Dead on Demand (A DCI Morton Crime Novel) (29 page)

'I don't-a know him!'

As Morton was about to berate him further someone knocked on the door.

'Come in,' Morton said, edging away from the floored man.

A deputy walked in, his eyebrow cocked at the scene in front of him.

'He fell over.' Morton knew he was convincing no one.

'OK. Got some results back for you, boss.' He handed him an envelope.

Morton tore open the strip at the top and decanted the contents into his hands.

Antonio Milano's DNA didn't match. He didn't kill Yosef Gershwin.

***

The list was getting shorter by the hour. A number had been interviewed by deputies, and all had alibis for the time of the killing. None had any connection to Yosef Gershwin.

There were three possible suspects left when Morton struck gold. Anthony Duvall was a low-level drugs dealer who had spent time at Her Majesty's pleasure, and his previous line-up photos, while out of date, did conform to the CCTV upon a visual inspection.

Morton pulled up his address in the system; it was still listed, as his parole was fairly recent and the system hadn't been purged since. It was local.

He shouted for a few deputies to join him. This time they were taking no chances. They would surround the property with enough deputies to guarantee they nailed their man.

Thirty minutes later, and they were outside in unmarked vehicles. They couldn't afford to spook their man lest someone else end up getting hurt. Morton hung back. He was under strict instructions from HR not to take any risks. One more bullet or blade, and that would be the end of his career.

It was with great trepidation that he kept back, waiting near the entrance to the apartment building. There were two doors into the building, and each was manned by two officers. No one would go in or out without their say-so, and Morton was fully prepared to go door-to-door to find their man. This time, they had found him. Morton knew it in his gut.

The first two deputies, McShane and Dockerty, were given the go-ahead to advance. Six flights up they paused on the landing to make sure neither had built up an oxygen debt.

'Ready?'

Dockerty nodded. Flat 617 was just down the hall.

'Police! Open up!'

A chain rattled, and the door inched open.

'Got some ID?' Anthony Duvall was cool as a cucumber.

Dockerty flashed his badge, and the door slammed shut. He expected to hear the chain rattle again, and the door open. Instead he heard the toilet flush.

'Open her up!' McShane slammed the battering ram into the door. It stayed in one piece, but swung open. Anthony Duvall could be seen flushing packages down the toilet.

'Drugs? He thought we were here for drugs?' Dockerty was quizzical.

'Aye. Well, we arrest the laddie for possession, process him and let Morton deal with 'im after that.'

Dockerty nodded and stepped towards Duvall.

'Anthony Duvall, you are under arrest for possession of a controlled substance. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?'

He nodded.

'Cart him away.'

CHAPTER 55: TAPED

'We've got the bastard.' This time, CCTV analysis confirmed the match. They could hold initially him thanks to the drugs charge. Morton had tried to start the interrogation as soon as he was in-station, but the greasy bastard had clammed up and demanded a lawyer within seconds of their opening fresh tapes.

'Get the Crown Prosecution Service on the phone. I may need them to extend the time period for detention.' The police could detain without charge for 36 hours before they needed to go to court. They would charge him with the drugs, but there was the possibility he'd make bail on that charge at the first hearing, and they might need to keep him off the streets a bit longer. With a magistrate agreeing they could keep him for 72 hours.

'Is his lawyer here yet? Good. Let's go.' He wanted another officer watching from the one-way mirror to see if their opinions matched.

'Afternoon, Mr Duvall.' The politeness was for the lawyer, not the suspect.

'I'm Theodore Leigh, and I represent Mr Duvall.' The portly lawyer rose, extending a pudgy hand to Morton. Morton waved it away. Leigh did not look like a typical defence solicitor. He was too well-dressed, even wearing a waistcoat. All that was missing was a pocket watch, and then Morton would have sworn on record that he had been transported back in time.

'Detective Chief Inspector David Morton. For the benefit of the tape, have you had time to counsel your client?'

'I have.' Leigh had been given thirty minutes' grace before both lawyer and client were hauled into the interview suite.

'Mr Duvall. Where were you on Tuesday afternoon?'

Duvall's face dropped. He thought he was in on simple drug possession charges, and had suddenly realised the extent of the trouble he was in.

'Can't remember.'

'That's unfortunate. Mr Leigh, have you explained to your client that the courts can draw an adverse inference from Mr Duvall's non-cooperation?' The question was intended to stick the needles in Duvall, but he sat there looking smug, the panic of the previous moment shuttered down behind glassy eyes as if someone had flipped a switch.

When he got no response, Morton continued.

'Were you at the car park of Greagor, Gershwin and Hopkins LLP on Tuesday afternoon?'

Duvall didn't dare lie directly. He simply shrugged, a slight glare thrown in the inspector's direction.

'Silence won't help you, Mr Duvall. We have blood evidence that links you to the scene.' The tests hadn't come back yet, but the police were allowed to lie to a suspect. He was pushing the limits of his ethical obligations, but he squared the white lie with his conscience with ease. It wasn't even a fallacy anyway, as the results were bound to come back positive.

Duvall's face paled, and he turned to whisper to his lawyer. It was the lawyer who spoke next.

'He wants to cut a deal.' The lawyer confirmed Morton's suspicions, forcing him to conceal a thin smile.

'Deal? He killed someone in cold blood.'

'That may be true, but there's more to it than that.'

'In what way?'

'He was put up to it. You want the big boss, not the little guy.'

'Interview terminated. 16:32. I need to speak to the prosecutor. If he agrees to a deal, I'll listen to what you've got to say. If it's no good, your client is going down for murder.'

'Fine with us,' Duvall said in a confident voice.

Morton left, wondering what the hell he had just stumbled into.

***

'The lab report came back in a rush. DNA confirmed that Anthony Duvall was involved in the altercation with Yosef Gershwin.'

'Then why are you asking me to cut a deal?' Kiaran O'Connor looked perplexed. He had known David Morton for years. Not once had he suggested a deal.

'I don't want to. I want this guy bang to rights.'

'Best I can do for him is manslaughter anyway, conditional on a guilty plea. The judge can still send him down for life.'

'I don't like this.' Morton switched sides, knowing that he could let the lawyer back himself into a corner. It was a technique he had perfected on suspects.

'Let's offer the deal, and see what he has to say.'

'Fine.'

Kiaran went into the interview suite first. It was no longer solely a police interrogation.

'Mr Duvall, I am willing to drop the charge to constructive-act manslaughter if and only if the information you provide is sufficiently valuable. I will decide that in my sole discretion.'

'That don't seem fair. You deciding, that is.'

'It's what I'm offering.' The lawyer entrenched his position.

'Naw. He decides.' Duvall gestured at Morton.

No one looked more surprised than Duvall's lawyer. Leigh almost sputtered as he took a sip of his water.

Morton shrugged.

'Let's hear it then.'

'That Gershwin guy stiffed me. He agreed to kill someone for me, and in return I was going to kill for him. Only he didn't do it, kept making excuses.'

'You move in different social circles. How'd you find him?' Morton 's tone was sceptical. It was only curiosity driving him; he didn't think there was any deal in this, yet.

'On the Internet.'

'We searched his computer, and didn't find anything.'

Duvall should have looked crestfallen, but instead he became even more smug.

'That's cause we used a darknet, didn't we?'

'You what?'

'A private network. Heard about 'em in prison. It's not on Google or anything, you just connect port-to-port.'

Morton was in over his head. The terms meant nothing. Thankfully Kiaran was more up-to-date. 'So you used an anonymous group to find each other?'

'Yeah, it's like a newsgroup, man. I use it for dealing weed.' That explained what he was flushing. With a class C substance, it was hardly worth bringing him in for just the drugs.

'Onion routing?'

'Yeah, man. All peer-to-peer stuff. We connected through Tor.' He named a common program for concealing his Internet presence.

'How'd you modify it?'

'Some white dude over the Silicon roundabout fixed us up. Said something about adding more latency to the darknet. Meant we couldn't be monitored, anyway. I don't know exactly how it works.'

'Can you show us?'

'Does this mean I've got a deal?'

'If we bust this network wide open, then yes, you've got your deal.'

CHAPTER 56: DARKNET

The dark web wasn't something Morton readily understood. The idea of swapping murders on the Internet was anathema to traditional policing, and was unlike anything he had come across in his three decades with the Met.

Still, he logged on quickly enough, and found Yosef's message in Ant's inbox. It occurred to Morton that while it wasn't the perfect crime, it might well be the perfect defence. Without prosecution knowledge of the murder swap plan it easily gave rise to reasonable doubt. A half-decent defence lawyer would have a field day pointing the finger at everyone else in sight.

Morton wondered how Yosef knew about the darknet, and what else he might have used it for. Ant's messages were less than subtle. Punks scoring weed online was nothing new, but Gershwin was a respected architect, not a petty thief.

'You.' He collared the nearest deputy as one ambled by his open office door.

'Yes, sir?'

'Get me Gershwin's laptop, and send someone up from IT when it gets here.'

The man nodded briskly, and set about his task.

It didn't take long to arrive. A deputy was sent straight out to fetch the laptop from among the late Mr Gershwin's possessions. Morton felt a certain chill as he rifled through it, but it was no longer simply a dead man's property; it was evidence in a murder investigation, and one that might lead him to a larger network of criminality.

'We have a suspect in custody who claims to have used a darknet to secure a deal whereby he would kill someone in return for someone's killing for him. I need to get into this laptop.'

'Yes sir. May I?' He gestured at the spare seat next to the desk.

Before long his fingers were typing at lightning speed, prising open the dead man's system to expose it for Morton to see. As he worked, Morton lazily read his name badge, Conway Lee.

Morton's coffee had cooled to room temperature when the laptop bleeped acceptance of its new master.

'We're in.' Conway announced, pride tingeing his speech.

'Good. I need to know who he talked to, and when.'

'Looks like just one darknet contact, sir, but this laptop is only a few months old.'

'I assume that the contact is Mr Anthony Duvall?'

'Doesn't have a name, sir. Got the messages Duvall sent? I can see if they match.'

Morton passed him the printout Duvall's lawyer had faxed over.

'Nope, he's not the one, sir.'

'What? That can't be right.'

'I'm afraid so, sir. The exchange in your printout doesn't match. Duvall demands performance in his messages, but Mr Gershwin didn't receive those messages.'

'There's a third person involved.' Morton surmised, absentmindedly drinking his cold coffee.

'I'd agree with that.'

'It's not just one murder swap, but a whole web. The question is, who's the puppet master?'

'Perhaps, sir, but I think it's more of a chain than a web. It had to start somewhere, right?'

***

Morton laid out all the unsolved death cases from the last three months on the conference table. He went back to the date on the first message Gershwin and Duvall had responded to.

The case files relating to the deaths of Eleanor Murphy, Janet Morgan, Vanhi Deepak and Barry Fitzgerald joined Yosef Gershwin on the table.

As their faces stared vacantly up at him, Morton realised he only wanted the cases where the suspect had no apparent connection to the victim. That removed Janet Morgan from contention. Her husband had almost certainly killed her; they just couldn't prove it. She clearly wasn't linked to the other deaths. Murphy was the earliest death that there was no other suspect for.

All of the others had died at the hands of someone who appeared to be a complete stranger. Gershwin had died by Duvall's hand, and Fitzgerald was killed in a spectacularly anonymous fashion on the ferry to Le Havre.

'Wasn't Fitzgerald involved in that other odd case, sir?' asked the deputy assisting him for the afternoon, Rob Dean.

'Oh yes, the death by self-defence case. Peter Sugden.'

Something clicked as he said the name. Sugden had been involved in an FSA investigation. Were the two connected? Morton made a mental note to contact Michael Burrows at the FSA.

'Five deaths? Nothing to link them. Get me their laptops.'

'On it, sir.'

'You do that; I'll phone the FSA.'

***

'Does the term darknet mean anything to you?'

'No, enlighten me.' Burrows' tone was too polite, as if he was humouring the detective.