Dangerous Games (27 page)

He saw that his recklessness had been rewarded as he reached the mile-long, sloping slip-road which led down to the dual carriageway. There was the black van, just ahead of him. The driver was getting as much out of the engine as he possibly could, but it was no match for the souped-up Cortina.

The road was wide enough for the Cortina to overtake the van – but only just. If the van chose to swing out as he was passing it, there was a fair chance that, with its superior weight, it could knock him off the road, and send him hurtling down the embankment to the fields below. Clearly then, his brain told him, the safest thing to do – the only
sensible
thing to do – would be to simply keep following the van until they reached a safer place to overtake. But even as these thoughts were going through his mind, his foot was already pressing the accelerator right down to the floorboards.

The van had been picking up speed as it went downhill, and now it was moving almost as fast as the Cortina. When Baxter drew level with it, he could see the van driver looking down at him, and read in the man's eyes that at any moment he intended to swing the van out.

He needed a diversion, Baxter thought.
Any
diversion!

He pulled his pipe out of his pocket, the bowl in his hand, and pointed the stem towards the van driver. It didn't look much like a gun, but at that speed – and in those conditions – it was close enough to fool the killer for a second. The Cypriot ducked his head, and Baxter was past him.

The Cortina had soon pulled a couple of hundred yards away from the van. It was now or never, Baxter decided. He hit the brakes, and pulled hard on the wheel. His vehicle slewed across the road, its tyres screeching, its gearbox almost swallowing itself. The Cortina came to a rocking halt, with its wheels no more than a few inches from the edge of the embankment.

Baxter flung open the door, and dived free of the Cortina. He went into a roll, and only stopped when seven or eight feet clear of the vehicle. As he scrambled to his feet, he could see that the black van was still heading towards him.

The driver still had time to slam on the brakes and put the van into reverse gear, if that was what he wanted to do. But he showed no signs of any such inclination. Instead he seemed to be concentrating on coaxing every available ounce of energy out of his engine.

‘He's decided that if he turns back now, he's finished,' Baxter thought.

And the van driver was right in that assumption. The only chance he had escaping now was ramming the Cortina out of his way.

The van hit the car with a sickening thud. The Cortina rocked, and even moved a little.

But not enough!

Nowhere near enough!

The van's engine bellowed like a dying animal, and then – but for a hiss of stream and the creaking of twisted metal – it fell silent.

Baxter ran around the car to the van. As he wrenched open the van door, he was expecting resistance. But there was none. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel – and it didn't take a doctor to see that he was dead.

Mr Forsyth sat in his room at the Foreign Office, looking at the secure-telex machine which had been spewing out ribbons of information for quite some time.

‘So the Cypriot's dead,' said Barrington, who was reading the same information over his shoulder.

‘Yes, he is,' Forsyth agreed.

‘Then all your troubles are over, aren't they?'

Forsyth swung his chair around, so that he was facing the man who he had come to regard as his protégé. ‘You disappoint me,' he said.

‘Do I? Why?'

‘Because a few gothic murders, in a part of the country that none of us would ever visit through choice, have never really been of much concern to us. Our primary interest has always been in covering up what went on in Cyprus seven years ago.'

Barrington flushed, like a cocky schoolboy who had suddenly and unexpectedly had the full extent of his ignorance revealed.

‘I appreciate that,' he said, ‘but I would have thought that now the killer is dead, the murder investigation would no longer have the impetus to …'

‘Monika Paniatowski is still in Cyprus,' Forsyth interrupted him. ‘Furthermore, she seems to have been making unexpectedly good progress in her inquiries, so that while she's not yet discovered the awful truth, she's getting rather close to it.'

‘Then she should be pulled out immediately,' Barrington said.

‘Indeed, she should,' Forsyth agreed. ‘And how, exactly, do you think we should go about doing that?'

‘We should contact someone in the military with the authority to rescind her privileges.'

‘General Doyle, for example?'

‘Yes, he would be a good choice.'

Forsyth sighed. ‘General Doyle is spending the night with his mistress. She is a woman of rather bizarre sexual tastes, and she seems to suit him perfectly. He thinks I don't know about her, and I want him to
continue
thinking that until the Service is in real trouble, and we desperately need his backing. Which means that for tonight at least, we cannot contact him.'

‘General Parkinson?' Barrington suggested.

‘General Parkinson is currently in the operating theatre, having something unspeakable done to his haemorrhoids.'

‘General Hatton?'

‘General Hatton is the one who secured the privileges for Sergeant Paniatowski in the first place. He did it to oblige a pal of his in the RAF, and he will not take kindly to any suggestion from us that he should let that pal down.'

‘So what
can
we do?'

‘Tomorrow morning, General Doyle will appear at his desk in the War Office – no doubt limping slightly – and I will immediately ask him to do what is necessary.'

‘But if this Paniatowski woman's as good as you say …'

‘She's very good,' Forsyth said. ‘But even someone as talented as Monika couldn't possibly blow the whole thing open in just a few short hours.'

T
he Chief Constable had all the morning papers spread out on the desk in front of him. The headlines told their own story:

Marlowe picked up one of the papers, scanned the story, then threw it back on the desk in obvious disgust.

‘Well, you haven't exactly covered yourself in glory with this case, have you, Chief Inspector?' he asked.

‘At least the killer's been caught before he could do any
more
harm,' Woodend pointed out mildly.

‘By the
Yorkshire
Police,' Marlowe countered. ‘He committed two of his murders in Lancashire, and got away with them, but the moment he tries the same thing across the border, he's caught.'

Woodend could have pointed out that the killer had taken far more chances with his third murder than he had with the previous two – that there was a big difference between killing his victim near a lonely canal bank and killing him in front of several thousand people – but he knew he would only be wasting his breath.

‘I'll be nothing but a laughing stock at the next meeting of the Association of Chief Police Officers,' Marlowe complained. He sighed heavily. ‘Still, I suppose I must do what I can to save you from the vultures waiting out there for their press briefing.'

‘Thank you, sir,' Woodend replied. ‘It's very kind of you. An' despite what anybody else might say,
I
know you're not only doin' it because you can't save yourself without savin' me first.'

‘That remark is bordering on the insolent, Mr Woodend,' Marlowe said angrily.

‘Is it, sir?' Woodend asked innocently. ‘And there was me thinkin' I was only bein' nice.'

Henry Marlowe tried to think of a suitably cutting comeback, and failed completely.

‘How much longer do you intend to allow Sergeant Paniatowski to swan about in the sun, at the taxpayers' expense?' he demanded, shifting his ground for a fresh attack.

‘I'll tell her to come straight home as soon as I get the chance to speak to her.'

‘And why haven't you spoken to her
already
, pray tell?'

‘Because I don't know exactly where she is. I rang Akrotiri, an' they told me she'd left the base.'

‘It's typical of you to lose track of your own people,' Marlowe said contemptuously. ‘Shall we get this press briefing over with?'

Woodend shrugged. ‘I suppose we might as well.'

The press room was crowded with reporters, but Marlowe kept his eyes on Williams, who he had now firmly identified as Enemy Number One.

The Chief Constable cleared his throat. ‘Previous to the dramatic events of last evening, our own investigation here in Whitebridge had already uncovered much of the information that I am now about to give you,' he said unconvincingly. ‘The killer's name was George Niko … Niko …

‘Nikopolidis,' Woodend supplied.

‘Thank you, Chief Inspector,' Marlowe said, flashing him a quick and venomous glare. ‘The man was a Greek Cypriot, and is believed to have been heavily involved in the EOKA terrorist campaign which was waged on that unhappy island some years ago. We have learned that he lived quite openly on Cyprus since its independence, and only came to England a few days ago. We consider it highly probable that these three recent murders were only the latest in a long line of killings, and you can all thank your lucky stars that the Lancashire Police were more on the ball when it came to apprehending him than those investigating his previous crimes seem to have been.'

‘But you
didn't
apprehend him, did you?' Williams interrupted. ‘He crashed his van and killed himself.'

‘That is undoubtedly true,' the Chief Constable agreed, ‘but had he not been involved in that fatal accident, we would certainly have arrested him within the next few hours.'

‘And Tom Bygraves would still have been dead,' Williams pointed out. ‘Isn't this simply a case of, “The operation was successful, but the patient died”?'

‘It is always so very easy for you gentlemen of the press to take a negative view of the way things develop, but we working bobbies prefer to be more constructive,' Marlowe said, a little shakily.

‘And another thing,' Williams pressed on. ‘Why did this Nikopolidis
want
to kill these three sons of Whitebridge?'

Marlowe sighed. ‘I thought I had already explained to you that the man was a natural killer, and that he once worked for EOKA. His three victims had all served Her Majesty's Government proudly – and no doubt bravely – in Cyprus, and it was probably the case that, in his sick mind, he thought he was exacting his revenge on the whole British Army.'

‘I can see that,' Williams conceded.

‘Good. I am pleased you finally seem to have caught up with the rest of us,' Marlowe told him.

‘But what I
don't
see is why he chose these three particular men. Of the thousands of soldiers who served in Cyprus, what was it about them that made them so
special
to him?'

Marlowe looked to Woodend for help.

‘We don't know,' the Chief Inspector admitted.

‘What Mr Woodend means is that
no one
can
ever
know,' the Chief Constable said hastily. ‘Niko … this Greek … was clearly a madman. There is no logic to his choice of victims, except perhaps a twisted logic in his own diseased brain.'

‘He had no trouble at all in finding these victims of his, though, did he?' Williams asked.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘If I was a Greek Cypriot, living on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, I don't think I'd have any idea of how to locate three soldiers who hadn't been on the island themselves for over seven years.'

‘But then you do not think
at all
as he did, because you are not a homicidal maniac,' Marlowe said. He permitted himself a small smile. ‘At least, Mr Williams, I sincerely
hope
you're not.'

The Cypriot Chief Inspector's name was Andreas Karamanlis. He looked a little like Anthony Quinn had, when playing the Greek patriot in
The Guns of Navarone
, and Paniatowski wondered if he'd seen the film – and if he had, whether that was the moment when he had decided it would be a good idea to grow a thick moustache and smoke a curved pipe.

Karamanlis' office had the same cluttered appearance as her own boss's, though, living in Lancashire as he did, Woodend would have had no use for the ancient but powerful fan which was clattering away noisily in the corner of the room.

‘I must tell you, Sergeant, it is a real pleasure to speak to a British copper again,' Karamanlis said.

‘In Lancashire, sir, we prefer to call ourselves bobbies,' Paniatowski told him, with a smile.

Karamanlis returned the smile. ‘Of course you do,' he agreed. ‘I should have known that, because the UKPU was drawn from forces all over your country, and there were both coppers
and
bobbies.'

‘What's the UKPU?'

‘It is, or rather, it
was
, the United Kingdom Police Unit. I take it you have never heard of it.'

‘The initials didn't mean anything to me,' Paniatowski admitted. ‘but now you've given me its full name, it does ring a bell – if only a very vague one.'

‘Then perhaps I should fill you in on a few details,' Karamanlis said. ‘Is that the correct term –
fill you in on a few details
?'

‘It's perfect.'

Karamanlis lit up his pipe, and puffed away for a few seconds.

‘Until 1955, the Cyprus Police was run on British lines – we were a colony of yours, after all – though it was made up entirely of Cypriots,' he said. ‘But when conditions here started to deteriorate, the Governor decided the CP was simply not equipped to deal with the situation. Policemen were identified with the colonial power, you see, and so were not always popular with the civilian population. Besides, it was claimed that the police had been infiltrated by EOKA.'