The Sweeney 01

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  The Sweeney: Regan

  In the first of the three Sweeney novels written by the creator of the TV series, Detective Inspector Jack Regan, expert at evading the proper channels, insolent and insubordinate to his superiors, exercises his usual trump card of cases solved with successful convictions.

  When he is ordered to London airport to pick up Lieutenant Ewing of the San Francisco and to cooperate with him in finding a police killer believed to be in London, Regan, pursuing a line of his own, finds the American an embarrassment and soon the two men are engulfed in a dangerous clash of personalities. The Lieutenant shoots first and asks questions – if at all – afterwards. Regan finds himself involved in a case that grows into something much more violent and sinister than he had envisaged.

  This is the first of the three novels, ‘Regan’, ‘The Manhattan File’, and ‘The Deal of the Century’, published at the time of the original series.

  www.iankennedymartin.com

  © 1975 Ian Kennedy Martin.

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  Patrolman Dennis O’Hagen sat in a field bordering the town of Anselmo (population 1,480), Northern California, for two days and nights and nobody seemed to notice him. Presumably even for a small town like Anselmo there’d be some crimes through those forty-eight hours; like it was known Mrs Kleimber was screwing a school kid, male, under age, and Mr Neil Bean was stealing money off his wife, which was a crime. And there was in fact an automobile collision which O’Hagen’s eyes must have witnessed — and Mr Levitt was in the wrong for sure, and not Mr Thomson which it looked like, him coming out of a side street on to the main drag. But Patrolman O’Hagen, although no doubt registering all this, was not doing anything about it. O’Hagen was sitting upright against a tree in the middle of some bushes. There was a small hole, between his staring eyes. It had been caused by a 9-millimetre Walther automatic. The shot that killed him had been fired from very close range.

  The boy scout who found him was near eleven and cool. He felt for the man’s pulse, touched nothing else, and ran high speed to Mrs Carey’s place which was nearest.

  As it was the murder of a policeman they sent 21-Unit out of Frisco — five large detectives, none of them friendly with the natives of Anselmo who would have liked to have been helpful. As it happened the murder had nothing to do with the town. When the five detectives reconstructed the last moments of O’Hagen’s life, it went like this.

  He was on patrol on the main road into Anselmo. Some automobile passes, maybe speeding. O’Hagen overtakes the guy, presumably waves him down, the man hesitates, the two cars stop with a minor collision. The guy’s car bangs into the back of O’Hagen’s car. He then shoots the cop and sticks him in the bushes with a view over the town. He goes back to his car, and makes one mistake.

  In the collision the two cars must have linked fenders, the killer’s front fender on top of the cop’s rear fender. The murderer must have gripped his own fender, done some weight lifting and got his automobile free. However, he left one thumb-print and a smudged index finger-print on the rear fender of the cop car.

  O’Hagen’s car was carefully examined for finger-prints, including the area which showed collision damage. The police mechanic, Maltby, was pretty sure that on the day of the cop’s death, when he went out on patrol, that car was undamaged. Within hours, 21-Unit out of Frisco had a suspect. The prints on the fender belonged to a James Purcell, alias Eddie Christopher, alias Hunt Kalman, et cetera. 21-Unit reckoned a guy who had knocked off a cop was in a hurry to move towns. They checked the airports. A man called James Purcell, answering the description of the wanted man, took the Pan Am polar flight, San Francisco — Los Angeles — London, twenty-four hours previously. It was a one-way ticket. But it had been booked a month before.

  21-Unit, San Francisco Police, followed the recognized procedure, which was to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation who then telexed a wire photo and all details to New Scotland Yard, that a cop-killer was in London.

  About a hundred miles from London, in Stroud, in the Cotswold area, a reasonably well-known criminal called Eddie Mavor pulled up at the traffic lights alongside a Daimler Van Den Plas limousine. The Daimler had smoked glass side and rear windows, like a pop star’s car. The driver’s compartment — it had a chauffeur’s division — was plain glass all round.

  Eddie Mavor was driving a Jensen Interceptor, his pride and joy. There were two joys in his life, a girl called Shirleen, eighteen, a stripper whom he employed and laid at the London night-club he owned, and the Jensen Interceptor. If he ever had to make the choice between loves, the lay would go.

  At the traffic lights he looked idly across at the chauffeur of the Daimler. The chauffeur was studying him. Mavor’s eyes wandered off for a moment taking in the main street of the pretty town, the grey Cotswold stone buildings under a weak sun. Spring daffodils lined up like parading troopers in the Norman churchyard.

  The main street deserted. Two cats sunning themselves without real sun. Lunch hour. Not one single human in sight.

  Mavor looked back at the chauffeur and did a double take. The traffic lights were still at red. The chauffeur had raised the thumb on his right hand and was looking directly at Mavor. In any language that sign meant only one thing. The chauffeur was challenging him to a race.

  Mavor did a quick calculation. The Van Den Plas had the V-12 Jaguar engine, bloody quick motor; the Jenson was a VS, but obviously would corner twice as fast as a huge limo. His heart suddenly, beating faster. Yeah, he could do it. He looked at the chauffeur, raised his own right hand, closed the fingers, stuck up his thumb, and wailed.

  The lights changed to green.

  Both drivers peaked their revs before they slammed home the clutches and burned rubber trails down the empty high street and out of the town.

  The Cotswolds are hilly country, not high hills but an area criss-crossed by valleys. As if the Ice Age had ended there and piled up the junk that glaciers had pushed four hundred miles from Scotland. The rolling hills now the green-brown of early spring, sheep grazing on grass that had been hit by frost.

  The Daimler was first away. It had fifty yards on Mavor in the first thousand yards out of the village. Eddie Mavor expected that. He kept the gear in third and the revs steady around the five thousand mark. He knew the road. He had a weekend cottage north of Gloucester. The Daimler was probably heading for some place like Wotton, or fashionable Thornbury. He would have at least around ten miles of road on which to crucify this optimist.

  The Romans made Bath one of their principal cities and they settled as far west as Bristol. And they built their roads which were wide and straight. And there were wide and straight roads in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. But the road that the Daimler and Mavor were racing on was something that had been a cart track sometime in history and later just tarmacadamed over. It followed every contour of the land and twist of the valley.

  Mavor slipstreamed the Daimler, marvelling first at the speed of the huge car, then its road-holding, and then its driver, in that order. The chauffeur knew how to shift the bastard. They were both dealing with country lanes no more than fourteen feet wide, often narrower. That bloke with his V12 engine and his Harrods standard light grey chauffeur’s uniform with peaked cap must have picked up his driving on some racetrack somewhere. But Mavor was no slouch — he’d done another type of racing. One of his proudest achievements was that, twice, the Richards’ mob had used him as a wheelman on bank hold-ups, one involving a well-known dice with the Force.

  An open stretch of road.
The Daimler climbing now, using just four thousand revs to take it from ninety over the hundred an hour mark as it hit the peak of a hill.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Mavor said aloud, but barely audible above the howl of his own engine.

  The Daimler sailed over the prow of the hill and bottomed its suspension with a crunch on the slope beyond.

  Mavor followed, mystified. It may have been an illusion, but as the Daimler went over the hill top a little of the weak sunlight did get through its front windscreen and the rear smoked glass, and Mavor thought for a second he saw two heads. Could there be two people in the Daimler, the peaked-hat chauffeur and someone in the back, in the smoked glass compartment?

  It was time now to use the Jensen’s superior road-holding, time to show the chauffeur and his pal, if there was another lunatic on the ride, that a limousine was no match for a piece of machinery that had been designed on the drawing-board as a sports car. Mavor knew that a half a mile on and about five miles from Wotton the road went round a bend, widened, then went into a series of S-bends. That’s where he’d take the Daimler.

  His eyes sought the bend. His left hand on the gear shift, still in third, engine at five thousand. Then he slammed the gear into second, drifted the car through the bend, less than four feet separating him from the limousine. Then he declutched, peaked the revs at six and a half and punched the Jenson past the Daimler while the chauffeur was still lining it up and steadying it after the bend.

  After that, it should’ve been a foregone conclusion. The Daimler never really had a chance. But the chauffeur wouldn’t let up.

  Mavor in the Jensen, waltzing the car through S-bends, listening to the music of the engine, the screaming choir of tyres. It was the first time he’d really driven the car, and tested its guts against his. And they matched. And he was driving away from the huge black monster that was growing smaller in his driving mirror. But still there. And he was loving every second of it.

  He hit the outskirts of Wotton. The traffic lights in the main square of the tiny town were red. He pumped the brakes and he brought the car cruising to a halt.

  In his driving mirror he studied the Daimler entering the village fast, and coming up as if to line up behind him. But Mavor hoped the chauffeur would bring the big car alongside, because as far as he was concerned the race was over. He’d clearly proven his and the Jensen’s superiority.

  The chauffeur brought the black limousine alongside. Mavor had ten seconds to study the man’s impassive face, staring ahead, not looking at all in his direction. And then suddenly one of the smoked glass windows at the back of the limousine, the one nearest Mavor, powered down. And Mavor realized there had been a passenger in the back of the limo…

  The smoke-brown window slid right down and Mavor saw a face he didn’t recognize. And he saw the 12-bore sawn-off shotgun come up and turn on him about a second before it went off and blew most of his brains around the immaculate white pigskin interior of the Jensen.

  Detective Inspector Jack Regan, Flying Squad, sat in Gennaro’s Restaurant in Soho and watched his Scallopini Marsala go cold. He had ordered it. He couldn’t eat it. He was thirty-six. He’d been eighteen years on the piss. But never ever a night like last night.

  All he remembered was the full bottle of Jack Daniels which he’d seen off in the opening two hours of the Flying Squad Ball at Grosvenor House. He remembered that label, but not the others. And the hell of it was that he wasn’t a drunkard. But just being around his colleagues socially made him nervous. And he’d worked out why last night. Before he went on to whatever it was after the Jack Daniels. What made him nervous around his colleagues was that they respected him, and he did not respect them. And that he had realized that for the first time last night and it was a hell of a lousy discovery.

  And now tonight the Greek.

  Theodoraki sat opposite him shoving spaghetti into his face as if a race was on. Theodoraki was eighteen stone of Greek crap, and a snout, which means a police informer, and a poor snout. But he knew some of the Thomson people, and Regan was on to that firm.

  So he had called Theodoraki, where he worked in the bookie’s in Romilly Street, and the bubble suggested Gennaro’s. Like Gennaro’s was expensive, and was going to take a lot of explaining as an incidental on the expenses side of his diary.

  He pushed the Scallopini Marsala aside and studied the Greek, trying through the blazing hangover to work out an approach. But there was no way but the direct way. ‘You know a bloke called Thomson. Frank Thomson. F. J. Thomson?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Greek said through the spaghetti, ‘know the boy very good.’

  ‘See him lately?’

  ‘No lately.’

  ‘How lately?’

  Theodraki shoved some chianti in with the pasta, chewed the lot around and pretended to think. ‘Four, five months ago, maybe.’

  ‘Did he have money?’ Regan asked casually.

  ‘No money. You remember he had big chauffeur car? No car. And no cabs. I drop him at the bus depot, Victoria Station. No money.’

  Regan took all that in and wondered about it. ‘Then it’d surprise you if I told you he’s been in Amsterdam and bought a hotel.’

  ‘Amsterdam? Hotel?’

  ‘Not a two-up two-down knocking shop, but a bloody great hotel on Dam Square.’

  Theodoraki pretended for a moment he was bringing an intellect as powerful as Plato’s on to the proposition. ‘Impossible,’ he announced, but his eyes were shifting like two trade winds, giving away that he knew all about such possibilities as hotels, and more besides.

  ‘I want to know who financed Thomson to buy the hotel — I want to know why a hotel. I know it’s probably a front for a blag. What blag? I think you can find out things. I’m going to give you a week. Then I’m going to come round to your flat in Dean Mews with those two nice young sergeants of mine who you know, and we’re going to kick the shit out of you.’

  Theodoraki choked on his spaghetti and grabbed for his glass of wine. ‘But what have I done, Mr Regan?’

  ‘Hand me your wallet,’ Regan said firmly. Heads were beginning to turn in the restaurant; not that he was creating a scene, but obviously something was going on between the two men.

  Theodoraki didn’t argue. Regan opened Theodoraki’s wallet. There were about fifty twenty-pound notes stuffed inside it. ‘The tax-payer picks up the tab for this meal. Normally. This time you.’

  He got up, dropped the Greek’s wallet back on the table. He had seen Jules, the head-waiter, on the opposite side of the room, answer a phone and turn and signal him. ‘A week. Then you get a kicking. Or Thomson information. And for information about how you have a grand in your skite. Don’t run away. That could become serious…’

  He left the Greek facing two ruined meals and crossed to Jules and took the phone from him. It was his guvnor. Chief Inspector Haskins.

  ‘Regan? Eddie Mavor’s dead, near Wales. Shot-gun. Friend of yours, yes?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Snout of mine, occasionally. Perhaps four years back.’

  ‘Why the shit? You knew him well. What is it? You don’t want to get mixed up in a murder case?’

  ‘He was a nobody, and he was a snout. There’s nothing deader than a nobody snout that’s ceased talking.’

  ‘You’re on the case. Till I take you off it.’

  Regan concentrated on his hangover. In some recess in the corner of his throbbing head there was a way out, an excuse to get off the case, but he couldn’t think of it.

  ‘Where are you?’ Haskins asked.

  ‘Gennaro’s.’

  ‘Have you got Len with you?’

  ‘Yes. He’s outside.’

  ‘Do me a favour. Go to London Airport, pick up a man called Lieutenant Ewing, San Francisco Police, PA Flight 101, due 21.30. Take him to the Berkeley Hotel.’

  Regan let a little pause creep into the conversation. He didn’t like the style of delivery of the request, or its type. ‘
I’ll see if I can fit that in. But just for the record, sir, I am not a fucking taxi service,’ he said finally.

  Haskins was not intimidated. ‘Welcome Lieutenant Ewing to our shores. He’s looking for a gringo cop-killer in the Smoke. You’re looking for a snout-killer in Wales or Gloucestershire. You’ve got lots of real words and common goals to discuss —’

  Regan put the phone down on his boss. One day he was going to be fired for his insolence and insubordination. That would be when he lost his trump card. Detective Inspector Jack Regan’s trump card was that he was the best detective in the Flying Squad and possibly in the whole of London, and he had the record, the printed words, the statistics of cases solved, convictions made, to prove it.

  He left Gennaro’s without a backward glance at Theodoraki, His driver, Constable Len Roberts, sat in the Ford Consul. Regan climbed in beside him, carefully sat back, took out a bottle of Disprin, shoved in two, and chewed.