The Reckless Engineer (8 page)

CHAPTER 11

Sunday, October 17 — Two Days Later

‘I should inform you, Mrs. Connor, Mr. McAllen, that my men are doing a search of the McAllen BlackGold offices as we speak,’ Edwards announced as he stood near the same seat as he had the day before, and paused to observe the effects of the news.

Ah, you’re going to find the place as clean as a whistle, Inspector
, Jeremy thought, chuckling to himself.

Magnus had got up from his seat with great difficulty by leaning to the left on the armrest and was now heartily shaking startled Edwards’ hand with both of his.

‘Welcome, welcome, Inspector Eddie. I’m Magnus Laird. This seat is for ye, ole boy. Please sit here.’

He pushed Edwards into his armchair, who fell backward with some alarm and landed in the middle of his seat to everybody’s relief. Magnus bent forward enthusiastically and handed him half a dozen McKinley & Laird business cards, dropping the rest on the floor between the seats. He tried to pick these up by bending forward, taking great care not to topple over by holding onto Inspector Edwards’ knee, but then gave up and sat himself down. Edwards, having recovered from Magnus’ welcome, picked up the cards and politely handed them back to him.

Everybody sat down.

‘Thank you, Mr. Laird. Er, now where was I? Oh yes, the keys to the offices were among Mr. Connor’s personal effects. I have instructed my men to take the PC base units and any laptops from the office rooms of Jack Connor and yourself, Mrs. Connor.’

‘My PC is in office number one, the room closest to the entrance and to the right. Jack’s machine is in his office next to mine. These are the only machines that we have sole access to. There is a blade server and 17 other machines. One for each one of our seven electronics engineers, two mechanical engineers, two software engineers, two geophysicists, two account managers, operations manager, and secretary. There is valuable intellectual property on the server and on the staff machines. The business cannot function without them, but I suppose Jack and I can manage without our personal PCs if you take them. The administrator password is “design4life,”’ Caitlin volunteered.

How cooperative,
Jeremy thought. He couldn’t believe how good she was at deceit.

Caitlin was seated in the rightmost seat of the three-seat sofa again, with her father to her left, and Laird in the leftmost seat. Bubbles sat on her lap for comfort. Harry was seated in the same armchair, set at a right angle and to the right of Caitlin, as he had been the day before. Sandwiched between the two imposing solicitors, McAllen and his daughter seemed protected by an impenetrable invisible barrier. Edwards had tried to gain the psychological advantage, but failed.

‘I need only the two PCs your husband and you have private access to. I shall also instruct my officers to make copies of any business papers they seize.’

Caitlin’s apparent cooperation seemed to have softened Edwards’ approach. If only he knew the truth.
A lot of people in this room today
, Jeremy thought
.
It was starting to feel stuffy. He quietly reached over from his usual perch on the windowsill and opened two of the side windows a couple of inches. A cool draft blew over the hair on his arm and into the room.

WPC Hansen, who was yet to take her seat, had walked over to the side of the room and was now hunched down giving instructions to the search party over her radio. Jeremy could see his breeze blowing her short hair up at the back of her neck.

When she was seated and ready to take notes, Edwards resumed.

‘You said yesterday, Mrs. Connor, that you have had no contact with Michelle Williams other than when she called your house. Now how do you explain this thick pile of reports containing every bit of even very private information we found hidden under the floorboards in your attic?’

‘I commissioned those reports, Inspector.’ Douglas McAllen answered the question. ‘I put some private investigators on Jack and the woman when I first received the anonymous letter about the affair. Caitlin has seen only the first report from when we first confronted Jack. She was not aware of the investigators after that or of those reports being up there. I hid them in the attic so that Jack would not find them and Caitlin would not see them and get distressed.’

‘Who did this work for you?’

‘A firm called Blackmoon Investigations based in Acton, London. They were quite expensive, so at a later stage I put a cheaper man on the job, but that guy took the last payment I made on account, thirty-two thousand pounds in cash, and vanished. He first contacted me in Aberdeen when the word got around that I was looking for a man to do some digging. He did a good job for a while, but now I cannot contact him.’

A disappearing second investigator? This sounds like an invention.

‘I’m going to need whatever information you have on this man.’

‘Well, he’s a white male in his mid-forties, about 5’ 10”, muscular, stocky build like a wrester, bald, brown eyes; Scottish—he spoke with a Scottish accent; lots of tattoos—in particular a skull on his right hand and a scorpion winding half way around the back of his neck. He approached me in person in Aberdeen, giving his name as Danny Brown, and all his reports were delivered to me by post or in-person, some delivered here and some up in Aberdeen. He was doing a good job, digging deeper than Blackmoon. So I kept him on. The mobile number he gave me has not been answered.’

McAllen was going to great lengths to create this imaginary private eye. Jeremy raised an eyebrow at Harry.

‘Where did you meet him? How did he contact you to arrange the meeting?’

‘He called me, always on my mobile from his mobile. I met him at the pub in town, The Eagle, and handed him the cash.’

This is
not
good for Douglas McAllen.
Edwards would be thinking he had paid the man to murder Michelle and vanish. However, McAllen had to account for the reports that the police had that Blackmoon would deny they produced. He was talking himself into quite a fix to protect his daughter.

‘What were you going to do with the reports?’

‘I was going to fire my son-in-law, Inspector. My daughter’s happiness is at stake here, but so is my family business I have built over decades. I can’t have him taking a chunk out of it for some gold-digging tart. So I took him out to a pub two Sundays ago, put some of the reports in front of him, and threatened to fire him from his post as Director of Engineering of McAllen BlackGold. I further threatened to ban him from entering the premises of any part of my company in any business capacity.’

McAllen reading Jack the riot act. Pressure with a capital P. I wonder how Jack took it.

‘That’s righ’, Inspector Eddie, ole boy,’ Magnus chimed in, temporarily stopping the combing of his moustache with his forefinger. ‘About two weeks ago Douglas instructed me firm to look into what liabilities migh’ arise from dismissing Jack Connor from his position as Director of Engineering of McAllen BlackGold and to fin’ a way to do it as cheaply and as cleanly as possible. We were planning to execute the dismissal next Thursday. Me firm will provide ye with all the paperwork I hae on this.’

‘He had until next Thursday to cut off all contact with Michelle Williams,’ Douglas McAllen continued. ‘I have been paying alimony, eight thousand pounds each month, to the former Mrs. Marianne Connor until she remarries; and a further eighteen thousand pounds per year each for a private school education and the upkeep of each one of Jack’s sons, Peter and Marc, out of that marriage on Jack’s behalf. I have a further agreement to pay the full tuition fees and costs for Peter and Marc to attend University in the US or the UK, twenty thousand pounds per year, if they qualify to read a science or an engineering undergraduate degree, and to continue paying the same for their further education if they stay on to do postgraduate studies. I threatened to cut off all of this funding also.’

Jeremy took a quick glance around to make sure that Peter was not in the room. He hoped he was not outside listening from a quiet spot the way he liked to.

‘That’s righ’, Inspector Eddie,’ Magnus confirmed again. ‘Me firm handled Jack Connor’s divorce from Marianne Connor and we agreed the finances the wee lass needed. I sent out a letter to Marianne Connor two weeks ago, outlining our lad Jack’s involvement with that odious Michelle Williams and including some of the Blackmoon reports. I put her on notice that we shall be terminating all funding tae her and her lads in the event of a separation between Jack and Caitlin.’

Pressure on Jack with a capital P and a capital R!

‘Peter’s a lovely, brilliant boy,’ McAllen continued fondly. ‘He’s the grandson I never had. Or rather he’s the only grandson I have. Peter grew up here with Gillian who thought he was her real brother until a couple of years ago. I was going to continue to look after his upkeep and education, but I am damned if I’m going to do it through the bloody Connor divorce agreements if Jack was going to separate from my Caitlin.’

‘Hardly fair that Douglas should keep paying the wee lass don’t ye think, Inspector Eddie?’ Magnus chimed in.

Caitlin had started sniffling softly into her handkerchief.

Douglas McAllen softened the regal and matter-of-fact tone with which he had been addressing the officers. He put a protective arm over the head rest of the sofa behind his daughter. ‘I am sorry, Caitlin. I am sorry that you had to hear any of that. Inspector, Caitlin was not aware of much of this until now, other than the first Blackmoon report of the affair with which we confronted Jack.’

Edwards sat back and paused. The satisfied smirk on his face told Jeremy that Edwards must be pleased with the barrage of information that had come his way.

‘Mr. McAllen, Mrs. Connor, I need to ask each of you some questions now and I need each of you to answer them individually, if you choose to answer that is.’

The cross-examination. Now this was going to be interesting. Jeremy listened intently.

‘Mr. McAllen,’ he began. ‘This man, Danny Brown, what did you pay him to do?’

‘I paid him to investigate the affair between Michelle Williams and Jack and report back to me.’

‘Then, if you were such a good source of cash to him, why did he just disappear? It doesn’t make sense. Did you pay him to get Michelle Williams out of your lives and then disappear?’

Just as I suspected, no end of trouble for McAllen.

‘Oh no, I did not. Honestly, I did not.’ Douglas McAllen sat back, alarmed.

‘You turned the screws on Jack Connor, and now that you’ve got rid of Michelle Williams, executing any of your previous threats is unnecessary. Isn’t that right, Mr. McAllen?’

‘No. Good heavens, no!’

‘Then we need to find this man, if anything to get your cash back. You need to give me the details and copies of all communications you have had with this man. I need his phone number and I need to access your phone records to trace through the calls he has made to you and vice versa.’

‘Like I said officer he approached me in person and all his communications were through the post. All I can give you are the reports he provided me with, and those you already have. I can assist you with a description of him if your officers can search for his whereabouts.’

Douglas McAllen was being evasive, but he needed to do so to cover for his daughter.

‘You can give me copies of these anonymous letters that triggered your investigation, I’m sure?’

‘Aye. Magnus has that bloody letter. He will make a copy for you.’

‘Mrs. Connor, so you have never seen these reports before?’

‘I have not seen those reports before, Inspector, except the first one with which we confronted Jack.’ Caitlin finally spoke, lying.

‘You said that Michelle Williams called you here. I’m having the phone records checked anyway, both hers and yours. Can you detail what she said?’

Caitlin gave a long description of the quite distressing verbal tirades.

‘That bloody woman,’ McAllen swore under his breath.

‘And you never called her back?’

‘No, her calls to my home were the only contact I have had with her. I got an anonymous letter too, about the same time that Papa did. Mine had photographs of Jack with the woman, and I think you already have these.’

‘The reports you had upstairs contain details of Michelle’s pregnancy tests just over three months ago. So you knew about her pregnancy even before your husband did, didn’t you?’

‘I
knew that, Inspector,
not
Caitlin,’ McAllen jumped in before Caitlin could respond.

Edwards looked annoyed. It was clear that he was thinking he should have taken the questioning of the father and the daughter separately.

‘Do you work with chemicals, Mrs. Connor?’

‘Chemicals? No, I do the company accounts. I’m a chartered accountant.’

Now where is
this
heading? Ah. They are getting to the poison.

‘How about your workmen? You have a pool here. I think you have it treated with chlorine, et cetera?’

‘We have a man, also a David, who comes in twice a week to treat and clean the pool, but he’s been sent on holiday now. He has trained Félipé to do some of his work when he’s away, but I prefer David to do it. Félipé’s main responsibilities are to look after the horses and the other animals and to attend to the grounds.’

‘What treatment does he do to the pool, do you know?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘My men found chlorine and dry sodium carbonate for pH adjusting for the hard water. So your man chlorinates the water and then pH adjusts it. Am I right?’

‘I don’t like much chlorine in the water because it smells bad and ruins one’s hair. Other than that that sounds about right.’

‘Who orders these chemicals? And how do you get them?’

‘Everybody gives his orders to Hannah, what to buy and where to order it. I run my eye through the accounts every now and then, but Hannah handles the orders for everything for the house. The orders are delivered here, or Hannah drives the pickup and picks things up with Johnny, the gardener.’

‘Do you know what dry sodium carbonate is?’

‘That’s pool pH adjuster.’

Edwards smiled and nodded quietly at his notes for a minute or two.