Stealth (24 page)

‘If you're hoping to frame me for the attack on da Rosta I was
not
responsible for that,' Hamlyn said.

‘No, I know who that was,' Patrick informed him. ‘And now you've mentioned it I'll tell you that it was very useful, just a flesh wound that'll keep him nice and safe under police protection until he's jailed after helping with enquiries in connection with an unrelated murder case. We know from him that you'd been demanding money with menaces and the proprietor of the club he frequents saw a man closely fitting your description talking to him. Then there's the matter of the jewellery.'

‘What damned jewellery?'

‘Miss Smythe's jewellery that you stole the night you killed her: a gold watch chain, another chain with a locket and a diamond ring. Da Rosta said you offered him the two chains in exchange for a discount on the money you were trying to force him to pay you.'

‘Well, he's lying, isn't he? Setting me up.'

‘Odd then, that his description exactly matches that of missing items that he cannot have known anything about. He said he thought they were hot. They were. How did you manage to get rid of them in the end?'

Hamlyn just shook his head.

‘And the diamond ring,' I interposed. ‘Did you give that to your somewhat bandy-legged girlfriend?'

He still said nothing but his restlessness increased, his limbs making jerky movements.

‘Do you want to make your off-the-record statement now?' Patrick enquired.

‘You have no case against me. That's the gist of my statement.'

‘That sounds like time-wasting and self-aggrandizement to me. OK, none of it's anything to do with you. Right, we'll discount for the moment the deaths of Tom Berry, or Jerry, Fred Jones and a guy calling himself Rapla on the grounds that the world is a better place without them, postpone until later the murder of Alonso Morella in Cannes and consider the brutal killing of Miss Rosemary Smythe. You killed her and that's quite enough to send you down for life. But first tell me why you changed your mind about staying with Jane Grant, her niece.'

‘I just did.'

‘You told her you'd had a fire at home. I was there when she rang you and suggested what she said. There's no damage to your house. The police have been watching it for getting on a fortnight.'

‘Damn you.'

‘I suggest that you were going to kill her. You're hooked on killing.'

‘Don't be a fool.'

‘What were you ultimately hoping to get from her? Money? Some of her inheritance? To find out for sure that her aunt hadn't told her exactly what she'd seen going on at the Trents' place?'

‘I'm not answering any more questions.'

‘Their house is being searched this morning, right now, in fact, and it's expected that weapons and possibly drugs and stolen property will be found.'

‘Nothing to do with me.'

‘So what's the reason for all this, if indeed there is one? Is it just revenge for past perceived slights and injuries or a good way to earn some readies on the side to pay for all that booze?'

‘Go to hell.'

‘We don't think you're the brains behind this now, even though you might have been in the beginning, mostly on the grounds that some of your thinking processes are now severely compromised.'

‘They are?' Hamlyn hooted in surprise ‘How d'you reckon I write the books then?'

‘Oh, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with your imagination. Let's talk about the book. How does it end?'

‘With your deaths,' Hamlyn said through his teeth.

‘I'm writing the end of your novel for you,' I interrupted sharply.

‘You're not listening. I've already done that,' Hamlyn retorted, staring through me in the most unsettling fashion. He tapped his forehead. ‘It's all up there.'

‘I think you've written in Jane Grant's death. She's staying alive.'

‘She can't. She's Clive Grant's wife. She told me his name.'

‘They're separated and he's living in Luton.'

‘No.'

‘No?' Patrick said quietly.

‘He's as good as dead. He has to be – he used to be with Fred Jones's mob.'

‘The man's a civil engineer!'

‘Not a chance. The pair of them, him and her, were right there when I was grassed up for a murder I didn't commit.'

‘Who was murdered?'

The crime writer shook his head. ‘I've forgotten – it was back in the bad old days.'

‘But you've never done time for murder.'

Hamlyn seemed to emerge from a daydream. ‘Er, no, you're right.'

That happened in the fourth of his novels, I seemed to remember.

‘And Clive Grant?'

A shrug.

‘You were going to kill Jane Grant and then go and look for him.'

‘I might have done.'

‘Who told you he was a member of Fred Jones's gang?'

‘I just knew.'

‘Was it Anthony Thomas?'

‘Bloody hell, the man's little more than a posing imbecile! Look, I said I didn't want any more of your damned questions!'

‘So you're going to take the blame for all these killings?'

‘Blame! What d'you mean, blame? I merely
created
them.'

‘Which is why they're in the book,' I said.

‘Of course. It will come right then. Completely on the line, a brilliant crime story written with hands-on experience.'

‘How long have you been drinking heavily?'

The man again appeared surprised. ‘Another stupid question from a stupid woman. Always. All writers drink. If you drank more you'd write much better novels.'

‘As has just been mentioned, it appears to be affecting your mental stability. Had that occurred to you?'

Slowly, he shook his head. ‘No. Why should it?'

‘Tell me exactly how the book ended before I rewrote it,' I requested.

‘How can I now?' he suddenly roared, making me jump. ‘OK, I lied, it
was
all in my head, very neatly too. But you've shitted it up. Da Rosta's alive without paying a penny and apparently that idiot Morella drowned when he was supposed to swim to safety and tell the police that Danny Coates had tried to kill him. And now
you're
still alive!'

‘We didn't have anything to do with Morella,' Patrick said.

‘You did. You gave him the kind of look that stopped him from throwing the pair of you in the harbour.'

‘Daniel Coates wasn't responsible for his death?'

‘No, why would he be? Morella was his eyes and ears. I didn't find that out until after I'd hired him to do a little work for me.'

‘But you wanted Coates framed for his attempted murder? No, don't tell me, it was in the book.'

‘Of course it wasn't in the bloody book, you idiot!' Hamlyn shouted.

‘Is Sonya Trent in the book?' I asked.

‘No.'

‘Where is she?'

‘God knows.'

‘You haven't killed her too?'

‘No, why on earth should I?'

‘But you did attack Morella,' Patrick persisted.

Hamlyn shot to his feet. ‘I'm going.'

‘You can't until I say so,' Patrick told him.

Whereupon the man, his face twisted with rage, hurled himself at us and it took four of the remand staff who had been standing by outside the door to subdue him even after Patrick had been forced to defend the pair of us by hitting him hard with the flat of his hand around the side of the head.

‘Patrick, that man's so dangerous he's going to end up in Broadmoor!' I said to him shakily afterwards, finding myself clinging on to his arm.

Even so I was wondering what Hamlyn had meant when he said that wanting Coates framed for Morella's attempted murder was not in his book. There seemed to be only one logical – if indeed anything approaching logic existed as far as Hamlyn was concerned – answer to that.

The hoard of weapons, drugs, stolen property and money discovered in different parts of the Trents' house was impressive, the currency in several different denominations so contaminated with drugs that it would never go back into circulation. Various hiding places, including the children's bedroom, had been utilized but most finds were in Hereward Trent's study: the money in a wall safe, and a medium-sized crate of assorted firearms and ammunition in a cupboard concealed behind a bookcase. Boxes containing stolen silver and silver-gilt items packed together with Chinese porcelain, the latter becoming increasingly valuable as the Chinese are buying back their heritage, were discovered in a garage.

The search had taken all day, someone apparently having been overheard saying that the only police departments not involved in these cases now the Art and Antiques Squad had been called in were Human Resources and the stationery office.

It was another three days before we formally interviewed Hamlyn in the extremely secure basement custody suite at SOCA HQ where suspects can be brought from either police stations or remand centres. Meanwhile, he had been assessed by a psychiatrist and found to be, in Greenway's requested translation of the technical terms, ‘in cloud cuckooland, probably partly brought on by a serious alcohol addiction, in and out of a dream-world of his own but with a sufficient grasp of reality to remember what had recently occurred including his own actions. Caution is urged when questioning this man as he has the potential to be extremely dangerous'. This, I think, we were aware of already.

In view of this the commander had asked me if I wanted to be present on this occasion.

I told him I did, adding: ‘Unless you think my presence would be likely to wind him up so that he becomes violent again. And I would like to point out that Patrick can't be expected to restrain him on his own if he does.'

Although eight days of good home cooking had made a visible difference to Patrick, right now I was not sure if he was strong enough yet for his stamina to be sufficient for any further prolonged resistance to questioning. Signs of this were the fact that the blow around the head he had meted out to Hamlyn at the last meeting should have floored him and also his having asked Greenway if he would prefer to carry out the interview himself. Smiling, the commander had shaken his head and said, ‘No, you're the interrogation expert.' A touch of Daws' ruthlessness or something quite the opposite?

‘Don't worry, I'll only be in the next room with several other strong bods and the remand people who brought him will be on call as well. It goes without saying that he's seriously mentally ill – what I really want to know is whether he's behind all this and, if not, who is.'

The interview room has the facility for other investigators to watch and listen to what is going on next door, courtesy of microphones and a window that appears to be a mirror on the other side. I had already known that Greenway would not be alone, present also would be CID investigators from the Met who were involved with trying to solve the various gangland murders, most of which, having occurred some time previously to Miss Smythe's, had not come within SOCA's remit. They would question Hamlyn later, but not necessarily all today. Such were the number of cases that a liaison officer had been appointed.

When Patrick saw me making my way towards the interview room – he had been requested, by Greenway, to write a report on possible Met failings at Virginia Water – he asked me the same question as had the commander.

‘I want to see this man locked up forever,' I told him.

‘And you are, after all, a formidable and beautiful woman,' he said with a grin.

Clement Hamlyn was already present when we arrived and subjected us to a black-browed stare, as though we had never met before. Patrick completed all the formalities, noted that the suspect had declined the presence of a legal representative, and switched on the tape machine. The interview would also be recorded using a concealed video camera.

‘It helps a lot that you're still sober,' was Patrick's opening remark. ‘Most of our previous encounters have been marred by the fact that you were rat-arsed.'

The author muttered a few obscenities and stared somewhere over my right shoulder.

‘And despite the fact that when we last met you virtually admitted killing any number of people what I said still stands and that conversation can't be used in court as evidence against you. So now it remains to establish exactly how many you've murdered so you can be charged accordingly.'

‘I was unwell when I said all that,' Hamlyn said. ‘That remand centre's a real dump and I'd caught a bug of some kind.'

Stolidly, Patrick continued: ‘Other people will question you about the deaths of those I'll refer to as career criminals but I want to concentrate on the murder of Miss Rosemary Smythe at Richmond and the associated organized crime that it is connected with. I take it you have a fairly clear recollection of that.'

‘You're wasting my time and I didn't kill her.'

‘This all starts after she wrote around a dozen letters to us, SOCA, as she thought her neighbour, Hereward Trent, was involving himself with criminals.'

‘She wrote to you? God, she was an interfering old bat
.
Hereward said she was a neighbour from hell.'

‘Do I add him to the list, by the way?'

The man's gaze fixed on the speaker. ‘Trent? No, of course not.' Then, ‘Why, is he
dead
?'

‘His body was found dumped at a nature reserve around ten days ago. Before you were arrested too. He'd been beaten up and then shot in the head. Threatened to turn you all in, did he?'

‘Look, I hadn't even seen Trent since that night we—' He abruptly stopped speaking.

‘Chucked the pair of us out of a van on the M40?'

‘I wasn't there!'

‘Time will tell where you were, or weren't, but you ordered it.'

‘I did
not
!'