Night of Fire: (DI Angus Henderson Book 6) Read online

  Sutherland sat down and signed into the Accounts Payable system using Margaret’s credentials. The smug little nerds who rarely ventured out from their IT lair believed themselves to be the cleverest cogs in the clock by changing everyone’s passwords on a weekly basis, but this was before they faced Christine Sutherland.

  With the Quinlan Accounts Payable System in front of her, she searched for two invoices, sent a few days ago to Quinlan by a company controlled by Sutherland. In a few clicks she found them. When she ran a scam like this in her previous company, she made the mistake of being too greedy by making the amounts too large, and, as a result, it was spotted quickly. The invoices in front of her were each less than ten thousand pounds, and without undertaking closer examination, had the appearance of being received from two of their largest suppliers.

  She authorised the payment, conscious of the time as she wanted the date stamp on the transactions to be as close to 3pm as possible. If her little earner was ever discovered, Margaret would be their first suspect. Her claim that she always left work at 3pm on the dot wouldn’t wash, as it would be a small stretch for her inquisitors, including herself, to believe she’d stayed an extra ten minutes to work her little scam. If by some miracle Margaret didn’t take the fall, the time it took for them to arrive at this conclusion would provide enough warning for Sutherland to gather her things together and disappear.

  She signed off the AP system and returned Margaret’s little black diary to its rightful place. Christine wasn’t so dumb she would now check her on-line bank account and find out how much this scam, now running for over six months, had made. No matter how little she thought of Quinlan’s IT staff, such a move would leave a record for smarter people than the bozos who worked here to find. It could wait until she got home.

  At six, Sutherland walked to her car, her face displaying the smile of another successful day. Unlike the senior management team and salesmen, who all drove BMWs, her company car was a VW Passat. The car suited her as it was comfortable and reliable, and with a fat bank account, she could buy any car in the BMW range she fancied.

  The offices of Quinlan Fine Foods were located in the Fairway Business Park in Moulsecoomb, north-east of Brighton. This part of the city was suburban and dowdy with rows of semi-detached houses and ugly industrial units. When at last she approached Steyning Road, her route weaving through banks of trees with the rolling hills of the South Downs close by, she would often wind down the window just to breathe in the fresh, cold air.

  She parked outside her rented three-bedroom house in the sprawling village of Steyning. The sad-looking man across the road would be peeping out, standing back so she wouldn’t see him, but she knew he was there. If in a playful mood, she would give him a wave or a nod, but not today, she had other things on her mind.

  She left her briefcase in the kitchen, poured a large glass of wine and climbed the stairs. When she first saw the house she loved it. It had been advertised as three bedrooms, when in reality it didn’t offer more than two decent-sized bedrooms and a box room, but she didn’t mind. It provided space with the freedom of the countryside nearby, not a semi in a busy street, packed with noisy neighbours and constant car movements.

  She walked into the box room. She didn’t fill it full of rubbish as in many houses, but left it clear, except for a small wall unit and a chair. Lying on one of the shelves of the wall unit were two boxes. She removed one, sat down and opened it.

  Inside, copies of emails, photographs, locks of hair, theatre and concert ticket stubs; all memories of her time with Marc Emerson. She flicked through them, lifting a memory here and a celebration there, and as usual when she did this, tears fell on the box lid with a dull but satisfying tap-tap.

  FIFTEEN

  Rachel closed the dishwasher, the dinner dishes stacked neatly inside. Henderson enjoyed evenings like this, a meal at home, just the two of them. Of course, the peace could be instantly interrupted with a phone call from Lewes Control informing him of a major crime anywhere in Sussex, but times like those were mercifully infrequent.

  ‘Fancy a coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah I do. But don’t worry, I’ll make it. You go through to the lounge and put your feet up. I’ll join you in a few minutes.’

  He walked into the lounge and sat on the settee facing the television, but didn’t switch it on. He’d lit the gas fire before starting dinner and the room felt warm, maybe too warm, a hard thing to achieve with dropping night temperatures, but it wasn’t a big space to heat. Thankfully, Sky wasn’t broadcasting a football match tonight as the combination of his comfortable surroundings and the commentator’s droning voice would put him out for the count before Rachel came in.

  Not surprising for someone who worked for a newspaper, a copy of today’s Argus lay on the coffee table. He picked it up. The wind had been knocked out of Rob Tremain’s sails when Gerry Hobbs caught the violent house robbers, as another story occupied the front pages and he couldn’t find anything about it in the other pages of the newspaper.

  Of course, he had to make sure he didn’t become Tremain’s ‘man on the inside,’ assuming all he needed to do was write a critical article and the DI would come running. With the benefit of hindsight, he knew now they could have ignored Tremain’s ranting last time and left him to eat his words when the robbers were brought into custody, but the force employed detectives not fortune tellers.

  ‘Coffees,’ Rachel said coming into the room. ‘God, it’s hot in here.’ She placed the mugs on the coffee table and walked over to the fire.

  ‘Only turn it down a little,’ Henderson said. ‘If you do it too much and the main burners go off, the temperature in here will drop like a stone in a couple of minutes.’

  Rachel returned from the fire and plunked herself down beside him with a thump, almost spilling the coffee he held in his hand. For a slim, well-groomed woman who walked with elegance and style, she could be as noisy around the house as any teenager, clumping upstairs, her heels clanking across the floorboards and the radio blaring at top blast while taking a shower.

  ‘Is there nothing on the box?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sure there’s plenty. With over two hundred channels, we’re bound to find something we’d like see, but I don’t fancy watching anything.’

  ‘Why? Is this investigation bothering you?’

  ‘Unfortunately for you as you have to live with me, it is. Every case I work on bothers me all day and night until the time it’s resolved. Sometimes, I’m just thinking about all the things that we should be doing, and other times, like now, re-examining what we’ve done and trying to determine if we’re moving in the right direction.’

  ‘I guess you need to look at everything as you didn’t have much to work with in the first place.’

  He sighed. ‘True, but it’s not as if we haven’t met this scenario before.’

  ‘You have? I’ve never heard of anyone being set on fire before like this.’

  ‘Neither have I, but I’ve investigated plenty of cases where there’s been scant evidence. Think of the body we pulled out of the Channel a few months back, and the stabbing in Hove three months ago of a banker by a complete stranger high on crack cocaine.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember the drowning. You were just the same then.’

  ‘There you go then. At least I’m consistent.’

  ‘I could think of other more appropriate descriptions, but we’ll park such a discussion for now. Tell me about this one.’

  ‘Are you trying to humour me?’

  ‘No, but I find talking to someone unconnected with the problem I’m struggling with often helps.’

  ‘You’re not going to blab about it in the office to your crime obsessed colleagues?’

  ‘No. For God’s sake H, I want to help, if I can.’

  ‘Why not? I guess you’re as good to talk to about this as anybody.’

  ‘You’re full of compliments tonight. Is it just you or have I stumbled upon a trait affecting the average Sco
tsman?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I was average.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so either,’ she said smiling. ‘C’mon, stop stalling, talk to me.’

  ‘Ok, ok. If we start by looking at the way Marc Emerson died, it’s up there with stabbings and strangulations: the killer needed to be up close and personal. There is nothing accidental about his death; whoever set the victim on fire meant for him to die in what I imagine to be an excruciating, painful way.’

  ‘But didn’t you say early on in the investigation, he had to have been drugged or something in order for someone to douse him with petrol?’

  ‘I did, but even though some drugs will incapacitate you and stop you fighting back, who knows how much pain the victim felt.’

  She shivered despite the warmth in the room. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘The process we go through in a situation like this is to interview everyone who knew him. In Marc’s case, the people he worked beside, the guys he played football with, his close friends and girlfriends and, to add to the list, his membership of the Weald Bonfire Society.’

  ‘It sounds like a lot of people to see.’

  ‘It’s plenty, but now having talked to many of them, we’ve come up with zilch. He was a nice guy who worked hard, made lots of money and drove a smart car. He had a number of girlfriends, but few enemies. The enemies we did find, his step-father and an old friend he fell out with a few months back, all have good alibis.’

  ‘It looks like you’ve hit the proverbial brick wall.’

  ‘That’s how it feels.’

  ‘What about ex-girlfriends? For some reason this killing makes me think it came from a woman’s hand.’

  ‘It does? Many of the officers in the murder team think the opposite.’

  ‘You must have read stories about women slashing a businessman’s suits or pouring paint over his car after an acrimonious split?’

  He nodded.

  ‘In any account I’ve read, they do it because the men they want to hurt seem to value the suits or the car more than them. Setting someone on fire is a league above this for sure, but it feels like the same distorted thinking: if he likes his suits or fireworks so much, he can have them back in spades. If it was a guy who attacked your victim, he would have hit him over the head with a baseball bat or stabbed him with a knife.’

  ‘An interesting perspective.’

  ‘With this in mind, have you talked to all the women in his life?’

  ‘There are three who matter: his ex-wife, his ex-girlfriend and the married woman he was seeing. We haven’t extended the net out to all his former girlfriends, but maybe we will if we get desperate. The ex-girlfriend is someone we became suspicious of early on as she’d stalked the victim for a few weeks after they split, but she’s over it now.’

  ‘That’s what she’s telling you, how can you be sure?’

  ‘Carol interviewed her and I value her judgement.’

  ‘I can’t argue with you there. Carol would do a better job than some of your misogynistic colleagues who can’t see past a pair of boobs or a short skirt.’

  ‘I trust you’re not classing all men in that category?’

  ‘No, but you know what I mean. I see it all the time with journalists.’

  ‘Funnily enough, Seb Young who partnered Carol for the interview did obsess about her figure.’

  ‘There you go then.’

  Henderson realised that dismissing Christine Sutherland or any other suspect so readily, could be fraught with dangers. Many murderers were often fine actors and consummate liars, psychopaths capable of fooling even their own doctors.

  ‘Who else are you looking at?’

  ‘His ex-wife’

  ‘Oh, I can see a twisted divorcee in the frame. What’s she like?’

  ‘Did I give you the impression that the victim was a charmer and a hit with the women?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What sort of a woman do you think he would marry?’

  ‘I don’t know, good looking…’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Nice dresser…’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘A woman who looks after herself and doesn’t get fat and flabby…’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Intelligent, GSOH…’

  ‘What’s GSOH?’

  ‘Good sense of humour.’

  ‘She might have that. Think fashion model.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She models for many of the big high street catalogues and was still keen and young enough to get back into it after the divorce. Domestic bliss didn’t suit her, she said.’

  ‘No hangover from the relationship?’

  ‘None. She married too young and is glad to be out. She doesn’t regret her decision and doesn’t wish Marc any ill will.’

  ‘I guess she’s out of the frame. Who’s left?’

  ‘The married woman he was having an affair with.’

  ‘I see a motive coming up.’

  ‘You’re right. She’s married to a guy who would be my first suspect as he’s big and brash and fell out with our victim big-time some months back. But, and it’s a big but, he has a sound alibi.’

  ‘You seem to have come full circle. What’s the wife like?’

  ‘She’s thirty-three, older than Marc’s ex-wife and six years older than Marc. She’s as good-looking and curvaceous as his ex-wife, but also a smart lady. She runs a division of a major publishing house.’

  ‘Not his normal choice of totty, using his ex as a guide?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Did you interview her?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Thoughtful and intelligent, and I suppose with working in the book business, she strikes me as studious.’

  ‘If she reads a lot of crime novels, she’ll be aware of plenty of ways to kill someone.’

  He smiled. ‘Too obvious. Her division publishes Romance and Fantasy books, and any case, she and Marc were having the affair right up until the day he died. We can’t find any sign of rancour or disagreement. Quite the opposite in fact. I think she was intending to leave her husband for him eventually.’

  She snuggled up beside him. ‘How come you get to meet fashion models and good-looking literary women when the only people I interview are greasy old men with more hair coming out of their noses than they have on their head?’

  ‘This investigation is not all about me, you know. We have to share around the pleasure of the interesting interviews.’

  She leaned over and kissed him. ‘All the pleasure you need is right here. Let’s go to bed.’

  SIXTEEN

  DS Walters reached the edge of the Fairway Business Park in Moulsecoomb Way and slowed down. She ignored the index board as she knew where to go and Quinlan Foods was hard to miss. She turned into the entrance. The long grey building didn’t have many windows and few vacant parking spaces so she parked in one marked ‘Commercial Director’. She hoped if Brendan Flaherty came back while she was inside, he wouldn’t mind.

  Seb Young beside her was like a dog with two tails at the thought of coming back to this place. He loved food and she would have called him a glutton if he didn’t look so thin. His thoughts would also be on Christine Sutherland and in this, the dog analogy was uncannily appropriate.

  She pushed open the main door and both detectives signed in. A few minutes later, Maureen from the admin office approached and led them upstairs to the Sales Department before guiding them into a small meeting room.

  Walters took a seat at the table, but Young continued to stand, peering through vertical blinds into the office beyond. ‘Seb, what are you doing?’

  ‘The Accounts Department is just over there. I’m trying to see if I can spot that gorgeous bird, Christine Sutherland.’

  ‘Sit down you clown, or you’ll have us thrown out before we can ask a single question.’

  He sat down and a few seconds later the door opened.
Maureen entered bearing a tray of coffee and biscuits. When she left, Walters grabbed a biscuit before Seb scoffed them all. She had just popped it into her mouth when Josh Gardner came in, displaying the characteristics of a typical salesman, all vim and vigour.

  ‘Good morning detectives, I’m Josh Gardner,’ he said leaning over the table to shake their hands.

  Walters didn’t dare speak in case she fired biscuit crumbs at his nice clean white shirt.

  ‘I trust Maureen has been looking after you?’

  ‘Yes, she has, thank you,’ Seb said, sensing her disquiet.

  Gardner sat on the other side of the rectangular table which, judging by the number of chairs, could seat eight at a pinch. This room, like other parts of the building she’d seen, was bright and cheerful, the walls cool pastel colours and the furnishings light oak. This airiness created the impression that the company operated in a clean, modern environment and she hoped this continued into the food preparation areas on the ground floor, as she often bought their meals for one.

  ‘We’re here as we’re conducting an investigation into the death of your colleague, Marc Emerson,’ Walters said, her voice now operating normally.

  ‘Tragic, it is,’ Gardner said without too much conviction.

  In the pictures Walters had seen of Marc Emerson, he looked expensively dressed, clean shaven, smart hairstyle, like any young businessman, out to make a good first impression. Gardner didn’t come with Marc’s good looks, but he exuded the air of a confident salesman, from the crispness of his clothes to the way he spoke and handled himself.

  ‘Were you and Marc close?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say we were best buddies or anything, but we had a good working relationship. I mean when I first started here, he took me out on calls and I guess I looked up to him, but after a time when I’d learned the ropes I regarded him more as an equal.’

  ‘But you weren’t equal, were you?’

  Walters let the comment hang without enhancement; Gardner’s face betrayed a trace of anguish.