The Hireling's Tale

by Jo Bannister

  ‘I think,’ said Donovan heavily, ‘that my Superintendent’s in hospital, there’s a replacement due this morning and my Inspector wanted me out of the way for a few hours while she gets him broken in. I think if you hadn’t called she’d have found some other fool’s errand to send me on.’

  Maddie nodded, a terse, jerky little movement. Watching the road, Donovan couldn’t see the bitter disappointment on her face, but he heard it in her voice. ‘At least we know where we stand. You think I’m a liar, I think you’re a fool. The difference is, if you’re right I still won’t get you killed.’

  That caught his attention. His eyes flicked sideways at her, surprised. If it was an act it was a good one. ‘I didn’t say I don’t believe you. I don’t know anything about you - well, nearly nothing. I don’t know what you have to say. I’m not going to interview you in the car because that’s not how it’s done. For all I know you could be a suspect by now: I could banjax the entire investigation by chatting away to you just to pass the time. You’re going to have to be patient, Maddie. DI Graham will hang on every word you have to say. Me, I’m just the chauffeur.’

  She wasn’t mollified, but she was damned if she was going to beg him to interrogate her. It wasn’t even that she was desperate to tell the story. She just didn’t appreciate being treated like a package. She didn’t let clients treat her like an inanimate object, didn’t see why she should put up with it from an officer of the law. She paid her taxes. Well, some of them.

  The real reason she was angry with him was, of course, that she was afraid. Fear is disabling; anger empowers. It made her feel less helpless to be angry with someone and Donovan was handy.

  A mile further on she said, ‘Was it you went to my house?’

  He saw no reason to lie but was obscurely uncomfortable about admitting it. ‘Some of the girls thought you might be in trouble. After what happened to - Linda?’

  ‘Linda Collins,’ she nodded, ‘we shared a flat when I lived in Cambridge.’

  ‘She was’ - he hesitated how to put this - ‘in the same line of business?’

  Maddie nodded. ‘It made sense to live together. It was a bit of mutual support and protection, and it meant we weren’t annoying two other flatmates. I came to Castlemere when my grandmother died and left me her house.’

  Donovan gave a grim chuckle. ‘Must have gone down a bundle with the neighbours: swapping a little old lady for …’ He ground to an embarrassed halt.

  Maddie’s laugh was brittle. ‘I’m a prostitute, Sergeant. Don’t let the word bother you, it doesn’t bother me. It’s an accurate description of what I do. Or a tom, or a hooker. Call-girl’s rather nineteen-sixties, and I have to say I find whore a bit vulgar. Prostitute will do nicely.’

  After a moment he said, ‘You’re not what I was expecting.’

  She looked at the sprigged cotton dress and shrugged. ‘This isn’t my working gear. I could be what you were expecting. I can be just about anything.’

  ‘Why do you do it?’

  ‘Why are you a policeman?’ she retorted instantly.

  Donovan frowned, unsure if she meant it as an insult. ‘I suppose, because it interests me and I’m some good at it.’

  ‘That’s why I’m a prostitute.’

  ‘But—’ It was: it was an insult. But it was a long drive back, he didn’t want to spend it arguing with her. He fell silent.

  She finished the thought for him. ‘But … I let men I don’t know inside me? That’s not what sets me apart from other girls, Sergeant Donovan, it’s the fact that I do it for money. How often have you taken a girl back to your place the night you met? Did you think it was love every time? Me and my clients don’t even pretend. They don’t take me to expensive restaurants, they give me the cash instead. I happen to think it’s more honest that way.’

  In fact she was talking to the wrong man. Donovan wasn’t celibate either by nature or design, but the combination of a demanding job and a personality that did not encourage casual friendships meant that he had about as many one-night stands as the Singing Nun. But he took her point. ‘It’s still a hell of a risky job.’

  ‘More than yours? Yes, I’ve been knocked about. I bet you have too. Since I learned the ropes there are certain individuals, and certain types of individual, I don’t do business with any more. I bet that’s a luxury you don’t enjoy. Even when you’re a superintendent with a flash car of your own you’ll still be vulnerable to a bullet in the back because you haven’t the right to say there are some jobs and some people it’s just too dangerous to deal with.’

  Again she’d misjudged him. Donovan would never be a superintendent. Barring a major change of policy at the top, Donovan would never be an inspector. Not because he wasn’t up to it and not because he didn’t deserve it, but because he wasn’t The Right Type. Liz Graham was The Right Type. Oddly enough, Frank Shapiro wasn’t, but at least he’d never been as aggressively The Wrong Type as Donovan. Superintendent Hilton wasn’t the only member of the police hierarchy who remembered him as the surliest detective constable in the history of the force, and had never updated that image in light of subsequent successes.

  He gave a dour sniff. ‘That’s how you see me? As a different kind of prostitute?’

  Maddie nodded negligently. ‘Pretty much. Look, if you don’t like the word, call us hirelings. You’re a body for hire, same as I am. Look what you’re doing here. You’re putting yourself at risk because I’m in danger. You’re not doing it for love, or because you think I’m such a special human being I must be preserved at all cost. But if somebody comes after me with a knife, or a gun, you won’t even ask yourself if I’m worth it. You’ll do what your Superintendent did - protect me, even if it means getting hurt yourself. Because it’s your job. Because you’re paid to.’

  His mouth opened and shut a couple of times before he was forced to concede that, in a particular narrow sense at least, she was right. He wouldn’t go on doing this if they stopped paying him. It was a job: he took a pride in doing it well, but not always in what he had to do. That was the nature of the thing: you took the rough with the smooth, the boring with the hair-raising, the plainly right and important along with those things you only did because someone higher up had decided you should. He’d done a lot of things he’d taken no particular pleasure in, and a few he was ashamed of. He’d done them because it was his job. He consoled himself with the thought that handling whatever came along was the mark of a professional. He hadn’t thought till now that such was also the prostitute’s creed.

  ‘Hireling,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve been called worse.’

  Even among the new generation of computer-literate policemen Detective Inspector Colwyn was a class act. He was as familiar with the workings of the Police National Computer as Liz was with the contents of her own desk. He took Philip Kendall’s list of delegates and started passing the names through successive databases, collecting information as he went.

  By mid-morning he had reduced forty-odd men to a shortlist of five. Before he went any further he made a hard copy on the printer. He might be able to explain to DI Graham what the icons on the screen meant, but Superintendent Hilton would be a pieces-of-paper man to the end of his career.

  ‘If we accept Maddie Cotterick’s word that she can link the girl’s death to the attempts on Kendall’s life,’ said Colwyn, ‘then we can make certain inferences about the person responsible. He’s a man who can call up first-class help at short notice, which means he has money or connections or both. He’s from out of town, or he’d have taken more trouble disposing of the girl’s body.’

  ‘Which all points to one of the overseas delegates at the Bespoke Engineering conference,’ said Hilton. ‘He killed a prostitute then hired someone to tidy up the mess. This Maddie girl thinks he wants her dead because of what she knows. If he also wants Kendall dead, that suggests he knows something too.’

  Liz refrained from saying that she’d reached that conclusion before he even arrived in Castlemer
e.

  ‘With this in mind,’ Colwyn went on hurriedly, ‘I correlated information on everyone on the list, and discarded off the bottom those without that kind of influence or any kind of a track record. There’s a mid-range of men who could cover up a murder in a foreign country but aren’t likely to have committed one in the first place. And what rose to the top are five men who look like reasonable suspects.

  ‘They have certain features in common. They’re all foreign nationals. One of them was representing his government, the others are executive directors of private companies. All are wealthy men by any standards, and could additionally call on the resources of their state or company. Any of these five could afford the services of a top-flight assassin.’

  He’d printed three copies of his research, one for each of them. He studied his own primarily, Liz thought, to give her and Hilton time to catch up.

  Kim Il Muk managed a petroleum refinery in Pusan, South Korea. Four years earlier the under-housekeeper of a Paris hotel had accused him of attempted rape. The Paris police had it down as a misunderstanding due to lack of a common language. Mr Kim apologized through an interpreter and was released with a caution. He was a man of about forty-five.

  Ian Selkirk’s father owned a shrimping fleet, a cannery and most of a village in Yucatan. Selkirk, who was thirty-two, was known to be handy with his fists, and on one occasion with a baling hook. There were also suspicions that the shrimp-boats had been smuggling drugs into the United States, and that the death of a Federal investigator was linked to that. The FBI were still looking for proof.

  Nicu Sibiu and his brothers ran the family munitions business in Romania. Twice during the civil unrest they used the finished product to defend the factory against angry mobs and Nicu, then in his late teens, was known to have shot a protestor dead. In view of the general chaos of the times, no action was taken to establish the legitimacy of this act.

  Eduardo da Costa was in the arms procurement office of the Brazilian defence ministry. He was forty-three, a former soldier who reached the rank of colonel before taking his current position two years ago. His military career had been dogged by allegations of brutality.

  Ibn al Siddiq was a minor member of the extensive Saudi royal family; he owned oil wells and racehorses. He’d had a distinguished career in the Saudi air force. The black mark against his name concerned the ill-treatment by one of the Siddiq wives of an African maid who travelled to London with the family. To avoid a diplomatic incident Siddiq paid the girl off and sent his wife home. Prince Ibn was in his early thirties and lived with his wives and children in a small palace outside Dhahran.

  ‘As well as being able to deal with the consequences,’ Colwyn continued, ‘these five have some history of violence; except for the Saudi, who was covering up for his wife. I wasn’t sure whether to include him or not.’

  Hilton was running a jaundiced eye down his sheet. ‘Are these names in any particular order?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Colwyn slowly. ‘Likeliest first; but don’t put too much weight on that. Is a man who may have tried to rape a girl, but just might have misunderstood the signals he was getting, more or less likely to have murdered a prostitute than someone with a reputation as a thug in his country’s military? I don’t know. Anyway, favourites don’t win every race. These five men are more fanciable than the other forty-three at the conference, but it’s still possible the killer is a rank outsider.’

  ‘We have to start somewhere,’ said Liz supportively. ‘It looks to me our best bet is to find these five and try to rule out four of them.’

  Colwyn gave an eloquent shrug. ‘Ideally, yes; in practice, I doubt if we can. Only two are still in the hotel; the others have already left the country and gone back to places where we can’t count on the cooperation of the local police. The man who killed that girl believes he’ll be safe once he’s home: he was probably airborne before the body was even found.’

  ‘You’re saying the job’s impossible,’ Liz said baldly. She’d toyed with the notion herself, but she still didn’t like the taste of it in her mouth.

  ‘Not impossible, no. We may be able to identify the killer. But unless he returns to this country at some juncture, that’s probably all we can do.’

  ‘But if we can’t arrest the principal, how do we stop the mechanic who’s cleaning up after him?’

  DI Colwyn had a round, open face on which deception sat uneasily. ‘I’m not sure we can. I think the mechanic’ll do what he’s been paid to do.’

  ‘Kill Philip Kendall. And possibly Maddie Cotterick.’

  Hilton took a deep breath. ‘All right, so it’s going to be uphill work. But we can’t just decide it’s too difficult and not bother. Maybe the man who hired him can recall the assassin if it’s in his interests to do so. We have to give him an incentive. Nobody’s fireproof: the back-home interests who were happy to protect him while his identity was a mystery might be reluctant to go on helping someone who’s been publicly named as a murder suspect.’

  Liz elevated an eyebrow. ‘Can we do that? With a foreign national who may be here representing his government? Won’t the Foreign Office have something to say about it?’

  ‘The Foreign Office,’ said Hilton heavily, ‘can only comment on what they hear about. You gave me a lesson on keeping secrets earlier today, Inspector Graham. Now let’s see if the three of us can keep this one.’

  For perhaps the first time, Liz saw clearly what Edwin Hilton brought to the job that was worth a detective superintendent’s salary. It wasn’t charm or an affable manner, it wasn’t the sort of intuition that had got her out of some tight corners or the deep perceptive understanding of the human condition that was the secret of Frank Shapiro’s success. It was moral courage. Her respect for him rocketed. He just might cost the three of them their careers, but it was the right thing to do and she saluted him for it.

  ‘We still have to pin the tail on the donkey first,’ said Hilton. ‘One of these five men is probably a murderer. Finding out which one is still the name of the game.

  ‘Inspector Graham, get on to the hotel, have those five rooms emptied and sealed. Get SOCO back there. He’s looking for physical traces - fingerprints, a hair in the plughole, a tissue in the bin - that we can match to samples taken from Mrs Atwood’s room. That’ll tell us who we’re dealing with even if we can’t get at him. Meantime I’ll call in some favours at Scotland Yard. They may be able to bring some pressure to bear. Have you had any experience of them, Mrs Graham? - they’re a devious bunch of so-and-sos. They’ve a specialist in every imaginable discipline. I dare say they’ve got a whole desk devoted to Making Foreign Dignitaries Amenable.’

  He turned again to DI Colwyn. ‘James, you stay on the computer. Find out where those five men are now - what flights they took, if they went straight home. If we get a name, and it turns out he felt safe enough just getting out of Britain, instead of going straight home he thought he’d do a bit of shopping in Paris or Berlin first, he may not be beyond our grasp yet.’

  Chapter Six

  It was after ten and the roads were full of lorries: long distance, short haul, artics and rigids. For once Donovan was glad to see every one of them. Partly this was because, with a wheel at each corner himself, their immodest slipstream caused him no problems today; but mainly it was because, if Maddie Cotterick was right and still despite all their precautions someone had followed them, he’d have equipped himself with something more manoeuvrable than a 36-ton bulk carrier.

  He felt safe ignoring anything that needed two minutes’ notice to turn, confined himself to registering the cars around him. There weren’t that many of them: most of the traffic was travelling the other way, heading for the coast. There was a white saloon ahead, a navy-blue hatchback a little way behind, a charcoal-grey Porsche bombing up the outside lane. He kept an eye on the Porsche until it passed, but it showed no interest in him, continued on its urgent, throaty, illegal way until it disappeared into the distance.

  He found
himself closing on the white saloon. He waited his moment, then accelerated past. He thought that, if he was allowed to, he could quite get used to driving a Jaguar. He watched the saloon in his mirror but it didn’t speed up to keep pace with him. Soon enough it dropped out of sight.

  Beside him Maddie had slumped in an inelegant collapse, arms folded tightly across her chest as if she was cold. A glance at her face showed her thoughts turned inwards, gnawing at her. While there had been things to do - setting up the meeting, vetting him, marking his card - she had been able to avoid dwelling too long on why she thought it was all necessary. Now they were on their way back she had nothing to do but think. From the tense little frown between her brows and the way she was chewing on the inside of her lip, her thoughts gave her no comfort.

  Donovan was looking for something to say to cheer her up - and since he had never made cheering people his mission in life he had no ready stock of suitable remarks - when she broke the silence herself. He thought she was saying aloud what she’d been worrying about for some time.

  ‘What I said before, about you risking your neck to protect me. Was I kidding myself?’

  Taken aback, Donovan barked a little laugh. Then he shook his head. ‘No. That’s the job, it’s what we do. But only when it comes to that, and thank Christ it doesn’t very often. Mostly what policing is about is just being there. For every fight we have to break up, we prevent an awful lot just by being around. But if you’re worried I’ll run out on you if the going gets rough, forget it. I won’t let anything happen to you.’

  ‘That’s easy to say when you’re not facing a man with a gun!’

  ‘I’ve faced men with guns before,’ said Donovan, with a studied nonchalance that was more transparent than he probably supposed.