Connections (10 page)

“
Yes, that's so,” he confirmed, glum and serious as a dissenting minister. “It has to be said we're not absolutely certain these three were the individuals who conducted the crime.
”

“
I see,” said I, leaving a long pause into which I hoped he would throw some gratuitous information. But he was too wily for that. He hadn't got to where he was without learning how to sit there, silent as a bespectacled Buddha, for years at a time if need be.

“
I can't help feeling, Mr Pugh, that you aren't revealing all the information you have about this matter. That is your right, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the more I know about the situation, the faster I will be able to deal with it. It's not wise to retain the services of those you hope will help you without disclosing all the facts. Can you, for example, tell me who was robbed?
”

“
I've been asked not to give you the relevant information until you've undertaken the case,” he told me. “After that I understand you're bound by the Official Secrets Act.
”

It was indeed true that I was so bound by that innocent-looking bit of paper without which I could not get Government jobs.

“
I think I ought to be clear about who I'm working for,” I said.

“
The Home Office, naturally.
”

“
Yes. But who would I be reporting to?
”

“
To me, actually,” he said without pleasure.

Oh Lord, I thought. Pugh was so obviously a man with a
wealth of knowledge and absolutely no understanding, or, to put it another way, a man with no common sense at all, or, to put it yet another way, you wouldn't let him take your dog for a walk. Men like Pugh go from prep to public school, from there to university and from there to Whitehall without ever touching the ground. Reporting to Pugh would be like reporting to Zozik from the planet Blank Nevertheless, it never pays to refuse a small job from a big employer, so I said to Pugh, “Fair enough. I'll do it.
”

If only I'd got that girl in Soho to do my I Ching that day – if only.

Pugh said, “Good. Now, Hope, I want you to understand that this must be dealt with by as few people as possible. By you alone, in fact.
”

This is a standard request from clients, no problem being so serious, so confidential, so potentially interesting to others as one's own. “Of course,” I responded smoothly. “Terms are normally handled by my secretary, who knows nothing more of the business.” This was completely untrue. The firm would have collapsed if Veronica hadn't known everything. “So,” I continued, “what have you got for me?
”

He opened his case and handed me a skinny buff file. I felt his eyes on me as I scanned the little information the file contained. There was a report of a burglary from the house of a David Hamilton at 5 Gordon Mews, which runs off Welbeck Street, about half a mile from where we were sitting. The goods taken were described as four silver snuff boxes, a gold signet ring and £500 in cash. A brief report from the West End Central the previous November – it was now May – stated that from the information received the reporting officer, Inspector Franks, believed the suspects in the robbery to be Dominic Floyd, Joe Carter and Vanessa Whitcombe, all NFA, all having been looked for but not found in London and all otherwise untraceable.

“
I'll do the best I can,” I told Pugh. “First I'll go and talk to Inspector Franks.
”

“
I thought I'd made it plain you should work alone,” Pugh
said. “All our technical resources are open to you, but we don't want any other individuals involved.
”

“
I understand,” said I mendaciously, and after various hand-shakes and assurances of mutual esteem Pugh departed and I sat back, put my feet on the desk and lit a cigarette. Then I rang Charlie Franks at West End Central, gave him the facts and figures concerning the theft and wondered if he was available for lunch.

And so I began work on what I had little doubt was the cover-up of some sordid misdemeanour or stupid blunder which the Government would find damaging if revealed.

I was surprised to find that the three – Floyd, Carter and Whitcombe – were not claiming DSS payments at that time. Though not too surprised, because they came from a world where false names aren't uncommon. So they could have been registered under other names.

I checked their police records and found that Floyd and Carter had been done eighteen months earlier for dealing drugs out of a place in North London and got suspended sentences, while the girl, Vanessa, had been caught shoplifting a year before that and got another suspended sentence.

There were three addresses on the file: Dominic Floyd's was a farm in County Mayo, Joe Carter's was a children's home in north-west London and Vanessa Whitcombe's was what looked like a council estate not too far from the children's home.

I drove to the estate which had been Vanessa Whitcombe's last known address and rang the doorbell of a neatly curtained flat on the sixth floor of a tower block. No one answered. I stood there a bit until an old lady appeared from behind a heavily chained and locked front door, gave me a suspicious look and asked me if I was anything to do with the delivery of a new couch.

Being sofa-less there was no point in claiming to be a delivery man. I said, “No. I'm looking for Vanessa Whitcombe.
”

“
You won't find her here,” said the old bird, eyeing me beadily.

“
Does her family still live here?” I asked.

“
Who are you?” she responded.

“
Probation Services,” I lied.

She looked me up and down and priced my leather jacket. “Let's have a look at your ID,” she demanded.

“
It's in the car,” I told her. “If she's not here, can I get in touch with her mother?
”

She looked at me hard, then said a phone number, which I wrote down.

When I rang the number a voice said, “Social Services.” I asked for Ms Whitcombe and heard she was interviewing a client. Did I want to leave a message? Definitely not. I'd told the old girl I was from the Probation Services, and the girl's mother was a social worker.

I rang George Hopkins, an unfrocked copper who sometimes worked for me, and asked him to take on a five-day job watching the flat on the estate – the Yarborough in Cray Hill – to see if the missing Vanessa Whitcombe or any of the others were around, and report on anything else of interest.

Then I went back to the office and, later, home to the lovely Fiona. About ten words were usually spoken on either side during the course of an evening, unless she wanted money, or there was something to do with the kids. And so another evening passed in the happy home.

Next day Charlie Franks and I sat down in an atmosphere of hearty good grub. As soon as we'd ordered I asked him what he knew about the robbery in Gordon Mews. He told me – nothing. There was nothing to know. The owner of the flat, David Hamilton, self-described as company director, had called the police on October fifteenth of the previous year and requested that officers go round to check out a burglary and get a list of purloined items from his housekeeper. He'd rung from the airport, being just about to depart on a business trip. He'd left, he said, as well as the list of items, a written description of the thieves, three of them, who he'd discovered the previous night in his sitting-room. Interrupted by him, he said, they'd fled through the front door.

The agency housekeeper that Mr Hamilton had hired when he'd bought the flat a year earlier hadn't been there when the robbery
took place. When she'd arrived the following day, Mr Hamilton had explained to her what had happened. He'd supplied her with the list of stolen property and a sheet of paper giving an account of the affair and rough description of the robbers. A young girl with long dark hair and two fellows in their early twenties, one tall and dark, the other average height with fair hair. Jeans and jackets.

The housekeeper showed the officers a broken sitting-room window, which was at that point shielded by a latticed metal shutter. Hamilton's account stated he'd gone to bed that night and forgotten to pull the shutters and lock them. He'd also forgotten to set the burglar alarm.

I looked at Hamilton's neatly typed account and said, “Seems a bit odd to interrupt three burglars in your house at eleven at night, sit and type a full account, plus details of the theft, and only get around to calling the cops from the airport the next day.
”

Charlie had checked out the matter with the sergeant who'd gone to the scene. Apparently Hamilton had later called him from the USA asking what was being done about finding the “homeless people” who'd robbed him. That made him think – how could Hamilton know for sure the perpetrators were homeless? By his own account he'd only interrupted them at their work, whereupon they'd legged it.

The sergeant drew the obvious conclusion that he'd picked up the girl and while they were at it the others had come in through the window. Or she'd let them in and Hamilton had broken the window afterwards to make it look like a burglary, for insurance purposes. He thought, considering the fairly unimportant nature of the theft, that he might have decided not to claim, but there's no accounting for people's meanness.

Then, in November, came the call from on high. Charlie was rung by his superintendent, who asked him how he was getting on with finding the suspects in the Gordon Mews robbery. When he asked casually why this one was attracting special attention in this crime-ridden metropolis, his Super said, “Ask no questions. Just try to find the thieves.” There were photofits of the three
burglars now, he informed Charlie, because Mr Hamilton had come in and worked with the unit.

Charlie took the photofits and duly circulated them. Working on the assumption that Hamilton had correctly described the perpetrators of the crime as homeless, he sent blokes round the West End, figuring it had been an opportunistic crime committed by local pavement residents. Three names surfaced more regularly than any others, and those were Floyd, Carter and Whitcombe. But they were gone, or so it seemed. Charlie got them, along with the other look-alikes, checked on the computer. Most of the other names turned up, claiming DSS and the like. Floyd, Carter and Whitcombe did not.

“
That's it, Sam,” Charlie said, regretfully putting down his knife and fork and looking glumly at his scraped-clean plate. “A slightly funny burglary, three missing persons who might or might not have been responsible. Someone with influence eager to find them. And another unclosed file in the city of unfinished business.
”

“
The stuff never turned up?
”

He shook his head. “And now you're here,” he stated.

“
I can't tell you,” I said. “I don't know, anyway.
”

He shook his head again. “Not a good idea,” he told me, “not to know.
”

“
Needs must, sometimes.
”

After Charlie and I parted I went down to the address in County Mayo, Floyd's home in earlier days.

The place was a fifty-acre farm lying on the edge of a little one-horse village. I put up at the local pub and spoke to the landlady there. She was reticent – she guessed I was up to something with my story of being an exhausted British businessman in search of rural calm.

What I found out was that she was in fact Floyd's aunt, the youngest of a big family, and that her older sister had had Dominic without letting on who his father was. In spite of the scandal her brother, who had inherited the farm about the time Dominic was born, had taken in his sister and the baby until the young Dominic was about ten. At that point he got married. The
farm wasn't big enough for both wife and sister, so Dominic's mother had taken the boy to Liverpool where, it seemed, she hadn't prospered. Dominic had written to them up until he was sixteen, at which point he'd left home. After that, they lost him.

I packed up at the pub and went to Liverpool. I tried the hostels, the shelters and the main DSS office, but there was no record of Floyd, Carter or Whitcombe. If they were leading the floating lives of the homeless this didn't mean they weren't in Liverpool, but they were no more likely to be there than anywhere else.

The pub landlady had given me the impression that Dominic had been a bright and likeable lad, so unless he'd blasted all the brain cells out of his skull with drink and drugs as he started growing up, he'd have heard that the police had been asking about the trio in London in November. That world has the usual complement of people prepared to shop a friend for fifty quid – the higher you go the more it costs, of course – but it also has its own kind of friendships and solidarity. If they'd thought the police were looking for them, whatever they'd done or not done – and in that world it's hard to survive without doing something – they'd have taken to their heels and not come back. They could be halfway round the EEC by now, and I didn't think it worthwhile to plod round Europe after them. Dominic Floyd, Joe Carter and Vanessa Whitcombe were moving lightly and quietly through life and it would have taken more time and money than I had at my disposal to find them.

I made an appointment to see Pugh. He didn't want me at the Home Office, so we met at the pub for a sandwich and a beer. I had the beer. Pugh drank orange juice. He was the careful sort.

I told him where we were Carter-Floyd-Whitcombe-wise, i.e. nowhere, and suggested I should submit my account.

“
Well, if that's all you can do, I suppose you'd better,” he told me.