Roller Coaster

by Michael Gilbert

  It turned down the next street and stopped. The night, under its black overcast, was so quiet that he could hear the doors slamming and a crescendo of chattering from the boys. After which all noises were cut off and silence descended.

  He left his bicycle in the doorway and went forward on foot. The tail end of the car he had been following showed in the gap between two buildings on the right of the road. The nearer building was boarded up and in darkness. The further one was showing lights.

  He eased his way forward.

  He could see, now, that ahead of the car and blocking it was a large lorry with a canvas tilt. Both vehicles had been abandoned by their drivers. The lights from the second building came from the upper floors, in one case strong enough to suggest flood lighting. Any doubts Hoyland might have had were set at rest when he lifted the back flap of the lorry and looked inside.

  As a keen video amateur he had no difficulty in identifying what he saw. Among a pile of tripods and flex, booms and rifle mikes was at least one Betacam complete with replay adapter and BVF viewfinder. If these were spares, he thought, the studio must be pretty lavishly equipped.

  Suddenly a fan of light hit the street. The front door of the building he was watching had been opened. Hoyland was not alarmed. The two vehicles gave him ample cover. If pursued he could move in either direction. However, the man who had come out did not seem to be planning anything hostile. He had lighted a cigarette. Smoking forbidden on the set, thought Hoyland. He’s come out for a drag. When the man turned his head he was unsurprised to recognise Blondie.

  Everything was now in his hands.

  He had located the studio, could identify two of the men involved and had noted the numbers of their car and lorry. All he had to do was to get back to base with his treasure.

  He decided to abandon the bicycle. His instinct, now, was to keep as low a profile as possible. As Blondie went in, slamming the door behind him, he crawled to the far end of the street, got to his feet and started for home.

  His quickest route was along the bank of the Amstel Canal for a few hundred yards, then north through the Vondelpark. After that there was a wide choice of ways.

  His first idea was to run. He rejected it. Running at night invited suspicion. He would stroll. He had to correct a tendency to keep looking over his shoulder. He told himself that this was nervous reaction, quite unsuitable for an experienced policeman. In any event, the night was so quiet that he would have heard a pursuer long before he caught up with him.

  Ahead, at one of the few points where a lamp lit the waters of the canal, a man was coming towards him. He was dressed as a sailor and was singing softly to himself. As Hoyland moved aside to let him pass the man lashed out with the loaded stick he was holding, hitting Hoyland once, on the side of the neck, paralysing him, and a second time on the head as he went down. Then he pivoted, put his foot into the small of Hoyland’s back and kicked him into the canal.

  He stood for a moment, watching the bubbles coming up, then went on his way, still singing. As he did so a few heavy drops of rain were beginning to fall.

  Chapter Seven

  Two men, both thick set and distinguishable only because one of them was bald and the other had shoulder-length greasy hair, had been watching Hoyland since he had emerged from Cornelis Straat and crossed the main road. Both were known to the police. Their speciality was robbing any pedestrian who was stupid enough to walk alone on the streets at night. Hoyland, from the moment he appeared, had seemed to them a perfect prospect; unsuspicious in appearance and smartly enough dressed to suggest that his pockets would be well lined.

  They had kept level with him by using the street above the canal path, ready to descend at the appropriate moment, and shear this slow-moving young sheep.

  What had happened next had outraged their professional feelings. What gross, what unbelievable stupidity to assault this promising subject and kick him into the canal without—for God’s sake!—making the smallest attempt to search him first.

  As the sailor disappeared they climbed down the bank, cursing steadily. The rain was belting down now, but this did not worry them. They were going to have to get wet anyway. Both of them slid into the water, feeling with their feet for Hoyland’s body. When they located it they heaved it out and laid it on the path.

  The inside pocket of the jacket yielded a wallet, promisingly heavy. The other jacket pockets were empty of anything of interest. They found some small change in the trouser pockets and unstrapped and removed Hoyland’s wrist-watch. Then, knowing that travellers, particularly Americans, often kept a wad of notes in their back hip pockets, they rolled him over onto his face.

  The immediate result of this piece of rough handling was that the pressure as he landed face downwards made Hoyland vomit, bringing up, with the rest of the contents of his stomach, a flood of black liquid mud. Finding nothing in his hip pocket and hearing a car approaching on the road above, they decided to call it a day and left the body lying, in its mess, on the path.

  An hour later, when the rain was easing off, the first passer-by on foot, a policeman coming off duty, spotted the body. His natural instinct was to leave it where it was and get home. Then his official feelings prevailed. He plodded off to the nearest police box and summoned the mortuary van. It was when this arrived and the attendants were hoisting up Hoyland’s body that one of them noticed his eyelids twitching. The destination of the van was changed from the mortuary to the police infirmary.

  When Hoyland finally opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Petrella’s face. The first thing he said was “2A Winder Straat.”

  “That’s all right,” said Petrella, who was grinning. “You said it six times before they got you into bed and sedated. As it seemed to be worrying you they sent a police car round to check the place. It was empty. The birds had flown.”

  Hoyland, whose wits seemed to be coming back to him in instalments, said, “Lot of stuff in that van. Maybe they’d started packing up ready to flit.”

  “Maybe. Your arrival certainly hastened their departure. And people who leave in a hurry often leave little things behind. Including, in this case, a few small items of equipment and some fingerprints. Which may be useful when they open up their next studio, which, no doubt, they will. However, that’ll be a matter for the Dutch police, not for us. And certainly not for you. You’ll stay here for a bit.”

  “For how long?” said Hoyland rebelliously.

  “Until the doctor lets you go. You must have an uncommonly hard head. One of those blows might easily have cracked your skull. And, incidentally, you saved your life by being so comprehensively sick. Otherwise, the doctor says you’d probably have choked to death. That’s two bits of luck. If I were you, I shouldn’t tempt providence again. Not just for a bit, anyway.”

  But Hoyland wasn’t interested in providence. What he wanted to know, very urgently, was where he had gone wrong. How had the opposition got ahead of him? Why, in fact, were they looking for him at all?

  “They were meant to think I was on my way to Paris.” He explained what he had done. “I certainly thought I’d fooled them.”

  “You may have fooled one of them. The fair-haired creep you saw sounds like a man called Jonathan Draper. He comes here quite a bit. Alleged to be interested in international re-insurance. Which he may be. Actually he seems to spend most of his time over here at what they call Blote Boys en Bengels, meaning Boys’ Clubs for Men. You might easily have fooled him. But not, I think, Ringland. He’s a very wide-awake character.”

  “Is he what he said he is?”

  “Oh, certainly. He’s a shipbuilder, with a lot of money behind him. It seems that what he did was he went round to your hotel and chatted up the proprietress. ‘Such a nice man,’ she said. When she told him that you hadn’t given up your room and also mentioned your changing to a room at the back, alarm bells started ringing. No doubt they picked you up when you left the hotel that evening.”

  “I ought to have thought of th
at,” said Hoyland dismally.

  “Don’t start blaming yourself. You did all right. You had some good luck and some bad. That’s the way things go in our job. Spaan will want to ask you some questions and he’ll have some photographs to show you. I’ll tell him you’re quite fit enough to be grilled.”

  It was three days before he extracted leave of departure from the doctor, a sour and pessimistic man who only gave it in the end because the bed was needed for someone else. Re-equipped with money, ticket and a temporary passport he made his way to the air terminal building opposite the main line station. Here he had joined a longish line of passengers at the flight reception desk when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks.

  Gently, so as not to attract attention to himself, he backed out of the queue and moved away until he was hidden by a newspaper kiosk. A second look confirmed his suspicions. Jonathan Draper was ahead of him in the queue.

  His first idea was to telephone Maplin Road, but he rejected it. If Petrella happened to be out, a message from a junior detective, no matter how urgent he labelled it, would go to the bottom of the pile. The number he dialled was the one he had been given for Mr Wetherall. He was relieved to hear the creaking tones of that pedagogue.

  He said, “I’ve got a very urgent message for Superintendent Petrella. I thought you’d be likely to be able to locate him.”

  “If he’s anywhere in East London, I can probably do that.”

  “I felt sure you could. The message is that Jonathan Draper is on Flight 373 from Amsterdam this morning. It might be a good idea to pick him up on arrival and see where he goes when he gets to London.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, that’s the message. Jonathan—”

  “All right. I’m not deaf. Not yet.” Clunk.

  The receiver at the other end was banged down.

  After further reflection Hoyland made his way back to the airline desk and succeeded in changing his ticket for one on the evening flight. Then he retired to the buffet and took as long as he could over two cups of coffee.

  Fifty minutes later when the information screen showed that Flight 373 was taking off he started to make some calculations. The flight time was seventy minutes. Adding fifty minutes it totalled just two hours. It was not a lot, but he had great confidence in Mr Wetherall’s ability to locate Petrella and Petrella’s to organise a suitable reception.

  Chapter Eight

  “We had quite an elaborate team waiting for Draper,” said Petrella. He was sitting in Charlie Kay’s office. The superintendent had listened with unconcealed amusement to an account of Hoyland’s adventures in Amsterdam. “We had to consider the possibility that he might have left his own car at the airport or perhaps arranged for one of his City friends to pick him up. But in fact he caught a tube train at Heathrow, like a good little boy, got out at Leicester Square and set off on foot, without once looking round.”

  “Sounds a simple sort of sod,” said Kay. “Where was he making for?”

  “It turned out to be a second-hand bookshop in Cecil Court – that’s one of the passages that join St Martin’s Lane and the Lower Charing Cross Road.”

  “Lot of bookshops there, some clean, some grimy.”

  “This one called itself the Naughty Nineties.”

  “Oh, yes. I know that one. When I was with the Porn Squad we gave it the once-over. Classified it as Hemp.”

  “Come again.”

  “Harmless Expensive Mild Porn. Semi-respectable stuff. The Palace of Pleasure; The Karma Sutra; History of the Rod by a retired clergyman. You know the sort of stuff.”

  “It doesn’t sound like my favourite reading,” said Petrella. “But, yes, I know the sort of books you mean.”

  “The proprietor’s a bod called Maurice Meinhold. Details of his early life a bit vague. No doubt we’d have got some of the facts if we could have thought up grounds for prosecuting him, but no chance of that since Lady Chatterley hit the canvas.”

  “What sort of customers?”

  “The normal ones, I imagine. Overtly respectable middle-class males in search of second-hand material for masturbation.”

  Petrella said, “My idea was that Draper was acting as postman. I expect they took it in turns to bring a number of videos back. Not really a dangerous job. The cassettes could go in their pockets and the Customs would be unlikely to make a body search of a businessman.”

  “Highly unlikely. Particularly if they’d seen him before and knew that he’d got some genuine business in Amsterdam. And suppose they did find them. All he’d have to do would be to say, ‘I picked them up in a high-street shop and brought them home. I haven’t looked at them yet, but I thought they might be amusing.’”

  “Breach of Customs’ regulations. You have to declare anything you’ve bought abroad.”

  “So what? If they pursued the case – which is unlikely – it might result in a small fine.”

  “Which would be paid by the organisation.”

  “Organisation?” For the first time Kay looked more than casually interested.

  “I think so. Based in London. And with a good deal of money behind it. They’re the ones I’m going after.”

  Many of the details were still unclear, but the outlines of the racket were forming in his mind. The bookshop would be an out-station. The heart of the matter, he was certain, was in the City.

  “The best of British,” said Kay. “They sound like the sort of shower I spent – or misspent – five years of my professional career chasing, but I never seemed to catch up with them. A few tiddlers occasionally, but the big fish had too many emergency exits. I can tell you one thing. If you do catch up with them, watch your step. They’ve a nasty habit of biting back. Look what they did to poor old Robin.”

  “Then you think Hood was fixed?”

  “Difficult to say. About a month before the Sentinel started sniping at him, he told me that he had, at last, got something that looked like hard evidence against a well-known publisher. He wouldn’t give me the name, which was odd because, after all, I was his number two. No. He was keeping his cards close to his chest. Next thing was we had all that stuff about him taking all-expenses-paid holidays with one of the porn kings.”

  “Which he admitted?”

  “He couldn’t deny the facts. The Sentinel had half a dozen affidavits from people who knew about the trip. But Robin maintained it was nothing whatever to do with the investigation he was conducting. Whether or not, it was enough to finish him.”

  Petrella said, “Yes,” and thought for some moments without adding anything, although Kay was clearly expecting something more. In the end Petrella said, “If Hood was conducting an investigation there must be some record of it.”

  “So you’d have thought. And, of course, we turned out all his working papers and we couldn’t find anything about it. There was a chance that he had taken everything home, to work on it there. Towards the end he was getting a bit paranoiac about—well—about treachery in the office. That sort of thing.”

  “And were there any papers in his house?”

  “There may have been. But a few days after his death – his wife was being looked after by her own family and the house was empty – some people broke in. They didn’t steal anything, but they rifled his filing cabinets and his desk. So if there were any papers there, they were gone.”

  Petrella was silent again. What had upset him was Kay’s use of the word ‘paranoiac’. Did he mean that Hood really was worried that a member of his own team might be playing for the other side, or that he was imagining treachery where no treachery existed?

  He was turning it over in his mind as he trudged down Victoria Street and Whitehall and up the Charing Cross Road. The movement of his legs seemed to settle his thoughts into a more logical sequence. Forget Hood. Concentrate on silly Draper, patron of Blote Boys en Bengels. Catch hold of his coat tails and he might lead them to where they wanted to go.

  The Naughty Nineties turned out to be one of thr
ee second-hand bookshops in Cecil Court. There was a line of books in a rack outside marked at one pound each, ranging from an old Bradshaw Railway Guide to a Boys’ Book of Cricket. Dear at half the price, thought Petrella as he pushed on into the shop.

  The front room was stacked and packed with books, on stands and shelves, and on the window-ledges and the floor. The only clear space was round an old-fashioned roll-top desk which seemed to be doing duty as a counter. Behind it sat one of the fattest men Petrella had ever seen. Without doubt this was Maurice Meinhold. He had been writing something at a smaller table beside the desk. Now he swivelled round, planted both elbows on the desk and said, “What can we do for you, sir?”

  “I was just looking round.”

  “Is there any subject in which you are particularly interested?”

  “Biography,” said Petrella firmly. “Military biography.”

  “I don’t think we’ve much on that. We specialise more in artistic than in military topics. You might be able to find something in the corner over there.”

  The corner was a dark one. Such light as there was struggled through the diamond panes which fronted the shop. Most of the books seemed to be lives of Victorian and Edwardian painters, sculptors and designers. There were one or two politicians looking a mite uncomfortable in this artistic jamboree. No generals.

  He moved along a little to study the books behind the door. Here the emphasis had changed. The shelves were packed with books on Indian personalities and affairs; not only histories and biographies, but Blue Books, Army and Civil Service Lists, records of Vice-Regal and Ministerial Edicts and what looked like a complete set of the Indian National Gazette down to 1965. These did not seem to have attracted much attention from the British buyer, and a volume of the letters of Lord Dufferin which he opened emitted an indignant spider and a cloud of dust.

  At that moment a shaft of light fell across the shop and he saw that a door at the back had opened. From where he stood he had a clear view into the inner room. It was startlingly different from the front section. He saw a neat, well-ordered office, with a line of filing cabinets on one side and a green and gold safe in the far corner. On a table he could see two telephones and what looked like a word-processor. Petrella was half-hidden and the woman who came through the door had clearly no idea that there was a third party in the shop.