Already Dead (33 page)

‘Are we talking hard or soft?’ asked Baird.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Basically, hard fraud is when someone deliberately invents a loss covered by their insurance policy. Criminal gangs get involved in hard fraud schemes, because they can obtain large amounts of money. Soft fraud is far more common. It’s more opportunistic. Policyholders exaggerate an otherwise legitimate claim. Almost anyone can be involved in that type of fraud. It’s so tempting just to overstate the amount of damage or the value of items lost. And of course, most small frauds go undetected, so it’s known as an easy crime to get away with.’

Fry shook her head. ‘Not soft fraud. There must be large amounts of money involved.’

He bit his lip. ‘I see.’

‘Those gangs who stage collisions to collect insurance money. The set-up sometimes involves insurance claims adjusters, doesn’t it? They create phoney police reports to process claims.’

‘It’s possible,’ said Baird slowly.

It was an evasive, noncommittal reply, if ever she’d heard one. Fry waited in silence for him to say more.

‘The sheer number of claims submitted each day makes it far too expensive for companies like ours to have employees checking each claim for signs of fraud,’ he said. ‘So we use computer systems and statistical analysis to identify suspicious claims for investigation. There are drawbacks.’

‘Such as?’

‘The system can only be used to detect types of fraud that have been identified before. Claims adjusters can be trained to identify “red flags” or symptoms that in the past have often been associated with fraudulent claims. Statistical detection doesn’t prove that claims are fraudulent. It merely identifies claims that need to be investigated further.

‘If a red flag is triggered on a claim, it’s passed on to a specialist loss adjuster to investigate. They’ll interview the policyholder, carry out background checks. Often the result of our fraud checks and an investigation is that the claim process becomes a bit long-drawn-out. Then some claimants simply withdraw their claim, and we never hear from them again. That’s a result too.’

‘An unscrupulous staff member could take advantage of that system,’ said Fry. ‘Meeting claimants and doing background checks – it puts someone in a position of power. Some individuals can’t resist abusing that sort of power.’

‘We participate in the Insurance Fraud Bureau scheme,’ said Baird. ‘Any legitimate insurance company would be mad not to. The IFB have recorded tens of thousands of staged collisions and false insurance claims across the UK. In one year, their use of data mining led to seventy-four arrests of individuals involved in insurance fraud networks.’

‘Data mining. Would that be in the job description of a fraud analyst?’

‘Like Ralph Edge?’

‘Yes, that’s who I’m thinking of.’

Baird looked suddenly alarmed. He stared out of the window as a defeated-looking Ralph Edge was led past his office by two men, each with a hand on an elbow. Fry jumped up and went to the door to watch them disappear down the corridor.

‘Who were
they
?’ asked Baird.

‘Those,’ said Fry, ‘were two of my colleagues from the Major Crime Unit. They appear to have arrested Mr Edge.’

‘You’re not going arrest me too, are you?’ said Baird. ‘Please tell me you’re not. It was just a bit of fun.’

‘What was?’

‘The paintballing.’

‘It has nothing to do with that, sir.’

‘Thank goodness.’

Baird wiped his hands on a tissue from a box on his desk.

‘Ralph?’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Really?’

‘He didn’t take advantage of your open door to talk to you about it?’ asked Fry.

‘No.’

‘No doubt they’ll be taking away his files and computer,’ said Fry. ‘Of course, Mr Edge isn’t the type to do the dirty work himself.’

Baird waved his bony hand nervously That imaginary irritating fly in his office had become an entire swarm of wasps.

‘How am I going to explain this to my managing director?’ he said plaintively.

‘Perhaps you could send a boy with a message,’ said Fry.

Fry knew Ben Cooper had his phone switched on now, so she called him first to make sure he’d be in. She would have spent the rest of the day trying to track him down if necessary, but he answered straight away and agreed to see her.

She parked right outside number eight Welbeck Street this time, just behind Cooper’s Toyota. Inside his flat, he offered her a coffee, which she accepted reluctantly, feeling obliged to maintain a veneer of sociability when her instincts urged her to do quite the opposite.

Fry sat on his settee with her mug, exchanged glares with the cat, which stalked out of the room, and decided not to beat about the bush any more.

‘Why didn’t you just tell me everything you’d worked out?’ she said. ‘You could have given me the whole damn case.’

‘Would you have appreciated it?’ asked Cooper.

Fry hesitated, realised there was no point now in telling anything but the truth.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Well, then.’

‘I never really understood this obsession of yours,’ said Fry.

‘Obsession?’

‘All those cuttings on your kitchen wall. I call that the sign of an obsession.’

‘How did you know about those?’ asked Cooper quietly.

‘I…’

‘You’ve been in here somehow? Oh, wait a minute – Mrs Shelley mentioned that friends of mine had called looking for me. That would have been you, I suppose? So you made sure I was out of the way, then you talked your way into my flat.’

‘It might sound that way.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘Let me explain, Ben. We’re all—’

He turned away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m finished listening to your explanations, Diane. Just leave me alone, why don’t you? Everyone else does.’

‘No, wait. That wasn’t what I came here for.’

‘What, then?’

‘I want you to explain it to me, Ben.’

He put down his coffee on a low table. ‘I suppose you haven’t been following the news stories the way I have over these last few months, Diane. Did you actually look at my cuttings?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘I mean, did you look properly? The way you would look if you were presented with them as evidence and you were trying to put the clues together, to make connections? Or did you just take one glance and jump to a conclusion?’

Fry didn’t answer. Well, she couldn’t respond to that without admitting a failure. So she said nothing. It didn’t matter. Cooper knew the answer to his own question anyway.

‘Some of them aren’t really what you’d call cuttings,’ he said. ‘They’re printouts from the internet. Specialist news sites, mostly. You’d be amazed what you can turn up just by creating a few Google alerts. That’s how I know about Prospectus Assurance. It was a buyout, you know.’

‘Oh, I had a feeling when I went there that it used to be called something different.’

Cooper nodded. ‘It used to be owned by a firm called Diamond Finance. They were also the parent company for Diamond Hybrid Securities, based in London. But the insurance division has different owners now. They became Prospectus a few months ago. I read all about the takeover and the rebranding. The details are right there on my wall.’

‘So?’

‘Before Prospectus Assurance was bought out it was called Derbyshire Reliance Insurance. I know that, because they provided the insurance cover for the Light House pub.’

31

Sitting opposite Diane Fry in his own flat, Ben Cooper began to feel that familiar sensation of unreality. The moment he mentioned the Light House, his head swam and he felt the stirrings of that tremor in his hand, the ache in the back of his throat. But they were fainter now, as if they were fighting a losing battle for control of his body. His mind felt clearer than it had for a long time. Though that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

‘Well, despite the takeover,’ he said, ‘many of the staff are still there in some departments. Call handlers come and go, but experienced people tend to stay on. They’re better paid, and they might find it more difficult to get the same level of salary elsewhere. Ralph Edge was working in the side of the business providing financial advice. He’s a fraud analyst. He knows what methods of fraud work, and which bring in the largest amount of money with the least risk. In fact, he was in a position to cover up fraud, if he wanted to. A gamekeeper turned poacher.’

‘How did he get away with that?’ asked Fry.

Cooper smiled. ‘How did people get away with losing billions of pounds for the banks? Well, they get put into positions of trust, where they’re left to handle huge amounts of other people’s money every day. As long as everything seems to be going okay, no one asks any questions. It’s only when it all goes wrong that people start saying there ought to be more regulation. And by then it’s too late.’

‘And poor old Glen Turner? Turner was pretty weird. He lived a strange life. But he was getting money from somewhere.’

‘Yes. From Ralph Edge,’ said Cooper. ‘Turner had been roped into his fraudulent money making schemes somehow.’

Fry nodded. ‘He was probably very willing at first. God knows, Turner had little enough excitement in his life. I can just imagine him hugging that secret to himself, knowing he’d broken away from his mother’s expectations of him. Then he bought her the greenhouse with the money.’

‘He sounds a sly beggar on the quiet.’

‘But still weird,’ said Fry.

‘And then I suppose he must have begun to feel he still wasn’t appreciated. He was still getting pushed around and disrespected at work. I bet he resented that even more when he’d just begun to feel he was a cool, edgy sort of guy underneath.’

‘After the incident at the paintballing session that Sunday, it all changed, though.’

‘That incident would have been the last straw for Mr Turner,’ said Cooper. ‘The final humiliation. Not only was he the butt of the joke yet again, but his humiliation was orchestrated by Ralph Edge, who he thought was his friend. Perhaps his only friend. But everybody has a limit. Even Glen Turner could only be pushed so far. I think he told Edge exactly that on Tuesday.’

‘He stood up for himself,’ said Fry. ‘Finally, the worm turned. He probably felt in a stronger position after he’d been to the solicitor, and believed he could sue Edge and Baird, even get them prosecuted for assault. I bet Mr Turner came away from that consultation with Mr Chadburn feeling happier and more confident than he had for a while.’

‘And he went straight off to confront Edge the next day.’

‘No,’ said Fry. ‘First he went and bought himself a fossil.’

Cooper hadn’t known that. ‘It takes all sorts,’ he said. ‘Some people would have gone a for a drink, or a slap-up meal, or bought themselves a box of chocolates, or whatever.’

‘Are we saying that it was feeling better about himself suddenly that got Glen Turner killed. Is that it?’

‘Pretty much,’ said Cooper. ‘Yes, pretty much. I imagine he went to see Mr Edge on Tuesday and told him he was going to pull the plug on the insurance fraud scheme.’

‘Or he demanded a bigger share of the proceeds,’ suggested Fry. ‘So he could buy his mother more presents.’

‘Possibly. Either way, Edge and his associates must have realised they’d misjudged him. Glen Turner wasn’t to be trusted any more.’

‘So they decided to kill him, to get rid of the problem? There must have been an awful lot of money at stake to justify that solution.’

‘Oh, yes, I think there was,’ said Cooper. ‘When you follow up all the cases they were involved in, I bet you’ll find the total just keeps mounting up and up.’

‘It will be the Major Crime Unit who do that,’ said Fry. ‘In fact, I suppose they’re doing it right now.’

She looked at her mug, and realised she’d drunk her coffee without noticing. She put it down empty on the table.

‘And the Gibson brothers …’ she said.

‘The strong-arm boys of the operation. I’m not sure how much control Ralph Edge, or anyone else, ever had over the Gibsons.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘You know, it’s been very strange these past few months. I told you once that I’d been driving around at night, didn’t I? Often I couldn’t remember where I’d been, or what I’d been doing. But I saw that sign one night.
A.J. Morton and Sons
. And I remembered Ryan Gibson. He was one of the first suspects I ever dealt with when I joined CID. PC Stanley Walker was the bobby with the local knowledge back then. He still is – except, of course, they’ve retired him. That was lucky from my point of view. Old Stan had become just another member of the public. Like me.’

‘What’s the connection between Ralph Edge and the Gibsons?’

‘Josh Lane is the connection.’

‘Josh Lane. The barman at the Light House.’

‘Yes, Josh Lane. My obsession,’ said Cooper.

He waited for Fry to make a sarcastic comment, but it didn’t come. He noticed the cat slink back into the room and sit watching them curiously, her whiskers twitching as if trying to detect something in the air.

‘According to the intelligence at the time, Lane was involved in the drugs trade on a small scale. He even supplied Ecstasy from behind the bar at the Light House. Selected customers only, of course. But you have to be very careful when you play that game.’

‘You certainly meet some unsavoury characters when you get involved in the drugs business,’ said Fry.

He was glad she understood that, at least. ‘Yes, it’s easy to get yourself in too deep. Those people have no hesitation in putting pressure on you, forcing you to do what they want. You have to go along with them. So you find yourself drawn in deeper and deeper. And then it’s too late. It was too late for Josh Lane. The only wonder is that he’s still out and free.’

‘Obsession,’ said Fry, surprisingly gently.

‘All right. Well, Lane knew the local drug dealers,’ said Cooper. ‘He had no choice but to acknowledge them. Sean Gibson introduced him to Ryan. Now, Ryan Gibson was in the army. He always claimed that he’d been a member of special forces. SAS, you know.’

‘They all claim that.’

‘Ryan either genuinely had been, or he’d mixed with people he learned things from. He was one of those men who was never able to go straight once he was out of the services. He’d learned so much discipline, and taken so many orders. Some men can’t adapt to civilian life, you know. They go to pieces without the discipline and structure, without all their mates around them. They can never hold down regular jobs, because they can’t tolerate taking orders from people they don’t respect, and don’t like dealing with members of the public.’