The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 18

A wry smile came to Daniel’s lips as he lay on the bunk in the police cell bed looking up at the ceiling. He was imagining how his spoilt, pampered ex-wife would cope if she banged up in such austere conditions as this police cell.

She’d go out of her mind.

For Daniel it was different. He had never developed a taste for luxury. He could enjoy it when it was presented to him on a plate. But he could manage equally well without it. He remembered how, not long ago, he had slept for several days on the open deck of a felucca — a river boat on the Nile. And then for the next few days he had slept under the stars in the Sinai Peninsula, travelling towards Sharm-el-Sheikh by camel with a Bedouin caravan.

Charlotte would probably have mocked him with some cutting remark accusing him of masquerading as Lawrence of Arabia.

He stopped thinking about her. There were more important things to think about. Like when they were going to release him.

If they were going to release him.

Up until the end of the last interview, he had been sure that they would. Indeed it looked like they didn’t have a choice. But now he was not so sure. When they told him about the “witness” who had “seen” him siphoning off petrol, it had completely blindsided him. He would have dismissed it as a police trick designed to elicit a confession. But unlike America, the British police are not allowed to use such trickery and any evidence obtained thereby is inadmissible in court.

But it all fell into place when the police had used the words “anonymous tip-off.” That alone made it clear what was actually happening. Whoever started the fire had also called the police afterwards. Presumably, thought Daniel, the original plan had been to kill both of them and then when that failed, the killer did the next best thing and framed him.

But there was more to it than that. Daniel had seen the protruding feet and thought that it might be a dead body. Sergeant Connor had confirmed that he was already dead and that he had been bludgeoned to death. So presumably whoever killed him had either killed him there at the house or brought the body there and then prepared the place for the arson attack. That would make perfect sense, because the fire would also conceal the time of death.

Of course, it would have been quite hard to get the body there. For a start, there was no access by car. The house was only accessible via a long footpath. Lugging a body there undetected in broad daylight would have been even harder than siphoning off petrol from a car without being seen.

On the other hand there was a parallel road nearby and the body did not have to have been brought there in daylight. It would all depend on when Costa was killed. A determined killer could have parked nearby and carried the body (possibly wrapped in a blanket) up the slope and through the bramble that separated the road from footpath. It would have been awkward but not impossible.

But the question then was when was Costa killed?

Whoever killed him and set this up would have to have known about the meeting between them. Of course the killer might have killed him and then taken a look at the text messages on his mobile phone. They might have killed him to shut him up and taken his phone to see who he had contacted. That would have told them all they needed to know.

But then another thought struck Daniel.

What if the killer had killed him as soon as he sent the original SMS. If everything came down to that SMS with the picture — if this whole thing was about damage limitation and suppressing something that some one wanted to keep secret — then maybe Costa was killed right after he sent the message. That would explain a lot of things. Why he didn’t answer the phone when Daniel called back. Why he replied by text, insisting that he was short on credit and that the battery was low. That way he could avoid talking. His voice would have given away that it wasn’t Costa. But the texts betrayed nothing.

It was a trap all along!

But who had set it? Who had killed Martin Costa and used his phone to lure Daniel into a trap that nearly cost him his life? Who had made that call to frame Daniel? Who wanted to suppress whatever it was they feared that Daniel might reveal? And perhaps more important what was it that they wanted to suppress?

The image on the phone had been blurred and unclear. Had the meeting gone ahead he might have been able to see the original. But presumably that was gone now. Whoever had killed Costa had surely made off with the document that Costa wanted to show Daniel. It might have been possible to study the image from the phone at leisure. But Daniel had dropped his phone in the burning building and it had presumably been incinerated.

At the back of Daniel’s mind was the thought that there might be a solution to this problem — and even that the solution was starting him in the face. He was still thinking about this when he heard a clanking sound. He sat up on the bed as his cell door opened. Standing there in the doorway was a smug-looking Sergeant Connor and a dour-faced Chief Inspector Vincent.

“It’s not looking too good for you sunshine,” said the sergeant, obviously enjoying himself as he put on his best tough-guy voice. “We’re charging you with murder.”