ROSS ARNOLD, THE BOSS of Allways Contract Cleaners, the firm that supplied Aimhurst’s cleaning staff, was a superficially friendly man of about 35. Broad, with a too-easy smile, his apparently open manner appeared designed to disarm.
As soon as he entered Arnold’s office and saw the set-up, Rafferty suspected that the task of clearing a few names off his suspects’ list wasn’t going to be quite as simple as he’d hoped. Because Allways struck Rafferty as one of those fly-by-night concerns that were always one step ahead of the taxman. Its one-room office was situated above a dry-cleaners and housed a mobile phone, a scratched, second-hand desk and a card-index box. That was it. Its location, close to the railway station, was also indicative of the wide boy nature of Arnold’s operation. The
