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CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

LONDON, ENGLAND

TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 2023

2:30 P.M.

Shortly thereafter, DS Frost pulled over and stopped in front of the Fleet Street office building that held the headquarters of Cybersecurity International. While he waited in the vehicle, his boss, DI Wallace, stepped into the lobby where he was directed to the third floor. Once there he found a receptionist desk located just outside the elevator doors.

“I’m here to see Mr. Smythe,” Wallace announced. “Is he in?”

“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“No,” he replied, flashing his badge, “but I have this. My name is DI Howard Wallace. I’m with the Essex Police.”

“May I ask what this is about?”

“It’s a private matter, and I need to speak to him directly. It’s urgent.”

The woman looked slightly flustered, but eventually she reached for her phone. “Very well,” she said. “One moment.” After a brief conversation, she turned back to the detective. “Someone will be out to collect you directly.”

Wallace surmised that the shapely young blonde who came to conduct him into George Smythe’s private office had most likely been hired on the basis of her looks rather than her computer skills.

“This way, please.”

Just past the receptionist desk was a partition with a glass door that required a badge to gain entry. Behind the door was an upscale suite of several offices. Wallace followed his escort to a closed door at the very end of the hallway, where she stopped and gave the door a light tap.

“Come in.”

The blonde opened the door and allowed Wallace to enter before closing it behind him. George Smythe was seated at a sleek glass-topped desk where a phone, a single keyboard, and several computer monitors served as the only decorations. Behind him a large window afforded a view that included a tiny slice of St. Paul’s Cathedral. As far as London real estate went, this wasn’t the low-rent district.

Smythe rose to his feet and held out his hand in greeting as DI Wallace crossed the room. “You are?” he asked.

“I’m Detective Inspector Howard Wallace with the Essex Police.”

“Please have a seat,” Smythe invited, but then, resuming his own chair he echoed, “The Essex Police? What’s this about?”

“I’m investigating the murder of Adrian Willoughby.”

“Oh, of course,” Smythe said. “I heard about that. Poor Adrian.”

“I understand the two of you had some business dealings once,” Wallace offered.

“Yes, we did,” Smythe agreed, “but that was several years ago now. I haven’t seen him for some time, but how can I help?”

Lie number one , Wallace thought. You may not have seen him, but you’ve certainly been in touch.

“We’re trying to collect background information on the deceased,” he said. “We thought that, as one of his former associates, you might be able to offer some insights. I’d like you to come in for a routine interview, this afternoon if at all possible.”

“You’re with the Essex Police?” Smythe asked. “Where are you located?”

“Chelmsford.”

“That’s totally out of the question, then,” Smythe asserted. “I won’t have time. It’s miles away, and I have a dinner engagement this evening.”

“Of course,” Howard said with a smile. “I understand that you’re a very busy man. That’s why I arranged to borrow an interview room at the Charing Cross Station of the Metropolitan Police. It’s only a matter of minutes from here, and I have a car and driver waiting down on the street.”

By now the man was looking a bit flustered, and DI Wallace was afraid he was losing him. He needed to have the man’s answers on the record today, if at all possible.

“I’d want my solicitor to be present,” Smythe added.

“Oh, absolutely,” Wallace said with an agreeable smile. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t.”

Shaking his head, Smythe picked up the phone and punched a single button. “Put me through to Peter Albers,” he barked into the receiver. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

While Smythe waited with the phone to his ear, DI Wallace waited, too, feeling more and more anxious with every passing moment. If Angela Baker had already dropped the hammer, and if Peter Albers’s firm was also handling Smythe’s divorce proceedings, this could very well go south in a matter of minutes.

Mr. Albers must have come on the line. “Good to hear from you, too,” Smythe said into the phone. “Yes, I need a bit of a favor. I have a policeman here from the Essex Police. He’s investigating the murder of a former acquaintance of mine and wants me to come in for an interview.” There was a momentary pause before he continued. “Yes, this afternoon. It’s evidently routine questions only. All the same, I’d like to have you or someone from your firm with me.” Another pause. “Yes, it’ll be here in London. The detective has made arrangements to use an interview room at the Charing Cross Station of the Metropolitan Police.”

After that there was another pause, a longer one this time. “Yes, I understand completely,” Smythe said finally before turning to Howard. “Peter is busy this afternoon, but he can have one of his junior associates there in half an hour. Will that work?”

“Perfectly,” DI Wallace breathed in relief. “Tell him we’ll wait for him in the lobby so we can all go in together. What time is your dinner engagement?”

“Seven,” Smythe answered.

“Good,” Howard said. “We should be done in plenty of time.”

By ten past five, four people were seated in an interview room at Charing Cross Station. DI Wallace and DS Frost sat on one side of a bare-bones table, while George Smythe and Matthew Hogan, Peter Albers’s younger associate, were seated across from them.

After reading the customary caution, Howard did his best to keep the tone of the interview friendly and nonconfrontational, wanting to lock Smythe in on answers to questions that seemed to have nothing at all to do with the matters at hand.

“When and how did you and Adrian Willoughby meet?”

“It was back in the nineties,” Smythe answered. “At the time, the whole idea of cybersecurity was still in its infancy. He did some consulting work for me back then. Later, he started a cybersecurity newsletter that was well respected in the industry.”

“Is that newsletter still in existence?” Howard asked.

“No, a few years ago he went through some personal difficulties and that went out of business. After that, we more or less lost track of each other.”

“And you’ve had no dealings with him since?”

“No,” Smythe answered without hesitation.

Most likely the solicitor would have preferred an evasive, “No comment.” DI Wallace, on the other hand, was delighted with Smythe’s unequivocal no, because Angela Baker’s wire transfer printout proved otherwise.

“You don’t have any idea about someone who might have wished to do Adrian Willoughby harm?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Have you ever heard of the name Ed Scoggins?”

Lulled into a sense of complacency, Smythe blinked in surprise before answering. “Not that I know of,” he answered finally.

Knowing he’d hit solid gold, DI Wallace ended the interview. “That’s all we need then,” he said. “Thank you so much. You’re free to go. We’ll be glad to take you back to your office.”

“No,” Smythe said. “Not necessary. I’ll catch a cab from here.”

Wallace and Frost stayed where they were while the other two men left the interview room.

“What now?” Frost asked once they were alone.

“Now we go to Tilbury and find out what Ed Scoggins has to say for himself.”

Before leaving for London, Frost had done some research on Ed Scoggins, who worked as a dock worker in Tilbury. Two years earlier he had been released from prison after serving fourteen years for a fatal drunk-driving conviction. He lived in a five-bedroom home on Albany Road in Tilbury, where he and four other dockworkers rented rooms from an elderly widow. He was also the registered owner of a white, ten-year-old Volkswagen Crafter.

Willoughby’s office on Curzon Drive hadn’t been fitted out with surveillance cameras, but Wallace and Frost had previously examined hours of surveillance video from businesses near the crime scene. At the time they had been looking for individuals who appeared to be suspicious. But now, with the possibility that a reasonably identifiable vehicle might be connected to the crime, they had asked one of their department’s uniformed officers to go back through those same video segments looking for a white Volkswagen Crafter. She had succeeded spectacularly.

On Saturday, March 18, she had found a van matching that description coming and going on Curzon Drive near Willoughby’s office at 7:45 p.m. on Saturday, March 18, 2023, a mere two hours prior to Adrian’s time of death. The footage was too grainy to reveal the number of passengers in the vehicle, but presumably Ed Scoggins had been at the wheel. If a confrontation had occurred inside the victim’s office, it would have been easy to move an unconscious victim from there and then conceal him from view in the van’s windowless cargo area.

“Great work,” DI Wallace told her once he heard the news. “Now see if you can find any footage of that van traveling to the Chafford Gorges.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard,” she replied. “There aren’t many direct routes, and we know the approximate times he’d be going to and from. I’ll get right on it.”

Less than an hour later, the CCTV footage paid off again, when at 8:36 p.m. the Crafter was spotted turning right off Mill Lane onto Warren, just south of Chafford Gorges. At that point, DI Wallace wasn’t prepared to wait any longer. Based on the two connections he’d already made—the Smythe wire transfer printouts from Angela Baker and the appearance of the van in close proximity to Willoughby’s office, he thought they had enough probable cause to bring Ed Scoggins in for questioning at least, and maybe even to obtain a search warrant for his vehicle. By the time he and DS Frost arrived on Albany Road, he had both warrants in hand.

The white-haired woman who answered the door wasn’t thrilled to see them. “Whaddya want?” she demanded without any pleasantries.

“We’d like to speak to one of your tenants, a Mr. Scoggins,” Howard Wallace said.

“Hey, Eddie,” she called over her shoulder. “A couple of coppas are here to see you.”

The big-boned, balding man who came to the door looked decidedly wary. “Who are you?”

Wallace pulled out his badge. “I’m DI Howard Wallace and DS Matthew Frost with the Essex Police. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“About?”

At that point, Scoggins’s landlady was still lurking almost out of sight behind the entryway wall.

“It would probably be better if we did this in private,” Wallace suggested. “If you wouldn’t mind accompanying us to the Grays Police Station…”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Of course not,” Howard assured him. “Just a few routine questions.”

But of course the questions weren’t routine at all, and DI Wallace didn’t mince words. “Where were you on the evening of March 18?” he asked for openers.

Scoggins frowned. “What day?”

“March 18 was a Saturday—late afternoon or early evening.”

“No idea,” Scoggins answered. “The weekend is the weekend, so I was probably at the pub with one of my roomies here. Why?”

“Does the name Adrian Willoughby mean anything?”

Scoggins shook his head, but Howard noticed the tiny pause before that happened. “Never met him?”

“No,” Scoggins added after another pause. “Don’t know him at all.”

“So if we were to examine the VW Crafter we saw parked outside your residence, there’s no chance we’d find any of Adrian Willoughby’s DNA there, correct?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Good,” DI Wallace said. With that, he removed a document from the inside pocket of his sport coat and slapped it down on the table.

“What’s that?” Scoggins asked.

“It’s a search warrant for your VW van, which was seen in close proximity to two separate crime scenes involved in the death of one Adrian Willoughby who died on the night of March 18, 2023.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not at this time,” Wallace told him. “But, depending on what the forensics team finds in your van, there’s a good chance you will be. So, if you’re thinking of taking off in the meantime, I suggest you reconsider. As we say in our business, you can run, but you can’t hide.”