The Jackdaw

‘I’m not sure of anything yet,’ Sean admitted, ‘but if he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar while laundering someone’s money, especially if they’re Eastern European or South American, they wouldn’t want to hide what they’d done. They like to make public statements – keep everyone else in line. And the abduction too doesn’t feel right. If it had been organized crime they would have lured him somewhere – somewhere quiet and out of sight. But I’m not ruling anything out until we know more.’

Donnelly parked as close as he could to Elkins’s home. Sean was out the car before he’d had time to kill the engine, looking up and down the upmarket street – looking for ghosts. Donnelly soon joined him.

‘Hell of a place to abduct somebody from,’ he offered.

‘And in daylight,’ Sean added.

‘A confident customer.’

‘Or insane.’

‘Either way the whole thing was seen by a couple of witnesses – both saying the suspect’s white van was parked in the street already, waiting for Elkins. So he wasn’t followed.’

‘Not yesterday anyway,’ Sean explained, ‘but he was followed at some point, otherwise how could the suspect know where he lived and the fact he regularly walked from the tube station to his home? Unless he already knew him – knew his habits.’

‘Someone who worked for him in the past?’ Donnelly suggested.

‘In the City?’

‘No. These people have a lot of hired help. I was thinking more a disgruntled gardener, or maintenance man, or even a husband of a cleaner his missus sacked.’

‘Possibly,’ Sean agreed. ‘It’ll all need to be checked out. It’ll be nice if it’s that easy.’

‘Shall we do the witnesses first or the family?’

‘The family,’ Sean replied. ‘Get it over with.’

‘If you don’t want to see them you don’t have to,’ Donnelly offered. ‘I can always come back later with Sally.’

‘No,’ he insisted. ‘I want to see them, or his wife at least.’

‘Fair enough.’ Donnelly didn’t argue. ‘After you.’

Sean walked the short distance along the immaculate street and climbed the short flight of steps to the shining black door of number twelve. He imagined Paul Elkins coming home to this door, day after day, content and confident, untouched by the problems normal people had – unable to imagine something like this could ever happen to him. Was that what the killer wanted – to drag the wealthy and privileged into a world where they could feel the pain of everyday life? Had the killer felt too much pain to bear? He took a deep breath and rang the doorbell – avoiding the heavy-looking metal door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head that looked like it would wake the dead. The last thing he wanted to do was advertise their presence. It was only a matter of time before the media discovered the victim’s home address and came crawling around, but he wanted to keep things quiet for as long as he could.

After a few seconds the door was opened by a short, stocky man in his late twenties wearing spectacles and dressed in an inexpensive-looking dark suit. He eyed them suspiciously. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked with a slight London accent.

Sean knew immediately he was a fellow detective as he showed him his warrant card. ‘DI Sean Corrigan from the Special Investigations Unit.’

‘DS Donnelly,’ Donnelly told him without producing his identification, ‘from the same.’

The other detective seemed to immediately relax. ‘Am I glad to see you,’ he whispered. ‘I was told you’d be taking this one over. Babysitting the family of a murder victim isn’t exactly my thing. DC Jonnie Mendham, by the way. You’d better come in.’ He stepped aside and allowed them to enter before closing the door and continuing to talk in a whisper. ‘They’re all gathered in the living room,’ Mendham explained. ‘Mrs Elkins and her two kids, Jack and Evie. There’s also a friend of Mrs Elkins here too, Trudy Bevens – a shoulder to cry on and all that.’

‘Fine,’ Sean acknowledged as he and Donnelly followed Mendham towards the living room and the desperate sadness he knew he’d find inside.

‘Any idea how long it’ll be before you send someone to take over from me?’ Mendham’s voice held a slight pleading note. ‘I’m not trained for this family liaison stuff.’

‘Soon enough,’ Sean answered carelessly. ‘Until then just keep a watch out for reporters and make sure they don’t speak to anyone they don’t know on the phone. Remind them details of the investigations are confidential and not to be shared even with family and close friends until I say it’s OK.’

‘No problem,’ Mendham agreed in a whisper. ‘Just get me out of this mausoleum.’ He opened the living-room door before Sean could reply and raised his voice to its normal volume. ‘Mrs Elkins,’ he addressed the attractive woman in her late forties who remained seated as she looked up at them – her appearance still immaculate despite the circumstances, her ash blonde hair framing her tanned face and piercing blue eyes that had reddened somewhat with crying.

‘Yes,’ she answered as strongly as she could, her voice wavering somewhat.

‘This is Detective Inspector Corrigan and Detective Sergeant Donnelly from our Special Investigations Unit,’ Mendham explained. ‘They’ll be taking over the investigation.’

‘Why?’ she asked in a slightly clipped accent.

‘It’s the way things work,’ Sean spoke to her for the first time as he scanned the other faces in the room – a weeping girl of no more than eleven or twelve who sat close to her mother wrapped in a protective arm, a stoical-looking boy probably about fourteen and Mrs Elkins’s tearful friend. ‘Most serious and unusual cases get passed on to us. We have a certain amount of experience in dealing with investigations like this.’

‘I wasn’t aware that anything like this had ever happened before,’ she questioned him.

‘It hasn’t,’ he agreed. ‘I meant experience in dealing with things that are a little out of the ordinary.’

‘A little out of the ordinary,’ she repeated, looking at him blankly. ‘My husband’s dead. Murdered by some lunatic.’

‘And we’re very sorry for your loss,’ Donnelly intervened. ‘We’re here because we’re best equipped to find whoever did this and bring them to justice, but we need to ask some questions. Maybe it would be better if the children weren’t here for that.’

‘No,’ she snapped back. ‘We stay together. I’m not about to let them out of my sight. Not until you’ve caught this madman.’

‘Fair enough.’ Donnelly didn’t argue. ‘I reckon I’d be the same. Do you mind if we sit down?’

‘Sorry,’ she apologized. ‘Of course not. Please.’

They both sat on the same large sofa opposite Mrs Elkins and her daughter, Sean glad of the large size of the room – just the thought of being trapped in a small room with this many grieving people was enough to make him feel claustrophobic.

‘I appreciate this must be very difficult,’ Sean tried to say the things she no doubt expected him to say, ‘but our questions really can’t wait.’

‘I understand,’ she assured him. ‘Ask what you need to. Let’s just get it over with.’

‘What time did your husband leave for work yesterday?’ Sean asked.

‘Not long after seven,’ she answered. ‘His usual time.’

‘A hard-working man.’ Donnelly tried to ease the tension.

‘You don’t get to where Paul was working nine to five,’ she told them. ‘It takes dedication and sacrifice.’

‘Yet he was abducted at about five pm – in the street outside,’ Sean reminded her. ‘So he didn’t always work late?’

‘No,’ she agreed, slightly defensively. ‘Not always, but most days. Does it matter?’

Did you know he’d finished work early? Sean asked the killer silent questions. Did you somehow know?

‘Did he call you at all during the day?’ he asked, more to try to establish a rhythm of questions and answers than hoping to discover anything useful, ‘or contact you somehow?’

‘He called me a couple of times,’ she answered. ‘Once in the morning and again early afternoon – to let me know he was about to leave work.’ She suddenly choked up, her tears contagious amongst the other women while the boy looked on blankly. Was the boy somehow involved? Sean asked himself, before deciding he was most likely still in shock. The tears would come later. ‘It was the last time I ever got to speak to him,’ she managed to say.

‘Why call twice?’ Sean asked, trying to remember the last time he’d called his wife Kate more than once a day just for the sake of it. ‘Was something troubling him?’