Stealth (10 page)

‘And the reason SOCA's got the job?' Patrick enquired, a very reasonable query, I thought.

The commander gazed at him steadily. ‘I thought you used to work for MI5. Anything you like. Lie, man, lie.'

If Patrick was offended by this he showed no sign of it. I was more concerned by Greenway's apparent lapse of memory concerning us having already noisily bumped into Trent's aforementioned dodgy associate in France. I voiced this worry, adding that surely Clement Hamlyn would have related to Trent what had occurred and given him our descriptions, thereby causing him to conclude immediately that he could, by association, be under suspicion.

‘It's worth taking into consideration,' Greenway said. ‘But I think it's also worth the risk. I'm of the opinion that Hamlyn went to France strictly on his own business – which Trent probably isn't interested in – and his threat to Coates about the stealth boat being there to make sure he paid up was nothing to do with Trent and a lie. No, as I said, play it cool.'

I had reservations about this as well but kept quiet. Just because you stir a murky pond it does not necessarily follow than anything stinking floats to the surface. This train of thought was soon to be oddly coincidental.

Patrick was not happy with his orders either. He said, ‘Before I do anything – and frankly, sending the pair of us in to talk to him in view of what happened at the literary festival is, to my mind, folly – I would like you to—'

His face grim, the commander interrupted with: ‘You don't think I've thought this through properly?'

‘With respect, no.'

There was a tense silence broken when Greenway said, ‘First you would like me to do
what
?'

‘Consider investigating the possibility that this man is involved in what appears to be a protection racket involving, for once, gang bosses and their head honchos as victims.'

‘I'm aware of something like that being noised around,' Greenway conceded. ‘Go on.'

‘As you know, there have been several murders of gang leaders and what might be described as their second-in-commands in the London area fairly recently, including Tom Berry, or Jerry, another surname he sometimes used, a self-styled crime lord in Enfield. He had petrol thrown over him and his car, the whole caboodle then torched. Another, a small-time mobster thought to be in league with him, Fred Duggan, had a nasty little accident down a flight of steps one night on the Embankment and ended up in the Thames, his body, head bashed in, fished out somewhere off Canvey Island by the coastguards. That was three weeks ago. A third, an illegal immigrant, referred to only as Rapla, who had imported himself into the UK together with a few next of kin from Estonia, and carried on his business as a drug dealer, only in Camden this time, had a lot of fresh air put into his brains by two bullets about a month ago. It's thought that his brethren took the hint and rapidly found their way home – either that or they've gone to ground. My point is that the criminal underworld thinks money and power is behind it all, surprise, surprise, but doesn't know who's responsible for the killings.'

‘But the Met's line is that they'd clam up about that side of it anyway,' Greenway observed.

‘That's exactly the kind of thing an overworked and glad-to-be-rid-of-mobsters bunch of cops would trot out.'

‘You could be right,' Greenway acknowledged grudgingly. ‘If someone from outside
,
someone living an outwardly law-abiding life, had chanced upon this novel method of making money . . .'

‘And there's the business of the cop crony of Trent's being investigated on account of some of
his
friends.'

Greenway, originally from the Met himself and with the News International scandal and criticism following the London riots still fairly recent history, sighed.

‘I'm not trying to be awkward here,' Patrick murmured with a smile.

‘God help us if you were,' retorted his boss and then laughed tiredly.

‘As we know already he has a crony involved with a London football club and boxing club,' Patrick went on, ‘who knocks around with people known to have serious crime connections. They were the folk you described as “the rats' nest”. Trent might be one of them. And, don't forget, someone had tried to kill Rosemary Smythe before by sabotaging the tree house.'

‘I'm liking this theory more and more. Hamlyn might be some kind of Trent's Mr Fix It on account of past experience in the criminal workplace.'

‘It's perfectly possible.'

I said, ‘I forgot to ask Alan who acts for him.'

I had mentioned speaking to my one-time agent in France to Greenway but, as far as he and other law-enforcers were concerned, had credited what Alan had told me to ‘reliable festival gossip'.

‘Useful to know,' Patrick said.

I rang and spoke to his secretary. And then put my phone away.

‘No luck?' Greenway said, watching my face.

I cleared my throat. ‘He collapsed and died yesterday afternoon.'

I apologized, having to leave the room, tears ready and waiting.

I understood later that there had been further discussion between the two and Patrick finally agreed that he would interview Hereward Trent, going down with all guns blazing by saying that he would play safe by adopting a squint and a fairly impenetrable Irish accent. For once I was happy not to accompany him as Greenway had changed his mind and now deemed that I was ‘too famous', as Hamlyn could well have given Trent an outline of his trip to France, mentioning my name.

Whether Patrick's threat would have been carried out or not, knowing him, probably, his call came to nothing. The Trents had all gone away, destination unknown, the au pair, conspicuously nervous, having been ordered either to tell no one or genuinely in the dark as to where they had gone, or even when they were returning.

Another point mentioned after my departure was the Met's ‘advice' that morning on the inadvisability of SOCA getting involved with any independent enquiries into the policeman under investigation who was being watched, as they were already working, with Complaints, in connection with it.

‘Greenway doesn't want me to get tangled up in that,' Patrick commented after he had related all this to me when he had come back from his abortive mission. ‘His words.'

‘You don't tend to tangle readily,' I murmured.

He smiled thinly. ‘But I can remember getting really annoyed when people, cops usually, crashed into my scenarios when we were with D12.'

‘So?' I prompted, having to laugh at the understatement.

‘So?'

‘Where do we go from here?'

‘Mike still wants me to talk to Trent when he finally comes back from wherever he is. Meanwhile, he's going to get some kind of timber expert to write a formal report that the tree house was sabotaged, something that'll stand up in court. Sorry about Alan, by the way.'

‘He helped me a lot when I had a writing crisis after a certain man came back into my life.'

‘Was it that bad?'

I gave him a straight look. ‘Yes – turbulent, for a while.' Not to mention having the living daylights scared out of me during the MI5 training sessions.

‘No regrets though?'

‘No, not at all.'

‘Not even now? Now I'm a bit . . .'

‘Tangled?'

‘If you like.'

‘Do you remember what you said when you proposed to me for the second time?'

‘Be fair: blokes don't tend to remember things like that.'

‘You said, “One day, if I'm alive and in honest employment, will you consider me for general tidying up and emptying your wastepaper basket?” And I replied, “Yes, I'll have you to grace my heart and my hearth even if you're broken and old and just out of prison”. What I said still applies.'

We were in one corner of the open-plan office we work in when at HQ but he nevertheless leaned over and gently kissed me.

As far as the Miss Smythe case was concerned there followed a few days of almost complete inertia while we waited for forensic reports. They finally arrived when I had taken the opportunity to return home for a short while. The one concerning the murder victim's house contained nothing positive, Patrick told me when he rang one evening, the only item of possible interest being very small amounts of fairly fresh grass cuttings that had been found on the hall carpet which could have come in on the killer's shoes. These had minute traces of oil on them – used motor oil. From the appearance of Miss Smythe's lawn – her gardener had to mow around the fallen tree house – it was clear that it had not been cut in the few days before the crime was committed and we already knew that the gardener had been away visiting his daughter. There were no patches of liquid motor oil in the garden, not even where the car had been parked before it was sold, and the conclusion had been that both grass and oil had come in from outside. There were no signs of spillages in the lane to the rear of the property either.

‘If he'd walked very far those oily traces, not to mention the bits of grass, would have come off,' Patrick told me Greenway had commented on giving him the report to read. ‘So he either drove and parked nearby or lived nearby.'

‘I'd put a lot of money on him having climbed over the wall from next door,' Patrick had said to him, relating the whole conversation to me just about word for word.

‘Just get me the evidence.'

‘I shall need a search warrant.'

‘You won't – and we haven't discussed it.'

‘I will, there are security cameras and you don't want SOCA brought into disrepute.'

Greenway had sworn vividly and slammed out of the office.

The other report had been the results of tests on samples taken from the woman's body. There was quite a list including those conducted on stomach contents, toxicology tests of the blood and urine, but all could be summarized very simply. Miss Smythe had been healthy for her age, had not been poisoned or under the influence of alcohol when she died. Heavy bruising to her upper arms had resulted from her having been gripped, probably to manoeuvre her into a position to be pushed or thrown down the stairs, other bruising a result of knocks she had received as she fell. The writer of the report felt that she had been strangled afterwards when the killer had realized she was still alive.

Early in the morning, after I had been apprised of this, Greenway rang me.

‘There's been a development,' he began by saying. ‘Are you free to come up?'

I was, very much so, between novels and in a kind of limbo of my own.

‘I – er – don't know whether he's mentioned it to you but I've apologized to Patrick for my thoroughly unprofessional behaviour yesterday,' he went on diffidently. ‘It's just as well he kept me on the straight and narrow.'

‘A role-reversal, I would have thought,' I said.

There seemed to be no lingering reverberations of this when I entered the commander's office late that morning, having caught the train. Patrick was already seated, drinking coffee as he read what looked like a report of some kind.

Greenway handed me a photograph, a printout on A4 paper from his computer. ‘Patrick gave the Cannes
gendarmerie
his card when he was there and they've sent this through. You've seen him before.'

I gazed into the dead face: swarthy, dark-eyed, dark brown hair, Spanish-looking. Horribly battered. ‘Of course, it's the man who changed his mind about attacking us in the marina in Cannes. The one Patrick had previously witnessed falling into the water and who we had an idea had been snooping on us for Clement Hamlyn.'

‘His body was fished out of the sea off Cannes yesterday morning having been spotted from an anchored dredger,' Patrick told me. ‘Alonso Morella, Spanish citizen, did odd jobs around the marina and hotels and lived in a small basement flat that he shared with a railway station cleaner. Any spare money he had, which wasn't much, he spent on booze and cigarettes. Hadn't actually crossed swords with the law but suspected of being likely to do anything iffy for a few euros. Hamlyn wouldn't have had any trouble hiring him.'

‘To snoop on us at the hotel too then,' I said. ‘I presume that he drowned after being beaten up and his body was washed out to sea.'

‘Not necessarily. Some or even all of the facial injuries were almost certainly caused by the corpse being buffeted against the bottom of the harbour, moving with the tide and battering against rocks and sunken detritus. As you know, bodies always lie face down in water with the head hanging. There were other quite deep, parallel cuts to the back caused by the body having been hit by a boat's propeller. That might have happened when it was rising to the surface as decomposition set in and was floating just below the surface.'

‘How long had he been dead?'

‘Three to four days, perhaps five.'

‘And was it likely that the currents would have washed the body out to sea if he'd fallen, or been pushed, off the harbour wall?'

‘Dunno. The email is in English – well, sort of – but the attached report is in French and that's as far as I've got with the translation.'

Greenway said, ‘Apparently he'd been drinking, heavily. Even after that length of time significant concentrations of alcohol were found in the blood and urine. I don't know about France but in Britain two thirds of adult males found drowning or drowned had consumed alcohol. The vital detail as far as this man's concerned is that there was foam in the airways, indicating that he was alive when he went into the water. And yet you say, Patrick, that the man was a good swimmer.'

‘Well, certainly good enough to swim the short distance to a flight of steps. But if he was totally sloshed and had ingested a huge amount of water as he fell in . . .'

‘What else does the pathologist say?' Greenway went on to ask.