Free Make Them Pay by Graham Ison Page B

inspector. Having eventually made contact, I introduced myself and went on to explain our interest in William Rivers and what had happened.
    ‘Oh dear! What appalling bad luck,’ said the DI, and laughed before promising to come and take a look.
    Twenty minutes later, he strode into the room. There’d been no flashing blue lights, no sirens, and no hordes of policemen stringing out miles of blue and white tapes, just the DI in a small unmarked saloon car. But then this was not the make-believe world so beloved of crime scriptwriters.
    ‘What’s the SP, then, guv?’ asked the Brighton DI, as he strolled into the room.
    I explained, as briefly as possible, the murder enquiry in which I was involved and that it had, in my view, led to Rivers’s suicide.
    ‘I don’t suppose he left a note or anything,’ said the DI as, hands in pockets, he surveyed Rivers’s dead body.
    ‘Nothing that I could find.’
    ‘Reckon he’s your man for this topping of yours, then?’
    ‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but could you arrange for a ballistics test on the pistol? With any luck it’ll turn out to be the murder weapon, and it’s a point two-two, the same calibre that was used by our killer.’
    ‘You can take it with you if you like, so long as you let me have it back.’ The DI glanced around the room, taking it all in. ‘Well, I’d better call up the cavalry and get them to clear up the mess. I’ll let you have anything we find, guv.’
    ‘Thanks, much appreciated,’ I said. ‘D’you mind if we take his house keys? I think a look round his drum might be profitable.’
    ‘Not at all,’ said the DI, ‘so long as you sign for them.’ He seemed very keen on paperwork and I wondered if he’d ever met our commander.
    The DI produced his pocketbook and made an entry, and I signed for the pistol and the keys.
    ‘There’s one other thing,’ I said. ‘He’s got a car outside. I’ll take a look inside, if it’s all the same to you, but then I’ll leave it to you to dispose of.’
    ‘No problem.’
    ‘I’ll drop the car key back when I’ve finished.’
    ‘Right,’ said the Brighton DI, and began to make calls on his mobile phone. ‘Be lucky, guv,’ he added while waiting to be connected.
    Dave and I descended to the ground floor.
    ‘What’s going on?’ demanded the ‘chatelaine’.
    ‘Any minute now you’ll have hordes of policemen swarming all over the place to investigate the death of Mr Rivers,’ said Dave. ‘He seems to have blown his brains out.’
    ‘But what will the other guests think?’ The woman’s face registered horror. ‘This is a respectable guest house,’ she complained.
    ‘Not any more it’s not,’ said Dave.
    We made a cursory examination of Rivers’s Renault Twingo. There was the usual unpaid parking ticket and an empty cigarette packet, but there was nothing to excite our interest. And certainly nothing to point to Rivers being our murderer.
    When we got back to London, I took Dave into my office and we settled down to work out where we were going to go from here.
    ‘D’you reckon he did top Eberhardt and Schmidt, guv?’ asked Dave, tossing me a cigarette before crossing the room to open a window. We’d both tried to give up smoking and not even the draconian rules that forbade smoking in police buildings, which we were now breaking, had had the desired effect.
    ‘I’m damned if I know, Dave. If the weapon he used to off himself with is the one that killed them, then yes, I think we might have a result. But this name Adekunle that Horst Fischer found on Eberhardt’s computer still bothers me. There’s got to be a connection there somewhere.’
    ‘So, what’s next?’ asked Dave.
    ‘Get the pistol across to ballistics, and then we’ll have a look round Billy Rivers’s house.’
    Colin Wilberforce was hovering when I left my office.
    ‘What is it, Colin?’
    ‘The Anthony Cook letters, sir. The local delivery office returned them all to the senders.’
    ‘Really? I