Thief Taker

by Alan Scholefield

  THIEF TAKER

  Alan Scholefield

  © Alan Scholefield 1991

  Alan Scholefield has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1991 by Macmillan London Ltd.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER I

  At 11.42 a.m. a millionaire called Robson Healey made a phone call from his Chelsea home.

  “Hello, this is — ”

  “No names, please,” a man’s voice said.

  “OK. Sorry. I forgot.”

  “Do you have a client number?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “I’ll just bring that up. Oh, yes. Fine. What may I do for you?”

  “What d’you think? I’m not phoning just for a bloody chat.”

  “Any particular one?”

  “The one I had last time.”

  “One moment. Yes. Lucy. She’s free. What time, sir?”

  “Six-ish.”

  “Do you wish her to bring anything special?”

  “Like?”

  “Well, sir, in the past she has brought — ”

  “No, nothing special, not this time. But I’ll want her for the whole night.”

  “Very well, sir. Six o’clock unless you hear from me. Thank you for your call and have a nice day.”

  It was a nice day.

  London on a sunny Sunday in spring.

  The daffodils were out in Hyde Park. So were the old folk, walking arm in arm.

  The young were out too; kids sailing their boats on the Round Pond; even younger kids, with their dads, feeding the ducks in St James’ Park.

  The riders were out in Rotten Row. Soccer was giving way to cricket.

  Joggers were out and so were young women looking for a suntan.

  Ice-cream sellers were out.

  Lovers were out, and in the parks you had to step over them. Tourists were out and in the Underground stations you had to push past them while they sorted out their currency.

  In Covent Garden the buskers were out; jugglers, and fire-eaters, and music students playing Bach.

  In Bond Street and Regent Street the window-shoppers were out.

  And in Whitehall cyclists were out for a race which would soon paralyse London’s traffic.

  Everyone was out.

  Even the killers.

  It was a nice day for murder.

  CHAPTER II

  “It’s a naive, domestic burgundy without any breeding,” Zoe Bertram said, pulling out the cork of a bottle of red wine. “But I think you’ll be surprised by its presumption.”

  “Amused,” Leo Silver said.

  “What?”

  “Amused by its presumption.”

  It was early evening on that same spring Sunday and they were in their maisonette in Pimlico. Zoe had recently returned from visiting her father in Surrey and had brought back a bottle of wine.

  “Everybody gets that quotation wrong,” Leo said.

  “Except you!”

  “Except me.”

  “You’re always correcting me these days. I told you about Thurber. He was mine. Now you’ve taken him over. You’re always taking over my things.”

  “It’s still “amused”.”

  “Where’s the book? We’ll look it up.”

  “I lent it to Macrae.”

  “It’s my book, Leo. Anyway, what would Macrae want with it?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. Macrae’s got shelves of books at his house, and he’s read them all. Once asked me if I’d read any Dickens. He loves Dickens.”

  “And I suppose he cries at the death of Little Nell.” She gave him a glass of wine.

  The thought of Macrae crying at anything did not come easily to Leo. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Detective Sergeant Leopold Silver was in his late twenties and was dressed sharply in black: black brogues, black trousers, black polo-neck and there was a black leather jacket hanging in the hall.

  The apartment was a mixture of yellows and greens and browns, splashy colours that even in winter gave it a summery look.

  Zoe had chosen the colours when she and Silver had begun living together. They suited her. She was small and dark with a brownish skin, large wide-spaced brown eyes, high cheekbones and a thin, restless body. She looked, Silver always thought, like a South American with just a touch of Indian.

  Exotic.

  She came and sat beside him on the apricot-coloured sofa and rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand. “How’s the family?”

  Leo’s family meant The Silvers. That’s how Zoe thought of them: in capital letters. Whenever he could, Leo had Sunday lunch with his father and mother and sister and brother-in-law and nephew. Zoe took the opportunity to visit her own father. She didn’t have to go quite so regularly but was glad in a way to escape Leo’s argumentative, opinionated and bickering relations.

  Leo had had to make excuses for her today, just as he made them most Sundays as they sat down to lunch in the large untidy apartment on the wrong side of the Finchley Road in north-west London.

  “Zoe never comes on a Sunday,” his father Manfred had said, beginning to carve the roast beef. “We never see her.”

  “She goes to see her own father on Sundays,” Leo said.

  “Every Sunday?” his sister Ruth asked. She was a large, bespectacled woman some years older than Leo, who wore wooden beads and sandals and a purple dress in between.

  “We like to see ours whenever we can, don’t we?”

  “Thank you,” (Zank yew) his mother Lottie said. “You’re a good boy.”

  The senior Silvers (née Silberbauers) were Austrian immigrants who retained their heavy accents.

  Now Leo said to Zoe, “It would be nice if you’d come for lunch one Sunday. I think they think you don’t want to come.”

  “Why?”

  “God knows. You know Dad.”

  “I know he washes his hands all the time.”

  Leo laughed. “There’s nothing Freudian in that. It’s just he’s used to it. Piano teachers like to have clean hands.”

  “Leo…do they ever talk about me? You know…”

  “Well, they ask after you. That’s only natural. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  He was lying. The subject of Sunday visiting had hardly come up when Ruth had said to Leo. “Are you going to marry Zoe?”

  Like a volley at the net he had replied, “Are you going to divorce Sidney?”

  His brother-in-law made a choking sound.

  “Are you mad?” Ruth had said. “What sort of question is that?”

  “A personal question. The sort you just asked me.”

  It wasn’t the sort of exchange he could explain to Zoe. “How was your father?” Leo asked.

  “He’s OK. He’s thinking of taking up golf. Last year it was wine-making. Next year, God knows.”

&nbs
p; “He should take up fishing. You can do that by yourself.”

  “What does the family think?”

  “About what?”

  “About you going fishing? I bet no one on either side has ever gone fishing before. It’s not something that Jews seem to do.”

  “Sidney thinks I’m going to catch turbot.”

  She laughed then said, “What are you really going to catch?”

  “I’m going to try to catch a salmon.”

  “I thought they always came in packets.”

  “Only when they’re smoked.”

  “Right. And you’ve got to catch them first.”

  “Right.”

  “God Leo, you’re so clever!”

  He ignored the sarcasm and went to fetch a short spinning rod on which there was a four-inch wooden minnow containing three barbed hooks attached to the end of the nylon line.

  “It’s Macrae’s,” he said. “He lent it to me. See the reel? It’s called a fixed spool, whatever that means.”

  “And you throw that piece of wood into the water and then the salmon eats it and you reel it in. Right?”

  “The word is cast. Not throw. I cast in the minnow…See? It’s painted to look like a little fish…”

  His mind suddenly went back a few evenings to the lawns on the Thames Embankment outside Cannon Row police station. Macrae had taken him out in a light drizzle to teach him how to cast.

  “No, no, laddie, not like that!” He’d shouted as Silver managed to cast the minnow round the neck of General Gordon, the hero of Khartoum, whose statue stared south across the river.

  “Watch what you’re doing! I told you, the fish are lying with their heads to the current. You cast the minnow upstream and then let it come down and as it swings past you — that’s when he’ll take it. That’s if he’s a bloody fool.”

  Zoe said, “I can’t wait. You realise it’ll be the first time we’ve been away properly. How shall we register? Mr and Mrs Smith? I’ve always wanted to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Or Mr and Mrs Silver?”

  He wondered if this was as innocent as it sounded. She hadn’t touched on the question of marriage for some time. And he hadn’t brought it up. It was one of the reasons he was glad she visited her father when he went to see his family. It would be just like Ruth or his parents to blunder in with some question like, “When are you two getting married?” He wasn’t sure that either Manfred or Lottie had quite got used to the openness with which people lived together these days.

  And what would he have said? That he wasn’t ready for marriage yet? That he wanted to move up in the police hierarchy before contemplating the finality of connubial bliss and children? That wouldn’t have been very bright even if it was true.

  “You want to see my country clothes for walking along river-banks, Leo?”

  “Haven’t you got any new underwear?”

  “I have, actually.”

  “I’d rather see that.”

  She came back with a Next bag and pulled out several pieces of lingerie.

  “Jesus, what’s that?” Silver said, as she held up something edged with black lace.

  “It’s called a Teddy. You want to see me in it?”

  She pulled off her shirt. Her smallish breasts, as Silver never tired of remarking, were fruity. They reminded him of all kinds of lovely, fruity things.

  She was about to remove her pants when he turned to the window and said to the house across the street. “Oh, hi. You want to see the show?”

  “There’s no one there,” Zoe said. “The windows are dark. But just because you’re such a prude…” She drew the curtains.

  Silver watched her with more than academic interest. She had no false modesty and this, more than anything, turned him on.

  “Come over here,” he said.

  At that moment the phone rang. He picked it up. “Yes? Yes. OK. Five minutes.”

  Zoe paused halfway across the yellow carpet. Her breasts were firm and hard, the nipples pointing at him, not so much like fruit, but crossly, like Luger pistols. “It always happens!”

  He held her and kissed her. “Don’t go away,” he said. “Raincheck.”

  He swallowed another glass of wine and grabbed a piece of bread and cheese. He didn’t know when he’d be eating next.

  She put on her shirt and was buttoning it slowly. Tears were trickling down her cheeks. “Even on a Sunday night,” she said.

  “I know. But people get murdered on Sundays too.”

  He held her tight. “Only a few more days. Can you hang on? Then no one’ll find us.”

  Her face was crushed against his black leather jacket and she did not reply.

  There was a toot from the street below. “That’ll be Eddie,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

  He let himself out of the apartment and heard her locking and relocking the three deadlocks that turned the place into a fortress. Then he was in the street. Except for Eddie Twyford in the unmarked police car, it was deserted. Eddie grunted hello and said they were going to pick up Macrae. They made for Battersea Bridge.

  CHAPTER III

  It was the early-evening booze-up at the Blind Pig in Battersea and the bars were crowded.

  Detective Superintendent George Macrae was slightly drunk. Not staggering. Or blurred. But floating just a few inches off the ground. His tongue and mouth had reached that state when every draw of his cigar tasted better than the last; and when the woman at his side was affecting him — as she had affected him before — like a dirty postcard.

  Her name was Mandy Parrish. She was in her thirties, big-bodied, fleshy in an overripe way, with thick black hair and a handsome face.

  She wore tight-fitting jeans which clung to her buttocks and thighs like paint, and a shocking pink blouse that stretched tight against her heavy, loose breasts.

  Macrae knew those breasts intimately, he knew the colour of the areolae and the delicate shading of the nipples. He knew just how they felt in the hand. Mandy Parrish had once been Woman Police Constable Mandy Macrae, his second wife.

  Macrae was a big man, dressed conventionally in grey slacks, shirt and tie, and a tweed sports jacket. He stood out against the other drinkers who were wearing — in what passed in the Blind Pig for leisure gear — dirty trainers, denims and rolled gold chains.

  She held a cheque in her fingers, looked at it and folded it away.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I wish it was always this early.”

  “If I hadn’t given it to you now I’d have spent it.”

  She lit a cigarette. “You know, George, it’ll have to go up a bit. I can’t manage on this. I mean the kids are growing up, they need things.”

  “I know.”

  It had been “his” day yesterday. He had taken Bobbie and Margaret to the zoo and become increasingly aware that he wasn’t much of a father any more. More of an uncle or a cousin. Bobbie was nine and Margaret seven, and they seemed to need each other more than they needed him. He had spent the day trailing along behind them, watching animals being fed. Then he had fed his children. Over the meal they talked about little except television programmes they had seen. He hardly watched TV so they had no real common ground. By the time they had finished their ice-creams they had become restless and he had taken them home.

  “Have another,” he said to Mandy.

  “I should be getting back.”

  “What time do you eat?”

  “About seven.”

  “It’s past that now. What about the kids?”

  “Oh, Joe’ll get them something.”

  “How are you and Joe getting on?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “None at all. Sorry.”

  “Oh hell, no need. He’s OK. Kind. A decent sort of bloke. And he thinks the world of me. And tells me so. And comes home at night — which you didn’t.”

  “You knew what the Force was like. You should’ve, anyway.”

  “Yeah, but he needs me. You ne
ver needed anyone. That was your trouble, George. You married the Force and became the great thief taker before you married either Linda or me. Anyway, Joe’s a good husband and he’s good with the kids. You don’t have to worry about that. And he’s doing all right in a quiet sort of way. He’s never going to be the Mr Big of the taxi-cab business but we’ll be all right. It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “Oh, you know…With you it wasn’t all sweetness and light. You’re a bastard when you want to be. But…when we had it going the walls could have fallen in and we wouldn’t have noticed. But Joe…Well, he’s not exactly Tarzan.”

  “No.”

  “I suppose saying that’s bloody disloyal. But it’s true. Anyway, there’s this other bloke. Two doors down. Works nights so he’s about during the day.”

  “Single lad?”

  “No, married. But his wife works days.”

  “You like him?”

  “I dunno really. We don’t talk much.”

  “Just the old one-two.”

  “That’s right, George, just the old one-two.” She looked at him sideways under her lids. “Not jealous, are you?”

  He had an overriding urge to put out his hand and fondle her breasts.

  “What about that drink?”

  “Why not?”

  “Two more,” Macrae said, turning his heavy head towards the barman.

  Harassed, and already taking an order, the barman snapped, “Can’t you see I’m — Oh, sorry, Mr Macrae.” He dropped the other customer and came quickly down the bar. “Gin and tonics, was it?”

  “Large ones.”

  “You’ll have me pissed,” Mandy said.

  “You remember that office party? The one — ”

  “The one when we were drinking Manhattans? And we did it in a broom cupboard?”

  “It wasn’t a broom cupboard.”

  “Well, it smelled of wet mops and we couldn’t lie down.”

  “And that time in Streatham. On the observation.”

  “I remember. In the car. God…I dunno how the kids manage. No cars for me anymore.”

  He smiled at her. “You shouldn’t have to. You’re built for comfort not for speed.”

  The present reasserted itself. “But I’m serious, George. The kids are growing up. And the money isn’t enough.”