Angels Passing by Graham Hurley

Author:Graham Hurley [Hurley, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2002-12-02T13:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

MONDAY, 12 FEBRUARY, early evening

This time round, Winter was taking no chances. The moment he saw Willard’s Saab backing out of his allotted garage in the car park at Kingston Crescent, he told Sullivan to stop. Getting out of the car, he bent to Willard’s open window.

‘Just been round to Finch’s nan, boss,’ he began. ‘One or two things you ought to know about.’

Willard was eyeing the clock on the dash. He had a rare social engagement he was determined to keep. What was so important it couldn’t wait until the morning?

‘Finch phoned me the night before he died. Only it’s taken me a while to suss the voice.’

Minutes later, upstairs in the MIR, Willard convened an impromptu meeting. Seated around the conference table were Sammy Rollins, Brian Imber and the DS in charge of outside enquiries, a sturdy Yorkshireman called Paul Ingham. Dave Michaels, en route home, had been summoned back on his mobile. For Willard, the time had come to light a fuse under his ever-growing team of investigators.

On the basis of Winter’s report from Flint Street, immediate lines of enquiry were pressing and obvious. Ray Brennan was to be contacted at once. He still owed Winter an up-to-date list of staff, and every one of them was to be TIE’d. That meant personal interviews as well as PNC checks. One or more of them must have known Bradley Finch and Willard wanted names ASAP. That way, Brian Imber and his Intelligence Cell could start some serious development of their association chart, the web of underworld contacts in which Finch had got himself ensnared.

Secondly, Willard shared the common view that Kenny Foster deserved a great deal more attention. The lack of any previous simply showed that the man was lucky, as well as clever. Five minutes listening to Brian Imber on the subject would convince anyone with half a brain that Foster was into criminality big time. There’d obviously been friction of some kind between him and Bradley Finch, and Willard wanted to know why. The stop-check on the Fiat which had left the traffic crew with Foster’s name and address was barely a week old, and although murder sounded a touch extreme as a reprimand for this bit of harmless fun, Finch’s recklessness may well have set him up for a smacking.

Thirdly, Willard wanted forensic to have a good sniff at the envelope Winter and Sullivan had seized at Flint Street. The phone number on the back had turned out to be the main switchboard at the local Inland Revenue office. Out of hours, there was only a recorded message but that had been enough to decode the other line of scribble beneath. 38593 84247K was a tax reference number. Whoever owned the envelope in the first place must have been talking to the tax people. With luck, the reference would lead to a firm ID.

At this point, Sammy Rollins wondered whether the tax reference might not have belonged to Finch himself, a suggestion that earned a snort of derision from Brian Imber.

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