‘You bleedin’ bugger!’ a thin whining voice had shrieked, so high in tone and so loudly that it was clear even above the roar of the machinery. ‘You bleedin’ bastards, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you –’
Lenny had come up from the basement to join in the hubbub and hurled himself at the two men. As George came out of her hiding place, she blinked, realizing there was more light in the building now; the small door had been opened and the late afternoon sunshine was pouring in in a long wide tranche, and, amazingly, the two men had been caught in it.
They went down together under Lenny’s frantic impact, crashing loudly as they hit the ground, and she pulled on the only leg she could reach, as hard as she could, and had the grim satisfaction of hearing a shriek of pain; but whether it was pain she had inflicted or Lenny had, she did not know.
Because she didn’t stop to find out. She was up on her feet and running for the open door as fast as she could. There was someone standing there, peering in, and as she reached it he spoke loudly and truculently in an attempt to hide his obvious fear.
‘What the ’ell are you doin’ in there? This place is supposed to be shut up! Who’s bin meddlin’ with the machinery? I could ’ear it clean acrorst the street.’
‘Police,’ she managed to gasp. ‘For Christ’s sake get the police.’ She stood holding on to the doorframe struggling for breath, for suddenly her body refused to do another thing she asked of it. She couldn’t walk, could barely stand, certainly couldn’t run; it was all she could do to get the words out. But when the man did nothing but stand and gape at her – she could see who it was now, the old man, Bert, the foreman, who had checked in Maureen’s goods the first time George had come to this place – she managed to find a last blast of energy to speak again.
‘Get the police, you idiot!’ she shrieked. ‘Police!’ And then tumbled out through the door to lean against the wall in the sunshine, sobbing for breath and resting her head back with her eyes tightly shut. Even if Salmon and Lester came out of the door now, looking for her, reaching for her, she wouldn’t be able to move, she thought in a confused way. I’d just stand here and let them do what they liked. It’s like being paralysed. Oh, God, let me breathe…
Out across the yard sounds reached her. After a long moment she managed to open her eyes to squint into the brightness of the sun and see what was happening. There by the entrance gate two or three people were standing and looking in; passers-by attracted by the noise she had made, she thought blurrily, and as she looked at them and then around her, she realized Bert had vanished. Inside the building? There was nowhere else he could have gone in the time and she managed to call in a croak, ‘Someone get the police.’
One of the people at the gate, a thin boy pushing a bike, leaned the machine against the ironwork and came across the yard towards her. ‘Someone’s rung 999,’ he said, his eyes wide with fear and self-importance, as he peered over her shoulder in through the open door. ‘They run off to do it as soon as you – Oh.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘There, you see? You only ’as to ask.’
The blue light revolving hysterically on the roof of the car was, George decided as she closed her eyes again, the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
They went belting into the building almost before the car had stopped, leaving just one uniformed man outside with her. ‘Where?’ one of them had called to her and she had managed to jerk her head over her shoulder. Now she made a conscious effort to breathe more normally and opened her eyes to look at the policeman who was standing with one hand on her shoulder as he talked into his intercom.
‘Ambulance on the way,’ he said as he shoved it back into its shoulder holder. ‘You don’t look too good and they’ll sort you out!’ He peered down at her. ‘Here, don’t I know you?’
‘You might,’ she said huskily. ‘Pathologist. Listen, is –’
The noise stopped her from saying more. Sirens blaring, two more cars arrived and pulled right into the yard. Out of the first of them came Mike and she lifted her chin at the sight of him and to her own rage burst into tears. The constable standing beside her made a clucking sound and took her firmly by the elbow and led her to Mike’s car.
‘You’d better sit down, Miss,’ he said. ‘Doctor, I mean. You don’t look right at all. What’s going on in there? Can you tell me?’
‘Mike,’ George said. She managed to sniff hard and stop crying. ‘Sorry. Listen, Lenny’s in there and they’re after him and they tried to get me, but I ran for it when Lenny came up as well and –’
‘No need to explain,’ Mike said. ‘They won’t be in there much longer. Got the world and his wife here now.’
She looked over his shoulder and then at last was able to take a deep breath instead of panting and felt her legs dissolve into jelly beneath her. She sat down hard on the back seat of Mike’s car as more policemen arrived and went running into the building. Mike crouched on the tarmac in front of her and looked up into her face.
‘Will ye be all right if I’m away to see what’s happening?’ he said ‘I’ll not leave you if –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, go in and get the sons of bitches!’ she cried. ‘And take care of Lenny. I think they were going to push him through that godawful machine too.’
‘I’ll no’ be long,’ he said and was gone. She found a little section of her mind with which to be amused. He was like a small boy at a party, aching to get in there with all the others. She leaned her head against the side of the car waiting to feel better. This adrenaline reaction will wear off soon, her medical self lectured her jelly-legged one. Just be patient. Soon.
Perhaps she dozed off for a second or two in the middle of all the hubbub; for now even more cars had arrived so that the whole yard seemed to be full of them. She couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that she opened her eyes and there he was, in front of her, crouching on the tarmac just as Mike had done and peering up at her with his dark eyes glittering with anxiety. She reached out and held on tightly.
‘Oh, Gus,’ she said. ‘Oh, Gus, I think I’ve managed to finish my Connections chart!’
35
By the time they had taken the two men in custody, gone through the ritual of cautions, interviews, statements and all the rest of it, and got the warrants for the arrests of the others – Mickey Harlow and Connie, and the woman in the pharmacy at St Dymphna’s – it was almost one in the morning. Bob Salmon, in the hope of getting off more lightly if he turned Queen’s evidence, had been only too happy to name the woman as the inside partner in the obtaining of medical drugs for smuggling, as well as their source of sedating drugs for the people Lester had killed; ‘and it was all down to Lester,’ Salmon had cried, literally, with tears running down his cheeks. ‘Lester did all the killing, not me. I was just forced to watch him, the bastard.’ (‘He has a great line in acting,’ Gus told her disgustedly.)
George came out of Ratcliffe Street nick and stood on the steps staring up into the night sky, aware of a deep weariness but also of an even deeper sense of self-satisfaction.
I’ve done it, she thought, staring dreamily at the only star that was able to show itself against the glow of London lights in the blackness of the night. I made the connections and I got Gus off. Come Monday, when they hear the case, they’ll have to apologize to him. I did it, I did it…
Gus came out and stood beside her, sliding one hand into her elbow in a companionable fashion. ‘He’s singing like a bloody nightingale,’ he said even more disgustedly. ‘There’s not a detail he hasn’t given us. Spilt every inch of gut he’s got. It’s enough to make you sick. I know he’s hoping to get off with a bit less time, but all the same …’
‘Why complain?’ George said comfortably, well aware of how Salmon, from the moment Mike had clamped his big hands on him at St Saviour’s Yard and rattled off the usual caution, had fallen over himself to answer every possible question in great detail. ‘Isn’t he making your life easier?’
‘Oh, yes, of c
ourse he is. But it makes me want to puke all the same. Bad enough him being as bent a copper as a ha’penny nail, without being a bent villain as well. Lester’s fit to be tied.’ He laughed. ‘He’s done his best to keep his mouth shut and leave it all to his brief, and there’s Salmon laying it out with a trim of roses and honeysuckle. You could almost feel sorry for Lester. They collect all this stuff from Salmon and then trot round to the other interview room where they’re working on Lester, and tell him all the stuff they’ve got and Lester’s face is a study!’
She stretched. ‘I got it all right, then?’ she said, looking at him wickedly under half-closed lashes.
‘It all depends on what you mean by right,’ he said. ‘If you’re saying you solved this one on your own –’
‘Well, why shouldn’t I?’ she said, firing up immediately. ‘I was the one who spotted the link between Philip and the women who were burned, even if I did go a bit further in my assumptions than I needed, and then the way the drugs were got for Connie’s smuggling when Gregory St Clair trusted me. Lester’s smuggling, that is. And I was the one who worked out what happened to that leg we found – the fibres and the clean cut – it had to be that hellish machine of Connie’s. And I was the one who –’
‘No one’s arguing,’ he said. ‘You did a great job.’ He bent and kissed the back of her neck. ‘I’m very grateful.’
‘Oh,’ she said, nonplussed. ‘I’m – Well, all right then. I mean, I’m glad. I mean –’
‘I always give credit where it’s due,’ he said with a sententious air, grinning down at her. ‘I hope you can do the same.’
‘Oh? Like where?’ She lifted her chin at him, and he laughed.
‘Like I’d worked out the tricks that Harlow and Lester were trying to make work, using Copper’s Properties as their front, with a phoney Board registered at Companies House, using that fella E. Pike – remember? – as a tool on all the Boards. They manipulated the value of the chunk of land Harlow owns behind St Dymphna’s by getting Monty to push for planning consent on it from his Committee. They flattered the old idiot till he was blue – he never did know what they were up to, believe it or not. Meanwhile they tried to get Old East to commit to sending their path. work there. That could have netted the two of them around a million, you know? A lot of cash. I was as close as dammit to getting them on that until Lester set Lenny and Salmon on to me and got me suspended. Lester’s been using Salmon as a private inside copper for years. Some sort of blackmail, from way back. And Salmon managed to fix it so that the whole investigation into Lester and his doings was folded up.’
‘You knew it was Lester you were after?’ she said. ‘You never mentioned his name to me. Though you did mention a bookmaker.’
‘There were a lot of names I never mentioned to you. Any more than you told me of the St Dymphna’s – Old East pathology business. If you had, I might have worked it all out sooner! So don’t complain because I didn’t tell you all there was to tell. Why should I? I was running my case, and I couldn’t see any connection between what I was doing and your severed leg and those burnings. Why should I have done? It was a very tangled connection, after all!’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She began to move, walking slowly down the steps to the street. Linked with her as he was, he had to fall into step alongside. ‘You said it was a network thing. That you had so many assorted villains involved you weren’t sure what or who was going to be part of it next. But when I told you I wanted you to take over my leg and the burnings, you didn’t want to know. If you had agreed to talk to me about them, I might have got round to telling you all that I knew! But you wouldn’t listen when I said you should be dealing with those killings. Left it all to Roop!’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that,’ he said. ‘It drives him potty. It’s all right when I do it, but it sort of gets to him when you do.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the reasons I do it. Stop ducking the issue, Gus. Admit you were wrong. If you’d listened to me, you’d have solved the whole thing sooner. You’d have realized that Lester and his companies had taken over Lenny’s property, because that was the address they used. You’d have worked out it was Lester’s people who were tailing you to make sure you didn’t get too close to the action. You’d have found out that Lester had been using Don Greeson as a bully boy, Don being hard up for betting cash as usual, and willing to do anything to earn it, and then when he got greedy, killed him in Connie’s machine.’
‘How do you know that?’ Gus demanded. ‘We’ve only just got that out of Connie.’
‘I was talking to Mike,’ she said and looked sideways at him in the darkness. ‘He knows who he owes his tip-offs to, if you don’t. If I hadn’t got Philip Cobbett to call him he’d never have been in on the arrests at Connie’s place, and wouldn’t have found out –’
‘Pax,’ Gus said. He stopped walking. ‘Do me a favour, doll. Let’s not try to add up scores on this one. Let’s just say it was a big nasty tangle and we sorted it out. We. Us. Both together.’
‘Didn’t we just,’ she said dreamily. ‘Just let me see if I’ve got it all straight in my head. I’ve picked up a good deal from talking to Mike, but not everything.’
‘I’ll bet you’ve been talking to Mike!’
She ignored that. ‘First of all we have Reggie Lester who’s a greedy man, after all he can get his hands on. He owns this rag factory and puts Connie in as a sort of front. Connie agrees because –’
‘Because he owes Lester so much money he has no choice. Lester’s been lending around the patch for years, wicked rates of interest too. It was that side I first started to investigate.’
‘You said we wouldn’t be totting up scores. So don’t.’ George said firmly. ‘OK, Lester’s the start of it all. He finds out there’s a market in India for expensive Western medicines, and uses his inside know-how, as a member of the Trust Board – and Heaven alone knows how he got that little plum of an appointment! – to get his hands on the goods. It was only him, by the way, never McCann or Harlow. They were just caught up in Lester’s schemes. They’ve done nothing they shouldn’t except be conned by Lester. Anyway, Lester puts pressure on Connie who owes him a fortune from failed betting, and uses him as a front for selling his drugs to India, stuff he gets on a scam using St Dymphna’s as well as Old East. He made use of Monty to get in there, poor old Monty.’
‘Yes,’ Gus said and sounded sober. ‘Poor devil never did a really wicked thing in his life. Just likes to show off and be the big Mr Fixit and look where it gets him. He never could resist being asked to do a favour. However powerful he is, however much he gets, he just loves to be the swaggering I-can-do-anything geezer. Like that fella – the millionaire whose wife worked for a film company, remember? Last year, in all the papers. He agreed to help someone make a lot of money out of insider share dealing when the company was taken over, and he got the office from his wife. There was nothing in it for him. Just showing off. Like Monty!’
‘Yes, I remember,’ George said. ‘I thought that guy was a real nerd, and I still do. But I know Monty, and it does make a sort of sense. Will he be in trouble over this?’
‘Of course he will. You can’t go around being the Chairman of an important Local Authority Committee and let yourself be used in wangles like Reggie’s, even if you weren’t rewarded for it and only did it to be seen as a powerhouse. It’s not allowed. Monty’ll probably get to do some porridge for it. And it’ll be his poor fool of a wife who’ll suffer as much as he does when he goes inside.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ George said. ‘There’s more to Maureen than you might think. She’s the sort who can always find someone to look after her.’ She smiled into the darkness, remembering. ‘Everyone is always so sweet and kind to her, you see.’
‘Well, if you say so,’ but he sounded dubious.
‘OK,’ George said. ‘So how far have we got? Oh, yes. Lester uses Connie’s place as a front for everything – including murder when it suits
him. But why the fires? The way they were done, burning their faces…’
‘Ah, I have the answer to that,’ Gus said. ‘Connie knew that. Lester owned the clinic where the two women had their collagen treatments.’
‘Oh!’ George said blankly and then, after thinking for a while, nodded. ‘It makes sense, I suppose. They suffer damage, set out to find someone else to put it right …’
‘And Lester is afraid of an expensive legal case against his clinic,’ Gus said. ‘It’s cheaper to kill the women. And Lester has no problems about killing people. He’s sitting there now looking furious that he’s been caught and that Salmon’s digging the biggest hole for him and filling it with shit to drop him in, but any signs of regret? Forget it!’
‘But why did Shirley give Connie’s place as her address? That was the detail that really broke this case, you know. If she hadn’t, I’d not have gone to check there.’ George shook her head and sighed. ‘Poor creature. What a horrible way to die. I’ve seen third-degree burns before, but never quite as bad as those.’
‘Yes.’ Gus was solemn. ‘Very horrible. But Lester didn’t seem to worry about such things. He gave them injections of sedatives from the stock he’d collected for India, and used methylated spirits to start the fires. Like a barbecue, Salmon said. Swore he was a helpless bystander when Lester did it, and couldn’t stop him. We’ll have to go into that claim, though. It’s my guess Salmon’s lying and was directly involved, both times. He knows so much about what happened, he had to be. Whatever he says, he’s an accessory after the fact – if not before as well.’
‘I wonder why Lester didn’t put them through that horrible machine?’ George said. ‘It would have been just as effective as the fires.’
‘Getting them to go to the place might have been a problem,’ Gus said. ‘If they didn’t usually go there.’
Third Degree Page 35
