Shroud of Evil Read online

  Allen came off the phone. ‘Roger Watling’s got two convictions for speeding. His main residence is registered as Battersea, London.’

  PC Jenkins returned alone to say that there was no one in Roger Watling’s apartment. ‘I’m to let him know when the car is removed. He gave me the name and contact number of the managing agents.’

  ‘Good, see if you can get a list of the residents.’

  He was about to call Eunice Swallows, thinking he’d waited long enough for her to check her cases, when his phone rang and he saw that it was her.

  ‘Have you found anything?’ she asked. Did he detect a slight nervousness in her tone or was that just concern?

  ‘No. Do you, or does Mr Kenton, know a Roger Watling?’

  ‘No,’ she answered promptly and firmly, which made Horton wonder if it was a lie.

  ‘Is Mr Kenton investigating anyone who lives at Admiralty Towers?’ he asked when she seemed reluctant to volunteer anything further.

  There was a moment’s silence, which gave Horton the answer, before she said, ‘It’s confidential.’

  ‘Not if Mr Kenton is lying ill or injured inside an apartment here,’ Horton said crisply, and clearly that wasn’t Roger Watling’s. That didn’t mean Watling couldn’t be involved in Kenton’s disappearance though. They only had his word he’d arrived from London at about eight o’clock. ‘I need the client’s name and the number of the apartment.’

  ‘The owner might not be there, and you can’t break in.’

  Oh, can’t I, thought Horton, knowing he could if he suspected a crime had been committed inside the flat or if he had good reason to believe someone’s life was in danger. A missing man and an abandoned car were good enough reason for him. Eunice Swallows must also know that.

  ‘Do you want us to find Mr Kenton?’ Horton asked tersely.

  ‘Of course, but I can’t let you trample over an investigation and put my client in a very difficult position, which is just what she wanted to avoid.’

  Female then. ‘Call her.’ Or had Eunice Swallows already done that?

  ‘I can’t. We have an arrangement. You must understand how these things work.’

  ‘All I understand is that you reported Jasper Kenton missing, you say you are concerned about his safety, and now you wish to obstruct us in our enquiries.’

  ‘There is no need to be rude,’ she snapped.

  If that’s rude, lady, you’ve led a sheltered life. Not bothering to hide his impatience he said, ‘Does the apartment belong to your client?’

  ‘It belongs to her husband.’

  ‘A matrimonial investigation?’ Horton said, quickly catching on.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is Mr Kenton’s investigation?’ He thought it best to check.

  ‘Yes.’

  And Horton wondered if the errant husband had discovered Kenton watching him. Not through the concrete of the car park, but perhaps Kenton had followed this husband here. After parking his car, the husband had left the car park on foot and had gone outside to confront Kenton. But would he have invited Kenton in? Possibly, if he had decided he needed to tell Kenton about his affair. Kenton had gone up to the apartment where the two men had fought and where Jasper Kenton was lying injured or dead.

  Eunice Swallows said, ‘Jasper wasn’t on surveillance though.’

  ‘The name of the husband, Ms Swallows, and the number of his apartment, please.’

  There was a moment’s pause before she answered, ‘Number twenty-five. It belongs to Brett Veerman, husband of Thelma Veerman. But you’re not to mention the investigation or that his wife has hired us.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he said, adding silently, unless it’s absolutely necessary. He rang off after confirming he would call her back as soon as he could. Was Veerman up there now staring horrified at the bloodied corpse of the private investigator he’d attacked? Or had he killed him and absconded? Perhaps Veerman had killed Kenton in a mad moment of rage and had then killed himself, unable to live with the knowledge of what he’d done, or was that Horton’s imagination running wild? Probably. There was only one way to find out. To Allen he said, ‘We’ll knock politely. But better fetch the ram rod just in case.’

  FOUR

  The apartment was small, modern and minimalistic with bleached wooden flooring and horizontal slatted cream blinds covering the ceiling-to-floor windows. It was also tidy and spotlessly clean: no blood-spattered walls in the open-plan living room, which gave on to a small kitchen, and no sign of Jasper Kenton, not even when Horton checked in the bathroom and double bedroom. And neither was there any sign of the owner, Brett Veerman.

  If Jasper Kenton had been here he’d left no trace. And Horton didn’t think any of the residents would claim to have seen him. This was the sort of building where you didn’t meet your neighbours – not because you were afraid of them, as might have been the case in the tower block where he’d lived with his mother, but because it was designed that way, little boxes behind closed doors. He doubted there was more than a handful of occupied flats on this floor anyway, which would be inhabited occasionally, used for weekends or a stepping-off place for the continent or the Isle of Wight. Nobody had emerged to see what was happening, even when Allen busted open the door.

  He told Allen to call the locksmith and to stay outside the apartment. PC Jenkins was still with the car where she and Bowman were awaiting instructions. Horton crossed to the window and pulled back the blinds. He was looking down on the main road, which ran towards The Hard on his right, southwards, and to the centre of the city on his left, northwards. The apartment didn’t have a sea view; instead it overlooked the Royal Maritime Club on the corner of a road of council houses and maisonettes built during the 1950s when no property developer or councillor had envisaged the area becoming a tourist attraction. Then, the dockyard on his right hadn’t been labelled ‘historic’ and neither had it housed attractions that now drew thousands of visitors from all around the world. Instead it had been the city’s major employer, with thousands of workers, and had attracted navies from around the globe.

  He had a good view across the city to the east, including that of the giant tower blocks that graced the skyline. The nearest one had been his home until his mother had disappeared. He couldn’t remember being afraid of any of his neighbours or any of the children who lived there. In fact he’d played with the kids in the broken-down playground beneath their twenty-third-floor flat – the second they’d inhabited in that block of flats, he’d since learned, though he had no idea why they’d moved from the seventeenth floor to the top floor. Perhaps it was more spacious or there had been problems with the flat on the seventeenth floor.

  There had been scuffles with the other kids but nothing any boy didn’t usually get up to and nothing like the fights he’d endured after being moved from there to this area, and the battles he’d fought at school. He’d learned the hard way to take care of himself. He’d come across a couple of those kids he’d fought with during his police career. Some had grown up to become violent criminals and he’d taken great pleasure in seeing them banged up.

  He turned back to survey the room, wondering about the flat’s owner. What sort of man was he? How old? What did he do for a living? Eunice Swallows had told him nothing about Brett Veerman, or her client, Thelma Veerman, and Horton hadn’t asked her about them; he’d been keen to see if Jasper Kenton had been here. He could get no firm impression of the apartment’s owner from what he saw except that he was very neat. There were no pictures or photographs on the white painted walls. No magazines or newspapers lying around and there were no cabinets except for those in the kitchen. Aside from a sofa, which looked as though it had never been sat on, there was a small television set on a low table but no DVDs, no music system or CDs, and no books – all of which would have given him an idea of Veerman’s tastes.

  Horton crossed to the small kitchen and began to open the drawers, cupboards and the fridge. The latter was empty; the drawers contained only
a few items of cutlery. In the cupboards were a packet of tea bags, a jar of coffee, two white mugs – both clean – and a white porcelain plate. There was no used crockery in the sink or in the dishwasher and no clothes in the washing machine. He touched the side of the kettle on the work surface – it was cold. Either Veerman had just purchased the flat or he rarely used it.

  Did he entertain a lover here, as perhaps his wife suspected? If so there was no sign of one, he thought, heading back into the bathroom. Again his search of the cabinets yielded only a few male toiletries: a toothbrush, toothpaste, aftershave (expensive) an electric razor and shower gel. The bed was made up, the sheets clean and there was no smell of perfume. There were also no women’s clothes in the wardrobe and only a few men’s clothes: two suits, both designer labels, good quality and expensive. He placed the trousers against him: Veerman was about his height, six foot one. And the jacket? No, that wouldn’t reach around his chest, so Veerman was leaner, with longer arms. There was a pair of casual trousers, the same size as the suit trousers, a couple of shirts, which by the collar size confirmed that Veerman was slender, and apart from some underwear only a couple of jumpers in the drawers, both bearing the labels of a prestigious London retailer. Of course Horton had no confirmation that the clothes were Brett Veerman’s: they could perhaps belong to a friend who was staying in the flat for a while.

  He was curious to see Kenton’s living accommodation, which would tell him more about the missing man than Eunice Swallows seemed inclined to divulge, unless it was as anonymous as this place, and the thought struck him that he only had Eunice Swallows’ word that Kenton wasn’t at his home. He considered this. Could the report of him missing be phoney? Perhaps Kenton and Swallows were lovers and she’d killed him and he was lying dead in his apartment. She was using delaying tactics to confuse the picture for when Kenton’s body would eventually be discovered. She’d parked Kenton’s car here to side-track them into making a connection with Brett Veerman. It sounded rather elaborate, but then people sometimes went to extreme lengths to hide a crime.

  He called Eunice Swallows. She answered immediately.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded irritably, rather than with concern.

  ‘Neither Mr Veerman nor Mr Kenton are here,’ Horton replied evenly. He wasn’t about to confide his thoughts to her.

  ‘You entered forcibly.’

  ‘Yes.’ He heard her suck in her breath. ‘It’s OK; we’ll make sure it’s secure.’

  ‘Then there’s no need to pursue that line of enquiry any further.’

  She seemed very keen to drop it, which made him keener to pursue it. Or perhaps that was her intention, to divert him from demanding to see Jasper Kenton’s apartment. Not that he needed her permission. He could use the same reasoning to forcibly enter Kenton’s home as he had at Veerman’s.

  He said, ‘Mr Veerman might wonder why his front door lock has been changed.’

  ‘You can say it was an attempted burglary.’

  Oh, could he? Since when did she tell him how to do his job and when to lie?

  When he didn’t reply she said, ‘I’m sure that Jasper’s disappearance has nothing to do with the Veerman investigation.’

  ‘Then why is his car here?’

  ‘Maybe he was meeting someone.’

  ‘Who? You said he didn’t have any friends.’ There was silence. He envisaged the disapproving scowl on her round, fleshy face. He continued, ‘He must either have had a fob to get through the barrier system of the car park or someone buzzed him through.’

  ‘It can’t have been Brett Veerman. I can hardly see him letting Jasper in.’

  Why not though? As he’d considered earlier, perhaps Veerman had invited Kenton in. Kenton had parked his car in one of the available spaces, which happened to belong to Roger Watling, and Kenton had left the car park in Brett Veerman’s car. But to go where, and why? It could hardly be to discuss the matter with Mrs Veerman.

  He said, ‘I’d like to see Mr Kenton’s apartment. And I need a list of his clients and those he was investigating in order to check them against the other residents here.’

  ‘I really don’t see that either is necessary.’

  There was definitely something she was hiding. He was beginning to believe it was the death of Jasper Kenton and the fact that she might be involved in it. ‘You can either meet us at his property or we’ll force an entry.’

  ‘I’ll speak to DCI Bliss.’

  ‘Do.’ He rang off.

  God, what a woman, he thought angrily. He was inclined to go ahead and order up a unit to accompany him to Emsworth but he thought sod it; Bliss for once could take responsibility for that, seeing as Ms Swallows was clearly her buddy. And Bliss could have her weekend disturbed. He wasn’t even meant to be working. No doubt she’d soon be on the phone to him about it anyway and probably complaining that he’d been rude to Ms Swallows.

  He gave instructions for Allen to wait until the lock was fixed and the door secure and then with PC Jenkins to ask if anyone had seen Kenton. Horton emailed the photograph of Kenton to Allen’s phone. He returned to the car park. There he asked Bowman to arrange for the car to be taken to the secure compound, where it would be held until they were instructed otherwise. PC Liz Jenkins went off to inform Roger Watling his space would soon be available.

  Horton crossed to the barrier and studied the entry system. As well as the automatic fob entry there was a key pad. Perhaps someone had given Jasper Kenton the security code or he could have watched someone – Veerman perhaps – punch it in. Veerman would have had a fob though, unless he’d lost it. His lover then. And Kenton had simply copied it and gained entry.

  Horton made a note of the company who had supplied the barrier entry system and headed for The Hard where he bought a coffee and a bacon sandwich for his delayed breakfast. Taking both he walked back towards the Historic Dockyard and found a vacant seat overlooking the narrow harbour entrance. Despite the grey October morning and weather forecast there were several leisure craft making their way out into the Solent, along with an orange and black pilot boat and the Fast Cat ferry to the Isle of Wight. But, as he ate, his eyes were drawn to the little green and white ferry crossing to the town of Gosport opposite and his thoughts turned to the place where he believed Jennifer had been visiting the day she had disappeared.

  He recalled his conversation with Dr Quentin Amos, who had been a lecturer at the London School of Economics in March 1967. Amos, a skeletal, balding, elderly man, with a terminal illness, living in a dirty urine-smelling flat in Woking, had told him that Jennifer had been involved with the Radical Student Alliance, which Horton had discovered had been formed in 1966 and, like the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in America, had become a centre for the protest movement. The 1967 sit-in at the London School of Economics was considered to be the start of that protest movement. It went on to organize the mass anti-Vietnam War rally in Grosvenor Square, leading to the Grosvenor Square riots in 1968, the year Zachary Benham had died in that fire. Amos’s information about Jennifer put a completely different light on the woman Horton remembered and even those memories had been tainted by what he’d been told as a child after she’d abandoned him. But the words of his last and loving foster father, Bernard Litchfield, came back to him.

  ‘Just because people tell you that, doesn’t mean it’s true. You have to find the truth for yourself. And even then you must ask yourself whether it really is the truth, or what someone is persuading you into believing.’

  Bernard’s wise words applied both to Horton’s professional and personal life. It was a shame he couldn’t ask Bernard questions about Edward Ballard, because Bernard must have known Ballard, otherwise why would he have given Bernard that Bluebird Toffee tin that had contained a photograph of Jennifer and Horton’s birth certificate, both of which had been destroyed by a fire on his boat? He could get another birth certificate, but the only picture he’d had of Jennifer had gone. He remembered seeing Ballard hand the tin to Bernard one day when
he’d bunked off school early. Bernard and Eileen Litchfield were dead, but perhaps their neighbours were still alive and maybe still living in the house next door. If so, would they remember much about the wayward boy the Litchfields had fostered? More importantly had the Litchfields ever said anything to them about his background and his mother?

  His thoughts returned to Amos, who had died in August, not from the cancer that had riddled his body but of a heart attack. He’d bequeathed to Horton an envelope which had contained two blank sheets of paper. On the reverse of the envelope there had been a set of numbers – 01.07.05, 5.11.09 – which could, with some manipulation of the second set, correspond with the longitude and latitude of Haslar Marina in Gosport, which he could now see across the harbour. The marina location was 01.07.05 and 50.47.27. If he removed the zero he got five, four plus seven gave him eleven and two plus seven added up to nine, giving the marina location. Except Haslar Marina hadn’t existed in 1978. Then the area had been just sea and shore. Close to it though was the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar, now closed, and the heavily secured Fort Monkton, allegedly a communications training centre for MI5. Had Jennifer been heading there the day she had disappeared? Is that what Amos had wanted him to know?

  Secrets and lies, Amos had told him. ‘You might think the days of spies and the Cold War are over and that I’m an old man seeing shadows across every ripple of the sea, but they’re not over; there is always evil below.’ What was the evil that Amos had alluded to?

  But perhaps the numbers had no connection with the marina, the hospital or Fort Monkton, Horton thought, finishing off his sandwich. Maybe he was just so keen to find the meaning that he’d grasp at anything. They could be the combination to a safe or a safety deposit box code. A bank account number or dates. Without more information he was floundering. Why hadn’t Amos given him more? A set of numbers was worse than useless without further reference and he had no idea where to look for that.