Death Comes First (25 page)

‘Vogel, get a search team down here, would you,’ she ordered. ‘Oh, and check where the fuck CSI are.’

Clarke shook her head wryly. The familiar SOCOs, Scenes Of Crime Officers, had a year or two previously been ‘rebranded’ by most police forces as Crime Scene Investigators. They weren’t even police officers nowadays, but civilian staff who wore dark-blue uniforms bearing the CSI logo. Clarke thought it had given them an exaggerated sense of their own importance. That and the American TV series some of them seemed to think they were part of.

‘The paramedics are trampling all over the scene,’ she observed. ‘Let’s hope it’s worth it and they can keep Tanner alive.’

Vogel nodded, took his phone from his pocket, and started to move away from his senior officer. He hadn’t spoken a word to her since their arrival at the car park, except when she had directly addressed him.

‘Oh, and Vogel, stop fucking sulking,’ she called after him.

‘Don’t know what you mean, boss,’ replied Vogel, deadpan.

‘All right, I give in – we’ll have a chat at the end of the day,’ Clarke promised, rather against her better judgement.

Vogel smiled. Almost. It was more a stretching exercise with his lips, thought Clarke.

Sixteen

Henry Tanner showed signs of beginning to recover consciousness as he was being loaded into the ambulance which would take him to Southmead, the newly renovated and extended hospital complex that housed Bristol’s premier accident and emergency department.

His eyes flickered open then shut again. He raised one hand a few inches then let it drop. He moaned two or three times, and even seemed to be attempting to speak.

But Henry had received a nasty bang on the head and been shot. He was not a young man. None of those gathered in Traders’ Court, not even the paramedics, were in a position to speculate on Henry’s chances of recovery, even though the signs were encouraging.

DCI Clarke climbed into the ambulance alongside the injured man. Vogel made a move to follow.

‘No,’ commanded Nobby Clarke. ‘This won’t take the two of us. You go tell the family what’s happened. I’ll see what our Henry has to say when he’s a bit more lucid.’

I’ll bet you will, thought Vogel. And you don’t want me to know what that might be, either, I’m pretty damned sure of that.

‘I’d rather come with you, boss,’ he protested. ‘I feel I need to know more
 . . .
’

‘Just get on with it, Vogel,’ instructed the DCI. ‘I want this area properly checked out – have someone pull up all the CCTV in the vicinity. And ANPR too – let’s get the registration of every vehicle arriving and leaving the area around the time of the incident. You never know
 . . .
’

You certainly didn’t, thought Vogel. The Avon and Somerset Constabulary, in common with other police forces, was not even privy to where ANPR cameras were positioned. There was, however, a specialist team of civilian investigators trained to study and evaluate CCTV and ANPR footage.

‘Yes, boss,’ he muttered resignedly.

Clarke gestured for the paramedic nearest the open ambulance doors to shut them in the DI’s face.

Vogel stood back and watched as the ambulance trundled off. He doubted he was going to learn much more from Nobby Clarke. Not for the time being anyway. Even if she did fulfil her promise to brief him later, he had a feeling she might still be economical with the truth.

Clarke had always been open with information in the past. Whatever lay behind this curious business, it had to be something at government level; that was the world Nobby Clarke moved in nowadays. Vogel was beginning to suspect a cover-up, the sort of thing that allowed criminals to get away with their crimes. He had no time for that sort of thing. He was a copper, not some latter-day George Smiley.

But despite his reservations he did what he always did and got on with his job. As Nobby Clarke had told him to.

When he’d finished coordinating the search and forensic teams who would investigate the shooting, Vogel asked PC Bolton to drive him to Tarrant Park. He didn’t know for
certain that the family would be there, but he deemed it unlikely they would leave The Firs empty whilst young Fred Mildmay was still missing. On the way he called PC Saslow to tell her he was en route. She told him the family had not wanted her to stay the night, even though she had offered to do so, but that she was heading back there now.

‘I’m only about five minutes away, boss,’ she said. ‘Do you have some news.’

‘Not about the boy,’ Vogel replied. He told her about the shooting.

‘Shit,’ said Saslow.

‘Exactly,’ said Vogel.

He asked her not to say anything about the incident to Joyce Mildmay or anybody else until he got there.

It was midday by the time he arrived at Tarrant Park. Vogel had had only limited experience of missing persons cases, but he knew that no matter how remote the possibility, families continued to cling to the hope that their loved one might walk in unharmed at any second.

He was not to be disappointed. Joyce Mildmay’s first words when she opened the door were: ‘Have you got news of Fred?’

Vogel thought that was normal enough behaviour for a woman in her situation. Even though it quickly became apparent that she already knew her father had been shot.

Once she had ascertained that the DI’s visit was not directly linked to Fred’s disappearance, she told Vogel that her elder son and her mother had gone to the scene of the shooting, arriving soon after the ambulance conveying Henry Tanner to A & E had left, and presumably not long after Vogel had departed.

‘Mum called a few minutes ago,’ Joyce explained. ‘They’ve gone on to the hospital.’

She went on to say that her mother had been told by one of the police constables on duty at the scene that Henry had been unconscious but had appeared to be coming round when he was being loaded into the ambulance. Vogel made a mental note to find out which officer and give him a bollocking. It wasn’t a policeman’s place to give medical reports.

Joyce then led Vogel into the sitting room instead of the kitchen, where he assumed Molly and PC Saslow were.

‘I’d like to speak to you alone first, Mr Vogel,’ she said, closing the door firmly behind them.

He nodded, waiting for her to continue.

‘When Dad comes to, I bloody well want him to tell us why all this has happened. Because one thing’s certain, Mr Vogel: my father knows the answer. He has the answer to everything that happens in this bloody family.’

Joyce spat the words out. She seemed more angry than anything else. Vogel didn’t blame her. He too was angry at being kept in the dark; as deputy SIO he felt he had a right to know what was going on. And like Joyce, he suspected that Henry Tanner knew what had triggered the sequence of events culminating in his shooting.

Before he could compose a response to Joyce’s outburst, she spoke again.

‘They decided I should be the one to wait here, just in case there was news of Fred. But I must admit I’m beginning to question everything now. Maybe the real reason they don’t want me to go to the hospital is because they don’t want me near my father.’

‘Who do you mean by “they” Mrs Mildmay?’ asked Vogel.

Joyce Mildmay looked startled. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m saying. Ever since Fred disappeared I’ve been thinking Charlie was right, that there’s some sort of conspiracy. And I don’t know who’s behind it, do I? It’s got to the point where I don’t know if I can trust my own mother. Or my son – my lovely son Mark, who took charge of everything this morning. And then there’s my father. I’m damned sure I can’t trust my father. Charlie was obviously right about him. I mean, he’s got to have been mixed up in something, else he wouldn’t have been shot.’ The desperation was evident in her voice as she added, ‘I want to know what he has to say for himself.’

And that makes two of us, thought Vogel. Only he had been effectively banned from Henry Tanner’s bedside. Perhaps Joyce Mildmay was right, and they were both being prevented from hearing what Henry had to say.

‘I understand how you feel,’ he said.

‘I am going to see Dad, Mr Vogel,’ Joyce continued. ‘Whether the rest of them like it or not.’

‘Maybe we can talk again after you have done so,’ responded Vogel, a tad lamely, he thought. What he wanted to do was to go with her. But that wasn’t in his brief.

If Joyce heard what he said she showed no sign of it. She seemed to have her own agenda now.

‘I’m not waiting here any longer,’ she said. ‘If Fred comes back, he isn’t going to disappear again because I’m not here. I’m going to the hospital, and I’m taking Molly with me. I’m not letting my daughter out of my sight.’

Vogel was on the brink of offering to take her there, but even he drew the line at so blatantly disobeying the direct order of a senior officer.

Joyce stormed out of the sitting room and headed for the
kitchen. Vogel followed her. Molly and PC Saslow were sitting at the table. Vogel had an idea.

‘Saslow could go with you to the hospital – you shouldn’t be on your own,’ he told Joyce.

He was thinking that, even if he were not allowed near Henry Tanner, it might be possible that he could glean something second-hand from PC Saslow. Nobby Clarke might be less guarded with the young PC than she was with an experienced DI with legendary antennae.

Joyce glowered at him. ‘I don’t want or need a bloody nursemaid in blue. And I won’t be alone. I shall have my daughter with me.’

Vogel was in no position to insist. No family member had been accused of any crime. And that included Henry Tanner. He could only watch as Joyce led a distraught Molly out of the house and installed her in the passenger seat of the family Range Rover before climbing behind the wheel.

Meanwhile, Henry Tanner was lying in a private room in the spanking new Brunel building at Southmead Hospital. It even had a balcony. He’d been moved there from A & E as soon as the bullet lodged in his shoulder had been removed. He would require further surgery on his shattered bones, but had been told that was unlikely to be thought advisable until at least the following day.

Henry hadn’t had the strength to arrange the move himself, and he doubted that any of his family would have had the presence of mind to do so at such a time. The innovative design of the new Brunel building, and a budget unusually high for the NHS in the current climate, meant that the majority of patients at Southmead would soon be given private rooms with en suite facilities. And Henry was merely
one of a number already installed in such rooms. But he didn’t know that. He was convinced that he was being given privileged treatment because of who he was. And he was also convinced that he knew who had arranged it. There were people in high places whom he believed would not want him to remain in A & E in a state of delirium any longer than necessary, nor to be placed in a ward alongside other patients.

For the first time in his life, Henry was afraid, truly afraid, as he lay there, wondering who in the world he could trust, and how he was going to get the remains of his family out of this mess.

There was one person, he supposed. There always had been. He’d alerted Mr Smith as soon as Fred disappeared, and then again when he and Stephen Hardcastle had been taken to Lockleaze police station. And Mr Smith, whose weighty presence from afar had been part of his life for so long that Henry could barely remember a time without it, had delivered. Stephen’s interview had been brought to a close in the nick of time and the hounds, in the form of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, had been called off. Mr Smith had not, however, been able to throw any light on the matter of Fred’s disappearance. Neither, Henry feared, would Mr Smith be of much assistance in apprehending the sniper who had shot Henry that morning.

Henry suspected that the person responsible was not someone he had come into contact with due to his dealings with Mr Smith. It remained a possibility that the Mr Smith connection was at the root of it all, of course. But Henry didn’t think so.

Felicity and Mark were at Henry’s bedside. Though he had a terrible headache and his right shoulder was in agony, Henry was fully conscious. But he chose to continue to keep
his eyes shut most of the time, and to feign confusion when he did open them, because it suited him. Henry Tanner always did what suited him. Being shot wasn’t about to change that.

He wasn’t ready to answer questions from his wife or any of his family, come to that. And he certainly wasn’t ready to answer questions from the police.

Henry had taken over every aspect of Tanner-Max from his father, and had long ago come to the conclusion that only he could keep all aspects of the company’s activities operational. Charlie had turned out to be a grave disappointment; he was every bit as weak as he had described himself in that damned letter. And Henry despised weak men. Weak men had their uses, but they were dangerous. It was thanks to Charlie that cracks had begun to appear within the Tanner business and family, cracks that over the last few days had split into huge chasms. It was thanks to Charlie that Henry had been shot. And it was probably thanks to Charlie that young Fred had disappeared.

Henry had suspected from the start that Charlie had taken his own life. He’d been an experienced sailor, and the weather conditions when he’d disappeared had been favourable for the time of year.

Then there was the letter. That letter. Stephen Hardcastle had assured Henry it was not an uncommon occurrence for someone to write a letter to their nearest and dearest to be opened only after their death, even when the writer was a healthy and relatively young man. Henry was not so sure.

He had kept his suspicions to himself, but he knew things about Charlie, things of which nobody else in the family was aware. Least of all Joyce.

The pain emanating from Henry’s shoulder and coursing
through the entire right side of his body was excruciating. He had been injected with morphine earlier. The effects seemed to be wearing off with a vengeance. Henry Tanner had always been both physically and mentally an extremely strong man. However, he was almost seventy and he knew that this injury was sapping his strength. Not only physically. He didn’t have his usual mental strength either.