Mistress Murder

by Bernard Knight

  One of them was a long and amorous post-mortem on the time that Rita had spent with the man at his place. He suddenly realised that the man might have stayed at the flat in Newman Street for all he knew, and he decided to bug the next place with a microphone until he realised that it would be impossible to keep it going for a fortnight at a time. He shrugged off plans for as far ahead as that and concentrated on the problems heaped on him by the sudden appearance of this man who had it in his power to wreck his trade and threaten his safety. The dangerous implications of it were clear enough.

  ‘When he comes back next time, do your best to find out everything you can about his real identity – get it?’

  The voice increased its brash Yankee intonation. ‘We’ve got him tabbed for the drug racket – we can put the squeeze on him any time for that, but if we can dig up his legit hideout and his real business, we’ll have him cold.’

  Rita broke in with a string of objections about how tight-lipped Golding was about everything.

  ‘Look, sweetheart, we’re sitting on a goldmine, see? You do what you’re told – haven’t you got any idea where he goes when he leaves you?’

  ‘I once found a luggage office ticket in his pocket for Euston station – so I suppose he goes up North. He gave me a yarn about going to Manchester once, but I didn’t believe him.’

  ‘Well, have a good hunt around the flat – he may have left something besides that ticket.’

  ‘I tell you it’s hopeless,’ retaliated Rita. ‘If I start that, he’ll soon smell a rat. I don’t trust him; he’s as hard as hell under the surface.’

  The end of the call took on a harder note from the man.

  ‘Look, quit bellyaching! We’re on the edge of the sweetest bit of blackmail you could think of. Golding will pay a lot to keep my mouth shut. He must be making a fortune out of that racket. And what if he does take a poke at you – it’s worth it, isn’t it? As soon as we’ve got all we want to know, you can tell him to stuff his flat.’

  Paul pondered over this until the boat reached Ostend and he was called down to the car deck.

  He drove off onto the quay, passed through the barriers where the officials were far more interested in his car than the driver, and then out into the streets of Ostend. He took to the right-hand side of the road without a second thought. His German origins and the frequent trips to the Continent made him equally at home on either side.

  He drove out onto the auto-route to Brussels and settled the big grey car down to a steady eighty miles an hour. Now he had time to mull over the last phone call on the tape. Again, there was a big gap in the plot, but it seemed that since the last call, Rita had mentioned the wall safe to her boyfriend. He had sent some crony of his over to Newman Street to crack it open. The man must have been an expert, as Paul had examined the lock minutely without finding any trace of interference.

  The taped voices echoed again in Jacobs’ mind as the Jaguar hammered slightly on the bad joints in the concrete surface.

  ‘Are you sure there’s nothing at all anywhere to give us a lead on where he really has his pad?’ demanded the man’s voice, sounding like the dialogue from a third-rate gangster film. ‘Those five passports in the safe make it a dead cert that he gets all his stuff from the Continent, but there was damn-all to give a lead on his real name over here.’

  ‘I tell you there’s nothing more – he’s never said a word about it and I’ve been through his clothes a dozen times –not even a tailor’s label on any of them. He knows the score too well to be caught like that.’

  She paused and hurried on.

  ‘I hope to God he doesn’t catch on yet that I’m in this – I hate to think what he’d do.’

  Paul Jacobs smiled grimly as the exit for Ghent flashed by the window. ‘You’ll never know, sweetheart,’ he whispered.

  A few miles further on the dull day closed in towards dusk and he switched on his side lights. Odd bits of the obnoxiously carnal phone calls came back to him as he neared the Belgian capital. He thrust them aside and his orderly chess player’s mind arranged a summary of the position.

  Firstly, some unknown man had cut Rita out from behind his back. That was a nuisance, but not a dangerous one. She suited him very well in a physical sense, but she was replaceable. Women – apart from his wife, who belonged to his other world of sacred respectability – were like the car he was driving. They were beautiful and a novelty when new, but should be changed before they got old. They could be changed as easily as a car – and as often – if one was willing to pay the price. Secondly, this man knew of his narcotic smuggling racket and was preparing to blackmail him over it.

  Thirdly, the unknown Mr X did not know his true identity – that he was Paul Jacobs, antique silver dealer of Cardiff. But he was working on it and had to be stopped.

  It was dark when he reached the outskirts of Brussels. Driving through the confusing maze of roads with the ease of familiarity, he arrived at the Boulevard Adolphe Maximus and checked in at his hotel.

  A porter drove his car around to the garages at the rear, while he went up for a bath and a rest before dinner. He lay on his bed before dressing, staring up at the ornamental plaster of the high ceiling.

  He chewed his lip as he polished up the plan that had been born when he helped the giggling Rita from the club the night before.

  When the pieces had all fitted into place in his mind, he swung himself off the bed to dress. As soon as dinner was over, he went out into the bright lights of the city. After walking a little way from the hotel, he hailed a taxi. Using good French, with a deliberate German accent just to confuse the trail in the unlikely event of there ever being one, he gave directions to the driver. The car turned into the Boulevard Leopold and ran parallel to its overhead viaduct for some distance. Then they cut across in the direction of the Gare du Nord. Outside the station, Paul paid the man off and walked into the station entrance. As soon as the cab drove off, he turned sharply to his right and walked up the Rue de Brabant.

  Some distance up, he turned off into a side street and, after a few more right-angled turns, found a shuttered bakery on the comer of an alleyway. The cracked paint above the front of the shop announced that it was Emil Corot et Fils. He dived into the gloomy tunnel alongside the shop and found a door, almost invisible in the darkness. Paul rapped hard on the peeling panels. Three heavy knocks, a pause – three more knocks, softer this time.

  After a long delay, there was the sound of bolts and a chain being unfastened. The door creaked open, but no face appeared. Jacobs stepped inside and walked down a short passage to another door, which led to a dimly lit storeroom, filled with sacks and cardboard cartons. A thick powdering of flour lay over everything.

  He turned inside the room and waited to greet an old man who shuffled after him from the passage. They spoke in French, but the bent old baker had little to say. He had red, inflamed eyes and a drooping moustache. Like his storeroom, he was covered in white dust.

  He slouched across the room to a pile of cartons marked Syrian Figs. Opening the tops of two of them, he took out a layer of cellophane-wrapped cooking figs, each parcel being about half a kilo. Beneath this layer was a layer of thin plastic bags containing white powder. There were several dozen in all and the old man carefully took them out and stacked them on top of a box.

  ‘I’ve already unpacked them from the figs,’ he muttered unnecessarily. Paul was not interested; he knew well enough how the drugs had arrived from the Levant. Each carton contained fifty kilos of figs, a hundred packets in all. In certain marked cartons, the fig packets one layer deep in the box had a plastic bag of heroin or morphine embedded through the fruit.

  Old man Corot shuffled in his senile way to a large cupboard against the wall. He took out two smart fawn-coloured suitcases and brought them over to the pile of drugs.

  ‘They were brought here last week,’ he grunted, ‘Just like you said.’

  Paul’s organisation had worked smoothly again. The special cases had
been made in Antwerp and delivered to Corot pending his arrival.

  ‘You’d better do it, I don’t understand these things,’ grumbled the baker, standing back.

  Paul opened the cases on the floor, threw the lids right back and began fumbling with both the locks and the lid hinges. In a few seconds, the whole of the taffeta lining came out in a single piece, stiffened beneath by a layer of fibreboard. Between the lining and the leather of the case, there was sufficient room to stack the thin plastic envelopes of drugs and still have room to spare.

  He stowed his illegal imports away and slid the linings back into place.

  ‘OK, Papa … ready for another trip.’

  He picked up the light and apparently empty cases and made for the door.

  Without a word of farewell on either side, Jacobs left the alley and walked back to the Gare du Nord where he caught another taxi back to his hotel.

  Next morning he went down to the garage behind the hotel and looked out the foreman mechanic.

  ‘I’m having some trouble with my carburation,’ he lied, patting the vast bonnet of the Jaguar. ‘Do you think you can get the Jaguar agent to check the carburettors while I’m away? I’ve to go to Liège for a night, but I can easily go on the train. I want the car perfect for the trip back to England.’

  With a few words more and a liberal tip, he had given himself a first class excuse for being away from the hotel without the car for the better part of two days.

  Collecting his cases, which he filled with some of his clothes and an assortment of stuff brought over in the car, he went by taxi to the airport.

  Here he caught a plane for Paris and Dublin, booked weeks earlier in yet another name.

  The amount of forward organising he had to do was immense. He worked out the details of each trip for a couple of months ahead, never using the same method or route more than once a year. It was the regular travellers that attracted the attention of the Customs, especially in the winter season. Every time Paul was in London, or abroad, he spent a great deal of time booking planes, rail tickets, hotels and arranging delivery of drugs. In fact it was like any other import business, but made more difficult by its clandestine nature and the sweat of having to do all the ‘office boy’ routine himself.

  Before he boarded the plane for Dublin, he put on a Germanic-looking raincoat and armed himself with a German newspaper and magazine. He used a passport, forged in Whitechapel, made out for Hans Korb, a textile representative from the Federal German Republic. There was such a boom in German-Irish industrial relations that such visitors were ten-a-penny in Eire and on arrival at Dublin, and the Immigration and Customs gave him the most cursory looking-over. They idly turned over the cloth samples that he had carefully provided himself with before leaving London then made the magic chalk marks on the cases.

  He had a meal in a hotel, shed his German coat and identity, and caught a train to Rosslare. The journey via the Fishguard ferry and train to Paddington took him all of the rest of the day and much of the early hours of the following morning.

  When the train approached Cardiff, though it was the middle of the night, he retired to the toilet and afterwards kept a wary eye out for anyone who might recognise him. There was no one, and he arrived in London tired, but undetected, with his precious cargo. At the station, he took a taxi to Bloomsbury and got out near the University Union. The streets were deserted and he went as near as possible to his second hideout to reduce the risk of a strolling constable getting suspicious about his cases.

  He walked to a block of service flats in Fenton Square and let himself into one on the third floor. This was his other pied-a-terre in London, known only to himself and Snigger. Rita Ronalde had no idea it existed and it was from here that Paul did all his narcotics distribution, with the help of the barman at the Nineties

  He pushed the cases wearily under the bed, set the alarm for 8 a.m., and had a few hours’ sleep in the single bedroom. All too soon the clanging of the clock woke him. He washed and shaved, then emptied the clothes from the fake cases into a similar pair of normal ones.

  He made his way back to Euston, had some breakfast and caught the Irish Mail to Belfast travelling via Holyhead. From there he crossed the border into Eire and went back to Dublin. As far as the border officials were concerned, he was Arthur Graham, an English textile representative. They had never seen him or his samples before and he aroused no interest.

  All the times had been carefully worked out many weeks before, so that he arrived at Dublin airport a mere hour before the take off. He became Hans Korb once again and arrived in the Belgian capital late on the Thursday evening.

  Next morning, the garage foreman sorrowfully explained that nothing could be found wrong with the carburettors of the Mark X. Another large tip helped him to get over his grief and, by mid-morning, Paul Jacobs was thundering back over the auto-route towards Ostend, the car seeming none the worse for having its carburettors disembowelled for nothing.

  At the Dover end of the trip, he had the most rigorous Customs examination of the whole trip. Whether the officers happened to pick on him as someone on whom to vent their mid-winter boredom or whether they had any reason to suspect him, Paul did not know.

  He stood by the car with the complacency of an easy conscience as they spent twenty minutes looking through all his luggage and examining every nook and cranny of the car. An officer in overalls even crawled beneath the car with a torch to see if anything was strapped to the half-shaft housings or steering gear.

  They eventually waved him away with that stony stare that only Customs Officers and police constables can generate. By five o’clock on the Friday evening, he was putting the Jaguar away in the garage behind Newman Street.

  Rita was expecting him this time and had carefully left off her jeans to please him. To please him even more, she was wearing a negligee and a pair of earrings – nothing else. Within ten minutes, she had taken off the earrings and he had attended to the negligee. He was so occupied for the rest of the evening that he had no opportunity to get to his hidden recorder.

  Next morning, Rita went out to look for a new dress in Oxford Street, in preparation for his promised celebration next evening. As soon as she was well clear, he squatted down on the bedroom floor and took out the machine. Sure enough, there was an inch thickness of tape on the spool. The unwelcome voice of the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ grated on Paul’s ears when he played it back. Again, there was nothing to give away the man’s identity. Rita infuriated him by using strings of mushily endearing names, but never once his real one. After some archly suggestive byplay, the voices got down to business.

  ‘I still haven’t found a thing to show who he really is,’ complained the woman.

  ‘You must do … for God’s sake, Rita, he must have some steady pad somewhere … look, stop messing about and find out.’

  ‘I tell you I can’t,’ she stormed angrily. ‘You don’t know him; he’s as tight as a bloody oyster. No papers anywhere, no nothing.’

  They carried on in this way for a few minutes, the man complaining and the girl making excuses. Then they calmed down and the last few feet of the tape were more semi-erotic slush.

  Paul punched the stop button with vicious finality. He replaced the equipment, but didn’t bother to set it ready again. Its job was done, he thought, as he tightened the screws and rearranged the dresses over the floor.

  Rita came back about twelve and he took her out to lunch, keeping his mood exactly as usual in spite of the slow burning fury at this silly little fool for putting his whole way of life in danger by her petty love affairs. In the afternoon, she went off to do some work for a photographer, which gave him time to prepare the next phase of his scheme.

  As well as this type of work, she had been a club hostess, a stripper, and part of a cabaret act in the ten years since she had come from Trieste as the bride of an English soldier. She had left him after three months in England and had kept herself by means of these various jobs, all of which dep
ended on her face and her figure, as well as her wits.

  The photography that she posed for was for the mildly obscene Cheese Cake magazine – known to the local police as the ‘garters and gum boots’ business. It paid well and gave her something to do when her man-friend was away.

  After Rita had left, Paul went by Tube to Shepherd’s Bush and called at a car hire firm. He picked an inconspicuous grey Ford Anglia and hired it until Monday morning, giving a totally fictitious name and address to the salesman. He drove off along Western Avenue, keeping on until he reached open country beyond Denham. Then he turned off into a series of minor roads for another ten miles until he came to Cuckoo Hill, well out in the countryside.

  Jacobs pulled up at the top of the hill and sat looking down the road with approval. He saw the long straight slope with a sudden bend at the bottom where the road turned right across a bridge. Below a low parapet, there was a deep drop into a ravine where a stream flowed beneath the road.

  His survey completed, he turned and drove slowly back until he came to a small side road about half a mile from the hill. A few hundred yards along this lane, he came to a rough lay-by, where road menders had dumped heaps of gravel.

  Pulling the Ford well off the road, he took out the jack and removed one of the rear wheels. Leaving the car jacked up, he put the wheel in the boot and locked everything up. Now he had a means of getaway all laid on, the missing wheel being a camouflage for any nosey-parker who happened to come by during the Sunday.

  He walked away in the opposite direction to a village a mile away that he had seen on the map. Here he caught a Green Line bus back to London and his flat.

  The stage was set for the following night’s drama.

  Chapter Three

  ‘I'm sorry, Mr Laskey, but as her husband you are the next-of-kin; the responsibility is all yours.’

  Mr Smythe, the Oldfield coroner, looked over his steel-rimmed spectacles at the indignant husband of the late Rita Ronalde. Her real name had been Laskey, after the soldier who had brought her from Italy.