Chapter Eighteen

The searches of the various Tickett homes dragged on through Wednesday morning. The easiest was Rory’s. For all its luxury, the newly built house had been sparsely furnished and apparently barely lived in. A brand-new and seemingly unused laptop computer was recovered, but little else for Rob Townsend to get his teeth into. There was no mobile phone there nor on Rory, and nothing was found in his car. Aidan Tickett’s home in Upper Rissington yielded a couple of mobile phones and a laptop, which his girlfriend Jo insisted were hers. It was the Tickett yard and Christopher’s static caravan that offered the real treasure trove. A dozen dumb phones, some still in their boxes, and a couple of grubby and ancient laptops.

Gillard called a hurried incident room meeting at Mount Browne at eleven a.m. Shireen Corey Williams was on Zoom, while Carl Hoskins, Rainy Macintosh and Michelle Tsu were there in person along with Rob Townsend.

‘This is where things stand,’ Gillard said, as he pointed to a whiteboard with adjacent circles around the names Blanchard, Arrowsmith and one around the label ‘Rissington Man’. ‘One murder, one disappearance, and one abduction. This definitely shifts the focus onto Aqua Western.’

‘Have you got a definite ID for the body yet?’ Shireen asked.

‘No, we only know who it isn’t. How have you been getting on with Aqua Western?’

‘I initially focused on the idea that Ozzy Blanchard had been involved in some kind of fraud, but the documents I’ve been sent from their head office don’t show anything untoward in the audit trail.’

‘Can you be more specific?’ Gillard asked.

‘If there’s a fraud it’s probably of the plain vanilla kind. According to Arrowsmith, it looks like Blanchard and the contractors were simply inflating invoices beyond what the work actually cost and sharing the proceeds.’

‘So just to be clear, you had been talking to Arrowsmith before his abduction?’ Gillard asked.

‘Yes, I spoke to him that afternoon. Aqua Western referred my queries to him because he was the regional financial controller. He told me he’d also been working with Stella Anderson from Hampshire Constabulary.’

‘That would be very convenient for him if he was involved in the fraud too, wouldn’t it?’ Gillard asked. ‘DCS Anderson might not have drawn the net wide enough.’

‘Yes. If it was something elaborate involving Arrowsmith, it would be possible for the entire audit trail to have been falsified,’ Shireen said. ‘I have to emphasise there is no evidence of that, because I’ve only been able to scratch the surface so far. We would need a full-scale forensic accounting investigation that might take months. And maybe DCS Anderson is already doing that.’

‘I might be dim,’ Hoskins interjected. ‘But the simple fact that Arrowsmith was abducted would indicate he was mixed up in something naughty.’