“Aha, there you are. Everything alright, sir?” the Detective Sergeant asked.
“It’s grand. Aye,” Ben said, all smiles. “Why d’you ask?”
“It’s just…” Hamza looked along the corridor behind him. “You’ve been a while.”
“I’ve no’ been that long, have I?” Ben checked his watch, then let out a low whistle. “Oh. Wait. No, I have. Time flies, eh? Do we have something?”
Hamza nodded. “Maybe, aye.” He stepped back and motioned for the door, indicating for the older man to take the lead. “Best if we talk in here.”
Inside the office, Hamza rolled a second chair over to the computer, then sat on the seat he’d been using. Ben took the hint and sat beside him, then peered at the screen while he searched his pockets for his glasses.
“What am I looking at?” the DI asked, still patting himself down.
“Andrew Dorlin.”
Ben squinted, and a balding, slightly overweight man came into a vague sort of focus. “Who’s Andrew Dorlin when he’s at home?”
“Well, he looks less like Jesus in this picture, right enough,” Hamza said. “That’s André Douville. That’s the guy who runs the…”
“Sex cult?”
“Wellness retreat thing, aye,” Hamza confirmed.
Ben gave up looking for his glasses and sat back in the chair. “He’s not French?”
“He’s not, no. He’s from Buckie. And those long flowing locks of his are as fake as his accent, going by this photo,” Hamza continued. “Which, I’m not sure if you can tell without your specs, is a mugshot.”
“He’s got a record?”
“He does. Did two years for insurance fraud back in twenty-thirteen. Before that, he’d had cautions for disturbing the peace, and was charged with assaulting a police officer, though that was later dropped.”
“Not the Christ-like know-it-all he’d like us to believe, then?”
“Definitely not,” Hamza confirmed. “He worked in an office before serving time. There’s a note on his record about complaints of sexual harassment from some of his female colleagues, but nothing ever went anywhere. After he was free, he pretty much vanished off the face of the Earth for a while, from what I can tell.”
“Then came back with a new name and a half-decent wig, and set himself up in the Messiah business,” Ben concluded.
“Pretty much that exactly, sir, aye,” Hamza confirmed.
“This is good work,” Ben said. “Print that off, will you?”
“Already done it,” Hamza said. He clicked the mouse a couple of times and Ben watched one blurry screen be replaced with another. “Oberon Finley-Lennox is a bit less interesting. Private education up at Gordonstoun.”
“That’s where Prince Charles went, I think,” said Ben, offering up the only bit of information he had on the school.
“Aye, I think so,” Hamza replied. “Not at the same time, though, obviously. And I think I remember hearing that Charlie hated it. Mr Finley-Lennox seems to have thrived. He was a prefect, in all the clubs—drama, debating, sailing, you name it.”
“He comes from money, then?”
“He does, aye. Formed Freedom UK in the wake of Brexit. Everyone wrote him off as just another right-leaning Farage-wannabe trying to capitalise on the anti-EU sentiment. He wasn’t expected to get a seat. Bit of a shock result, really, although he had a good PR team working for him, and he did a big push for the Christian vote.”
“No record, I take it?”
“Squeaky clean. Not so much as a parking ticket.”
Ben picked up a pen and tapped it idly against the edge of the desk. “He married?”
“Since he was nineteen.”
“You checked out the wife?”
“Aye. No record for her, either. She’s a member of Freedom UK, but doesn’t seem to have much, if any, involvement besides smiling and waving in a couple of pictures.”
Ben twisted from side to side in the swivel chair, contemplating all this new information. “Missing persons throw anything up?”
Hamza shook his head. “Not really got anything to go on. We don’t even have a picture of Bernie to compare, and the date range for his arrival in the area is too broad to sift through. The name ‘Bernie’ brought up a few hits, but nothing that’s unresolved, unless he’s a hundred and twenty years old, in which case there’s one possibility. Pretty sure that’s not going to be him, though.”