Charlie (6 page)

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told herself, walking on, holding her head high. ‘It’s your home, you have a perfect right to go in there.’

She stopped short as she rounded the bend and saw two cars parked by the garage. One was a new dark blue Rover which looked vaguely familiar, the other was a dark green Morris Minor. Obviously the owners were in the house. A sudden surge of irrational anger rose up inside her. The police had got her mother’s permission to go in there the day after her attack, but Charlie didn’t think they had any cause to return. And even if they had, surely they would have informed her of it?

Full of indignation, she opened the gate, marched up to the front door and let herself in with her key. To her astonishment the house was clearly in the process of being thoroughly searched. The bookshelves in the small sitting room to the left of the front door were bare, the books lying in piles on the floor. In the drawing room to the right, the bureau was open and letters and bills had clearly been leafed through. Only her parents’ bedroom appeared untouched, and male voices were coming from upstairs.

Charlie faltered for a moment, afraid it might be the men who hurt her mother, but her anger was much stronger than her fear. Pinpointing the voices as coming from her father’s study, which was next to her bedroom, she picked up the cast-iron doorstop and crept up the stairs, then kicked the closed door open, brandishing the doorstop.

Two men were bent over the filing cabinet. ‘What do you think you’re doing in my house?’ she shouted.

They both looked up. One was so surprised he dropped the batch of letters in his hands. She was relieved they weren’t the same men who hurt her mother, they were much too small and old.

Before they could reply, the door partly closed again, then to her surprise James Wyatt appeared from behind it. ‘Charlie!’ he exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

James Wyatt was a friend of her parents, she had met him at several parties here at the house. Now she remembered that the new blue Rover was his. ‘I just came to water the houseplants,’ she said, feeling a trifle foolish. ‘This is my home, remember! What are these men doing?’

‘We’re police officers. CID,’ the smaller and older of the two men said, his face cold and clearly irritated by the interruption. ‘We do have a search warrant and Mr Wyatt is accompanying us because he is your father’s lawyer.’

Charlie’s stomach lurched. The man’s curt manner implied he was searching for evidence of a crime and she had no business to be here.

‘I thought you said Miss Weish had been informed about the search?’ Wyatt said to the men. He came right out of the room and took the doorstop from Charlie’s hand, putting his arm around her shoulders in a protective gesture.

‘We thought she had been too, must have been a slip-up,’ the policeman shrugged. He managed a tight smile. ‘We’re almost through here anyway, miss.’

‘But what are you looking for?’ Charlie asked.

The other man picked up the papers he had dropped, not even glancing in her direction. The older one gave a sort of shrug and looked at Wyatt as if expecting him to explain.

‘Come downstairs with me, Charlie,’ Wyatt said. ‘We’ll make some tea and have a chat while they finish up.’

Down in the kitchen the blinds were drawn and the table was strewn with the contents of a drawer Sylvia used for odds and ends. There were letters, odd bills and receipts, rubber bands and pieces of string.

Mr Wyatt let the blind up at the window and put the kettle on. Charlie looked at him curiously. He was dressed in a dark pin-striped suit with a stiff collar on his shirt. On all the other occasions she’d met him he had been casually dressed and she hadn’t known what his profession was. He was a tall, well-built man with a hearty voice and a face to match. She remembered he shared her love of tennis; the last time he’d called at the house they had talked about Wimbledon.

She didn’t know him very well, any more than she did most of her parents’ friends, but the impression she’d got of him on several meetings was favourable – he wasn’t snooty and he’d always been nice to talk to. Charlie thought she could trust him because her father obviously had.

‘I’m very sorry you had to walk in and find all this,’ Wyatt said, scooping up the contents of the drawer and putting it back where it belonged. ‘After all you’ve been through already, this must seem appalling. I was intending to call at the Mellings’ this evening to talk to you, after I’d seen your mother again. But maybe it’s best that you are here now, at least we’ll have some privacy.’

He turned away for a moment to make the tea. When he got milk from the fridge he sniffed it to make sure it hadn’t gone off.

‘Good old Mrs Brown’s been in,’ he said with a boyish grin. ‘It’s as fresh as a daisy. I shall have to pop up to see her too today. It’s not fair on her to be so unsure about her position here.’

They sat down at the kitchen table and Mr Wyatt cleared his throat and took a sip of tea before speaking. ‘What I need to tell you is going to be difficult, Charlie,’ he said apologetically. ‘Now, if I seem brusque, it’s not that I don’t care about your feelings, just that I want to explain it all as simply and clearly as possible.’

Charlie nodded.

‘Your father is a friend along with being a client and as such it’s my duty to protect you and your mother to the best of my ability in his absence.’

Charlie felt sick; that word
protect
suggested he knew something even worse was going to happen soon.

‘While the police’s primary concern was with catching the two men who attacked Sylvia, your father’s continuing absence has changed the direction of their investigations,’ he went on.

‘You don’t mean they think he had something to do with it, do you?’ Charlie interrupted him.

Wyatt looked apprehensive. ‘I’m quite sure he wasn’t responsible for it,’ he said quickly. ‘But the two things must be related in some way. I’m sure you can see that?’

‘I think those men came here to find Dad,’ Charlie said. ‘Might they have found him and hurt him too?’ Just voicing this tiny fear she’d had in the back of her mind made it seem larger and more plausible.

‘I think that’s unlikely,’ Wyatt said. ‘But trying to find your father has made it necessary for the police to look into his business interests. Unfortunately, some unexpected and very significant details have come to their notice which put a whole new slant on their investigation.’

‘I don’t understand. What details?’ Charlie asked. ‘Do you mean they’ve found he’s been doing something bad?’

Wyatt looked uncomfortable and ran one finger round the collar of his shirt.

‘Not exactly. It’s more like odd things which don’t fit into the image we all had of your father.’

‘Like what for instance?’ she asked with some indignation.

‘Well, that he used to be a club owner in Soho?’

Charlie’s eyebrows shot up into two inverted ‘V’ shapes.

‘So you didn’t know either! Oh dear!’ Wyatt grimaced. ‘I was shocked myself. In all the ten years I have known him as a friend and a client, he never even gave me a hint about it. I imagined he’d been in the importing business all his life.’

‘What’s wrong with owning a night-club?’ Charlie was instantly on the defensive.

Wyatt looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Well, discovering something like that, Charlie, is a bit like finding a locked box. If we could find the key to open it, we might find something inside which would help us to understand why those men hurt your mother.’

‘Can’t Mum help?’

Wyatt sighed deeply. ‘I have tried to talk to her, but I didn’t make any headway. She’s so very angry. Of course that’s understandable under the circumstances, she’s in pain, her husband has disappeared, and her future looks grim to her.’ He paused and frowned. ‘She claims she knew nothing about his business, she even denied all knowledge of any clubs. I can’t tell if she’s speaking the truth or whether she’s trying to shield Jin.’

‘But why, and from what?’ Charlie asked. Her stomach was churning, she could feel a cold sweat trickling down the back of her neck.

Wyatt shrugged. ‘That could be what’s in the locked box! Maybe she only suspects something and someone, and she’s playing for time hoping Jin will get back to sort it out. But the most worrying thread in all this is money.’

Charlie was confused and frightened now. ‘Money?’

‘Yes, Charlie, money, or rather the lack of it. Now, forgive me if you don’t understand all this, stop me if you want something explained more fully.

’Last year your father borrowed a great deal of money against this house. It was free and clear before that as he’d bought it with cash. He said he needed capital to expand his business and I handled the legal side of it for him. The mortgage company checked his accounts and as they were entirely satisfied with his credit-worthiness he received the money he needed in the early part of this year.

‘When someone disappears, Charlie, one of the first things to be checked is a bank account, to see when and where it was last used. It was while doing that that the police discovered he had drawn out sixty thousand pounds in cash, plus everything from a savings account, and indeed almost emptying his current account, some months ago. He arranged it through a bank in central London.’

‘Well, that’s no one’s business but his,’ Charlie said indignantly. ‘It’s his money after all.’

‘Of course it is,’ Mr Wyatt said quickly. ‘But in the light of his disappearance, and added to other things the police have found, it is rather suspicious.’

‘What other things?’ She didn’t like the way this ‘chat’ was going at all.

‘Well, they’ve found several unpaid bills, and it seems Jin is seriously behind with the mortgage payments on the house too. In fact the only thing we can find which has been paid was his life insurance, that was by standing order at the bank.’

Charlie gulped. She didn’t fully understand what a mortgage meant, but she had the gist of what Mr Wyatt was getting at. Her dad had robbed Peter to pay Paul, but he’d overlooked the bills back home.

‘What happens if someone doesn’t pay their mortgage?’ she asked, her voice trembling.

Wyatt sighed. ‘Well, the very worst thing that can happen is that the mortgage company repossesses the house. That means they take it back. Of course, if Jin gets back in time and pays the arrears, everything will be fine.’

At this point they were interrupted by the police calling to him from the middle floor. Wyatt went up to speak to them. Charlie crept out to listen, but apart from hearing them mention some papers they were taking with them, the rest of their conversation was too muffled to follow. They left then and Wyatt came back downstairs into the kitchen looking extremely worried.

He sat down at the table again.

‘What is it?’ she asked after what seemed to be an interminable silence. ‘Did the police find something else?’

He looked at her, and his eyes dropped from her firm gaze. ‘Yes, Charlie,’ he said at length. ‘Something I hadn’t anticipated and it’s very serious. The last thing I want to do now when you already have so much anxiety is add to it. But as your family lawyer I would be derelict in my duties if I kept you and your mother in the dark about what is happening. What the police have just found was a registered letter. It was signed for by your mother, but unopened amongst a batch of others. It was from the Inland Revenue, warning your father that a bankruptcy order would be issued against him unless they received what he owed them within ten days.’

Charlie didn’t understand. Bankruptcy was a word she’d read occasionally in the papers but she didn’t know its real meaning.

Seeing her bewilderment, Wyatt explained it in simple terms. He also stated they had found other demands for this amount earlier in the day.

‘I don’t suppose he imagined they would press him for it so quickly,’ he went on. ‘I expect this deal he had up his sleeve was intended to sort everything out. Unfortunately the Inland Revenue do not wait indefinitely. As far as they are concerned, when the ten days are up and no payment is on their desk, that’s it. That ten days passed some time ago.’

‘But surely if we explain to them that my dad didn’t see it and that we don’t know where he is, they’ll understand?’

James Wyatt was moved by the girl’s naivety. Just one look at her was enough to know all she’d ever had to do was ask and she received it. From her stylishly cut hair, trendy mini-dress, confident manner and cultured voice, everything about her said ‘money’. But if the money was gone, she had some hard knocks coming to her.

James Wyatt was just a family lawyer, he handled wills, divorces, trusts and house purchases in the main, bankruptcy or criminal law wasn’t his bag. What he’d stumbled on here now was well out of his sphere, and if he was honest with himself, he didn’t want any part of it.

When the police called on him immediately after Sylvia’s attack and asked for his assistance, he’d steadfastly refused to believe Jin’s disappearance was anything other than a coincidence. Jin was something of a dark horse, he rarely spoke about his business and never about his personal life, but in Wyatt’s book those were admirable qualities, he had no time for men who boasted about their wealth and success.

Yet as the days had passed and disquieting facts surfaced, so he’d begun to have his doubts about the man he’d always trusted implicitly.

It looked very much as if Jin was an unscrupulous bounder. He might not have anticipated the Inland Revenue would take such action so soon, but he had known the tax was well overdue, and that he hadn’t met the mortgage payments and other bills. Why, then, had he drawn out all that money in cash and disappeared?

To the police it had begun to look as if he’d hired those men to hurt his wife, perhaps hoping it would lead them to believe he’d been murdered by the same gang and his body disposed of. As they had said so succinctly, Jin wouldn’t be the first man to go to such lengths to start a new life, with a new identity.

On top of his anxiety about becoming embroiled in a case which might affect his own standing in the community, Wyatt was very puzzled by Sylvia Weish’s attitude. Her anger and distress at being crippled were understandable enough, but why wouldn’t she speak out about what she knew of her husband’s business, unless she knew for certain that to do so might precipitate more trouble and hurt for herself? She was such a difficult woman to read, on one hand she seemed entirely self-centred, complaining loudly about her treatment in hospital and demanding to be moved to a private nursing home, on the other she seemed terrified of everything and everyone.