Shroud of Evil (3 page)

‘He’s a very private person,’ she added, pursing her lips, clearly annoyed that her statement needed expanding. ‘He left the office at four-thirty on Thursday and should have been in today. I thought he might have overslept although that would be extremely unlikely. Jasper is always punctual. I rang his mobile phone – he doesn’t have a landline; says it’s a waste of money – but I only got his voicemail. I have left several messages and I emailed him. When he didn’t reply by lunch time I grew more concerned. I thought he might be ill so I went to his flat.’

‘Which is where?’

‘Emsworth.’

A small village fronting on to Chichester Harbour, ten miles to the east of Portsmouth.

‘We each have a key to the other’s home in case of emergencies. Jasper wasn’t there and there was no evidence that he had returned home last night. No unwashed crockery lying around or in the dishwasher and his bed was made up, but that’s how I would expect to find the flat even if he had been home all night and left early this morning. Jasper is meticulously tidy.’

‘Obsessively so?’

‘No,’ she snapped, moving a pen on her practically clear desk – apart from the computer, telephone and a buff-coloured folder – so that it lined up with her telephone.

‘Have the neighbours or any of the other residents seen him or his car?’

‘His flat isn’t in a block of apartments. It’s a converted sail loft with a garage below and there is only one other apartment next to him but that’s a holiday let. It’s empty at this time of year and yes, Inspector, I did check. There is a row of terraced cottages opposite, which face west whereas the sail loft faces south so there are no windows overlooking Jasper’s apartment. However, I knocked on the property nearest to Jasper’s and the woman who lives there said she didn’t see him come home yesterday or leave this morning. I called DCI Bliss.’

‘You know her?’

She looked as though she’d like to tell him that was none of his business. Her unplucked eyebrows puckered as she said curtly, ‘Yes, from when she was stationed at Havant, before her promotion. Our offices were based there. We moved here a year ago.’

That explained the personal telephone call and why he’d not heard of Swallows before. It also explained why Bliss had sent him. He suspected that Eunice Swallows had called in a favour. He said, ‘Mr Kenton has been missing just less than twenty-four hours; surely it’s too early to get alarmed.’

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘It’s totally out of character for Jasper to do this,’ she crisply replied.

‘What do
you
think might have happened to him?’

‘He must have had an accident and before you ask, I have checked with the local hospital, and neither he, nor anyone fitting his description, has been admitted. There’s nothing in his apartment to indicate where he was going either, but he could have been involved in a road accident elsewhere in the area or be lying injured somewhere. Here is a photograph of him.’ She flicked open the folder on her desk and handed him a large photograph which she’d obviously printed off her computer. ‘I’ve also emailed a couple of pictures to DCI Bliss and she can let you have them.’

Horton studied the slim, slight man with short thick dark hair, a thin face, solemn brown eyes and a serious expression, about mid-forties.

‘I’ve printed off all Jasper’s particulars including his address and vehicle license number.’

She gave him a sheet of paper, which he knew she must also have emailed to Bliss, as well as giving her the information she had relayed to him. It made a mockery of his visit here. Maybe by now Bliss had ordered Cantelli to run a check of the reported accidents and put out an alert. So why waste his time by sending him here? Perhaps Bliss was just trying to impress Eunice Swallows, or perhaps, as he’d thought earlier, she owed Swallows a favour. If that was the case then Bliss could have come herself, he thought with annoyance.

He consulted the sheet of paper Eunice Swallows had handed him. Jasper Kenton was forty-seven, single, five foot nine, weighed approximately ten and a half stone. He drove a new dark blue Vauxhall. The last time Eunice Swallows had seen him he’d been wearing a black two-piece suit and black slip-on shoes, a white shirt and maroon tie. He had no distinguishing marks or tattoos (how did she know, Horton wondered, unless Kenton himself had told her that) and he wore no jewellery.

‘Was he carrying anything when he left the office?’

‘His briefcase.’

‘Containing what?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t search him,’ she retorted. Then she added more evenly, ‘It was his computer briefcase.’

‘Any surveillance equipment in it?’

‘I doubt it, but he has been issued with a camera, Dictaphone and video recorder. They’re not at his apartment. They might be in the boot of his car.’

‘So he could have been on surveillance.’

‘No,’ she answered with conviction.

‘Why so sure?’

‘Because we always discuss our cases and our actions so that we each know what the other is doing. It’s best practice. He would have told me if he was undertaking a surveillance operation.’

‘Perhaps something came up and he couldn’t miss the chance of following it up.’

‘Then he would have reported to me.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t and can’t risk making contact. Perhaps his surveillance has taken him abroad or some distance away in the UK.’

But she was shaking her head. ‘We always make it a rule to keep in touch. And he hasn’t left the country because his passport is still here in the safe. We keep both our passports on the premises in case we need to go overseas in a hurry.’

With that ruled out he asked, ‘How did he seem?’

‘Fine,’ she answered crisply.

That was a fat lot of help. ‘He wasn’t anxious or excited?’

‘I would have said if he was,’ she said tartly. ‘Jasper is rarely excited and never anxious.’

What is he, a machine?
Horton was beginning to think this cool, tidy and organized individual was a figment of Eunice Swallows’ imagination, either that or Kenton was very good at hiding his emotions, something Horton had once been expert at but the recent events of his divorce and trying to get to the truth of his mother’s disappearance had proved otherwise. He’d had momentary flashes of anger both with Catherine and with Lord Eames.

‘Did Mr Kenton say anything to the staff about what he was doing last night?’

‘No. We don’t gossip and we don’t have time to waste on idle chit chat.’

She was sounding more like Bliss with every minute. Perhaps Kenton had got fed up working for her and had taken off. Horton wouldn’t blame him if he had.

‘What is he currently working on?’ Could it be something that might have caused someone to want him to disappear, he wondered. Was that why Bliss was concerned?

‘Background checks on individuals, fraudulent insurance claims, suspected matrimonial infidelities, that sort of thing,’ she said with an icy stare. Horton knew that expression of old. It said
don’t ask me any more because I’m not going to tell you
.

‘Did he have any meetings scheduled for late yesterday afternoon or today?’

‘No.’

‘Have you contacted his clients to check if he’s been in touch or called in to see them?’

‘Of course not. I don’t want them alarmed.’

No, mislaying one of your operatives didn’t exactly instil confidence in a private investigation company. ‘We could speak to them,’ he said, anticipating the reaction he was going to get.

‘No,’ she said vehemently. ‘This has nothing to do with any of them.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I am. Look, put out the usual alerts. Surely even you can do that?’ she added cuttingly.

Yes, and any police officer could have done that
. Horton rose. He briefly thought about questioning the staff he’d seen when he’d been shown into Eunice Swallows’ office – a very thin lady in her late fifties with a short severe haircut and two men stationed at computers, one in his mid-twenties, the other late thirties – but he’d already spent too much of his time here. He almost changed his mind though when Eunice Swallows whisked him out at the speed of light. None of the staff looked up from their desks. Probably too terrified of her to even blink.

He returned to the station, irritated with both Bliss and that Swallows woman, wondering if Bliss’s strategy was to dump on him as many mundane and low-ranking jobs as she could as a way of making him so uncomfortable and angry that he’d apply for a transfer.
Just let her try
, he thought, marching into the CID operations room where he found both DC Walters and Sergeant Cantelli.

‘How did it go?’ Cantelli asked.

‘My interview with Ms Swallows?’ Horton tetchily replied.

‘No,’ Cantelli said, puzzled. ‘The court case.’

He brought them both up to date with the outcome of that and the assignment Bliss had sent him on, which drew a surprised raising of dark eyebrows from Cantelli. ‘They know one another,’ Horton explained. Tossing the sheet of paper and the photograph Eunice Swallows had given him of Jasper Kenton on to Walters’ desk, he added, ‘Make out the missing persons report and put out the usual alerts but it’s low priority until Bliss tells us differently. So where were you two when your boss needed you before having to scrape the barrel by sending me?’

‘In a Greek restaurant,’ Cantelli answered.

‘There’s been another attack?’ asked Horton, perching on one of several empty desks in the room.

Cantelli nodded. ‘In the same road, and the same as the other two, racist slogans painted on the kitchen and passageway walls.’

That made three in a fortnight. The other restaurants targeted had been Bangladeshi and Cantonese in a road in Southsea just off the seafront, which seemed to boast more foreign restaurants than the United Nations had members.

‘It’s also the same MO, rear door forced, wouldn’t have kept a nine-year-old out,’ Cantelli relayed. ‘And the security system was defunct. Nothing stolen or wrecked. Walters took some photos with his mobile phone.’

Walters tapped into his computer where he’d uploaded the photographs. Horton studied the pictures. The lettering was in large dark-blue paint scrawled across the wall of a passageway that led into the kitchen and on the available wall space in the kitchen. The slogans included ‘Free UK of dirty immigrants’ and ‘Filth go home’.

Cantelli, looking over Horton’s shoulder, said, ‘It’s polite as far as slogans go and no swastikas.’

Yes, and that was unusual. They’d had them carved on gravestones in the Jewish part of a local cemetery and on the walls of the four mosques in the city but that had been some months ago and it didn’t look to be the work of the same vandals.

‘I’m organizing extra patrols in the area over the weekend,’ Cantelli continued. ‘And I’ve requested copies of all CCTV footage. Some of the other restaurants have their own and they’re sending them over. We might catch sight of chummy.’

To Walters, Horton said, ‘Have you got a list of the restaurant’s suppliers?’

‘Going back later to pick it up,’ Walters answered, opening his desk drawer to reveal a mini larder and plucking out a bar of chocolate. ‘I’ve got the list of employees though, and past employees. I was just going to check them with the staff lists from the other two restaurants. Most of the names sound foreign though so I can’t see it being one of them.’

‘Do it anyway. It might be a disgruntled employee who’s been overlooked for a pay rise or promotion, or a former employee who’s been sacked in favour of someone of a different nationality.’ Horton addressed Cantelli. ‘Fix up a meeting with DI Grimes and the STOP team.’ It was one new initiative that Horton agreed with. The STOP team had been set up specifically to focus on hate crime and comprised officers from Special Branch and Counter Terrorism. It didn’t mean that they were looking for a terrorist but someone holding strong views could end up taking action or being groomed by those who didn’t care how they achieved their aims and who they maimed and killed in the process. ‘You might also like to ask Tim Shearer if he could send one of his staff along. When we catch this bugger I don’t want him walking on a technicality.’ He made for Bliss’s office, knocked perfunctorily and entered.

‘Well?’ she said, looking up from her computer.

Tersely he relayed the outcome of his interview with Eunice Swallows, knowing that Bliss already had this information from Ms Swallows herself. She’d probably telephoned Bliss the moment he’d left. ‘There’s little we can do except the usual, unless Eunice Swallows is prepared to let us have a list of the clients Jasper Kenton is working for and those he is investigating in case they have something to do with his disappearance. There is also the chance that’s he’s absconded with funds stolen from the firm or from one of his clients.’

‘I doubt that,’ she said primly.

How did she know?

Her phone rang. She nodded dismissal at him.

Glad to get away from her, he returned to his office. It was almost five and he had little to show for his day’s work but he was curious to know more about Swallows. He did an Internet search on her name, and within seconds he was reading how they had built up an enviable track record of success since being established four years ago. Before then both Eunice Swallows and Jasper Kenton had been working alone. Eunice Swallows came with vast experience in the field of retail fraud and employee theft. Jasper Kenton had worked with major corporations in London and was an expert in computer and Internet-based investigation, digital forensic examination and cyber security services. Something Eunice Swallows hadn’t told him, though to be fair he hadn’t asked. But it made him consider what he had just mentioned to Bliss. Could Kenton have stolen from a client or from the agency itself and absconded with the proceeds? If he was that much of a cyber expert then it was unlikely that anyone would notice for some time.

The website also mentioned that Kenton acted as an expert technical witness, providing case and trial consultancy in the field of cyber crime. Horton hadn’t come across him but then he hadn’t been involved in any complex cases that involved a high level of computer forensic data and Internet use. That would have been the remit of the Hi-Tech Crime Unit, the Serious Organized Crime Agency, or the Intelligence Directorate. Horton had dealt with pornography cases and investigations where computer evidence had been vital but the Hi-Tech Unit had assisted with those. Maybe he’d ask around internally to see if Kenton’s name rang any bells. And perhaps Tim Shearer had heard of Kenton. He made a mental note to ask him on Monday if Kenton hadn’t shown up by then.