Stealth Page 8

  ‘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 o
f 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.

  ‘My conversation French is much better than the written word and a lot of this is in medical language,’ Patrick said. ‘You’ll have to get an interpreter to look at it to get the full story. But in his conclusion there’s something along the lines of investigators having to determine the circumstances preceding death before final conclusions are reached. Finally, I think he says he cannot possibly be expected to explain the cause of all the lacerations and bruising to the body and, in his view, there is unexplained bruising to the back of the neck and head.’ Patrick looked up. ‘That’s interesting if I’ve got it correctly. He could have been chopped across the nape of the neck or hit a couple of times with some kind of blunt weapon like a pickaxe handle. There’s nothing in the police email about any witnesses, is there?’

  Greenway shook his head. ‘No, and it could have happened after dark. There wasn’t anything in the email about police intentions to determine the circumstances before death before they reach any conclusions either. End of foreign immigrant nobody cared about. Sad, but it’s not our problem and I can’t see that anything would be gained by going over there and trying to throw our weight about.’

  ‘The motive if he was murdered, though?’ I queried. ‘Clement Hamlyn or someone else working for him tying up a few loose ends? That seems a bit far-fetched unless Morella had threatened to go to the police, blackmailing him, perhaps.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t see Hamlyn having any strong connections with the South of France. Why would he?’

  ‘Is Daniel Coates still on the loose?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ Greenway answered. ‘Didn’t turn up in St Tropez. If the truth were known the cops there missed him if he only stopped overnight. But I’m hoping he’s still in the sights of Operation Captura.’

  ‘He told me he didn’t know the man who had fallen in the water. He could have been lying.’

  ‘And went back to Cannes and had some kind of drunken altercation with him,’ Patrick ventured. ‘Or shoved him in the water just because he felt like it. It would figure.’

  We then turned to the subject of Miss Smythe’s murder and I forgot to raise the matter of tides and currents again and the likelihood of Alonso Morella’s body finishing up in the sea off Cannes if he had fallen, or been pushed, off the harbour wall into the water.

  Greenway reiterated that the Met had carried out comprehensive house-to-house enquiries in the immediate area of Miss Smythe’s house and nobody had reported seeing anyone loitering or behaving suspiciously. Local known villains, those not detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, had been questioned with no useful findings there either and police informers had been silent on the matter.

  ‘This case cannot be allowed to go cold!’ he finished by almost shouting.

  I was beginning to see why the Met had been so delighted to hand everything over to us and afterwards had been so helpful.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ Patrick said.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Greenway invited, calming down.

  ‘We want to get hold of Hereward Trent right now but can’t. Clement Hamlyn probably has to be put on the back burner – for now. With regards to other iffy associates the Met has advised us not to stick our noses into the suspect cop investigation as he’s under surveillance. Does that apply to his chum the football and boxing Johnny who it would appear also has dodgy connections?’

  The commander consulted the relevant email. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘Not in so many words. But anyone with a modicum of intelligence would read that meaning into it.’

  ‘But it doesn’t actually say that he’s under surveillance as well.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve always been a bit thick.’

  Greenway frowned in the general direction of the window. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever been that bright myself.’

  ‘Ingrid and I could go and take a look at him. What’s his name?’

  Burrowing into a wire tray on his desk, Greenway hauled out a thin file and opened it. ‘Some years ago he was a Russian film star by the name of Anatoli Tomska
ya. It may not have been his real name, just a professional one. These days he calls himself Anthony Thomas, which is an Anglicization of sorts, and to confuse matters even more I gather he’s known as both Tommy and Tony, depending on who’s doing the talking. That’s those close to him, you understand. To everyone else he’s Mr Thomas. What name appears on his council tax demands is anyone’s guess.’

  I said, ‘And your file’s on him because of the dodgy associates?’

  ‘Oh, no, in my view he’s über dodgy as well. The problem is that nothing evidence-wise has stuck to him yet, not even a genuine identity, mainly because he’s a slimy bastard.’

  ‘He’s not likely to be on the Mystery Mobster Murderer’s list then if we’re right about his connection with Trent, Hamlyn and the policeman under investigation. He could even be the hit man responsible for the killings.’

  ‘That could easily be the case if the money’s right as the football club’s doing very badly right now. He’s not been known to carry weapons but my guess is he’d subcontract that out anyway to avoid getting his hands dirty. By all means go and take a look at him.’ Greenway continued, turning to Patrick: ‘Get a good photograph of him if you can. He’s succeeded in keeping his face off television and out of the papers, God knows how. Records only have a couple of blurred shots of him taken at matches plus one good clear one where he’s on a horse in some costume B-movie shot around twenty years ago on the outskirts of Moscow. I suggest you look at those first so you have some idea of his appearance.’

  ‘I know hardly anything about the football world,’ said the one-time rugby-playing man of mine, planning how he was going to get close to Anthony Thomas without tripping over the Met, if they were there. Not to take his photograph, that was unnecessary with telephoto lenses, but to try to find out how the man ticked.

  ‘But you boxed at school,’ I reminded him. As head boy he had taken real bullies – male – into the ring with him for a couple of rounds, thoughtfully providing gloves. With the head master’s blessing too. It would not be permitted now, of course.