Moving Target (16 page)

“They thought I was a spy?” Leland demanded. “How could they? I never would have done such a thing!”

Ali sat down next to him and placed a hand on his knee. “I know that,” she said. “So does anyone with a brain who knows anything about you. What struck me as odd yesterday, with Maisie and Daisy going on about your friend Thomas and his dead wife, is that it seems as though they knew nothing at all about what was going on between you and Thomas, and that’s the good news in all this. Thomas’s part of your leaving town went completely under their radar and most likely everybody else’s, too. So I’m asking: Do you want to see Thomas while we’re here? I found his phone number. I have it.”

“No,” Leland said without hesitation. “What’s done is done. Let’s leave that in the past, where it belongs. As for my father? When you left, you said you were going to visit the police. Did you learn anything about my father?”

While Ali and Marjorie Elkins had been going through the evidence file, Ali had used her iPad to make a series of notes. Pulling out the device, she consulted the notes as she gave Leland an overview. “The assumption was and still is that your father’s death was a robbery gone bad. This was back before credit cards came into use. Your father was thought to be carrying a small sum of money. His watch and wallet disappeared along with the money. His bloodstained vehicle was found abandoned in Southampton a few days later. I looked at the crime scene photos, Leland. The blood in the car was definitely smear rather than spatter. The supposition is that he was killed elsewhere and then the body was placed in the vehicle and driven to a dump site.”

“No one knows where it happened?”

“No crime scene other than the vehicle was ever established. The evidence suggests your father was already dead or else badly injured when he was loaded into the car. He went missing after a Friday-afternoon business meeting here in town that stretched into dinner at
a local pub. His body was found two days later, washed up in the sand under the pier here in Bournemouth, but with no sign of drowning. He was already dead at the time he went into the water.”

“He was found under this pier?” Leland asked.

Ali nodded. “Do you remember when it was that you left town?”

“Toward the end of August,” Leland answered. “I managed to get hired on with a tramp steamer leaving Liverpool. I jumped ship in San Francisco.”

“You were an illegal immigrant?” Ali asked.

“I was to begin with,” he admitted. “I was very fortunate in that Anna Lee took me under her wing and helped me formalize my status. I expect she pulled a few strings to make that happen.”

Ali nodded. “I expect she did, too, but here’s the thing that bothers me: Your father’s death occurred only six weeks or so after you left town. By the time he died, he had already rewritten his will to exclude you. Why would he have done that so soon without even bothering to hear your side of the story?”

“Langston must have made an excellent case against me,” Leland said. “If my father truly believed I was a spy, then his reaction is entirely understandable. As far as my father was concerned, honor was everything. His father died at the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Father was too old to join up for World War II, but he served here at home with the Civil Defense. Having a suspected traitor in the family is something he wouldn’t have tolerated.”

“Still,” Ali said, “to cast you out without any kind of formal charges ever being brought against you? And to do so simply on your brother’s word . . .”

“Langston was a bully,” Leland said with a shrug. “He could be amazingly charming when he put his mind to it, and amazingly persuasive as well.”

“Lucky, too,” Ali added. “With you gone, he got the farm, which he eventually sold for a tidy profit while Lawrence got the print shop and probably not nearly as good a deal.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Leland asked. “You suspect Langston had something to do with Father’s death?”

“It’s possible,” Ali said. “The last entry in the murder book dated from 1961. That means that in all this time, there’s been no effort to subject any of the remaining evidence to modern forensic technology. The autopsy showed defensive wounds on your father’s hands and body as well as bloodstains on his shirt. Those samples have never undergone DNA testing.”

“Could they be?” Leland asked dubiously. “Even after all this time?”

“It’s not a slam dunk,” Ali told him, “it’s possible. A few years ago samples like that would have been useless, but they’re doing some pretty miraculous things with DNA these days. If the guy who did this was a juvenile delinquent who went on to a life of crime, his DNA may be in the UK’s national criminal database.”

“Except you don’t really believe that the perpetrator was some kind of common criminal,” Leland said. “You think he was my brother.”

Ali nodded. “Yes, I do,” she agreed. “Nothing I’ve heard about Langston Brooks causes me to have a good feeling about him. If he did do it, DNA testing would most likely be the only way to prove it. Unfortunately, at this point, we don’t know if those sixty-year-old samples can be tested, and we don’t know if Marjorie Elkins can even obtain permission to send the evidence out for testing.”

“That’s expensive, isn’t it?”

“I told her High Noon would cover any expenses the local authorities won’t handle.”

“That’s not fair.”

“We’ll cover it, Leland,” Ali insisted. “No argument. Now how about if we go into the dining room and have some dinner. I’m starved.”

“How was tea at Jordan’s-by-the-Sea?” Leland asked.

“Believe me,” Ali said with a laugh, “it was nothing to write home about. We’re far better off here than there.”

They were given a seaside view table, but there wasn’t much to see. The vast seascape had turned inky black, with only the occasional
lights of a seagoing vessel to indicate there was life of any kind out there. Ali satisfied her longing for beef with a well-aged bone-in fillet accompanied by duck-fat fries and the best Brussels sprouts that had ever passed her lips. Leland settled on the sole but didn’t attack his food with much enthusiasm. He seemed lost in thought throughout the meal. The unwelcome possibility that Langston might have been responsible for their father’s death was clearly weighing heavily on his mind. Having been the bearer of that news, Ali didn’t push it.

They were perusing the dessert menu when the maître d’ approached the table with a frown. “Excuse me, Ms. Reynolds. I hate to interrupt your meal, but there’s a visitor here who needs to see you. She says it’s a matter of some urgency.”

Ali looked back toward the entrance and was surprised to see Marjorie Elkins standing in the doorway. “Invite her to come join us,” Ali said. “Perhaps she’ll have a bite to eat.”

Marjorie apologized as she approached the table. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner,” she said. “I could always come back later.”

“We were about to have dessert,” Ali said after making the introductions. “You’re welcome to join us for that or to have something else, if you’d like.”

“A glass of wine would be appreciated,” Marjorie said. “It’s been an interesting afternoon.”

The strained look on her face indicated that it hadn’t been interesting in a good way. When the waiter appeared, Marjorie ordered a glass of merlot while Ali and Leland chose their dessert course—Dorset apple cake with clotted cream.

Marjorie waited until the waiter left before she leaned down, pulled an envelope out of her purse, and laid it on the table. “I had to see you and do this tonight,” she said. “I was afraid if I gave myself time to sleep on it, I’d back out.”

“Back out of what?” Ali said.

Marjorie met her eye. “I don’t like being laughed at,” she said quietly.

“By your fellow detectives at the station I presume?” Ali asked.

Marjorie’s lips curled into something that didn’t remotely resemble a smile. “Indeed,” she said.

She started to say more but then waited to speak until after the waiter delivered both the wine and the cake.

“If you’d been passed along to one of the detective superintendent’s fair-haired boys when you stopped by today, it might not have come to this,” she said. “If one of them had initiated the request for DNA testing, it might have been approved.”

“But yours wasn’t?” Ali asked.

“No,” Marjorie said glumly. “It was not.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ali said. “None of those other yokels would have given me the time of day. You at least listened.”

“Yokels,” Marjorie said, savoring the word and a sip of wine. “How apt, but that’s why I came. The official answer may be no, but the unofficial answer is yes. I went back down to the evidence room and used my scissors to remove a strip of bloodstained material from the victim’s shirt collar and from the shirt cuffs as well. You’ll find both samples in here.” With that she pushed the envelope across the table.

Ali stared at it in slack-jawed amazement. “Are you kidding? If you deliberately removed or destroyed evidence, you could be fired.”

“True,” Marjorie said grimly. “I could be, but I won’t. When I went into the detective superintendent’s office with your request, I received a very public dressing-down for my trouble. I was told in no uncertain terms that I had absolutely no business bringing up a sixty-year-old case that nobody, with the possible exception of Mr. Brooks here, gives a damn about anyway.” She paused and sent a small nod in Leland’s direction. “I was told that this case is so far beyond cold that it’s frozen solid, and the only way there’d be any testing done on those bloodstains was over the detective superintendent’s dead body.” She gave a dismissive shrug. “Since no one in authority is going to make use of any of that evidence, I decided to bring some of it to you. I can tell you, no one else has any intention of going back through that evidence box. If the
DNA testing works on the samples and we end up identifying a possible suspect, which I think is highly unlikely, I’ll deal with the evidence-box problem then. Cross that bridge when I get to it, as they say.”

Not wanting to give Marjorie an opportunity to change her mind, Ali snatched up the envelope and tucked it into her own purse. “Thank you,” she said.

Marjorie nodded. “There’s a place just outside Oxford, a private DNA lab, that I know about. It’s an NGO. A secondary-school chum of mine, Kate Benchley, runs it. I don’t remember what it was called when her uncle started it years ago. After he died, Kate was left in charge. She renamed it after she took over. Now it’s called the Banshee Group.”

“As in screaming banshees?” Ali asked.

“Something like that,” Marjorie said with a nod. “The name comes from an Irish legend about the Angel of Death. Kate was responsible for changing the company name because they specialize in DNA testing on the remains of war crime victims.”

In the past, Ali’s friend Sister Anselm was sometimes called the Angel of Death due to her service as patient advocate to badly injured patients. Kate Benchley, it seemed, had taken that theme one step further.

“Katie was still in her teens when she cut her good-deeds teeth working with her uncle on the skeletal remains found in mass graves in Kosovo back in the nineties. Banshee Group’s goal was then and still is to return the bodies of war crime victims to surviving family members so they can receive a proper burial. I already called Kate and told her about you, by the way. She says she can make time to see you late tomorrow morning. Here’s the address.” Marjorie handed Ali a slip of paper with a phone number and address that included the town of Littlemore.

“Where’s this?” Ali asked.

“Just outside Oxford, a little south of the Oxford Ring Road. Banshee Group is located in the Danby Building in the Oxford Science Park.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“If the weather stays like this, a couple of hours. The problem is, there’s a new arctic front pushing down through the Midlands. Bournemouth should be spared, but weather in the central part of England is going to be bad again over the next several days. If I were you, I’d come and go as early as possible, starting early in the morning rather than later in the day.”

“Does your friend understand that this is all slightly irregular?”

“One thing you should know about Kate,” Marjorie said with a fond smile. “The more irregular things are, the better she likes them. The two of us got in our share of scrapes growing up, before she went back to the U.S. for college and I went off to the University of Portsmouth. According to our teachers, we were both considered less than exemplary students.”

“In other words, most unlikely to succeed?” Ali asked.

“That’s it,” Marjorie responded. “Considering what I’ve just done, maybe that assessment isn’t far from wrong.” With that, Marjorie polished off the last of her wine, set down her glass, and stood up. “And now that I’ve shoved it to those ‘yokels,’ as you call them, I believe I’ll head home and pick up some tandoori chicken for my son and me on the way.”

“Thank you for doing this, Inspector Elkins,” Leland said, rising formally and holding out his hand.

“Glad to,” Marjorie said with a smile. “Especially now that I can see quite clearly that you’re not one of the yokels.”

She left. Leland sat back down. “It seems to me that Inspector Elkins is putting rather a lot of faith in someone she just met.”

“You should see how her fellow officers treat her,” Ali said. “Compared to them, we must feel like a breath of fresh air. I have a feeling your brother Langston would have been right at home with those guys.”

“Bullies?” Leland asked.

Ali nodded. “Every last one of them.”

“Do you want me to accompany you to Oxford tomorrow morning?” Leland asked.
“If so, I’ll be glad to go along. After all, it’s my problem.”

“Is there something you’d rather do?”

“Mostly, I want to walk and woolgather,” he said. “It’s odd being someplace I know so well where I’m also a complete stranger.”

“You do that, then,” Ali said. “I’ll take care of the DNA testing.”

They rose and started toward the door to the dining room. Out in the lobby, Ali turned back. “Oh wait,” she said. “I forgot something. I’ll catch up with you at the lift.” She got back to the table just as a busboy was starting to clear it. “Sorry,” she said, gathering up Leland’s empty coffee cup. “I’ll just take this up to the room, if you don’t mind. We still have some coffee, but they took the cups away.”