What they found when they got there was no answer at any door or to the only telephone number they knew. The pub was silent, the curtains were drawn upstairs, and the youth with a ring in his left nostril who acted as barman (cash in hand – no National Insurance, no pain, Slider would bet) was hanging around, knocking at the door and peering up at the flat. As soon as the cars drew up he had it away on his tiny toes. To chase a fleeing man is as instinctive to a copper as to chase rabbits is to a dog, and PC D’Arblay was out of the car before it had come to a complete halt; but chummy had too substantial a lead. He shot down the cut between Evans House and Davis House and was lost to them. Slider consoled D’Arblay as he came panting back that they could find him if they needed him.
‘But I expect,’ Slider said when their own knockings had gone unanswered, ‘he was just trying to report for work.’
‘But work there is none,’ said Atherton. ‘Where’s our Sonny? Gone away?’
Slider looked up at the curtained windows and shivered a little in the May warmth. Somewhere nearby – in the park probably – a blackbird was singing, and the chippy in the parade of shops had started frying the first batch of the day. Those were the sounds and smells of life; but the closed curtains gave him a premonition of death.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Force an entry.’
There was a separate door round the side for the flat. Renker and Coffey burst it in, while the others held the gathering crowd at bay. Inside was a tiny lobby with a locked door into the bar and stairs straight ahead. Slider listened, and then with Atherton at his shoulder started up the stairs.
The flat consisted of a sitting room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, all with the unrelieved flat walls and mean proportions of the sixties. It was sparsely furnished, and unexpectedly clean and tidy, the walls painted cream, the floors lino-tiled, everything stowed away in cupboards as if the owner were still at sea and under orders. There was also a spare room which was set up as an office and contained, as well as what was needed to administer a public house, a powerful two-way radio. So that, Slider thought, was how information and orders were passed without bothering British Telecom.
Mr Colin ‘Sonny’ Collins was in his desperately tidy bedroom, lying naked under a sheet on the hard single bed. On the locker beside the bed was an empty pint glass which seemed to have held water, and empty pill bottle with the label removed, and a bunch of keys with a luggage label attached on which was written in capitals HW. Collins’s eyes were closed, his hands folded together on his chest as if he had composed himself with an easy conscience for sleep, but he was dead and cold.
‘Pipped at the post,’ Atherton said. ‘Blast and damn it! So they decided to sacrifice him?’
Or did he sacrifice himself? Slider wondered. He liked that possibility even less.
‘But how did they know we were on the way?’ Atherton went on. ‘You don’t think they’re bugging us, do you?’
‘I hope not,’ Slider said. ‘But I dare say they’re bugging Everet Boston. Mobiles are relatively easy to hack into. He pointed us at Sonny. Don’t forget he said he was the control for him and Lenny.’
‘So they didn’t trust Sonny to keep his mouth shut?’
‘Maybe. Maybe he didn’t trust himself. Whatever he might have told us, we’ll never find it out now.’ He looked at the pill bottle – sleepers? Probably. You could force a person to take sleepers by threatening a worse death, but Slider couldn’t see Sonny Collins caving in without a fight, and there was no sign of a fight, on him or in the flat. But if he took them voluntarily, what order of loyalty did that suggest? It wasn’t nice to think about. ‘Maybe the pill bottle’s a ruse and we’ll find there was a different cause of death,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t pre-empt the postmortem.’
Atherton nodded. ‘What about those keys, left prominently for our attention?’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised to discover that HW was Herbie Weedon, would you?’
‘Not overwhelmingly. We’re being led by the nose to the supposition that Sonny killed Herbie.’
‘Well, maybe he did,’ Slider said. ‘Anything’s possible.’
Porson looked even more haggard than in the morning. ‘This is getting out of hand, God damn it! What the hell is going on? We’ve already got two murders on our hands and now this! We can’t have our ground littered with bodies like Amsterdam after an England away! And not a suspect for any one of the three!’
‘I think we’re meant to take it as confession and suicide,’ Slider said cautiously. ‘The keys are the keys to Weedon’s office and house. We’re meant to assume that Collins did Weedon and then topped himself.’
‘Then why no note?’
‘Maybe they thought that would look too obvious. This way is more natural-looking – more subtle.’
Porson gave him a ripe and goaded look. ‘Subtle? A subtle criminal? This is not Ealing Studios! What are you going to give me next, the cockney char? The tart with the heart of gold?’
Slider withstood the blast. ‘They left the keys in case we wanted the evidence. The way I see it, it’s an invitation to us to let it go.’
‘An invitation?’
‘It won’t be hard for them to guess we’re over-extended – it’s all over the papers every week – and here’s a way for us to clear up something, get the Brownie points and release some manpower.’
Porson’s frown was terrific, but he was following, however unwillingly. ‘That still leaves Lenny Baxter.’
‘Maybe they’re just hoping we’ll write that off, let it go by default. After all, we’ve got no evidence and nothing to link him with anyone.’
‘Except Everet Boston.’
‘Yes,’ said Slider.
‘What price his life now?’ Porson moved restlessly, the light from the window throwing his head into planes and his face into shocking hollows. How much weight had he lost, for Pete’s sake? ‘I’ve put out an all units on friend Boston, but if he keeps using his mobile like the plonker he is, I don’t stack any hope on us finding him before they do. But what kind of bloody people are they? This isn’t Chicago!’ He paced about a bit, thinking. ‘Where do we go from here, if it’s not a rhysterical question. We’ve got no concrete evidence on either the Baxter or the Weedon murders,’ he continued, ‘which is what you’d expect if they’re professional. No forensic, no witnesses. And Collins either was or wasn’t suicide, and there’ll be no evidence there either, you can bet your bottom boots. So unless we can pick up Everet Boston, we’ve got nothing to connect any of this with the gang or the boss – Needle, or whatever they call him. What a bloody shambles! So what are you working on?’
‘Trying to trace the Susan or Susie Mabbot we think may have been the friend of Boston and Baxter, in the hope that she may know where Baxter’s girlfriend Teena is.’
‘What good will that do if you do find this Teena?’ Porson snapped suspiciously.
‘She lived with him, so she may know who the two minders were who talked to him that night, and she may have seen who searched the house.’
Porson snorted. ‘May and might butter no parsons! I can’t see any future in wasting effort trying to find her. If she knew anything they’ll have done her as well. You said yourself she might have been lifted when they searched Baxter’s gaff. What else?’
‘We’re trying to find out more about Trevor Bates.’
‘But you don’t know he is the Needle. You’ve no reason even to think so, except for that bloody jacket.’
‘And the sophisticated electronics equipment and the radio and telephone masts on his house.’
‘Anyone could have those.’
‘Anyone could, but he has got them. I think he’s worth looking at.’
‘All right. But carefully. We don’t want a case against us. What else?’
Slider shrugged. ‘Keep slogging on, looking for witnesses.’
‘Right,’ Porson said gloomily, and turned to stare out of the window. ‘Someone saw something. Sometimes it takes months. Some
times it takes years. Look at the Dando and the Russell murders. But we’re not rolling over. I’m not having some bastard smart alec villain treating my manor like his own private playground.’
Death, Slider thought, had suddenly become personal to Porson. ‘We’ll get him, sir,’ he said, which was as near as he could go to offering sympathy.
Porson turned. ‘See you bloody do!’ he barked, but there was understanding in his red-rimmed eyes.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Intimations of Mortality
The search of Collins’s house had revealed in the storeroom a vast stock of cigarettes, including Lenny’s own favoured brand Gitanes, for which there was no paperwork upstairs in the office, and which it was pounds to peanuts had been brought in illegally from the low-tax continent; ditto various cases of spirits. Evidently Sonny, either on his own behalf or for the Boss, had been used to augment his income by the sale of these private stocks without involving the brewery. Slider wondered if the smuggling was itself another of the gang’s operations. With cigarettes retailing at £4.50 a pack here and purchasable for £1.20 in Spain, there was plenty of leeway in between for a healthy profit to be made. Perhaps Sonny’s pub was a distribution centre? The brewery was not going to be happy about that.
The brewery had of course been told that Sonny was dead and that the Phoenix was closed while the investigation went on. It was agitating for more information and for a date when it could reopen with a new manager, and the phone calls were coming from progressively further up the hierarchy; to which Slider had responded at last by leaving orders for all such calls to be rerouted direct to Mr Palfreyman. Palfreyman got the big money, let him have the nuisance, Slider thought. He had enough to do without that.
The rest of the search had revealed a very Spartan lifestyle for Mrs Collins’s son Colin. The bed was hard and narrow, the floors uncarpeted, the kitchen sparsely stocked. Even the soap in the bathroom was Wright’s Coal Tar. Personal possessions were few, with the notable exceptions of an old and beautiful piece of scrimshaw work, and a ship in a bottle which Slider thought might be late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth. But these two rather exquisite esoterica only seemed to sharpen the question of what Sonny spent his money on. There seemed little point in a criminal career if you didn’t enjoy yourself with your ill-gotten gains. Maybe he was stashing it away for a comfortable retirement? But the kind of spare living exemplified in the flat did not argue a disposition that craved comfort. Maybe it was just the power he had craved. That at least made sense. But why, then, had he so obligingly killed himself?
One gratifying thing emerged from the search, however. Sonny’s clothes were generally few and monotonous, leaning heavily towards the black trousers and teeshirts. Everything was spotlessly clean, beautifully ironed, and squared neatly away in true Bristol fashion. The man even ironed his underpants, Slider discovered, with a sense that it was more than he really needed to know. But hanging in the wardrobe (the first wardrobe he had ever seen in a private house where you could actually push things back and forth along the rail) was a black leather jacket with a rather distinctive tartan wool lining in caramel shades; a jacket new enough to make the wardrobe smell like the inside of a Rolls-Royce.
‘The fourth jacket!’ Slider had exclaimed happily when they discovered it; at which Atherton had warned him sternly not to jump to conclusions. But it was a perfect match with Lenny Baxter’s. It gave Slider great satisfaction to have this small part of the puzzle sorted.
‘But it doesn’t help,’ Atherton pointed out. All it proves is that Lenny knew Sonny, and we knew that already.’
‘I know,’ Slider said, ‘but when little things like that trip up the mighty, it makes it all seem worthwhile. Lenny Baxter has four leather jackets and sells one of them to Thomas Mark, driver to the great mogul Trevor Bates—’
‘Who we have no reason to suspect is the Needle,’ Atherton interpolated.
Slider waved that away. ‘—and thus provides a link without which no-one would ever have looked in Bates’s direction. It’s the mad bitch Chance at her most trivial. It’s beautiful.’
‘So you’re determined to believe it’s Bates?’ Atherton asked.
Slider tapped his chest. ‘I feel it. In here. He lied about the jacket, you see. That was his mistake.’
‘But you don’t know Mark got the jacket from Lenny,’ Atherton said, frustrated. ‘Bates could have bought it in Boston. After all, how did he know it was American if he didn’t buy it there himself?’
‘I suppose Lenny told Mark and he told Bates.’
Atherton shook his head. ‘You’re more obsessed with jackets than Spud-u-Like.’
Slider looked at him, amused. ‘You’re determined it isn’t Bates, aren’t you? What is it, his suits?’
‘I’ve no feelings about the man either way. I just don’t like to see you run ahead of your data. It’s not like you.’
‘What’s a man without a hunch?’ Slider said lightly.
‘Tall,’ said Atherton.
Freddie Cameron telephoned.
‘Working on a Saturday?’ Slider wondered.
‘So are you,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘Got to catch up with the workload somehow. Besides, we’ve got builders in, and it offends my delicate sensibilities to watch them spend all day drinking tea and listening to Kiss FM on my penny.’
‘What are you having done?’
‘We’re having the bathroom refitted, God help us. Of course the brunt of it falls on Martha, but what drives me mad is that they could have finished a week ago if they’d just got on with it. If it was me, I’d sooner work hard for a week and have a week off than slop around for a fortnight for the same money. But what do I know?’
‘Start taking your work home,’ Slider suggested. That’d have ’em out in no time.’
‘The speed one of them moves, I suspect he’s clinically dead anyway.’ Cameron said bitterly.
‘So what have you got for me?’
‘The Collins PM. The report’s in the post, but I thought you’d like to know that it was the pills that killed him.’
‘That’s something, I suppose.’
‘It was a short-acting barbiturate, secobarbital. He’d had a large dose – blood levels were 20mg. Death would have occurred within about half an hour, from respiratory collapse.’
Any idea where he might have got hold of it?’ Slider asked.
‘Well, as you know, old boy, barbiturates haven’t been prescribed in this country for twenty years, or in any of the other civilised countries, but they’re more or less freely available in places like Mexico and China, so they leech in across the borders onto the illicit market. My personal preference for country of origin in this case would be China. I found remnants of the capsule cases in the stomach, and they were coloured a shade of blue that I’ve come across before with Chinese drugs. There’s a large Chinese population in every major city in the world, and half the cargo ships on the high seas are crewed by Chinese, so distribution’s no problem. That’s only an opinion, mind; I can’t prove it.’
‘Your opinion’s usually good enough for me.’
‘By the way, I didn’t find any evidence of force – no bruises or chipped teeth – so it does look like suicide. And, unusually, there was no alcohol in the bloodstream. He did it stone-cold sober in the clear light of morning. Odd, that.’
‘It’s not just odd, it’s creepy,’ Slider said.
‘Greater love hath no man?’ suggested Freddie.
‘Yes, but love for what?’ said Slider.
The Chinese restaurant Karen Phillips chose for her rendezvous with Atherton was down one of the little side turnings off Holland Park Avenue. It had ground-floor and basement dining rooms, and the latter was low-ceilinged and divided into a multitude of secret little booths by bamboo screens and large palms in pots. The lighting was dim, from low-hanging bulbs shrouded in red paper lanterns, and monotonous Chinese music from a loop tape added to the authentically mysterious atmosphere of an
opium den in a Carry On film.
Miss Phillips herself, a strikingly pretty young woman with thick, dark, curly hair and innocent brown eyes, was evidently deep into the character of conspirator. She had chosen a booth in the darkest corner and looked round constantly and nervously in a manner guaranteed to draw attention to herself, should anyone actually be watching them. Atherton found this rather endearing. Most of the women he knew were so briskly capable that her ineptitude at intrigue had the attraction of novelty.
‘I shouldn’t really be here, you see,’ she said in a low, thrilling voice. ‘I mean, not talking to you like this. Not that we’re not allowed to meet people, but there are things we’re not supposed to talk about.’
Atherton gestured towards the menu. ‘Shall we order lunch and get that out of the way?’
‘Well, I don’t really want anything to eat,’ she said, in faint surprise that he hadn’t twigged that.
‘Yes, but it would look rather more like a secret meeting if we didn’t have any food, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh! Yes. You’re smart! I guess your training makes you think of things like that.’ She smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘I’d never make a detective, would I? Or a spy.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a distinct advantage to begin with.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Somehow one never suspects beautiful women of anything underhand.’
To his surprise she withdrew a little. ‘Now you’re making fun of me.’
He backpedalled. ‘Sorry. That sounded a bit patronising. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s this place going to my head.’
She giggled. ‘Yeah, it is kind of goofy, isn’t it? I keep expecting Inspector Clouseau to jump out and do a karate chop or something.’
The waitress came and hovered, and they ordered some food, more or less at random, and tea – Karen said she didn’t drink at lunchtime. While they were thus engaged some more people came in and took tables: a young man and woman; three giggly twenty-something females; an older woman with two younger ones, mother and daughters who’d been shopping. Another waiter appeared to attend to them. Everything looked like normal enough lunch trade to soothe Karen’s nerves, and they chatted easily about books and movies until the food arrived.
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