“What are we all looking at?”
He walked around to lean over Lowerson’s shoulder and look at an e-mail from one of the investigators in the financial investigation unit, then grabbed a spare chair and wheeled it across to join their little huddle.
“Where’s Mac?”
“On her way back,” Phillips told him. “Faulkner’s still at it but there’s no need for her to hang around.”
Ryan nodded.
“Alright. Where are we at?”
“I’ve been focusing on Victor Swann’s household documents—mortgage, pensions and so on, while Yates has been liaising with the FIU to peel away the top layer.”
Lowerson reached behind him to grasp a sheaf of papers showing Swann’s personal current account and handed it to Ryan, who skim-read the figures, paying attention to transactions highlighted in neon yellow and green.
“As you can see from those accounts, Swann had access to considerable funds and spent them freely.”
Ryan’s eyebrows raised when he noted ￡1,000 had been spent on a solid silver and 18ct gold cartridge pen.
“There are some weighty cash deposits here,” Ryan observed.
“Yes, it confirms what we already suspected. There was more to Victor than met the eye,” Lowerson said, then showed him a different set of papers. “These are some of the papers we found scattered on the floor of his house.”
Ryan looked down at a set of sale documents for the retirement bungalow, which had been bought with a small mortgage. Flipping the page, he found pensions and life insurance documentation, showing that Victor had invested heavily in both.
“There isn’t much out of the ordinary there, nothing that was flagged by the money laundering reporting officer at the bank, anyway,” Lowerson said. “But at this point, I’ll hand over to Yates, who can tell you the fun stuff.”
He gave her an encouraging smile.
“Um, yes. The disparity of income and expenditure seemed suspicious, so I contacted our colleagues in FIU. They tell me that Victor Swann has several markers on their system for separate transactions over the space of at least two years, owing to unusually high cash deposits and outgoings, but he was not being actively investigated.”
“Why not?”
“Resources, they tell me. Frankly, sir, they ‘have bigger fish to fry than a pensioner splashing the cash’. That’s a direct quote from them.”
It was the same story they’d heard many times before.
“I explained the potential link between Swann and one or more members of the household at Cragside to the FIU investigator and I’ve submitted the paperwork for them to go ahead and seek full disclosure of all Swann’s records from his bank. We’ve only been able to find one current account and two savings accounts held with the same bank, both of which contain a moderate sum.”
“There might be more accounts but it will take time to find them,” Ryan predicted.
“Yes.”
“I bet there’ll be a timeshare in Marbella hidden somewhere, ’n all,” Phillips grumbled, thinking that all he could look forward to in his dotage was an annual trip to Butlins.
“So,” Ryan said, moving swiftly on, “they’re going to come back to us with Swann’s financial records. What about tracing the source of these cash deposits?”
Yates gave him a pained look.
“The only way we can really do that is to seek speculative access to the private accounts of the people on our list, to see if there are withdrawals of a similar amount and date range as the deposits made into Swann’s account. We’d need to make a formal application to see those records, which isn’t granted lightly.”
“We’ve got a long list,” Lowerson agreed. “But we need to whittle that down to a short list otherwise we’ll get nowhere with the banks.”
Ryan clapped his hands together.
“Let’s get whittling.”
CHAPTER 22
Just before three o’clock, MacKenzie stepped through the shiny automatic doors of the main entrance to the new police headquarters in Wallsend. The foyer was large and open-plan, without any sign of the mouldy walls and persistent smell of urine and bleach that had been a defining feature of their old workplace. The visitors’ chairs were brand new but made of the same cheap plastic so they could be wiped clean. The clientele was just the same as before: a mixture of people who had fallen prey to substance abuse, prostitutes, local thugs, and students seeking a crime reference number for the mobile phone they’d lost during a heavy night out at the weekend.
Everything felt familiar, yet unfamiliar.
“Denise!”
She swung around to see a couple of uniforms heading across to greet her.
“Great to see you back on your feet! How are you feeling?”
She listened to their well-meaning remarks and forced a smile, thanked them for their good wishes, then moved away as a small headache started to pound in the base of her skull. In another moment, the headache would intensify and she’d black out.
MacKenzie made it to the other side of the security doors and was grateful to find she had the corridor to herself.
Her vision was spinning.
“No,” she told her treacherous mind. “Not again. Not today.”
She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, visualising herself in a safe place, with warm sun on her skin and quiet music playing in her ears. Her breathing slowed to an even pace and the headache receded.
“That’s better,” she muttered and made her way to the first floor.
*
MacKenzie found the rest of her team holed up in a small meeting room, where Phillips was product-testing a state-of-the-art flat screen television mounted on the wall. “Good to see you’re all hard at it,” she declared, taking a seat beside Phillips at the oval-shaped conference table.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, fiddling with the buttons.
“It’s plain to see I’ve come back to work just in time. The public don’t pay you to watch Judge Judy.”
“You’ve arrived in the nick of time,” Ryan agreed and confiscated the remote control from Phillips. “We were about to eliminate some suspects from our list of eight.”
He ran through a summary of what they’d learned so far about Victor Swann’s accounts, as well as their reasons for suspecting that someone at the house might have been financing the old man.
“It goes like this,” Ryan stood at the head of the room and spread his hands. “Victor was accepting cash from a person or persons unknown, who may have killed him. After Victor died, they raided his house and locker to recover something incriminating. The following day, Alice Chapman is found dead at the bottom of the valley. Bearing in mind the odds and ends belonging to Victor we found scattered around her body, it stands to reason that Alice had found or come into possession of them—”
Ryan broke off as an alternative scenario presented itself.