know she likes you a lot. I can’t think why.’
‘Okay, go on: this golf club?’
‘It’s just outside Reigate. Pretty exclusive, to be honest. Mum’s only a member through her role as chair of the local WI. It seems that one of the other members, some bloke called Harold Lansing, wealthy local businessman, has died in a road accident right outside his own house.’
‘Did your mum know him well?’ Heck asked.
‘Reasonably well, but not to the point where she’s grieving. The puzzle is the manner of his death. Some spoiled brat in a Porsche – kid called Dean Torbert, nineteen but with half a dozen traffic violations to his name already – ran into Lansing while he was pulling out onto the main road. Before you ask, Torbert was killed too. It was a nasty smash, very high speed. The first weird thing is that Lansing, or so my mother says, was a careful driver. He’d even fitted a safety mirror onto the tree trunk opposite his drive entrance so that he could check it was clear before pulling out. Apparently it gave good vantage in both directions. Well over a hundred yards.’
‘Perhaps it was suicide?’
‘If so, he didn’t leave a note. Plus no one who knew him felt he had any personal issues of that magnitude.’
‘What have Surrey Traffic said?’
‘Fatal RTA. No witnesses, no evidence to suggest third party involvement. No sus circs. Coroner ruled death by misadventure.’
‘Okay …’ Heck considered this. ‘So what’s the second weird thing?’
‘This is the one that really got me thinking. A couple of weeks earlier, Lansing closely survived another accident.’
‘Maybe he was a worse driver than people realised?’
‘This one wasn’t on the road. Seems that Lansing was a keen angler. It was a Saturday afternoon and he was fishing at his favourite spot on the River Mole when a radio-controlled model plane from the nearby flying club swooped on him.’
Heck frowned. ‘Actually swooped on him?’
‘Well …’ Gemma became thoughtful. ‘It’s difficult to say. Apparently it came down from a significant height, and it was big, not some toy – and it got close enough to knock him into the river and send him over the weir.’
‘Bloody hell …’
‘Only the vigilance of another angler saved his life. Local plod investigated the incident, but the plane was never recovered – presumably that went over the weir too and got washed away. To date, no member of the flying club will admit either responsibility or having seen anything, even though all were out in force that day in the next field.’
‘Could be a coincidence.’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’
‘Well, real-life coincidences are few and far between, I suppose. Certainly when they’re that extreme.’
‘My thoughts too,’ she said.
‘Did the local lads do a thorough job?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘What made your mum so suspicious? I mean there must be more than that.’
‘Nothing solid. It was a gut feeling, apparently.’ Gemma made a vague gesture. ‘Sometimes she’s a bit oversensitive to this sort of thing. All those years married to a copper, I suppose. She reckons Harold Lansing was strangely … well, to use her words, “carefree and innocent for a guy with so much dosh”. He didn’t have a driver, for example, or any professional security. Used to go fishing on his own, lived out in the sticks on his own – all that stuff. Sort of unintentionally made himself a target.’
‘But he wasn’t robbed?’
‘Not as far as we’re aware.’
Heck gave it some thought. ‘It’s a mystery for sure.’
‘Which is why I’d like you to pop down there and check it out. Just cast your eye over it. See if anything strikes you as odd.’
‘Okay.’ He nodded as a waitress handed them two dessert menus. ‘Thanks for lunch anyway.’
‘Like I say, it’s the least I can do,’ Gemma said. ‘Is Grinton having a party to celebrate the Hood conviction?’
‘There’ll be a few drinks. Low-key. I’ve told him I’ll give it a miss.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Yeah.’ Deciding against a slice of delicious-sounding banoffee pie, he closed the menu and laid it on the table. ‘I need to catch up on some sleep.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t find the Surrey job too stressful. This time there’ll be no ticking clock.’
‘Let’s hope not.’
‘No … seriously.’ She signalled to the waitress for the bill. ‘Seems like a straight-up case. Someone had it in for Harold Lansing.’
‘We think …’
She eyed him guardedly. ‘Those instincts of yours again?’
‘And yours, ma’am. I know you of old – whatever favour your mum asked, you wouldn’t be sending me down to Surrey if something about it didn’t make you twitchy.’
If there was one county where Heck’s investigations hadn’t taken him before, it was Surrey. Violent crime wasn’t, and never had been, an exclusively urban problem, but if there were any common denominators they tended to be deprivation and despair, and though Surrey wasn’t free of these, it had deservedly earned its reputation as the English county that had ‘made it’.
Though it boasted a green, leafy landscape with much agriculture, it was still densely populated; the lion’s share of this concentrated in suburban villages and affluent commuter towns servicing London. It had naturally beautiful rural features such as the North Downs, Greensand Ridge and the Devil’s Punch Bowl, but it was also home to numerous multinationals – Esso, Toyota, Nikon and Philips – and had the highest GDP per capita of any county in the UK. Heck was sure he’d once heard it said that Surrey claimed to have more millionaires than anywhere else in the whole of Great Britain.
But even by those standards, the district he followed the map to was a verdant haven, unbroken vistas of meadow and common alternating with beech groves and scenic tracts of rolling, flower-filled woodland. The occasional houses were rambling, timber-framed affairs – Tudor or Jacobean in style – usually located amid lush, landscaped parks. The house he was actually looking for, Rosewood Grange, stood alone in woodland but was a touch more modern – Georgian apparently, which only made it 300 years old – but he couldn’t see much of it when he arrived as it stood back from the road, only its upper portions, its curly gables and even rows
