Taken By Experts

It was too late for introductions. You don’t shake hands with a dead man; especially one whose fingers and thumbs of both hands had been severed at the first joint. Phil Rudolph of Auckland CID knew he had the job ahead of him as he took stock of Anton Clegg Chairman of the Board of Air-Chill Cold Storage strapped in his chair in his private office at 3am on a disturbing Sunday in the middle of winter. Here was a man who was going nowhere other than the morgue from a place that resembled an abattoir more than a cold store. Chief Inspector Philip Rudolph didn’t need a coroner to tell him Clegg had used up his life’s supply of group something blood. A gory trail of investigation lay ahead for Auckland’s top policeman. Prime suspect Greg Parkinson was drunk enough and sober enough to leave his car after a Saturday night birthday binge and wander into the loading bay of a city warehouse to relieve nature. He heard somebody’s death cries and stumbled upon the butchered body of Anton Clegg. Clegg, a white collar criminal who excelled when misappropriating investors funds. The question had to be raised: Is it Anton Clegg? His identical twin brother was knight of the realm Sir Alexander Clegg, philanthropist. The two were often mistaken for each other . Who was the one slain in that Auckland City cold store? No fingers meant no fingerprints which made it hard to confirm the identity of the bloodied remains. And so began the chapters of corruption, murder and suspicion. Anton Clegg was not unknown to Greg Parkinson who with Clegg’s blood on him was the immediate suspect. It was one of Clegg’s investment companies those years before that had eaten up in excess of a million dollars of Greg’s money and in the process destroyed his marriage. ’I was taken by experts,’ Greg told the police who were keen to connect him to the crime in the cold store. This story is more intricate than that, however, with a string of dead bodies and savage deeds reaching from the Eastern Bay of Plenty to the Bay of Islands; from Hamilton City in New Zealand to The Rocks on the waterfront of Sydney. All this merely a beginning to an intricate story of murder and extortion.