The Laundry Man

by Graham Ison

  ‘No,’ said Fox thoughtfully. ‘Not yet.’

  *

  Making life uncomfortable for the criminal fraternity was a Tommy Fox speciality. It was not, however, his intention that the fourth-rate villains he had in mind should have the undivided attention of the Detective Chief Superintendent himself, and he therefore authorised sundry teams of detectives, once they had the list of Conway’s associates in their hands, to conduct yet another wave of early morning searches. This procedure causes great distress to the targets of these ‘spins’ as they are called, and often results in the provision of gratuitous information ... for no better reason than to get the Old Bill off their backs.

  The outcome of all this was a number of arrests, and the recovery of a quantity of stolen video recorders, video cameras, and several cases of whisky. An assortment of dangerous drugs was also found by the police which, in turn, led to the arrest of a high-powered pusher whom the Drugs Squad had been seeking for some months. But the Flying Squad was no nearer discovering what Conway had done with the gun used in the bank robbery that had resulted in his conviction. When enquiries are being made about who among them may have shot a policeman, there is a tendency on the part of the villainry to stay shtum.

  Fox’s conclusion was that young detectives today were nothing like as nasty as when he had been a young detective.

  *

  Her Majesty’s Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, is in Du Cane Road, Hammersmith. On one side lies the Royal Hammersmith Hospital, and behind them both, one of London’s rare bits of grass. Just to confuse the unwary, this bit of grass is also called Wormwood Scrubs. The prison has accommodation for over twelve hundred; the hospital half that number. In 1966, the spy George Blake escaped from the Scrubs; escapes from the hospital are not recorded.

  But these trivialities were of no interest to Detective Inspector Henry Findlater. Another of Fox’s recent acquisitions from the Criminal Intelligence Branch, and sometime leader of its surveillance team, he had been Fox’s obvious choice to keep an eye on Waldo Conway.

  Given the unnatural predilection of the prison authorities for releasing time-expired prisoners at eight o’clock in the morning, Henry Findlater had been obliged to leave his home in Worcester Park at an unearthly hour. On a Bank Holiday, to boot. Despite that, Henry Findlater was not unhappy. Neither was Detective Sergeant Percy Fletcher nor Detective Constable Ernest Crabtree, both of whom had been deputed to assist. All three were incurring double-time for their trouble.

  At eight o’clock precisely, as some distant clock chimed the hour, the wicket gate in the massive doors of the prison was opened and three men emerged. For a moment or two they stood in a group, as if uncertain what to do with their new-found liberty; then they sniffed the diesel-laden air appreciatively and shook hands with each other. Two of them walked out into Du Cane Road and hailed a taxi. The third, Waldo Conway, started to walk westwards.

  ‘Just our bloody luck,’ said Fletcher. ‘Too mean to get a flounder.’

  ‘Don’t blame him,’ said Findlater, a Calvinistic Scot. ‘Very expensive things, cabs. Take him, Percy.’

  ‘Right, guv.’ Fletcher waited while Conway placed his brown-paper parcel between his knees and lit a cigarette. Then he got out of the car and started to amble along the road on the opposite side.

  Apparently unaware that the police were renewing their interest in him, Conway kept going until he turned into Wulfstan Street. From there he took a left into Erconwald Street, entered East Acton tube station and boarded an eastbound train.

  ‘Sod it,’ said Fletcher.

  When it became apparent that a bit of underground surveillance was occurring, Findlater sent Crabtree to accompany Fletcher, but, as befitted his rank, stayed in the car himself and went back to Scotland Yard. The next time that he heard from his two subordinates was when they rang in at nine o’clock. He listened to what they had to say and then reported to Tommy Fox.

  Fox wrote the address down on a pad on his desk and glanced up at Findlater. ‘Well, Henry, what do we know about it?’

  ‘Nothing, sir ... at the moment. Enquiries are continuing.’

  ‘I should bloody well hope so,’ said Fox caustically. ‘Further and better particulars in the fullness of time, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Wonder why he didn’t go home.’

  ‘You said that he and his missus had split up, sir.’

  ‘That is so, Henry.’

  ‘Well then, sir ...’

  ‘That is what I said, Henry, and that is what Kate Conway said, but villains tell lies and, by definition, so do villain’s wives. However ...’ He paused to light a cigarette. ‘However, he’s obviously not rushing to leap into his wife’s arms, which is what most of these toe-rags do when they’re let out.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘She’d probably charge him for it now, anyway,’ he added.

  *

  In fact, Waldo Conway had travelled only four stops on the underground, getting off at Notting Hill Gate. From there he had struck northwards, eventually entering a Victorian mansion to the west of a street called Pembridge Villas.

  Two hours later, Conway came out of the house accompanied by a striking-looking girl. The observing officers — now increased in number to four — took great care in writing down an accurate description of the young woman. In addition to recording that she was taller than Conway, slim with shapely legs, and wore her long brown hair in a pony tail, Fletcher included the gratuitous information that she was probably a thirty-eight D-cup, but Findlater subsequently ruled that item out as unnecessary. Conway had a travelling bag, slung over his shoulder on a strap. The girl was carrying a nylon holdall. And they were holding hands. In Pembridge Villas they hailed a cab.

  Fletcher and Crabtree followed the cab to Victoria Station where Conway and the unknown girl alighted and went to the continental booking office. After a cup of coffee, they boarded the Ostend boat-train for Dover Marine.

  After a moment’s indecision, Findlater, who had raced to the railway station from the Yard when he had received the telephone call, told Fletcher to board the train and phone in again from Dover. Then Findlater went back to the Yard in search of Tommy Fox.

  Fox sat sideways-on to his desk and drummed his fingers on the blotter. He peered at Findlater over his half-glasses — a recent acquisition that had caused several of his subordinates to suggest that he was bucking for commander — and carefully balanced the cost of sending the pursuing officers to Belgium against what he might achieve, and, more to the point, what the Commander of S08 Branch — the official title of the Flying Squad — might say when he got the bill.

  ‘I think we’ll have to let them go, Henry,’ he said finally. ‘It’s a pity, but we can’t really justify it. After all, we’ve got no evidence against Conway, and playing a hunch is not a good enough reason.’ It was an uncharacteristic statement for Fox to have made and caused Findlater, too, to believe that Fox might be in the running for promotion. But Findlater was wrong. Fox had a few tricks up his sleeve; no one got to be operational head of the Flying Squad without being cleverer than his men.

  *

  The Special Branch unit at the Port of Dover was a bit thin on the ground — the cost of officers working on a Bank Holiday eating nastily into the budget of the Chief Constable of Kent — but they pulled out all the stops when the Flying Squad’s telephone call to the National Ports Office had been relayed to them.

  With policemen’s thoroughness for detail, they subsequently advised the Flying Squad that Waldo Conway — and went on to give his date of birth, his Criminal Record Office number, and a description — had left the Port of Dover aboard the jetfoil Princesse Clementine at fifteen twenty-five. Conway, the message went on to say, was accompanied by Eugenie Vandermeer, a Belgian citizen, unmarried, aged twenty-five. The Kent policemen’s description of the girl exactly matched the one furnished by Fletcher, except that they opted for a size forty D-cup.

  ‘Well, fancy that,’ said Fox. ‘Denzil, get the Bel
gian law on the phone, tell ’em the tale, and ask ’em if they can do a quick housing job. Then I think we’ll forget Waldo and start all over again.’

  *

  Unfortunately — and it is no criticism of the Belgian gendarmerie — Conway’s arrival at Ostend went unreported by any of their officers. In all fairness, it takes only one hundred minutes to get from Dover to Ostend by jetfoil, and given that, during those minutes, a message had gone from the Special Branch unit at the English port to Scotland Yard, and from there to the headquarters of the Belgian police in Brussels, and from there to Ostend, it was really a wonder that it got to its destination on the same day. But that’s the police for you.

  But all was not lost. It was subsequently learned that Conway and his Belgian girl-friend went straight to a car rental office in Ostend where they hired a Mercedes 320SL and promptly headed south-west on Route E5. This information only came to light because Waldo Conway was unable to convert kilometres per hour into miles per hour. The speed limit on Belgian motorways is 120 kph, which in English is 75 mph. But confronted by an open road, Conway, with sheer Toad-like bravado, could not resist the temptation to wind his speed up to one hundred and twenty, except that in his case it was miles per hour not kilometres. The traffic police of Belgium, who are equipped with beautiful white Porsche motor cars, take great exception to drivers who play fast and loose with the law — particularly the ‘fast’ bit — but despite that, and to their chagrin, the crew who sighted Conway’s speeding car lost him. They did, however, get the number. And that told the Belgians Conway’s name and United Kingdom address. But it did not tell them where he was in Belgium ... or France ... or Germany ... or wherever. When this piece of intelligence arrived at New Scotland Yard, it drew a typical xenophobic response from Fox.

  In fact, Conway and his girl-friend were in blissful ignorance of this turn of events and made for Brussels with the intention of seeing a bit of night-life. But in Brussels the night-life is not all that it’s cracked up to be. As a consequence they started to move around the country, but each time one of the little forms that they, in common with all travellers, were obliged to complete at an hotel reached the gendarmerie, Conway and Juffrouw Vandermeer had moved on.

  But there was more. With ruthless administrative efficiency, the name of Eugenie Vandermeer was put through the computer at the headquarters in Brussels. The result did not make the Belgians any happier. A one-time Brussels call-girl, the Vandermeer woman had progressed to conspiring with several known criminals to extract money from the unsuspecting, but not entirely innocent, by way of blackmail. It was a simple ruse and probably one of the oldest in the book. After selling her professional services to married Common Market officials, and at least two MEP’s, her cohorts then persuaded the individuals concerned that it might be beneficial to the continuance of their hitherto unblemished careers to part with certain sums of money for the sake of peace and quiet. And they supported their demands with action photographs. In colour. All went well until one official took exception to this arrangement and reported the matter to the police via the Belgian Foreign Minister. At that point, Juffrouw Vandermeer took a health cure in England. But the authorities in Belgium did not know that that was where she had gone until now.

  Then the manager of a supermarket in Armentières was shot and robbed of fifty thousand French francs.

  *

  The Sûreté Urbaine in Armentières was not overly impressed by this sudden outbreak of crime. Nor, for that matter, was the manager of the supermarket, but he recovered more quickly. Policemen of all nationalities are schooled, in their early days in the force, to make molehills out of mountains if at all possible. And that is precisely what the French did, by taking the most obvious course. The bullet taken from the supermarket manager’s shoulder was identified by the ballistics experts of the Police Nationale as a nine-millimetre round. The most popular weapon in which this calibre of ammunition is used is the German Walther, but many of these pistols are manufactured under licence in Belgium by the Fabrique Nationale. And because the Belgian border is less than two miles from the centre of Armentières, the French police looked to their Belgian colleagues for assistance first.

  Following the discovery that the E5 speeding motorist was an Englishman called Waldo Conway, the Belgian National Gendarmerie made a routine enquiry of Scotland Yard. Not that the National Gendarmerie was unduly concerned about speeding Englishmen, but paperwork, once started by any police force in the world, cannot easily be stopped. However, the reply from New Scotland Yard informing them that Waldo Conway had previous convictions for armed robbery, and had recently been released from prison, had the involuntary effect of narrowing their enquiries, and they became somewhat agitated that such a person was marauding the countryside, apparently eluding the police at every turn. And when, on the same day that the French police spoke to them about the shocking robbery in Armentières, they heard that Conway had recently stayed for one night in Menin — about twenty miles from the French border — they advised their French colleagues to have a word with the British police.

  ‘I don’t bloody believe it,’ said Fox, when this latest information found its way to his desk. The bastard’s at it again.’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure, guv, do we?’ said DI Evans.

  ‘You taking bets, then, Denzil?’

  ‘No, guv,’ said Evans with a grin.

  ‘No,’ said Fox pensively, ‘I thought not, but we’ll know for certain shortly. The French are sending the round over for comparison.’

  *

  ‘I am willing to swear that the round used in the French robbery’, said the ballistics expert, ‘was fired by the same weapon that was used in the building society robbery at Surbiton ... and in the bank robbery in which Conway was involved five years ago.’

  ‘Blimey!’ said Fox, ‘you’re going out on a limb, aren’t you?’

  Inspecteur Principal René Bodin threw his tooth-pick into the waste-paper basket and sniffed loudly. ‘So,’ he said, fingering the report on his desk, ‘first we have English football hooligans, and now we have an armed English robber.’ The inspecteur looked angrily at his two subordinates. ‘And he was accompanied by a girl.’

  No one made jokes about Bonnie and Clyde, and no one made jokes about the Mademoiselle from Armentières.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Where have you been, then?’ Conway was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Out,’ said Eugenie.

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but where?’

  ‘To see some friends.’

  ‘What, round here?’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Eugenie defensively. ‘I am a Belgian, and this is Belgium. Of course I have friends here.’

  ‘ ’Ere, you’re not still on the game, are you?’ Conway propped himself up on one elbow.

  Eugenie gave him a contemptuous glance. ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  ‘Oh!’ Conway sank back on to the pillow. After all, he was a criminal and in a way he could understand that Eugenie might not want to introduce him to her friends, particularly those who were unaware that she was no longer exactly on the straight and narrow. Nevertheless, she had been out alone on two or three occasions since their arrival in Belgium. He looked round the small, sparsely furnished hotel room. ‘What’s next then?’ he asked.

  Eugenie lay down beside him and snuggled up close. ‘It is a surprise,’ she said. ‘I want to show you the Festival of the Cats.’

  Conway pulled away slightly so that he could look at her. ‘Gordon-bleeding-Bennett,’ he said. ‘I never know what you’re going to come up with next.’

  *

  ‘Well, we’re here. Now, what’s this about bleeding cats then?’ Waldo Conway brought the red Mercedes to a standstill and gazed around the market square in Ypres.

  Eugenie leaned over and placed a hand on Conway’s knee. ‘It’s the Cat Festival,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen it for such a long time ... please, Waldo.’

  ‘Yeah, yea
h, right. But what’s it about?’

  ‘Well, you see that building over there ...’ Eugenie pointed. ‘That is the Cloth Hall.’

  ‘Looks like stone to me.’

  ‘No, silly. It was built in the Middle Ages, when this city was famous for its cloth. They used to trade from there.’

  ‘I still don’t see what that's got to do with bleeding cats.’

  ‘Well ...’ Eugenie pouted at him. ‘Suddenly they found that the Cloth Hall was full of mice. So they got some cats in ... to catch them.’

  ‘Seems logical,’ said Conway.

  ‘But you know what cats are like, don’t you.’ Eugenie ran her fingernails down Conway’s bare arm.

  Conway grinned. ‘Yeah. I know about certain cats,’ he said. ‘What are you saying? That they suddenly finished up with a whole load of cats?’

  ‘Exactly. So they raised a cat-catcher.’

  ‘I think you mean they hired a cat-catcher, girl.’

  Eugenie shrugged. ‘So? They hired one. Every year he would round up all the cats and throw them from the belfry tower. Up there.’ She leaned forward so that she could see the top of the Cloth Hall through the windscreen, and pointed.

  Conway laughed. ‘Blimey!’ he said. ‘I bet that goes down a treat with the old animal rights lot.’

  Playfully, the girl punched his arm. ‘They don’t do it any more,’ she said. ‘But every year they have the Cat Festival, with floats and bands and fancy dress. And at the end of the afternoon, the Town Fool climbs up to the top of the tower — you can see the little platform, if you look — and throws velvet cats down to the crowd.’ She snuggled close to Conway. ‘Please, Waldo, let’s go and catch a cat.’

  Conway sighed. ‘When does this caper start, then?’

  ‘In about three hours’ time.’

  Three hours! And what the hell are we going to do till then?’

  ‘We park the car, and then we eat ... in that café over there. First I show you where to park.’

  ‘You seem to know this town pretty well, girl,’ said Conway. Eugenie nodded. ‘I was born here,’ she said. ‘And I went to school just down that road over there, at the corner of the square.’