The Sweeney 01

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  Michael Mahoney. He had taken that back to the Yard arriving approximately at four am.

  It was not until seven am that morning that the photograph of Michael Mahoney had been positively identified.

  Lieutenant Ewing had nodded his agreement when shown it at eight am, and pointed out how close the photograph and expression were to the official FBI photo.

  The Irish Embassy in London supplied the information at eight thirty am. They said that, seven months before, a batch of fifty blank passports had been stolen from Dublin Castle, and that the Provisional IRA was suspected.

  At nine am Lieutenant Ewing and Inspector Jack Regan met again, but this time it was an official meeting. The two Irish passports found at Carlyle Buildings had belonged to Eddie Mavor. The photo in the Irish passport found in the darkroom of Joe Lear’s photographer’s shop had been positively identified by Lieutenant Ewing as the likeness of James Purcell.

  Regan had been officially put on the Mavor case, which meant that he would be working with Lieutenant Ewing of the Frisco PD. The Mavor case and the Purcell case were now obviously part of one and the same investigation.

  The first thing that Lieutenant Ewing said to his new partner, Regan, was that he was busy and could they meet later sometime? Regan said that was fine — he had plenty to do.

  Ewing returned to the Bayswater Hotel, and asked the cabby to drive twice round the block where the hotel was situated. He was looking to see if Securcom had made the right noises in the right places. There were no parked cars with suspicious guys studying the hotel.

  But it was early still — nine-forty-five a.m. It was raining.

  He talked to the Hall Porter who lent him an ‘A to Z’ of London and an AA map of England. He went up to his room, sat on his bed and opened the AA book. He looked up Wotton, Gloucestershire, where this guy Mavor was killed. He studied the route between London and Wotton, Gloucestershire. He reckoned it was a two and a half hour ride in a Jaguar. And the Hall Porter had told him it had arrived – a Jaguar 4.2 which the porter had managed to rent from a specialist car hire company in London,

  After fifteen minutes with the map, he got up, strapped on his Navy Colt .45, took the street guide and the AA map down to the basement car park and found the Jag.

  For the next half-hour he took a practice amble round London to familiarize himself again with a non automatic car driven on the wrong side of the road.

  He went back to the hotel and toured the block again, parked and went into the hotel lobby. He came out and noticed there were two cars by the kerb opposite the hotel entrance.

  He got into the Jaguar and drove off slowly. One of the cars started off slowly after him.

  No, maybe he was wrong. Within half a mile the car had disappeared from his rear view mirror.

  He drove on another mile and the car was there again in his rear view mirror. It was a red Alfa with two guys in it.

  He drove through heavy traffic to Camden Town. Then he stopped and consulted the A to Z. Whenever he went to a town like LA, New York, Boston, and now London, he always went to the local left-wing bookstore and picked up their folksy mags. For the simple reason that they invariably had lists of where the action was in town — old movies, whore houses, demonstrations, theatre. Ewing liked all their crap.

  He’d gone to the Compendium Bookshop, Camden Town, yesterday, and had seen an ad there for a Comic Mart in the Camden Town area today. He’d talked to a salesgirl who was too good-looking to be true. Compendium would be there with a stall at the Comic Mart; she would be manning the stall. Reason enough. He had taken down the address.

  It was a large church hall, maybe two hundred feet long. Ewing parked the Jaguar and waited. No red Alfa. He went inside.

  A hundred trestle tables, and at least five hundred people. A lot of quiet-spoken beards and heavy-rimmed glasses, and a churchlike air except for the stallholders themselves who shouted cheerfully from one to another. Thousands upon thousands of comics, mainly American, but as the British invented this illiterature, now turned kitsch; there were piles of Beano, Dandy, and Radio Fun which were unrecognizable to Ewing. Lieutenant Ewing had his own modest collection at home in Frisco. He had had a mother who’d doted on him until six years ago when she’d given up her personal fight against Richard Nixon, Mayor Alioto and property taxes, and quietly died. His mother had kept every toy and book he’d had as a child. It had shattered him when he’d found out that some pre-war editions of Batman comics were now worth half a grand apiece. He had some, and he was holding on to them.

  He wandered through the push of devotees, looking at titles familiar and unfamiliar: Godzilla, The Hulk, Jekyll and Hyde, and Frankenstein. It struck him that there were hardly a dozen children in the crush. The average age of these curious people seemed to be around thirty, thirty-five.

  He asked and got directed to the Compendium comics stall. The beautiful girl wasn’t there. He was told she’d been and gone.

  Meanwhile he was wandering the perimeter of the hall, looking out of the tall windows for a red Alfa. Suddenly it was there, parked in the street which was diagonal to the street where he had parked the Jaguar. The Alfa was empty.

  This place is a mistake, he realized suddenly — too many folk.

  A bullet in the back of the head and the assassins melt into the crowd. He moved quickly now, pushing down the jammed aisles, aware of a number of faces that could belong to the driver and the passenger of the Alfa.

  He passed straight out into the street, got into the Jaguar and drove off. They knew where they could get him. They would follow him back to the hotel. He would stage the meeting with them, or the collision with them, to be more advantageous to him next time. Next time being in the next couple of hours.

  He drove back to his Bayswater hotel. The Alfa never appeared in his rear view mirror. He took the maps out of the Jaguar and went up to his room again. He looked up Wotton once more, where the draftsman called Mavor had died. He started to memorize the route to Gloucester along the M4 motorway. He worked out distances and time, and decided that if the interception didn’t take place earlier, he’d stop off for late lunch at Bath.

  He took the maps and went back to the Jaguar. He drove south through the Park, and right, along Cromwell Road, to Hammersmith. Then he took the Great West Road to the Hogarth roundabout. He had hardly got round the roundabout when he saw the red Alfa, travelling half a mile to his rear.

  Twenty minutes later he was passing the London Airport spur and they were still there, tucked into a pack of cars and trucks half a mile back. He guessed their objective must simply be to tail him, to find out where he was going. That suited him fine. His objective after driving them about for a few hours would be to corner them. Ewing took out the Navy Colt .45, slid it under the open map on the passenger seat, and relaxed. But his brain was ready to alert his right foot to hit the accelerator at a microsecond’s notice.

  The afternoon was cold and cheerless, with some light rain. He turned on the car radio and tried the English stations before finding a distant Radio Luxembourg, with music that sounded like the Moody Blues strained through grit. Every ten seconds his eyes on the rear view mirror.

  The red Alfa stayed in the mirror. Once the car, bunched in the traffic, approached within a hundred yards and Ewing got a closer look at them. They didn’t look very Irish; more Sicilian — or maybe that was suggested by their dark complexions inside an Italian car. One was around forty and thin, with a long crop of black hair framing a sallow face. His companion was older. There were traces of grey in his hair and he had a thick moustache. They both wore dark suits. Whatever their business, they looked professionals.

  It took him another hour and a half to get off the motorway and south to the city of Bath.

  It was a place he’d always wanted to come to — the ancient Roman spa, wholly dominated by the yellowish stone Georgian squares and terraces, the flat, yellow-grey stone unique to Somerset and called Bath Stone.

  He took the Jaguar roun
d the two-mile, one-way city centre system, and selected, out of the half dozen on offer on the George Street-Broad Street-Westgate circuit, the largest hotel: the Bath Regency Hotel. He’d worked out a plan. He went in and registered. Now the two men in the Alfa would presume he was going to stay there at least twenty-four hours.

  He told the Hall Porter he’d be back with his luggage, went back out to the car, got in and drove north. Half a mile, trailing to his rear, the Alfa.

  He crossed the M4 motorway again, passed Dodington House, and started to head for open country around Horton. To deal with the men in the Alfa he needed open country, some hills, and maybe the two lakes described on the map as the Colmer Reservoir.

  It was not at all difficult to pull off the switch. Past Horton he arrived at a small group of hills covered in a plantation of high pines. Three or four tracks switchbacked around the base of the hills. He pushed the Jaguar fast into a series of bends and intersections, and with the superior handling and speed of his car he lost them. Then he found the road that climbed up through the densest trees to the plateau top of one of the hills. He reached the top of this hill, drove the car in among some trees and braked. He got out, and climbed a fifty-yard slope to the pinnacle. From here he had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view over the countryside. For the next half an hour he saw and heard the Alfa back-tracking and weaving around the intersecting tracks below. At one point it made a half-hearted attempt to climb up the mud-covered slope of the hillside towards the trees which concealed the Jaguar. The Alfa’s tyres failed to grip the mud as the Jaguar’s had. Finally it braked to a halt in an open area about half a mile south-west of Ewing’s position. Obviously a debate was going on in the car. It lasted five minutes and then the Alfa took off, heading south. They were obviously heading back to Bath.

  He went back to the Jaguar and started it up. He reversed it out of the trees and down. He’d achieved his purpose. They’d been following him; now he was following them.

  They went straight to Bath, parked in a sidestreet next to the Bath Regency Hotel, and entered the hotel. Ewing parked the Jaguar in another sidestreet and carefully made his way to the street where the red Alfa was parked.

  The first thing he saw as he examined the car was an air-carrier folder for a plane ticket lying on the glove tray under the facia. It was a folder for a BEA ticket. There was a name on the folder but he couldn’t make it out. He moved on round the car, looked in the rear window and saw a briefcase tucked under the front seat. Below the briefcase handle, the initials TF. That was enough.

  He walked down the street, found a side entrance to the hotel, and entered. Moving warily, he stepped into the lobby. The two men weren’t there. He checked the dining room and bar. They weren’t there. He came back and crossed to the reception desk. The clerk looked up from a ledger.

  ‘I’m still waiting for a friend who’s bringing my luggage,’ Ewing said.

  ‘That’s quite all right, sir,’ the clerk responded.

  ‘I wondered if you could tell me if Lord Dalhenny has arrived yet?’ Ewing enquired.

  ‘Lord Dalhenny?’ The clerk looked puzzled, but impressed. ‘We have no Lord Dalhenny staying with us at present, sir.’

  ‘You sure? He said he’d be here by the time I arrived.’

  ‘I assure you, sir, that Lord Dalhenny is not here.’

  Ewing appeared to think about it. ‘There’s one possibility. He sometimes travels under a pseudonym — he’s an important man in public affairs.’

  The clerk nodded his knowledge of Ewing’s fictional aristocrat.

  ‘He goes under the name of George Hale, his first two Christian names.’

  ‘I’ll check the register, sir.’

  ‘I think he also sometimes calls himself Carson, his mother’s name.’

  The clerk studied the register. There’s no Hale or Carson here, sir.’

  ‘Could I look at the book? I might recognize another name he’s using.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’ The clerk turned the book for him to read.

  Ewing’s eyes went down the column of names to the last registration. The briefcase initial TF stood for Terence Feeny. Feeny gave a Camden Town address. The room number was 403.

  Ewing had already been allotted Room 110. He now asked if there were rooms higher up in the hotel -the traffic in the square would make the lower room noisier. Was there perhaps a room on the fourth floor? The clerk checked and discovered Room 417.

  The only risk now was that he would collide with the Alfa occupants on the way to the lift. He didn’t. He went up to the fourth floor and was shown into Room 417. He tipped the pageboy and returned almost immediately to the lobby. He bought a newspaper and retired to the furthest corner of the lobby, held the newspaper up to shield his face in the best tradition of spy fiction, and waited.

  They came down for the set afternoon tea at three-thirty. They didn’t see him. Now they were out of the car he could assess their physical capabilities. They were both tall and solidly made, younger than he was, and in good shape. They looked like a couple of bodyguards. He gave them ten minutes by his watch to go into the sitting room and settle down to tea.

  He took the lift back to the fourth floor and entered his own room. He began to search for some kind of material that was stiff but pliable. He’d been on a recent SFPD refresher lecture on picking locks and entering rooms. The bald-headed captain with startlingly bad breath who had given the lecture had listed the best equipment for sliding a lock bolt back: the stiff cellophane sheet that stuck Gillette stainless steel blades to their display backing, the see-through cartons that toothbrushes are sold in. He had neither new blades nor toothbrush. He found a substitute. There was a plastic folder for the hotel services with pages inside listing tours, shops, and places of interest in the area. The loose pages were wrapped in a stiff plastic sheet. He didn’t even have a penknife. He broke off a piece by bending it along an edge, back and forth a score of times. He then had a section three inches by one. He moved quickly out of the room.

  The corridor was deserted. The cleaners would certainly be finished for the day and he would hear the sound of the lift well before it reached this floor. He moved down to Room 403.

  It took two minutes to position the plastic sheet and start the bolt moving back. He heard the click, and the door unlocked. He listened for a moment. No sound from the lift. He entered the room.

  The first thing he saw was the door to the adjoining room, open. The men had a suite. It took him ten minutes to do a thorough search and draw a blank. No notes, no scribbles on phone pads. Nothing.

  He sat on a bed for the moment and had a think. Then he got up, pulled the phone as near to the door as its cord would allow, put it on the floor and went out, pulling the door to, but not closing it. He quickly returned to his own room. He was short of time. He calculated the minimum they would spend on tea was half an hour. He picked up the phone in his room and dialled Room 403. Then he dropped the phone on his bed and hurriedly made his way back to Room 403. He went to the ringing phone on the floor, picked it up and put it down on the bedside table. Then he took out a box of matches and broke a match in half. Holding one of the prongs of the phone in one hand he pressed the broken matchstick down the gap between the other prong and the plastic shell of the phone, jamming the prong solid in an upright position. Then very carefully, he replaced the receiver on the prongs. He had now manufactured a bugging device between his room and the room of Feeny and his companion. Everything they said would go through their telephone and be heard on his phone, up to the moment when they tried to make a call out. Then they would either discover the jammed prongs or think the phone had broken down. He walked out of Room 403 and closed the door.

  They took an hour over afternoon tea. Ewing lay on his bed reading a Country Life that had been left in the room, phone cupped to his ear. He heard their door open and they came into their suite. They were arguing. Their voices were Southern Irish. Then the argument lapsed for a moment while they discu
ssed what they were going to do. One suggested returning to London; the other said they must wait it out — obviously the Ewing feller would turn up. The other said he doubted it — Ewing had seen he was being followed and had given them the slip because he wanted to avoid them, and so wouldn’t come back to the hotel.

  ‘Then what in Christ is it?’ the lower of the two voices demanded.

  ‘I’m telling you, we phone Kavanagh and Parrish, then back to London – ‘

  ‘I don’t want to talk to the Broker. I don’t want his advice about anything. I don’t think he’s a patriot. I don’t trust him.’