Cry of the Needle

by Radford, Roger

The rain began to beat against his car even more vehemently as Jonathan Tring skidded to a halt outside the cottage, a lone sentinel in the middle of Cambridgeshire’s brooding fens. The heavy skies were already beginning to darken as dusk approached, adding an air of the surreal to a location that was already famous for its witches, warlocks and other whimsies.

  The wait for this moment had been almost unbearable for Tring. More than a week had passed since he had first tried to contact Derek Sutton, the erstwhile director of science at KleinKinloss. Abe Klein’s comb through company records had discovered quite quickly that it was Sutton who had made an inordinate number of direct phone calls, three hundred and sixty-seven to be precise, to either the home or office of his opposite number at Parados Pharmaceuticals. The calls between Sutton and Martin Locke had begun seventeen months earlier, and it was reasonable to assume that this coincided with the beginning of the liaison that was cruelly cut short by Locke’s untimely death. Eager to quiz Sutton, the professor had immediately telephoned his fellow scientist, only to be told by his housekeeper that he was on holiday in Thailand. Sutton had probably been in the arms of some lady-boy in the back streets of Bangkok while the fate of his former employers had hung in the balance. Nevertheless, all that had changed yesterday, when the inebriate had welcomed Tring’s request for them to meet.

  When Tring had informed Fiona Harrington of his intended visit, she had barely contained her excitement. She’d wanted to accompany him, and it had taken all his powers of persuasion to convince her that he should act alone. If certain scientific papers were involved, then only he would be able to understand their relevance. As luck would have it, her parents’ farm was less than twenty miles away, and he had arranged to meet her there after his meeting with Sutton. She had already retreated there anyway in order to free herself of the pressure from an increasingly agitated Sharon Proctor.

  As Tring rang the doorbell, he just hoped the old man was sober enough to be coherent. ‘Hold on, I’m coming,’ slurred a voice beyond the door. ‘Just putting my slippers on.’

  Rain dripping from the lintel bathed Tring’s face as he waited patiently for Sutton to let him in. When the door finally opened, the professor gasped at the sight before him. The old man was in his pyjamas. They were grubby and soiled, although pristine by comparison to a face that was a mass of red blotches. The hooked, purple-veined nose was almost incandescent, and the beady eyes rheumy and baleful. The Thai lady-boys probably hadn’t cared as long as the old man’s money was good. Sutton’s shock of white hair looked as if he had plugged himself into the nearest socket. In his right hand he held the requisite brandy glass. It was empty.

  ‘Come in my friend,’ Sutton gushed, ‘come in. Hic.’

  ‘My God, you’re in a state, Mr Sutton,’ said Tring, entering premises that were clearly in need of renewed attention from the old boy’s housekeeper. Tables and chairs lay on their sides, pillows and cushions lay scattered like confetti, and the haberdashery was grubby and torn.

  ‘Excuse the mess, excuse the mess,’ Sutton repeated contritely. ‘My housekeeper only comes Tuesdays. I haven’t been feeling too well lately. How about a little drink? I’m sure you’ll join me in a brandy, mister, er …’

  ‘Baker – no, thanks.’

  ‘Baker,’ Sutton mumbled, and shuffled unsteadily towards a drinks cabinet that was already open. Bottles, most of them empty, stood gloomily on the opened shelf. Others lay on the floor where they had keeled over. Tring thought his host was about to do the same. ‘Are you sure you’re okay, Mr Sutton?’ he asked with genuine concern.

  ‘Call me Derek.’ Sutton hiccupped again as he poured himself a further large draught of Cognac. ‘Ah, this is the staff of life,’ the older man enthused, and downed the potion in one gulp. ‘That’s better, now what can I do you for?’

  ‘As I told you on the phone, I’m a private investigator searching for the truth about your partner’s death.’

  Sutton slumped into an armchair. ‘He was murdered, you know,’ he said balefully, ‘although you’ll never prove it.’

  ‘The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. That fuck Proctor was too clever for the police. Listen, my friend, if you want to get rid of someone cleanly, call in a calculating chemist from Castleford.’ Sutton began to giggle. ‘Hey, that’s what they call an allit –, an allit –’

  ‘Alliteration.’

  ‘Yeah, couldn’t think of it for a mo’.’

  ‘So what makes you believe Proctor had him killed?’

  ‘Martin had something on that ugly bastard. He told me as much just before he died.’

  ‘But he didn’t give you any details.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Try to think, Derek,’ Tring said forlornly. It was the clear the man was in no state to exercise a brain addled by years of alcohol abuse.

  Sutton stared morosely at his brandy glass. ‘He was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ he said with a melancholy that threatened to engulf him. ‘I even went on the wagon.’

  ‘Surely if you lived together, he must have given you a few clues.’ Tring could sense the desperation in his own voice.

  ‘We never lived together.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We had a relationship, but we didn’t live together. We both wanted it that way. We kept our relationship secret.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’

  ‘I couldn’t come out of the closet. That Scotch shit Kinloss would have crucified me. Now it doesn’t matter anymore.’

  Tring felt the icy fingers of disappointment knot his stomach. The shell that was before him was proving useless. ‘Think, man,’ he ordered with more than a hint of desperation, ‘did Locke leave you anything? Did he send you anything before he died?’

  ‘I don’t remember, old boy. Hic. Are you sure you don’t want a brandy?’

  ‘Surely he must have left you something in his will?’

  ‘A cousin of his got the lot,’ Sutton said without rancour. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway.’

  ‘Shit,’ Tring muttered under his breath. Sutton looked like being a waste of time.

  ‘Nice chap, his cousin. Knew Martin and I were into jazz, so he gave me all the CDs and cassettes. Said he couldn’t stand jazz himself. I had my housekeeper stack them all in that display cabinet over there. Haven’t even gone near them, though. Music doesn’t matter anymore.’ With this, Sutton picked up the bottle of brandy and seemed to down half of it in one long gulp.

  God, what was the man raving on about, thought Tring. The professor didn’t know why he moved over to the display. Perhaps it was just a natural inquisitiveness; the sort of thing one does when one enters the home of stranger, such as looking at photographs on the mantelpiece or perusing a bookshelf. He ran his eye almost peremptorily over the spines of the cassette boxes. There were three or four Charlie Parkers, a few Dizzy Gillespies and some Duke Ellingtons that immediately caught his eye. Some of the spines had writing on them. They obviously contained cassette copies of originals. Most of them were of musicians he’d never heard of. Tring was just about to turn away when the spine of a box near the bottom of the rack caught his attention. Written on it were the names ‘Proctor & Sellars’ His first instinct was to think what a coincidence it was that there was a jazz musician who had the same name as his tone-deaf boss. Then Tring’s heart skipped a beat as the enormity of his discovery suddenly hit home. Stephen Sellars must be none other than the Secretary of State for Health.

  The sound of alcohol-induced snoring suddenly punctured the professor’s thrill of expectation. He looked round to see Sutton spark out in his armchair. He withdrew the cassette case and opened it. Inside was a min-cassette, the type used in a portable Dictaphone he always carried in his car, just in case he might come up with some inspirational new formula. Tring walked over to the old man, gently released the empty bottle from his grasp and straightened his head a little to make him more com
fortable. ‘God bless you, you old sop,’ he muttered kindly, and quietly let himself out.

  As Jonathan Tring reversed out of Sutton’s driveway, furthest from his mind was the notion that his sleek company Mercedes SLK might host a tracking device and be wired for sound, or that his every move was being surveyed by a variety of people who did not have his best interests at heart.

  ‘Bob, you and Trevor go into the house and grill them. Maximum coercion, minimum force. I don’t want it messy unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ The voice of Jack Proctor boomed out its order to the occupants of one of two vehicles containing his henchmen. Meanwhile, the chairman himself continued to keep his Roller at a discreet distance from Tring’s car, reassured by the ping-ping of the tracker and its on-board display module. Directly behind the Yorkshireman’s Rolls-Royce was an altogether different car, one more suited to pursuit along twisting country roads. The latest Porsche 911 was as mean as the men inside it. They were Jack Proctor’s personal bodyguards, paid to cater to the chairman’s whim when it came to matters of persuasion. The aptly named Bill and Ben were two Cockney ex-pugilists whose loyalty was in direct proportion to their salaries, and they were paid very well indeed.

  ‘You got the fix on him okay, Bill?’ said Proctor.

  ‘Yes, boss, mile ahead, straight.’

  Proctor then turned his attention elsewhere. ‘Ian, let me know as soon as you find out anything,’ he told the man who was just about to press the doorbell of Derek Sutton’s home. Mobile phone conferencing was a truly wonderful thing.

  ‘They’re not answering,’ said the man named Ian after a few seconds. ‘We’ll have to force entry. Shouldn’t be too hard.’

  Proctor heard a crash and what seemed like the splintering of wood, then, after a few more seconds, a staccato of slapping sounds.

  ‘The man’s drunk, boss, paralytic. I can’t even get him to wake up.’

  ‘Shit,’ Proctor cursed, ‘stay with him until he sobers up. Look around and see if you can find out anything about him from his papers.’

  At that moment, Proctor came within range of picking up the microphone in Tring’s car. He was surprised at suddenly hearing his own voice. ‘I’m going off air for a few minutes,’ he screamed at his minions, and switched off his mobile in order to concentrate.

  PROCTOR: ..put the word in with the agency, Stephen?

  SELLARS: Are you sure it’s safe to talk, Jack?

  PROCTOR: Safe as aspirin (loud laugh).

  SELLARS: They’ll pass it, don’t you worry. Just don’t let there be another fuck-up like Triamerol.

  PROCTOR: You worry too much, Stephen. They’ll never get us to court on that one. Anyway, as far as the agency’s concerned, the new drug’ll be okay. No comebacks, don’t you worry, my lad.

  SELLARS: Did you, er, make the payment?

  PROCTOR: You’ll be a much richer man by Thursday.

  SELLARS: I don’t like talking about it.

  PROCTOR: But you like getting it.

  SELLARS: I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Jack.

  PROCTOR: We both know you can’t live on a ministerial salary today, Stephen. Every man has his price. You’re just more expensive than most, that’s all.

  SELLARS (nervous): Must go, Jack. Another call.

  PROCTOR: Give my regards to the gnomes in Zurich, Stephen (loud laugh).

  For the first time in his life, Jack Proctor felt naked, exposed. His jowls quivered as the rage within him began to mount. He had been betrayed, by who did not matter – for now. He had to have that recording, at any price. He was just about to send in his dogs when he heard the sound of Tring’s voice.

  TRING: Hello, Fiona.

  FIONA: Jonathan, how goes it?

  TRING: Jackpot!

  FIONA: What do you mean?

  TRING: Locke sent Sutton a tape. It’s damning.

  FIONA: For God’s sake tell me, will you.

  TRING: Jack Proctor and Stephen Sellars.

  FIONA: I knew it!

  TRING: Proctor bribed Sellars to influence the Medical Controls Agency. Stay on the line and I’ll play you the tape.

  An unalloyed expression of horror crossed Proctor's face. ‘Fuck those bastards!’ he screamed to the roof of his Rolls. He quickly dialled his heavies. ‘Bill,’ he growled, ‘move in now. He’s got a cassette tape I want. Make it look like an accident.’ The chairman slowed slightly as the Porsche sped by him. ‘Make it good, lads, make it good.’

  Jonathan Tring had just concluded his conversation with Fiona and switched off his hands-free mobile when he noticed the lights of a car behind him. It was almost eerie that he had driven thus far without seeing another vehicle. Not that it surprised him much, for the night was so bleak that anyone in his or her right mind would be tucked up in front of the television with a hot totty of rum. The monotonous tone of the wipers accentuated the brooding loneliness of driving across the Fens. If anything, the rain was lashing down even harder. The replay of the conversation ended quickly, and Fiona’s excited voice came through loud and clear.

  ‘Fantastic, darling! We’ve finally got them. How long will it take you to get here?’

  ‘Half-an-hour, probably. The weather’s crap, and I don’t want to drive too fast along these winding lanes.’

  ‘I’ll have a whisky mac waiting for you.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell you the full story when I get there. Bye, love.

  ‘Bye – oh, Jonathan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Everything’s okay, I promise.’

  ‘I’ll play the recording over to my answer phone at work as soon as you arrive.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ll make a few copies, just in case. I’d love to see Proctor’s face when he reads about this in your paper and hears his voice on the ten o’clock news.

  ‘Jonathan?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too. You know that.’

  ‘Bye, darling.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Tring switched off his mobile, and with the vision of his lover in his mind, stepped a little more firmly on the accelerator. The Mercedes glided around a bend and for a brief moment the following headlights disappeared. When they next came in sight, he was startled to see the car right up his backside. The headlights were then flashed continuously, not something somebody would do if he wanted to overtake. Tring’s first instinct was to believe it might be a police car, so he slowed. But then fear gripped the pit of his stomach. What if Proctor were on to him? He didn’t know what made him do it, but he ejected the cassette, leaned forward and placed it in his sock just above the left ankle. He then switched to full headlights and gunned the SLK forward.

  Jack Proctor could only watch in dismay as the tracker signal indicated his prey was speeding up. The urgent voice of his Cockney henchman cut through on the mobile. ‘He’s taken off like a fuckin’ bat out o’ hell, boss.’

  ‘Catch him, you fools. Don’t let him get away or you’re both fucking history.’

  With this, Proctor, too, began to accelerate, although the Rolls was soon complaining about the sharpness of some of the bends. Normally cool under pressure and self-reliant, the Yorkshireman began feeling the twinge of fear that came whenever he delegated responsibility to others. Failure could mean the collapse of his empire, everything that he had worked for all his life. Various rationalisations flooded his mind. Firstly, Tring had to be stopped at all costs. Fiona Harrington had heard the incriminating evidence, but she had no case without that tape. That shit Locke had sold him down the river. The irony was that he had had nothing to do with the man’s death. Who knew what demons had possessed him to top himself, but it was unlikely to have involved money, for Locke would have known the value of that tape to his ex-boss. Then again, some people were incapable of blackmail. They just didn’t have the bottle. He also knew that he would be pissing in the wind if he tried to negotiate a deal with the likes of Tring and Fiona Harrington. Investiga
tive reporters were single-minded buggers who would sell their souls for a scoop, and, anyway, his chief scientist was besotted with the girl.

  The chairman of Parados Pharmaceuticals also knew that if the tape saw the light of day, it would be the end of his marriage. He was under no illusion that Sharon would abandon him as soon as there was a sniff of ruination in the air. His Southern Belle could be as manipulative and as ruthless as anyone in business, but she would never countenance corruption of a government minister, or for that fact, murder.

  ‘Bastards,’ Jack Proctor growled, ‘they’re all bastards.’

  Jonathan Tring felt his heart pounding as he negotiated the next bend at high speed. He couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the road ahead for a fraction of a second, and if he took a hand off the wheel in order to dial Fiona, or 999, he might lose control.

  ‘Jesus!’ he screamed as he swerved to narrowly avoid a pair of glowing animal eyes that came up on him like a hazard in an arcade game. Dammit, he was a rugby player, not a Grand Prix driver. And it wasn’t a Sony Playstation he was driving, either.

  The lane was so narrow that Tring felt that unless his pursuers intended to blow him off the road with shotguns, they couldn’t hope to force him to a halt. The question was how long he could keep up this speed, and also how far it would be before the road might widen and present them with an overtaking opportunity. He didn’t know this countryside that well, and for the first time it dawned on him that he had lost all sense of direction.

  He’d probably already missed the turn that would take him to Fiona’s. Then again, she would be the last person he would endanger, and to expect a police car to suddenly appear and come to his rescue was the stuff of fiction. For the first time he felt a fear that was almost sickening in its intensity.

  With thoughts of doom racing through his mind, the professor fought to regain his concentration. Raindrops were now pounding on his windscreen like demented hobgoblins with pickaxes. There was no way he could keep this up for much longer. Mesmerised by the brooding black shapes of the hedgerows flashing past him, it was a good half-minute before he realised that the lights behind him had disappeared. The scientist could scarcely believe that he was alone again. He drove on for a few more seconds at about sixty miles an hour, before slowing down to about forty. His whole body gradually began to relax. The nerve endings that had hitherto tingled with adrenaline began to suffuse him with warmth that was as debilitating as it was comforting. Totally spent, he suddenly became aware of the damp caused by his sweat on the leather seat.