14
The Suspects
April and Connor had agreed to go for a coffee in Starbucks after they’d finished filing their copy. As Martin Seth had been arrested, April’s interview could not be used as it was sub judice. Events had overtaken her exclusive chat with murder suspect number one, anyway, after the discovery of Jackie McIvor, a well-known street worker whose neck had been broken and her body dumped in a ditch.
Connor had been sent to the crime scene where yet again his friendly copper on police line duties had managed to slip him a few more nuggets of information that would keep the Daily Herald ahead of the pack.
April and Connor had left the office as the splash was being designed on screen – Woman No. 2 murdered, Seth’s husband arrested. It was certainly striking, but both felt uneasy about it.
‘I don’t think Martin could kill anyone, never mind two women in two days,’ April said, emptying her fourth sugar sachet into her latte and taking a bite out of her Danish pastry.
Connor looked at the empty sachets with disdain. ‘Do you know what? I don’t think I’ve met anyone who eats as much as you do.’
April let out a raucous laugh. ‘I know – wherever do I put it all?’ She patted her wide hips.
They were silent for a moment, stirring their coffees absent-mindedly.
Connor was the first to speak. ‘Well, I’ve never met him, but it’d take a special kind of psychopath to kill twice in two days – it’s almost unheard of.’
‘He honestly doesn’t have it in him. He looks fairly fit but he’s not strong enough to have snapped someone’s neck,’ April mused.
‘Don’t be so sure. Look at Peter Tobin, a right wee insignificant guy, yet the brutality he inflicted on his victims was horrific.’
Tobin was a small, wiry man who had kept his emotions in check throughout his police interviews and the search for three separate murder victims. The facade had only slipped once when he was being led from the High Court in Glasgow to a prison van where he’d kicked a kneeling Daily Herald photographer Paul Kielty in the neck. Before the snapper had passed out, he’d managed to fire off one frame of Tobin’s evil face twisted and contorted with rage – so obviously the real Tobin his poor victims had seen before he sadistically took their lives.
‘I still can’t believe Paul Kielty didn’t win a press award for that picture,’ spat Connor. ‘And who did they give it to? Some twat who’d taken a picture of a Highland cow in the snow. That sums up this bloody industry. Do you know what the biggest problem is with newspapers today? Tyrants. There aren’t enough tyrants who want to be proprietors any more. It’s all shareholders wanting their slice of the profits now. But newspapers are about gut instinct – not playing the market.’
‘And what,’ interrupted April, ‘does that have to do with Selina and Martin?’
‘Well, they’re in the fashion business. Again, something you need to have a feel for. That needs a tyrant at the top, too. So who was the tyrant of the duo – Martin? I don’t think so. It was Selina. Tyrants make great captains of industry but they also make great enemies. Find Selina’s enemies and we’ll find who snapped her neck.’
April sighed. ‘But where do we begin? I remember a wee lassie from Selina’s office came to see me a few years back. Charelle or Chantal or something?’
‘Chantal Cameron. She was the office dog’s body. Like Selina’s shadow for a while. Went everywhere with her,’ Connor replied.
‘That’s the one. Selina fired her and she came into see me bumping her gums, hinting at all sorts. But she wanted £10,000 up front to tell her story and the same again on publication.
‘Well, we weren’t going to pay that sort of money. I managed to haggle her down to a grand. Then she changed her mind and that was the end of that.
‘But Chantal was just one of several. Selina’s sacked so many staff she needed to fit a revolving door. They’ll all be bearing grudges.’ April reckoned.
‘‘Nah, too obvious. The ones who were still working for her bear even bigger grudges. She was a total nightmare. But they’re all women and there’s no way a woman killed Selina.
‘Maybe there’s someone who sees himself as Selina’s equal but who’s been crossed by her. A previous lover? Although I don’t think even the Daily Herald has enough resources to track them all down. You should trawl through cutts, mainly the business papers, and see if there were any lawsuits against Seth International that may have slipped under the radar.’
‘Oh no,’ screeched April, ‘you know I’m useless with Factiva.’ Factiva was the new online newspaper archive system – known as ‘cutts’ – that had replaced the old Telnet system which had been in place for fifteen years. ‘The bastards only went and changed Telnet just as I’d learned to master it,’ she added with no hint of a joke.
Connor laughed. ‘They can upgrade the system but they can’t upgrade our April Lavender.’
Apart from establishing a timeline of Martin Seth’s movements on the day of his wife’s murder, the formal interview had been unproductive. Crosbie had asked him directly if he’d killed his wife. Martin had replied with a firm ‘No’ before his lawyer had intervened. He was still a suspect, but as this was such a high-profile active case, Crosbie would have to pursue all other lines of inquiry.
Crosbie was thinking along the same lines as Connor. He reckoned that Selina Seth’s sacked office junior was unlikely to have been involved in murder, but he still had to send a couple of detectives to interview the former staff member about her whereabouts when her ex-boss was brutally killed. Crosbie knew it would be a dead end.
He also wanted to find another disgruntled business associate with a major grudge. He could take his pick. Then there was the second case of the murdered prostitute Jackie McIvor, which Crosbie was determined to keep separate from the Selina investigation. The man who’d killed Jackie was likely to be a known user of street workers. He’d most likely have previous for assault and possibly had killed before.
Crosbie hoped that by morning forensics would confirm that he was indeed after two different murders, even if the newspapers were determined there was only one. He afforded himself a wry smile. ‘Print and be cunting damned. I wish my life was so pissing easy.’ That reminded him, he needed to see his psychiatrist sooner rather than later.
April was one step ahead of DCI Crosbie and his team.
She was sitting in a Starbucks having an 8 a.m. meeting with Selina’s former employee. Chantal Cameron had threatened to spill the beans on her time working for Selina, before she had suddenly clamed up. No cheque she’d subsequently been offered from a string of April’s tabloid rivals to reveal all about her rich and famous employer could break her silence.
But now Selina was dead, Chantal had agreed to meet April once more. The reporter had ordered two lattes and the pair sat outside so they could smoke. Chantal was in the mood to get a lot off her fake chest. It transpired that she had been more than just Selina’s dog’s body. She’d also procured illegal drugs for her.
Chantal explained: ‘I used to talk to Selina when I brought her coffee in the morning. We got quite close. She was like a big sister to me.
‘Then one day she said she was feeling really down and tired and asked if I could think of anything to help her out.
‘I’d do a bit of speed and the likes out clubbing at the weekends and actually had some on me. She said she’d never tried drugs before but was well up for it. She paid me out of petty cash. Then the next day she asked me for some more.
‘Within a few weeks I was running errands left, right and centre on so-called company business, when all I was doing was picking up stuff from my dealer. She was into everything. Speed. MDMA. Blues, you name it.
‘The speed was to get her hyped up before meetings, diazepam to bring her back down again. She also liked a bit of hash to get her off to sleep. She even asked me to get her crystal meth once.
?
??But then she sacked me.’
‘Why?’ April asked.
‘‘Cos I was doing a bit of skimming,’ Chantal replied nonchalantly.
‘Skimming?’ April enquired.
‘I could skim around five hundred pounds a week for myself, plus what I needed for personal use,’ Chantal replied, before deciding she needed to justify her stealing, ‘but you have to remember it was my neck on the line. If I’d been busted then I would have taken the full rap – Selina had made that very clear. She was paranoid about being caught. But then paranoia and drugs kind of go hand in hand.’
‘Who was your dealer?’ April asked.
‘I’m not at liberty to say,’ Chantal replied coolly, ‘but he’s into drugs in a big way and not the sort you cross.’
‘How much was Selina spending on drugs every week?’ April asked.
‘By the end? Up to two grand,’ Chantal replied from behind her oversized shades.
‘How much was your salary?’ April asked.
‘I was on buttons as a junior - twelve grand a year,’ Chantal snorted.
‘But you were earning another twenty-five on the side tax-free. You’re quite the little entrepreneur,’ April said.
‘Look, I didn’t come here for you to look down your nose at me. That bitch fired me after all the risks I took on her behalf. So what if she discovered I was ripping her off? What she was doing was illegal, too. I told her I’d expose her drug habit if she didn’t pay me off.’
‘Is that what happened. Did Selina buy your silence?’ April asked.
‘Er, no. I ended up getting another job,’ Chantal added shiftily.
April knew she was lying. But as far as she was concerned Chantal was a symbol of everything that was wrong with today’s generation: all me, me, me. Drugs and extortion came so easily to Chantal. It was just another bargaining tool. She was clearly a girl with issues and a massive chip on her shoulder. When April had been in her mid-twenties she would have been delighted to be worked for a rich and famous company boss. But that didn’t appear to be enough any more. Chantal wanted to live the high life, too, having done nothing to deserve it.
April picked up the bill, thanked Chantal for her time and left with the excuse that she had another meeting to go to. Really, she was desperate to head to her favourite café, the Peccadillo.
Fifteen minutes later she took her usual seat. She was particularly hungry this morning. Dipping her link sausage into the yolk of her fried egg April muttered out loud, ‘I blame X Factor and Pop Idol and all these talent shows. Kids just want to turn up and be famous now. They don’t want to do the years of hard graft to get there.’
The waitresses and the regulars were used to April airing her thoughts in public, but she drew some looks from those who didn’t know her.
‘Mind if I join in your conversation?’ Connor beamed.
‘Oh,’ April laughed, ‘was I talking to myself again? I better stop that. People might think I’m mad.’
‘There’s no “might” about it, my batty old friend. Right, what have you got?’
April recounted her meeting with Chantal Cameron. At the end Connor had just one question: ‘How did Selina know Chantal was ripping her off unless someone told her? I’m guessing it was the dealer and I have a funny feeling I know who it is.’