Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street by Sally Spencer

even before that footman got snotty with you, weren’t you?’
    â€˜Damn straight!’
    â€˜With Flynn?’
    â€˜Hell, yes. This is all a game to him, isn’t it?’
    â€˜No, I don’t think it is,’ Blackstone said. ‘He might appear frivolous, but he’s as serious about the case as you or me – possibly even more so, since it happened on his patch.’
    They had reached the first of the steel doors.
    Meade tapped on it experimentally with his knuckles, then said, ‘I believe what Mrs Turner told us – and I don’t just mean I believe that she believes it, I mean I believe it’s true .’
    â€˜You believe it’s true that her husband was an honest man who could never have been bribed to let the kidnappers into the guard room?’
    â€˜Yes. And, by all accounts, the other murdered guard was almost as saintly as Turner.’
    â€˜He would seem to have been,’ Blackstone agreed.
    â€˜So how did the kidnappers get beyond this door?’ Meade asked, exasperatedly.
    â€˜I don’t know. It might have been through trickery.’
    â€˜But what kind of trickery would be likely to work?’ Meade asked, his frustration bubbling over. ‘What could have persuaded the guards to go against all their training and allow strangers to pass through the door in the middle of the night?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘Someone – a person they knew and trusted – must have told them it would be all right.’
    â€˜And who could that person be?’ Meade demanded. ‘I can only think of three – Fanshawe, Mr George or Mr Harold.’
    â€˜Or Big Bill himself,’ Blackstone pointed out.
    â€˜You think he’d let his own kidnappers in?’
    â€˜He won’t have known that’s what they were – he will have thought they were there for some completely different reason.’
    â€˜So after seven years of refusing to see anybody but his sons, his butler and the parlour maid—’ Meade said sceptically
    â€˜And one – or a number of – prostitutes,’ Blackstone amended.
    â€˜. . . after seven years of that, he suddenly changes his attitude to visitors completely?’
    â€˜Circumstances may have changed. He may not have wanted to see them, but he could have thought it necessary .’
    Meade sighed dispiritedly. ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he said. ‘We can speculate and deduce for forever and a day – and it all still ends with us disappearing in a cloud of smoke up our own assholes. It’s solid facts – not fancy theories – that we need.’
    â€˜Then let’s see if there are any solid facts on the other side of that door,’ Blackstone suggested.
    They opened the second steel door, and William Holt’s study – the room in which he had spent every day for the previous seven years – lay before them.
    Blackstone ran his eyes over the whole area: the filing cabinets; the bearskin rug, soaked with the blood of the men who had been hired to protect Big Bill; the desk, with its towers of paper and its dinner tray.
    â€˜There’s something missing,’ he told himself.
    But what?
    He wished he had Ellie Carr with him at that moment, he thought – but then, he wished he had her with him most of the time, both when he was investigating a crime and when he wasn’t.
    He had never experienced love for a woman until his thirties, and then – as if to make up for lost time – he fallen in love three times in as many years. Each time, it had been a disaster. His first two loves had betrayed him for a cause. His third, Dr Ellie Carr, had not so much betrayed him as deserted him for the work that she loved – the work that consumed her.
    â€˜We could use a forensic criminologist right now,’ he said.
    â€˜I didn’t know there was such a thing as forensic criminologist,’