Free The Windermere Witness by Rebecca Tope Page B

police detective seems to be quite … well, he seems to know what he’s doing.’
    George shook his head angrily. ‘Wasting time, asking all those stupid questions. Needs to cut to the chase, before the trail goes cold.’ The hunting metaphor wasn’t surprising, she supposed, but it sat very awkwardly with her impression of DI Moxon.
    ‘They’ll be doing a lot of forensic stuff,’ she said vaguely. ‘It’s probably much more proactive than it looks.’
    ‘I
told
him it had to be one of the gang – most likely the Spaniard. He was in a real state through the ceremony, dancing about, eyes everywhere. A picture of guilt, if we’d only realised at the time what he’d done. I
told
that detective bloke all about it. There were money issues, damn it. Markie’s got a lot coming to him, it needs to be managed properly—’ He stopped on a choking breath, as he heard himself. ‘What’ll happen to it now?’ he whimpered.
    Give it to Bridget
, Simmy thought. Wasn’t she just as fitting an heir as Markie?
    ‘Pablo handled Markie’s money?’ she queried. ‘But you said he was in insurance.’
    ‘Life insurance. Covering his back. It’s complicated.’
    She threw caution out of the window. ‘But how would he benefit from Markie’s death?’ she asked.
    ‘Benefit?’ The man blinked at her, mastering his anguish with an effort. ‘He’ll be given merry hell, if there’s a payout. The boy’s life was insured for millions.’
    ‘So he’d be more likely to do everything in his power to keep him alive, then – wouldn’t he? Why would he murder him?’
    She tried hard to keep abreast of the flying shards of information. If Markie’s life was insured, wouldn’t his parents get the payout when he died?
    Baxter closed his eyes. ‘He’s quite liable to have taken out a counter policy, a gamble if you like, betting the lad would die young.’
    ‘What? That can’t be legal, surely?’ The murky practices of high finance were no less obscure to her than to any other ordinary person, its language so alienating that she preferred to ignore it completely. ‘And if he did do that, the police will discover it.’
    He nodded with a brief smile, suggestive of a cunning satisfaction. ‘They will now I’ve spoken to them,’ he said.
    ‘But you don’t know for certain. You’re just guessing.’
    ‘It’s what I would have done,’ said the City financier, without a shadow of shame.
    ‘You would have killed another man’s son? The brother of your friend’s fiancée?’ She gave herself a mental gold star for getting the relationships right first time.
    ‘No, of course not. I mean I’d have tried to cover all the bases. Make sure it was win-win. It’s second nature.’
    Simmy felt a quiver of fear at the effortless power these men could wield. Nothing could break their hold on thepurse strings; as soon as the rules changed or tightened, they found a loophole, like rats shut out of the food store, making an alternative entrance overnight. The comparison with rats seemed to hold good in other ways, once she began to think about it. Ruthless, sharp, hungry and with no sense of moderation – both groups fitted these epithets quite neatly.
    ‘But—’ She wanted to shout at him, to accuse his entire breed of inhumanity and wholesale lack of integrity. She wanted to tell him his way of behaving was sick and corrupt and small wonder it ended up with the death of an innocent boy. And yet he had just lost his only son, and was therefore not to be shouted at. She wondered how gently DI Moxon had treated him. Had the detective taken Baxter’s accusation against Pablo and the others seriously? Perhaps, by now, the whole business had been settled, the Spaniard in custody making a tearful confession.
    Baxter interrupted whatever she might have said, with a flapping gesture in front of his face. The sort of gesture people made when they were choking and did not want to be slapped on the back or given water. His face