Hotbed (9 page)

‘Oh? We have several mounts here, haven't we, dad? Maybe you'd like to –'

‘Tea or coffee?' Ember said. The way Brown slipped her his address infuriated Ralph. It might be just modesty – an understandable, unavoidable, admission that 15A Singer Road didn't rate with Low Pastures, and that he had to think bike not cob. Or . . . or it might be his way of telling her where to find him, the dirty schemer.

‘Tea would be great,' Brown said.

‘Two teas, then, Venetia. Yes, Mansel's eyes,' Ralph said, when she had gone. ‘Can you read a yearning there, a policy, and a determination?'

‘I haven't concentrated on his eyes.'

‘Eyes convey, Joachim, especially with someone otherwise hard to read and whose words come out as such a mess.'

‘But it's his voice I notice. Not what he actually says, of course. An impression I have. I keep coming back to that word.'

‘You can hear this yearning, this determination, in his voice, regardless of what he actually says?'

‘There's
something
there. Intent is there – as if he has to fulfil a destiny, and cannot do other than aim for it.'

‘And this “something”. Does he try to involve you in that, Joachim?'

‘Perhaps too early for such an approach. As I say, I don't push. He probably wouldn't see me at this moment as any more than a courier for you, who happens to bump into him during market times at the park. We have to bring him on, Ralph.'

‘Bring him on', like fattening up a goose to give
foie gras
. Ember loathed to hear these cruel, purposeful words used about Mansel, but, yes, the scheming, ruthless sod had to be brought on. ‘Does Shale speak of me?'

‘Now and then.'

‘In what terms?'

‘Always friendly, admiring, at this stage. And I'm sure you'd speak of him in friendly, admiring terms, at this stage.'

‘Which stage are we at, Joachim?'

‘The game-playing stage. The best-man stage. The old buddies who'd never harm each other. It's the phoney war.'

Venetia reappeared with the teas on a tray. She'd brought a cup for herself. Ralph would have expected this. ‘There are good rides here,' she said. ‘Not just around the paddocks, but down towards Aspley's farm, Mr Brown – oh, but, look, I can't keep calling you Mr Brown, can I, if we're to ride together?'

‘Joe.'

‘What, like the actor in old TV movies, Joey Brown?'

‘That was Joe E. Brown. No, not like an actor. Just Joe.'

‘I like short names for men. Bold.'

‘Venetia's a grand name,' Brown said.

‘It's historical,' Venetia said. ‘She was a Lady and very beautiful. A famous painting of her, by Van Dyck.'

Drop-in 2

‘I think we have a change,' Brown said.

They spoke again in the study. Ralph made the tea. ‘Change?'

‘The kind we want. There's a sort of bond.'

‘Between you and Manse?'

‘This time he obviously wanted to talk to me in private, not to his own man. Manse sent him away.'

‘You were out in the street, chatting through the Jag window?'

‘It's jokey, light-hearted.'

‘Manse? Jokey?'

‘Relaxed. His words get a bit garbled, as you know, but what he's saying in his own style is, doesn't it seem strange that in one way we're rivals up there, although I hobnob with his people like mates. Punters move from one side of the park to the other, looking for the sweetest deal – best stuff, lowest price. He sees what he describes as “like a contradiction there”. He wonders if it's “max efficient”. He mentions that lately he heard about a terrific business school in one of the US universities. He asks, would this business school consider the trading arrangements around Willows Park sensible, if the professors did a deep study of drug pushing there? He means Harvard Business School. He couldn't get to that but did say he thought it began with an H or a V or a W. He asks me, don't I believe the experts in that business school would regard it as mad that two companies who are almost partners should at the same time waste effort and perhaps endanger good relations through local competition?'

‘What do
you
say?'

‘Not much. I let him go on. Of course, he doesn't – can't – put things as simply as I've just done, but that's what he means. Although Manse talks gibberish, there's a lot of nous behind it. Well, you wouldn't have an arrangement with him otherwise, would you, Ralph?'

‘It stays like this – in the realm of theory?'

‘Not a bit. In a while he asks, why don't I come over and look at how his operation works, look thoroughly, so I know from the inside what he's talking about? Just out of interest, to make it not all academic. However, he stresses, no neglecting of my duties for you – he's very strong on that. But when I have a few hours free, get in touch and he'll give me the tour of his firm.'

To Ralph, the invitation seemed damned quick. Damned? ‘You'll do it?'

‘This is how we hoped it would go, isn't it?'

‘Along those lines, yes, but does it strike you as too pat? What about his eyes, his voice?'

‘Nothing unusual. Not that I could make out. I watched his eyes especially, after what you said. Just steady, businesslike – as if he was offering work experience.'

‘But what
is
he offering?'

‘Oh, I'd say he wants to bring me over, so the balance at Willows shifts. He'd be stronger – got an extra body – me – plus, and much more important, he'll expect me to talk about
your
,
our
, operation and plans, won't he – reciprocity? It would look suspicious, otherwise. So, he thinks he'll have a spy – the way you wanted a spy, Ralph. I'll be double-agenting! He can make his initial move against your firm at the park. Then the rest of the city.'

‘But if you went to him like that he must realize I'd guess something was up.'

‘He'd act fast. It's like Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia, isn't it? No Venetia today?'

‘They're at school.'

‘Ah, I should come Saturdays or Sundays if I want to talk horses.'

‘On the whole, I think weekdays are the best.'

‘But I enjoyed her company. I'll try for Sunday week, Ralph.'

Drop-in 3

It didn't happen.

Venetia said: ‘I thought Joe might come back.'

‘Why?' Ember said.

‘That was just the feeling I had,' Venetia said. She'd cornered Ember in the Low Pastures library. He'd gone there to do an internet search on a London club he'd not previously heard of, the Oriental. Ralph constantly looked for metropolitan models to base the reshaped Monty on any time soon. Obviously, he was careful. He didn't believe
all
London clubs might give him a pattern. Good God, the papers had a story lately about someone shot in a London club for asking people not to smoke. That most probably would never happen at the Monty, even in its present shady state. But he didn't want to be entirely stuck with imitating exceptionally respectable clubs like the Athenaeum or the Garrick or White's, either. Limiting. These clubs certainly had their strengths and reputations, but might be over-conventional. The Oriental possibly offered something unusual, exotic, he could aim for at the new Monty.

‘It was a bit of business previously with Brown,' Ember said. ‘A one-off, really.'

‘I wanted to show him around the stables.'

‘He's a busy character. He handles a lot of work for the company.'

‘What kind of work?'

‘Specialized.'

‘But specialized how?' Venetia said.

‘It's just that he called by for an urgent briefing,' Ralph said. ‘Exceptional. He needed my instant advice. That's what I'm here for.' But he, too, had expected Brown to show at Low Pastures today, the Sunday week he'd mentioned. He'd know Ember would be anxious following their last conversation. Following that, and
as the result of Ralph's instructions
, Brown meant to make his move, into the Shale operation for a look-around. Although Brown would decide tactics and timing himself, ultimately he was acting as the result of Ralph's instructions. Ember worried about that. Brown ought to realize this and get out to Low Pastures, if only to prove he still could. A turnaround. Ralph recognized it: he
wanted
Turret at Low Pastures now.

‘Many a beard like his I saw in France,' Venetia remarked. ‘Not those big bushy things like over here, but neat and distinguished on the end of someone's chin, often for what are referred to as intellectuals. Called an imperial because their emperor Napoleon III had one.'

Harpur's mobile phone rang. Jack Lamb said from his car outside: ‘Alert, Col.'

‘What?'

‘Possible bother.'

‘What?' But Jack did not answer. Harpur stood still and waited until Lamb spoke again. The pause stretched. Harpur considered ringing him back. Then Lamb said: ‘Sorry. I had to put the phone out of sight. It draws attention.'

‘From?'

‘Do you know what this reminds me of, Col?' Lamb replied.

‘Should I?'

‘
All the President's Men
.'

‘All the what?'

‘That film. It comes on the movie channel. About Watergate. The break-in at the Democratic Party HQ. The raiders' lookout man warns them by radio phone they've been rumbled. And so we're on the way to the end of Nixon.'

‘Have I been rumbled, for fuck's sake, Jack? Are we on the way to the end of Harpur?'

Another break. Then Lamb said: ‘Repeat, please. I missed that. Had to hide the phone again.'

‘Somebody's spotted you? Us?'

‘This one's sharp.'

‘Which one?'

‘This kid. I worried that she'd see me. I'm noticeable, anyway, lurking in a car at night. The phone makes it worse.'

‘She?'

‘She.'

Lamb was on watchman duty for Harpur in the street. As he would expect from Jack, he seemed to be handling it conscientiously. Twenty minutes earlier, Harpur had broken into Joachim Bale Frederick Brown's place at 15A Singer Road for a quick look around. Now and then, Harpur regarded this kind of visit to someone's home as absolutely necessary – a proactive surge, though not one to win him the Queen's Police Medal if he got caught. He felt he could learn quite an amount about the occupier from the way the rooms were arranged and decorated, plus, occasionally, there might be some revealing find on the premises, not otherwise reachable. This could be true of tonight's search. He wondered if he might discover Brown dead in there, and dead a long time.
Joachim Brown's body lay a mouldering in 15A
? Harpur went quietly. Brown's flat occupied the ground floor of a large old semi. Above it, on the first floor, was 15B, well-lit and obviously in use.

Harpur liked to make these intrusions solo. He could observe and think better then. Other officers moving about inside would distract him and possibly interfere with fittings or ornaments. Harpur wanted such items exactly as they should be: their situations might signify. Even the trivia could talk. Or, Harpur kidded himself it could. He suspected he actually fancied illegal break-ins because they excited him, and that kind of job excitement at his rank was rare.

‘Perhaps
she
has seen me,' Lamb reported. ‘Hold on, Col.' Jack went quiet again, presumably lowering the phone once more. Then he said: ‘This is a girl about fourteen, fifteen, on a bike.'

‘What about her?'

‘I thought at first maybe your daughter. Hazel? I met her once at your house. I wondered if you'd told her you were coming here.'

‘Of course I wouldn't tell her.' He told nobody – except Jack. But that was the wrong way to put it. More accurately: it had been Jack Lamb who suggested the break-in, with himself as flagman, and Harpur had said OK. If he'd done the entry with a police team there'd be all the worthy, dismal palaver about permission and a warrant. These were very admirably intended to safeguard ordinary people's important rights and privacy, but, plainly, Harpur couldn't always be arsed. Perhaps he should have been. He realized it now.

‘Someone ought to take a look inside 15A Singer Road,' Lamb had said. This was at a second, urgent, Jack-called meeting with Harpur a couple of days ago.

‘Which someone would that be, then?' Harpur replied. ‘I'll watch, if you like, while you're at it. Make sure your mobile's working.'

And Harpur's mobile
was
working. Now, he waited again for Jack to come through on it. Harpur stood near a big wardrobe in the 15A bedroom. He had a thin-beam torch with him, off for the moment. The flat was ground-floor, half the house, self-contained with its own front door. As soon as he entered with his plastic card, he'd heard someone, perhaps more than one, moving about overhead, in 15B. Harpur had stood still in the small hallway and tried to decide the disposition of rooms. There were three closed doors near him, two on the left, one on the right. Also on the right, another door stood partly open. Briefly, he shone the torch there. He could see what seemed to be a breakfast bar and beyond that a fridge and stove. He reckoned a bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting room and the kitchen.

He did some big breathing, partly to quieten himself, partly to take in the atmosphere of the flat: after all, Jack believed a body might have lain here for up to three weeks.

‘The mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and instincts of a police officer.' This gem had fixed itself in Harpur's memory years ago, when his wife, Megan's, books still lined the walls of the big sitting room. Occasionally, among all the heavy, dismal stuff there, he'd find an interesting title, and one day he pulled out a volume called
The Secret Agent
. Glancing through it, he'd found that sentence. Harpur did not fully agree. No, not fully. Close, though. And he sometimes thought of the words, muttered them to himself. He thought of them again in 15A, muttered them again in 15A. They fitted pretty well, didn't they?

The dangers for a police officer on this kind of grossly lawless jaunt at Brown's flat also matched those faced by a burglar. Absolutely no entitlement. Absolutely no back-up. Brown could be alive but away for a while. He, or someone else with a key, might arrive and find Harpur here. He was unarmed, of course. Because the job did not officially exist –
could
not exist – he had no cause to ask for a weapon from the armoury. A bad drawback when dealing with somebody nicknamed Turret? All the same, the risk of discovery had seemed to Harpur just about acceptable – acceptable against the big, unavoidable need to get in and do some gifted nosing. This was how he argued and reargued the case to himself.

He needed to re-argue, and re-re-argue, because he didn't stay convinced. If he thought Brown's body might be here, shouldn't he organize a proper, authorized rummage, regardless of his mad, egomaniac, juvenile taste for going alone? Didn't a suspected death make that behaviour wrong – more wrong than usual: wrong from a police procedural point of view, obviously; and also wrong towards the dead man, if here, and his possible family – disrespectful? Yes, it did. But Harpur couldn't go public with his fears for Brown, because the tip-off behind the fears came from that important, second symposium with Jack Lamb. This meant, it was
only
a tip-off, not guaranteed fact, though Jack's tip-offs almost always turned out sound. More important: because Lamb gave the tip to Harpur privately, he, Harpur, must do nothing that might point to Jack as the source, or there would be no more tips from him. This followed the sacred, unvarying precept of all cop–informant deals. If Harpur announced that he wanted a police party to scour 15A Singer Road, he would naturally have to say why. And, however discreet and evasive he might be when answering, someone – say, Iles – say, especially Iles – someone would probably be able to work out where the original murmur came from. An informant might speak to a detective when
only
the informant could have known what he spoke about. Dicey. And, therefore, Harpur felt bound to do at least his first inquiry unsupported and on the quiet. Something precious, binding and very practical existed about an officer's obligation to a source, particularly a priceless source like Jack.

Soon after bringing his earlier item about Shale's drive for more important, more expensive, pictures, Lamb had telephoned Harpur at home, as usual, wanting another rendezvous. Not in the launderette. They'd talked this time at the remains of a Second World War anti-aircraft gun site on wooded high ground near the edge of the city. For some months they had abandoned this venue, afraid it might be known. But Lamb seemed to consider the spot safe again. Invariably, Harpur let him pick the location: it was Lamb's balls at risk in the mincer, not Harpur's. It was
always
the informant's balls at risk, except if the informant were female. Grassing – the unforgivable virtue. Jack liked military connections. When they met here, or in an old concrete defence pill-box on the foreshore, he'd generally come wearing army surplus gear, though not necessarily British or harmonious. Perhaps he could convince himself by the costume that this was someone else blowing the treacherous gaff.

This gun-site meeting would eventually – or, actually, much quicker than eventually – lead to the disgraceful Harpur–Lamb operation at 15A Singer Road, and to this moment in 15A Singer Road when Harpur deep-breathed laboriously, more to keep himself steady now than to trace the possible remains of Joachim Brown. Harpur felt like – well, like a secret agent, and an agent who wanted to stay secret. Admittedly those words in the novel comparing detective and burglar were self-proving and vastly obvious: clichésville. When the police officer wanted to catch the burglar he had to try to think like the burglar, of course, so he, the police officer, could work out where the burglar would be, or had been, burglarizing. Harpur put up with the obvious, though, and how would writers fill a book as long as that without clichés? He'd read some of the tale and thought it pretty good. But he'd had most of the books taken away and never finished it. Books in bulk disturbed Harpur, and Megan had a lot. They'd seemed to disturb the children, too. Partly it might be the collection was associated with Megan only, and therefore continually reminded them of her absence. But he felt it was more than this. Books in such a number seemed to boast that life could be set down on the page and nicely presented between covers. This struck him as vain and presumptuous. Perhaps Hazel and Jill thought so, too. He'd never asked. The books were a sensitive topic. Neither girl objected when he had the majority of them taken away. Especially he'd hated books with gaudy gold or silver lettering on the spine.
The Secret Agent
's title and author name appeared in ordinary black type, though. He liked the title, embraced it, enacted it now.

At their second get-together, Lamb had said: ‘A youngster called Brown, Col – missing. One of Ralphy's. Courier type. Know him?'

‘Missing? What's that mean?'

‘Missing.'

‘These people drift about, particularly low-level personnel. They go where they think the money's better. He might be in London, Manchester, San Francisco – not missing, questing.'

‘He might.'

‘Anywhere with what he'd regard as a bigger trade scene. Pushing is not like being a head teacher – stuck with one school.'

‘Ember's worried.'

‘Ember's always worried. He should have been somebody's mother.'

For their conference, Lamb wore a beautifully cut short grey overcoat, especially short on him at his height. Silvercoloured rank insignia decorated the epaulettes: a pair of crossed sabres and three narrow bars. In the meagre light at the gun site, the coat looked unmotheaten, inspection-standard, though it might date back to the French or Russian or Swedish cavalry, when cavalry meant horses, not tanks. They'd need a hefty mount for Jack. With the riding coat, he had on a large-peaked baseball-style – or American admiral-style – blue and yellow cap, a cerise cravat, and red-edged training shoes. ‘This Brown from Ember's lot, Col – know him, or of him?'

‘Brown?'

‘Joachim Brown. Same first name as Hitler's foreign minister, Ribbentrop – and, of course, there's
Saint
Joachim apocryphally father of the Virgin Mary.'

‘That's something to load a child with.'

‘Which?'

‘Both.'

‘Also called Turret. He can shoot.'

‘We'd probably have something on him,' Harpur said.

‘You know Joachim Brown, do you? Brother an actor, Clement Porter Brown. Towards star status.'

‘Ribbentrop was hanged, wasn't he?'

‘This Brown, extremely close to Ralphy.'

‘And only a courier?' Harpur said.

‘Yet. My information is that Ember had, has, something very major lined up for him.'

‘Information based on what, Jack?'

As a formality, Harpur always asked this kind of question, and, as a formality, Lamb always ignored it. Any informant would. A source's sources remained confidential, just as a source him/herself remained confidential. Tonight, though, Lamb had answered. ‘You know these Agincourt company get-togethers they have – his outfit and Shale's?'

‘They still do that?'

‘A very intimate – sensitive – chat between Ralph and Turret at the back of the hotel. The edge of the car park.'

‘How do we know this?' Another disallowed question.

‘I know it,' Lamb said.

‘Ralph's gone gay?'

‘Business.'

‘Someone saw them?'

‘Hurried. Furtive, you might say.'

‘But seen all the same?'

‘Obviously.'

‘How – if it was intimate?'

‘An accident. Someone going home early spotted them.'

‘As I recall it, the Agincourt car park is badly lit.'

‘No question – them. My source got under cover until they disappeared. A few minutes. Nothing more.' Lamb had climbed on to the low, concrete circular wall, marking the outer limit of the gun site. He looked down across the gleaming city. He probably felt protective, like one of those ack-ack gunners, ready to fight off Nazi bombers in the war, though the city would have been dark, blacked-out, then. A concrete slab road, originally laid for transporting supplies and ammunition and troops up to the emplacement, was part overgrown but still usable, and Harpur had driven halfway up, then walked. Lamb had left his car at the bottom of the hill and done all the rest of the climb on foot. Now, he didn't turn his head away from the sight below but spoke over his shoulder: ‘Ah.
You
were at the Agincourt car park, were you, Col? You saw this encounter, too.'