Fatal Catch Read online

  ‘Maybe someone else opened that window after striking him on the back of the head and dragging his body to position it over the fire.’

  ‘So that’s what Dr Clayton found.’

  ‘Yes. Massive blows to the back of the skull.’ Horton saw Maitland’s eyes travel the room. ‘Precisely,’ Horton added. ‘Nothing to have caused that violent trauma to the skull and I said blows, plural.’ Borland’s death was murder, or manslaughter at the least, and that meant this would be Uckfield’s baby unless there was a link with Langham and then DCS Adams would assume control and that was the reason why Horton hadn’t yet called this in. He wanted to view the scene first because if Adams took charge then he’d certainly be excluded from any subsequent investigation.

  Horton continued to study the room, envisaging what might have occurred here. ‘Mr Borland comes in, shuts the door behind him, switches on the electric fire and sits at his table in the window to do what?’

  ‘Read a book, write a letter? There was no computer—’

  ‘It could have been taken by his assailant.’

  Maitland nodded. ‘But there were binoculars.’ Maitland pointed to their blackened and buckled remains on the floor.

  Interesting. But maybe Borland just liked looking at the scenery. Horton couldn’t see outside because of the boarded up windows but he knew that from here Borland would have had a clear view of the boats on the pontoons. He’d also be able to focus on anyone sailing or motoring up or down Wallington River, into Salterns Lake and then into Portsmouth Harbour. And on the opposite side of the river there was the golf course. Perhaps Borland’s interest had been focused on the golfers or on others using the bunkers for another form of recreational activity. Perhaps Leonard Borland had been a peeping Tom and a blackmailer and whoever he was blackmailing had killed him.

  ‘Was there any evidence of a break-in?’

  ‘No. And the back door was locked.’

  ‘It could have been locked by the assailant himself when he left. Where were Borland’s house keys?’

  ‘In the kitchen, on the work surface.’

  ‘Perhaps Borland kept a spare back door key outside under a mat or flower pot. The assailant knew it was there, let himself in and then calmly let himself out again replacing the key as he went. He’d have enough time to get away before anyone noticed the smoke.’ And where had he gone? Had he climbed into a car and driven off, or simply walked away? Had he entered the marina and gone on board a boat? Teams of officers would be deployed here to ask questions and take statements. They needed to know when Leonard Borland had last been seen alive.

  Maitland’s voice pierced Horton’s eager thoughts. ‘Maybe Leonard Borland willingly let someone in, showed him upstairs and when his back was turned he was attacked.’

  ‘That means it would be someone he knew and someone he trusted.’ Or someone he was blackmailing. A golfer perhaps who’d come armed with a club.

  Maitland said, ‘Or it could be a con merchant who got violent when Borland wouldn’t tell him where he kept his savings.’

  Possibly. ‘Do we know anything about his background?’

  Maitland shook his head.

  ‘Let’s take a look around. You do the back bedroom and bathroom. I’ll take the other front bedroom.’

  It was small with a single bed, unmade, a wardrobe and chest of drawers, both empty and smoke damaged. The window was also boarded up and the walls were blackened by smoke, and plaster had come off the walls and ceiling just as it had on the stairs as Horton descended them. The front room overlooking the green, footpath and then the pontoons was untouched by the fire except for a layer of ash over everything. It was where Borland must have spent his time when he wasn’t looking through his binoculars upstairs. There was a fairly new television, a music centre, comfortable sofa and two chairs. There were also family photographs on the walls and on the mantelpiece. Some were of a woman in her thirties with three young children, the daughter and grandchildren in Boston, Horton presumed. There were several of a couple, a lean, tall man with a sun-tanned smiling face, intelligent and kindly grey eyes, whom he assumed was Leonard Borland and presumably his late wife beside him, because if they had been estranged then Horton didn’t think there would have been any photographs of her or of them as a couple.

  He’d expected a larger set man with a solemn expression or one who had looked shrewd rather than friendly, he didn’t know why. He took the most recent picture from its frame and slipped it into his notebook wondering when Mrs Borland had died. They would be able to get all that information from the daughter, or possibly a neighbour.

  He met Maitland in the hall who said, ‘There are only his clothes in the back bedroom and a photograph of him and his wife beside his bed along with a thriller. And only the usual toiletries in the bathroom.’

  ‘No golf clubs?’

  ‘No.’

  Horton asked Maitland to check out the kitchen while he entered the back room. It had once been used as a dining room. In it was a round oak table and four matching chairs all darkened by the smoke. In the alcove to the right of the fireplace was a dresser displaying crockery and cupboards below it. The cupboards revealed six blue folders neatly inscribed. Borland had been a methodical man.

  Horton spread the folders out on the dining room table. They were marked, correspondence, bills, insurance, guarantees, pensions, personal. Horton turned to the latter. It revealed Borland’s birth and marriage certificate and his wife’s death certificate. She had died two years ago of an aneurism. He turned his attention to the file labelled ‘pensions’. A few minutes later Maitland entered.

  ‘Nothing in the kitchen except the usual.’

  ‘According to this,’ Horton said, indicating the piece of paper in his hand, ‘Leonard Borland was in the civil service for forty years. He retired at the age of fifty-eight after achieving the grade of Senior Executive Officer. He worked for the Department for Work and Pensions.’ That certainly didn’t throw any light on why he had been killed. And it didn’t sound like a blackmailer. He took his phone from his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll call this in. Do you have any photographs of the body in situ?’

  ‘No. The fire fighters pulled the poor beggar out in the hope he might still be alive.’

  That was standard practice. He asked Maitland to check the contents of the garage and garden shed while he rang Uckfield.

  ‘We have a suspicious death, Steve.’ Horton quickly brought him up to speed.

  Uckfield listened in silence until Horton had finished, then Uckfield said, ‘Could be a coincidence that Langham was in the area, and he was there three days before the fire, it could also be chance that Westerbrook kept his boat there.’

  ‘That still doesn’t alter the fact that Leonard Borland was viciously assaulted before being left to die in a fire.’

  ‘Seal it off, get SOCO in. Trueman will get the incident suite up and running.’

  ‘I’ll bag up the files and bring them back with me.’ Horton said. ‘Maitland will send over the photographs of the fire scene and his full report.’

  Maitland returned. ‘Just the usual stuff in the garage, old tools, bits of furniture he no longer wanted in the house and a fairly new car. Garden implements, pots and compost bags in the shed. No golf clubs, walking stick or torch.’

  Horton left Maitland to brief SOCO and the uniformed officers when they arrived and went to speak to the neighbours. There was no answer at the property the other side of the shared driveway but at the adjoining house he found himself facing a neatly dressed slight woman in her early seventies, with soft white waved hair. Horton introduced himself, showed his warrant card and told her she was at liberty to contact the local police station to check his credentials but seeing the police patrol car arrive she declined and showed him in.

  ‘It’s awful what happened to poor Leonard and him such a careful man,’ she said, waving Horton into the rear room, which judging by its comfortable furniture and the television was the one she lived in, while
preserving, Horton guessed, the front room overlooking the road and marina as her ‘best room’ in the old tradition of the British working and middle classes. ‘I can’t think how he could have set fire to the house.’

  ‘How well did you know him, Mrs …?’

  ‘Samson. Margaret. Very well, both him and Jean, his late wife. Nice couple. They were good neighbours, which counts for a lot these days. Not sure who I’m going to get in there next,’ she said worriedly, gesturing him into one of the three comfortable chairs in the room. ‘You read and hear so much about difficult neighbours. People aren’t as respectful as they once were. Oh, I’ve been lucky, nice professional couple the other side of me. Out at work all day, hardly see them except sometimes at weekends when they’re in the garden in the summer or washing their cars. They’ve each got one, new models too. It makes you wonder—’

  But Horton didn’t want to wonder not unless it concerned Borland. ‘Did Mr Borland have any hobbies or interests,’ he quickly asked, stemming the flow.

  ‘He liked his garden. And he used to go birdwatching.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘He’d go out with binoculars,’ she declared as if that sealed the matter.

  ‘Did he say where?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or what kind of birds he’d seen?’

  ‘No,’ she eyed him, slightly puzzled.

  He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘I just wondered if he took any books with him, to help him identify the birds and perhaps he showed you these when you got chatting.’

  ‘No, nothing like that. We never talked about birds, just the weather, the local news, that sort of thing.’

  And that to Horton didn’t sound like a keen ornithologist. The binoculars and his walks were used for another purpose.

  ‘Did he have a boat?’ he asked.

  ‘Good gracious no,’ she declared, smiling at Horton as if he was mad, her tone conveying that it was beyond the realms of fantasy for anyone like her and her neighbours to own such a luxury.

  ‘So he didn’t go fishing?’

  ‘No,’ she firmly answered, which backed up the fact that neither he nor Maitland had found any fishing equipment in the house, garage or garden.

  ‘I understand he was retired,’ Horton said.

  ‘Yes. He used to work in the civil service like my late husband. He died two years ago. He’d had dementia for years. I nursed him right to the end. He had a series of mini-strokes then pneumonia finally took him off. Leonard had a good pension like my Jim. And only the one child. Sandra. She went to live in America. Pity really, because neither Leonard nor Jean got to see their grandchildren as often as they would have liked, although they did go to America not long after Leonard retired and again before Jean was taken.’

  Picking up something she said earlier, Horton asked her what she had meant by Leonard Borland being ‘careful’.

  ‘Well he wasn’t one to do things in a hurry, or on impulse. Jean used to say it drove her mad sometimes. It took him ages to make a decision. He’d research everything, go to the library, read books, write it down, weigh up all the pros and cons. And he had to have everything just right in the house, boiler checked, doors properly equipped with locks.’

  But no alarm system, Horton had noted, so perhaps not so careful after all. ‘Apart from the walking with the binoculars and his garden do you know how else he spent his time?’

  ‘Like most retired people living alone, cleaning, shopping, cooking, changing his library books.’

  Horton smiled. ‘When did you last see Mr Borland?’

  ‘Monday morning.’

  So Langham hadn’t killed him on Saturday but Horton hadn’t thought that for longer than a nanosecond.

  ‘I was wiping down the front windows, it’s the condensation, it builds up in this cold weather, when I saw him walk past. I rapped on the window and waved. He waved back and smiled. And to think—’

  ‘Did he have the binoculars with him?’

  ‘No. He was smartly dressed, suit and overcoat. Though he was never a slovenly man, always neatly turned out.’

  ‘But he didn’t usually wear a suit?’

  She looked puzzled as though she didn’t understand the question and she probably didn’t. ‘Well not since he retired,’ she said. ‘Only when he was going somewhere special.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Again she threw him a confused look. Clearly she didn’t know. So where was he going, wondered Horton. Not that it was relevant. And why hadn’t he taken his car. Horton asked if he often went out leaving the car behind.

  ‘Yes. Well, it’s so expensive these days to run a car and to park it. And Leonard gets, got,’ she corrected with a sorrowful expression, ‘his free bus pass and discount on the trains. It’s not worth taking the car into Fareham when you can walk it from here or hop on a bus, unless he was doing a big shop, then it’s always handy to have a car.’

  So maybe he was just staying local but not going to shop, or, as she suggested, perhaps he had been taking public transport somewhere. ‘Did you see him return?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t see him at all on Tuesday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know if Mr Borland had any visitors on Tuesday afternoon or evening, anyone who might have parked a car on his driveway or who you saw approach his house?’ He didn’t hold out much hope of her having seen anyone because she lived at the rear of the house and not the front.

  ‘He might have done. I don’t know. I was out in the afternoon and early evening. Good job too because if I’d have seen that fire it would have frightened me to death. I came home to find firemen all over the place with hoses and three fire engines outside the house, it almost gave me a heart attack.’

  Horton wasn’t sure about that. He thought Margaret Samson was made of stronger stuff.

  ‘The firemen assured me the fire was out and that my house was safe. I asked about Leonard and that’s when they told me they’d found him dead. He must have had a heart attack and knocked over or fell on a fire. He didn’t smoke I know that. Such a terrible way to go.’ She shook her head sorrowfully.

  He rose. She looked momentarily disappointed. Perhaps she didn’t get many visitors. As she showed him to the door Horton told her that there would be a police presence for some time as they were investigating the circumstances surrounding Mr Borland’s death and that an officer would call on her again to take her statement. She didn’t seem surprised or curious but accepted it as a matter of course.

  The SOCO van had arrived but there was no sign of Taylor and Tremaine or Maitland which meant they were inside the house. The area had been cordoned off and a uniformed officer stood outside. The activity was beginning to attract the interest of passers-by. Soon the local press would be here. Uckfield would probably set up a mobile incident room on the green opposite and would delegate officers to conduct a house-to-house. Horton crossed the road and made his way through the narrow footpath to the Hard where he found Julian Tierney in the marina office.

  Tierney spoke first. ‘I hear that Mr Westerbrook’s been found dead, heart attack.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Aubrey Davidson. He was here a moment ago. Just left.’

  ‘He came specifically to tell you?’ Horton asked, thinking Davidson must have headed here from the mortuary.

  But Tierney shook his head. ‘No. Said he had a boat to check on. Told me he had to identify the body, quite shook him up.’

  Horton showed Tierney the photograph of Graham Langham and asked if he’d ever seen him at the marina or in the area. Tierney said he hadn’t. Horton then showed him the photograph of Leonard Borland and asked the same question.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen him around the marina and passed the time of day with him now and again. Pleasant enough chap.’

  ‘Can you remember the last time you saw him?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago, I think. Aubrey will tell you.’

  ‘Th
ey know one another?’ Horton asked, interested.

  ‘Well they were chatting together by Aubrey’s van. Why? Who is he?’

  Horton told him but didn’t mention the fact that Borland had been viciously assaulted just that he had died in the fire in the house opposite the pontoons.

  Tierney looked solemn. ‘Poor soul.’

  Thanking him, Horton wondered if Uckfield would want to check if any berth holders had been on their boats at the time of the fire and witnessed anything suspicious. But it had been late and dark when the fire had begun, so that was unlikely.

  He headed back to Borland’s house where Maitland told him Taylor had been able to lift some prints from the back door, the bannister and under the fire. ‘They’ve also found blood by the table under the plasterwork. Oh, and Trueman rang to say that DI Dennings is on his way over.’

  That, thought Horton, was his cue to leave.

  FOURTEEN

  Horton headed back to the secure berth at the port and Westerbrook’s boat. He unzipped the canvas awning and climbed on board leaving the awning open. It flapped in the chilly stiff wind that drove icicles of rain into the cockpit. Horton called Walters and asked how he had got on at Westerbrook’s flat.

  ‘I found two passwords written on a piece of paper, stuffed at the back of a kitchen drawer.’

  ‘Careless.’

  ‘Yeah. But they’re not to his email account. They’re to two gambling websites. I’ve been studying his account. He gambles like there’s no tomorrow.’

  ‘There isn’t for him.’

  ‘Well he’s gambled away thousands of pounds over the last year.’

  ‘How many thousands?’

  ‘Over fifteen grand and there could be other accounts. He could have gambled in private syndicates, and we know they’ll bet on a fly crawling up a wall. He might also have used street bookies and gambled at casinos.’

  Which made Horton think of Larry Egmont. He said, ‘Only in the last year?’

  ‘That’s all that’s on here. He might have used another computer before this.’

  Horton recalled that Walters had said Westerbrook had been released from prison two years ago after receiving a custodial sentence of two years, and had served one year. So had he kept free of gambling for a year, or had he, as Walters said, used another computer or visited a betting shop?