Page 29

By now I was realising that I wished I hadn’t followed my gut in the first place, but Cis was relentless.

My passive attempts at any kind of placation with her had failed, so I had to do something to protect Fran from her.

I was just still hoping it was a random stranger who had offed O’Neill.

I was going to be in trouble if it ended up being Angus.

‘Crystal clear,’ Cis repeated.

I stopped for a moment, trying to make sense of all the mess Cis worked in. Did she not have any kind of organising system? No colour-coded markers to signify importance?

‘Well, I need to find the transcript somehow,’ I said, waving my hands at the sheer amount of chaos rammed into the tiny room.

Cis quickly walked over to one of the many jumbles, pulled out a document, and passed it to me.

Why did you visit Gordon O’Neill a few weeks before he was murdered? Cis had asked Angus.

He’d apparently just given a grunt at that; Steve had annotated on the script that it sounded most like an ‘I don’t know’ after he had slowed it down on the recording.

Do you know Gordon O’Neill?

Apparently, Angus had just mumbled again.

Do you know anything that could help us find Mr O’Neill?

Apparently, that ‘no’ had been more audible than his previous answers.

The whole conversation had seemed pointless, and considering they had nothing on Angus at the moment, they were unable to arrest or charge him with anything, nor search his apartment, which would have required hundreds of police man-hours.

I wondered if Fran knew that Angus had been questioned.

It wasn’t like he was the world’s best communicator.

I knew that Angus’s life had involved moving between various foster families, where he’d struggled to adapt, frequently experiencing violent outbursts and emotional breakdowns.

Most of this I had gathered from dribs and drabs that Fran had told me over our relationship.

What I hadn’t known, as I scanned his profile now, was that seven years ago, when he was twenty-two, he had tried to rob a Tesco Metro.

I had not known he had a criminal record…

A question began to percolate deep within my mind, something that I had been wondering for the longest time.

‘Cis?’ I asked, peering up from my document. ‘What’s the difference between a Tesco Metro and a Tesco Express?’

Cis, who had begun to chug on a protein shake, paused and gently placed the bottle down on a column of papers.

‘You know what? I don’t know. Let me google it.’

As I continued reading, I tried to push aside the ethical qualms I had about delving into such confidential information, especially considering this was a part of Fran’s history she had actively decide not to share with me.

The reports from Angus’s social care worker, forwarded to Cis, detailed him as a recluse battling severe agoraphobia.

Exposure to the external environment would trigger intense anxiety and behaviour bordering on schizophrenic.

Intriguingly, his ill-fated robbery at Tesco Metro had involved him dialling the police before even entering the store and holding the cashier at knife point with no real demands.

Charged with attempted robbery, Angus’s guilty plea had met a sympathetic response from both the jury and judge, resulting in mandated therapy and several hundred hours of community service.

How he’d avoided any prison time was a mystery to me – probably because Isla wasn’t on the prosecution team that day.

‘So, what do you think, darling?’ Cis asked. ‘Please tell me your brilliant detective mind can make more sense of it than I can. I feel like my head is about to explode.’

I rubbed the palm of my hand across the soft stubble on my chin as I thought it over, trying not to let Cis’s poorly disguised flattery get to me as I inspected the transcript one more time, making sure there was nothing I missed.

She puckered her lips as if she was trying to stop herself from saying something.

‘Just say it,’ I said to her, exhausted of her performance. ‘Seriously, just say it.’

‘It won’t show up on the transcript but…Fran was too good in the questioning. She was too good, Gareth. She did the little shaky voice, the little teary concerned eyes, she came across as a saint. But the woman started to smile at some points. I mean, who does that?’

‘Oh, come on, it could have just been nerves, like people who laugh at funerals.’

‘Seriously, Gareth, that’s your excuse for her?’

‘She had been preparing the whole night before for it,’ I reasoned peevishly. ‘We forget, but it’s incredibly nerve-wracking for the people on the other side of the desk. Come on, stop being an eejit.’

Cis nonchalantly shrugged her bulky shoulders.

‘Maybe,’ she said, clearly not believing anything I was saying.

I spread the papers across her desk and began breaking them apart and analysing them as quickly as I could, finally digesting all the information I’d not had a chance to look at before I’d been yanked off the case.

There was something I was missing, something I had overlooked about O’Neill from the very beginning.

Why did we all assume that his charity had been altruistic?

‘You’re looking at it wrong,’ I grumbled, before quickly adding, ‘sorry,’ knowing that Cis would be slightly offended by my harsh but honest critique.

I extended out a few more sheets across her desk.

‘I was looking at it wrong, too,’ I said, more reassuringly.

‘You have his personal accounts, right?’

‘In one of the folders, yeah?’ Cis said, pointing at one of the boxes. I lunged for it, sending the various papers into the air like confetti.

‘We gave O’Neill too much credit, thinking he was this golden boy Robin Hood. He wasn’t, not at all. How best to get a tax-free return on a profit as a kind of organisational entity?’

‘Set up a non-profit,’ Cis answered in response.

‘Right? So, you close down your business in its best fiscal year yet and then begin to funnel money through that. Because look, that business may have closed, but he set himself up as an independent contractor not three months later; he was still making money on the side. It says so here.’ I pointed to one of the records.

‘Who buys a second home the year after you close down your business?’

‘But the man had a non-profit, Gareth. We have evidence of him investing in the community,’ Cis responded, like she was talking to a mad man, while I held another business file aloft in my hands.

‘No, no, no. We have evidence that he said he would,’ I corrected, jabbing my hand at one of the many photos we had received from archives.

‘What have we been finding? Pictures of him making pledges, announcing funding, launching scholarships, but all these initiatives ended before they were off the ground. Look at these Heart of Hope Foundation projects here,’ I said as I began to slap the pictures on the table like they were tenners at a strip club – not that I had ever gone to one, of course.

‘The community centre that never finished construction, the children’s home that had to close down after a fire, the scholarships that no one actually was awarded.

I would bet my pension that these schools and town halls only saw fractions of the money they were promised.

Imagine it: countless local council grants, government funds, big donations, all becoming one big income stream that can’t be taxed, plus being an independent contractor to keep up appearances. ’

I reached across the desk, snatched yet another piece of paper, and smoothed it out under my palm. Lord above, I despised the way Cis organised her work.

‘Just look at this,’ I said, jabbing my finger on the paper.

‘In 1995, ￡150,000 from a local council grant, and another ￡50,000 donation from a tech company for corporate social responsibility. All of it earmarked to renovate a sports centre for local communities based in Southampton. And now? Want to guess what that sports centre is today?’ I didn’t wait for an answer from the slack-jawed Cis, practically hurling my body into the nearest pile of papers to search for the relevant file.

‘Here,’ I exclaimed, holding up one of the files.

‘See this? Six hundred pounds, a measly six hundred pounds! That’s what they claimed they spent on bringing in a surveyor, and that’s it.

And the so-called sports centre now?’ I quickly searched for it on my phone before holding it up for her to see. ‘Renovated into luxury apartments.’

Cis took a step back and raised her hands triumphantly above her head.

‘That’s it. That has to be it,’ she said, as I could see the spark of excitement behind her eyes.

‘He was a common fraudster, of course he made enemies,’ I explained, as the fog of the case seemed to dissipate ever so slightly.

‘I mean, he didn’t deserve to die, don’t get me wrong.

But the man leeched money off the state, had some friends in high places, probably split it a few ways and got rich doing it.

Maybe he conned the wrong person on a really bad day, and it finally caught up with him after all these years. The axe forgets, the tree remembers.’

‘Oh my, Vivian is going to be so happy,’ Cis exclaimed, the glee visibly beaming from her face.

A folder caught my eye with a name I recognised: Francesca Donoghue.

‘Is Fran’s file here? Have you got her history?’

‘Yeah. You know she was involved in an investigation before?’

‘She was?’

‘You didn’t know?’ Cis said. I thought I saw her face twist and break into concern, perhaps the first time I had seen her exhibit a genuine emotion today.