Find Them Dead

110 Saturday 1 June

Nick Fox was feeling very seriously lucky.

He was sitting at his desk in the deserted Hoxton offices of his law practice, shortly after 7.30 a.m. He liked to be in well before the rest of the team, whenever he wasn’t attending a trial or client meeting out of town. And while the Gready trial had been in progress, he’d barely been in the office at all, which meant he had a mountain of catching-up to do. But that was fine. Today, everything was fine!

And it wasn’t going to be for much longer that he had to put up with the never-ending criminal scumbags he had to deal with. Truth was, much though he put on a smiling, positive facade, he mostly despised his clients. Whining lowlifes, protesting their innocence, swearing blind they’d been fitted up by the police — or as many of them called them, the filth.

Throughout his career, he’d kept his eye out for opportunities. Playing the long game had always been his tactic. And he had been playing a lot of different clients — all in the criminal arena. Just like that old Biblical parable: Some fell by the wayside; some fell on stony ground; some fell among thorns. But others fell on good ground and brought forth fruit.

And with one, he had struck gold. His client Terence Gready. Over the past twenty-five years, Gready had brought forth so much fruit. And some of it truly low-hanging.

Fox knew he had been lucky — lucky that Gready trusted him implicitly, lucky that, with Gready’s scheming mind, the Brighton solicitor had, all those years ago, set a trap, miscalculating the risk that it might one day backfire and help to ensnare him. Just like himself, Gready played the long game, too, always carefully covering his back. But, Fox knew, almost everyone, at some point, makes a mistake, even the cleverest people. The safety deposit box account was Gready’s first mistake and where it had all started to unravel.

As a hedge against ever getting investigated, Terence Gready had made sure it was always going to be Mickey Starr who took the fall, not him. With the deposit box, he’d made it look as if Starr had forged his signature. He’d also left the key in the shed, which could have been accessible to Starr or someone else. He’d been scrupulously careful not to be seen together with Mickey, and all contact they had was either by burner phone or where they would not be seen. By not having cameras and alarms at his house there was always the chance that someone, possibly Starr, could have planted the evidence that the police found. This concoction he always felt would be enough to distance himself if he was ever to be part of a police investigation.

Like so many successful criminals before him, Gready had become complacent. For many years, his network of drug distribution and, more recently, his system of importing drugs concealed in high-end classic sports cars, had worked brilliantly. Complacency had been his second mistake. He thought he could easily manipulate a jury. His third had been to entrust so much to Mickey Starr, who had a vulnerability. Stuie.

His fourth mistake, Nick Fox thought, very happily, had been to hire him as his trusted solicitor, and to confide in him over these many years. Fox knew where all the bodies were buried — or rather, in this case, where all the cash was stashed. And Gready had given him unique access to it.

With Gready now dead, there was no one standing in his way. He held all the bank account numbers, and the equally important codes to them, to access over £35 million that Terence Gready had carefully squirrelled away around the world.

All it had needed for that money to become his was one piece of luck. And that had come in the form of Mickey Starr’s love for his brother, Stuie.

When Gready had told him to find someone to ‘rough Stuie up a little’, as a warning to Mickey not to attempt to grass him up for a sentence reduction, Fox had seen his chance. All he needed to do was find a couple of thugs from his client base and offer them a massive financial incentive to kill Stuie, while making it look like a roughing-up gone too far.

He tapped on his keyboard, entering a serial number, followed by the password for one of Terence Gready’s accounts — at a bank in the Cayman Islands.

$750,578.02 on deposit.

All his now.

Luck had smiled on him. Not that luck was chance, it was something you worked at. Like his golf pro once told him after holing-in-one at a pro-am tournament, ‘Nick, I find the harder I practise, the luckier I get!’

That was kind of how he felt right now. Subtly feeding the information to Mickey Starr that it had been Terence Gready who had ordered Stuie’s death had done the trick. Producing a better result than he could have imagined!

Shame about the kid brother, but shit happened.

He smiled, cynically.

He was now rich. Properly rich. Beyond what would once have been his wildest dreams. All he needed to do, publicly, was to continue playing the long game. Be just like Terence Gready had always been, Mr Respectable. Just until everything died down. And then, a quickie divorce and vamoose! Off shore and out of sight. With his new girlfriend — well, not so new, three years and counting — not that Marion, his wife, suspected a thing.

His reveries were interrupted by a knock on his door, and his loyal secretary entered.

‘Sorry to interrupt you, Nick. There are two police officers — detectives — asking if they could have a word with you?’

‘Police — where from?’

‘I believe they are from Sussex.’

‘Show them in,’ he said, confidently.

A stocky, suited man in his mid-fifties with a shaven head and a smart tie entered his office, holding out a sheet of paper in one hand and his warrant card in the other. He was followed by a tall, equally sharp-suited younger man.

‘Acting Detective Inspector Norman Potting and Detective Sergeant Jack Alexander from Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team,’ he announced. ‘You are Nicholas Fox?’

‘I am,’ he said, pleasantly. ‘How can I help you, officers?’

‘Nicholas Gordon Fox, I have a warrant for your arrest on the charge of conspiracy to commit murder.’

Fox stared at them in sudden, utter panic, bewildered. What the hell was going on? For an instant, he wondered if he should make a dash for it. But Alexander, behind the DI, was blocking the doorway. ‘Arrest?’ he said, instead. ‘What do you mean?’

Potting started to caution him.

Fox held up his hand, interrupting him. ‘Yadda, yadda, yadda. I’m a solicitor, OK? Spare me the fucking pre-take-off crap. I know how to put on a life vest and blow the whistle.’

Ignoring him, the DI continued with the caution.

‘Which way exactly do the straps go around my chest?’ Fox asked, facetiously. ‘And you haven’t pointed out the emergency exits.’