The Sweeney 01

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  But he didn’t look up the address 14 Carlyle Buildings. Torrential rain hit the M4 all the way back to London. In France or Italy at the first sign of a cloud burst the motorist automatically accelerates to ninety miles an hour. The English, a population raised in howling and brawling gales, have never got used to driving in them, and reduce speed to a bumper to bumper twenty mile an hour crawl. Regan was supposed to get back to the Yard by five. He got to London at seven.

  He stopped off at a phone kiosk in Hammersmith to make two calls. The first to Tanya. She’d been away for two weeks at some Trade Fair in Germany. She had told him, when she left, specifically when she’d be back — he’d forgotten except that it was one day this week. He phoned and she was in, and sounded as if she’d be pleased to see him. The relationship had been having its problems recently. ‘But don’t tell your office at the Yard that you’re at my number. D’you understand, Jack?’

  Regan understood. He phoned Squad Office at the Yard and left Tanya’s number with the switchboard. The switchboard operator said that Regan’s immediate guvnor, DCI Haskins, urgently wanted to speak to him. Regan instructed the operator that Tanya’s telephone number was for the convenience of everyone except Haskins.

  He drove on from Hammersmith, east, and then north up Exhibition Road, through Hyde Park to Bayswater Road.

  She lived in a small block of flats about a quarter of a mile from Marble Arch, buried in the hinterland of modern high-rises and quiet Victorian squares. Regan punched the entry phone. The door buzzed and he took the lift to the third floor. There were only four floors.

  She greeted him a little coolly. He saw why. The cockney cleaning lady who ‘did’ for her was just finishing up her stint, and washing out the dusters. There was little else they could do for ten minutes while the important duster washing and terminal tidying away was completed.

  Regan’s eyes weighed her up. Her eyes were alert and hungry, her face paler than usual. She had no make-up. That meant she’d decided she’d want him immediately and had already wiped off the war-paint.

  He’d left Gloucester four hours ago.

  Slow car journeys fatigued him; the traffic had been appalling. He wasn’t feeling particularly like sex, but was prepared to put on a show.

  He felt her fine eyes critically on him. Over the last twelve months she’d been grooming him by suggesting the clothes she’d like him to wear. Dark suits, with a good, large-patterned silk tie, ‘comme Prince Windsor’ she would say; Italian shoes. She’d bought him a present of a dozen pairs of silk socks from Cardin in Paris. He knew tonight he passed the test. He wore a dark blue suit, dark blue socks, black shoes, and a big blue tie with red polka dots on it. She’d bought the tie as well.

  Mrs Mop took five minutes over her good-byes and what cleaning materials were running short, then the front door closed.

  They kissed briefly. He broke it off. They moved across the hall into the bedroom.

  In the bedroom he stripped her immediately and wordlessly, and led her to the large bed.

  She, as always on these occasions when they’d been separated for two weeks — and that was a long time for them — was keyed up almost to desperation, and this made Regan suddenly hot and uncomfortable even though they made love naked and uncovered. And then immediately afterwards he was cold and shivering as the night air from the open window caught him. Manoeuvring off her and getting out of bed was a collection of awkward motions full of their elbows digging each other and a jar to his knee from some wooden edge. He had a shower and hoped she wouldn’t join him. She didn’t. He came back into the room wanting to find that perhaps she’d dozed off. She sometimes did after their sex. She was wide awake, and taking the pillow out from underneath her.

  ‘You miss me?’ Regan nodded.

  ‘Really?’ she said with a toss of her shoulders. ‘Then why do you make love to me as if you were in the other room?’

  He met her eyes, and put on an expression as if to dismiss the question as nonsense. He stood his ground, drying himself, while she worked out something in silence.

  ‘Are you tired of me?’ She said it in a practical way.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think two years is a long time for a love affair. I think you are tiring of me..’

  ‘Not true at all.’ He spoke the words gently.

  She considered this, first pursing her lips and then putting her head to one side, watching him. ‘You didn’t even notice.’

  ‘What?’

  She decided not to answer him, climbed out of bed and went into the shower.

  Ten minutes later she was back, drying herself, duplicating the water pools that he’d sown across the carpet. She now looked much younger than her twenty-eight years. ‘I put aloes in my womb.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Regan was pouring himself a drink from a tray on a coffee table.

  ‘It’s a preparation. I bought it in a sex shop in Stuttgart. It makes the passage smaller. They said it gives it more satisfaction. Yes?’

  He felt on the point of annoyance. She was in one of her challenging moods. He didn’t feel like being forced into responses. He felt tired. He said quietly, ‘I always enjoy our times together and I’m touched by the trouble you take.’

  He took his drink over to the bedside table, then lay down with her. For a few minutes she said nothing, but suddenly her mood changed; she was looking content, her eyes unfocused on the ceiling.

  ‘My beautiful after-sex cigarette.’ She inhaled on it deeply. ‘You know I have sometimes thought about this cigarette while we’ve been making love. The thought of it right in my mind.’

  The phone by the bed rang. Her face turned to fury. She reached out, grabbed the phone and threw it down on the pillow beside him.

  She slammed out of bed, grabbed up a dressing gown, went through the door and banged that closed with enough force to shake the walls.

  It was Carter on the phone. ‘How did it go in Gloucester, guv?’

  ‘Carlyle Buildings, Jamaica Road.’ Regan lay back in bed, picked up Tanya’s cigarette from the ashtray where it smouldered, and inhaled. ‘Know it?’

  ‘Den of thieves. Ted Miller, Harry Johnson — among others — in residence, when not at her Majesty’s addresses.’

  ‘I want something done fast and efficient.’ Regan looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully, as if suddenly he had a doubt that Carter could do something speedily, efficiently. Carter was twenty eight, not Bramshill, that elite embryo officer training outfit, but Dollis Hill, a suburb of London where Regan had poached him from the local CID. He’d poached Carter because he’d heard, and then checked, that Carter was efficient, hard, opinionated, right, honest, clever, and could work, on his own. It was really only the last of these talents that Regan needed. Regan was a rare policeman in the Flying Squad — his superiors would describe him as a complete anomaly. The Flying Squad was an elite group of two hundred selected detectives, the backbone of Scotland Yard, who had a single identity that came from working closely together. But Regan, the DI with the best record of arrest and conviction, was a one-man show. DCI Haskins and Superintendent Maynon hated him for it. He had bucked the system and had made it work. They hated him also because the people Regan picked to work for him, brought in from outside Squad Office, were minor Regans. And they were transferred to Squad on Regan’s insistence, and they went wrong at some point because Regan wouldn’t chaperone them, and then finally he’d get rid of them in some endless quest to find one Detective Sergeant who’d function exactly the way he wanted him to.

  Carter not only fulfilled all Regan’s needs, he fulfilled them too well. Carter would bear watching. Carter was after his job and the position that he, Regan, had pioneered — Regan the loner, the joker in the pack, too efficient to hold back, too ordered to take other people’s orders. But on results, one of the top five DIs in London. They can’t touch you if you’re the best. That was Carter’s goal, to be better, and even more isolated than Regan. At least that’s what Regan decided. ‘1
4 Carlyle Buildings, relates to Eddie Mavor. You read the files while I was in Gloucester?’

  ‘Yes, guv.’

  ‘If Number 14 is occupied, search. If it’s unoccupied, take it to pieces. I’m wiped out or I’d come with you.’

  ‘All right, I’ll try and find the duty JP.’

  Regan looked at his watch. It was nine-fifteen. ‘If the place is occupied, talk your way in; if unoccupied, use your God given brute force. A door is a door...’

  Carter was probably opening his mouth for a smart answer when Regan put the phone down.

  He got dressed and walked into the sitting room. She was pouring herself a vodka straight. ‘I’m on a very important case,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care any more about your very important cases.’ She went to the window, looked down over the square, knocked back the vodka in half a dozen gulps, ignoring him.

  ‘Is this whole bloody evening ruined?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said flatly, ‘if the phone rings again for you, and it will ring — yes, the whole bloody evening is ruined.’

  ‘You know the score.’ He said it softly. ‘The job I work on, I have to be available on the end of a phone twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘If you can’t screw your girl and lie in her arms without the bloody phone ringing, you will end up totally inhuman.’

  ‘I don’t want to start that discussion now.’

  ‘Well I do!’ she said, anger mounting in her voice.

  He picked up his raincoat and walked out of the flat.

  Lieutenant Ewing had come away from his working breakfast with Detective Chief Inspector Haskins with the distinct impression that he had failed to make his point.

  His three colleagues back home in SFPD who had started the fund had performed no mean feat. Fifty thousand dollars had been raised within the Department inside a week. That worked out at nearly ten dollars from every cop, clerk and coolie in the outfit.

  Lieutenant Ewing knew the rules in England — Haskins didn’t have to point them out.

  The idea had been to acquaint Haskins with the news, so he could quietly whisper it around, that highly unofficial money was available for results. If a cop got a slight clue which would involve a lot of following up, he might do it if there was the prod of some dollars. Haskins had informed him in so many words that human nature wasn’t the same the world over. Ewing did not believe Haskins. But there it was.

  Not that anybody in the SFPD set himself up as an expert on the ‘chaps’ at New Scotland Yard; but rumours had reached Northern California in recent years that detectives in London no longer wore stiff white collars and bowler hats.

  Word was that the Yard had changed, enlarged its horizons, got it together, and pulled itself fast into the middle of the twentieth century.

  He had been in London eight years before, for a month. It had been the honeymoon of his second lousy marriage. Six weeks after London, where they screwed a lot, he had the doctors check, and the suspicions of his first wife were confirmed. He was sterile — by no means impotent — just one hundred per cent sterile. His second wife left him after a year.

  For that London visit, his Chief at SFPD had fixed him up with an intro note to some guy at Scotland Yard. The guy had given him a quick look over the old Scotland Yard building on the river and smiled a lot; it was an hour’s hospitality and that was that. Ewing had not been able to form any impression of the workings of the British police.

  But, back home, a lot of guys who knew, said that lately there had been changes. So Haskins had been a disappointment.

  After the breakfast, he had left the hotel, found a cabby, asked him did he know any left-wing bookstores, and did he understand what was meant by left-wing bookstores? The cabby said he did and off they went.

  An hour and a half later he was back at the hotel with half a dozen cheaply printed magazines.

  He had then looked up Yellow Pages (Central) under ‘security organizations’. He had dialled the first of twenty listed companies. ‘Are you the largest security company in London?’ Ewing had asked. The reply had come back honest and negative. ‘Then who is?’

  The reply came back that Securcom was the largest security business in London and England. Lieutenant Ewing had phoned Securcom and had explained his position and asked for an appointment with a senior executive urgently.

  They had suggested he meet Mr Elmount at eight pm that night.

  At eight pm exactly Lieutenant Ewing walked into Elmount’s office in the Securcom headquarters in the Strand. It took Ewing about ten minutes to explain who he was, and about Purcell, and the killing, and the reward.

  Mr Elmount was a large man who smoked thin cigars. At the end of Ewing’s explanation he offered one to the Lieutenant. Ewing declined. ‘So what exactly can we of Securcom do for you Lieutenant?’

  ‘I want to find a man. I’m working with Scotland Yard. They’re slow. I have limited time.’ He paused to make quite sure that Elmount was following him. ‘There are in London certain crime ghettos, right? Brixton, the East End, Fulham...’

  Elmount was nodding.

  ‘I want to discuss with you how much it would cost say to take thirty of your operatives and send them tonight into these ghettos to spread the word that I, Lieutenant Ewing of San Francisco, am in London and staying at the Bayswater Hotel, and would like to meet a Mr James Purcell.’

  Elmount sucked on the cigar. ‘It would cost a good deal of money, to have thirty men doing that. May I ask you why you want that particular information dispersed?’

  The big American nodded slowly as if he thought it was a reasonable question. ‘It’s day-pigeon shooting. I set myself up as a clay-pigeon. If there’s a shot, at least I’ll know he’s there. And I hope to see what direction the shot comes from.’

  This is what Detective Sergeant Carter did in seven hours, from nine-fifteen pm to four-fifteen am — and a good example of the kind of efficiency that Regan approved of, and worried about.

  At nine-thirty pm, having determined that there was no one answering the front door of the flat, 14 Carlyle Buildings, he’d gone up the fire escape at the rear of the building, lifted his right foot to the height of the lock and kicked at the door, tearing the Yale lock out of its gate.

  A little old woman had catapulted out of the kitchen door of the adjoining flat and started screaming. ‘Robbers, thief. Stop thief!’

  Carter had studied Sarah Bernhardt reincarnated and marvelled at the noise of it all. He’d then produced his police ident. This had calmed her. She went off, she said, to make a cup of tea — would he like one? He’d said no.

  The flat was three rooms, two of which were bedrooms and empty — not even bed linen on the bed. A kitchen deserted and damp, and a living room. Someone had recently moved out in a hurry. So fast in fact that he’d left a bottle of Glenlivet Highland Malt Whisky, which Carter had done some quality sampling on while he studied the other features of the interior décor in eluding a cold cup of coffee and a green mould sandwich. This, together with a half-packed suitcase, promoted the idea of the possible high speed departure of the last tenant.

  Carter had wrapped a kitchen drying-cloth round his right hand, not to damage fingerprints, and had very carefully taken out, piece by piece, and spread on the bed, the contents of the suitcase. A man’s suit, good cloth, good tailor. Some other clothes, socks, pants, shaving-gear, and four passports.

  It was difficult opening the passports and trying not to smudge possible prints. They were Irish passports, looked genuine, two completely blank, two with the names Eddie O’Kane and Joe Dan Touhy. The photographs of the two men were identical. When the photographer had said to the late Eddie Mavor ‘smile’, he had failed to comply. So two frowning Mavors, under two different names, in two passports.

  The time was now 10.45. By 11:52 Carter was back at the Yard, had processed the passports through the print section on the second floor and watched the police printers and photographers isolate two distinct sets of prints.


  The next process took two hours — matching the prints. At 1:57 two names — Eddie Mavor, and a gent by the name of Joe Lear, photographer, ‘Wedding Prints a Speciality’, name spread over Yellow Pages (North), address Caledonian Road.

  At 2:23 precisely Carter had got Mr Lear out of his bed by the simple expedient of continuously pressing the doorbell, whilst monotonously kicking the front door.

  Mr Lear was an old timer and asked Carter outright for a search warrant, and Carter said that people who asked for search warrants usually had something to hide, and would he like to discuss this hypothesis at considerable length in the local nick. Lear demurred. Carter walked straight into the back of the shop, and found what he was looking for under a heap of rubbish in the darkroom. Another Irish passport, not blank, a different photo-graph, not Mavor, of a good looking man going under the name