The Cross

Chapter Thirty-One

Oxford

The operations room deep inside the St Aldates police build ing was one Joel had been inside many times before, but never as a task force commander overseeing an entire team of his own. They were a mixed bunch of male and female CID officers, some of whom Joel had worked with in the past. He was just glad that his old friend Superintendent Page was nowhere to be seen.

Sam Carter perched his bulk on the corner of a desk and bustled through the introductions. ‘This is Inspector Solomon, for those of you who don’t know him already. Inspector: Sneddon; Jenkins; Lloyd; Hardstaff; Cushley; Braddock; Myles. Okay?’

‘Got it,’ Joel said, memorising their names and faces more quickly than he’d have imagined possible. When the murmurs of ‘Afternoon, sir’ had died away, Joel pointed at DC Cushley. She was about thirty, blond-haired, the most alert-looking of the team with quick blue eyes. ‘Cushley, tell me what we’ve got on Stone.’

Outwardly, he projected an impression of calm efficiency, focused on the job and completely in his element; exactly the same Joel Solomon that those who knew him would have remembered from all the previous times they’d worked together. But it was an impression he was having to fight to keep up. The humans’ voices were beginning to echo in his ears, blurring into one, and the room swirled around him as his incredibly keen sense of smell threatened to take over completely. The scent of their warm blood, pulsing tantalisingly through veins and arteries … gallons of it, lakes of it and all within such easy grasp, there for the taking … it was intoxicating. He wanted to gasp. He wanted to run out of the room. But he fought it, maintaining his expression of thoughtful concentration and trying not to let his eyes linger on Cushley’s throat as she spoke.

‘Good deal less than we ought to, sir,’ Cushley said. ‘It’s like no Gabriel Stone ever existed. No birth records, no National Insurance number, nothing. No vehicles registered to him either. The plates on the McLaren F1 taken from Crowmoor Hall turned out to be false. And we can’t trace where it was bought.’

Joel had already checked them before his trip to Romania. ‘Any luck digging up the property deeds?’

Cushley shook her head. ‘Our guy seems pretty adept at not leaving a paper trail. Crowmoor Hall’s bills were always paid in cash, we think by Stone’s employee, Seymour Finch.’

‘Now resident in the police morgue,’ Carter said. ‘Anyone been down there lately and seen the size of his hands, by the way? Buggering things are enormous. Hardly human, even.’

‘Another blank there,’ Cushley said. ‘Finch is as much of a mystery as his former boss. Forensic analysis of the bullet dug out of him shows up an unusual rifling pattern, suggesting it was fired from an old wartime Webley.45 revolver. No sign of the weapon so far.’

That’s because I disposed of it so carefully, Joel thought. ‘Okay, let’s move on. What about the Jeremy Lonsdale connection? Anyone?’

‘Lonsdale hasn’t surfaced yet, Inspector,’ volunteered the tall, greying CID detective called Hardstaff. ‘I’ve been working on tracking the movements of his private jet, and we have a record of a flight from Surrey to Brussels five days ago. That’s the last we have on it. After that, it just disappears, along with the pilot and crew.’

Brussels? Joel wondered.

‘Who the hell flew it out of there?’ Carter demanded. ‘I thought we were working on that.’

‘We are. There’s nothing,’ Hardstaff said. ‘Nobody knows where it went.’

‘Inspector, there’s one other thing,’ said Myles, a female DS Joel had worked with on a drugs case a few months before. ‘The day after Lonsdale’s plane landed in Belgium, there was a major incident at a conference venue outside Brussels. The anti-terrorist boys are going through the place as we speak. Right now, there’s no obvious connection to our case, but we’re following up every lead we can.’

‘Good. What about Lonsdale’s homes?’

‘Country pile just outside Guildford, pad in Kensington and a villa in Tuscany,’ said Braddock, sliding on a pair of glasses and checking a file. ‘We’ve talked to all his domestic staff … let me see … a Mr and Mrs Hopley are the live-in housekeepers at his estate, The Ridings. Officers visited them at the same time as Italian police sent people out to his Tuscan place. Nobody’s heard a peep; same goes for his office personnel in Whitehall. The only thing they all say is that he didn’t seem to be himself over the last little while. As if he’d been worried about something — he never said what. He’d been taking days off work, missing appointments, going off places without telling anyone. All very out of character, seemingly. But nobody’s heard from him, and we’ve checked all the phone records and emails. Zilch to go on there.’

‘You ask me, sir, a crashed jet’s going to turn up somewhere and none of this will be connected to the Stone case at all,’ said Sneddon, short and round with a mottled complexion that spoke of imminent heart failure. ‘I think we’re chasing down a blind alley. So Lonsdale has a few dodgy friends. You show me a politician who doesn’t.’

‘So basically,’ Carter said, shifting his weight uncomfortably on the desk to face Joel, ‘we have bugger all with knobs on. But hopefully, now that you’re here, we can crack on and make some badly-needed progress. The old man’s baying for blood.’

Joel stared at him. Don’t say that word, Sam. Just don’t say it to me again.