Gunrunner Read online

  ‘What happened?’ asked Maitland. ‘Was it a car accident?’

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that she was found murdered in her car at Heathrow Airport earlier today.’

  Mrs Maitland leaned back in her chair. ‘Oh, how awful,’ she muttered. ‘But she was supposed to be going to New York to spend Christmas there with her husband. She was very excited about it.’

  ‘D’you know if they left here together, Mr Maitland?’ asked Dave.

  ‘No, I don’t know, I’m afraid. I was playing golf yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘No, they didn’t,’ said Janet Maitland. ‘Kerry said that she was going to meet Nick at the airport.’

  ‘I take it that Nicholas Hammond is Kerry’s husband,’ I asked, wishing to confirm the entry in the dead woman’s passport.

  ‘Yes, that’s correct. Just before she left, Kerry dropped in to leave her spare set of house keys with me. It’s something she always does whenever she and her husband are away, just in case anything happens. We’re quite good friends, Kerry and me.’

  ‘What time would that have been?’ I asked.

  ‘It was between five and six, I suppose. Yes, I remember now because Kerry glanced at her watch and said that it was twenty past five and she’d have to run. She said she didn’t want to be late checking in. Apparently the airport can get very busy on Christmas Eve, and so can the roads leading to it.’

  ‘Have you any idea why Kerry and her husband should’ve travelled to the airport separately?’

  ‘She told me that Nick had a last minute meeting in London. He runs his own estate agency business in Mayfair, and apparently he was near to closing a deal on some expensive property.’

  ‘On Christmas Eve?’ I wondered about that. It seemed strange for an estate agent to be clinching a deal on the day before Christmas, especially as he was apparently due to fly to New York with his wife.

  ‘Well, that’s what Kerry said,’ confirmed Janet Maitland.

  ‘And does Mrs Hammond pursue a career?’ asked Dave.

  ‘Indeed she does. She’s involved with a haulage business in Chiswick, and from what I’ve heard, it’s a pretty big concern. I believe they do quite a lot of carrying to and from Europe and beyond,’ said Maitland. ‘Kerry Trucking, I think it’s called.’

  That tallied with the registration details of the car in which Kerry Hammond had been found.

  ‘D’you mean she owns the company?’

  ‘She does now. Her husband started it. Her first husband, that is. His name was . . .’ Maitland paused, and turned to his wife. ‘What was his name, darling?’

  ‘Richard Lucas,’ said Janet. ‘He was killed in a car accident about seven years ago,’ she continued. ‘It was a terrible tragedy, him being so young. He was on his way home from Sheffield in December and got involved in one of those awful pile-ups in the fog on the M1. The company became Kerry’s when he died, and she’s continued to run it ever since. Very successfully, I believe.’

  ‘They certainly weren’t short of money, if that’s anything to go by,’ said Maitland, and received a nod of agreement from his wife.

  ‘Were there any children?’ asked Dave, who was an inveterate collector of inconsequential bits of information.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Janet. ‘In fact, I’m certain.’

  ‘But then she remarried,’ I said, taking the wedding photograph from Dave and showing it to Mrs Maitland. ‘Is this her second husband or her first?’

  Janet Maitland put on a pair of spectacles, but needed only to glance briefly at the photograph. ‘No, that’s Nick, her second husband. I think they were married about five years ago. It was a couple of years after Dick died, I seem to recall. But she’s only a young woman, early thirties, I suppose, so you can’t really blame her for finding someone else.’

  ‘Did they get on, Kerry and her husband?’ asked Dave, just beating me to the question. ‘Were there any rows, fights or disagreements, for instance?’

  Janet Maitland looked shocked at that. ‘No, they were a perfect couple,’ she said, in a rather tart manner, as though it were impertinent for Dave to have posed such a query.

  ‘It’s a question we have to ask,’ I said. ‘You’d be surprised how often a woman is murdered by her husband. Or a husband by his wife,’ I added as an afterthought.

  ‘Really?’ Mrs Maitland did not seem at all mollified by that particular statistic of the crime of murder. ‘Well, I very much doubt that in this case you’ll find that Nick has murdered Kerry. He’s not the type.’

  Don’t you just love armchair detectives?

  ‘Did Kerry enjoy a busy social life?’ I asked. It was a question designed to prompt any revelations about extramarital affairs; not that I expected Janet Maitland to tell me even if there had been. She seemed very defensive of her friend Kerry Hammond’s reputation.

  ‘She was always on the go.’ As I’d anticipated, Mrs Maitland declined to read between the lines of my question. ‘And she and Nick enjoyed themselves socially. Well, they had the money, so why not?’ she added. ‘At one time, she was involved in charity work, too. Of course, I don’t mean that she worked in a charity shop in the high street; it was more a case of charity balls in big West End hotels, and dinners at five hundred pounds a plate, that sort of thing.’

  ‘D’you know which charity it was?’ asked Dave.

  ‘No, I don’t, other than to say it had something to do with starving children in Africa.’

  ‘The Hammonds had a pretty full life, then,’ I said. ‘I imagine they had a lot of friends.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ put in Peter Maitland. ‘Dinner parties and drinks parties, but nothing rowdy, of course. No loud music. They’ve got a swimming pool in the basement, too. Well, all of us round here have, but we don’t use ours much. But the Hammonds used to hold parties in theirs. We went to one or two. They were very generous hosts.’

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ I said, ‘and my apologies for interrupting your festivities. If and when Mr Hammond returns,’ I continued, addressing myself to both the Maitlands, ‘perhaps you’d ask him to contact me as a matter of urgency.’ I handed Peter Maitland one of my cards, but sincerely hoped that the arrangements to intercept Nicholas Hammond at Heathrow on his return, assuming he’d actually gone, would obviate the necessity of Maitland breaking the news to him.

  There was a good reason for that. It’s of invaluable assistance to a detective to watch the reaction of a man when he’s told of the murder of his wife, particularly when he’s suspected of that murder. And in the absence of any firm evidence, and based on the history of homicide, right now Nicholas Hammond had to be a front runner. Wife-killers are devious people. It’s surprising how often a bereaved man is keen to appear on television, appealing for information about his partner’s murder, only for police eventually to discover that he’s the guilty party.

  Having obtained all the information that we could, we left the Maitlands to enjoy their Christmas pudding, although I suspected that our visit had put a damper on the celebrations.

  Back at Curtis Green, DS Flynn was waiting with news.

  ‘Both Nicholas and Kerry Hammond were booked on the flight to New York’s JFK Airport that left Heathrow at twenty-hundred hours on Christmas Eve, sir. But only Nicholas Hammond turned up. He asked the passenger service agent to page his wife, but there was no response. The man I spoke to said that Hammond seemed extremely fraught that his wife hadn’t arrived.’

  ‘I wonder if he was covering his tracks,’ I suggested. ‘He could’ve been making a fuss so that his concern about his missing wife would be remembered. It wouldn’t be the first time it’d happened.’

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me, guv,’ said Flynn, who shared most CID officers’ suspicions of the husbands of murdered wives. ‘However, when she failed to show, Hammond left his wife’s ticket at the airline desk, and asked the agent to tell her he’d gone on ahead. He said to tell her he’d meet her in New York, and that she knew the hotel they would be stayi
ng at.’

  ‘Par for the course.’ I was beginning to move Nicholas Hammond to the top of my suspect list; leaving the airport without knowing what had happened to his wife did not gel in my book. ‘Did you find out which hotel they were staying at, Charlie?’

  ‘No, guv. The man I spoke to didn’t know and he said that Hammond hadn’t mentioned it.’

  ‘If the flight left at eight o’clock, what time would it arrive in New York?’

  ‘About nine o’clock that evening local time, guv. New York is five hours behind GMT.’

  ‘Just in time for a late-night dinner à deux at Cipriani’s on Forty-Second Street.’ On one occasion in the distant past, I’d sampled that famous restaurant’s cuisine, and having seen the prices I was extremely grateful that the NYPD had picked up the tab.

  ‘We could ask the New York police to try and track him down, guv,’ suggested Dave. ‘Shouldn’t be too difficult as we know he was due to arrive at JFK at about nine o’clock New York time.’

  ‘What, and alert him to our interest? If we did that, he might never come back, Dave, and then we’d be into extradition. Assuming, of course that he had murdered his wife. Not that we’ve got any evidence. Yet!’

  ‘We won’t have long to wait, sir,’ said Flynn. ‘Hammond’s ticket was a return. He’s due back the day after tomorrow, the twenty-seventh, and, as you suggested, Dave has already lodged his details with the Border Agency to intercept him on his return and notify police.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Dave and I will be there to greet him. What time’s he due in?’

  ‘According to his return ticket, sir, he should be touching down at Heathrow at three in the afternoon, our time.’

  It was now past midnight and very little had been achieved. Admittedly, we knew the identity of the dead woman, and had obtained a few sparse background details from the Maitlands. The next two important steps would be to interview Nicholas Hammond on his return from New York, and to visit the offices of Kerry Trucking. DS Flynn had said that Hammond would not be back until the twenty-seventh, but there was a chance that Kerry Trucking would be operating on Boxing Day, particularly if it had the international commitments that Peter Maitland had suggested it had.

  I sent the team home, but told them that I expected to see them the following day. There were a few groans, but a general acceptance that murder enquiries rarely fitted in with detectives’ social arrangements. It was not the first time my Christmas had been ruined, and I don’t suppose that it will be the last.

  I arranged for a duty car from the Yard to take me home to my flat in Surbiton. I’d decided that it would be most unwise to return to Gail’s house, not that I would have shared her bed in any event; Gail is a little shy of sleeping with me when her parents are staying with her. Apart from anything else, George and Sally Sutton were travelling back to Nottingham later on Boxing Day, and that would avoid my having to answer George’s question about whether I intended to marry his daughter. It also meant that I would miss out on further gripping yarns about the land speed record and Formula One motor racing. But I could live with that.

  I was in the office by nine o’clock. Dave was already there, as were Kate Ebdon and the rest of the team.

  ‘Kerry Trucking is operating today, guv,’ said Dave. ‘It seems they don’t recognize Boxing Day. Bit like us.’

  ‘In that case, we’ll get out there.’ I glanced at Kate. ‘Anything for me?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been checking on Kerry Hammond’s mobile, guv. There were several unanswered calls from Nick Hammond on Christmas Eve at about the time he discovered she wasn’t at the airport. And over the past few days there have also been calls from a mobile that goes out to a Gary Dixon. There were quite a few calls from him over the preceding weeks, the last one being at about three thirty on Christmas Eve. There were also a few from Kerry to a Miguel Rodriguez. So far I don’t know who Dixon or Rodriguez are, but I’m working on it.’

  ‘Well done, Kate, and thanks.’

  ‘There’s one other thing, guv,’ said Dave. ‘The CCTV tapes from the airport car park.’

  ‘Yes?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘They were duff, guv. Half of them weren’t working, and those that were operative weren’t focused on the area we’re interested in.’

  ‘Terrific!’ I said. But it was no more than I’d expected.

  THREE

  Kerry Trucking occupied a huge area in Scarman Street, Chiswick. There were several Volvo articulated lorries in the yard, a couple of which were backed up to the loading bay. A group of forklift trucks stood in a rank at the other end of the compound where a bulk container was being hoisted on to a flatbed truck. Beyond it there were about twenty similar containers stacked in groups. And all this on Boxing Day. You didn’t have to be in the haulage business to see that Kerry Trucking was a huge operation.

  A security guard approached as we arrived.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  I identified Dave and myself. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ I asked.

  ‘That’ll be Mr Bligh, sir. Mr Bernard Bligh. He’s one of the directors.’

  ‘Is he here today?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’ The security guard smiled. ‘He seems to spend most of his time here.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d tell me how I can get to his office.’

  ‘No need, sir. That’s him standing on the loading platform.’ The guard pointed to a stocky figure whose gaze was sweeping back and forth across the yard. ‘Either he or Mr Thorpe always like to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Who is Mr Thorpe?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s the company secretary, sir, but he’s also a director.’

  Dave and I crossed to the loading platform and mounted the short flight of steps at the side.

  ‘Mr Bernard Bligh?’

  ‘That’s me. Who are you?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Brock of New Scotland Yard and this is Detective Sergeant Poole.’

  ‘What’s this about, then? Illegal immigrants or bootlegged liquor?’ Bligh sounded resigned to it being one or the other.

  ‘Neither, Mr Bligh. It’s about Mrs Hammond.’

  ‘What’s she been up to?’

  ‘It might be better if we went into your office, sir,’ I suggested, having noticed a loader doing a bit of earwigging.

  ‘Yes, right, follow me.’ Bligh led the way up a flight of wooden stairs and into an office that overlooked the loading bay. ‘Always like to keep an eye on the drivers,’ he volunteered. ‘Never know what the buggers are up to otherwise. Now, what’s this about Kerry?’ He gestured towards a sofa upholstered in threadbare corduroy, and took a seat behind his paper-laden desk.

  ‘She was found murdered in her Jaguar in a car park at Heathrow Airport yesterday,’ I said, seeing no reason to avoid the stark truth.

  ‘Good God!’ For a moment or two, Bligh stared at me. ‘Murdered? But what the hell happened?’

  I gave Bligh the brief details of the finding of Kerry Hammond’s body, and that she had been due to fly to New York with her husband on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Do you know of anyone who might’ve held a grudge against Mrs Hammond?’ I asked.

  Bligh laughed. ‘The haulage business is a pretty cut-throat game, Chief Inspector, but I doubt that any of our competitors would resort to murder.’

  ‘Did she have any problems that you know of?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone? But no, she’d none that I can think of. She was very much a hands-on sort of boss. She took over the company when Dick was killed.’

  ‘That’d be Mr Lucas, I take it?’ queried Dave.

  ‘Yeah. He was killed in a car accident on the M1 about seven years ago. They were devoted to each other. Dick even named the company after her. He worked it up from nothing. Well, we both did, but he was the brains behind it.’

  ‘But I understand that she got married again,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, to Nick Hammond. They got spliced about five years back.’

  ‘
Does he have anything to do with the business?’ asked Dave.

  ‘Never comes near the place,’ said Bligh. ‘He runs some sort of poncey estate agent’s outfit in the West End. I don’t think he’s doing too well, mind you. As a matter of fact, I think that Kerry had to bail him out a couple of times.’ He paused and stared at me. ‘Are you sure it was her? I thought she was off to the Big Apple for Christmas. That’s what she told me, anyway.’

  ‘I understand that those were her plans,’ I said, ‘but she only got as far as the airport.’

  ‘D’you think Nick killed her?’ asked Bligh bluntly.

  ‘D’you have a reason for asking that?’

  ‘Not really. I just wondered. They’d had the odd falling out, but no more than most married couples, I suppose.’

  I had a gut feeling that Bligh wasn’t telling us the whole truth. ‘We’ve no idea who murdered her, Mr Bligh,’ I said. ‘It’s early days yet, but our enquiries are continuing.’

  Bligh laughed. ‘That’s what all the detectives on TV say.’

  ‘Probably,’ I said. I have an ingrained dislike of the way in which the CID is portrayed in fiction with, for the most part, airy-fairy pseudo-intellectual chief inspectors and dim sergeants.

  ‘Does the name Gary Dixon mean anything to you, Mr Bligh?’ asked Dave, referring to his pocketbook. ‘Or Miguel Rodriguez? Kerry had spoken to both of them on her mobile over the last day or so.’

  ‘Yeah. Dixon was one of our drivers up to about three months ago.’

  ‘Why did he leave?’

  ‘I sacked him. He got captured by the customs guys at Dover, bringing in a load of bootlegged booze from Calais.’

  That was interesting. Dixon’s calls to Kerry’s mobile had continued long after he’d been dismissed. I wondered why, but I was not about to ask Bligh because I thought I could guess.

  ‘And Rodriguez?’ I asked.

  ‘No idea. Never heard of him.’

  ‘Is the company in a good way of business, Mr Bligh?’ I asked.

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ said Bligh, ‘despite the recession, although we’ve had to make one or two cutbacks. It’s made Kerry a very rich woman. Well, good luck to her, I say. She worked bloody hard to learn the ins and outs of the trade after Dick was killed. And she did, despite knowing nothing about the haulage business to start with. But she knows a hell of lot about it now. She even got a licence to drive a forty-four tonner just so she’d know what the guys were up against.’