Alarm Call ob-8

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘I was angry with you.’

  ‘I know, and I’m not knocking you for it. What I’m saying is that if I’d done the honest thing as opposed to what I saw as the right thing I’d have told you about the baby and given up the pretence.’

  ‘And maybe I’d have forgiven you, confessed my sins with Nicky, we’d have gone on, me loving you, you doing the right thing. Who knows where it would have ended?’

  ‘In a mess. So why did you run off with Nicky, if you loved me all along?’

  ‘To find out how much you really cared. I knew it wasn’t working; I thought. . inasmuch as I thought about anything … that it might shock you into action. I hoped that you would come down to Mexico and we’d have a big scene and that you’d take me back with you. When you didn’t, when you only phoned me, I was shocked. When I told you it was over and you didn’t argue or try to persuade me, that made it worse.’

  ‘So when you turned up in Edinburgh with Johnson. .’

  ‘I was still hoping to drag us from the wreckage.’

  ‘Christ, Prim, you got the clown hurt and humiliated in front of a lot of people. His career’s gone straight downhill since then, because nobody wants to upset Miles by hiring him. He’s gone from being reasonably successful in movies to auditioning for crap parts on television.’

  ‘God, is that true?’

  ‘Yeah, but don’t feel too sorry for him. Miles put detectives on him. He was giving one to someone else at the same time he was carrying on with you.’

  ‘That makes me look an even bigger fool.’

  I squeezed her hand. Until then, I’d been making a point of not touching her, but I forgot. ‘That was then, and this is now. Until everything’s sorted we’re going to concentrate on two things, Tom and the money, in that order.’

  She squeezed back, then raised my hand to her lips and kissed it. ‘Thanks, for being a love.’ She frowned. ‘It’s all Mike Dylan’s fault in a way. If he hadn’t gone bad, he and Susie would be married now, and maybe it would all have turned out differently with us.’

  ‘The flaw in that argument, my dear, is that you and Dylan had a fling when he and Susie were engaged, and you, or so you say, were deeply in love with me.’

  ‘I never said I was perfect.’ She chuckled.

  There was no answer to that, so I let the conversation lapse as the plane began its descent towards Heathrow.

  There are always press photographers there, but happily none of them had thought to meet the Sunday-morning shuttle so we made it unobserved to the taxi rank, where I hailed a black cab and gave the driver Prim’s address.

  He turned out to be a cricket fan who had been to the movies. ‘I saw you in Red Leather, Oz,’ he began, as we pulled out into the roadway. ‘Triffic. I just loved seeing all those Aussies gettin’ ’it arahnd the ’ead.’ He launched into an anti-Australian diatribe, which lasted all the way to Hammersmith. ‘This your missus?’ he asked, once his invective had been exhausted.

  The words ‘cabbies’, ‘the Sun’ and ‘tip-off ’ flashed before my eyes. ‘My sister,’ I lied.

  In spite of the monologue, he found the address straight away; I never cease to be impressed by the Knowledge, as the black-cab drivers call their photographic memory of the London street map, even if satellite navigation has overtaken it.

  Prim told me that the flat was on the second floor; the block was new, and it looked as if the builder hadn’t skimped on materials. There was a lift, but it was going up when we walked into the entrance hall, so we took the stairs instead. I waited while she dug a set of keys from the depths of her bag, then watched her slide a brass key into the mortise lock.

  ‘That’s funny,’ she muttered. ‘It seems to be jammed.’ I reached forward and gave the key a twist, but it wouldn’t budge.

  ‘Are you sure you locked it?’ I asked, getting her ‘Do you think I’m daft?’ look in return.

  ‘Of course. You know how serious I am about security.’

  I turned the key clockwise: there was no resistance and I heard a click. I did it again and heard another. ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Damn it!’ she said. ‘I was sure. I really must have been drinking too much.’

  I unlocked it again, then found the Yale key; there was no problem with that. When I stepped inside, though, instantly I was appalled. The door opened straight into a big living room, and the place was a shambles. Most of the sideboard drawers had been left open, newspapers were strewn all over the hardwood floor, a scream-coloured rug. . No, I don’t mean cream: it was so bright and garish that it made me want to scream. . was crumpled as if somebody had tripped over it, and an empty wine bottle and two glasses stood on a coffee table.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Prim exclaimed behind me.

  ‘As you say, you really must have been boozing.’

  ‘Oz, I didn’t leave it like this,’ she protested. ‘Somebody’s been in here. I was right: I did lock up properly.’ She rushed off; I followed her into her bedroom. The place had been ransacked. All the drawers and the wardrobe doors were open, and a small wooden filing cabinet lay face down, as if it had overbalanced when both of its drawers were opened at once. I checked the rest of the place. It had been gone over, systematically.

  I went back to the bedroom and righted the cabinet. Prim was sitting on the bed, both hands to her mouth, looking pale and shocked. I sat down beside her, put an arm round her shoulders, and drew her to me. ‘Just what you didn’t need, honey,’ I murmured, kissing her softly on the forehead. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  I let her cry for a bit, then picked a box of Kleenex off the floor and wiped her eyes with a couple of tissues. She smiled up at me, wanly. ‘I’ve really got a fucking rainbow on my shoulder, haven’t I?’ she said.

  I smoothed her hair back off her face. ‘You’re not at your luckiest, I admit. Can you see anything missing?’

  She looked around and shook her head, then got up, walked over to the wardrobe, knelt in front of it and threw a shoebox to one side. I looked over her shoulder and saw, where the box had lain, a small safe. I guessed that once it had had a combination lock, but all that was left was a hole, where it had been drilled out. I opened it, reached inside and took out a red jewel box. It was familiar; I had given it to Prim myself. I lifted the lid, and recognised none of what was inside. All that was in it looked like cheap costume stuff.

  ‘Your diamonds?’ I asked her. ‘The necklace I gave you, those earrings, your engagement ring: were they here?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking stunned. ‘They’re gone, Oz, all gone.’

  ‘Where do you keep your papers, the ones we’ve come for?’

  She jumped to her feet and opened the top drawer of the wooden cabinet. ‘In here.’ She flicked through a series of folders. ‘They look okay,’ she announced.

  ‘We phone the police,’ I insisted. ‘Have you still got their number?’

  She found it in a book by the phone in the living room: I let her make the call, listening as she spoke to the switchboard, then someone else. ‘Right away?’ she concluded. ‘Good.’

  I looked at the empty bottle on the coffee table: it was Pesquera, a taste Prim had acquired in Spain. ‘Looks like that’s something else they took,’ I remarked. She reached out to pick it up, but I stopped her. ‘Fingerprints.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  The apartment had a balcony overlooking the great grey River Thames; we went out there to wait for the police. As we sat in the two metal-framed armchairs, I noticed that the railings were lined on the inside with sheer plastic, as if to prevent a toddler climbing. ‘Tom’s toys,’ I asked her. ‘Did he take them all?’

  To my surprise her eyebrows rose and she glared at me. ‘I put the rest away in the wardrobe in his room,’ she snapped, ‘because every time I looked at them, they made me cry.’

  She jumped up and ran inside, returning with a handful of framed photographs. She thrust one at me. ‘That’s him,’ she exclaimed, ‘with Paul. It’s the most recent one I’ve g
ot; I took it in the park, a week before Paul stole him.’

  I looked at the dark-haired, blue-eyed little guy, and fell for him on the spot. He was a sturdy little muppet; he looked like his dad, but I could see a little of Prim about him.

  I didn’t take to the bloke who was sitting behind him on the grass in the park, though. I didn’t take to him one bit. He was smiling, of course, but there was a narrowness to his eyes, and a weakness in them that, knowing what I knew, made me dislike him at first sight. I felt slightly hurt that Prim had thought he looked like me.

  I was still gazing at the two of them when the door buzzer sounded: Prim went back into the flat to answer its call. When she came back she had forgotten her earlier annoyance with me. ‘They’re on their way up,’ she said. ‘Of all people they just had to send the same pair who were here before.’

  We went back inside and waited for the ring of the bell. When it came I opened the door; two men in crumpled dark suits walked past me without a look. ‘Hello again, Ms Phillips,’ said the older of the two. ‘What’s the panic this time?’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in my direction. ‘Is this the runaway bloke, come back after all?’

  Having just seen the runaway bloke for the first time, I was not having that. For a brief period after leaving university, I had been a police officer. Just about the only thing I learned there was that as a public servant it behoved me to speak politely to citizens, at least to the respectable ones. I made that point there and then.

  The guy glared at me. If I’d been casting a bad cop for a series I’d have picked him. ‘And who the fuck are you, then, Mr Ex-copper? The latest flame?’ He peered at me. ‘I know you from somewhere, mate. Didn’t I nick you a couple of years back?’

  ‘No, you did not. My name’s Oz Blackstone; I’m Ms Phillips’s former husband. I’m an actor, and it’s possible you may have seen me in a movie or on a poster. Now you know who I am, who the fuck are you? Let’s see your warrant card, and your mate’s.’

  He looked at me for a few seconds longer, trying to work out whether or not I was bullshitting, I surmised. When he decided that I was not, he produced his card and nodded to his partner to do the same.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Lacy,’ he said, unsmiling but more courteous, ‘and this is Detective Constable Garrett. What seems to be the trouble? We were told a robbery.’

  ‘You were told correctly,’ I replied. ‘The place has been done over, and it must have happened since Primavera left on Friday.’

  He looked around. ‘I don’t see anything obvious missing from here. The telly’s there, and that looks like a Bose hi-fi unit.’

  ‘They did nick what used to be inside a very decent bottle of Ribero del Duero,’ I said, helpfully, with a nod towards the coffee table.

  ‘You’re sure that entry was forced? It looked all right when we came in.’

  ‘The lock was picked, or a skeleton was used.’

  ‘You sure, Mr Blackstone?’ asked DC Garrett. He sounded more. . how should I put it?. . circumspect than his sergeant. ‘Couldn’t it have been Mr Wallinger, back for something he might have forgot? Wouldn’t he have had a key?’

  ‘No,’ Prim told him. ‘I had the locks changed a couple of weeks ago. In any event, this is my flat and he has no right being here in my absence.’

  ‘In that case, ma’am,’ Lacy countered, ‘this is probably just the local talent out to see if you’ve got anything worth nicking and deciding you ain’t.’

  ‘If that was the case, Sergeant,’ I said, icily, ‘they’d have been even dumber than you. But they weren’t for they screwed the safe in the bedroom and took a hundred grand’s worth of diamonds.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty grand’s worth, if you don’t mind,’ Prim corrected me. ‘I had them revalued last year.’

  I looked at the two detectives. ‘So, you see, there really has been a breakin and I’d appreciate it if you two took it seriously. Otherwise I’m going to have to call someone else, beginning with your station commander. I promise you, I’ll get his attention even if I don’t have yours.’

  DS Lacy got the message: he moved into full placatory mode. ‘Okay, Mr Blackstone, okay; just keep calm. I’ll call in our specialists right away.’

  ‘You do that. When they get here, you can tell them that we’ve disturbed as little as possible; we’ve just checked on what’s missing, that’s all.’

  ‘Cheeky bastards,’ said Garrett, as his boss dug out a phone from his jacket. ‘They turned the place over, drank a bottle of wine and left.’

  ‘Didn’t even wash the glasses.’

  ‘It’s better than crapping on the carpet. That’s the norm.’ Prim winced, visibly; the detective caught it. ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

  I took her out on to the balcony to wait for the forensics people. As we sat there, and as I thought about it, I came to a conclusion as to their likely findings: in a word, fuck all. Prim’s visitors had been pros. They had picked the locks, they had searched the place efficiently, they had found the reasonably well-concealed safe, they had opened it expertly, having come equipped to do so if necessary. They had come for something specific, and they had not been about to mess up by stealing anything else, however valuable, that might ultimately have led back to them, or to their employer, had they tried to fence it. Diamonds are easy to move, especially if they’re in a necklace, ring and earrings; take them apart and remodel them and they’re untraceable.

  They’d got what they were after, so would there be fingerprints on those two glasses, or anywhere else? Would there hell, as like.

  My musing led my hand into my pocket, and to my mobile. I had patched in Mark Kravitz’s number just in case, so I called it. ‘Do you have any free time?’ I asked him.

  ‘Right now, yes.’

  ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘What? You want me to fly up to Scotland?’

  ‘No need, Mark. I’m in London.’

  ‘Where do you want to meet?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Okay, the Rockwell Bar in the Trafalgar Square Hilton. You know where that is?’

  ‘If I said Trafalgar Square, would I be far off the mark?’

  ‘Not a lot, but the address is two Spring Gardens, if you take a cab.’

  I glanced at my watch: it was twenty past twelve. ‘I’ll see you at one.’

  ‘What about me?’ Prim asked, as I repocketed the Sony.

  ‘You wait here. Starsky and Hutch in there will want to take a statement from you at some point. Plus, you need to get all your papers together, remember, once the scene-of-crime people let you.’

  ‘What if they won’t let me take them?’

  ‘They will once they’ve dusted everywhere. I’d guess they’ll find two sets of prints on the cabinet, yours and mine since I put the thing back on its base. Although I suppose they might still find Wallinger’s too.’

  ‘I doubt it. My cleaning woman is very thorough.’

  ‘Okay. I’m sorry I have to leave you with these two, but I need to see Kravitz.’

  I told the coppers that I was going out for a while. I’d half expected Lacy to ask me to wait till I’d given a formal statement, but he seemed more relieved to be seeing the back of me than anything else.

  I left the building like Elvis and copped a taxi straight away, a much easier feat in London than in most cities. For example, in New York, the yellow cabs have a customers’ charter entitling passengers to a courteous driver who speaks English and knows his way around the city; finding all three in one man is a challenge, but just finding one who’ll stop can be worse.

  My second driver recognised me too, but he was much less gabby than the airport guy. He took me across the river and down Whitehall, dropping me at the front door of the Hilton, all done without even the slightest hint of a detour to ramp up the fare.

  When I walked inside, I saw that the Rockwell Bar was busy. I was there before Mark and at first I thought I was going to lose out on a booth, but once again, the movie-star thing d
id the business for me. The blonde who was running things came over, smiling. ‘Why Mr Blackstone,’ she exclaimed, ‘how good to see you again.’ I’d never been there before, remember. ‘Your table is right here.’ She swept me past the other people in the queue. . some were glaring, some were staring. . and fixed me up with a view back across the square to old Horatio Nelson on his column. She started to clear away the other place that was set, but I palmed her a twenty. . miserable Scots bastard, she probably thought. . and asked her to leave it and to bring me two menus.

  Mark arrived ten minutes later, neatly dressed and pressed as always, his stocky frame rendered unremarkable by expensive tailoring. ‘Is this okay?’ he said, looking around the crowded bistro. ‘I meant I’d see you at the bar and we could go on from there, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting a sit-down lunch.’

  He had a point: there was background music and plenty of babble, but when you’re in my position you can never be quite sure who might be ear-holing your conversation. ‘Tell you what,’ he suggested, ‘let’s order, then go up on the roof terrace for a look around, and tell them. They’ll hold it till we get back.’

  That seemed sound to me, so we asked our waiter for two large steaks, medium, broccoli with mine and fries with his, plus a bottle of claret, told him to bring them in fifteen minutes then headed for the lift.

  Up on the roof we weren’t quite eyeball to eyeball with Nelson, but the view was pretty impressive nonetheless.

  There were plenty of people up there too, but we were able to find a quiet corner. Someone in the crowd spotted me and headed towards us, possibly with autograph in mind, but I’ve developed a warning-off look that works every time. . unless I’m in Los Angeles: autograph-hunting is one of its biggest industries.

  ‘What’s brought you down here?’ Mark asked straight away. ‘You never said you were coming.’

  I told him, then filled him in on what we had found in Prim’s flat. ‘Interesting,’ he said, when I was finished.

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘I can’t say, as yet. Does she know if Wallinger had any friends in London?’