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“Inspector Harrington-Bowen? I’m DS Charlie Rees. We spoke on the phone. There are a few things I’d like your help with, sir, if you have a moment.”
Harrington-Bowen’s look of satisfaction was echoed by his expansive welcoming gestures. There was a generous porch with coat hooks and a shoe rack. The coats were the expected Barbours and duffels, but amongst the Hunter wellingtons was a grubby baseball cap with a V-shaped logo on the front. It didn’t look like anything Harrington-Bowen would wear. Charlie was escorted along the wide hallway with its engineered oak floorboards, into a lounge painted in pale grey, with a deep grey carpet and deliberately mismatched sofas in green and blue velvet. An enormous television dominated one side of the room, and at the opposite end, an unlit wood burner stood in a recess lined with cut logs. French windows looked onto a small, well-manicured lawn. It could have been a show home, and maybe it had been.
“Sit down, DS Rees. I recognised you from your pictures, of course. Quite the media sensation. Perhaps not the fifteen minutes of fame you were hoping for.” Harrington-Bowen laughed, and not in a pleasant way.
“No, sir,” Charlie said, consciously arranging his face into an unthreatening neutrality. “I wanted to ask you about your nephew, Gwilym. Do you know where we might find him?”
Whatever Harrington-Bowen had expected, it wasn’t this.
“Gwilym? Why are you asking me where he is?”
“We need to talk to him, so we’re contacting his friends and relatives. He appears to be of no fixed abode.” Charlie allowed his glance to encompass the perfectly appointed room as he spoke.
“You thought I might be keeping him here?”
“I don’t know, sir. And you can’t suggest where he might be found?”
“I believe I just answered that DS Rees.”
Actually, you didn’t. But let’s move on.
“The other thing I wanted to ask you about were some videos we found in the police station, specifically on a data stick in your desk. These appear to be recordings of assaults on young women. I wondered what you can tell me about them.”
“I would have thought that was more your sort of thing than mine, Rees.” Harrrington-Bowen said with a sneer.
“The videos were in your office, sir, and since you mention it, no, they were not to my taste. I’m curious about whether you put them there. One of the videos appeared to show a very recent assault on a female student. You will understand we need to know where they came from.”
The answer, like the appearance of the dog, was exactly as Charlie had expected: blustering denial. What Charlie couldn’t determine was how far Harrington-Bowen was lying. Lying he certainly was. He asked all the wrong questions for someone who had never heard of such videos. But Charlie wasn’t sure the inspector knew they were in his desk drawer.
“Who do you think could have put the material into your desk, sir?”
“How the hell should I know?” Harrington-Bowen snapped.
“It’s very incriminating material, sir. I would think you would want to know where it came from.” Charlie said. “Obviously we will be sending it over to the technicians in Wrexham, to see if they can enhance the images. Maybe we can see who some of the people are, and where the events took place.” Charlie had no idea if any of this was possible, but he guessed Harrington-Bowen didn’t either.
Harrington-Bowen sprang to his feet. “What a ridiculous waste of police resources! Forensic examination of pornography.” His face flushed. “Understand this, Rees, better men than you have tried to blackmail me, and failed. Get out of my house!”
Charlie left, without seeing the dog or hearing anything suggesting there was anyone else at home. But the baseball cap didn’t fit, and Charlie couldn’t imagine Harrington-Bowen covering his luxuriant hair with it. But collecting videos of young women being assaulted? That he could imagine with no difficulty at all. He set off back to the police station, turning the collar of his coat up against the chill.
As he walked, much easier on the way back, the baseball cap nagged at him. There was something about the logo. He’d seen it before, and recently. Suddenly, the V shape resolved itself into a pair of rabbit ears: the Playboy Bunny logo. The same logo that had been on the data stick in Harrington-Bowen’s drawer. And, Charlie realised with a jolt, the same logo on the front of the hoodie worn by the young man he’d passed on the way up the hill. A young man he had noticed had a straggly beard. All of it like the witnesses’ descriptions of the arsonist.
Charlie was out of breath by the time he got back to the station, full of news about his probable sighting of the arsonist and his connection to Harrington-Bowen. He found Patsy and Mags in despair.
“We cautioned Kaylan and it was water off a duck’s back, ”Mags told him.
"He’s told you nothing?”
“Talks and talks until our heads are spinning, but not one bit of useful information has he shared. Lots of talk about how amazing Vitruvious is, lots of talk about how he’s living in a police state. Lots of talk, full stop. He’s an arrogant shit, and he’s enjoying all the attention.”
“Enjoying the attention?” Charlie asked.
“He’s playing with us.” Patsy said. “You got Eddy to look up anything that might have caused a week’s lost memory, and there are both street and prescription drugs that would do it. But he’d have to have been given dose after dose, and he’d have been confused and delirious for a long time while they wore off.”
“Anything about money?”
Patsy waved her hand airily. “Oh, my accountant deals with all that,” she said in an appalling American accent.
“Right then, tell him he can stay in our luxury accommodations tonight and we’ll see how he feels in the morning.”
