Written in Blood Page 13

  Thank God for that. ‘What kind of arrangement?’

  ‘I’d take an envelope of cash to this drop-off point, with the name of the horse scribbled on the back, and the bookie’s runner collected it and placed the bet for him.’

  It wasn’t quite what Mariner had anticipated. ‘What kind of drop-off point?’ he asked.

  ‘A left luggage locker at Euston station.’ Sandie’s eyes widened. ‘Oh. I’ve still got the key. I should take it back, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Might be an idea.’ Mariner was still trying to get to grips with the logic of this activity. ‘And did you collect his winnings too?’

  Sandie chuckled. ‘To be truthful, I think he hardly ever won. It was a little joke between us. When he did, the bookies must have paid the money straight into his bank.’

  ‘How often did Sir Geoffrey place these bets?’

  ‘Not very often, only once a month.’

  ‘Exactly once a month?’

  ‘Yes. Always on the last Wednesday. He used to say it was his end of the month treat to himself. It was what helped him get through the first three weeks.’ She giggled. ‘Sir Geoffrey had that kind of sense of humour where you never knew if he was joking or not. I mean you couldn’t tell from his face at all. He would say these things and I’d think that’s awful and then he’d just get this twinkle in his eye—’

  ‘Deadpan,’ said Mariner.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. That’s what Dom said. He said—’

  ‘Did you ever see how much Sir Geoffrey placed?’ She looked shocked. ‘Oh no. The envelopes were stuck down and I would never have looked inside.’

  ‘So it could have just been a tenner, or a twenty?’

  ‘Oh no, it was more than that. The envelope always felt as if there was something in it.’ She measured with her finger and thumb. ‘It was about half an inch thick.’

  The flaws in the system were glaringly obvious, but had not apparently occurred to Sandie.

  ‘How long have you been working at the Commission?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘Four years this May.’

  ‘And has Sir Geoffrey always placed these bets?’

  ‘I expect so. But he only asked me to start helping with them about, let me see, eighteen months ago.’

  ‘Have you told the police about it?’

  Sandie looked horrified. ‘Oh no! Sir Geoffrey’s wife didn’t like him gambling, and I know Miss James wouldn’t approve. That’s why Sir Geoffrey asked me to do it on the quiet. I’ll get into terrible trouble for it. And it can’t have anything to do with . . . you know . . . what happened. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’

  Mariner didn’t necessarily think Helena was ignorant of the scam. He was pretty sure now that it was why he’d been introduced to Sandie in the first place. Ryland had taken advantage of Sandie’s loyal innocence and now Helena was doing the same. But betting on horses was a perfectly legal and harmless activity. The Queen Mother indulged for God’s sake, so why develop such an elaborate, covert strategy and why the secrecy? Ryland might have wanted to conceal it from his wife, but he could easily have slipped out during the working day to place the bets, without her ever knowing. And if that wasn’t convenient there were other, discreet mechanisms. Most white collar gamblers picked up the phone and arranged the transactions electronically.

  None of it made sense, unless Ryland got a buzz from the intrigue, the thrill of doing something illicit. No, it had to be something more than that. Either Ryland was telling an outright lie and the packages had nothing to do with horse racing, or it was possible that he was bending the truth and was more deeply involved in something closer to the boundaries of the law. If horse racing was at the root of it then it could be that he belonged to the kind of gambling syndicate that had become increasingly common in recent years.

  A group of men, usually businessmen, bought shares in a racehorse, contributed regularly, usually monthly, to the animal’s upkeep, and then took a proportion of any winnings. Unless there was race fixing, belonging to such a syndicate was far from illegal, but there were certain seedy connections and it probably wouldn’t be the sort of thing a government official should be visibly linked to. Added to which, there was little doubt that heavy involvement in such a venture would not have gone down well with his wife. If she didn’t approve of betting she wouldn’t have wanted him embroiled in something shadier. ‘I doubt that it would bother anyone now, Sandie,’ Mariner said. ‘So don’t worry.’

  ‘It was going to stop anyway,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘On the last Wednesday in November Sir Geoffrey went to place the last bet himself.’

  ‘The last bet?’

  ‘Yes. He said he’d reached a decision, and that he wasn’t going to do it any more.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  Sandie shrugged. ‘Perhaps Lady Diana had got wind of it, or maybe he was losing too much money.’

  ‘Was he disappointed do you think, that it was the final flutter?’

  ‘No. He seemed sort of - pleased with himself. “The last one, Sandie,” he said. “And then we can get on with the real work.”’

  ‘Were you surprised?’

  ‘Only because he had to cancel a meeting so that he could go and do it. Sir Geoffrey hated cancelling meetings. He didn’t like to let people down.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Then when he got back he seemed really upset. He’d gone out all pleased with himself but when he came back he seemed really down.’

  ‘You mean deflated, as if he knew the fun was over?’

  ‘It was more than that. He’d brought a bottle of scotch with him because he said it was a cause for celebration.’

  ‘I didn’t think he drank.’ Maggie said Ryland had taken the pledge when he met Diana.

  ‘That’s the thing. He didn’t. And he was making out like we were celebrating but all the time he looked as if he was heading for the gallows. Something had really shaken him up. I thought maybe he’d gone for broke and made the last bet a really big one, and that he’d lost a lot of money.’

  ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘Oh no, I never asked about the money. None of my business, was it? I just had a drink with him and played along.’

  ‘And this was the last Wednesday in November.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Which would make it only a couple of weeks before he was killed. So why did it fit into that slot in the timeline? Was it just coincidence? Eleanor had said she thought her son was planning to contact Mariner. Was it because he knew his son was a senior police officer and he needed help? Or was it because he knew something terrible was going to happen to him and it would be his last chance?

  ‘Which betting shop did Sir Geoffrey use?’ Mariner asked. But Sandie didn’t know.

  If Ryland was involved in some kind of syndicate it could be as Sandie had described, and that on that final payment day Ryland was planning to pull out. But he’d somehow been thwarted, meaning that other syndicate members may have refused and perhaps even threatened to reveal his secret vice? Or maybe they set a ridiculously high buy-out price that left Ryland significantly out of pocket.

  But it was hard to see how either of those scenarios would lead to Ryland’s assassination just a couple of weeks later, and even less the murders of his wife and his driver. Mariner had reached the end of speculation alley. Sandie’s instinct could be right. The horse racing scam, whatever its exact purpose, was probably completely unrelated to the shooting. He should get back to the task he’d come here to tackle: finding out more about Joseph O’Connor.

  Mariner tapped on the pile of files Sandie had deposited on Ryland’s desk. ‘I’m keeping you from your work. Do you need to do something with these?’

  Sandie rolled her eyes. ‘I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on properly. I’ve got to take them down to the archives. Do you want to wait in—?’

  ‘No, I’ll come with you. Could do with stretching my legs, if that’s all right?’

&nb
sp; ‘It’s not very exciting.’

  ‘Who wants excitement?’

  On the walk down two flights of stairs and along another corridor, past the staff toilets, Sandie was back in full spate, this time concerning the general lack of space for anything and how they were being squeezed out by all the files. The storage area had originally been used as a conference room, but they’d had to put in shelves even though it couldn’t be secured, and now there was hardly space to swing a cat, was there? She led the way into a room about 5 metres square that housed with rows of shelves stretching up to the ceiling and packed with alphabetically labelled archive boxes. It took her only seconds to locate the required row, extract the relevant boxes and replace each file, chattering all the time.

  ‘Copies of all the files are kept here?’ Mariner tried to get his head round the implications of that in relation to the statistics Helena James had quoted earlier. The amount of storage space needed would be phenomenal.

  But Sandie shook her head. ‘Oh no. We hold all the records electronically, too, and then once a case is closed the hard copy goes to a special government storage facility. ’

  ‘I don’t understand. So what are we bringing down here?’

  ‘Sometimes individual members of the Commission ask us to hold a further copy of files they consider significant. Sir Geoffrey did it all the time.’

  ‘Significant how?’

  ‘Sometimes there’s a pattern, say the same trial judge, or the same police force.’ Or, thought Mariner, the fact that a suspect had been coerced into making a confession; Ryland’s witch-hunt against the police.

  So somewhere in this mass of paperwork there could be a copy of Joseph O’Connor’s file. Mariner knew that asking outright would be a step too far. Helena’s introduction had been carefully worded and so far Sandie had quite openly accepted his questioning, assuming that he was here in some sort of general official capacity. Getting too specific would no doubt involve consultation with her seniors, and there was a simpler way of doing this, if not completely above-board. It made him uneasy, but taking the broader view, what he was doing was in the name of justice and if he did uncover something that had been missed by Special Branch it would all come right in the end, wouldn’t it? If Dave had been more open and honest with him there wouldn’t be any need for all this cloak and dagger stuff.

  ‘I could do with a pee,’ he said as they passed the gents on their way back from the archive. ‘Shall I catch you up?’

  ‘Oh there’s a much nicer one on the upper floor,’ Sandie said. ‘These aren’t really used any more.’

  ‘Oh I’m not fussy,’ said Mariner. ‘And all those stairs,’ he joked. ‘I’m not sure if I’ll make it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Now Sandie was concerned, probably thinking now that the old feller had prostate problems. ‘Okay then. You’ll be able to find your way upstairs?’

  ‘If I’m not back in an hour send out a search party.’

  Sandie, it seemed, had trouble determining when anyone was joking, but she continued on her way, leaving Mariner with full access to the archive and feeling like Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. He hoped to God that it was a logical filing system.

  Though his watch said only minutes, it seemed to Mariner that it took him hours to locate Joseph O’Connor’s file. Contained in the folder were notes on the interview that followed O’Connor’s arrest. They looked unobjectionable, but interviews weren’t routinely taped until the late eighties, so the accuracy was questionable. On the front page the names of the arresting officers were outlined several times with pink highlighter. Were they the significant aspect of the case? Mariner noted their names in his pocket book: Detectives George Hollis and Stephen Jaeger. O’Connor’s confession had been bullied out of him, so the chances were that this wasn’t the first or last time these two had indulged in a bit of malpractice.

  It brought a new possibility into the equation; that O’Connor was helping Ryland to build a case against Jaeger and Hollis. Sharon O’Connor had denied that her husband was offering any additional help and talked categorically about her husband ‘wanting out’, but would she necessarily have known? She’d intimated Ryland’s promise that he would ‘get the men’ who’d put Joseph in prison the first time and Mariner had taken that as meaning the men who’d set him up; Brady and his crew. But she could have equally been referring to the police officers who’d secured the wrongful conviction. If that’s what she meant then it was a whole new ball game.

  If Ryland was planning to initiate disciplinary proceedings against Hollis and Jaeger, citing O’Connor’s case in evidence, then the detectives would be keen to keep both men quiet. Offering O’Connor a job could have been Ryland’s unsuccessful strategy to protect him. The timing was a puzzle, though. O’Connor had been released years ago. If the officers were taking some kind of revenge, why wait until now? Had it taken this long for Ryland to build the case against them, or had something triggered a decision to act on his findings? Or maybe the policemen in his sights had been tipped off about what was going on.

  Knowing what he now knew, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Mariner to understand why Ryland was being overlooked as the victim in the shooting. Potentially there were all kinds of people who were unhappy about what he was up to. The trouble was that none of these revelations would be palatable to the public, especially with a general election coming up and a government that claimed to be tough on crime. It was also exactly the kind of thing the Met would be keen to draw a veil over, preferring instead to divert attention towards O’Connor’s so-called previous drugs activity.

  Flicking through the other paperwork in the file, Mariner came across a large envelope. He pulled out the contents; a series of eight-by-six black and white surveillance photographs. Two men in conversation beside a car, neither of them Joseph O’Connor; bright sunlight, sunglasses, one of them in a Hawaiian shirt, the other wearing a polo shirt.

  Casual, holiday clothes and somewhere warm. Other photographs were almost identical, but with slightly modified poses, so taken in close succession. Mariner could almost hear the shutter clunk and whirr.

  Another shot was of the same two men with a third sitting at what looked like a pavement café. Same brilliant sunlight and sharp shadows. The pub landlord had talked about Terry Brady having a villa in Spain, so one of the subjects could be him.

  Mariner realised he’d been standing here too long. Sandie would wonder where he’d got to. He should have dropped stronger hints about his prostate. It would have bought him a little more time. Committing as much detail of the photos to memory as possible, including the partial index on the car, he slid the photographs back into the envelope. But they caught on something; a yellow Post It note that had become detached from the pictures. It bore a scribbled message: Well, what do you know? M.B.

  Sadly, M.B. whoever he may be, had chosen not to share any further detail about what he knew, and he provided no clue about the identity of the men or what they might be doing. His frustration mounting, Mariner returned the photos to their envelope and replaced O’Connor’s file.

  Sandie didn’t appear to have missed him at all and had done her own disappearing act upstairs, but in the hushed corridors Mariner tracked the sound of her voice to the open door of an office he hadn’t yet been shown. He could see why. The tiny boxroom lacked the order of the main office, the small computer work-station surrounded as it was by piles of cartons, haphazardly stacked on the floor. Sandie was chatting to another young woman of about her age, with dark intense eyes in an oval face.

  ‘Hi,’ Sandie smiled, perhaps with relief. ‘You found your way back then.’ Was it Mariner’s imagination or did she just check his trousers for telltale residue? The girl she was talking to looked on curiously. ‘This is Trudy, she’s new to the team. Detective Mariner is here to look round.’

  ‘Public Information Officer,’ Mariner read from Trudy’s badge, simultaneously thinking that he really ought to break this habit of staring at the bosom of any
young woman he met. ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  ‘I’m still finding out,’ admitted Trudy, unconcerned by his curiosity. ‘I’ve only been here a few weeks, since the advent of the Freedom of Information Act. Now that the public has a right to access some of the Commission’s data, I’m here to process the requests.’

  Of course. The legislation that might just work in Mariner’s favour. ‘Have you seen much action yet?’ he asked.

  ‘A bit. At the moment most applications seem to be from organisations concerned with miscarriages of justice, wanting information about referrals that have been turned down. They like to compare the performance of individual members of the Commission.’

  ‘Ah, so you’re the very person I need to speak to,’ said Mariner, smoothly, as the idea occurred to him. ‘Helena James said I’d be able to get a list of the cases rejected by Sir Geoffrey Ryland. Would it be convenient to have that now?’ He made a point of checking his watch. ‘I have to leave shortly, but—?’ It was a technique called bulldozing, not allowing the other party time or opportunity to object.

  Trudy looked unsure. ‘I should probably check with Miss James. There’s paperwork to complete—’

  ‘You should,’ Mariner agreed. ‘Although she did say she had a lot on this afternoon. All I need are the names and basic details,’ Mariner went on, the epitome of the voice of reason. ‘I mean, everyone on that list has, rightly or wrongly, been convicted of a crime, so I could easily track them down through police systems, but you’d be saving me a lot of trouble.’ It’s really no big deal, he was telling her. ‘And if the list is being sent out to other groups anyway—’

  ‘All right then, but you won’t thank me. It’s a long list.’

  Long wasn’t the word. Nineteen pages of tightly packed data, Helena’s fifteen cases a month and 96 per cent rejected over the last eight years, and it took Trudy several minutes to print out a copy for Mariner. As the inkjet clattered and hummed they stood making small talk in the tiny office, and it was while he was idly scanning the notice board above the desk that Mariner spotted the business card for JMB Associates; Professional Investigation Services, an address in High Street, Hammersmith. In other words, a Private Detective Agency. ‘I’m sure I’ve come across JMB Associates before,’ he said casually to Trudy. ‘Who is it runs that outfit?’