Jigsaw Man (9 page)

‘OK,' Tartaglia said, surprised at his vehemence. ‘Tell me a bit about their relationship,
their marriage.'

‘What's there to tell? Let's just say it had run its course and it was time to move
on.'

‘How did she feel about it?'

‘How did she
feel
?' Armstrong looked puzzled, as though it was an odd question. ‘Upset
to start with, I guess. Nobody likes being yesterday's news.'

His tone was matter-of-fact, but genuine feelings, such as those Tartaglia sensed
when talking to Lisa Armstrong, were not so easily dismissed. Maybe in Armstrong
and English's
world feelings didn't matter, or didn't exist; maybe money was all
that counted and people could be bought off.

‘Could she have had a hand in his disappearance, do you think?' Tartaglia asked.

Armstrong looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Bumped him off ? I did wonder, what with his
disappearing so soon after he filed for divorce. But if she was mixed up in it, she'd
have needed help. I had McCann watch her – cost an arm and a leg – but according
to McCann there was no evidence she was seeing someone else.'

‘Was Richard English seeing anybody else?'

‘A girlfriend, you mean?'

Tartaglia nodded.

‘Nobody serious.'

‘I'll need her name and details when we're done.'

Armstrong sighed. ‘You're wasting your time. She knows nothing.' He leaned forward
towards Tartaglia. ‘Look, Inspector, neither of us was born with a silver spoon and
we made it up the ladder the hard way. As far as Richard was concerned, the business
was his family. He put everything into it and it was everything to him. Nothing else
mattered.'

Tartaglia wondered if Armstrong was actually speaking for himself, although what
he said tallied with Lisa English's account of what her husband had been like. But
maybe Mike McCann would be able to reveal another angle.

‘So, you'd describe Richard English as ruthless?'

‘Single-minded, focussed, obsessive. Like all successful people, very driven.'

‘If anything or anyone got in his way he'd remove them?'

‘Yes. Though without breaking the law, obviously.'

‘I hear you inherit some of Mr English's shares if he's declared dead. Is it a meaningful
amount?'

‘It gives me just enough for control of the business. That's the whole point of it.'

‘How much are they worth?'

‘The company's not quoted, but based on our last set of accounts and the valuation
formula we use, they probably come to a few million pounds, that's all. But they're
voting shares, as I said. The strategic value is worth a lot more than that to me.
My will is made out in Richard's favour in exactly the same way.' He made it sound
as though nothing could be more natural and fair.

Armstrong surely couldn't be so disingenuous, and it was Tartaglia's turn to smile.
‘Yes, but you're sitting here, alive, Mr Armstrong, while he's missing.'

Armstrong's expression hardened. ‘Before you go getting any silly ideas, I wouldn't
have harmed a hair on Richard's head and I miss him more than anything. He was closer
to me than anyone.'

Tartaglia returned his stare. ‘Then what do
you
think happened to him? You must have
a theory?'

Ian Armstrong leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘Honest to God, Inspector, I've
absolutely no idea. I've thought about little else for the last two years, I can
tell you, and I'd give a lot more than my right arm to find out.'

Even though he spoke forcefully, it didn't ring true. He must have formed some sort
of an idea, however unlikely, about what had happened and why his business partner
had disappeared without warning off the face of the earth. Given that he seemed
to want to solve the mystery, it was odd that he didn't want to share his thoughts.
They would need to look into English's finances, but assuming he wasn't in financial
trouble, it gave Lisa English a strong motive to get rid of him. There was also the
possibility that he was in some other kind of hot
water and had needed to disappear.
Maybe he had arranged it all to look as though he had been murdered, or possibly
he and Lisa had arranged it together and the so-called split was just a cover story.
But if so, who were the other victims in the burnt-out car?

Outside in the street, it had stopped raining. Tartaglia took a few deep breaths
of the cold, damp air as he walked quickly along to where Minderedes was parked.
He was struck again by the force of Armstrong's denial when he had suggested that
English might have kept secrets from him, or might have planned to disappear without
involving him. The reaction had seemed genuine, but maybe the man was a good actor.

The BMW idled in the parking bay, windscreen wipers flipping back and forth rhythmically.
Tartaglia opened the door, slid into the warm passenger seat and stretched out his
legs. Minderedes was still on his phone.

‘He's here now,' he said to whoever was at the other end, glancing over quickly at
Tartaglia. ‘OK. I'll tell him.' He hung up. ‘That was the Guv'nor. She wanted to
know if we'd heard anything from Sam. I said we hadn't, so I think she's going to
send Sharon over to see her.'

‘Good idea,' Tartaglia replied. Donovan had been asleep when he left home early that
morning, or at least the bedroom door had been closed, with no sign of a light on
the other side. Things had been moving so fast since then that he'd had no time to
call her to check how she was, let alone find out what was going on with the Dillon
investigation. ‘Any news on the DNA?'

‘Not yet. They're still checking all the relevant databases. In the meantime, I've
arranged to meet the first wife.'

‘What about the son? When can we get a DNA sample?'

‘She's ringing the school to sort it. Someone from the local station will be going
out there to take the swab. Where to now?'

‘I need to make a call. Did you ever come across a DI called Mike McCann when you
were working up in Hendon?'

Nine

Tartaglia managed to get hold of Mike McCann almost immediately and had arranged
to meet him in a coffee bar around the corner from the PI's office, just off Tottenham
Court Road. Although the lunch hour was nearly over, the place was still full, with
a queue stretching almost to the door. McCann sat hunched over a table at the back,
reading a well-thumbed copy of the
Independent.

‘Didn't know you were a veggie,' Tartaglia remarked, sitting down after the initial
pleasantries and scanning the short but interesting-sounding menu.

‘I'm not,' McCann replied, his Northern Irish accent undiluted by more than twenty
years of living in London. ‘But it's the best place for miles. I could almost give
up meat if my wife could learn to cook this sort of thing.'

Of medium height and build, with thinning brown hair and regular features, McCann
had the sort of unremarkable looks that helped him blend into any crowd. He had worked
undercover, both in his native Belfast during the Troubles and then for the Met for
several years, before moving to a less frontline role. He had happily opted for early
retirement and the last time Tartaglia had seen him was a few years back at his leaving
do, in a pub near the Peel Centre in Hendon. McCann had subsequently set up in business
as a private investigator with another ex-policeman, and word on the grapevine was
that they were doing very well.

McCann ordered a plate of Moroccan-style meze, while Tartaglia decided on wild mushroom-stuffed
pitta bread and a
salad. The place wasn't licensed and both men chose coffees from
a small but exotic list on the blackboard.

‘So, you think you've found Richard English?' McCann said.

‘We're not sure it's him yet, but there's a good chance. I need to find out more
about what happened.' He didn't want to be evasive with McCann, but the less he said
for the moment, the better.

McCann shifted in his seat, folded his hands on the table in front of him and gave
him a look that said he understood the score. ‘Well, Ian Armstrong brought me in
after about a week, when there was no result from the missing person investigation.
I can't fault what the team did, but you know what it's like.'

Tartaglia nodded. Missing Person investigations were a question of priorities and
resources, and he was familiar with the statistics. Every year, in the UK, roughly
two hundred thousand people went missing, usually of their own volition. Almost all
turned up within a year of their disappearance and only a small number were never
found.

‘I got a look at the file,' McCann continued, ‘and there was no indication that any
crime had been committed. Armstrong insisted that English wasn't in any sort of financial
trouble, so the general view was that he must have had some sort of mid life crisis
or breakdown and had gone off somewhere, either on his own or possibly with a woman.'

‘What's your view?'

McCann shrugged. ‘He's not the type. No history of mental illness or issues with
self-confidence; if anything, the opposite. He'd just initiated divorce proceedings
and had moved out of the marital home. I interviewed a good cross-section of people
who knew him – immediate family and friends of course – and
people he worked with,
as well as a couple of his clients. Nobody gave me the impression he was the sort
of man who'd just wander off without telling anybody, or be led astray by the female
sex.'

Tartaglia nodded. McCann's judgement was usually acute, and what he said tallied
with the little he himself had already learned that day. ‘Could there be some other
reason why he wanted to make himself scarce, I wonder?'

‘It's one of the first things I considered. But the man's the type who cares about
how he puts his toothpaste on his toothbrush, and how the tube is squeezed.'

‘I'm warming more and more to him by the minute.'

McCann's rubbery mask of a face cracked into a wide grin. ‘If he'd decided to disappear,
for whatever reason, he'd have planned it all very carefully. Instead, he leaves
all sorts of unfinished business and loose ends, not least a highly important meeting
to raise more cash for one of his new little pet ventures, as well as on going divorce
proceedings. I quickly came to the conclusion that something must have happened to
throw him off track.'

A teenage waitress came over with their coffees, which she plonked down unceremoniously
in front of them, before moving on to the next table to take an order.

‘Foul play, you mean?' Tartaglia said, once she was out of earshot, mopping his saucer
with a couple of paper napkins.

McCann tipped the contents of his saucer back into the cup and took a gulp. ‘Or something
blew up in his face and he was forced to react on the spur of the moment. But I have
to tell you, we found no hint of anything like that, so foul play seems the most
likely. We know he arrived at Heathrow that morning from Edinburgh, and records for
his mobile show he used it twice in and around the airport after he landed. One call
was
to the office, the other to a shop about a pair of shotguns he'd ordered. CCTV
footage at Heathrow shows him going down into the tube for the Heathrow Express.
He was carrying a small suitcase and that's the last we see of him. The suitcase
was never found, by the way. A couple of the cameras at Paddington were on the blink
so we have no visual, but the last location we have for his smartphone was in one
of the side streets off Paddington station. We assume he went out to look for a taxi.
He was living in a serviced apartment in Mayfair close to the office and, according
to what he told his secretary, he was intending to go back there to drop off his
things and change. We offered a substantial reward for information, but no taxi
drivers came forward to say they picked him up near the station and there's no sign
he ever made it back to his flat. The next thing we considered is that somewhere
en route he'd had an accident or been mugged, and lost his ID. We checked with all
the local hospitals and mortuaries, but nobody matching his description had been
brought in either injured or dead. We monitored his bank accounts and credit cards
but the last transaction was at Edinburgh Airport that morning, when he took out
a thousand pounds in cash.'

‘That's a lot.'

McCann shook his head. ‘Not for him. He liked to pay for things in cash.'

‘If he'd decided to disappear, he'd have needed help. Was the split with the wife
genuine, in your view?'

‘From what I can tell.'

‘Then the obvious person to help him would be Ian Armstrong.'

McCann looked at him with watery eyes. ‘I agree, but why bring me in, then? Why not
just leave it to the police
investigation? They were going nowhere with it fast.
Instead, he spends a small fortune trying to find out what really happened.'

‘Maybe it's a smokescreen. He can certainly afford it.'

McCann shook his head. ‘I don't see the point; plus he seemed genuinely worried,
almost panicked, I'd say.'

‘He didn't seem like a man easily panicked when I saw him this morning.'

‘This was two years ago. Maybe “panicked” is a bit strong. Let's say he was surprisingly
emotional, even a little paranoid, for someone like him. Unless he's one of the best
bloody actors I've ever seen, he wanted Richard English found, and preferably alive,
PDQ.'

‘Had either of them received any threats?'

‘Armstrong said “no”, quite categorically. I have to say I didn't come across anything
to suggest it, although if they
had
been receiving threats from somewhere, it's not
something they'd be happy to advertise.'