘Yes?'

‘Guv,' McLaren said, ‘I think I might've got something.'

‘I'm buying,' Slider said.

McLaren came all the way in, printout in hand. ‘Well, I was looking for the hire car up the A1, like Jim asked, and there's cameras on the big roundabout where the A1 crosses the A411. I got him going up and then again coming back.'

‘As you would,' Atherton said impatiently.

‘Yeah, but no – fact is, he gets pinged there three times.' He looked at Slider hopefully. ‘He goes north in the morning, straight up the A1. But coming back in the afternoon he turns off, down the A411 towards Chipping Barnet. Then about an hour later he comes back along the A411 and turns south on the A1 towards London.'

‘Chipping Barnet,' Slider said triumphantly to Atherton, ‘is where June lives, in a delightfully bungaloid residence right on the main road.'

‘The main road being the A411,' McLaren said, eager there should be no mistake.

‘Yes, I get it,' said Atherton. ‘So he has his jaunt – perhaps meeting some old friends or perhaps not – and on the way home—'

‘It's only a mile out of his way, if that,' McLaren interpolated.

‘—he drops in to see the lovely former Mrs Bygod—'

‘Something she omits to mention to us when asked,' Slider said happily.

‘—to tell her – what?' Atherton reached for the end of his sentence.

‘There is one obvious topic,' said Slider. He paused, thinking.

Eventually, McLaren broke the silence, saying, ‘Shall I go on tracing the hire car, guv?'

‘What? Oh, no. Not for the moment. I've got something else for you to do. Get on to the DVLA and get the numbers of June's van, Buckland's van, and the Range Rover that's parked on their front, which I imagine is registered to Buckland. Then look for any one of the three on the Tuesday in the vicinity of Shepherd's Bush Road.'

‘Right, guv,' McLaren said, a light going on behind his eyes.

And to Atherton, Slider said, ‘I want you to have a look at Buckland's business, Barnet Multibelt Limited. Get Gascoyne to help you.'

Atherton frowned. ‘You're thinking the ex-wife? Isn't that revenge served unreasonably cold?'

‘Just do it.' He waved them away. He stared at the wall a bit longer – it was being unusually helpful today, that wall – then got up and went to his door. Out in the CID room, Swilley, at her desk, looked up and caught his eye. He beckoned and she got up and came towards him.

‘There's something I want you to check,' he said.

It was late before the various strands came together. Connolly and Fathom went for a tray of teas and everyone assembled in the CID room for the reports to be shared.

First McLaren. ‘It turned out to be the Range Rover – lucky, cos it's easier for the camera to see in. They're both there – you can see 'em nice and clear on two of the cameras. He's driving. They've done the M1 and North Circular, he comes off at Dudden Hill Lane, then he must've done some back route he knew through Willesden. But we catch him again on Scrubs Lane, then West Cross roundabout, and Jerry gets him on the bus camera in Shepherd's Bush Road.'

Fathom looked modestly pleased. ‘Five to four that was.'

‘So Lionel had only just got back,' Connolly remarked.

‘Then we got 'em going the other way starting twenty-five past four. Only, going back,
she's
driving,' McLaren concluded.

‘Thirty minutes. Longer than they needed for a straightforward bash 'n' dash,' Atherton observed.

‘Maybe they had a chat that turned into a barney,' Connolly suggested.

‘What have you found out about Buckland's business?' Slider asked Atherton.

‘Buckland owns it. He had a partner way back, but bought him out ten years ago. Did pretty well for a while. But there's been a sharp downturn since the financial crash, and the business is struggling now. He closed his office two years ago – he does some of the paperwork, and he's got one secretary working out of her own home, part time.'

‘She's the one I talked to,' Gascoyne said. ‘I got the impression she's more than just a secretary, if you get me.'

‘Might be useful to look into that,' Swilley said.

Gascoyne nodded. ‘Anyway, she says he's doing it all himself now. Had to let his men go, does the skilled stuff himself, has a boy to help him when there's heavy lifting to do, but she says he's useless – the boy. One of a series of useless boys. She was quite defensive about him working too hard, but proud that he never minds getting his hands dirty. Got the impression he's a bit of a hero to her.'

‘He took out a second mortgage on the house two years ago,' Atherton went on. ‘It's in his name, by the way. And there's a court case in process against him – a dispute with a big logistics company about some work he did for them.'

‘She mentioned that,' Gascoyne put in. ‘She says they're just trying to get out of paying because money's short since the crash. She says there was nothing wrong with the installation. But it's costing him in lawyer's fees, and she says he's “worried to death” about it – her words.'

‘Anything against him?' Slider asked.

‘He's got no criminal record,' Atherton said, ‘and there's nothing about him on Crimint. Just this dispute – and he's two months behind with the mortgage payments.'

‘But he
is
married,' Swilley said. They all looked at her. ‘And I don't mean to June.' She read from her crib sheet. ‘Philip Arthur Buckland, age sixty-two, married in 1969 to a Wendy Harper in Willesden Town Hall. They were divorced in 1979. He married again in 1984 to a Patricia Boyes, divorced 1992, married a third time – he was a glutton for punishment, this bloke—'

‘Dick-happy, more like,' McLaren muttered.

‘—in 1993 to a Gillian Cunliffe, from whom there has been no divorce to date. So he could well still be paying for her,' she added, looking up.

‘So him and your woman June aren't married?' Connolly said. ‘Well, well. Livin' in sin, the little splapeens!'

‘Not married,' Swilley confirmed, looking at Slider. ‘And the other thing you asked me to check, boss – her and Lionel were never divorced, either.'

‘Ah,' said Slider, with satisfaction.

‘“Ah” is the mow juice,' said Porson, making them all jump. He had slipped in quiet as a cat with the inevitable cup of tea in his hand. ‘I've been wondering along those lines myself.'

‘It was the missing will that was puzzling me,' Slider explained. ‘The only person who would automatically get his money was his wife. Then when Mrs Bygod telephoned me this morning to ask how long it would be before the murder was cleared up, I started to wonder. Everyone talked about his “ex-wife”, but we were just assuming there had been a divorce.'

‘But why wouldn't he divorce her,' Connolly said, ‘after the way she treated him?'

‘Diana Chambers said he never held grudges. And he had no-one else. Diana was his great love and she wouldn't marry him, his son was gone. Why go through the palaver of a divorce when there was no need from his point of view? And from hers – I imagine Buckland had had his fill of marriage by now and preferred just to live together. And as long as she stayed married to Lionel, anything he had would come to her in the end.'

‘Until the point,' Atherton gloated, ‘when he came to tell her their son had resurfaced and he was changing his will to leave everything to him.'

‘Blimey, that's a bit rough,' McLaren said. ‘I mean, even if she was a cow, he'd let her expect to get it all them years …'

‘He left something to Diana Chambers,' Atherton said. ‘Maybe he left something to June, as well – we don't know. But not enough, when she was expecting to get the lot.'

Slider took it up. ‘Buckland's business is in trouble, they've got their old age to provide for, she's been relying in a quiet way on Lionel coming good in the end, and suddenly he turns up and tells her it's not going to be. Probably he told her he didn't have long to live, as well, so she knows she has to move quickly.'

‘So she plans to kill him?' Swilley said. ‘My God, that's cold.'

‘Well,' said Slider, ‘I'm not sure if it was that. They were at the flat a long time – I suspect they went to plead with Lionel, or argue with him, at any rate. But he was determined to give the bulk of the money to the son June hated and disowned. Maybe the contemplation of what they were losing was just too much, Buckland lost his temper and whacked Lionel on the head. Disaster. Then all they could do was snatch the new will and leg it.'

‘Hmm,' said Porson. ‘Well, there's plenty of questions for them to answer, anyway – enough to bring 'em in.'

‘I've an idea,' said Slider, ‘that if we put pressure on them separately one of them might turn on the other. I didn't get any great sense of harmony in that house.'

‘Good point.' Porson looked at his watch. ‘Getting late. What do you want to do?'

‘I find it always unsettles people more if they're picked up at night rather than in daylight,' Slider said.

‘Buckland's out on a job this evening,' Gascoyne said. ‘The secretary mentioned it. Putting new belts into the checkouts at a supermarket. She was letting me know how hard he works, out day and night while June sits at home doing nothing. She doesn't like June.'

‘It's a big club,' Connolly muttered.

‘Even better,' Slider said, growing cheerful. ‘We can pick 'em up separately and keep 'em apart until the right moment.'

The Harmony Shopping Centre in Willesden was showing its age. Built small and cheap at the beginning of the fashion and overtaken in the nineties and noughties by larger, more luxurious malls, it now sported cracked tiles and chipped floors, planters where nothing grew but rubbish, and enough streaked concrete to turn even Le Corbusier blind. The big names had abandoned it, a lot of shops were boarded up, and the smaller traders left behind gave it a ramshackle air. Even the supermarket was only a PaySave, a small, local chain. It alone had lights on inside. Barnet Multibelt's van was parked in the loading bay outside it at the back, and the security guards let them – Mackay and two uniformed officers – in the same way, raising the metal shutters for them with the look of alert glee that usually comes over people when they realize someone else is in trouble and they are going to witness them copping it.

Back at the station, Slider was warned that both teams were on their way back with their quarries. ‘Good. Process Buckland, put him in the pokey, get his fingerprints checked against the lift from the door in the flat. When June comes in, put her in the interview room and I'll come and talk to her first.'

He let her wait a bit before going in, with Swilley to intimidate her with her tallness and beauty. June Bygod was looking small, dishevelled and cross anyway, and gave Swilley a look of extreme disfavour. She transferred her angry gaze to Slider and evidently thought he would be the softer option, because she tried to smile, though it was plainly an effort.

‘What's all this about?' she demanded. ‘Why are you dragging me out of my house at this time of night?'

‘Sorry about that,' Slider said, sitting down. ‘I wanted to ask you a few questions.' He allowed himself to look her over, guessing it would annoy her to be discovered in a shapeless pair of slacks and an elderly jumper covered in dog hair, make-up rather worn after a day's use, and no jewellery.

She bridled. ‘Well, there was no need to come rushing over practically in the middle of the night. Why couldn't you call tomorrow and be civilized? I'm perfectly willing to help you, but I don't see why my leisure time should be interrupted. I was just brushing my Lhasa Apso.'

Slider heard Swilley turn her snort of laughter into a cough, but couldn't help glancing at her hair, which was sticking up at one side, perhaps where someone had guided her head into the back of the car. She put a hand up to it automatically and snapped, ‘And that's another thing! Sending uniformed policemen like that! What will the neighbours think?'

‘I think you're losing sight of an essential point,' he said. ‘We are investigating a murder. That's rather more important than your poodles and pekes, wouldn't you say?'

‘I don't have a peke.'