Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery) by Rodney Hobson Page B

Sons, Bailey Contractors, Beswick George but no Berry, no Berry and something. Amos proceeded methodically through the top three drawers. Finally, towards the back of the bottom batch, he discovered: Wardle & Berry.
    It rang a bell with him. Amos followed the business world very little except when it impinged on his work, but Wardle & Berry had been quite a well known electrical wholesaler in its day. You never heard of it now.
    Amos extracted the file and straightened up. Miss Nolan was not pleased and coughed a phoney “ahem” but the officer wandered back into Jones’s inner sanctuary and closed the door behind him. Swift was still ploughing through the Warren file but she was getting on faster than Amos had done.
    Wardle & Berry was another thick dossier. Amos skimmed through, stopping to study certain pages in greater detail. Soon Swift had finished with Warren and Amos passed selected documents from Wardle & Berry across to her. Swift whistled.
    “So Jones destroyed Berry’s business,” she commented.
    “It gets better,” Amos returned. “When Jones financed the rival business that drummed Berry’s lot out, it looks as if Wardle was in cahoots with Jones. Look at this’” he went on, passing more pages to Swift. “Jones paid Wardle off rather handsomely while Berry ended up with nothing.
    “In fact,” Amos picked up excitedly as he turned more pages in the folder, “Berry went bankrupt and Jones got all the stock and the vans for peanuts. Then he sold them at a profit to the rival wholesaler he was backing. So Jones won twice over, Wardle got out comfortably, and Berry went bust.”
    “It’s enough of a motive for murder,” Swift said, reading what Amos was obviously thinking, “but how long ago was this?”
    Amos shuffled through the papers again. “About five years ago,” he answered.
    “So why did he wait so long for his revenge?” Swift posed. “If he was working for Jones he must have had lots of opportunities to settle the score before now. And why wait,” she added suddenly as the thought struck her, “until there was a security guard installed outside Jones’s home? It doesn’t make sense.”
    “I think it’s time we asked Berry himself,” Amos said. He ambled to the door and opened it.
    “Do you mind if we use the phone?” he called across to Nolan.
    “I’m surprised you bother to ask,” she replied frostily. “You seem to have helped yourself to everything else.”
    Amos closed the door and muttered “I’ll take that as a yes” to Swift, who giggled. He picked up the handset, rang the office and asked to be put through to Sgt Burke.
    “Listen carefully,” Amos told the seargeant. “I want three officers down here at Jones’s office pronto with a van and cardboard boxes, and I want a search warrant for Jim Berry’s home ready for me when I get back to the station, plus a team standing by to tear his home apart. Move it.”
    Amos replaced the receiver and went back to the Wardle & Berry file while he awaited the arrival of the three officers. When they duly pulled up outside, he went out to the pavement to greet them.
    Amos dropped the filing cabinet key into Sgt Burke’s hand. “You stay inside to make sure no-one tries to remove any files behind your backs,” Amos instructed him. “The other two load the entire contents of the drawer in Jones’s desk and the two filing cabinets in the main office.”
    As the three arrivals marched in, Amos signalled to Swift to join him outside. They stayed only long enough to see Nolan watch open-mouthed as the ransacking of the precious documents began.
    “I think it is also time to take Berry apart,” Amos said. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow morning.”
    However, it so happened that Amos was distracted from this intended action for another 36 hours.
     

 
     
     
    Chapter 14
     
    "There's a woman waiting to see you, sir," a uniformed policewoman remarked as Amos walked into the police station next morning.
    Amos was