by Mike Ripley
‘How?’
‘Your motorbike messenger service. I’ll lay you odds that leak has come from something hand delivered.’
‘You think we haven’t checked that? You think we haven’t timed the deliveries? You think we haven’t sent a bike off and asked the receivers to phone us on arrival? Not one delivery –’ he held up one finger –’was more than six minutes later than we estimated, taking account of the traffic, and we checked every delivery over a period of two weeks.’
Well, after all, he was supposed to be in charge of security.
‘All the same messenger service?’ I said confidently.
‘Yes, as it happens.’
‘Airborne?’
He thought for a second then said: ‘Yes, that’s the name. So?’
‘Oh, nothing. If you’ve checked them out to your satisfaction, then fair enough. I just thought that them being owned by Simon Cawthorne would ...’
‘What?’
I think it was fair to say I had his attention, though the fountain pen he was strangling would never be the san again.
‘Didn’t you know? Didn’t you even check that far? Didn’t you make the connection with Pegasus Farm? Or am I way off base thinking that’s Cawthorne’s little war-gaming place down in Kent? Maybe Sal and Alec really were having dirty weekend down there with the hedgehogs among the cow-pats?’
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Fairly.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
‘Hey, hey, José, that’s your department – finding out who owns who. I’m just the hired help, and if I’m still hired, I’ll find out how they’re doing it.’
His pen moved away from the cheque-book. Bad sign. He was getting his confidence back.
‘We’ve gone through that procedure. There’s no way it can be the bike riders. How are you going to find out?’
‘Ever followed one?’
‘Christ, no.’
‘I can, without being spotted. If we know where he’s supposed to be heading, even easier. Rig a delivery for this afternoon. It doesn’t have to be anything important.’
‘How did you rumble them? It was more or less the first thing we checked.’
‘After Salome, that is.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘She’s female and black. I’m surprised you didn’t have her shot out of hand.’
He looked down at the cheque-book.
‘You don’t think much of us, do you?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘Except her.’
‘That’s right, and I want two things. First, is Salome covered by BUPA or some company medical scheme?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Good. Get her moved up to town ASAP. Private room, whatever it takes.’
He blanched at that, but it wasn’t the insurance premiums he was worried about.
‘You think she’s in danger?’ He wasn’t as daft as he looked.
‘Let’s just say she’s too near to Cawthorne at the moment, which brings us, mystery lovers everywhere, to this week’s request on Desert Island Discs. Tell me, Tel, which eight records and which book other than Shakespeare and the Bible, would Mr Cawthorne choose?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘The second thing. I need to know all you know about Cawthorne.’
In a split second he made his mind up and decided to be decisive.
‘No.’ He began writing on the cheque again. ‘The moving of Salome, yes, we’ll do that. We’re covered for it anyway. But the rest – forget it. Take this and we’ll call it quits.’ He handed me the cheque and looked at his watch. It was a Rolex.
‘Not bad for one and a half days’ work,’ he said smugly.
I took the cheque, folded it and put it in the back pocket of my jeans.
‘Orders from Mr Prior, was it?’ I slipped into my Humphrey Bogart, but it came out more like George C Scott. ‘“Get that fella Angel’s ass off this case, Patterson.” Something like that?’
‘How ...?’
‘Oh, come on, you were on the phone to him when I came in. Reporting on what the copper said.’
He tried to get angry.
‘I don’t have to listen to you. Get out or I’ll have you ejected.’
I liked that. In the City you get ejected, in a pub it’s chucked out.
‘No you don’t.’ I didn’t stand up. ‘You talk to Mr Prior, I’ll have a word with Mr Keen. Is there a Mr Baldwin, by the way? I wouldn’t want him to feel left out.’
‘Why do you want to talk to Mr Keen?’ he snapped.
‘To tell him that his son Morris is the office pusher, and I don’t mean the tea-trolley.’
Patterson’s mouth fell open. I thought I was getting to him.
‘Wha ... wha ...?’
‘Young Mr Morris Keen is your friendly coke machine. Deliveries at least every Friday, probably mid-week too, I’d guess, direct to your door. Well, your desk anyway. I could even put a tag on a few customers. They’re all out there beavering away at their terminals right now.’
‘Cocaine?’ he said loudly.
‘Look me in the eye and tell me you never suspected.’
‘Just exactly what do you want to know?’ he said carefully.
‘That’s more like it.’
I gave him my full smile. I’ve got good teeth, so why not show them? And I always like doing business with a man who knows he’s over a barrel.
I spent just over an hour with Patterson, which, I found out later, turned out to be another first. Time is money in the City, and few people are worth an hour unless it’s over lunch and only then if you’re involved in a takeover bid. It was also, I learned, one of the few occasions anyone at PKB could remember that Patterson had a meeting with his door shut and nobody got fired.
Even Purvis treated me with more respect as I sauntered out. Well, at least he toned down his sneer a notch or two.
‘Have we used a Don/R at all?’ I asked, remembering to slip into the Purvis jargon.
‘Just the one.’ He slipped a sheet of paper out from under the blotting-pad on his desk, then put on a pair of spectacles to read from it. ‘Lewis Luther; that’s Lewis with a “w.” Lives at 23 Marlowe Road – that’s Marlowe with an “e”–’
‘As in Philip.’ He looked blank. ‘Or Christopher?’ I tried. Double blank.
‘London SW2,’ he completed.
‘Brixton. Would Mr Luther by any chance be a coloured gentleman.’
‘Dark as pitch. Not that I noticed, of course.’
Not bloody likely you didn’t, I thought, but bit my tongue.
‘Good work, Sergeant. How did you find out?’
‘Asked to see his driving licence.’
‘Did he clock you – did he notice you copying it out?’
Purvis bristled. ‘Of course not. I’ve got a photographic memory for some things. Wrote it out soon as he’d gone.’
‘Excellent.’ I took the sheet of paper from him. ‘Good initiative there, Mr Purvis. I’ll make sure it’s mentioned in the right quarters.’
As I went down in the lift, I thought it pretty clever of Purvis to get the bike rider’s licence. I was impressed. But I was also glad he’d never asked to see any of mine.
I bus-hopped down to Covent Garden to start putting the feelers out for Werewolf. The City is one of the few places left with the old London buses you can jump on and off. With most punters having travel passes with those twee colour pictures on their identity cards, the conductors rarely bother to come upstairs to collect fares any more, so you get a fair amount of free rides in if you’re prepared to keep moving. The new, one-man buses that are everywhere these days are not only designed by maniacs who’ve never heard of the aged or disabled, but you can’t get on one without f
lashing the cash. Sometimes I think all the fun’s going out of London.
Sorrel was on duty at her stall on the corner of the flea market, so that was my first port of call.
She was wearing biker leathers and cowboy boots, which all looked as if they’d been applied with the aid of a shoehorn. The jacket had ‘Those Whom the Gods Love’ picked out in brass studs across the back, and the trousers had parallel lines of matching studs down the side seams. The boots had fake spurs. She was carrying more rivets than the average U-Boat and would probably have turned a compass away from Magnetic North.
The antiques business looked slack. Sorrel couldn’t have made more than a grand so far that morning.
‘Hi. Remember me?’ I smiled at her.
‘Sure. It’s Gabriel, isn’t it?’
‘Close, but no cigar.’
‘What?’
‘A Transatlantic expression meaning –’ I paused and looked in the air for inspiration – ‘meaning “almost,” I suppose.’
She studied me for about half a minute, then rearranged some of the knick-knacks on her stall.
‘The Wolfman was right,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘You are a weird person.’
‘Werewolf said that? About me? About anybody?’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean. Don’t worry, I’m not convinced. Not totally, anyway. What can I do for you?’
‘Loyalty to Werewolf, and the fact that he’s bigger than me, rule out answers 1 to 100, so I’ll settle for knowing where the lad is.’
She picked up a book from her stall and browsed. She browsed beautifully. It was an 1875 edition of Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I’d never read it, but I knew how much I could have sold it for.
‘The lad, as you call him,’ she said, still reading, ‘or the Mad Irish Git as I prefer to call him, is in my flat nursing a Full Metal Hangover. If there’s any justice in the world, that is.’
‘Good night last night?’
She shook her blonde hair. She shook her hair wonderfully. I’d better stop looking at her, I decided.
‘You could say that,’ she said in a sing-song sort of way. ‘I never knew there were so many different types of stout. I never knew there were so many Irish pubs in London. And I’ve never been carol-singing in April before. Yes, you could say it was a good night.’
‘Is he in a state to receive visitors?’
‘The Pope and maybe a Guinness salesman, but otherwise I’d have to say probably not. But since it’s you ...’ She looked at me suspiciously. ‘He seems to think a lot of you.’
‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ I quipped, but she took it seriously.
‘No, I suppose not. I’ll give you the address if you want, but I’m heading back there with some lunch for him in an hour or so.’
‘That’ll do. Just ask him to ring me this evening, would you? Tell you what, let’s go out and eat tonight. On me.’
‘Okay. He knows where to get you?’
‘Yeah. Tell him to ring about seven, and we’ll fix a place for eats. Italian food okay with you?’
‘Sometimes I could kill for fresh pasta.’
‘Good. But you’d better give me your number just in case.’
I like to think there aren’t many tricks I miss, but I have to credit Sorrel in that she did write it down on a scrap of newspaper without saying ‘In case of what?’ I filed it away in my wallet.
‘Are you sure you want me along?’ she asked. ‘I mean, it’s not boys’ night out or anything, is it?’
‘Oh no. It’s purely for the pleasure of your company. The two of you, that is.’ She didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Well, I do want to pick your brains, just slightly.’
‘What about?’
She turned half away from me as she had, rightly, detected a brace of customers approaching down the aisle of tables. They were a couple in their mid-fifties, I’d say, but dressed like they thought they were 20 years younger. The man carried a bulging leatherette wrist bag. I put them down as Dutch, and everybody knows the Dutch buy antiques by the lorry-load.
‘The other day,’ I said quickly, ‘you mentioned a guy called Cawthorne. Simon Cawthorne.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, busying herself with miners’ lamps, old spectacle cases and various china oddments that had ‘A souvenir of Cromer’ stamped on the bottom.
The Dutch couple stopped and began to inspect the merchandise.
Out of the corner of her mouth – and she did it with great flair – Sorrel said:
‘Sure I’ll come along. You’re going to need all the help you can get.’
Chapter Eight
By 2.30, I was having lunch at the wheel of Armstrong, parked on the edge of the pavement in Gresham Street about 60 feet from the Prior, Keen, Baldwin entrance. I had disguised myself with an old cardigan with faded leather elbow patches and a copy of the Daily Express. Lunch was an avocado and prawn sandwich and a carton of mango juice, which I admit were a bit out of character, but otherwise I looked for all the world like a real musher. I must have done, as not only did the Old Bill and the Ritas (as in meter maids) ignore me, but a real cabbie parked nearby came over to pass the time of day.
He told me how he’d been conned three times that week by people who took ten-quid rides, then said they hadn’t any cash but offered to leave a watch with him while they went inside (usually a block of flats) to get some dosh. Of course they never came out, and he was left with three digital watches that, in the cold light of day, turned out to be worth approximately 99p each retail, 30p wholesale. I sympathised and threw in a few choice obscenities and ‘Hanging’s too good for ‘ems,’ but made a note to pick up a few watches next time I was down the Brick Lane midnight market.
He wandered back to his cab eventually. It was one of the newish, two-litre Metrocabs, and it was painted red. How gross. As a staunch supporter of the traditional FX4S design in any colour you like as long as it’s black, I suppose I shouldn’t have even talked to him, let alone been friendly.
At 2.40, a motorbike rider appeared on Gresham Street, parked outside the PKB building and disappeared inside. I couldn’t tell much about him, as he was covered from head to toe in red crash helmet with black visor, red riding leathers and red boots. The bike, a medium sized Kawasaki, had rigid saddle-bags with ‘airborne’ stencilled on them, so even if it wasn’t Lewis Luther, it was the right company.
I started Armstrong up as he emerged from the building with a large jiffy bag under his arm. Like most of the City messengers these days, even the ones in the dinky shorts on BMX bikes, he was radio-controlled and, like a copper, he had his radio tacked on to his collar. Before he got on the Kawasaki, he spoke into it and then tilted his helmet to hear the response. Then he was mounted and off.
It’s almost impossible to tail a bike in London unless you’re on a bike yourself, and that’s a definite if it’s rush-hour. But the next best thing is a taxi, which can always bend the odd rule and rewrite bits of the Highway Code without attracting too much attention. And of course it helps if you know where your target is going.
Patterson had arranged for the hand delivery to a firm of corporate solicitors who had an office in Bloomsbury round the back of the British Museum. The contents of the jiffy bag weren’t important, but they were genuine and the solicitors were well known for handling City problems. Even I’d read about them. The idea was that the package might be tempting enough to follow all the other leaks down whatever conduit somebody was using.
I’d picked the Bloomsbury address, from a handful of alternatives Patterson had offered for the set-up, as the easiest route, and also the time, early afternoon, though in town these days the traffic was a matter of pot luck with the odds stacked on it being bad. If it rained, I’d be in trouble. Despite the number of golfing umbrellas you see around, advertising everything from building societies to aftershave, nobody ever uses them;
they jump into cabs when it rains. I’m convinced half of them don’t actually open, they’re just designed as offensive weapons for use by psychopaths fed up with not getting a seat on the tube.
The Kawasaki cut through to St Paul’s as I’d expected and accelerated up towards Holborn. So far, so good. I didn’t bother with keeping a car or two between us like they do in the movies. If he looked behind him (he didn’t have a mirror), all he’d see would be a black cab. So what? And how many despatch riders ever look over their shoulders?
Having said that, the bugger nearly threw me at Holborn Circus.
He turned left down an alley without indicating, and I had to carve up a Volvo with Swedish number plates in order to follow him. I felt a wee bit sorry for the driver – reindeer probably don’t drive like that – but this was London, and if you can’t stand the heat, leave the wheels at home.
The Kawasaki disappeared to the right up ahead of me and I followed slowly. He seemed to be working his way round the back of the Daily Mirror building, though I couldn’t think why. There were loads of light vans in the Mirror livery parked on both sides of the street, and the pubs down one side were doing a roaring end-of-shift trade – or maybe pre-shift. It was difficult to tell, but since Fleet Street had more or less stopped producing newspapers, this area was now the journalism centre of town, which meant the pubs would be doing some sort of trade.
I slowed some more, and it was just as well or I would have missed him.
He’d pulled up behind one of the newspaper vans, except it wasn’t a newspaper van. It was a red Transit, one of the new designs that look like they’ve been punched in the nose, but there were no markings on it and the rear windows had been painted out.
The rider parked the bike nose-in to the pavement and killed the engine. I swung Armstrong to the right and mounted the pavement on my side, not more than 20 feet from him. I took down the battered, broken-spined A-Z I keep taped to the driver’s sun visor and pretended to be looking something up.
The Don/R spread his legs so he was holding the bike up, then he rapped on the back door of the Transit with a gauntleted hand. The door opened and he handed in the jiffy bag.
