One Last Lesson (14 page)

‘I understand but even though I take keen interest in exactly where I put my money, I don’t have anything to do with the day-to-day management of the site. Jon Lehman, Alan Stark and my nephew do that and they would have a better idea if one of our subscribers was taking an unhealthy interest in some of the girls.’

‘We
have already spoken to Mr Lehman and will speak to Mr Stark shortly. What does your nephew do?’

He explained about his nephew’s role but stopped at giving them the address of the warehouse and wo
uldn’t do so unless compelled, as the less people that knew about the business, the better.

‘How did it start, this web site?’

‘Alan came to me with the idea and Jon asked some of the students if they were interested and they said yes, they were willing to model. I provided finance and some of the IT people from other parts of my business to build the site.’

It hadn’t been his first foray into the porn market as in the last ten years,
there had been investments in strip clubs, luxury men’s clubs with topless hostesses and a VIP lounge, and latterly, lap dancing and pole dancing pubs, but this web site was the easiest bucks he would ever earn. This was to his eternal delight because he imagined web sites like this were ten-a-penny but to the credit of Lehman and Stark, they got the formula right and almost overnight it became a roaring success.

‘I don’t have a problem with you talking to these guys but I would like to make
one suggestion.’

‘Which is?’

‘Can I ask you to tread carefully?’

‘
We would anyway, but why do you say that?’

‘Well, many of these girls are using the money they make to finance their studies and
they wouldn’t appreciate their details being broadcast around the university.’

‘It wouldn’t serve anybody’s interest to fuel the morality crusade the Argus seems to have embarked upon. Enough has been said already.’

‘Do I detect an edge to your voice? Perhaps you don’t approve of what we’re doing. Is it rubbing up against your Calvinist upbringing, perhaps?’

‘I might be Scottish and like a drop of whisky but I hate golf, tartan bunnets and the Scottish Parliament so please don’t try and pigeon-hole me
, Mr Green.’

‘It was a cheap jibe Inspector
, and for that I apologise.’

‘What I do object to, is the exploitation of vulnerable girls,
that you say are only trying to finance their way through college, but are displaying their wares for all to see. This blatant exposure could not only blight their future career if a prospective employer happened to see the pictures but future relationships too, and not to mention harmony at home if their parents ever found out.’

‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate these things as I have two teenage girls of my own but nobody is going to tell me these girls don’t go into this with their eyes open. They are bright, intelligent people
, so why wouldn’t they? If they had any scruples about doing it, they would be working in Tesco. It’s an old story, we do it because there is a market for it and they work for us because it pays well. The people that subscribe to this site are ordinary, decent people who appreciate the female form and would no more commit a sexual crime than beat up their kids.’

‘We could talk about this all day,’ Henderson said rising from the chair, ‘but all the recent research does suggest that easy access to porn corrupts young minds and finances criminality
, but I think we’ve taken up enough of your time already.’

He couldn’t be bothered getting up so Henderson leaned over and shook his hand and Walters did the same.

‘We’ll see ourselves out Mr Green. Goodbye.’

Henderson turned th
e key and let himself into his top-floor flat in Vernon Terrace, in the busy Seven Dials district of Brighton. Walking inside, it felt like he hadn’t been there for a while but in fact he was sleeping in his own bed more than usual as Rachel was still in the Royal Sussex and he normally stayed at her place in Hove a couple of nights a week. However, over the last month he had been working so much on the Robson case, all he could do at the end of the day was close the door and tumble into bed.

It was
n’t just the investigation that was eating into his time because as soon as he left Sussex House, he would call into the hospital to see Rachel. She was out of Intensive Care now and transferred to a general ward for recuperation and further treatment. It was a sign that she was making good progress but it gave him a major problem as it meant he was forced to stick to restricted visiting times like everybody else, and he missed the flexibility of IC where he could come and go as he pleased.

Although her memories of the crash were still vague, she was not only starting to feel better, but looking better too, with colour in her face and a healthy shine to her hair. Facially, she suffered a multitude of small cuts and bruises from flying debris and they were healing quickly but her left arm was in plaster and her right leg was supported by a contraption with so many wires and pulleys,
that looked as though it belonged on a building site and not a precision piece of medical equipment used by doctors.

Like most people
he had ever visited in hospital: witnesses, friends and relatives, they were all desperate to come home and Rachel was no exception. The spectre of her lying bedridden in his flat, unable to go to the toilet or into the kitchen to make a meal without help, raised its ugly head once again the previous day when her mother rang him up, ostensibly to find out how he was doing but covertly trying to do some digging and trying to find out what provisions he was making for looking after their daughter when she was finally discharged.

From day one, her parents made it clear they were happy to
take her back to their house in Epsom, but Rachel was equally adamant she did not want to go. She enjoyed a good relationship with her father but couldn’t say the same for her mother as they would bicker and fight at the slightest issue and it had taken years to reach the state of truce where they were at now and she didn’t want to risk damaging it all over again.

With the
discharge day looming, he still didn’t know what to do, although he couldn’t take time off while there was a vicious murderer running around or give Chief Inspector Harris the opportunity to parachute his mate into Serious Crimes, but he did know he wouldn’t be able to do a good job if he was also looking after an invalid.

It had been a week since the Lehman interview and the search for Mike Ferris was continuing but as neither of them were completely satisfactory suspects
in his mind, and with no new leads to follow, it seemed to him and to many in the team, that the investigation was coming to a grinding halt.

There were those
that believed Ferris was their man and all they needed to do was catch him. It was assumed he was in Scarborough, the place he told them where his wife was living now and where they used to live, and so pictures of him were sent to the local force in Yorkshire, and also to Lincoln, the place where he was born and where his mother still lived.

There were others in the team
that believed Sarah was killed as a consequence of her involvement in the porn web site and as a first step, he tasked a team with interviewing all the people that might have seen Jon Lehman on the Thursday night when she was killed. He was coming to the conclusion that Lehman was physically and emotionally incapable of carrying out such an act himself, but that didn’t preclude them from speculating that if wasn’t Lehman, then it could have been someone else connected with the web site. Rightly or wrongly, Dominic Green was sitting at the top of that list and nothing he said earlier this morning would change that.

He had been a thorn in the side of Sussex Police for many years, most notably
when charged with murder after a building caretaker was killed in a fire, when he refused to leave a derelict hotel that had been recently bought by Green. The case happened several years before he joined Sussex Police but according to those in the know at the time, there was euphoria in John Street, Brighton’s main police station when Green was brought in. Unfortunately, their sense of joy was rapidly transformed to abject despair when he was eventually released after the only witness mysteriously withdrew his statement.

It was believed Green was responsible for a string of beatings, fires and bribery
that had dogged the Brighton and Worthing areas for over a decade, done in the course of building his fledgling property development company into one of the largest companies of its kind in the South-East of England. Building numerous apartment blocks in Crawley, Brighton and Worthing and shopping centres in Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells, not to mention the clubs, pubs and nursing homes he owned, turned him into a multi-millionaire and now he was regarded by many with shorter memories than his, as a pillar of the community.

Over the same period, he filed a string of harassment complaints against Sussex Police and now every officer was more or less banned from issuing
him with a parking fine or a speeding ticket without the approval of the Chief Constable. Henderson sighed, no sooner did a ‘person of interest’ pop their head above the parapet, than he and the team could find five good reasons for shooting them down.

From his limited cooking repertoire of quick meals which included spaghetti Bolognese, spicy meat balls and a passable lasagne, he cooked some pasta and mixed it with a jar of tomato sauce and threw in some basil
from a jar that had been lurking at the back of the cupboard for as long as he could remember, but hopefully could still provide some additional flavour.

When
the food was ready, he carried the plate into the living room and sat on the settee to eat, while listening to a CD by David Gray, lent to him by Gerry Hobbs in an attempt to ‘broaden his musical horizons.’ It was proving fruitless because his musical tastes were basically unchanged since his youth when he was a member of the road crew for his younger brother Archie’s rock band, Blackheart.

They were competent performers of a repertoire of rock staples including, ‘Smoke on the Water,’ ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ together with tracks from other major bands of
that era such as Marillion, Journey and U2, and played in numerous church halls, small theatres and village halls from their home in Fort William to Aberdeen. He still loved the songs, probably as a result of hearing every one of them a hundred times or more and in some cases he preferred the Blackheart version to the original.

His brother was
a talented guitarist but didn’t pursue a career in music as everyone expected, and instead he joined the Army. There is an urban legend about James Blunt, a more famous musician-soldier than his brother, that his guitar was strapped to the back of his armoured vehicle while he patrolled the streets of Kosovo on peacekeeping duties. Archie was convinced this was simply marketing hype as knowing the Serbs as he did, a price would be offered to anyone who could put a hole in it. Archie’s guitar didn’t make it to Afghanistan and if the reports sent home about the locals were accurate, they wouldn’t have appreciated his music anyway.

After dumping the dirty dishes in the sink and resolving to wash up before he went to bed
, and not four days later as usual, he ignored the unplugged television and sat down in the only armchair, positioned strategically beside the large sash window to benefit from the good light it offered, with an excellent view of the green opposite from its elevated position on the third floor.

With a glass of Glenmorangie in one hand and the Lehman file in the other, he opened the file and knew he had to get out of his head any prejudices, legal short comings and small-town sensibilities about the porn industry before he started, otherwise there wasn’t a chance in hell he would be able to look at the evidence in front of him with any objectivity.

He had never worked in V
ice nor seen the negative effect of their activities at first hand, but he possessed a deep seated resentment of anyone who exploited women and could never respect a person that had amassed a fortune without working bloody hard to earn it, or stole it off the backs or efforts of others, and Dominic Green seemed to tick all the boxes.

He picked out the reports provided by the team interviewing students at
tending the same party as Jon Lehman, on the night Sarah died. The more he read, the more it sounded like a drunken binge, topped up with banging loud music and very drunk guys and girls making fools of themselves in front of their friends.

At least seven people remembered seeing Lehman and the last sighting
of him was at three in the morning, by a boy that was in one of Lehman’s seminar groups. He felt sure this was sufficient corroboration for his alibi but unfortunately none of interviewers noted down the condition of the interviewees and whether they were in any fit state to recognise Jon Lehman or even tell the time. It was a small point but experience had taught him that the successful prosecution of many cases often hinged on such small issues.

He was just making a note to ask someone to follow-up that very point when his phone rang. He was sorely tempted to ignore it
as he found sessions like this; a problem to wrestle with, a seat by the window and a glass of whisky in his hand, were invaluable at juggling disparate facts into some form of cohesion.