Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(13)
Others had not been so lucky.
Detective Chief Inspector Joan Tebbutt, a respected and longstanding colleague based from the Major Crimes Unit in Durham, had lost her life on the same day. Assassinated on the doorstep of her own home, Tebbutt hadn’t seen it coming—nobody could have—and the shock of her death had sent a rippling tidal wave of grief and anger across all the local area command divisions.
In the immediate aftermath of the heist, and once he’d been reassured of his wife’s status, Ryan and his team had devoted their collective energies to investigating who had killed Tebbutt, and, more importantly, why. At the same time, they’d done everything in their power to track down a missing artefact that was irreplaceable in historic and cultural terms.
To their surprise, the two lines of enquiry had converged.
Tebbutt had been gunned down by one of her own team; a young woman by the name of Justine Winter, who’d chosen to take her own life rather than face the scales of justice. That same young woman had been a party to torturing a man by the name of Edward Faber, who’d spent many years operating in the criminal underworld as a high-class forger, before turning informant. When their investigations turned up the fact that Tebbutt had been Faber’s contact during her time spent on the Fraud Team, things began to unravel. Through a stroke of technological genius, they were able to triangulate the location of the robbers using their phone signals and track down the missing cross in the process, leading many to believe the case was closed, and their troubles all over.
Except for one, niggling fact…
The cross they recovered was an excellent forgery; a fact Faber had discovered and reported to the late Joan Tebbutt.
Ryan believed—right down to his bones—that Faber had been tortured until he’d confessed to sharing his knowledge of the forgery with DCI Tebbutt, thereby signing her death warrant. But, the questions of why a young detective of good standing would involve herself in perpetrating such violent crimes, and of why a gang of criminals would go to such lengths to hide the fact that the cross they’d stolen—in spectacular style—was a fake, were unanswered. Until they were, there remained the possibility that Ryan and other members of his team were targets in the same way Tebbutt and Faber had been. To protect himself, his team and their loved ones, Ryan had taken the executive decision not to make public their knowledge of the forgery, which afforded them a short window of time to try to find out the answers they so desperately needed.
Ryan had his own theories but, unfortunately, no proof—despite having spent several months conducting a covert investigation in the hope of generating new leads. In the meantime, there had been no further robberies, no further assassinations or reports of torture killings aside from the usual gang-related assaults, and ‘The Powers that Be’ were growing impatient with his methods.
It could only be a matter of time before the order came to shut it down.
With such troubling thoughts circulating his mind, Ryan made his way to one of the smaller conference rooms and prepared to deliver what might be his last covert briefing on the matter of the missing cross.
*
A little after nine-thirty, Ryan’s small team of trusted men and women assembled for their bi-weekly briefing on what had come to be known as ‘Operation Bertie’. Their meetings were held at irregular times on irregular days, quite deliberately; the reason for their absence being listed in the departmental diary as something innocuous each time.
Ryan moved to the head of the oval table in the centre of the room, having shut the door firmly behind them.
“Anybody ask where you were going?”
There were negative responses all round.
“Good,” he said. “It may have been a few months, but we can’t afford to get complacent. Tebbutt was one of ours and, like it or not, so was Winter. Whoever managed to turn Justine Winter infiltrated our ranks, and it could happen again.”
“That was over in Durham—” Lowerson started to say, but one look silenced him.
“Winter was one of ours,” Ryan repeated. “The fact she was based in a different area command makes no difference. If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that almost anybody can be susceptible to blackmail or coercion.”
Lowerson pulled a face, not wishing to remember some of his own demons on that score.
“Okay, let’s get down to it,” Ryan said, and cast his eyes around the table, looking at each of their faces in turn.
Phillips, MacKenzie, Lowerson and Yates.
Each one a trusted friend.
“We all know why we’re here,” he said, leaning forward to rest his forearms on the table. “But let me spell it out, in case anybody’s forgotten. We know that the artefact we recovered back in March was a fake; that’s been confirmed by Dr Ahern at Durham University, who’s an expert on Cuthbert and his relics.”
For the same reasons they were now sitting in a room under the guise of completing ‘Continuing Professional Development’, Ahern had agreed to complete confidentiality in the matter of the pectoral cross—for her own protection, if nothing more. The same applied to their Senior Crime Scene Investigator, Tom Faulkner, who was the only other forensic professional to know the truth of the matter.
“Our working theory is that whoever killed Edward Faber and Joan Tebbutt did so because of what they knew about the cross,” Ryan said. “Faber was killed before the heist, which means they knew the cross was a fake before they stole it—but why would anybody want to steal something they knew to be a fake? The obvious answer would be to conceal the fact from the police, before Tebbutt or Faber had a chance to tell anybody else. The best way to do that was to steal their own forgery.”