A Narrow Victory Page 4

  ‘No, I agree,’ Hillary said. ‘It was a thorough job, but not over the top.’

  Zoe looked at Jake thoughtfully. It was a good point. She was going to have to keep her eye on the Boy Wonder. She was the one who wanted to shine in this outfit.

  ‘What about the suspects, guv?’ Zoe asked, bringing the spotlight firmly back her way. ‘DI Varney really fancied this man Brandt for it, didn’t he?’

  ‘Or failing that, the business partner, Greer Ryanson,’ Jake added.

  Hillary held up a hand. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. And remember, what we’re reading here is the result of DI Varney’s work, done nearly fifteen years ago. Which is useful, but it’s only our starting point.’

  Hillary took a sip of coffee and held up a warning finger. ‘Working a cold case isn’t like working a new case, where everything has an urgency to it, and a sense of time running out. As you may have heard, most fresh murder cases are either solved within the first three days, or week at the most, if they’re going to be solved at all. After that, solve rates diminish rapidly. So DI Varney would have been under immense pressure to produce results right from the start, and of a necessity he had to do things in a rush. That’s not to say that he skimped things, or necessarily missed anything. So far I haven’t seen any signs of that. But we have the luxury that he didn’t, of being able to take things much more carefully, to check out the things that he thought irrelevant, and to tie up any loose ends that he disregarded. And generally to use the passage of time to take an overview that was denied to him.’

  As the other two solemnly acknowledged the wisdom of these words, Hillary took another sip of her coffee and rubbed her eyebrow thoughtfully. ‘Tell me what you make of the forensic evidence.’

  Zoe laughed helplessly. ‘Where do you start? There was so much of it! I was beginning to get cross-eyed trying to keep track of it. There was the different blood spatter patterns on the different coats, for a start. And all that that proved was which coat was lying where, and in relation to other coats, when he was stabbed. And then the owners of the coats had their own DNA and hairs all over them, as you might expect.’ She rolled her eyes and took a breath. ‘Then there were fingerprints all over the bedroom – some from the party guests, some from this Querida Phelps woman, by the Phelps woman’s cleaner, for Pete’s sake. I mean, there were over a hundred people at the party. It must have been a nightmare.’

  Hillary nodded.

  ‘And then there was the fact that the victim had been partying all night as well. How could they say what hairs or fibres were relevant to his murder, and what he’d just picked up during what was obviously a boisterous party?’ she demanded.

  ‘In fact,’ Jake Barnes put in quietly, ‘there was so much forensic evidence, you might as well say that there was no forensic evidence at all. At least, none that helps us.’

  Hillary gave him a quick approving glance. ‘Exactly. And that was the first of DI Varney’s problems. Speaking of which, we need to talk to him. I daresay he’s retired long since but, Zoe, check with personnel and see if you can find a current address for him.’

  ‘Guv.’

  ‘You said that was one of his problems,’ Jake said cautiously. ‘What would you say was another?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Hillary said quietly. He was obviously a bright boy – it would be interesting to see how long it took him to figure it out.

  Zoe shifted restlessly on her seat, not liking the way the Boy Wonder seemed to be taking over.

  ‘Well, the witness statements aren’t helpful, are they?’ Jake Barnes said, a shade tentatively. ‘I mean, it seems everyone was shocked by what had happened, and all that, and nobody seemed to be acting out of character, or had anything to hide. But it was a big, lavish New Year’s Eve party. A lot of the witnesses were sloshed. And those that weren’t had been milling around, dancing, chatting and what have you. It’s not surprising that nobody seemed to be able to give a coherent answer to when was the last time they’d seen the victim. And the fact that nobody noticed when he left the room, or who with, isn’t really surprising either, is it? I mean, why would they notice? It’s not as if they knew beforehand that the poor sod was going to get murdered and so kept track of him. Not only that, but with so many people at the event it’s almost inevitable that everybody’s eye-witness evidence gets mixed up with everybody else’s, making it almost impossible to make sense out of the jumble. And that’s not really helpful either, is it?’

  He took a huge breath and gave another of his semi-shy smiles. ‘Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Again, it’s like we’ve got so many witnesses that we might as well not have had any at all,’ Zoe chipped in, paraphrasing the Boy Wonder’s previous words with a cheeky grin.

  It was nice to see that even Jake Barnes could fluff things sometimes.

  ‘And the costumes don’t help,’ Hillary said wryly.

  Zoe laughed. ‘Yes, it was a costume party, wasn’t it? I keep forgetting that. I mean, who does that nowadays? Or even back then? Aren’t they a bit naff?’

  ‘The upper classes at play,’ Jake said with a smile.

  Zoe snorted. ‘Hardly that. True aristos probably wouldn’t be caught dead dressed up as highwaymen or Marie Antoinette. No, this was strictly a middle-class jolly hockeysticks affair. Ugh! What was our victim dressed as again?’

  ‘Lord Byron, or some other romantic poet,’ Jake said, again taking a quick sneak at the crime scene photos.

  Hillary pulled one out and looked at it thoughtfully. Felix Olliphant had been a very good-looking man when alive. Six foot one, according to the pathologist, and a healthy twelve stone, he’d had a full head of honey-blond hair and big grey eyes. The hair, on the night of the party at least, had been covered by a dark wig with bangs, and his costume had consisted of tight-fitting black leggings and knee-high boots, and the sort of loose, white blouson-style shirt that had supposedly made him look Byronic.

  ‘He was a looker, wasn’t he?’ Zoe echoed Hillary’s thoughts, but she was looking at a head-and-face shot of the victim, taken at the morgue, in which Felix Olliphant looked as if he was asleep.

  ‘Right,’ Hillary agreed. ‘Which suggests what?’

  ‘A lover killed him?’ Zoe said at once. ‘A man who looks like that, single – well, not married at any rate – and running his own business with presumably plenty of lolly to splash around, he must have broken a few hearts. And how likely was it that he was faithful to the girlfriend anyway? If he had been playing around, it could be reason enough for someone to want to kill him when they found out.’

  If there was one thing that Zoe understood, it was passion. Sexual passion, emotional passion – she didn’t really differentiate.

  ‘Unless the motive was money, like DI Varney thought.’ It was Jake Barnes who spoke ‘It seems his business partner Greer Ryanson came into both his half of the business and a substantial insurance payout when he died.’

  ‘Oh, trust the Boy Wonder to think about the cash,’ Zoe said, with a grin. ‘My money’s on a crime of passion every time.’

  ‘Yeah, but male or female? According to the reports, it seems the victim might have been gay,’ Jake shot back quickly.

  Zoe cocked her head to one side. ‘Something wrong with that?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m just saying – from the interview notes with his friends, there seemed to be a strong suggestion that he was in the closet.’

  Hillary coughed gently. ‘He had a girlfriend of some years standing at the time of his death,’ she pointed out. ‘And other friends didn’t believe the gay rumour.’

  ‘Perhaps he wasn’t either gay or straight, but bi,’ Zoe put in nonchalantly. And fluttered her heavily mascara-clad eyelashes camply, first at Jake, who grinned at her, and then at Hillary, who likewise grinned at her.

  ‘We’re getting ahead of ourselves again,’ Hillary remonstrated gently. ‘Let’s stick to what we know, as of this point. Time of death?’

&nb
sp; ‘Sometime between the hours of 11.30 and 1.15 when the body was discovered,’ Zoe said smartly. ‘It seems odd that nobody can say for sure whether he was there when they counted down to midnight though. Surely you’d remember who you were with when the New Year came in?’

  ‘You’re forgetting the costumes,’ Jake pointed out. ‘Even the victim, who wasn’t wearing either a full face mask or anything even more outlandish, looked different in a wig. And if you were standing next to some bloke with a Bill Clinton mask on, would you necessarily know who it was underneath?’

  Zoe grimaced. ‘Oh yeah, right. I forgot. I’m beginning to feel sorry for the original team. It must have been a nightmare sorting out what was what and who was who and who saw what and who. Er … if you see what I mean.’

  Hillary laughed. ‘OK, enough. We need to keep on reading and sorting. I’ve ordered the boxes up. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I need you both to go through what we’ve got and get sorting. Jake, I want you to follow up and report on the financial aspects of the matter since that seems to be your area of expertise. Go into the partnership agreement Felix had with his business partner, and see if there’s anything dodgy about it, as well as the other financial leads DI Varney came up with.’

  ‘Guv.’

  She took a breath and turned to Zoe. ‘Zoe, I want you to make up a list of all the main witnesses. I want to know their current whereabouts, addresses, phone numbers and jobs. Plus I want to know what they’ve been doing since the time of Felix’s death and how they’ve all got on. When we get around to interviewing them again, who knows what you might have discovered. Sometimes the seeds of a crime can take a long time to grow, and it’s only a long time after the event that you begin to get a clearer picture of what went on back then. I want to know how everyone’s coped since Felix Olliphant died. I’m guessing psychology is more your thing?’

  Zoe’s eyes shone. ‘Yes, guv. Where will you be?’

  Hillary smiled wryly. ‘Oh, I don’t know, getting my nails done, perhaps, or having a massage down at the spa. Perhaps I’ll do a bit of window shopping or grab lunch at Browns.’

  Jake Barnes, for the first time, laughed out loud.

  Zoe, abashed, grinned.

  Hillary went back to her office and dived into the files. Time to open a new murder book and start making a to-do list. Before the day was out, she needed to know all that the dry and dusty paperwork could tell her about the living and once-breathing man known as Felix Olliphant.

  Only then could she begin to set about finding who it was that had wanted him dead.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was nearly 4.30, and Hillary had just read the last of the preliminary files on the Felix Olliphant case. Her mind was still on DI Varney’s joint favourite for the killing, William Jeffrey Brandt.

  Brandt had been sixty-one at the time of the murder. From his rap sheet photograph, he’d been a heavy-set, balding man with small brown eyes and a somewhat florid complexion. The broken veins on his nose had clearly shown up the man’s weakness, which had always been booze.

  Married at twenty-five, the man had blamelessly worked as a building labourer for all his life, and with his wife, Margaret, had produced three children, who’d likewise all been raised as good solid citizens with not a black mark between them. Well, none that would make the law sit up and take notice, anyway.

  From what Hillary could tell, the Brandt marriage had been happy and straightforward enough, with no signs of domestic violence. Usually, when booze was involved, violence wasn’t far behind, and Hillary knew that paperwork could only tell you so much. Just because his wife had never reported abuse didn’t mean that abuse hadn’t taken place. And neighbours could be very selective in what they heard and saw.

  One day, in the summer of 1998, William had been taking his grandson out to see a local football match when he’d lost control of his car on a corner and crashed into Felix Olliphant. Felix had been driving a rather old but sturdy Range Rover at the time, and Brandt, in a small Skoda, had not surprisingly come off the worst.

  When the ambulance and fire brigade services extracted him from the crumpled wreck of his car, Brandt had broken his right leg in several places, fractured his collarbone and jaw and lost a considerable amount of blood.

  But he’d lived.

  The same, tragically, could not be said of his 10-year-old grandson, Billy, who’d been declared dead at the scene.

  In the hospital, a blood test had shown that William Brandt had been well over the legal driving limit. Moreover, the traffic investigation team were able to calculate that at the time of the accident Brandt must have been driving at well over fifty miles an hour, which would have been all right on a straight bit of road but highly dangerous on a sharp bend. It was not surprising, then, that he’d taken the corner far too wide, and had clearly been on the wrong side of the road when he’d collided full on with Olliphant’s Range Rover.

  From the skid marks and various measurements taken, the accident investigation team had had no hesitation in confirming that Brandt had been in the wrong. Not that too much technical evidence had been needed, for the whole incident had been witnessed by another driver, just behind Olliphant, who’d seen the whole thing.

  Colin Harcourt, a 48-year-old who owned his own modest double-glazing company, had been on his way back from seeing a potential customer and confirmed Felix’s account in his police statement.

  Felix had stated that he’d been driving at about thirty miles an hour, on the correct side of the road, when he’d approached the bend and found a red car bearing down on him very fast. He said he didn’t have time to do much, except to start, instinctively, to try and turn the wheel to run his Range Rover up on the side of the road to get out of the way. But it was by then way too late to avoid the other car. This was confirmed by the positioning of the impact itself, which had Brandt’s car clearly colliding with the Range Rover not quite full on but at a slight angle.

  Moreover, Olliphant, who’d been shaken up but not seriously injured, had agreed to take a breathalyzer test there and then at the accident scene, and had passed it with a zero reading. He’d been released after being treated at the local hospital for cuts and bruises, shock and a slight shoulder injury.

  Not surprisingly, Brandt had been convicted of dangerous driving while under the influence of alcohol. The fact that he’d been badly injured himself, spending nearly six months in hospital, helped marginally at his trial. His legal team pointed out vociferously that he’d suffered a great deal already, being responsible for the death of his beloved grandson, which had left him and the rest of his family utterly distraught. Obviously the court to some degree agreed with this assessment because Brandt was given just a short prison sentence plus a lifetime driving ban.

  But it was what had happened after this tragic tale that had attracted the attention of DI Varney, and now, nearly fifteen years after the event, caused such thoughtful contemplation from Hillary Greene.

  For, far from admitting to his guilt and trying to come to terms with it or seeking therapy or psychiatric treatment, William Brandt had consistently and with increasingly angry desperation insisted that he had not been to blame for the accident.

  Faced with the results of the blood tests, he’d been unable to deny that he’d been drinking but he’d claimed, as so many heavy drinkers did, that he could handle his booze and that six pints of bitter had not affected either his hand-eye coordination or his driving abilities. He’d flat out denied that he’d been speeding, saying that he’d been doing thirty, if that – the same as Felix Olliphant. This was in direct contradiction to both Felix Olliphant’s and Colin Harcourt’s eye-witness testimonies. It also flew in the face of the skid marks on the road, the measurements taken that proved the speed of Brandt’s car, and the report of the very experienced accident investigation officer. Even the computer-generated programme that allowed the accident investigation team to re-enact the crash proved that Brandt had to have been travelling at speed, and
had been on the wrong side of the road at the time of the collision.

  Of course, it wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone that Brandt had been unable to accept responsibility for what had happened. By all accounts, he’d adored his eldest grandson, who’d been named after himself, and had gone to pieces after his death. After serving his prison term, things had only gone from bad to worse for him. Brandt’s son, the boy’s father, Matthew, had cut off all contact with his father. Brandt, unable to drive, lost his job. His wife suffered a physical breakdown and required hospitalization for a short while.

  And William Brandt publicly and repeatedly blamed Felix Olliphant for it all. He started by accusing Felix of lying, and when he wasn’t believed, insisted that Colin Harcourt had been paid off by Felix to support his version of events. From there, he’d accused the accident investigation team of bias, and threatened to sue.

  And on more than one drunken occasion, he had, in front of a variety of witnesses, threatened to ‘get that bastard Olliphant for killing my Billy’.

  DI Varney had suspected that Brandt also made abusive and threatening phone calls to Olliphant, and left similar text messages, but Olliphant had never lodged a complaint. Hillary didn’t find that particularly surprising. Innocent of blame or not, being in a car crash where a 10-year-old boy dies is going to leave anyone with a whole shedload of unresolved guilt. And no doubt Felix hadn’t had the heart to make things worse for the dead boy’s family by dropping his grieving grandfather in it with the police.

  So it was not surprising, therefore, that once Felix had turned up stabbed to death, DI Varney had been very keen to question Brandt.

  Unfortunately, his alibi for the night of the murder had been one of those that was neither too elaborate nor too non-existent to be of much use.

  Being New Year’s Eve on such a momentous date, Varney might have expected Brandt and his wife to be at a party of their own, in which case dozens of witnesses could have vouched for them. Alas, that was not the case.