‘You’re not going arrest me too, are you?’ said Baird. ‘Please tell me you’re not. It was just a bit of fun.’
‘What was?’
‘The paintballing.’
‘It has nothing to do with that, sir.’
‘Thank goodness.’
Baird wiped his hands on a tissue from a box on his desk.
‘Ralph?’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Really?’
‘He didn’t take advantage of your open door to talk to you about it?’ asked Fry.
‘No.’
‘No doubt they’ll be taking away his files and computer,’ said Fry. ‘Of course, Mr Edge isn’t the type to do the dirty work himself.’
Baird waved his bony hand nervously That imaginary irritating fly in his office had become an entire swarm of wasps.
‘How am I going to explain this to my managing director?’ he said plaintively.
‘Perhaps you could send a boy with a message,’ said Fry.
Fry knew Ben Cooper had his phone switched on now, so she called him first to make sure he’d be in. She would have spent the rest of the day trying to track him down if necessary, but he answered straight away and agreed to see her.
She parked right outside number eight Welbeck Street this time, just behind Cooper’s Toyota. Inside his flat, he offered her a coffee, which she accepted reluctantly, feeling obliged to maintain a veneer of sociability when her instincts urged her to do quite the opposite.
Fry sat on his settee with her mug, exchanged glares with the cat, which stalked out of the room, and decided not to beat about the bush any more.
‘Why didn’t you just tell me everything you’d worked out?’ she said. ‘You could have given me the whole damn case.’
‘Would you have appreciated it?’ asked Cooper.
Fry hesitated, realised there was no point now in telling anything but the truth.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Well, then.’
‘I never really understood this obsession of yours,’ said Fry.
‘Obsession?’
‘All those cuttings on your kitchen wall. I call that the sign of an obsession.’
‘How did you know about those?’ asked Cooper quietly.
‘I…’
‘You’ve been in here somehow? Oh, wait a minute – Mrs Shelley mentioned that friends of mine had called looking for me. That would have been you, I suppose? So you made sure I was out of the way, then you talked your way into my flat.’
‘It might sound that way.’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Let me explain, Ben. We’re all—’
He turned away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m finished listening to your explanations, Diane. Just leave me alone, why don’t you? Everyone else does.’
‘No, wait. That wasn’t what I came here for.’
‘What, then?’
‘I want you to explain it to me, Ben.’
He put down his coffee on a low table. ‘I suppose you haven’t been following the news stories the way I have over these last few months, Diane. Did you actually look at my cuttings?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘I mean, did you look properly? The way you would look if you were presented with them as evidence and you were trying to put the clues together, to make connections? Or did you just take one glance and jump to a conclusion?’
Fry didn’t answer. Well, she couldn’t respond to that without admitting a failure. So she said nothing. It didn’t matter. Cooper knew the answer to his own question anyway.
‘Some of them aren’t really what you’d call cuttings,’ he said. ‘They’re printouts from the internet. Specialist news sites, mostly. You’d be amazed what you can turn up just by creating a few Google alerts. That’s how I know about Prospectus Assurance. It was a buyout, you know.’
‘Oh, I had a feeling when I went there that it used to be called something different.’
Cooper nodded. ‘It used to be owned by a firm called Diamond Finance. They were also the parent company for Diamond Hybrid Securities, based in London. But the insurance division has different owners now. They became Prospectus a few months ago. I read all about the takeover and the rebranding. The details are right there on my wall.’
‘So?’
‘Before Prospectus Assurance was bought out it was called Derbyshire Reliance Insurance. I know that, because they provided the insurance cover for the Light House pub.’
31
Sitting opposite Diane Fry in his own flat, Ben Cooper began to feel that familiar sensation of unreality. The moment he mentioned the Light House, his head swam and he felt the stirrings of that tremor in his hand, the ache in the back of his throat. But they were fainter now, as if they were fighting a losing battle for control of his body. His mind felt clearer than it had for a long time. Though that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.