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“I have a witness named Dennis Frost,” said Patrick Edwards, the youngest member of the team, who had an earring in one ear, “who works in the loading bay opposite. He saw a dark green Evoque leaving Butts Court pretty rapidly around ten.” Edwards had played a blinder in a recent case and had gone up in the SIO’s estimation.
“Good work, Patrick. Did he see the registration, or where it went?”
“No reg, sir, but the vehicle took off down Short Street. Mr Frost thinks the driver was male, but it all happened so fast, and he wasn’t looking for anything suspicious at that point.”
“Did he see Michael Foreman?”
“No,” replied Patrick.
“Seeing as you can’t drive straight down Butts Court because it’s a dead end,” said Reilly, “he’s taken Short Street, and then had to go right onto Upper Basinghall Street.”
“Where there are more CCTV cameras,” added Gardener. “He could only have turned left onto The Headrow, so that’s another set of cameras to check. Patrick, follow that up please. I want all the CCTV footage. Find the registration of the Evoque and see what we can learn from that. If we’re lucky we might be able to compose a picture of who we’re looking for. If we’re really lucky, we might even get a photo of him.”
“What about the other names on the other boards, sir?” asked Paul Benson. “Any information on them?”
Gardener let Shona Pearson take over. She quickly summarised in detail from the night of the hit and run to the present day, including the information in the attaché case and the bitcoin scam, and what they had discovered about a team known as DPA: real names, false names, and business premises that did not exist, registered to the company called V-Tech, that didn’t exist either. She finally finished with the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of them all – apart from Michael Foreman who was now laid out on a mortuary slab.
“So this guy killed David Hunter?” asked Colin Sharp. “And somehow or other, he’s laid low all this time?”
“We still don’t know for sure who was driving,” said Pearson, “but, yes, you’re right in what you’re saying, he was responsible for the banker’s death in one way or another, and he hasn’t been seen until today.”
“I remember when all this happened,” said Rawson to Gardener, “you spoke to James Henshaw’s wife and you discovered he was missing. Is that still the case, or has he turned up as well, and does she know anything about it?”
“We need to speak to her again,” said Pearson, also to Gardener. “When we spoke to her very recently she confirmed that James Henshaw was still missing but she has no idea where. He hasn’t made any contact at all. To be honest, she’s at her wits end. She’s now harbouring suspicions that he’s been leading a double life for years.”
Gardener also summarised what they knew about the business premises in Leeds and the damaged Overfinch; that the accident hadn’t happened where James had said, neither was the vehicle being repaired in Skipton like he’d also claimed. “We’ve been checking with Range Rover UK about the vehicle’s tracker. They can’t help because they’ve had no signal from it since the night of the hit and run.”
“The first person we have seen from the investigation is Michael Foreman, and he’s now dead,” offered Pearson.
“Well he isn’t just dead, is he?” said Rawson. “He’s been made to die.”
“Which suggests that someone might know who and where they are,” said Bob Anderson.
“Maybe he’s fed up of the fact that we haven’t been able to come up with any answers,” said Sharp, “taken the law into his own hands.”
“Maybe,” said Gardener. “But who’s to say that one of the others isn’t behind today’s little incident? Is James Henshaw controlling it all? He’s been clever enough to conceal everything from his wife.”
“Or is he caught up in it?” asked Reilly. “Does someone else have all of them? Has this person had them all from the beginning, which is why we haven’t been able to find them?”
“That’s always possible,” said Paul Benson. “We never found any evidence that they’d left the country. Have we found anything since?”
“Nothing,” replied Pearson.
“But they could have gone,” offered Sharp, “obviously using false names.”
“We didn’t get anywhere with facial recognition software,” said Gates.
“So maybe they didn’t leave,” said Pearson. “Let’s go with this theory that someone knows more than we do and has been keeping them prisoner.”
“That’s a bigger mountain to climb,” said Reilly. “We’ll need to go back through all the original witness statements to see if we can spot anything that might tell us who this person is.”
Gardener could sense his team really had the bit between their teeth, and were definitely showing signs of hunger to proceed.
“So we have a hit and run, a cyber crime and the sudden appearance and death of one of the DPA team, Michael Foreman. All of these events are connected.”
“So what’s the plan, boss?” asked Bob Anderson.
“We need to cover the local airports again. I realise we did that before but in the event of one or all of them reappearing we need to go back and check again. It’s possible that one of you guys might just ask a new question, which may produce a fresh lead. We won’t know until we try. Drag up every scrap of airport CCTV you can find dating back to the night of the hit and run, and come forward to the last couple of days. I realise it’s an awful job but it needs to be done.
