Chapter 19: The Dawney-Mendeleyev Conjecture

Chapter Introduction

There is good news for Joe and Jenny, an anxious day for some Senior Officers of the Metropolitan Police, an interesting moment as Stephen Appleyard pulls another rabbit out of his hat and a sober reflection from Chief Inspector Grantby about the purpose of policing.

Jigsaw

It’s a good day for Joseph and Jennifer McEwan! Today, two letters arrived in the post. One told them that their Insurers were prepared to honour their home and contents insurance policy. It means there will be money to pay off their mortgage or, alternatively, maintain their mortgage and rebuild their home — and there will be some money left over to replace a portion of their possessions. If they elect to pay off their mortgage, there might even be enough left over for a deposit on another home, even though it would have to be very modest. The settlement offer was enough to dispel the nightmare that haunted Joe: no home, no possessions, no job, and still a debt owed to the Building Society.

The second letter came from Cassini. They were prepared to offer him a position in their London Office, to begin in three months. At last! A job!

Hand in hand, the McEwans walk along the Great Ouse Path (1) on a cool spring morning under the wide East Anglian sky. There is much to do to get them back to where they were in life before, but, after the news of the morning, it seems that, for them, the sun is shining brighter.

It is an anxious day for the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Head of the Organised Crime Directorate. They are conducting a formal review-of-progress in the Jennifer McEwan investigation and all its messy ramifications, involving the Swedish Rikskriminal Polisen, the CIA, the British Security Services, and a powerful Russian businessman. They are aware of the potential risks their investigation might have on trade and economic relationships with Russia at a time when relationships between the two countries have been severely strained by a high profile political murder in London. If there is substance to the case, a clear end-point in view, that is one thing. If Grantby and Ackroyd are chasing phantoms, that is another...

Chief Inspector Grantby and Inspector Brian Ackroyd are coming to the meeting encouraged by the progress they have made. They are keen to secure continuing funding and support from their superiors for what has become an investigation into an international slave trading racket, not merely the disappearance of a hapless young woman.

As Grantby and Ackroyd, Sergeant Borland and Dr Elba assemble with their two senior colleagues, Grantby notices — with some irritation — that Stephen Appleyard is also attending and another man with him, someone Grantby has not seen before. Still: it is a much less formal and unwieldy gathering than the last meeting at Scotland Yard to discuss the McEwan case. Grantby likes that because, in his experience, “results” come out of small meetings where the people he regards as “key players” are all present.

Elba is, in his estimation, probably helpful. The DAC is the important link with Senior Management. He has the authority to decide how they will proceed with the investigation. The Head of Organised Crime is Grantby’s boss and Appleyard ... well, Appleyard, he supposes, is there to provide information about the political and international dimension to the case, but Grantby does not like Appleyard. Appleyard’s instincts are too pragmatic for Grantby’s liking. His agenda does not have a sharp cutting edge, like that of a good policeman, who deals with Right and Wrong and who knows the difference between Upholding the Law and Breaking the Law.

Canopus ImpEx

The DAC begins...

“Good morning, gentlemen, Sergeant Borland, Dr Elba. Thank you all for attending. DCI Grantby and his colleagues” — he acknowledges Annie Elba and Brian Ackroyd and Joan Borland with a nod of his head — “have issues to report in the McEwan case since our last meeting. It is now time to take stock and refocus. Colin, please begin.”

Colin Grantby glances at his notes and clears his throat. There is a lot to say and he wants “Organised Crime” and the DAC to receive a tight and tidy message. Meanwhile, Sergeant Borland begins to project a PowerPoint summary to illustrate and underline the important points Grantby and Ackroyd have to make.

“We are here to review the new information which has come to light concerning the McEwan case and to decide where to concentrate our future efforts. We have discovered there are two poles to the investigation. On the one hand, a slavery and people trafficking racket based in the UK which is important but something parallel to Jennifer McEwan’s abduction and, on the other hand, information about Mrs McEwan’s abduction itself.

On the screen, Jennifer’s image appears, the image of the happy carefree woman Joe had on his ‘phone. To the left, the word “Abduction” and to the right “Slavery.”

It is followed by a map of England with stars marking Warwick, Coventry, Inward Bound in Suffolk, and London.

“Very shortly after our last meeting, Dr Corinne Aimes, the CEO of Inward Bound, came to see me. She had enjoyed, so to speak, a recent visit from Jennifer and Joseph McEwan. The details are in the written summary but first, she gave us new information about events which took place when Jennifer McEwan first came to Inward Bound, information which Mr Appleyard has helped to evaluate.”

Grantby nods towards Appleyard. Well, he concedes, give credit where credit is due.

“Second, she wanted to explain that she had begun to have very significant unease about the transport and logistics company FCE who had invested in her organization. I will explain when we deal with the Jennifer McEwan thread but, for now, her information was enough to encourage us to look at FCE more closely and I will talk about the FCE investigation first...”

The screen changes to read: “Inward Bound. Investment. Freddie Clegg Enterprises.”

As he is speaking, Grantby notices that Appleyard is smiling, as if he has other private information of his own and Appleyard’s complacent smile re-awakens Grantby’s poor opinion of him...

“At this point, I shall hand over to Inspector Ackroyd to take up our presentation. Brian...”

“Thank you, Chief Inspector. When Chief Inspector Grantby contacted me to ask me to look at some facilities the FCE company had in my area, I was, luckily enough, in my car and drove over to have a preliminary look only to see that a local demolition company were reducing the FCE Depot to rubble. I was able to persuade the Site Manager to take me round and he drew my attention to one building still standing.

“Said building reminded him of a military barracks and it strongly reminded me of a custody suite so, overnight, I was able to obtain a warrant to take possession of the site and have the area carefully searched before any more destruction took place. In particular, I was able to get the West Midlands Forensic Team to take a close look at what was left. They took samples from what we will call the ‘custody suite.’ These included DNA.”

The screen image changes to show a demolition site marked out with blue Police Incident tape, followed by a view of a collection of damp and dreary half-demolished buildings, then another image inside one of the buildings to show small rooms and the Forensic Team at work.

Ackroyd pauses to make sure he has the full attention of his audience.

“The DNA was almost all Caucasian and Female. It is not what you would expect in a normal workplace. It would be consistent with females being imprisoned there for extended periods, as might happen in a slave-trafficking operation.”

The screen changes to two stark words: Caucasian. Female.

“Then came another significant development. The Warwickshire Police website has a link to accept non-urgent emails. (2.) The email address will also accept file attachments. Because the mailbox is tagged as for non-urgent items, it is not monitored throughout the working day. Someone sent us a spreadsheet which I think you will agree is a little out of the ordinary. Here it is...

If there was any question about whether Grantby and Ackroyd had the full attention of the meeting, they had it now.

Ackroyd continues...

“I am bitterly disappointed that this was not brought to my attention as soon as it arrived, but whoever sent it did what they could to let us know what was going on inside of FCE, trying to send us a message in a bottle, so to speak, and we let them down.

“As you can see, the spreadsheet was written in Excel and this particular copy was registered to a company called Canopus ImpEx.

The screen changes again to show a map of east London, with a star on one of the back streets, and then to a street view showing the front of a shuttered warehouse building. Above the delivery door, in faded letters, it says Canopus ImpEx. For such an unusual and superficially exotic business as Slaving, the Canopus building is merely dilapidated and squalid.

Grantby now resumes...

“All of a sudden, a lot began to happen very quickly. First, I had a call from a Mr John Aspinall, a partner in the solicitors Wright, Wilkinson, Aspinall, and Cooper. He called to tell us about a client of his, Dr Pamela Jordan, a Consultant Anaesthesiologist at St Thomas’ Hospital. She had confessed to being part of a slave trafficking organization called Canopus ImpEx.

“Second, Dr Jordan told him that a girl had been transported from Canopus and was being air freighted from Heathrow that day. We were able to locate Canopus ImpEx and raided the premises. We found that it had been very carefully stripped out to leave nothing useful for a forensic examination. Several areas had been washed down with bleach which denatures DNA and prevents the recovery of useful samples — but we almost expected that to be the case.

“We discovered that a freight forwarding company called Ace International had collected from Canopus and put a crate on a flight to Tampa, Florida. We heard from Mr Aspinall late in the afternoon, and I am very sad to say that it took us until the following day to find out about Ace International. By that time, the crate had arrived and been collected. We are in touch with the police in Tampa to explain that we suspected the crate contained a human cargo and ask their assistance, but this is out of our hands now.”

“So, what about Dr Jordan?” asks “Organised Crime.”

“Dr Jordan was very seriously ill and took her own life. Her body was found on Hampstead Heath by a member of the public that evening.”

“Ah...” Organised Crime.

“So we took energetic steps to speak to the Chief Executive of FCE, one Frederick Clegg. We went urgently to the Company Head Office and we learned that Mr Clegg had been making arrangements to retire — in fact, he already had retired and was no longer working with the Company. He had vacated his London flat along with his wife and has not been seen since. Also disappeared was a Mr Larry Ross who was the FCE ‘link man’ with Inward Bound. We have issued an ‘all ports’ alert for all of them and have contacted Interpol to register our interest.

“We now believe that Freddie Clegg and some associates such as Larry Ross, operated Canopus ImpEx using the expertise they gained from their legitimate Transport and Logistics business, Freddie Clegg Enterprises. Canopus was set up specifically as a slave-trafficking operation. We suspect they were mainly concerned with exporting of British girls abroad, rather than importing foreign girls into the UK.”

The screen changes again, to show photographs of Freddie and Ellie, Pam Jordan and Larry Ross beneath an acknowledgement of the Passport Office as their origin. The four of them stare out, looking rather like accomplished yet unremarkable business people though Dr Jordan’s image is curiously different, more benign, despite her central role in the slave-trafficking racket.

“We think that Canopus, in the guise of the legitimate Freddie Clegg Enterprises, became aware of Inward Bound and saw it as an alternative business model — arranging consensual slavery contracts does not carry the same business risk as abduction.

“Concerning Mrs McEwan, whose re-appearance sparked this investigation, we think that her original trip to Inward Bound was not connected with Canopus but was made for bona fide research purposes. However her work was extremely interesting to Canopus because it might have been useful in some way to alert them to women who might be suitable targets.

“And now, a final piece of information about Mr Larry Ross. Whilst Inspector Ackroyd’s team were at work in the FCE buildings in Warwick, a woman now confirmed to be Rachel Kurnow was arrested at Heathrow. She had been carrying a condom filled with white powder in her vagina. The condom also contained several one pound coins which, of course, tripped the security alarm.

“She confessed to travelling on a false passport using a false name. She claimed to have been abducted several years before and had been held as a concubine for Larry Ross in a flat in London. She was being taken initially to New York by Ross and Ms Kurnow realized this was her opportunity to escape. Abused women often find it hard to break from their abusers but Ms Kurnow was formerly a writer and used her imagination to arrange for others to take her away from him. Ms Kurnow has been able to confirm that she was aware of the Cleggs, Jordan, Ross and, of course, Canopus as well as another man who we have been able to identify as Harry Keitley. Keitley is also being sought.”

The screen image refreshes again and now Harry’s face joins those of his erstwhile colleagues.

The room is quiet for several seconds after Grantby finishes his account of the FCE Investigation. The DAC says, “Chief Inspector, please accept our congratulations on the progress you have made. We share your disappointment at missing the last abductee and we must hope that our colleagues in Florida can make progress.

“At our last meeting, we spent quite a lot of time on the idea that Mrs McEwan had been abducted to Russia. This would be the second strand of your investigation. Is there any further information on that score?”

The McEwan Disappearance

“Yes, DAC, there are one or two rather important issues to look at. At the moment, we can lay out the pieces of the jigsaw but we have not been able to fit them together as nicely as we want so we will now summarise where we are with all this.”

“Where did she go? We think Mrs McEwan was in Russia and the evidence is the scientific article co-authored by Vyera Anatolyevna Kuznetsova writing from the Department of Psychology, Moscow State University. The article was written in Mrs McEwan’s style and turn of phrase and is very similar indeed to work she did at the University of Warwick. Since her return she can speak Russian, which she never could before. However, we have not managed to find anyone who saw her when she was there. There are no ‘sightings.’

“Who was she with? For a start, the two other authors of the scientific article, people called Mendeleyev and Romanova, but, of course, not just them. Our prime suspects are people working for or connected with a Russian businessman called Anatoly Kustensky. We suspect she left for Russia on his private plane. However, there is someone else who matches Mrs McEwan’s description claiming that she was the passenger in question and we have been unable to ‘break’ her account.

“Mrs McEwan reappeared in Stockholm, close to a yacht owned by Mr Kustensky. The Swedish Authorities have confirmed to us that one Vyera Anatolyevna Kuznetsova was listed as a member of crew on his yacht both on arrival and departure.

Grantby now turns to his colleagues: “Inspector Ackroyd and Sergeant Borland and could you... ?”

“Thank you, Chief Inspector,” says Ackroyd as he begins.

“Not long after Mrs McEwan had returned to the UK, she and Mr McEwan went to Birmingham, he on business, she just to tag along and go window-shopping. At some point in the afternoon, Mrs McEwan became disorientated and lost. She used her mobile phone to call for help and the people she called seem to have been the people responsible for her abduction. Although her phone record of outgoing calls had been wiped from her phone, it was not wiped from the phone company records.

“I was able to obtain a number from them and trace it to a taxi company office in Berlin. I was able to get a look at the premises with Google Street View and a look at the roof of the building from a Google Earth aerial view of Berlin and was able to make out a satellite aerial dome. It was the sort of ship-to-shore equipment you see on ships. I had advice from a contact in the security company Rampart-Webster who said he thought the taxi company was either a front organization or their switchboard had been hacked such that it was (perhaps unwittingly) acting as a relay station and rerouting certain numbers.

“I have not been able to pursue this any further because, from this point, we will need the cooperation of the German Security Service, but it shows that whilst the Clegg and Canopus are the sort of criminals we are used to, the people dealing with Mrs McEwan are working at a much higher level of sophistication.”

“More recently, I am sorry to say that Mr McEwan was made redundant from his company (I believe his former company had merged with another concern) and when he was in London attending an interview fir a new job, he was seriously assaulted. What lifts this out of the ordinary, to use that phrase again, is that someone sent Mrs McEwan a video message showing her the assault on her husband and after she left for London, to see him in hospital, their home burnt to the ground. In the context of the night’s events, I think it’s fair to say their house was torched but we have not found out just yet who was responsible for the assault or the fire and why they did it. However, Sergeant...”

Borland now picks up the thread. “I went to see Mr and Mrs McEwan when he was in UCH.(3) He was not well enough to be interviewed but I was able to speak to Mrs McEwan.

“She admitted to me that she was Vyera Kuznetsova and that she had not left the UK voluntarily and was not allowed to contact her husband or family here in the UK, which really adds up to her being an abductee held captive. However, she also referred to being adopted by the people she was with and finds it very difficult to say much about them in the sense that she is very loyal to them. In fact, she is very firm about her duty to be loyal. She had no idea who attacked her husband or why, but she was very clear that it was not the people she had been with, who we suspect had held her captive. When I told her that she and Mr McEwan could expect protection from us, she replied that we could not protect her from a State.

“Finally,” says Grantby as he resumes the presentation, “what was she doing in Russia?” When Mrs McEwan made her recent visit to Inward Bound, she told Corinne Aimes that she had been asked to make a presentation about the research data she had been analysing...”

“I am sorry, Colin, can you give me that again?” — it is the Head of the Organised Crime Directorate who interjects — “Are you saying that Mrs McEwan was working on technical data when she was ‘away, ‘ if I can put it like that?”

“Yes, sir, I am saying exactly that and, of course, it was the publication in the Russian technical journal which alerted Mrs McEwan’s university colleagues to the idea that she was still alive. This was the first sort-of ‘contact’ that anyone had with her since she vanished.”

Grantby glances across the table and his eye catches Appleyard once more smiling as if he knows something no one else knows. It takes Colin Grantby an effort of will to direct his gaze back to the DAC and “Organised Crime.”

“What you need to know is Mrs McEwan reported someone at her presentation meeting saying something like —

‘So that’s why they are interested. They do not have to go after people. The people come after them.’

“Mrs McEwan wanted to ask Corinne Aimes if she and her colleagues corresponded to they — which was a very unwise question to ask because, if Corinne Aimes and her Team were conducting people smuggling, it’s hard to see how the McEwans would have escaped with their skins. Anyway, this was what prompted Corinne Aimes to come and see me, and to express her concerns about Larry Ross and FCE in the context of Mrs McEwan’s information.