Dead Man’s Footsteps

86

Bella radioed one of the researchers in the Operation Dingo incident room and asked her to compile a complete list of all stamp dealers in the Brighton and Hove area. Then, with Glenn driving again, they headed for Queen’s Road and the dealer Stephen Klinger had mentioned.

Just down from the station, Hawkes looked like one of those places that have been there for ever. It had the kind of window display that never changed but was just added to from time to time. It was full of boxed coin sets, medals, first-day covers in plastic envelopes and old postcards.

They hurried inside, out of the hardening drizzle, and saw two women in their thirties who could be sisters, both fair-haired and good-looking, not the image Branson had in his mind of a stamp dealer at all. He’d imagined stamps to be a rather nerdy male domain.

The women were deep in conversation and didn’t acknowledge the detectives, as if used to time-wasting browsers. Glenn and Bella glanced around, politely waiting for them to finish. The shop was even more cluttered inside, with much of the floor space taken up with trestle tables on which were cardboard boxes filled with vintage saucy postcards and bygone Brighton scenes.

The women stopped talking suddenly and turned to look at them. Branson pulled out his warrant card.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Branson of Sussex CID and this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Moy. We’d like to have a word with the proprietor. Would that be one of you?’

‘Yes,’ said the older-looking one, pleasantly, but slightly reserved. ‘I’m Jacqueline Hawkes. What is this about?’

‘Do the names Ronnie and Lorraine Wilson mean anything to you?’

She looked surprised and shot a glance at the other woman. ‘Ronnie Wilson? Mum used to deal with him some years back. I remember him well. He was often in and out, haggling. He’s dead, isn’t he? He died in 9/11, I seem to remember.’

‘Yes,’ Bella said, not wanting to give anything away.

‘Was he a big trader? At a high level?’ Branson asked. ‘You know, very rare stamps?’

She shook her head. ‘Not here. We don’t deal much at the top end – we don’t have that kind of stock. We’re just high street retail, really.’

‘What kind of values do you go up to?’

‘Small stuff, mostly. Stamps with a value of a few hundred pounds are about the highest we get involved with. Unless someone comes in with an obvious bargain, then we might go up a bit.’

‘Did Lorraine Wilson ever come in here?’ he said.

Jacqueline thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Yes, she did – I can’t remember when exactly. Not that long after he died, I think it must have been. She had some stamps of her husband’s she wanted to sell. We bought them – not a huge amount – a few hundred pounds’ worth, from memory.’

‘Did she ever talk to you about dealing in a much larger amount? Spending serious money?’

‘What kind of serious money?’

‘Hundreds of thousands.’

She shook her head. ‘Never.’

‘If someone came to see you wanting to buy, say, several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stamps, what would you do?’

‘I’d direct them to an auction house in London or to a specialist dealer, and hope he’d be decent enough to give me a bit of com-ission!’

‘Who would you send them to in this area?’

She shrugged. ‘There’s really only one person in Brighton who deals at the level you’re talking about. That’s Hugo Hegarty. He’s getting on a bit, but I know he’s still trading.’

‘Do you have an address for him?’ ‘Yes. I’ll get it for you.’

Dyke Road, which turned seamlessly into Dyke Road Avenue, ran like a spine from close to the centre of the city right up to the edge of the Downs, and formed part of the border between Brighton and Hove. Apart from a couple of sections where it was lined with shops, offices and restaurants, for much of its length it was residential, with detached houses that got progressively swankier away from the city centre.

To Bella’s relief the traffic was heavy, forcing Glenn to drive at a sedate crawl. Calling out the numbers, she said, ‘Coming up on the left.’

There was an in-and-out driveway, which seemed an almost mandatory status symbol for this neighbourhood. But, unlike at the Klingers’ house, there were no electric gates, just wooden ones that did not look as if they had been closed in years. The drive was completely cluttered with cars, so Branson parked outside, putting two wheels on the pavement, aware that he was obstructing a cycle lane, but not able to do much about it.

They walked in, edging past an elderly BMW convertible, an even older Saab, a grimy, grey Aston Martin DB7 and two Volkswagen Golfs. He wondered if Hegarty traded in cars as well as stamps.

They ducked into the shelter of a porch and rang the bell. When the imposing oak door was opened, Glenn Branson did an immediate double-take. The man who answered was a dead ringer for one of his favourite film actors of all time, Richard Harris. He was so startled that for a moment he was lost for words as he fumbled for his warrant card.

The man had one of those craggy faces Glenn found hard to put an age to. He could have been anywhere between mid-sixties and late seventies. His hair, closer to white than grey, was long and rather unkempt, and he was dressed in a cricket sweater over a sports shirt and tracksuit bottoms.

‘Detective Sergeant Branson and Detective Sergeant Moy from Sussex CID,’ Glenn said. ‘We’d like to have a word with Mr Hegarty. Is that you?’

‘Depends which Mr Hegarty you’re after,’ he said with an evasive smile. ‘One of my sons or me?’

‘Mr Hugo Hegarty,’ Bella said.

‘That’s me.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to leave in twenty minutes to play tennis.’

‘We only need a few minutes, sir,’ she said. ‘We want to talk to you about someone we believe you had dealings with some years ago – Ronnie Wilson.’

Hugo Hegarty’s eyes narrowed and he looked very concerned suddenly. ‘Ronnie. Good God! You know he’s dead?’ He hesitated before stepping back and saying, in slightly more affable tones, ‘Do you want to come in? It’s a foul day.’

They entered a long, oak-panelled hall hung with fine oil paintings, then followed Hegarty through into a similarly panelled study with a studded crimson leather sofa and a matching recliner armchair. There was a view out through the leaded-light windows on to a swimming pool, a large lawn bordered by autumnal-looking shrubs and bare flowerbeds, and the roof of a neighbour’s house beyond the closeboard fence. Directly above them was the whine-thump whine-thump of a vacuum cleaner.

It was an orderly room. There were shelves laden with what looked like golfing trophies and a mass of photographs on the desk. One was of a handsome, silver-haired woman, presumably Hegarty’s wife, and others showed shots of two teenage boys, two teenage girls and a baby. Next to the blotter on the desk was an enormous magnifying glass.

Hegarty pointed them to the sofa, then perched on the edge of the armchair. ‘Poor old Ronnie. Terrible business, all that. Just his luck to be there on that one day.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘So, how can I help you?’

Branson noticed a row of thick, heavy-looking, Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogues and a row of another dozen or so other catalogues lining the bookshelves. ‘It’s concerning an inquiry we’re carrying out which has some links to Mr Wilson,’ he replied.

‘You trade in valuable stamps, we’ve been told. Is that correct, sir?’

Hegarty nodded, then scrunched up his face in a slightly dismissive way. ‘Maybe not so much now. The market’s very difficult. I do more with property and stocks and shares than with stamps these days. But I still dabble a bit. I like to keep my finger on the pulse.’

He had a twinkle in his eye, which Branson liked. Richard Harris had had that same twinkle – it was part of the great actor’s magic. ‘Would you say you did a substantial amount of business with Mr Wilson?’

Hegarty shrugged. ‘A fair bit, on and off over the years. Ronnie wasn’t the easiest person to deal with.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, you know, to put it crudely, the provenance of some of his stuff was iffy. I’ve always been careful to protect my reputation, if you get my drift.’

Branson made a note. ‘Do you mean you felt some of his dealings were dishonest?’

‘Some of what he had I wouldn’t buy at any price. I used to wonder sometimes where he got the stamps he brought to me and whether he’d actually paid what he claimed he had for them.’ He shrugged. ‘But he had a fair grasp of the business, and I sold him some good things too. He always paid cash on the nail. But…’ His voice trailed away and he shook his head. ‘To be honest, I have to say he wasn’t my favourite customer. I try to look after people I do business with. You can trade with someone a thousand times, I always say, but you can only screw them once.’

Glenn smiled, but said nothing more.

Bella tried to move things on. ‘Mr Hegarty, did Mrs Wilson – Mrs Lorraine Wilson – contact you at all after his death?’

Hegarty hesitated for a second, his eyes shooting warily at each of them in turn, as if the stakes had suddenly been raised. ‘Yes, she did,’ he answered decisively.

‘Can you tell us why she contacted you?’

‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter now – she’s also been dead a long while. But I was sworn to secrecy by her, you see.’

Remembering Grace’s instructions, Branson put things as tactfully to the man as he could. ‘We are dealing with a murder inquiry, Mr Hegarty. We require all the information you can give us.’

Hegarty looked shocked. ‘Murder? I had no idea. Oh dear. Gosh. Who – who is the victim?’

‘I’m afraid I cannot disclose that at the moment.’

‘No, right, of course,’ Hegarty said. He had blanched visibly. ‘Well, let me get this straight in my head.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The thing was, she came to see me – I suppose it was about February or March in 2002 that would be – or perhaps April – I can check that for you from my records. She said that her husband had left massive debts when he died and every penny they had had been taken and their house had been repossessed. It sounded a bit brutal, to be frank, to hound a widow like that.’

He looked at them as if for support, but got no reaction.

He went on, ‘She told me she’d just discovered she was due some money from a life insurance policy and was scared about his creditors getting hold of that too. Apparently she was a joint signatory on a number of personal guarantees. So she wanted to convert it into stamps, which she thought – quite rightly – would be easier to hide. Something I think she had learned from her husband.’

‘How much money was it?’ Bella asked.

‘Well, the first lot was one and a half million, give or take a few bob. And then she came into the same amount or even a bit more again months later, from the 9/11 compensation fund, she told me.’

Branson was pleased that the amounts Hegarty stated tallied with their earlier information. It suggested he was telling the truth.

‘And she asked you to convert it all into stamps?’ he asked.

‘It sounds easier than it was,’ he said. ‘That kind of spending draws attention, you see. So I fronted the purchases for her. I spread the money around the stamp world, saying I was buying for an anonymous collector. That’s not unusual. In recent years the Chinese have gone bananas for quality stamps – the only bad thing is that some dealers are flogging them rubbish.’ He raised a cautionary finger. ‘Even some of the most respected dealers.’

‘Can you provide us with a list of all the stamps you sold to Mrs Wilson?’ Bella asked.

‘Yes, but you’ll have to give me a little time. I could make a start after my game – could let you have it by around teatime this afternoon. Would that be OK?’

‘Perfect,’ Branson said.

‘And what would be extremely useful,’ Bella added, ‘is if you could let us have a list of all the people she could have gone to who would have had the money to buy them later on, when she needed the cash.’

‘I can give you the dealers,’ he said. ‘And a few individual collectors like myself. Not so many of us as there were. I’m afraid quite a few of my old friends in this game are now dead.’

‘Do you know any dealers or collectors in Australia?’ she asked.

‘Australia?’ He frowned. ‘Australia? Now, wait a minute. Of course, there was someone Ronnie knew from Brighton who emigrated out there, some years back, in the mid-1990s. His name was Skeggs. Chad Skeggs. He’s always dealt in big numbers. He operates a mail order business from Melbourne. Sends me a catalogue every now and then.’

‘Do you ever buy from him?’ Glenn asked.

Hegarty shook his head. ‘No, he’s dodgy. Tucked me up once. I bought some pre-1913 Australian stamps from him, I seem to recall. But they weren’t in anything like the condition he’d told me over the phone. When I complained, he told me to sue him.’ Hegarty raised despairing hands in the air. ‘The amount wasn’t worth it and he knew that. A couple of grand – it would have cost me more than that in legal fees. I’m amazed the blighter’s still in business.’

‘Anyone else in Australia you can think of?’ Bella asked.

‘Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll give you a full list this afternoon. Want to pop back around, say, 4?’

‘Fine, thank you, sir,’ Branson said.

As they all stood up, Hegarty leaned forward conspiratorially, as if for their ears only. ‘I don’t suppose you can help me,’ he said. ‘I got flashed by one of your cameras – along Old Shoreham Road – a couple of days ago. You couldn’t have a word in someone’s ear for me, could you?’

Branson looked at him, astonished. ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

‘Ah, well, not to worry. Just thought I’d ask.’

He gave them a rueful smile.