Stealth

by Margaret Duffy

  My brief with SOCA lay with another of Miss Smythe’s neighbour’s associates, a successful crime writer, Clement Hamlyn, who was staying in this hotel for the festival. The name was, apparently, a pseudonym: his real identity I had not been able to discover and he had used several in the past, under one of which he had served three years for GBH – grievous bodily harm. I had not read any of his books but they were, I understood, very realistic, or ‘gritty’, as they say in the trade.

  Patrick broke into my thoughts. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to connect her neighbour with the death.’

  ‘Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?’ I snapped. ‘He was probably in Bermuda at the time.’

  ‘Skiing with the family at Klosters, actually.’

  ‘You were feeling down last night?’ I said after a short silence.

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  ‘Patrick—’

  ‘Yes, I know. I shall have to get over it soon or go and see a shrink.’

  After a longish silence, I said, ‘What does Greenway want you to do now?’

  ‘About Miss Smythe? Nothing for the moment. The Met’s on the case and we’ll get the info when we return. We’re to drop the travelling separately bit and I’m to move in with you. He doesn’t like the look of this crime writer he’s asked you to watch and wants me to keep a closer eye on you in view of what’s happened. You do seem to have the knack of stirring up mobsters in general.’

  I took that as a compliment.

  Miss Smythe had mentioned Hamlyn, spotting him at dusk one summer’s evening staggering drunk and urinating against a tree in her neighbours’ garden during a party, which, judging by loud music and the sound of cars revving late at night, they gave quite often. She had recognized him only because she had seen him on TV the previous week taking part in a books programme talking about his latest publication, a crime novel set in wartime London that included a murder that had taken place in Richmond, not far from where she lived. It was soon to be dramatized for television. This, I thought, could have made an elderly lady feel uneasy, imagining him loping the streets near her house to get the feel of the location. Hamlyn was a giant of a man with a deep, booming voice, a mane of black hair and an eye that was half closed by a scar across his face as a result of a car crash some years previously. Someone, another author, had once said to me, waspishly, that his grim looks alone probably sold thousands of copies of his work and the man seemed to be aware of this and played on it.

  His revolting social lapse had not been the sole reason for Rosemary Smythe bringing him to SOCA’s attention, although she had seemed to know about his criminal record. She had already reported that he was a frequent visitor to the house next door and usually arrived with a woman, possibly his girlfriend, who she recognized from the television news as a councillor in another London borough who had been suspended during an investigation into allegations of expenses fraud and irregularities concerning council contracts. No, later that same day, after it had got quite dark and she was watching the house through binoculars from the tree house she had seen several men including, she was sure, Hamlyn, in what she had an idea was Hereward Trent’s study, handling weapons: handguns, she thought. As if feeling an outsider’s gaze on them, someone had wrenched the curtains across the window.

  I said, ‘I only know the main details of what Miss Smythe wrote as I read a heavily edited version. How many letters were there?’

  ‘At least a dozen,’ Patrick replied. ‘We do need to look at them in detail. Have you spotted Hamlyn yet?’

  ‘No. Perhaps he’s having his meals in his room. Does Mike really think he’s going to make contact with one of the Met’s Most Wanted hiding here in the South of France?’

  ‘He was linked with a gang when he did time when the boss was a bloke calling himself Cat Danny on account of his burglary days. Danny went on to specialize in the vice trade and drug dealing and eventually fled to Spain. He was sent on the run again by Operation Captura, which as you know we, SOCA, are working on together with Crimestoppers to arrest British criminals living on the Costas. Danny – the name he mostly uses is Daniel Coates – is now thought to be in this area – Cannes. Mike’s theory is that he might owe Hamlyn money, his share of whichever scam he missed the pay-off due to having been inside.’

  ‘Does Hamlyn need money?’ I asked dubiously.

  ‘You’re normally good at criminal profiling. Think about it.’

  OK, never open mouth before clutching in brain. ‘He would want what he probably regarded as compensation for the time he spent behind bars.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Are you going to search his room?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And follow him when he goes out?’

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘I take it he’s arrived.’

  ‘Late yesterday afternoon. I had to get the hotel manager on board. Luckily for me his son’s in the local gendarmerie and he was delighted to cooperate once I’d produced my ID card. I just hope he doesn’t gossip.’

  ‘The man might have gone out already.’

  Patrick looked pained. ‘He hasn’t. While you were stuffing your face last night I was watching him in the bar. He drank enough Bourbon to drown himself in and then reeled off to bed.’

  ‘It’s a wonder he has enough brain cells left to be able to write.’

  ‘You could always ask him about that.’

  TWO

  Clement Hamlyn remained elusive, not appearing for breakfast that morning, for the short opening ceremony or the address by the Norwegian author. He may well have been forewarned as the latter was so stupifyingly dull I will not bother the special characters application of my computer in order to type his name. Afterwards, everyone seemed to be drinking coffee and chattering with huge relief. I glanced around but failed to spot the black-haired Hamlyn. Surely he would tower over just about everyone else? I had made sure that I was on the same panel as he was – we were both, after all, crime writers – and made my way to the room set aside for it.

  The whole affair was still giving the impression that the visitors to the festivals of Cheltenham or Bath had been picked up, wholesale, and dumped down on the south coast of France. Most of the voices I heard were British, seemingly from every possible region, very few speaking English with foreign accents.

  ‘Are you still giving a reading?’ asked a woman suddenly appearing at my elbow.

  I turned to see someone I knew to be one of the organizers: slightly out of breath, glasses awry, her long fair hair escaping from an untidy bun on the top of her head.

  I told her that I was, at two thirty.

  She frantically scrabbled at the papers attached to her clipboard. ‘Oh, God, I’ve got you down for three.’

  ‘No, it’s definitely two thirty, with Ian MacBride and Stephanie Blackwood.’

  ‘You are Barbara Somerville, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, Ingrid Langley.’

  ‘Oh, oh, sorry. You won’t be late, will you?’

  ‘I’ll try not to be,’ I replied evenly.

  ‘They’re complaining already, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘People always complain. I really don’t know why I do this year after year seeing as . . .’

  Still talking she rushed off before I could ask her if Clement Hamlyn was still expected on the panel session. To my disappointment, as I had been hoping to find out something about him for the commander, he did not appear. His place was taken by a volunteer from the audience, a young writer who had had two crime novels published, modestly hoped to learn something and, not having thought of himself as sufficiently famous, had not put his name forward. As it happened he was very articulate and amusing and when it was over I congratulated him.

  ‘Thanks – but what happened to the big man?’ was the blushing response.

  ‘Size isn’t everything,’ I told him and went off to look for Patrick, not expecting to find him and more than a little desperate to know what was going on.
True enough, I failed to locate him, met Alan and we went in to lunch together.

  He looked ghastly, the once tubby and frankly, sleek and self-satisfied man now gaunt and hollow-eyed. Despite his assurances – he has always been a very positive soul – that he was recovering after two major operations, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, I feared for him.

  ‘You’re with Berkley Morton now, aren’t you?’ he enquired after some general conversation, not really eating what was on the plate in front of him.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Never did like the man. A whole brass band of self-blown trumpets.’

  ‘You have a point there,’ I said, amused by this neat vignette. It was Alan who had helped me immensely when I had first started writing, taking me on when I had not had so much as a short story published. Our relationship had been a slightly stormy one – my fault, especially when Patrick had come back into my life and I was going through emotional turmoil – but Alan had always been able to make me laugh.

  ‘Tell me, what do you know about Clement Hamlyn?’ I requested.

  ‘Nothing repeatable in the present company,’ was his immediate response.

  ‘Censorship isn’t important to me.’

  A glimmer of the old gossip-junkie appeared. ‘May I ask why you want to know?’

  ‘He was supposed to be on a panel with me and a couple of others this morning but didn’t show up.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. He drinks heavily. Probably sleeping off his breakfast.’

  ‘And? Come on, I’m curious. What have you heard through the agents’ grapevine?’

  Alan took a deep breath and then said, ‘That he served an apprenticeship for crime writing in London by hitting old ladies over the head to steal their pension money, acted as a paid thug for a couple of minor crime barons as well as having his own little gang on the side. One of his hobbies is rape, both sexes, isn’t fussy. Uses it as a weapon to settle old grievances or as a threat to extort money out of one-time partners in crime. Or if he just happens to feel like it.’

  ‘That last bit was in the present tense.’

  Alan nodded. ‘But for God’s sake, don’t quote me as it’s rumoured he has admirers, even eyes and ears, in the world of crime and crime-writing. I have enough problems as it is without that bloody monster knocking on my door.’

  I rather got the gist of that and changed the subject.

  The afternoon passed. To a modest audience – true enough almost everyone seemed to be in the bars – I had given the reading from my latest novel, Death Calls on Friday, which seemed to be well received, and then attended a debate on the subject of: Will Ebooks Mean the End of Libraries? Still no sign of Patrick or Hamlyn. This was not what I had expected at all, the plan having been that I would monitor the author while he was attending various functions and inform Patrick accordingly via my mobile. I had been rather hoping that this would have allowed him some rest, sleep even, and thus go towards enabling him to draw a line under what had taken place at that farmhouse in Sussex. I found myself wondering what had happened to it: the Keys Estate that had belonged to the Woodleys, a long-established local family.

  I was also finding it difficult to get the episode off my mind. Commander Greenway had commended Patrick, and he had been cleared by the subsequent inquiry of any wrongdoing. He had been engaged, as Greenway had emphasized, on account of his Special Forces experience for situations exactly like this. What he had done – and he was not to know at the time that the situation would be saved, bizarrely, by the arrival of a rival gang headed by a mobster referred to as Mick the Kick, now dead – had potentially prevented innocent people from being killed or wounded. Patrick knew all this; he had pointed this out at the inquiry.

  I went to Reception to discover that Patrick had checked out of his room, not surprising as we had arranged that he should and I had told the hotel before breakfast that he would be moving in with me and asked for him to be given a key. Whatever anyone thought of this new arrangement I did not care: I had not bothered to mention that we were married. Going up to my room I found that his stuff had indeed been dumped on the floor but there was no sign of the owner.

  After circulating generally in the large side lounge where various authors had copies of their books for sale – I had declined to load myself down with extra luggage, which had probably paid off as the bars were still heaving, the writers talking mainly to one another, and themselves – I showered, put my feet up for half an hour and then changed for dinner. We have a working agreement that I do not call Patrick’s mobile when he is watching and following someone, which I imagined was the case, and was about to break that rule, my phone in my hand, when it rang.

  ‘I’m down opposite the ferry terminal for the Lerins Islands,’ Patrick reported. ‘Hamlyn’s aboard one of the boats on the nearby marina and has been for almost two hours. I don’t intend to tail him closely when he leaves in case he sees me but my guess is he’ll head back towards the hotel.’

  ‘Did he walk there?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, very fast, like a bull at a gate. See you later.’

  I went down, the thought of a glass of wine, or two, before dinner appealing. I am not in the habit of drinking during the day.

  Just inside the conservatory bar entrance someone tapped me on the shoulder, hard, and I spun round.

  ‘That bloke who picked you up last night followed me this afternoon,’ said, or rather shouted, Clement Hamlyn right in my face, a couple of drops of spittle hitting my cheek.

  Heads turned.

  ‘No one picked me up last night,’ I told him icily. ‘We’re old friends and if he happened to go for a walk at the same time as you did then—’

  ‘He’s moved in with you though, hasn’t he?’ the man sneered. ‘And as a matter of fact I spotted him, down by the harbour near where I was calling on someone.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s a fan of yours,’ I said, backing away a little so as to be out of his spit range.

  ‘Don’t mess me around!’ he yelled, advancing. ‘Just tell him to stay away from me in future!’

  ‘You’re drunk and this isn’t doing your reputation one bit of good,’ I said quietly.

  I got a few obscenities for this and then he stormed out, thrusting a woman to one side as he did so.

  A little shakily – the man looked like something really nasty from Pirates of the Caribbean – I organized my drink, found a table in a corner and rang Patrick, needing his presence right now, his bird having definitely flown.

  A short and dapper man dressed formally for evening with a black bow tie hurriedly approached.

  ‘Mademoiselle Langley, I am the manager,’ he said in an undertone in heavily accented English. ‘I hear from Jules at the bar here that there was a little trouble for you . . .?’

  ‘Hamlyn’s been drinking,’ I said. I had smelt whisky on his breath.

  ‘You are all right?’

  ‘Absolutely fine, thank you.’

  ‘Please let me know if he offends you again. I will not tolerate such behaviour.’

  A few minutes later Patrick turned up, quick march, slightly out of breath. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was rather rude, that’s all.’ I had decided to play down what had occurred and delay telling him what Alan had said to me as my husband has been known to take drastic measures against men who have, to varying degrees, ‘bothered’ me. ‘And he’d spotted you,’ I continued. ‘Down by the harbour.’

  ‘He must have got off the boat without my seeing him.’

  ‘How, though?’

  ‘God knows. But I couldn’t get that close as it wasn’t moored by the jetty but towards the end of a pontoon at right angles to it and, obviously, I couldn’t stand right out in the open. If he’d stepped over the rail on to the boat next to it I suppose it might have been possible to go from there up on to the outer harbour wall that the pontoon’s fixed to at that far end. There are all kinds of huts and piles of stuff on it. But I still should have seen him.’
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br />   ‘The worst thing is that he knows you’ve moved into my room.’

  Patrick’s eyes narrowed. ‘Then someone’s watching us.’ He got up, went to the bar and returned with a Scotch for himself, another glass of wine for me and for a while said nothing, staring pensively into space. Then he said, ‘I’ve screwed up again, haven’t I?’

  ‘No, you have not screwed up,’ I countered crossly. ‘Whoever’s watching us spotted you and called Hamlyn on his mobile. Did anything happen that distracted you?’

  ‘Yes, a bloke fell in the water and I thought I might have to jump in and rescue him. But when I got to the edge of the harbour wall I saw that he could swim.’

  I gave him my best Mona Lisa smile and sipped my wine.

  ‘Yes, it could have been a ploy,’ Patrick conceded.

  ‘Are you getting changed for dinner?’

  ‘I’m not really hungry.’

  ‘Your oracle is about to lose her rag and resign,’ I said slowly and through the teeth.

  This seemed to shake him slightly. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Look, Mike asked you to keep an eye on me because Miss Smythe’s been murdered. I need you with me and I think it’s important to act normally. But if you keep starving yourself like this and get any thinner and carry on beating yourself up about what happened on the last job, you’ll either go home in a strait-jacket or by ambulance. I’ve never seen you like this before and it’s really upsetting me.’

  He just looked at me, driving me to continue with: ‘I know it doesn’t make it all right but what you must remember is that one of the men you killed was the subject of a European Arrest Warrant, wanted in Germany for the triple murders of his ex-partner and her two children. The other two were Londoners on the Met’s Most Wanted list, again in connection with the murders of women. How many lives did you save by what you did? How many women and children are alive now as a result of it?’

  ‘Point taken,’ he whispered.

  ‘Can we find out to whom that boat Hamlyn went aboard belongs to?’ I asked the following morning.