Chapter 4

I got my phone and took a picture, close up, followed by a couple showing the whole board. When I got back home, I uploaded the pictures to my laptop and added them to an email to Strachan. Well, he did say to report only to him, didn’t he?

Monday morning, I was up and out, picking up a breakfast on my way to Skegness. Using my new card, I entered the station and found my way to the office. My desk now sported a big screen, with a computer alongside the desk, cables nicely bundled, and it all looked neat. I sat down and turned it on. There was a note on my desk with a password, that got me onto the system. I changed the password to ‘boxcutter’ and then started with Google Earth. Looking at Hunstanton, I zoomed in and found the building site I had visited, then located the tourist park, among a whole swathe of cabins. It looked like you could house a whole town there. I was looking around that area when Cathy came in.

“Boss wants you in his office in ten minutes, Polly, for a short meeting.”

Thanks, Cathy, how was your weekend?”

“After all the secrecy of Friday, it was nice to be with the family. I went out with some school friends on Saturday evening. How about you?”

“Just did some chores on Saturday and cleared up a couple of cases I had, runaway kids. Sunday, I had a drive to Hunstanton to get a fish and chips to eat on the seafront.”

She picked up her notebook and we both went into Strachan’s office. He told us to sit, and we were joined by Thredbolt and Carson. When we were all seated, Strachan cleared his throat.

“Officers, we have a couple of things to discuss, this morning. Thredbolt, you can start.”

“Thank you, sir. On Friday afternoon I, and one of my technicians, went back to the shed, where we discovered the hiding places that Bernice had used to hide her finds. One contained nothing but threads that matched the material found in the other. That material was wrapped around a desiccated finger of a small child. The DNA matched one of the blood samples found in the back of the Jaguar. We didn’t get a match with any other people until Jessica, my technician, had the bright idea to put it up on the public website Ancestry. There was a ninety-five percent match with our Assistant Commissioner. We looked him up and he had a daughter who would have been the right age. He had reported her as a missing person in ’93 and that case has never been closed. Until now.”

“Thank you for that, Thredbolt. I’ll set up a visit to the AC and I’ll have to let him into our little circle. I’m sure that he never suspected who it was that kidnapped his daughter. Knowing him, he would have wanted to keep it quiet, he was up and coming at that time and being the centre of a kidnap case wouldn’t do his career any good. Now, have a look at these, you two. Polly sent me this last night.”

They looked at the photos and Thredbolt pulled out a magnifying glass to look at the car.

“That’s got a set of plates on it! If you send me the picture, I’ll get it enhanced.”

“Better still, I want you to go to the tourist park with Carson and his men, and we’ll commandeer the whole board to bring back here to look at properly. Carson can ask the questions about the when, where and who were around during the construction. If we can date this picture, it will date when the car got the underbody layer. You did say that the Jaguar had been washed before it got that red sand layer?”

“Yes, it had been, sir. If we can put the car in that area, in the late eighties to early nineties, it would then match the timing of the kidnaps. This is fantastic. When you’re ready to go, DI, give me a call and I’ll follow you. I’ll want to go and have a look at the other sites where the red sand is showing.”

“That’s at the eastern end of Hunstanton, it was the foreman there who sent me to the tourist park, yesterday. I went out for a seaside lunch and caught more than a fish!”

“Good work, there, Polly. Can you and Cathy stay. Gentlemen, I think that you have work to do!”

We stayed sitting as the others left.

“Polly, this is a breakthrough, as well as handing me a very sensitive call to make. If I get an appointment with the AC, will you come with me? Cathy, you can be our driver. It will have to be out of office hours, so it would mean overtime, but I think that having two strong women with me will help, especially if we can talk to him and his wife, together.”

When we agreed and left him to his task, we went back to the office. Inside, Cathy closed the door and gave me a hug. Then she asked me how I liked my tea and went off to the canteen to see what she could find. I sat at my desk and pondered what I should look for, first. For the moment, I had nothing to look for with our chief suspect, so, on a whim, opened up Ancestry to see what happened to the delivery driver and his mate, just to close off that line of investigation.

With the driver, it was straight-forward. Looking at the census records, he remained living at his address until he retired and then died, of a brain cancer, perhaps brought on by being coshed. The mate, however, was another kettle of fish. His name was Malcolm Cuthbertson and he had been twenty-one at the time of the robbery, having joined the company some two years before. He was in hospital for a few weeks after, so that his broken arm could be reset, and the swelling around his brain allowed to recede. He was at that same address on the next census but there wasn’t a trace of him after that. I checked the shipping and airport records to see if he had left the country but came up without a hint of his whereabouts.

The police records showed him as a victim of crime and there was also a short record of misdemeanors. It looked like he had been a naughty boy, but not bad enough to preclude him from delivering money. We needed to talk to his family to find out where he went. The pattern wouldn’t have been apparent to the officers of the day, and there were no photos saved. I drafted a report for Strachan to send on to the Sheffield divisional headquarters.

Still on Ancestry, I looked up our main suspect. I found his birth certificate and noted his date of birth and parents’ names. I then looked further and found that his parents had died, in a car crash, less than a year later. Given the names, and the date, I checked with police records and found the report of the accident. What I read there made me sit back and mop my brow. Cathy looked over to me.

“What’s up Polly, you look like you’ve seen a ghost?”

“You’re spot on with that one, Cathy. I’ve just discovered that our main suspect, whose name you don’t know, was killed in a car accident, with his parents, when he was a few months old.”

“That’s the old trick, isn’t it? You look in a graveyard, find the grave of a baby and use the name and date of birth to get a certificate. If the child is under a year old, there wouldn’t necessarily be a death certificate, even if there is, once you have the birth certificate, you can start building a life story that become more real with every passing year.”

I added this information to the email I was going to send to Strachan but then printed it off without sending it, then erasing the draft.

“Cathy, can you please set me up with a short talk with the boss, he has to know this.”

Ten minutes later, I was leaving Strachan’s office after giving him the next shock of the day. He had told me to dig as deep as I could, but not say anything to the others. He would get on to the Sheffield station to get them to talk to the family and associates of the mate and would get on to Nottingham to get us pictures of a certain gravestone in the main cemetery, along with a copy of the burial records.

Back on the computer, I looked for anything I could find on our suspect. What did surprise me was that company records showed that he was the biggest shareholder in one company, and one company only. This, for a man reputed to be in development, transport, electronics, whitegoods, and a whole host of other things. The company that he ran, though, was an accountancy business, and, looking at their website, AGM records and Company House gave me a long list of businesses that the accountants worked with, looking after all of their financial business, for a fee. If the fee was anything near others I had known, they were a very successful business.

It took all day, but I ended up with a stack of notes; lists of companies in all the areas he was noted for, but with him being a minority shareholder in all of them, and a director of most of them. The guy was clever, I’ll give him that. He was a high-profile poster boy who looked like he owned the world, but only owned a little bit of that world, even if he did have an influence on that whole world. I sat and thought a lot. If I was correct, he was earning a good return on his investments, but never had to lay out a lot to be where he is today. If he had created the accountancy firm, or even bought a small firm cheaply, it would have just meant that he needed his wits about him to build the company to where it is today, using his earnings to buy into the companies they began to look after.

I then started another list, with the timeline. From my notes, I listed the year in which he became linked to other companies, going back to the original listing of him owning the accountants. That was in ’87, five years after the Sheffield job, and the last listing of him in his birth name, except the birth certificate. In interviews, he had claimed that, after his parents had been killed, he had been sent to an aunt in Germany, where he was home schooled, only coming back to England in ’86, to make his own way in the world. He said that a lot. There were a lot of ‘making my own way’ statements among the interviews I looked at. My final thing, before I packed up for the day, was to check his claimed birth date against the drivers’ mate. They were only a month apart.

Tuesday was more of the same, checking and double checking the facts, finding interviews where he spoke about his earlier days, and trying to track his whereabouts in various times. He now had a property at Reepham, down in Norfolk, but had other places in Germany, South of France, and a shooting lodge in Scotland. He had done very well for a totally self-made man. His parties, at Reepham and in Scotland, were often written up in women’s magazines, which led me down another rabbit hole. Some of the afternoon was taken up by a short coroner’s court, where we got the expected ‘Death by person or persons unknown’.

It took another day of searching, but I finally had pictures, taken at his parties, of every father of our five kidnap victims. That led me to searching for the dates when these had first been brought into his web of companies. In every case, the kidnapping had taken place within six months of the parent being part of a company that had joined the consortium. The AC, however, was the odd one out. Perhaps that had been a chance encounter. He might be able to tell us when we spoke to him. What I did have, at the end of that day, was a list of other companies, and their directors, that had joined up between ’88 and ’95. Some further checking might give us the sixth body. It was a list of over fifty people, but, with a name and a time scale, I would be able to check the missing persons reports.

By the end of the week, I had a list of three of the directors who had put in a missing person’s report. I had all three case files sent to me and then passed them on to Thredbolt to check. Saturday, however, we had a lunch appointment with the Assistant Commissioner and his wife, at their country house near Alford.

Saturday morning, I dressed well and went to the station. There, I parked the car and then joined Cathy in the Chief Super’s car. She was trim in a skirt suit, as I was, and was excited to be part of something so important. We went to Strachan’s home, where we met his wife and teenage daughter. I reckon that the wife was a good twenty years younger and a beautiful woman. He got in the back of the car, and we were off to Alford. On the way, Cathy was brought into the circle, being given our suspects name, which allowed me to explain what I had discovered and the theory that I had come up with.

The AC lived in a country house, on about four acres, and the gate was opened for us by a uniformed officer who checked our names against a list. Cathy parked in front of the house and the door opened as we got out, a stately lady coming to greet us.

“Charlie Strachan, it’s been too long, who are these ladies?”

“That it has, Margaret. These ladies are my PA, Cathy Chatterton, and Polly Ibbotson, a Special Consultant on a case I’m here to talk to Gerald about.”

“Come in, come in, I think there’s a pot of tea just boiled and I’m sure we can find some biscuits.”

We found the AC in the drawing room, looking at the Saturday paper. He stood and shook hands with Strachan and then turned to us.

“Charles, who is it that you’ve brought with you?”

“This is Cathy Chatterton, my PA, sir. And the other is Polly Ibbotson, a consultant.”

“Polly Ibbotson, eh! Now, where have I heard that name before. I’ve got it, the up-and-coming DS, and the mad mistress. I must say, Polly that they did a wonderful job in the hospital. I think my PA sent flowers.”

“I got a lot of flowers, sir, but it took some time before I could fully appreciate the gesture.”

“Yes, I can see that. Please, be seated and Margaret can pour the tea. Charles, you said that you needed to talk about a sensitive case and that it was important.”

We sat, the AC in an easy chair, his wife on a two-seater opposite him, and the three of us on a settee at right angles to the other two. She poured the tea into cups on a low table, able to be reached by us all.

“Gerald, I want to tell you about what looked like a simple case of accidental death but has turned into a bubbling cauldron of linked cases. It all started when a body was found, face down, in the Fairy Dell last November. At first glance you would have taken it for a woman, but when the body went to the morgue, it was found to be a man dressed as a woman. I had a new Admin CI, who gave the case to the name on the top of his available officers’ list. That was the one big mistake as the Constable in question is a rabid homophobe and just closed the case without properly investigating. The victim’s wife finally called in Polly to look into it as she was sure her husband had been murdered.”

“All right, I’m with you so far. What capacity were you in at that time, Polly?”

“I am a registered Private Investigator, sir. I bought a going business in Boston.”

“Right, carry on Charles.”

“Polly did what our officer should have and went to talk to those associated with the victim. Later, that day, she called my Admin CI and gave him an address where the victim had a large shed. He was carrying out a business, buying and selling collectable cars. In that shed, we found a Jaguar S Type that had been used in a bank delivery robbery in Sheffield, in the early eighties. It had distinctive damage that occurred during that robbery.”

“I see. How does that become sensitive?”

“The victim’s wife had told Polly that he had been quiet for a while since getting that particular car. From photocopies of documents that we discovered; we believe that he had found a wallet in that car. This is where it becomes sensitive.”

“Ah! The nub comes closer.”

“The nub, sir, is that the paperwork we found was items from a wallet, lost about ’93 or ‘94, and the details were all from Jurgen Beyer.”

“Jurgen! The man is beyond reproach, He’s a personal friend and has been very helpful in the past, putting me in touch with people who have helped my career. There’s no way he could have been involved in that robbery!”

I could see him getting redder, and Margaret starting to look very serious, so, seeing the chink, I went for it.

“Did his being helpful include loaning you the money to pay the kidnappers of your daughter?”

“What are you talking about, my daughter went missing she…”

“Just shut up, Gerald!” snarled his wife. “Your ambition and stupid pride has come back to bite you! There has to be more to bring Charlie to talk to us. It’s not about you, anymore. Now, Polly, tell me about my poor Mia, I felt that she had gone from us.”

I put my cup and saucer on the table, stood and went to sit beside her, taking her hand in both of mine. This had the added advantage of putting me directly opposite the AC. I looked at Strachan and he nodded.

“That Jaguar has been forensically examined and it gave up the DNA of a well-known getaway driver, who was suspected in the Sheffield case. In the boot, it also gave up six different blood samples. Four of those samples have been positively matched with the victims of kidnappings, where the parents didn’t report it until the child was not returned, even though the ransom was paid. In all those cases a finger was sent to the parents.”

I could feel Margaret gripping my hand, hard enough to hurt.

“Of the two samples left, we found the hiding place of the extra items that caused our victim to be murdered. We believe that he had taken the wallet, and a wrapped finger, to Beyer or one of his associates, after negotiating payment. He was killed, rather than paid.”

Margaret whispered.

“What about my Mia?”

“We found a wrapped finger, this week. It matched one of the two remaining blood samples. One of our technicians had the bright idea of checking the DNA against the public records and came up with a better than ninety percent match with you, sir.”

The AC visibly deflated; he was a beaten man. I just hoped that when he came back, he would be ready to move against Beyer, come hell or high water. Margaret lightened her grip, before any bones broke, and turned to me.

“Thank you, Polly. I knew that she wasn’t coming back after the first few weeks. Gerald couldn’t allow himself to believe he wasn’t in control of the situation. He did pay Jurgen back, but it took a while.” She looked at Strachan. “Have you come to arrest Gerald for making a false report and wasting police time on a known falsehood?”

Strachan saw his opportunity and ran with it.

“Certainly not, Margaret. This is a quiet visit between friends. I don’t know what I would have done in the same circumstances but I’m sure that Gerald thought he was doing the right thing. Because of the profile of the people involved, this case is being strictly controlled. Other than the three of us, there are only three others who know who we are investigating, and only us and our forensic team who have the knowledge about your daughter. One thing that I have to tell you is that the other four cases we know of all have links with Beyer and had met him about six months before their children were kidnapped and murdered.”

I was looking at the AC and could see him listening. His bluster had deflated, but he was coming back, and I could see the anger building. He suddenly stood.

“Chief Superintendent Strachan, if you want to arrest me, then do it now and I’ll go with you, quietly. If you leave me as you found me, today, I give you the promise that I’ll back you, all the way. If you find enough evidence to arrest Beyer, then I want to be the one to arrest him. It’s only by doing it that way can we keep his political friends from burying us, any lesser rank would be hounded out of the force.”

Strachan stood and held out his hand.

“Welcome to the team, Gerald. It’s going to be rough with you on board but could have been impossible without you. We’re all sorry to have brought you the information about Mia, this way, but there was no getting around it.”

They shook hands and then the two men had a man-hug as Gerald started to cry. Margaret and I stood, and Cathy joined us for a group girl hug. Gerald was whispering “It’s out in the open” over and over. I think he must have bottled it for so long, it was like popping the top of a shaken Coke bottle. He detached himself from Strachan and reached out to his wife. Saying that he was so sorry, he held her as they both cried. It must have been in the air as I felt myself tearing up and saw that Cathy was the same.

Eventually, we all settled down. I went back to the settee as the couple sat together, on the two-seater. Finally, the AC got his voice and looked at Cathy.

“You haven’t said much, young lady. What else is there which is going to turn my world even further upside-down?”

“Well sir, it could be the fact that we have discovered that, although Jurgen Beyer was born on the day his birth certificate says, we have a police report of a car accident, some three months later, where he died, along with his parents. The Jurgen Bayer you know, isn’t Jurgen Beyer, after all.”

“That’s more than I expected. That is going to make it even more complicated. You’re going to find out who he really is.”

“I think Polly already has a lead on that, sir.”

He looked at me.

“As you may be aware, sir, my police career was in white collar crime, a lot of that is research on the computer. If we go back to the Sheffield job, the drivers’ mate was a lad, just out of his teens, called Malcolm Cuthbertson. He wasn’t even suspected, but he disappeared off the face of the earth a few years later. The earliest known listing we have on Beyer is a few years after that. At the moment, the only thing we know about Cuthbertson is that his arm was broken during the robbery. I’m waiting to get the hospital reports to find out how bad it was.”

The AC went white.

“Beyer often rubs his left forearm when the weather is changing. He says that he broke it in a skiing accident as a teenager. Have you any idea why he’s involved with all of this?”

“That’s simple, sir. It’s purely as a cash injection into his business. I think that it was his cut of the Sheffield job that paid for his new life and his first, and only, company. The kidnappings all coincide with times he needed cash to keep expanding. I’m sorry to tell you this, sir, but you, and all the other parents, were just acting as his own private, bank.”

Marianne Gregory © 2023