The Hawk Is Dead

88

Wednesday 29 November 2023

Roy Grace had been at his desk in the Major Crime Team suite of Sussex Police HQ for just twenty minutes, preparing for yet another press briefing on Operation Asset. It was 7.25 a.m. Day ten since the shooting of Sir Peregrine Greaves, and he had nothing new to give to the press and media — well, nothing that he wanted to give out.

Exhaustive house-to-house calls in the surrounding area had been carried out. Ballistics tests had not yet given them the exact make of weapon the shooter had used, and it was unlikely they would. The motorcycle seen by the eyewitness Sarah Stratten was still not identified, and nor was whoever had subsequently threatened Stratten.

The murder of the royal footman, Geoffrey Bailey, gave him something fresh to talk about, and in today’s briefing he would explain how they were looking to see what connections they could find between the two dead men.

After his call late yesterday afternoon with Shannon Kendall, he had googled Rose Cadoret, as well as asking ChatGPT-4 for any information it could come up with. But there wasn’t a lot from either of them. An only child, Rose Cadoret had obtained a BA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute, but then in somewhat of a contrast she enlisted in the Army as a soldier — not even on an officer training course — and did three tours in Afghanistan. After leaving the Army five years ago, she had joined the Royal Collection team at Buckingham Palace, rising — rather quickly, he thought — to become its Deputy Director.

For much of the night he’d lain awake, fretting about the case, about what clues he might have missed. And just as importantly, who he could trust.

But for now he had a much more pressing issue. Shannon Kendall’s rather cryptic choice of words about Rose Cadoret, yesterday.

She’s one to watch.

What did she mean, precisely? Was this going to give them the answer to why Rose’s name was coded in the diary?

And what was Shannon going to discover about Sir Jason Finch?

He didn’t have long to wait to find out. His phone started ringing, and this time a name appeared on the display instead of just the number.

Shannon Kendall

89

Wednesday 29 November 2023

‘Good morning, Shannon,’ he answered.

‘You ever play Monopoly?’ she retorted, straight in.

‘Monopoly? Yes, I did. Every Christmas in the evening with my family, when I was a kid. Why?’

‘Good. So you’ll understand what a Get Out of Jail Free card is?’

‘I probably had a few in my time.’ He found himself making a mental note that he and Cleo should get a Monopoly board, and teach Noah and one day Molly, and do the same, play it on Christmas evening, all engaging with each other instead of the usual thing of flopping in front of the television and falling asleep.

‘Like, what I mean is, I think you’re going to agree that this — what I’m about to tell you — is your vindication for springing me from prison.’

‘It is? Tell me!’

‘Rose Cadoret, right?’

‘What have you found out about her?’

‘She’s a former soldier. Saw action in Kabul where she came under fire. She has a pretty impressive military background, which may or may not be significant, because that’s how she ended up at Buckingham Palace — following a Royal Protection Officer she had an on-off relationship with, who was in the same regiment. Her former commanding officer in that regiment is now a senior member of the Royal Household, Sir Jason Finch. All very cosy, the old-boy network and all that, not that there’s anything necessarily suspicious in that. But here’s where we cut to the chase. Everyone makes mistakes, that’s human. Even the cleverest person. I’m sure you as a cop know that better than most, right?’

‘Yep, very true.’ Grace could think of dozens of examples. A pair of discarded surgical gloves found in a bin outside the home of a murder victim. The forensically aware offender thought he was clever, wearing those gloves. He hadn’t realized his DNA was all over the insides of them.

Ronnie Biggs was identified by fingerprints on a bottle of Heinz ketchup on the kitchen table at Leatherslade Farm, the hideout of the Great Train Robbers. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was stopped for driving without a licence plate. Ted Bundy’s first arrest was because he’d forgotten to put his headlights on. The list was endless.

‘I told you at my flat about the auction on the dark web?’

‘The Anne of Cleves miniature — by Hans Holbein.’

‘Hans Holbein the Younger,’ she corrected.

He smiled. She said it like a teacher correcting an errant pupil. ‘The Younger,’ he repeated.

‘OK, I’ve still not got to the bottom of whoever is actually running the auction, but I have made inroads. Someone very tech savvy is behind the way it’s set up, but they’ve made one small mistake, through an IP — Internet Protocol — address. You’d have to be looking extremely hard to find it. And I mean extremely. It’s buried deep beneath several firewall layers — which I’ve navigated through. That’s part of what I do. Which not many people can.’

Grace listened intently.

‘That IP address is for an internet account with an email address for someone called Gisella Standing. Gisella Standing is a real person, German-born from Dusseldorf, married to an Englishman and they live in Reigate in Surrey. She’s a dentist and her husband is a maxillofacial surgeon. But Gisella Standing, almost certainly unaware of it, is an internet alias for Rose Cadoret, Deputy Director of the Royal Collection. Gisella might get the occasional email that makes no sense and she’d just bin it, assuming it was spam.’

‘For what reason would Rose Cadoret use an alias?’ Grace asked.

‘There could be a number of reasons. A lot of people use aliases when surfing the net — particularly people looking at porn sites who don’t want to take the risk of being entrapped by blackmailers. Or simply because they are well known and they want to be anonymous. That’s a very plausible scenario for Rose Cadoret and nothing sinister about it. Her position as Deputy Director of the Royal Collection makes her a high-profile individual in the art world. If she wanted to make an acquisition on behalf of the Royal Collection, the moment she gives her name, the dealer’s eyes are going to light up with pound signs. Kerchinggggggg! The price has gone up twenty per cent before she opens negotiations.’

‘I get that.’

‘So far so good for Rose Cadoret. But then I went a little off-piste, and that’s where it gets more interesting. I thought I’d take a look at her personal finances.’

‘You hacked her bank account?’

‘I didn’t need to. I found out who she banks with — easy enough. OK, I told a bit of a fib — a white lie, right — to my lovely police Financial Investigator I was assigned to — Emily. I told her that Rose Cadoret was now a suspect in a major internet fraud scam, involving her bank and it was time critical. She spoke to her bank and, what do you know, I got all her account details through late last night.’

Grace smiled. ‘Good work!’ It had taken him a great deal of persuading the authorities to get Shannon released from prison, and there was a lot riding, reputational-wise, for him — on her delivering. His instincts had been right, and what he had just heard from Shannon was helping to confirm them. This information, together with Cadoret’s name in the diary, felt like they were getting closer.

Shannon continued. ‘Rose Cadoret’s on a salary of £78k. She has an apartment in south-west London, in Putney, with a mortgage that costs her £24k per annum as well as an annual service charge of £6k. She gives her mother an annual £5k top-up on her state pension. She has an HP payment of £8k per annum on her Fiat 500 Abarth car. A raft of standing orders — a gym membership, magazines, a vitamin supplement supplier called Foodstate. All of these tot up to almost £3k per annum. She has total fixed outgoings, without food, travel, holidays, of around £40k. After tax of around £12k, her income is now down to below £20k. So she’s not likely to be saving much, right?’

‘Doesn’t sound like it, no,’ Grace replied. ‘If anything at all.’

‘She doesn’t have a deposit account. Nor does she have any account with a stockbroker or wealth manager or IFA. What I’m saying by that is that she doesn’t have a savings stash anywhere — at least not that I’ve been able to find, so far.’

‘OK.’

‘But unless she won on the lottery or won big at gambling somewhere — and nothing I’ve found so far indicates to me that she is a gambler — there’s something I can’t explain, and it needs explaining.’

‘Tell me?’

‘Five weeks ago an amount of £180k was deposited into her bank account. The source of the money has been well concealed.’

Grace considered this for a moment. Sir Jason Finch, as Keeper of the Privy Purse, had access to all the Royal Household’s finances. A Bird in the Hand? ‘Could the source of this be Sir Jason Finch, Shannon?’

‘Not that I’ve been able to find so far. Not a trace of any activity on the dark web, nor on the internet at all. He features in the Royal Household social media posts, but that’s all — he’s totally under the radar.’

‘So he’s either innocent,’ Grace mused.

‘Or very clever,’ Shannon jumped in.