The Reckless Engineer (3 page)

Caitlin must be in a panic.
He dialled Jack’s home number. Her voice, fearful and confused, came through to him over the phone as he stepped out into the cold night air. A few minutes later he put Harry’s car into gear and found himself heading once again towards the McAllen-Connor mansion in the Guildford suburbs.

CHAPTER 4

Friday, October 15 — The Day Of Arrest

Caitlin McAllen came from a Scottish aristocratic family that had made its fortune, and was still making its fortune, in the Aberdeen oil fields. Her father, Douglas McAllen, had inherited the family business, McAllen Industries Limited, manufacturing and supplying heavy drilling machinery for onshore and offshore oil rigs. Jeremy had gathered from Jack’s stories at work and during their long drives from Marine Electronics, and the banter around their mansion, that Jack had met Caitlin when he took up a lucrative engineering contract in her father’s company some ten years ago.

Jack had been married to his first wife, Marianne Connor, at the time and had been living in their home in Portsmouth. He had been looking for his next contract and Douglas McAllen’s offer had been the best, worth about 19,000 pounds more per annum than the next best offer on the table. This had been further augmented with an expense account and a bonus worth more than 25% of his salary. The biggest appeal to Jack had been that it launched him into a management career reporting directly to McAllen, giving him freedom over all of his design decisions, a position he would have had to work his way up to over five to seven years in a different organization. McAllen Industries had just acquired a small company, BlackGold Engineering Limited, based in Portsmouth and specializing in downhole and subsea oil and gas extreme engineering to complement its existing product range. Douglas McAllen had offered Jack the position of Chief Engineer to run it and integrate its innovative products with his company’s own traditional engineering product range.

Douglas McAllen had wanted Jack Connor for the job. When Douglas McAllen wanted something it had been said that little could stop him from getting it.

Jack had first met Caitlin at his interview in Aberdeen and had thought to himself,
What a stunner
. Caitlin was a chartered accountant and ran the McAllen Industries’ accounts. The interview in Aberdeen had been conducted over two days with a visit to an offshore oil rig to view their equipment in actual operation scheduled for the second day. It had been Caitlin’s responsibility to book overnight hotel accommodation for Jack and to reimburse his flight costs. Caitlin and her brother Ronald had taken Jack out on a brief tour around Aberdeen and then to dinner before dropping him at his hotel.

The second interview had been based at the newly bought Portsmouth site where Jack had started work two weeks later.

Their romance had sparked off within months if not at first sight. Jack’s job had involved frequent visits to Aberdeen and extended stays there. Caitlin had also had a scheduled visit every fortnight to attend to the new acquisition’s accounts. Their visits’ lengths and frequencies had grown as the relationship became serious.

Jack had been asked to help find a house to accommodate the members of the McAllen clan during their visits to the south of England, big enough to accommodate Douglas McAllen, his wife, Leana McAllen, Ronald and his then girlfriend, Gillian—Caitlin’s then two year old daughter from a previous relationship—the family’s guests, and the Company’s incidental clients. The McAllens had finally agreed on the three-storey, ten-bedroom Regency-style mansion with several outbuildings and thirty-two acres of land in Guildford, which was to become Caitlin and Jack’s home about a year later, the driveway of which Jeremy was now entering.

The gates closed behind Jeremy as two of Jack’s German Shepherds ran out from the side of the house and authoritatively herded his car down the driveway to the exact spot the dogs had allocated to him a few yards away from a fleet of three cars and an SUV parked at the front of the house. They were followed eagerly by a puppy Labrador gleefully running every which way, excited to see yet another stranger in his house that day and still too young to understand the gravity of the day’s events. It must have been more than a year since Jeremy had last seen the dogs. He remained in the car until Caitlin called them to herself.

Caitlin McAllen-Connor was a stunning woman at 37 with dark hair, porcelain skin, and a face made regal by prominent cheekbones and deep-sea blue eyes. She packed her 5’ 7” medium frame with the toned muscles of a woman who had firm control over the world’s most exquisite foods she had readily available to her and was kept very active and busy by her normal life without being expressly athletic. Caitlin kept house, garden, horses, dogs, and rare exotic Silkie birds with the same flair and precision with which she kept McAllen Industries’ books.

If anything challenged Caitlin’s self-control it was cigarettes, which she liked to roll herself from fine imported tobacco. She was always quitting for Jack and Gillian’s sake, but was always eventually failing, particularly in the event of anything that disturbed her world. No more than three or four times a week she would retreat with her vintage black-satin embroidered tobacco box to one of her selection of outdoor “smoking-seats” she had had specially built in her landscaped garden, at least one to suit any particular kind of weather. There Jeremy saw her extinguishing her cigarette at her favourite sheltered autumn seat in the falling early evening darkness, under-lit by the subtly shifting lights of the subterranean fish tank beneath the glass on which she stood. She hurried towards him, flanked by the obedient Alsatians, as he got out of the car.

‘Jeremy, thank god you are here,’ she cried, giving him a nervous, anxious hug. ‘Is Jack okay?’

‘He’s in good hands with Harry, Caitlin,’ Jeremy reassured her and followed her indoors. He had briefly explained on the phone that Barrett Stavers had been brought in as Jack’s solicitors.

Someone who did not know Caitlin might have been surprised to see a used crystal champagne glass and a half-empty bottle of champagne by the living room seats to which she led him only a few hours after her husband had been taken into custody. Champagne, however, was what Caitlin drank. When others drank beer, cocktail, fine wine, scotch, brandy, port, or sherry, Caitlin drank champagne for no reason other than she liked the taste of it.

‘Can I get you a drink, Jeremy?’ Caitlin walked over to the drinks’ cabinet.

‘A scotch on the rocks, please.’ It had been a long day for him. The armchair of the handcrafted light-gold Empire suite took his weight like a puff of cloud. ‘Is Gillian in?’

‘When the police first showed up at the front gates I asked Peter to drive Gillian out the back gates to his mother’s place. The police took hours searching the house, the garage, the front garden, and the cars after the arrest.’

She shook her head, seemingly traumatized by the whole experience.

It was a Friday. Marine closed offices at 12:00 noon on Fridays. As the head of the team Jack would have left about an hour later and taken another hour to get home. The police must have been on the lookout for him and followed his car in as he entered through the gates.

Jeremy looked around. Caitlin seemed to have straightened out the room somewhat, but things—expensive things of great beauty and luxury—were still out of place from the search. Valuable artwork in gold-worked frames stood stacked on the pristine off-white carpet that was a barely-there shade of stone. A safe built into the far wall was open and papers had fallen out of it. Beautifully carved pieces of antique furniture stood at odd angles to each other.

‘Gillian will be on the next flight to Aberdeen with Hannah. Peter’s driving them to the airport as we speak.’

He remembered Hannah, Caitlin’s loyal housekeeper, who had come South with her mistress long ago and had never left. She lived in the dedicated living quarters in one of the outbuildings close to the stables. She moved around the house as quietly and as invisible as a ghost in her all-black skirts and dresses and skin as pale as a corpse sprung tightly over strict bony cheeks and knuckles, her raven hair strung back as taut as the cords of a violin into a netted bun, her cheeks hollow, and her mouth a stern thin line. Hannah’s dark eyes seemed to absorb everything like twin black holes.

‘It must have been a shock for you . . . today, er, all this.’ He tried not to be too specific.

‘Michelle’s death and Jack’s arrest, yes. But we have known about his involvement with Michelle for a few months now and it has been three weeks since it came to light that Michelle was pregnant. Did you know?’ She looked at him, piercing, searching.

‘I lost contact with Jack soon after my move to London, Caitlin. During my last year there I was too preoccupied with Maggie, as you know, and then my redundancy to notice anything else. There were some rumours going around, but I didn’t take any notice. The guys were always joking about something or the other,’ Jeremy lied.

He had gently warned Jack that he was playing a risky game of cat-and-mouse. How had she found out?

‘I received an anonymous letter in the post about three months ago saying Jack had been having an affair with Michelle for over a year. Papa received a similar letter too, but mine also had lurid details about the times and the places they were seeing each other and pictures of that whore taken outside her house with Jack. The writer claimed to be a neighbour of Michelle and the letters were postmarked at her local post office.’ She spoke with a voice of undisguised outrage, jealousy, and hurt.

Shit!
Jeremy shook his head in disgust. He had sensed that woman was trouble, and a poison-letter was just the kind of trouble he had been thinking of.

‘I thought Michelle had sent them to us. When I confronted Jack he said it was all a lie by someone who was envious about us and professionally jealous about Michelle. I didn’t know what to believe. Unknown to both of us Papa and Ronnie had then put a private investigator on Jack and Michelle and a few weeks later he was caught red-handed with her. Jack swore that he had now finished it off and would stop seeing the girl. He really tried, I think, until three weeks ago Michelle announced that she was five months pregnant by him. She actually dared to call him here.’

Caitlin gulped down her glass of champagne. Jeremy rose from his seat and refilled it.

‘Thanks.’ She took a sip. ‘And then there was Sally’s breakdown. What’s going on there?’

‘Sally’s breakdown?’

So things had turned out badly for poor Sally.

‘Last Friday Sally drove her car in through the gates right behind Jack’s and started a hysterical argument with him. There were words about Michelle and Jack getting her fired from her job, and she was crying:
How could he do this to someone who had loved him for two years
? Jack shouted back that she was “an underhanded witch” who had “ruined the best things in his life,” and that she must leave at once, trying to physically herd her back into the car. Sally was pushing him back, kicking, crying hysterically, and shrieking that Michelle and Jack had killed her career and it is better that they kill her. She was shouting,
Just kill me why don’t you? Or I’m going to kill myself
. At this point the dogs went at her and she was held down and bitten by Hunter.’

Caitlin paused and took a gulp from her drink.

Poor Sally. Michelle had used her grip on Jack to eventually get her fired. Where was she now?

‘Is Sally okay?’

‘Yes. The police arrived about this time,’ she continued. ‘Hannah had called them straightaway when Sally had driven in through the gates behind Jack. Jack told the police that Sally was having a breakdown because she had been fired from her job in his team and that she needed help. Sally was taken to the hospital, bleeding from her wounds and, I think, is still being held under observation in the psychiatric unit. Hunter had to be sent away for retraining.’

So things had come to a head rather explosively! How did Caitlin really feel about Jack now? Jack’s vehement denial of having anything to do with Michelle’s death flashed through his mind. If he hadn’t kill her, who had? He watched Caitlin as she poured a fresh glass of champagne. No doubt Michelle’s death and the death of her unborn child was a relief to her. The champagne could be a celebration, after all.

‘Are you staying here alone tonight, Caitlin?’ He quickly changed the subject and snapped out of his train of thought.

‘Tonight, yes, I have to. Peter will go back to his mother’s after Gillian’s flight out of Southampton. Papa’s taking the first flight out of Aberdeen and will arrive tomorrow afternoon. Hannah’s flying with Gillian and, after dropping her with Mom, she will be heading right back. Are they going to keep Jack in there? They are not going to let him come home tonight?’

‘I don’t know. We shall have to see what Harry can do.’

She got up and refilled his scotch, then excused herself for a minute.

So Caitlin and the McAllen’s knew about Michelle and the pregnancy, and they hadn’t kicked him out, yet. Or had they? The McAllens did everything in spectacular style and Jack certainly wasn’t here right now. If Jack hadn’t killed Michelle, someone seemed to have framed him. Jeremy put aside the questions that buzzed through his mind like a newly disturbed hive of hornets. His head ached from them. He closed his eyes, leaned his head forward, and massaged his temples. It was past 10:15 p.m. Tonight was not the time to ask them.

Caitlin reappeared and handed him a cheque written out to Barrett, Stavers & Associates for £10,000 on account.

Jeremy nodded and smiled. ‘Thanks, I shall give this to Harry.’

They sipped their drinks and chatted about Barrett Stavers.

‘Stay here tonight. I can fix up your room again. Harry can stay also. It is getting quite late.’

Before Jeremy could answer her phone rang.

‘Papa!’

No sooner than Caitlin had started her conversation on the phone with Douglas McAllen than Jeremy’s mobile rang. It was Harry. He stepped out into the hallway.

‘Jeremy, the interview’s over. Where are you?’

‘I drove over to Jack’s house, Harry. I’m with Caitlin right now.’

‘Listen, the interview went as well as it could under the circumstances. But they’ve got something. From what I gather from their line of questioning a small vial, possibly containing remnants of the suspected poison. I don’t know where from. Edwards has advised me that the police are keeping him in tonight and in the morning they plan to apply to a magistrate to keep him in custody until the post mortem report.’ Harry paused and sighed. ‘I tried to get them to release him on police bail. Edwards will consider this tomorrow, but not now. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.’

He told Harry about Caitlin’s offer for them to stay in Guildford overnight and mentioned that he was partial to the idea.

‘No Jeremy, I need to get back. But it is good if you could stay because Caitlin is alone there tonight. You’re a family friend. I shall tell Jack, and I think he, too, will rest a little easier. Come and get me, and I shall drop you back.’