Ryan inclined his head.
“At this precise moment, we haven’t got a scrap of evidence to prove any of that theory. Whoever pushed Martin Henderson to his death probably went home and slept like a baby last night because there isn’t a damn thing to connect them. So far, at least.”
“I like a challenge,” MacKenzie said, with a wicked grin.
“Good, because that’s what we’ve got. We need to find out what Henderson did, to whom, and why it was so bad someone killed him for it.”
Phillips scratched the side of his face.
“Don’t ask for much, do you?”
A moment later, Anna stepped into the kitchen and found them huddled around the table with their heads together.
“You’re as thick as thieves,” she said. “What are you plotting?”
“A killer’s downfall,” Ryan said, shortly.
Anna pulled a face and left them to it, feeling sorry for whoever would be on the receiving end.
*
The working theory that Martin Henderson died because of a past misdeed was not particularly helpful, considering the mounting body of evidence being accumulated by the financial investigation unit alone. Their separate enquiry had already established that the man’s history had been entirely falsified and they were working closely with various government bodies to unravel the lies. Ryan had a lengthy telephone conversation with DI Anika Salam, whose team resources were stretched to the limit and who found herself in the uncomfortable position of having to abandon the investigation now that their prime suspect was dead.
“I want to help you but we’re snowed under with enquiries,” she said, apologetically. “We could spend weeks on this but, in the end, we’d have nobody to charge.”
“People like Martin Henderson never work alone,” Ryan argued. “Odds are, you’d find his network and haul in some of the bigger fish.”
That gave her pause for thought.
“That’s a lot riding on ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’,” she said.
“You know he was dirty,” Ryan pulled out every persuasive skill he had and didn’t feel a moment’s guilt about it. “Don’t you want to chase down the bad guys? Don’t you want to see them brought to heel, to pay their debt to society? There are too many people living off the fat of the land—”
His spiel came to an abrupt stop, as a thought struck him.
“Land,” he repeated. “It’s been staring us in the face. Why else would Henderson pretend to have a history of estate management? Why come and work at Cragside?”
At the other end of the line, Salam sat up a bit straighter in her chair.
“You think he wanted to spin something with the land up there?”
“Speak to Lionel Gilbert and ask him if he was planning to sell off any parcels of land on Henderson’s recommendation. Then ask him if he’d received an offer from anyone to buy it. I’m betting an offer will have come from a newly formed company, which we will find has closed down its operations in the last few days. Follow that company all the way back and you’ll find your big fish, Anika.”
There was a short pause on the line.
“Are you interested in a transfer to the FIU?”
Ryan laughed.
“I’ll leave financial crime to the experts. Wouldn’t hurt to take a closer look at some of the local estate agents, while you’re at it,” he tagged on.
Salam chuckled.
“Alright, you’ve convinced me. We’ll speak to Lionel Gilbert to see if your theory’s right and take it from there.”
“One last thing,” Ryan said. “Before he was Martin Henderson, he was Martin Jennings. What have you been able to find from that period of his life?”
“It seems to have been the only time he wasn’t involved in anything untoward. Until the age of twenty-one, when he changed his name and started to go by Henderson, Martin Jennings was just a lad who worked down at the dockyards in Newcastle.”
“Why did he change his name around then?”
“Who knows?” she said. “I can’t see any obvious reason from the files.”
“Can you send across everything you have?”
“Consider it done.”
After he ended the call, Ryan sat back in his chair and considered the type of person Martin Henderson had been. It hadn’t surprised him to learn that Henderson had walked away from a life of honest hard work in favour of one where he was willing to lie, cheat and steal to make a quick buck. It was a question of weak character and, unfortunately, it made their work all the harder. If Martin Henderson had spent over forty years casually trampling over the lives of others in his quest for personal gain, who could say how many enemies he had made in the process? Added to which, his crimes were impersonal; all the deals he had been party to, all the back-handers, had a human cost but they were faceless, nameless people whose pensions or livelihoods had been affected.
Then again, he had not been too squeamish to kill Alice Chapman in cold blood.
Who else had Martin Henderson hurt?
The possibilities were endless.
CHAPTER 32
The key to everything came unexpectedly from his fiancée.
Having dispatched his team on a mission to uncover everything there was to know about Martin Henderson and the five people who remained on his suspect list, Ryan was seated quietly at the kitchen table trawling through background checks. He was disappointed to find there was hardly a speeding ticket among them and was about to harangue the CSIs for any further news when Anna wandered into the kitchen, intending to grab a snack and then leave him to it.
“Making any progress?”
She began rooting around in the fridge for ham and cheese.
Behind her, Ryan made a disgruntled noise.
“They’re all squeaky clean,” he complained. “I was hoping to see a drunk and disorderly, maybe a few pops for assault.”
Anna smiled into the fridge.
“Just too law-abiding, eh?”
“One of them killed Martin Henderson, I know it,” he muttered. “But until I can find the reason why, they’re wandering around hiding in plain sight.”
Anna reached for a knife and began to lather butter on four slices of bread, not bothering to ask if Ryan wanted a sandwich.
He always wanted a sandwich.
“Why don’t you tell me what you know about Martin Henderson so far? Whenever I think of him, I just picture an obnoxious sixty-two-year-old with an ego the size of a small planet.”
Ryan grinned, despite himself. As summaries went, it was pretty accurate.
“He was born in Wallsend, not far from our new police headquarters, actually. He used to be Martin Jennings until he changed his name when he was twenty-one.”
Anna slapped some ham on the bread.
“Why’d he change his name?”
“That’s one of the questions I’d like to answer, but I can’t figure it out. There was no death in the family, no trauma on record. In 1975, he was just some lad who worked down at the shipyard—”
“Bad year to be working at the shipyard,” Anna said, as she began to cut thin slices of cheese.
Ryan looked up with interest.
“Why?”