Page 110 of Joker in the Pack

“And?”

“As I suspected, Eleanor had a whole host of poker accounts, but one of them kept cropping up. Every month, exactly two thousand pounds was deposited into it, and then that money was ‘lost’ to one of her other aliases and withdrawn via an eWallet.”

“What does that mean? That she was still laundering money for someone?”

“It’s possible, or she may have been fencing. The two thousand could have been her payment for services rendered.”

“But you don’t think it was?”

He shook his head. “The amount never changed, and there wasn’t the pattern of large deposits you’d usually see with money laundering.”

“Then what?”

“Regular payments like that? Month in, month out? My bet’s on blackmail.”

My jaw dropped. “Aunt Ellie was blackmailing someone?”

“Or Ronnie was. The payments started a couple of months before he went to prison. Eleanor could have just carried on with the collection process.”

Burglary was one thing, but blackmail? That was a whole lot worse in my eyes. At least with burglary, the victim suffered one short, sharp shock. Blackmail could drag on for years and make a person’s life unbearable.

“Who were they blackmailing?”

“I don’t know yet. But when we track that person down, we might well find your mystery attacker.”

“What if we can’t work out who it is?”

“We will.” Nye furrowed his brow as he pondered. “I don’t think we can discount Larry, and I still want to look into Warren further. But this angle’s promising. Blackmail brings out the worst in people, and Ronnie, assuming it was him, chose a smart amount. Your average person could live on two grand a month, but not so lavishly the transactions would arouse suspicion. And it’s also low enough that even someone on a moderate income might scrabble around to cover the payments rather than have their secret get out.”

“I still don’t understand why the blackmailer didn’t search the cottage years ago, or even threaten Eleanor to make her reveal where she’d hidden the…thething. They don’t seem averse to a bit of heavy-handedness.”

“Because he didn’t know it was her until recently.” Nye ate another mouthful of pancake and chewed slowly. “That night in the pub where Graham was shooting his mouth about Eleanor and her online poker habit—I bet it was news to the culprit. When he goes to deposit more money in the account, he’ll see the balance, and he’ll know it hasn’t been touched since the day she died. If I were a gambling man, I’d put a few quid on him realising that night who’d been conning him.”

“But she’s dead now. She’s hardly going to ask for any more money, is she? So why does it matter? Why didn’t the burglar just stop paying the money in and disappear?”

“This is about more than two grand a month. He’s worried that whatever she had on him is still in this house, and you might find it.”

That did make a certain amount of sense. “But how would I know if I found it when I haven’t got a clue what it is?”

“Thanks to his persistence, we’ve got an idea now. It’s something small that fitted in that padded envelope the vicar gave Eleanor. And whatever it is, it’s also the key to something bigger.”

“So now what?”

“Now, we look for it.”

CHAPTER 32

NYE MADE IT sound so simple.

“Just like that? We look for it?”

“You have a better idea?” he asked.

“Well, no, but…”

“Why don’t we get started, then?”

While I’d managed to duct-tape my subconscious, which still wanted to scream every time I set eyes on the piles of peril, the mess was still there. And now Nye wanted to dig through everything and make it worse? The thought alone made me want to move into a convent. Nuns didn’t have possessions, right?

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