Plane Dead: A mile-high murder puzzles Irish detectives (The Dublin Homicides Book 5) by David Pearson

Author:David Pearson [Pearson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE BOOK FOLKS bestselling Irish crime fiction
Published: 2021-10-17T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Peter Ward was a tall, slim, good-looking man in his very late forties or early fifties. He was neatly dressed in chinos with a linen jacket, a well-ironed button-down shirt, and casual brown loafers. His hair, a kind of salt-and-pepper colour, was neatly trimmed and he was clean-shaven.

“Come in, folks, take a seat,” Ward said as the two detectives entered the room via an electrically operated sliding door.

Ward’s office was large and uncluttered. Behind his desk, which had nothing but another large Apple computer on it, there were huge plate-glass windows that provided a view of the factory floor below. The factory was comprised of three large rooms, each with a different-coloured metal surround at the entrance. The units had a kind of airlock arrangement at the door, so that personnel entering did not contaminate the interior, and everyone working inside there was clad in clean suits, so that they looked like some kind of zombie army as they moved slowly and deliberately around.

Burke walked over to the glass and looked down.

“Impressive, Mr Ward. What exactly do you make here?” he said.

“We manufacture electronic components for various companies such as IBM and Intel. We also do work for some of the more advanced automotive companies such as Tesla and Nio, but that’s top secret, I’m afraid.”

“I see. As I said, very impressive,” Burke said, turning back to the office and taking a seat beside his colleague.

“How can I help you today then?” Ward said to them both.

“We’re here to talk about the death of Jim Farrelly and his wife, Mr Ward. I understand you are, or were, related to them in some way.”

“Oh, yes. Very tragic, very tragic indeed. Poor Jim just having a heart attack like that. Still, I suppose we know not the day nor the hour as they say.”

“What makes you say it was a heart attack, Mr Ward?”

“Well, wasn’t it? It’s what most highly stressed businessmen die of, after all.”

“No, it wasn’t. Mr Farrelly was murdered with a particularly nasty poison. His last hours must have been agony for him. We’re investigating his death, and that of his poor wife too,” Burke said.

“Wife! I thought she died in a car accident.”

“Tell me, Mr Ward, without betraying any trade secrets, what sort of components do you manufacture for the automotive industry?” Moore said.

“They are mostly highly reliable temperature control units. These new electric cars are prone to overheating, so keeping them cool is vital to avoid fires. That’s our speciality. We make control units for IBM and Intel too, for their servers, which also have to be kept at the right temperature to function correctly.”

“Really, how so?” Burke asked.

“Well, if a computer or a server gets too hot, its calculations can become unreliable. With double precision maths, even an error at the fifteenth decimal place can be disastrous for the end user, so temperature has to be carefully controlled,” Ward said.

“Do any of these components end up in the cruise control mechanisms of cars?” Moore said.

“I

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