The relief manager at the Lobster Shack had pointed Elise out the back. “I went and got him this morning. They said he could come home but he’s not in a good place. There’s been a terrible row and his husband’s gone.”
Toby was sitting in the restaurant courtyard, shoulders hunched against the world. He tried to get up when he saw her but got his leg tangled in the bench.
“Hello,” Elise said, noting the complete collapse of Toby’s gelled spikes and the blue smudges under his eyes. “How are you doing today?”
“Not good,” he said weakly.
Same, she wanted to say. She’d had a bad night; cancer demons had plagued her, preventing her from sleeping and leaving her feeling as though she might crumble at any moment. But Elise hadn’t been about to let it stop her.
“I need to have that chat with you about Charlie Perry. Are you up to that?”
He nodded and led the way back inside and upstairs.
“Did you have financial dealings with Mr. Perry?” Elise said as soon as they sat down at the kitchen island.
He laughed silently. “You could call it that,” he muttered. “Charlie stole every penny I had. He took it all.”
“How did he do that?” Elise said.
“A scam,” Toby sighed. “You think these things only happen in e-mails from Nigerian princes or fake Microsoft phone calls. But he sat at my bar and said he was helping me raise the money for our surrogate baby. Then stole from me. I invested money in a scheme he said he’d set up with some City friends. Chums, he called them. And it paid out the first time.”
“But not the next?”
“No.”
“When did you last see Charlie Perry?”
He looked up at the ceiling while he considered. “Not for weeks—I phoned every day and he kept saying the money was coming, that there’d been a slight delay but it was coming. And then he stopped taking my calls. I went up a few times to try to talk to him but no one ever answered the door.”
“That must have been very frustrating,” Elise said. “Do you know Kevin Scott-Pennington?”
Toby swallowed hard. “Er . . . he’s got a holiday home on the High Street, hasn’t he? He comes in the restaurant sometimes.”
“We think he may also have been conned by Mr. Perry.”
Toby looked at Elise, his eyes sliding around.
I hope you don’t play poker.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly as if he didn’t trust himself to say the words. “You’ll have to ask him.”
“I’m afraid we can’t. Mr. Scott-Pennington disappeared while swimming in the sea yesterday.”
Toby put his head in his hands.
“I’d like to continue our discussion at the station, Mr. Greene. And we’re going to need your phone.”
* * *
—
There was a buzz in the incident room when Elise stepped in on her way to the interview. Atkins practically bounded over and the younger ones on duty scraped back their chairs to stand.
“Toby Greene’s husband has called in,” DS Atkins said. “He says Toby gave Charlie Perry all their money and was regularly driving to the Perrys’ place. He’d put a tracker on his phone because he thought he was cheating on him. We’ve got the data, and some days he makes the same journey four times.”
“What car does he drive?” Elise interrupted. “Is it a black SUV?”
“Er, hang on. Right, so no. It’s a Volvo estate. Silver.”
Elise smiled. They were on their way.
“Okay, let’s get that car in pronto. I’ve had the same story from Mr. Greene—that he was being scammed out of thousands of pounds by Charlie Perry and made repeated unsuccessful attempts to confront him about it. Did his husband say anything else? About how Toby was acting?”
The wind temporarily went out of Susie Atkins’s sails.
“Er, distracted. But, hang on, according to this data, Toby Greene carried on visiting after Charlie was reported missing. Not as frequently but we’ve got him driving up and down the road from Saturday morning until just after midnight on Monday morning. Then he stops.”
“Brilliant. Well, we’d better ask him why, hadn’t we? What time was his last visit?”
“Er, twenty-three fifty-one.”
Elise smiled. “Excellent. Come with me Atkins—and someone give the CCTV team the new information.”
She noted the ubiquitous Mr. Grimes looked a lot less pink-cheeked sitting beside his new client. No knee patting or exchanged glances. Toby Greene was the color of the magnolia walls and she hoped she wouldn’t need the first-aider.