Hunting for Crows (21 page)

DI Henderson drove slowly through the centre of Henfield, a large village to the north of Brighton. It would be more appropriate to call it a small town as he passed a couple of garages, several pubs and a smattering of small but smart shops, including a bakery, a mini-supermarket and a wine merchant.

‘I used to go out with a guy from Henfield once. Had his own place up there,’ DS Walters said as they passed a side road.

‘It didn’t work out?’ Henderson asked. ‘But don’t give me the long version as we’re nearly there.’

‘It was difficult for us to get together, so it was over before it started. Between the daft hours we work and his commute to and from London on a train that often arrived late, and added to the mix, an unreliable car, trying to meet him became too much hassle.’

‘I can see how it might give you a problem. Perhaps you need to date someone near where you live or one of our fine officers at Sussex House.’

‘No chance. It’s bad enough having to work beside most of them.’

He stopped the car outside a modest semi-detached house in Northcroft, a bit of a come-down from the former marital home in Woodland Drive. He knocked on the door and when it opened, meeting Emily Grant once again reminded Henderson what a fine looking woman she was. Deep blue eyes complimented a mop of thick, brown hair, cut to shoulder length, and with the shapely figure of a disciplined dieter or a fitness enthusiast. However, the sight of two young Labradors confirmed the svelte shape was likely a function of long walks in neighbouring fields rather than any pounding done on the streets of Henfield or on a running machine at the nearby Leisure Centre.

With the dogs safely locked away in the kitchen, they moved into the lounge. It was a small, cosy room, filled with a few pieces of furniture which might have looked good in the larger room at her old house, but here they dominated.

‘If you remember,’ Henderson said, ‘when we last spoke I said we were looking into Peter’s accident because losing two members of the same band so close to one another looked odd…’

‘Yes, and you also said Sarah Corbett asked you to look at it again.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She's been here to see me, you know.’

‘Oh, has she?’

‘Yes. She called me not long after I saw you and said she would like to come and see me. She’s a nice woman, genuine. I think she and Pete were only going out for a short time and she feels bereft at losing him so soon afterwards. Perhaps coming to see me added a little more colour to her memories.’

‘Was it a difficult meeting?’ Walters asked.

She flicked back her hair in what could be considered a suggestive gesture if they weren’t discussing the death of her husband and a conversation with his former lover.

‘It was less awkward than you might think, as our marriage was finished and I was ready to move on, although I don’t think I could say the same for Pete.’

‘Did Sarah leave a happier person?’

‘I think so, she hasn’t been in contact since. Did she talk to you again?’

‘No, I haven’t spoken to her since she first approached me.’

‘I hope she finds peace.’

‘Emily,’ Henderson said, ‘can you tell me what was the connection between the band and a guy called Mathew Street?’

‘God, there’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time, Mat Street. His connection with the Crows? Let me think, it’s been a while.’ She stared at the coffee table for a few seconds. ‘I don’t know if I told you before, but Pete was the only married man in the band, and to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble, as if he would, I often joined him on tour.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘We travelled all over, to the north of England and parts of Europe, and even went up to your neck of the woods a couple of times. Mat Street was a roadie and general handyman who only joined us for the big tours, but on the side he could get us anything we wanted like cheap booze, fags and illegal magazines, and for me and the other girls, perfume, clothes, dresses and jeans. I don’t know where he got it all from, abandoned warehouses he said, but as we didn’t have much money at the time, we didn’t care.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Street could supply drugs, but being a rock band, drug dealers were ten-a-penny. Pete, if you can believe it, didn’t do drugs. Even then, he was into keeping fit, he had to be, as he was the drummer. He liked a drink and Street could always lay his hands on some pretty strong Russian vodka, Pete’s poison at the time.’

‘I get the impression Mat did more for the band than booze and drugs.’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘I think something was going on between him and the band, something big was being planned, before they split up.’

Henderson was fishing, trying to fill in the gaps Mathew Street had left unsaid.

She shook her head. ‘No, I wasn’t aware of anything else.’

She looked calm and unruffled by the question, good. It wouldn’t do his reputation any good to be thrown out of two houses in the same week.

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘both Mathew Street and Derek Crow–’

‘Have you seen Derek? How is he taking this? It must be awful for him to be the last man standing.’

‘We interviewed Derek just before we met you at the house in Woodland Drive. He’s pretty concerned as you might expect. Who wouldn’t be in such circumstances?’

Her face creased with worry. ‘I’ve called him a couple of times but I must go and see him. I can’t begin to understand what he must be going through.’

‘You sound like you are quite fond of him,’ Walters said.

‘Do I? I suppose I still am.’ She looked over in the direction of a photograph of her and a bloke Henderson assumed to be her new man, standing behind two grown-up kids. ‘I think I can say now as Pete’s no longer with us, but Derek and I were lovers back then. I would have left Pete if he’d asked me, but he didn’t ask and here I am.’

‘When we spoke to Mathew Street and Derek, they both became evasive when asked where the guys got the money to start their various businesses. I don’t think they got it from being in the band.’

‘Why not? They sold plenty of albums and did loads of tours. I should know, I was with them a good part of the time.’

‘Frannie Copeland said–’

‘Frannie Copeland? I wouldn’t believe a thing that thieving shyster said.’

‘No?’

‘Derek always said he was conning them, keeping back money promoters had paid them, and all the while making them survive on a shoestring. We once did a gig in Preston and I saw the promoter give Frannie a wad of cash. We never saw any of it.’

‘Why didn’t they sack him?’ Walters asked.

‘He had them tied up in a water-tight contract, they couldn’t get out of it, even if they wanted to.’

‘If we stay with the assumption,’ Henderson said, ‘that they didn’t make much money from the music, and why would they when they walked away from their best-selling album, where did they get it from?’

‘Now I think about it, you could be right, life with the Crazy Crows was one long party. When you’re in your twenties, you don’t think who’s paying the bills, the hotels, the road crew, the rent of the hall and everything else. I know now the band paid for it, out of their twenty per cent or whatever that mean swine Frannie Copeland was giving them.’

‘Peter needed money to set up Grant’s.’

‘The business will pass on to my daughter Danielle in a few weeks’ time, and with luck she’ll use some of the profits to keep her mother in the style to which she has become accustomed,’ she said smiling, as her eyes roamed her modest surroundings.

Henderson was beginning to lose patience with all this reminiscing and diversion, she was being as evasive as Derek Crow and Mathew Street. It had begun as an innocent question, almost a throwaway to Crow and Street in an attempt to make them open up and reveal a little more of what went on, but the more he probed, the more he realised it was something no one wanted to talk about.

He tried again. ‘This is important, Emily. I need to get to the bottom of this, as it might be the reason someone is killing members of the band and we need to stop the same thing happening to Derek. I think the start-up money question might be the key to the whole thing.’

The room went quiet and he could hear one of the dogs moving in its basket and a pigeon cooing in the trees outside. Walters had been with him long enough to know that silences between words were important in giving witnesses time to consider the options, and she wasn’t tempted to open her sizeable mouth, even if the oppressive silence was willing her to do so.

Emily sighed as if deciding something. ‘It wasn’t like Pete turned up one day with a pile of money.’

‘No? What was it like, then?’

She looked at him, chewing her lip. ‘I suppose now with Pete and Eric dead…I don’t know. It might not reflect well on Derek.’

‘I don’t think he would care, if the choice was life or death.’

‘Derek wasn’t involved, you have to take my word for it, but you know what newspapers are like nowadays, he would be tarred by association.’

‘I don’t want to get heavy handed, Emily but I do need to remind you this is a murder investigation. We believe someone murdered your ex-husband and is planning to kill Derek Crow. Isn’t this enough incentive for you to try and stop it?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Eric, as you no doubt gathered from your other interviews, liked his dope, but in his more lucid moments he could be a bit of a daredevil. The first time the band were in Germany, he met this Dutch guy who could get drugs, not the little packets people like Mathew Street supplied, but big bricks of top quality Lebanese and Afghani hash, LSD by the thousands, and bags of cocaine. With help from Fast Eddie, one of the band’s roadies, who’s dead now, they packed out a couple of speaker cabinets and became big-time drug importers.’

It was Henderson’s turn to take a deep breath.

‘Incredible. How many runs did they make?’

‘Five, I think. When it started off, they were doing it for personal consumption and selling a little on the side, but soon it developed into a big business. They were making serious money and pretty soon all of them, except Derek were involved.’

‘If they were doing so well importing drugs, why did they pack in the band?’ Walters asked. ‘I imagine if they didn’t tour any more, their little business venture would stop too.’

‘It would, but they believed Customs were on to them. At the time, we just thought it was Eric’s paranoia, but when another band got stopped at Dover and busted, he got scared and decided to pack it in.’

‘I would imagine by then,’ Henderson said, ‘they’d made enough money for each of them to start something legitimate.’

‘That was the plan. Then, with Danny dying and Eric out of his head most of time as he blamed himself for the accident, finishing the band and starting something new became an easy decision.’

‘I see.’

‘The main reason they got away with it for so long was because Derek didn’t know a thing about it. They never involved him as he would have put a stop to it right away if he did. You see, they always made sure he was driving one of the vans when they went through Dover. He did it, bless him, without a care in the world, convinced it was full of nothing but amplifiers, speakers, instruments and a bunch of knackered musicians.’

With an almost imperceptible nod, Detective Sergeant Willard Jenkinson indicated to DC Huntington to follow him as they made their way down to the interview suite at Snow Hill police station. At this stage, he would often say something encouraging to the young detective he was mentoring about how he hoped the interview would go well and that with some luck another criminal would be taken off the streets, but not today. He couldn’t give a toss if it went well or not.

‘What do we know about the suspect, sir?’ Huntington asked.

‘It’s in the arrest papers son, read ’em,’ he said. He neither wanted conversation nor the observation of social niceties. He banged the interview room door open, making the suspect sitting inside jump, and took a seat. Huntington would do the technology, as sure as hell, he wasn’t doing it.

The papers were lying in front of him, but instead he stared at the suspect. In many respects, a sight to cheer the saddest heart, as she was a lovely looking woman with deep brown eyes, the subtlest of makeup, a small button nose and ruby-lips that looked almost kissable. To add to the pleasant vista, she was wearing a bright flowery dress displaying a generous amount of boob, but as this was a serious conversation, he was more pleased to see her face sporting a worried look. Well, no bloody wonder.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Hannah.’

‘Good afternoon, detective.’ The voice sounded forced-cheery, a result of never having been in police custody, and in his job a suspect without a criminal record was as rare as a carnivorous hen.

‘I am Detective Sergeant Willard Jenkinson and this is Detective Constable Bradley Huntington.’

‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.’

He talked her through the usual admin stuff about the use of recording devices, her right to a lawyer and how she wasn’t under arrest, at least not yet. Based on what she said in the next ten minutes, she would either walk free and go home to her house in Farnham, or be locked in a cell awaiting the arrival of Serious Robbery detectives who would cart her off to Paddington Green or some other dungeon.

‘If I can make a start, Mrs Hannah. Early this afternoon you entered the premises of bullion dealers, Stevens, Makepeace and Riedel in Hatton Gardens, and informed them you wanted to sell a gold bar. Is this correct?’

‘Yes, it is. But I don’t see there’s anything wrong with doing it, so why was I taken in here and left to freeze for hours in a draughty corridor?’

‘I’m getting around to it, have no fear.’

He took a photograph out of a folder and spun it around for her to see. ‘Does this look like your gold bar?’

She looked at the picture. ‘I suppose so, but it looks like any gold bar. No hang on, it is mine. I recognise the little flag symbol.’

‘Can you tell me what you said to the man you spoke to, Mr Jocelyn Stevens, about where you obtained it?’

‘I told him and I’m telling you now, it used to belong to my grandmother, a dear woman who died a few months ago. She told me she brought it over from Poland during the war. She said it might be Nazi gold but I’m not sure if that bit’s true.’

‘You don’t sound very Polish to me.’

‘I’m second generation British, but our family still observes Polish tradition.’

‘Do these traditions involve robbing airlines?’

Her mouth fell open, goldfish-like. Not a good look for such a pretty face. Shortly afterwards, a single word, ‘What?’ came out.

‘Mr Stevens is a cautious man and he knows there is a lot of dodgy gold around. When he spotted the little logo there,’ he said pointing at the photograph, ‘he decided to look it up. Sorry, if it’s not too clear, someone has tried to file it off. Do you know what he found?’

‘No, but I’m sure you are about to tell me.’

He liked this part of police work, the reveal, as comedians called it. He waited a second or two before handing her another photograph, not another shiny gold bar, but a close-up of the logo from the first gold bar, blurred and indistinct.

‘What’s this?’

‘The little symbol or flag as you call it, from your gold bar.’

‘Oh.’

‘If you look closely, it says, ‘Suisse’ with a little symbol underneath which I’m told is the Swiss flag. Not a polish flag but a Swiss flag. Can you see it?’

‘Just about,’ she said in a croaky and dry voice. This interview didn’t stretch to refreshments.

‘Do you want to know something interesting about your gold bar?’

‘No.’

He leaned forward. ‘This one and a pile of its mates with a value of £20 million at 1989 prices, along with a couple of mill in cash and securities, were all nicked from the Windlass Security depot at Gatwick Airport in August 1989. The gold and boxes containing the securities and cash were about to be loaded onto an AeroSwiss jet for onward transportation to Switzerland when seven robbers attacked them.’

‘I don’t know anything about the theft of any gold bars. I got this one from my grandmother.’

‘So you say but I think you do. Do you know what a kilogram of gold is worth?’

‘About thirty-five thousand pounds, the last time I looked.’

‘Very good Suzy, I can see you’ve done your homework. Now do you know the sentence you would receive for stealing or re-setting gold nicked from the AeroSwiss raid? I might add, five Windlass security personnel were hospitalised. One was shot and the others beaten up and sprayed in the face with CS gas.’

‘I didn’t steal it,’ she said, her face red and flustered, ‘I tell you, I found it.’

‘Ah, I see we’ve moved on from the benevolence of your dear, departed Polish grandmother to a remarkable lucky find. In which field or woods did you find it, as I think I might be tempted to go out and buy a metal detector?’

‘I didn’t find it in a field,’ she said.

‘No? What a disappointment. Where then?’

She sighed the sigh of the defeated; the lady had been rumbled. ‘My husband died two weeks ago. I went through his things and found the gold bar in a bag. In fact, I found two. I swear to God it’s the truth.’

‘This sounds more like it. Tell me about your husband. I’ve known people who would kill for a lot less than thirty-five grand.’

She scowled, perhaps he needed to tone down the sarcasm a notch or two.

‘He died in a car accident almost two weeks ago when his car went out of control and crashed into a lorry. You might have read about it as it was in all the papers. In his younger days, in the eighties, he was the guitarist in a rock group called the Crazy Crows.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Eric Hannah.’

He turned and looked at Huntington, his researcher of all things arcane and a skilled user of technology, often of the kind he could barely switch on.

‘I believe it happened on the A31 near Farnham, sir.’

‘Very good, Huntington. Yes, I remember it now, a big blaze that closed the roundabout for hours.’ He looked back at the suspect. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs Hannah.’

‘Heartfelt I’m sure, but thanks for saying it anyhow.’

In his mind, she was moving away from his initial assumption that she was a fence, to more like the innocent party trying to pick up the pieces after her husband died. His chances of locating a horde of gold would have to wait for another day.

‘So,’ he said, trying to sound more conciliatory than previous. ‘Where do you think your husband obtained these two gold bars?’

‘I don’t know because he never told me anything about it. You see, I’m his third wife and as I’m a lot younger than him, I wasn’t around in his musical days.’

‘I guessed as much.’

‘I assume he bought it on his travels when he was still playing with the band, or from one of the dodgy characters who used to hang around with them.’

‘Maybe he bought it a few months back without your knowledge.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I think he’s had it for a long time. See, the only period in his life when he had any money was when he was in the band and just after, and even then, he seemed to spend it just as fast as he was making it.’

‘The bullion raid at Gatwick airport was carried out by seven armed men who fired shots into the ceiling as they helped themselves to the goodies being loaded on to a conveyer belt. All seven were captured and since then, served lengthy prison sentences, but the gold has never been recovered. We assumed it was melted down and sold to dodgy bullion dealers. Most of the gang were released in the last couple of years, so you can see why the sudden appearance of one of the bars from the raid interests me.’

‘If the men are now out of prison, you would expect to see a few more of them popping up, I would think.’

‘You could be right, and maybe I can look forward to more chats like this one in the future, although something tells me they will not be as pretty as you.’

He gathered his papers together and stood. ‘Thank you for coming in Mrs Hannah. I do hope we haven’t spoiled your day.’

‘What? You’re not going to charge me?’

‘As you said at the start of this interview, you haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘I can go?’

‘Yes, you can, but we might need to talk with you again.’

‘Can I keep the gold bar?’

He shook his head; cheeky mare. ‘Unfortunately, no. We’ll keep this one and send someone over to collect the other one you have in your possession, so do not try to sell it. They don’t belong to you or your late husband, but the insurance company covering the security raid loss.’

‘I see.’

‘It was a pleasure to meet you, Mrs Hannah. DC Huntington will see you out.’

Jenkinson strode back to his desk, whistling a merry tune, but stopped when he realised it was Rihanna, a song playing every hour on Capital Radio. He was forty-five, for God’s sake, and any interest in her was only from the waist down and nothing to do with her singing.

He was happy nonetheless, as there was nothing coppers hated more than unfinished business, and who knows, maybe the finder of the missing AeroSwiss gold would get his name in the papers. If that couldn’t please him, nothing would.