Picture You Dead

45

Thursday, 24 October

A note in Norman Potting’s diary told him that Stuart Piper had been scheduled to return from his second home in Barbados a few days ago.

The DS had originally planned to pounce on him on his first day back, hitting him hopefully at a disadvantage when he would be jet-lagged and not thinking as sharply as he might otherwise. But a series of medical tests on Potting’s suspected throat cancer had intervened and this was now his first opportunity. He was driving the unmarked Ford Focus along a narrow country lane accompanied by Velvet Wilde.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked her.

‘Going? With what?’ she asked spikily, in her Belfast accent. Although they’d been buddied-up several times recently, she’d still not warmed to the ageing, totally non-politically correct detective.

‘Your partner’s pregnancy. The IVF?’

‘Just had another failure,’ she responded gloomily. ‘How did your medical tests go?’ She looked at the moving arrow on the satnav. ‘We’re close now,’ she added.

‘It’s looking good. As I said to the boss, it may be just a polyp which the quack says could be removed easily, but I need some more scans and stuff.’

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘That it might just be a polyp.’

‘Hopefully.’ He paused then said, ‘Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but if you need a donor, I’d always be up for it. You know, just to help out a colleague.’

For a moment she was floored, but not by his generosity. ‘Well, yep, thanks, Norman, but that won’t be necessary.’ She restrained herself from adding, not if you were the last man on earth.

Then she said, ‘Coming up on our left!’

They drove alongside a tall, imposing and clearly very old stone wall, topped with spiked defences, for several hundred yards, before they reached what looked like it must be the main entrance. A pair of closed wrought-iron gates set between pillars topped with stone balls, with a lodge just inside. A discreet sign, gold lettering on a black background, read BEWLAY PARK. Two CCTV cameras, perched like birds alongside the balls, looked down at them, and there was a phone panel inset on the right-hand pillar, with another camera.

Potting lowered his window, reached out his arm and pressed the button with a bell symbol. Almost instantly, a stern voice with a heavy London accent said a curt, ‘Identify yourself.’

‘Police,’ Potting replied. ‘We would like to speak to Mr Piper.’

‘You have no appointment,’ came the blunt reply.

‘Correct but we would like a few minutes of Mr Piper’s time.’

‘For what purpose? Mr Piper doesn’t see visitors without an appointment.’

‘It is in connection with a murder enquiry we are conducting. If this isn’t a convenient moment for Mr Piper, then we can make an appointment for him to come in and talk to us at Sussex Police Headquarters in Lewes,’ Potting said. ‘If that doesn’t suit him we can return with a search warrant.’

A moment’s silence, then, ‘Wait please.’

Velvet Wilde looked at Potting and, her voice lowered, asked, ‘A search warrant? Would we get one for this?’

‘Probably not.’ He grinned, lowering his voice too. ‘But whoever that wanker is doesn’t know that.’

‘You’re terrible!’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘After you’ve been doing this job as long as I have, you’ll learn.’

She thumped him playfully. ‘Always keen to share your wisdom, aren’t you?’

‘I’m taking that as a compliment.’

After a few minutes, during which the two detectives became increasingly convinced they’d been cut off, the gates suddenly began opening, and the same voice came back through the speaker. ‘Hold up your warrant cards.’

Potting held his up to the panel’s camera. ‘Detective Sergeant Potting,’ he said. Then he took Wilde’s and showed that, too. ‘And Detective Constable Wilde, both from the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team.’

There was an abrupt, ‘Mr Piper will see you now for fifteen minutes.’

‘Very gracious of him,’ Potting responded, and without waiting for a reply, drove on through.

They headed, for a good quarter of a mile, along a straight avenue lined on both sides with tall trees, until a huge, elegant, Tudor mansion appeared ahead. Beyond were acres of immaculately mown lawn, and a lake with what looked like Grecian statues on an island in the middle.

Velvet Wilde murmured, ‘Where did it all go wrong for poor Mr Piper?’

Potting nodded. ‘Yeah, my heart’s bleeding for him having to live in this shithole.’

‘Mine too.’

‘I mean, why would anyone want to live here, with all the bills, when they could be in a nice council flat in Brighton, with everything paid for and drug dealers on the floor above and below?’

‘Beats me.’

A moment later Potting’s tone changed abruptly as he nodded at the rear-view mirror. ‘Hello, we’ve got an escort.’

Wilde glanced in her wing mirror and saw, just a short distance behind them, the menacing grille of a black Mercedes G Wagon. ‘Thoughtful of them to provide security for us,’ she said.

Potting carried on, pulling up outside the portico, and switched off the engine. The Mercedes had stopped, effectively blocking the exit to the driveway, as if signalling they could forget thinking about making a run for it if they weren’t who they said they were.

Turning to Wilde, he said, ‘If you lived with your partner in a pad like this, would you want to have all this security stuff?’

‘I think I would,’ she replied. ‘Because if I’d made the kind of money that could buy this place, I’m unlikely to have made it honestly. So I’d always be looking over my shoulder.’

Potting smiled. ‘My thoughts exactly.’