26

  1 August 2020 – evening

  Jim and Greg took stock at the end of the day, leaning exhaustedly on the sides of their cars as they chatted. In the background, firefighters were still rolling up hoses and generally clearing away. Ned and his team were close to completing their first search of what was left of the machinery store and no more casualties had been discovered.

  ‘That,’ as Greg had said, ‘was at least one piece of good news.’

  Greg and Jim had interviewed all the regular workforce and the two additional harvest workers. Their whereabouts during the evening had been established, which wasn’t terribly difficult as all of them had been hard at work driving combines, lorries or chaser bins – roles from which it was pretty difficult to absent yourself without someone noticing, as Greg had also remarked.

  ‘Any news on the post-mortem?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Scheduled for tomorrow,’ replied Greg. ‘The doc was away today and her deputy had already been called out to a suspected drowning in the Yare, so it won’t happen now until first thing in the morning. It’s unlikely to change anything. Ah, here’s Ned. Anything new?’ he asked as Ned approached pushing the paper hood of his overalls back from his shaved head.

  ‘Not much to report as yet,’ he said. ‘The fire investigator thinks the accelerant was petrol and that Molotov cocktails were used in at least two of the barns. I concur. You can still smell the petrol in places, and fragments of the bottles are scattered around sheds 2 and 3. We’ve taken samples from a lot of places, and I think we’ve got some decent fingerprints, probably mostly from the farmworkers. We’ll check against the ones taken this afternoon for exclusion purposes and see where we get to. Only one thing new to report, and that’s the contents of the machinery store. We can find no evidence of a Range Rover nor of a Kawasaki Mule having been stored there when the fire was set. So, either they were nicked last night, or our friend Hamish is trying to boost his insurance claim.’

  Greg looked up quickly. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Word with Mr Grey, I think, Jim, then we’ll be off home.’

  As they arrived back at the farmhouse, Greg’s phone rang. Concentrating on his parking, he was slightly distracted as he answered on his hands-free.

  ‘Jill, can I catch up with you later? We’re just about to interview the farm manager again.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was just an update on what I’ve managed to dig up on Mrs Hamilton. Some of it’s a bit odd, but nothing—’

  ‘OK, thanks, Jill,’ he interrupted. ‘I need to go. I’ll ring later. Thanks for touching base.’ He rang off.

  When they walked back into Hamish Grey’s office he was on the phone, and two other logoed workers were occupying chairs at the small table – one of them half asleep and the other chewing on a bar of chocolate. They looked round at Greg and Jim. Greg recognised them as two of the lorry drivers, and realised, from the half of the phone conversation he could hear, that Hamish was negotiating for grain storage space elsewhere. When he put the phone down there was a tired smile on his face.

  ‘That’s OK then,’ he said. ‘From now on, we’ll be taking grain direct from the combine to Perry’s, the grain merchant at Thetford. They’ll be expecting us.’ The two drivers nodded and stood up to leave.

  ‘Have you got some news for me?’ Hamish asked of the two detectives.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Greg, ‘but we do need a word. May we?’ He gestured at the two chairs recently vacated by the drivers, and on Hamish’s nod, they sat down.

  Hamish joined them. ‘What’s not exactly news?’ he asked.

  ‘Can you take me through, again, what was in the machinery store last night?’ asked Greg.

  ‘From the top,’ said Hamish, ‘one Range Rover, one Kawasaki Mule on a trailer, and a long list of tools and spare parts. I’ve started on a full inventory.’ He leaned back in his chair and scrabbled around on his desk. ‘Here, this is as far as I’ve got. It’s not comprehensive yet.’

  Greg took it from him and ran his eye down the page. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘our forensic team tell me there’s no evidence that either the Range Rover or the Kawasaki were in the building when the fire began.’

  ‘What!’ Hamish exclaimed. ‘But they were definitely there when we went off to combine.’

  ‘Do you have any evidence of that?’ asked Greg. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to ask.’

  ‘Bloody cheek,’ said Hamish. ‘First some arse burns my buildings down, then the police accuse me of imaginary machinery! You’ll be suggesting I set light to the place myself next!’

  ‘We did consider that possibility,’ said Greg, unmoved by the display of anger. ‘You wouldn’t be the first farmer to solve his financial difficulties with a well-timed fire. But this wasn’t good timing. There’s ample evidence you were elsewhere and none that we’ve found so far that you stand to benefit from a fire.

  ‘So, there are a number of possibilities. Either the equipment never existed, and you thought you’d inflate your insurance claim, or it’s somewhere else and the same applies regarding insurance. Or it was stolen last night. And if the latter, then it’s too big a coincidence for it to have been nicked by someone else just before the fire started. Odds on it was taken by the arsonist, either as a side venture or the fire was at least partly designed as cover for the theft.

  ‘So, have you any evidence of the presence of those two vehicles?’

  Breathing slightly heavily, Hamish went to a storage rack and selected a box file. It hit the table in front of Greg with a slam, and Hamish opened it to riffle through a pile of papers. He slowly and deliberately selected two, then placed them in front of Greg.

  ‘Proof of purchase of each,’ he said. ‘If you hang about a bit, I’ll find the insurance docs as well, but those are on the computer and I may need my secretary to dig them out on Monday. As to them being in the building, I suggest you ask my mechanic when he last saw them there. And we can check the CCTV to see if there’re any images of them being moved around. Unfortunately the cameras were lost in the fire, but images before that, up to the point the cameras were lost, should be on record.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Greg. ‘We’ll need all the CCTV footage you’ve got for the twenty-four hours up to the fire, as a starter at least.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Hamish, turning back to his desktop. ‘But it’ll be a big file. Do you want it on a memory stick?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Greg.

  Out by the cars again, Greg handed the memory stick to Jim. ‘Make sure that gets to Jill, will you,’ he said.

  27

  2 August 2020

  When Greg arrived in the office early Sunday morning, he wasn’t surprised to find Jill there ahead of him, already scrutinising CCTV footage from the farm.

  ‘Morning, Jill,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just realised I forgot to ring you back last night. What was it you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘Morning, Boss,’ she said, turning round from her laptop. ‘It’s OK. I realise you had a busy day yesterday. It was about the old lady who lives in that bungalow in Ormesby. You know, the one that won’t let us in. I had a chat with the local surgery, as you suggested. They couldn’t tell me anything about why she’s shielding, but not because of patient confidentiality. Just that, as they hadn’t seen her for over two years, they had no current knowledge of her health. They said she’d been called for routine checkups and vaccinations but never turned up nor made any appointments. All they could tell me, therefore, was that she was a woman, born in December 1950, and presumably in robust health since she never bothered them. While I was at it, I rang the local dentists as well, four or five of them actually, and none of them had her on their books either.’

  ‘So, what’s bothering you?’ asked Greg. ‘You said last night there was something you weren’t happy about.’

  ‘First, I think she looks young for her age. Not exactly in the first flush of youth, but not that old either. Second, if she’s so fit she never sees either a doctor or a dentist, why is she shielding?’

  ‘Could just be her age,’ replied Greg, hazarding a guess. ‘Not unreasonable to protect herself at that age. She’s in the high-risk group.’

  ‘Suppose so,’ said Jill, but her tone made it clear she wasn’t convinced. Privately determined to do some more checking, she turned back to her screens with a sigh.

  Late morning, with the post-mortem report on his desk and Ned on his way in, Greg called the team, such as it was, together in the incident room. He looked round his depleted ranks with a sigh. Jill, Jim and Ned sat near the open windows, benefitting from the breeze. Steve sat opposite, drinking coffee from an enormous mug that bore the words ‘I used to cough to hide the fart. Now I fart to hide the cough!’

  Greg suppressed a grin and turned to Jill. ‘No Bill or Jenny?’ he asked.

  ‘Bill got pinged and he’s isolating,’ said Jill, referring to the Covid contact warning scheme. ‘It’s Jenny’s day off, and given the hours she’s been working recently, I thought we could spare her for today. Mind you, I didn’t know about Bill then,’ she said ruefully.

  ‘Still makes sense,’ said Greg. ‘It won’t be any help if we all run ourselves into the ground. This looks like being a long haul. OK, let’s review where we’ve got to with the two main cases.

  ‘I’ve had the post-mortem report on the casualty at the farm, who has, incidentally, been identified as Andrei Popescu, the grain store manager. The cause of death is given as one, blunt force trauma, with two, a contributory factor being an underlying heart condition. The doc says he may not have been aware of the heart condition, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped his body deal with the shock of the blast and the subsequent trauma resulting from him hitting the concrete yard. It seems he was in front of the grain store when it blew up, probably heading out to see what was happening in the yard. He took the full force of the blast when the grain dust ignited. So it seems likely that the death was an unintended consequence of the arson, rather than the primary object. However, we need to keep an open mind on that. In any event, I think we should treat this as a murder inquiry until we can rule anything out.

  ‘I’ve informed Hamish Grey, who tells me that Popescu’s wife has been notified of her husband’s death. She’s apparently on her way to Norfolk now. Ned, anything from you?’

  ‘Not much yet,’ said Ned, looking up from his notes. ‘I’m hamstrung by lack of staff too. We put the effort into collecting samples of DNA and fingerprints, and we’ve got exclusionary samples from the farm team. What I don’t have is the manpower to process everything quickly. I’m sorry about that.’ He looked intensely frustrated, and Greg could appreciate how he felt. ‘I can confirm that petrol was the accelerant, and that it was both flung around from a petrol can and deployed in glass bottles. We recovered shards of glass from the bottles, and a petrol can.

  ‘I can also confirm that there is definitely no sign of either the Range Rover or the Kawasaki in the machinery store at the time of the fire.’

  ‘I can add something on that,’ interrupted Jill. ‘I started on the most recent CCTV images available – those recorded shortly before the blast and fire – and worked my way back. I’ve got as far as up to an hour or so before the fire, and I can see what looks like someone driving the Range Rover out of the farmyard, towing something behind it which could have been the Kawasaki on a trailer. It heads out of the machinery shed, then turns away from the camera and disappears. I haven’t completed my check of all the feeds, but it doesn’t seem it went out of the main farm gate. I think it probably went off across the fields.’

  ‘That’s great work, Jill,’ said Greg.

  Jim jumped up with his phone in hand. ‘I’ve already got uniform checking the area around the yard for signs of entry,’ he said. ‘I’ll get them to look specifically for traces of the Range Rover and Kawasaki. If they were nicked, then either they’re still around, or they’ve been picked up somewhere in the vicinity. Anything on the driver, Jill?’

  ‘Not much,’ she said. ‘Tall man, I think, in dark clothes and with a balaclava over his head. That’s all so far, but I’ll keep looking.’ Her phone rang as she spoke, and she glanced down to turn it to silent. ‘Sorry, Boss,’ she said.

  ‘No problem,’ said Greg. ‘As you have the floor, Jill, can you update everyone on the missing children.’

  ‘I’m afraid it won’t take me long, and you’ve heard most of it before. The last confirmed sighting of the children was on the morning of the twenty-seventh of March, by the man in the garage who sold them a sausage roll, amongst other things. There’s an unconfirmed sighting by the same man the evening of the same day, when he saw what sounds like the children near the end of the road opposite the garage. Given that he’d already talked to them and knew what they looked like, I’m inclined to take that sighting seriously. Unfortunately no one else saw them after that, and at least one key householder – the lady who lives in the bungalow with a boat, where Turbo signalled some interest – is refusing to engage. She claims to be shielding, but the local doctor’s surgery haven’t seen her for two years, so who knows?’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve done a bit more checking this morning, and she receives a pension from the civil service, and has a passport. There’s something just not sitting right with me about that woman, but that’s all I’ve got so far.’

  ‘OK,’ said Greg. ‘Sorry I haven’t anything inspiring to add. It’s a case of keep on keeping on, I’m afraid. See you all later, and thank you for coming in. I may not always remember to say so, but I appreciate your dedication and so does the Chief Super.

  ‘Jim, let’s have a word about Suffolk.’

  The two men went back to Greg’s office, leaving Jill in front of her screens and Steve heading over to Silfield.

  ‘I guess Suffolk hasn’t followed up our tip-off,’ said Greg.

  ‘No,’ said Jim. ‘I spoke to the DI Chris put me in touch with, and he wasn’t keen on committing resource. I’ve checked, and they didn’t. Had something better to do, apparently.’

  ‘It occurs to me,’ said Greg, ‘that it may have been the location for the handover of the Range Rover and Kawasaki. The timing would fit, and bearing in mind where we got the intel from…’

  Jim nodded. ‘I was thinking along the same lines,’ he said. ‘We pick up details of a rendezvous from the phone belonging to Jacko Green, who already has previous for twocking and is apparently more affluent than his known income would account for. Moreover, we also have him linked to another farm which suffered an arson attack recently.’

  ‘Although his link to the farm was earlier in the year than the arson attack,’ replied Greg. ‘He was identified in connection with the hare-coursing incident. But don’t let me put you off, Jim, I’m just playing devil’s advocate. On which theme, it can’t have been Jacko at Silfield on Friday night because we still had him at the station.’

  ‘I wish to God that Suffolk had taken us seriously,’ said Jim. ‘We might have had last night’s culprits in the bag and the network that takes stolen vehicles abroad as well.’

  ‘You’re assuming they were headed for Felixstowe,’ said Greg.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I am. Which leaves us with what?’

  ‘Let’s assume we’re right. If it wasn’t Jacko carrying out Friday’s arson attack, then it was one of his contacts and one, maybe, who was hare coursing at Welsh Farm last month. We could start from there.’

  ‘And at the other end, if the Range Rover and Kawasaki were on their way to Felixstowe that night, we might find them on cameras somewhere between Silfield and the rendezvous point.’

  ‘Good thinking, Jim. I’m also going to have another go at Suffolk police. They may have missed the rendezvous, but they could have a look round at Felixstowe. If that was the intended destination, then the vehicles might be in a container there, awaiting shipping.’

  ***

  Back at her desk, Jill immediately got stuck in to reviewing more CCTV material from the farmyard. As a result, it was after six before she remembered the message on her phone. Dragging her eyes from her screens, she looked down at her phone and flicked through to voice messages. What she heard electrified her. She glanced round the room, but she was the last one there. Steve hadn’t come back from the farm, and no one else had arrived. She grabbed her phone and headed for Greg’s office.

  ‘I’m sorry, Boss,’ she said as she went in. ‘I’ve had a message you need to know about. I’m afraid it arrived this morning, but I didn’t have chance to look until just now.’

  Greg looked up from his phone. ‘Sorry, Jill,’ he said. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment.’ Then, into the phone, he said, ‘Thanks, Chris. Anything you can do to prod your colleagues into action would be good. I think they missed an important opportunity Friday night, and if they don’t follow up on this, they’ll miss another.’ He listened in silence for a moment, then said, ‘Aren’t we all? See you later. I should be home this evening.’ He put his phone down and looked up at Jill. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. Suffolk are pleading shorthandedness, if that’s even a word – like they’re the only ones! What have you got for me?’

  ‘A message I should have picked up sooner. It’s from Tim Simmons, Anne Mirren’s boyfriend. You know, the children’s mother’s boyfriend.’

  ‘Yes, I know’, said Greg. ‘What’s he got to say?’

  ‘He says he’s had an email from the children. I’ve spoken to him briefly, and he’s forwarded it to me.’

  ‘He’s what?’ Greg was galvanised into life. ‘Does it tell us where they are?’

  ‘No, unfortunately, and I don’t think it’s recent. At least, I’ve read it over and over, and I think it was written sometime ago but only sent today. Here. See.’ She held out her iPad.