Make Them Pay (14 page)

The first thing that Fischer produced when we arrived at his office was one of the DVDs he had seized from Trudi Schmidt’s apartment. He crossed the office and inserted the DVD into a video player.

The opening scene was of a naked woman lying on a bed. She was joined by a black man and they engaged in sexual intercourse. At first, the man’s face was not visible, but a few frames later he turned to face the camera.

‘The girl is Trudi Schmidt,’ said Horst.

‘Bloody hell, and that guy’s Samson Adekunle,’ exclaimed Dave.

‘Ah, I think that is the name of one of your victims,
ja
?’ said Fischer.

‘Yes, he was the man whose body we found at a house in Paddington,’ I said. ‘He’d been severely beaten and then shot. It’s our belief that he was tortured to reveal Eberhardt’s email address, and that the murderer then sent an email to Eberhardt persuading him to come to England. And you told me that you’d found those emails on Eberhardt’s computer, Horst.’

‘
Ja
, that is so.’

In the next scene a young white man climbed on to the bed and joined in the fun with Adekunle.

‘I wonder who he is,’ said Dave.

I turned to Fischer. ‘Is there any way of finding out that man’s identity, Horst?’ I asked.

‘I’ll speak to the Vice Squad again, Harry. They’re in touch with the company that made the videos and they might know who he is. I’ll let you know.’

From Fischer’s office, we visited Trudi Schmidt’s apartment at Glockestrasse. Fischer had done a good job in searching the place, but Dave and I spent an hour going through everything that was there. Regrettably, we found nothing that would further our investigation.

Hans Eberhardt’s house was interesting, but failed to reveal anything that we didn’t already know about. We examined the sophisticated printing press and it was clear that no expense had been spared in setting up the boiler-room scam. But given that this little team had extracted millions from gullible punters they could obviously afford the best.

‘A fingerprint examination of this place and that of Trudi Schmidt did not reveal any prints of use,’ said Fischer, anticipating my next question.

That evening Horst Fischer took Dave and me to a restaurant in the centre of Essen where we had a sumptuous dinner. Once again, he seemed to know the waitress who served us and engaged in his usual banter with her. To add to our enjoyment there was a cabaret, and we drank far too much German beer.

The next morning, our host drove us to Düsseldorf Airport and poured us on to an aircraft. Dave and I were suffering terminal hangovers, and I determined that I would never drink German beer again. But such vows tend to be forgotten with the passing of time. We thanked Fischer for his hospitality, but he shrugged and assured me that it hadn’t cost him personally a single euro. The Essen police, he said, would cover all the costs, even for the hotel in which we had stayed, albeit briefly. I wish his boss could meet my boss.

All in all, we had learned little, but I was prepared to tell the commander that the visit had been extremely beneficial to our enquiry. I just hoped that a murder conviction would eventually back up that assertion.

Our first job on Monday morning was to attend Samson Adekunle’s post-mortem.

As usual, Henry Mortlock had almost finished by the time Dave and I arrived.

‘As far as I can tell, Harry, Adekunle had been dead about ten days.’

‘That agrees with what we’ve learned since, Henry. Before Adekunle’s body was found, the German police discovered evidence that he’d sent emails to Hans Eberhardt on the fifteenth of July, or was alive enough to provide his killer with Eberhardt’s email address. So he was probably murdered very shortly afterwards.’

‘Yes, that makes sense.’ Mortlock pointed a pair of forceps at a stainless steel kidney-shaped bowl. ‘That was the bullet I took out of him.’

‘Looks like a two-two, guv,’ said Dave. ‘Same calibre as the ones that killed Eberhardt and Schmidt.’

Minutes after we’d returned to Curtis Green, Dave entered my office flourishing a message form.

‘We’ve just had a call from the governor of Stone Mill prison, guv.’

‘If someone’s escaped, it’s nothing to do with us,’ I said. ‘I’ve got quite enough on my plate dealing with three murders.’

‘Not this time,’ said Dave. ‘This prisoner’s still firmly banged up, and he told the governor that he has important information for us regarding the murders of Eberhardt and Schmidt.’

‘Did he tell the governor what this important information was, Dave?’

‘No, apparently he refused, saying that it was confidential and that he’d only tell the officer dealing with the case.’

‘Sounds a bit dodgy to me. Did the governor at least tell us the inmate’s name?’

Dave grinned. ‘Yeah, it’s our old friend Luke Dobson. So it’s got to be a con.’

‘But wasn’t he supposed to be going straight, Dave?’ I asked, with a jocular attempt at being surprised. ‘What’s he in for this time?’ Dave and I had jousted with Dobson in the past, contests in which Dobson had always come second. A forty-two-year-old villain who specialized in serious robbery with violence, he had a string of convictions as long as the M1 motorway. But he was one of those likeable villains who bore no animosity towards the police when they captured him and succeeded in getting him banged up for a few years.

‘I did a quick search on him in records. He’s straight all right, guv, about as straight as a corkscrew. He was nicked by the Thames Valley Police some three years ago for a jeweller’s shop blagging on Slough’s ground. Apparently he and his cohorts emerged from the jeweller’s to be confronted by a fully armed response unit. He’s currently doing a nine stretch for that little job. They’ve obviously got some good snouts in Thames Valley.’

‘Give the prison governor a bell, Dave, and ask him when we can see Dobson.’

‘Already done that, guv. Any time today,’ said Dave. ‘By the way, the prison governor’s a “her” not a “him”.’

The governor’s office was immediately above the gate at the front of the nineteenth-century, grim, grey edifice that is Her Majesty’s Prison Stone Mill.

The governor was a brunette of about forty, attractively dressed in a navy trouser suit with a white jabot. Her long hair was dragged tightly away from her face and fashioned into a ponytail, a style that Dave described as a Croydon facelift.

‘Welcome to Stone Mill, Mr Brock. Or to put it another way: this is Stone Mill and you’re welcome to it,’ she said, smiling mischievously as she crossed the office and shook hands with a firm grip. ‘I’ve arranged for you to speak to Dobson in one of the interview rooms. Mr Reece will show you the way,’ she added, indicating the prison officer who had escorted us from the main entrance. ‘If you need any further assistance, do feel free to come back to me. I should warn you however, that these so-called prison cell confessions are commonplace, and usually turn out to be fiction. Prisoners like Dobson are very good at blowing smoke up your arse, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know, Governor,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on the receiving end of all too many.’

Prison Officer Reece led the way along a labyrinth of corridors, through numerous locked gates and up an iron staircase until eventually we reached the interview room.

‘I’ll be outside, guv,’ said Reece, unlocking the door. ‘Give me a shout if you need me.’

I pushed open the door of the interview room, and Dobson, clad in a maroon tracksuit, immediately leaped to his feet.

‘Blimey, I never knew it was you what was doing these toppings, Mr Brock,’ he said, astonishment written large on his face. ‘And you an’ all, Mr Poole.’

‘Life’s full of little surprises, Luke,’ I said, waving to Dobson to sit down. ‘How’s life treating you?’

‘Up and down, like the proverbial fiddler’s elbow, Mr Brock,’ replied Dobson with a crooked grin. ‘I don’t s’pose you’ve got any snout on you, have you?’

‘Are you allowed to smoke in here, then?’ It was a facetiously rhetorical question to which I knew the answer. I tossed a cigarette to Dobson and handed one to Dave. It was one of the perversities of successive panicky governments that whereas the draconian smoking ban forbade smoking almost everywhere else, it allowed it in Her Majesty’s penal establishments.

‘Course I am,’ said Dobson, accepting a light from Dave. ‘They don’t wanna breach me human rights, do they?’

‘Perish the thought,’ said Dave. ‘You might sue them for damages.’

‘Anyway, I dunno what all the fuss is about.’ Dobson leaned back in his chair, relaxed and expelling cigarette smoke. ‘D’you know what, Mr Brock? The biggest cause of death in this country in a few years’ time will be worry. People are slowly worrying themselves to death. Worrying about what they eat and whether it’s organic, what and how much they drink, whether they’re breathing in pollution and whether there’s nuts in anything. I’ll tell you this much: the non-smoking, teetotal, vegetarian, wind-farm nutcases are taking over the world, and that’s a fact. So there you are, guv’nor,’ he added with a satisfied expression, certain that he’d diagnosed all the ills of mankind.

‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but now that we’ve had a helping of your porridge philosophy, Luke, can we get down to why you wanted to see me?’

‘Ah, yes, well . . .’ Dobson leaned forward, lowering his voice to a confidential level. ‘It’s this geezer, see, what come in last Friday, name of Emery, Kevin Emery.’

‘Mean anything?’ I asked, glancing at Dave, but he shook his head. ‘Go on, Luke.’

‘Well, he got banged up in my cell. He’d not been there longer than half an hour when he told me as how he’d done for them two in Richmond. You know, the camper van what was set on fire.’

‘Why on earth did he tell you that, Luke?’ asked Dave.

‘Don’t ask me, Mr Poole—’ began Dobson.

‘But I am asking you, Luke,’ said Dave, with commendable patience.

‘I asked him what he was in for, like,’ said Dobson, being in no position to answer Dave’s question about why Emery had taken him into his confidence. ‘Well, you do, don’tcha? And he said as how he was on remand, having had his collar felt on Thursday for a blagging. But then he said he’d got hisself nicked on purpose to get out of the way because the Old Bill was looking for him for this double topping what you’re dealing with. And he reckoned you’d never think of looking for him in the nick. Know what I mean?’

I was having doubts already. Nothing had been released to the media about the two victims having been murdered. As far as the general public was concerned Eberhardt and Schmidt had died as the result of an unfortunate fire. The inaccurate inference drawn by at least two of the crime reporters of Fleet Street was that a gas canister had exploded, and we’d done nothing to disabuse them.

‘Is that it, then?’ I asked. ‘He didn’t say how he’d done these toppings, or where he’d come from, or if he’d got form for violence? Nothing like that?’

‘No, he clammed up after that. I s’pose he realized that he’d given up too much. He said that if it got passed on, whoever grassed would get striped. Well, I said to meself, that’s all bullshit, so I thought I’d give you the heads-up, like.’

‘Thanks, Luke.’ I stood up and tossed him my packet of cigarettes. It wasn’t too magnanimous a gesture; there were only three left in it.

‘Be lucky, Mr Brock,’ said Dobson, as I banged on the interview room door. ‘You won’t forget to mention to the governor that I’ve been helpful, will you?’ he added as we left the room.

‘Don’t worry, Luke,’ said Dave. ‘We’ll be sure to tell her all about it.’

‘Everything all right, Mr Brock?’ asked the attendant prison officer.

‘Yes, thanks, Mr Reece, but I need to see the governor again.’

‘Right you are. Follow me.’

We had to wait a few minutes while the governor finished a telephone conversation.

‘Sorry about that, Mr Brock. The Department of Justice is a pain in the arse, always on the phone asking some damn-fool questions that they should know the answers to anyway. Now, how can I help you?’

‘Dobson started off by saying he’s sharing a cell with a prisoner called Kevin Emery.’

‘Mr Reece?’ The governor glanced at the prison officer.

‘That’s correct, ma’am,’ said Reece. ‘Dobson and Emery share a cell on number two landing in D Wing.’

‘Dobson said that Emery was on remand for a robbery and went on to claim that he’d confessed to the two murders I’m investigating,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how he knew about the murders though. We haven’t released that information yet.’ I knew, however, that the prison grapevine was extremely fast and extremely accurate when it came to learning about villainy in the outside world.

‘We don’t have any remand prisoners here, Mr Brock. They usually go to Brixton,’ said the governor. ‘When were these murders exactly?’

‘Friday the eighteenth of July.’

The governor chuckled and crossed to a filing cabinet. Extracting a folder and returning to her desk, she donned a pair of heavy, black horn-rimmed spectacles and spent a few moments glancing through it.

‘He’s having you on, I’m afraid, Mr Brock,’ she said, glancing up and removing her glasses.

‘Who, Dobson? Or Emery?’

The governor laughed. ‘One or the other, or both,’ she said. ‘Emery was transferred here last Friday from an open prison in Yorkshire. He’s a sex offender who’d already served half a five-year term for grooming a young schoolgirl on the Internet and is being considered for day release. He’s on the sex offenders’ register and he’ll be tagged if and when he’s released. But at the moment it’s a big if; he’s to be interviewed by the Parole Board next week. So, there’s no chance that he committed your murders. But I know what Dobson’s up to. He wants his assistance to be noted for
his
Parole Board hearing. Not that that will occur for a few years yet. As I said earlier, prison cell confessions are all too common.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve been the victim of duff info. No wonder he didn’t want to tell you why he wanted to see me. You’d’ve seen through it straightaway.’ Dave and I rose to leave. ‘Thank you for your time, Governor.’

‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, Mr Brock.’