One Last Lesson (15 page)

‘Is that Detective Inspector Henderson?’

‘Aye, it is.’

‘This is Lewes Control Room. We have received reports of a body in Hove.
You’re the current SIO on my list, can you investigate?’

He sat up. ‘
I can. Let me have the details.’

‘
Thank you sir. The location is West Hove Golf Course.’

Dominic Green was drinking a mug of coffee while finishing off an article in the Argus, written by their Country and Environment correspondent
, Rachel Jones about the grants available to landowners for planting trees. There was plenty of space at Langley Manor and he liked trees as much as the next man, so why not? He made a note to follow-up, as the one thing that got the adrenaline flowing in his veins was free money.

The rumble of car tyres over stone chips broke his concentration and wearily
he put down the newspaper. A few minutes later, he heard the sound of Alan Stark and Jon Lehman being led into the small lounge by his housekeeper. He stopped her in the hall and was just giving her instructions to bring in coffee for his guests, when another car drew up. The pale blue Porsche Cayman parked beside Stark’s 5-Series BMW and shortly afterwards John Lester came into the room to join them.

‘Thank you all for coming,’ Green said after coffee was served and the door closed. He was pacing the room impatiently, his mind buzzing with ideas. ‘Now we know why we’re here, so there’s no need to fuck about. Sarah Robson, a lovely girl who’s appeared on our web site quite extensively and was
very popular, according to the analysis done by my nephew, has been killed, murdered by person or persons as yet unknown.’

Stark and Lehman looked contrite as well they might, but
Lester was wearing his serious face and that meant he would happily strangle or garrotte the killer if he walked into the room right now.

‘For those of you that
have been with me a while, you’ll know I won’t tolerate anybody trying to damage my business interests, trying to muscle in on my turf or trying to rile me with their petty jealousies or thirst for revenge. I didn’t get to this position by pussyfooting around or accommodating my enemies and I’m not going to start now.’ He looked at each one intently. ‘We’ve got to find this person before he does this again and rid the earth of his odious presence.’

He turned to Stark and Lehman
, sitting together on the settee. ‘How did this happen, fellas? This is just innocent fun after all, so how come this little girl is dead? Who is doing this to us, Alan?’

He had known
Alan Stark for years, ever since his father died and left him a large legacy, which he wisely invested in one of his apartment developments. When it was completed, with his money doubled as he told him it would, he continued to prosper in the years following and wore clothes, drove cars and lived in houses, way beyond the level that a university salary could provide.

It was
Alan that introduced Jon Lehman to him and although he was younger by about twenty years, he was smarter than the wily lawyer Stark. It was Jon that came up with the web site idea in the first place, a better money generating idea he had yet to see and one that had not yet fulfilled its full potential and therefore something he would not let go without a fight or a bloodbath.

‘I’ve been racking my brains, Dominic,’ Stark said. ‘Jon and I don’t have any enemies to speak of
, as you can imagine, its difficult making serious enemies in a benign educational institution like a university. We’ve looked at all the emails received on the site over the last year and none addressed to Sarah, or to any other girl for that matter, were in the least bit malevolent.’

‘Fair enough but what about the people
that come and go, like delivery men and our two snappers?’

‘I checked them out
too. The only people that are allowed to go beyond the front office where your nephew sits at his computers, and into the area where the pictures are taken, are the two photographers.’

‘What about them?’

‘Graham and Jeff have been with us from the start, you’ve met them.’

He grunted;
that was true. He didn’t normally like arty types but they seemed like a couple of decent lads.

‘I’ve talked to them
both and using the excuse of me being a lawyer and someone needed to check their alibis before the police did, I questioned them about where they were on the night she was killed.’

‘Do they check out?’

‘They do, plus I get the impression that both of them would rather get involved with men than women.’

‘What about the peo
ple in the warehouses next door and the maintenance people that sometimes come in and fix the roof or the toilets? Are any of them taking too close an interest?’

‘Not according to your nephew and as you know, we don’t have the name of the w
ebsite up on the warehouse wall so all the mail we receive is delivered to Belanco Entertainment and anyone on the outside wouldn’t know what’s going on in the inside, not even the people beside us on the industrial estate.’

‘Jon, what’s your take?’

‘I did much of the checking with Alan and we found nothing that would point to a stalker or a weirdo targeting Sarah, or any of the other girls. In any case, only thirty per cent of our subscribers come from the UK and even then, all we know about them are their name, address, email address and encrypted credit card details, so we wouldn’t know if someone was a vicar or a serial rapist. Also, that number doesn’t include casual viewers who can view limited parts of the site without signing up, and until this thing happened and your nephew took them off the system, pictures of Sarah were up there.’

‘
Yeah, I thought you might say that,’ he growled. ‘Not many of them live in the UK as you say and even less in this part of the South East. Although at the end of the day, I just need to get my hands on one.’

He walked to the window and looked out. It was
early spring and only a few bushes and trees were showing any signs of budding but he couldn’t see anything much now as it was dark and even the security lights didn’t stretch that far. He would take a walk around the estate in the morning for a more complete picture, as he was particularly fond of the apple trees and was looking forward to seeing a decent crop this year.

‘Could it be one of your business rivals, Dominic?’ Lehman asked.

Green spun on his heels and faced the young lecturer who shrunk back in surprise. The guy was like a frightened rabbit caught in the headlights, no wonder he was a bloody academic and not out in the real world. ‘Don’t you think I’ve thought of that already, Jon?’

He started to pace the room again. ‘It could be, could be but that’s a bit extreme don’t you think? I mean if they wanted to get
at me, why wouldn’t they attack me here in the house or when I’m down at one of my clubs in town and take their chances when Mr Lester’s not looking? Now if they just wanted to bring down the web site because they are offended by the content, although, why would they be when there’s another million or so just like it, why not just set fire to the warehouse or,’ he turned to face them, ‘why bother with the girls at all and just kill one of you two?’

He liked his little
macabre jokes and the expressions on the faces of the two men were a picture. They might be bright but if they didn’t realise they might also be targets, they were idiots. He took nothing for granted in business and in situations like this, suspected everyone, whether it was a friend he had known for years or someone he had just met.

‘I realise you’re thinking out loud Dominic,’ Stark said, his voice betraying an uncommon nervousness in this normally confident lawyer, ‘but I really don’t think that
’s what this murder is about. It’s probably more simple like some weirdo out there has probably seen Sarah on the site and targeted her.’

‘Who says I was thinking out loud?
’ He paused. ‘I have to say, I agree with you Alan, that this could merely be the actions of a psychotic killer who has picked on her for no reason other than she was coming out of that club in Brighton alone, but what if it’s not? What if it’s the work of a clever criminal who will kill more and more of our girls until we pay a ransom or close down the site or do whatever the hell he wants?’

‘Surely not,’ Lehman said, clearly appalled, ‘that’s an awful scenario.’

‘It is Jon, but we must guard ourselves against such things. So listen up gents, here’s what I propose to do about it. I will take steps to review my business relationships and investigate a couple of miscreant characters that it has been my misfortune to deal with in the past. Jon, I would like you to analyse the subscriber stats and provide Mr Lester here with a list of all you know about those that live in our neck of the woods, for argument’s sake let’s call it Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and Kent but we’ll spread the net wider if we have to. We need to start our own investigation immediately because if the meeting I had with the filth is anything to go by, they haven’t got a bloody clue.’

It gave him no satisfaction to be one of the first on the scene and avoid the sarcasm of t
he Home Office Pathologist, but this time there was no excuse as Henderson lived only a few miles away from the West Hove Golf Club and traffic at this hour of the evening was light. Before the murder of Sarah Robson, he didn’t like golf much but now with another one to add to that list, he was sick to the stomach of the game and never wanted to see or hear of it again.

The SOCO’s
were there already and starting to rope off the scene and erect a bank of arc lights. He spotted Pat Davidson, The Crime Scene Manager, busy directing his team and he walked over to talk to him but he could offer little information at this early stage and they agreed to meet later. From the boot of the car he donned a plastic suit, overshoes and hat and started to climb the short slope leading up to the site, and even though not many of his people had arrived yet, there was enough activity close to the top to tell him where he needed to be.

Among sharp gorse bushes and overgrown rhododendrons, he bent down to take a look. Despite having attended dozens of murder scenes, there wasn’t much he could determine with any certainty without the benefit of a skilled pathologist
, but it would take an idiot not to recognise the similarities with the Sarah Robson case as it was young girl about her age, naked, badly bruised, with serious head wounds and hidden in the undergrowth beside a golf course.

He thumped his fist into the ground and screamed. ‘Ahhhhh! You bastard! You’ve done it again!’ The sound was only heard by those close by, causing them to look round briefly before it was lifted by the whistling wind and drifted away
.

A few minutes later, Davison tapped
him on the shoulder and led him down the hill and introduced him to Jenny Holmes and Peter Franks, the couple that first reported finding the body. They were standing close to a continuously expanding collection of squad cars, unmarked detective cars and SOCO vans that were now gathered in a long line on a narrow access road known as Badger’s Way.

He
slowly regained his composure, the cold night air and a chat with a sombre Pat Davidson were seeing to that, but not his anger. This was not because he feared the screaming headlines in the Argus the following morning, proclaiming police incompetence, nor the equally strident tone his boss would take when he found out, but a voice in his head that was telling him this woman would still be alive today, if only they were smarter, if only he was smarter and Sarah’s killer was now locked-up in jail.

Holmes and Franks were huddled together
, covered in blankets and clutching large mugs of tea. He flashed his warrant card and said as calmly as possible, ‘hello there I’m Detective Inspector Henderson of Sussex Police, the senior investigating officer on this case.’

They shook hands but before he could frame a question, Franks jumped in.

‘We were just leaving the clubhouse see, which is just down the road there and I was giving Mrs Holmes here a lift home to her house in Portslade ‘cause her hubby Danny doesn’t play. I took short and rather than go all the way back to the clubhouse where I had just said goodbye to everyone five minutes before, I decided to go into the bushes. I took the torch and all, and then I...’

Henderson felt a hand on his arm and turned. ‘Sorry I’m late sir,’
Carol Walters said, slightly breathless.

‘Good evening, Sergeant Walters,
its good that you’re here.’

‘I’ve just been talking to Doctor Singh
as she turned up about the same time as me and is now over there getting all her kit out of the car. We’ve interrupted her monthly book club so we have, so she’s not in a very good mood.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind
when I speak to her. Let me introduce you. This is Jenny Holmes and Peter Franks, the couple that discovered the body and this,’ he said to Holmes and Franks, ‘is Detective Sergeant Walters.’

‘So,’ he said looking again at Franks, ‘you were saying?’