A Conflict of Interests
Karen Whitfield was attractive, wealthy and dead. What puzzled Detective Inspector Coghill most was how she had become wealthy enough to afford a luxury house in Wimbledon and send her only son to an expensive prep school. Her husband had a low paid job as a courier for a travel agency and her boutiques weren't sufficiently lucrative. Clearly, the woman had had another source of income.
The other source, it transpires, was a nice line in blackmail. A call girl, Karen Whitfield had catered to the sexual perversions of her influential clients and video-taped them at the same time. Although their identities and details of their peculiar tastes were listed in an individual code, it is obvious from the amounts of money she had been extorting that any one of her victims might have killed her.
But the waters are muddier than that. Suddenly Coghill begins to receive unsubtle hints that his investigation is taking him into areas which are politically taboo, hints which come from very high up indeed and can only be ignored at the expense of his career. What Coghill doesn't know is that one of Karen Whitfield's clients was being kept under surveillance by the Security Service. Furthermore, Nicholas Vaudrey, the head of K Desk, has already identified the killer, a ruthless ex CIA agent hired by the VIP to recover the incriminatin tapes. Vaudrey wants to manipulate the investigation for his own Intelligence purposes and in so doing, produced a classic recipe for a Conflict of Interests. As Coghill ploughs doggedly on, he discovers it is no longer a question of his job being on the line - but of his life.
The other source, it transpires, was a nice line in blackmail. A call girl, Karen Whitfield had catered to the sexual perversions of her influential clients and video-taped them at the same time. Although their identities and details of their peculiar tastes were listed in an individual code, it is obvious from the amounts of money she had been extorting that any one of her victims might have killed her.
But the waters are muddier than that. Suddenly Coghill begins to receive unsubtle hints that his investigation is taking him into areas which are politically taboo, hints which come from very high up indeed and can only be ignored at the expense of his career. What Coghill doesn't know is that one of Karen Whitfield's clients was being kept under surveillance by the Security Service. Furthermore, Nicholas Vaudrey, the head of K Desk, has already identified the killer, a ruthless ex CIA agent hired by the VIP to recover the incriminatin tapes. Vaudrey wants to manipulate the investigation for his own Intelligence purposes and in so doing, produced a classic recipe for a Conflict of Interests. As Coghill ploughs doggedly on, he discovers it is no longer a question of his job being on the line - but of his life.
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