Last Reminder by Stuart Pawson Page B

suspicious cash transaction. If you go into a bank to deposit a large amount of cash, currently three thousand or over, you will be asked where it came from. If the bank manager is not satisfied, the law requires him to report it. The National Criminal Intelligence Service correlate the reports and let us know about any coming from our patch. It’s a bit of a dodgy area, so we keep mum about them until we are sure that the money comes from criminal activities.’
    A bit dodgy was putting it mildly. Over eighty per cent of SCTs were quite legitimate, and the civil liberties people would have a field day if we actedon them all. A handful lead to convictions and the rest fall into a grey area. Lawyers are the best people to launder money. They are protected by rules of confidentiality that priests and doctors can only envy. Second-hand car dealers come next on the list. A financial adviser, calling into his bank every week with a couple of thousand pounds in grubby notes that his clients have handed to him, might just about get away with it. Except that he would be doing it in every bank in town.
    Gilbert grunted and shuffled around. ‘Do you think we’re talking drugs money?’ he asked, peering at Maud over his new half-spectacles.
    ‘Early days, Mr Wood. Let’s see what we find.’
    Hartley Goodrich was beginning to look interesting. Maud answered a few more questions before I invited the SOCO to spellbind us all with his revelations.
    ‘Fingerprints,’ he announced, briskly. ‘First of all, to eliminate the milkman who started the whole thing off, we checked the bottle on the doorstep. It had been wiped clean. We asked him if he wore gloves and he said not. We also checked next door’s bottles and they bore his prints. The plant pot that hit Goodrich had also been wiped clean, most likely with a tea-towel that was hanging in one of those pull-out rails, under his worktop. His assailant had put it back, but it bore dirty marks similar to the soil from the pot. We’ve sent it to the lab. On thetable was a bowl, or a planter, that the plant pot has stood in at some time. We found plenty of Goodrich’s prints and one or two other marks, probably old ones. I’m not hopeful of them being of interest. For what it’s worth, the plant was a Dieffenbachia picta. It would have been less messy to have poisoned him with it.’
    I said, ‘Let’s not explore that avenue. This isn’t St Mary Mead and Mr Wood isn’t Miss Marple.’ I couldn’t resist adding, ‘In spite of the spectacles. Anything else?’
    ‘We’ve taken the usual fibre samples and found a couple of hairs that we haven’t identified yet, but they are almost certainly his own. Oh, and a few flakes of dandruff.’ He turned to me, saying, ‘We’d like a word with you about that, Mr Priest,’ which earned him a cheap laugh from the audience.
    ‘I see,’ I replied through gritted teeth. ‘Is that all you could find? You were there long enough.’
    ‘One little thing,’ the SOCO said. ‘When I lifted the milk bottle to dust it, there was a wet ring of condensation on the step, where it had been. Next to it was what might have been the remnants of a similar ring, as if one bottle had been taken away, or the one present had been moved. Unfortunately, the mark dried out and vanished as we were looking at it.’
    I wasn’t sure if this was interesting or confusing. We all want to be detectives, follow the trail, makesweeping deductions, but mostly it’s easier than that. Look for the woman or the money; find the blunt object; match them together. End of story. This was going to be one of those, I hoped. I’d had enough revelations for one day, but I was reckoning without Nigel’s phone call.
    We held a questions and answers session and doled out the various jobs. I asked Jeff Caton to take over the list of clients that Claud – Brian – had started and try to develop some sort of profile of each one that would eliminate most of them and leave us