Dead Man's Footsteps

stamps and plates so they couldn’t be identified as one collection.’
    ‘Did you confront him?’ Glenn asked.
    She shook her head. ‘No, he’d boasted to me the first time we met how easy stamps were to conceal, that they were a great way of laundering money and transporting it around the world. That even if you got stopped, mostcustoms officers wouldn’t have a clue there was any value to them. He said the best place to hide stamps was inside a book – a hardback novel, anything like that, which would protect them. So I just searched his bookshelves. And I found them.’
    Bella smiled.
    Branson watched Abby’s face, her eyes, absorbing it, but not comfortable. This wasn’t the whole story. There was something she was omitting, but he had no idea what. Clearly, she was smart.
    ‘What happened then?’ he asked.
    ‘I did a runner. I took the stamps, crept home, packed a bag and flew to Sydney on the first flight I could get in the morning. I was scared because I thought he would come after me – he’s extremely sadistic. I made my way to England via Los Angeles and then New York.’
    ‘Why didn’t you go to the police in Melbourne and report what he had done?’ Glenn asked.
    ‘Because he scared me,’ she said. ‘And he’s very clever. He’s very good at lying. I was worried he would spin the police a story and get them back. Or that he would come after me and hurt me. He’d already hurt me once.’
    Glenn and Bella shot each other a knowing glance, remembering Chad Skeggs’s history with the police in Brighton.
    ‘And I needed the value from them badly,’ Abby said. ‘My mother is extremely sick – she’s got multiple sclerosis. I need the money to pay for her to be in a home.’
    Glenn picked up on the way she said that last sentence. Nothing he could put his finger on, but she said it in a strange way, as if that would be justification for any action. And it just struck him as strange that she said the word need . If someone took something that belonged to you, it wasn’t a question of whether you needed it. You had a right to it.
    ‘Are you saying it will cost millions to keep your mother in a rest home?’ Bella said.
    ‘She’s only sixty-eight, although she looks a lot older,’ Abby replied. ‘It could be for twenty years, maybe more. I don’t know what it will cost.’ She sipped some coffee. ‘Why does that have any relevance? I mean – if we don’t do something quickly, she won’t survive. She won’t.’ She buried her face in her hands again and sobbed.
    The two detectives shot each other a glance. Then Glenn Branson asked, ‘Did you ever meet someone called David Nelson?’
    ‘David Nelson?’ She frowned, dabbing her eyes, then shook her head. ‘The name rings a bell, I think.’ She hesitated, then went on, ‘David Nelson? I think Ricky may have mentioned the name.’
    Branson nodded. She was lying.
    ‘And the stamps – are they here in England now?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Safe, under lock and key.’
    He nodded again. Now she was telling the truth.

109
OCTOBER 2007
    All Nick Nicholl wanted at this moment was a good night’s sleep. His problem was that it was 8.30 in the morning and he was in the back of a blue unmarked Holden police car, in brilliant sunshine, heading away from the airport complex towards downtown Melbourne. They were on a wide, multi-lane highway which, to his eyes, could as easily have been in the USA as in Australia, except that the driver, Detective Sergeant Troy Burg, was sitting on the right.
    Some of the road signs looked similar to those in the UK, but some were a different colour, blue and orange a lot of them, he noticed, and the speed limits were in kilometres. He stared at a slim black box on top of the dash, at a touch-screen computer mounted on the front binnacle and at the big shiny buttons all around it. It was like an adult version of a child’s computer. Although Ben wasn’t old enough yet, Nick was already looking at educational toys for him.
    He was missing him. Missing Jen. The prospect of spending the weekend in Australia without them, with just bloody Norman Potting for company, filled him with dread.
    The avuncular Detective Senior Sergeant George Fletcher, in the front passenger seat, seemed well briefed and got straight down to business after a few pleasantries. His taciturn colleague, a decade younger, drove in silence.Both the Australian detectives wore freshly pressed white shirts,