Chapter 41
Jim Baker sat on a hard chair in an interview room in the bowels of Tradmouth police station, carefully selected by Gerry for its spartan and intimidating atmosphere. The duty solicitor sat beside him, a young man in a cheap suit who looked as though he’d rather be somewhere else.
‘Mr Baker. Good of you to join us,’ said Gerry with heavy irony.
‘You didn’t give me much choice. I was walking down the road minding my own business when this pigmobile drew up. I was dragged here against my will. It’s a violation of my human rights.’
‘We only want to ask you some questions,’ said Wesley gently, playing good cop. ‘You’ll know that your friend Dale Gadson was found dead at his zoo yesterday.’
‘I’ve been told, but I can’t believe it. Dale was always so careful. After what he told me happened to his sister . . . He said that’s how she killed herself.’
Wesley caught Gerry’s eye. ‘We’re aware of that. At first it looked as though he’d been mauled by the lions. Then our pathologist found out that he was dead before he was put into their cage.’
‘The lions were framed,’ said Gerry. ‘They didn’t do it. Unless they’ve taken to strangling their victims.’
‘Your pathologist must have got it wrong.’ Baker sounded desperate, as though he was clutching at any remote possibility that would let him off the hook.
‘Let me get this clear,’ said Wesley. ‘The girl who was mauled to death in 2011 was Dale’s sister?’
‘His half-sister. But he wasn’t around when she died. He was in the States and he only heard what had happened a lot later.’
‘The news must have come as a shock.’ Wesley tried to sound sympathetic.
‘You were seen going into the zoo on the morning Dale died.’ There was a challenge in Gerry’s statement.
‘I need to study the animals for my work. I’ve already told you that. Don’t you listen?’
Wesley took over. ‘How long have you known Dale Gadson?’
‘Only since I moved into the bungalow. I asked if I could sketch his animals and we hit it off. Kindred spirits, you could say.’
Gerry leaned towards the suspect, putting his face close to his. ‘What happened after you’d killed Mr Gadson? You were caught on someone’s dashcam going back into the zoo. Was that to transport the body to the lions’ enclosure?’
‘I didn’t kill him. Why would I do that?’
‘I don’t know. You tell us. Did you argue? We know you’ve got a temper. It wouldn’t have taken much to push you over the edge.’ Gerry sat back, arms folded, waiting for a response to his question.
But Baker looked at his solicitor. ‘I’ve had enough. I want a break.’
The solicitor opened his mouth to say something, but Gerry got in first. ‘After you’ve told us exactly what happened.’
Baker sighed, resigned to the inevitable.
‘OK. I called round first thing to sketch the chimps for a new painting I’m working on.
When I’d finished, I went to Dale’s office and we had a drink.
I think he’d been hitting the bottle before I arrived and he seemed a bit unsteady, so I left him to it and went home to paint.
’ He hesitated. ‘Then, a couple of hours later, I realised I’d left my phone in his office, so I went back. ’
‘And . . . ?’
‘I found the phone, but Dale wasn’t in the office, so I went to look for him, to tell him I’d picked it up.’ He fell silent for a few moments. Wesley saw that Gerry was about to prompt him, but he nudged the DCI’s leg under the table. He wanted Baker to speak in his own time.
‘I saw him lying there,’ Baker said in a whisper. ‘It was horrible. The lions had got him. They were mauling him, gnawing at him. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. That’s why I went off. I couldn’t face . . .’
Unexpectedly, tears began to trickle down the man’s face. The hard shell he’d built around himself was showing signs of cracking. And Wesley intended to take advantage of the situation.
‘Why didn’t you call for help?’ he asked.
‘Yes, why?’ Gerry said almost in a growl. ‘If a mate of mine was being attacked by lions, I’d at least try and scare them off.’
‘I could tell he was dead. It was too late.’
‘You didn’t think to alert anyone?’
‘There wasn’t anyone else around, and I didn’t want to get involved.
Dale ran the place on a shoestring. Employed a couple of casual workers but did most of the work himself.
He didn’t call it a zoo, he called it a collection.
The private collection he’d inherited from his father.
He didn’t really like the public coming.
But he said it brought in some whisky money. ’
‘Can you tell us what happened to Carla?’
Baker appeared to be surprised by the change of subject. ‘You mean his sister?’
‘What do you know about her?’
‘Only what Dale told me. The subject came up one evening when we were drinking. Got very maudlin about it, he did. They said it was suicide, but Dale was sure it must have been a terrible accident. Like I said, he was away travelling in the States at the time, doing odd jobs to support himself. He didn’t get back until a year later.
He was devastated when he heard what had happened. ’
‘It didn’t put him off keeping animals?’
‘He never had another tiger. His father got rid of it.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t think Dale ever knew.’ Baker paused for a moment. ‘He wondered whether he’d taken it onto Dartmoor and released it in some isolated place because he couldn’t bear to kill it.’
‘If that’s what happened, it was incredibly irresponsible,’ said Wesley.
‘Dale’s dad, Jacob Gadson, was a rich man because his own father had made a fortune during the war.
Dale’s mother was Jacob’s first wife. His second wife, Carla’s mum, had two kids and then was killed in a car crash.
Jacob married for a third time, but Dale didn’t have much to do with his new stepmother because he was in his twenties by that time.
But he did tell me that the two younger kids hated her.
She wasn’t much older than Dale, you see, and he reckoned she’d only married Jacob for his money. ’
‘Have you got a name for this woman?’
‘Dale just called her the wicked stepmother. When he got back from the States, he was told that she’d killed Carla’s dog and that was why Carla . . . did what she did.’
‘What became of the stepmother?’
‘She walked out on Jacob a few months after Carla died and went to live abroad.’
‘And what about Dale’s surviving younger sibling?’
‘His half-brother. No idea. He’d gone off to work abroad by the time Dale got back from the States.
Dale never saw him again. He was almost ten years younger than Dale and they’d never been that close.
In fact Dale said he’d never had much to do with him.
Or Carla for that matter. So then it was just Dale and old Jacob – and the animals. ’
‘What was the brother’s name?’
Baker frowned as though he was making a great effort to remember. ‘Something beginning with J. John? Jules? Not sure. Dale never spoke about him.’
Now that the suspect was in a more talkative frame of mind, Wesley decided to ask the question that had been on his mind since his interview with Penny Worksop.
‘Ever heard of a house called St Julian’s? It was owned by a bookseller called Ethelred Bingley.’
Baker considered the question for a few moments.
‘Yeah, I know it. I lived there for a short while. I’d just left a toxic relationship.
Girl who sucked all the creative life out of me.
Anyway, I met a guy in a pub in Morbay and he said he was renting a room in this big house and was looking for people to share the cost. I went there to have a look round and I ended up staying for a couple of months.
’ A smile played on his lips. ‘The landlord sold up around the time my girl came back on the scene and I moved back into her place. Perfect timing. Although the relationship didn’t last.’
‘The man you met in the pub – what was his name?’
Wesley saw a wariness appear in Baker’s eyes. ‘Something Italian.’
‘Carlo Lanzani?’
Baker looked surprised. ‘Yeah, that sounds right. How did you know?’
‘We’ve seen a list of former tenants. What was he like?’
‘He was a strange guy. Bitter.’ He looked away as though he found the memory of his former housemate disturbing.
‘You paint strange beasts. Mythological,’ said Gerry. ‘Ever heard of a lanzani in that context?’
There was a long silence, and Wesley noticed that the solicitor looked puzzled. This wasn’t the way he was expecting the questioning to go.
‘Yeah,’ Baker said quietly after a while. ‘I’ve heard of it. A lanzani is a creature that lives to attack anything that’s not of its own kind.’
‘This Carlo Lanzani you met – what did he do?’
‘He was a student. Morbay Uni, I think. He said he was a writer too, but I never saw much evidence of that. Look, Carlo was getting a bit heavy. Full of hate, you know. As soon as the landlord sold the place, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’
‘Why was that?’
Baker looked down as though he found his hands fascinating. It was clear he didn’t want to answer the question.
‘Do you know where Carlo Lanzani is now?’
He shook his head.
‘Someone else was living in the house at the time,’ Wesley said. ‘Aphrodite – had a partner called Apollo.’
Baker gave a bitter laugh. ‘Those weren’t their real names. The two of them were in a world of their own. Hello clouds, hello lambs. Hippies without a care in the world. They kept themselves to themselves.’
‘What was their relationship with Carlo Lanzani?’
‘As far as I know, they didn’t have one. They kept to their own part of the house. Rarely saw them.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘No idea. For all I know, they’re now living the suburban dream. Nine-to-five jobs and two-point-four kids. People sell out. I’ve seen it time and time again. The world grinds people down.’ He gave the two detectives a look of pure disdain. ‘Like you. Servants of the oppressive state.’
‘So it was just the four of you living at St Julian’s?’
‘That’s right. I think there used to be more, but when I was there it was only four.’
‘This was in May 2011, just before the house was sold to a Timothy Fontescue-Burns?’
‘Was that his name? Yeah. It must have been around then.’
‘Was any building work carried out in the dining room next to the kitchen while you lived there?’
‘No,’ Baker said quickly, the colour draining from his face.
Wesley looked at Gerry. He knew the man was lying.
‘So you don’t know how the body of Aleric Donnal came to be sealed up behind the wall in the dining room? Because it probably happened while you and Carlo Lanzani were living there.’
A shadow of panic passed across Baker’s features and he looked away. ‘I don’t know anything about that. Can I go?’
Wesley could tell that his questions had upset him and he needed to get to the truth. ‘Are you sure about that? Because you must have been there at the time.’
Baker flung his head back. ‘I need a break.’
When Wesley returned to the office Rachel walked over to his desk and perched on the edge. He could tell by her expression that she had news.
‘I’ve just spoken to Fiorenza, alias Pauline. She was surprisingly helpful. She’s now running an arts workshop in a deprived are of Leeds. Got a partner and two kids. Mortgage too, she said.’
Wesley raised his eyebrows, thinking of Jim Baker’s words: how the rebellious spirit of youth often faded in later life when reality hit. ‘She’s left the carefree commune life behind, then?’
‘Sort of. But she still goes on demos. She’s very passionate about animal rights.’
‘What did she say when you told her about the body in the wall?’
‘She sounded genuinely shocked. She says she doesn’t watch the news so she hadn’t heard about it. She swore she’d never heard of Aleric Donnal and that to her knowledge nobody fitting his description ever visited Casa Mirabilis.’ Rachel smiled. ‘She still called it that.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘Yes, I did. She only moved in after Tim bought the place. She said she’d known him previously and that they were friends.
But reading between the lines, I’d say they were more than that.
She said he bought the place from some old guy who had a bookshop – her words, not mine.
I asked her whether any building work was carried out in the room next to the kitchen while she was living there, but she seemed pretty sure that the downstairs loo was the only work done. ’
It seemed that Fiorenza had proved to be a dead end, and Wesley felt mildly disappointed. But he saw a smug smile on Rachel’s lips, as though she was about to divulge some delicious secret.
‘There’s more. She told me that Aphrodite was already living there when she moved in.
There were a couple of other sitting tenants, but Tim asked them to leave because he didn’t think they had the right vibes.
Aphrodite, however, ended up staying on with her boyfriend, Apollo.
Which proves they were there when Donnal was put inside that wall. ’
‘We already knew that, but we’re no nearer to finding them. Did she know where they were now?’
Rachel’s smile widened into a grin of triumph.
Wesley half expected a drum roll. ‘After the commune closed, she met up with them at a few demos. They’d decided to abandon their fancy names, and guess what?
Aphrodite’s real name is Betsy and Apollo’s name is Barnaby.
Last she heard, they were running a kennels up on Dartmoor and they share her passion for animal rights. ’
‘Betsy and Barnaby Chalmers. Our dognappers.’
‘They’ve been released on bail.’
‘To think we had them here in custody, and all the time . . .’
‘Don’t blame yourself, Wesley. We couldn’t have known about the Casa Mirabilis connection, could we? And at least we know where to find them now. They’ve got animals to look after, so I don’t think they’ll do a runner.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right. We need to go up there and have a word with them. I’ll tell the boss.’
Wesley hurried to Gerry’s office. This was the most promising lead they’d had to date. If Rachel had spoken to Fiorenza before the couple had been released, it would have saved them a journey up to Dartmoor. But sadly, they hadn’t been in possession of a crystal ball, so it couldn’t be helped.