Stealth

by Margaret Duffy

  Da Rosta shook his head. ‘No. He was Fred’s sort of boss and didn’t chum up with no one. Right off the wall, according to Fred.’

  ‘What about the man from Estonia known only as Rapla who was shot about a month ago?’

  ‘Never knew him.’

  ‘Who’s next then?’

  ‘God above knows.’

  ‘You must have an ear to the ground. Who else is in the firing line?’

  ‘Dunno. Everyone’s clammed up.’ Another phony smile. ‘Do I get my protection now?’

  ‘If you’ll agree to testify against this man when we finally catch up with him.’

  ‘OK – I promise.’

  ‘You already have protection,’ he was informed.

  I asked myself what a mobster’s promises were worth.

  ‘It looks as though what Coates told you on the boat about his car business and Hamlyn working for him was the truth,’ Patrick said as we made our way towards the hospital exit. Although we had no real leads he was cheerful. Was it because it appeared he really had saved the man’s life by his actions? A little less guilt rolling around in his mind?

  ‘There was no real reason for him to lie about that though, was there?’ I pointed out.

  ‘And da Rosta used to be a chum of his. This is where the list of those being targeted starts to make sense. I suggest we try to find out if there’s a connection between them and any of the previous mobsters who’ve ended up dead. Perhaps Hamlyn knew them all. By the way, you’re a genius for asking da Rosta about Miss Smythe’s jewellery.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’m sure Hamlyn will have got rid of it by now. It was interesting what da Rosta said about another man hanging around by the door of the club. I wonder if that was Anthony Thomas.’

  ‘Could have been – or a hired bruiser. Mike may want Hamlyn picked up now.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he’s much more interested in getting hard evidence against Hereward Trent first so he can arrest them both.’

  ‘That connection is going to be very difficult to prove. Unless Hamlyn drops him in it.’

  ‘Which he would, fast.’

  Patrick laid a hand on my arm. ‘Honeybunch, I think it’s only fair that you share your theory about Trent with me.’

  ‘Greenway might go off at a tangent and if I’m wrong . . .’

  ‘Fine, we don’t tell Greenway until we’re really sure.’

  I did not speak again until we were in the car. ‘I think it’s possible they’re using Trent. Hamlyn might have something on him from his past – he seems to go in for that kind of thing. Trent has the respectability, outward or genuine, that Hamlyn can hide behind: a big house in a respectable district where he can conceal loot and weapons and hold meetings with his hired thugs without any fear of police interference. Rosemary Smythe witnessed things like that. And, as you yourself noticed, Trent was a bit hesitant about his wife and children’s actual whereabouts. They might be being held as insurance.’

  ‘It should be easy to find out whether the kids are at school or not.’

  In this Patrick was wrong for these days schools are very reluctant to reveal anything about their charges, especially over the phone, and I cautioned against going down that route. Finally, and not wishing to risk a head teacher telling Trent that the police had been making enquiries about his offspring, Patrick requested that a short-term watch be put on the house at a time when children might reasonably be expected to come home from school. True enough, a plain-clothes woman PC having been despatched to do the job that same day, the au pair departed in the car and arrived back shortly afterwards with two young girls, both wearing the uniform of the local primary school.

  ‘She saw no sign of the wife,’ Patrick reported, putting his mobile back in his pocket. ‘She’s probably staying with a friend, or visiting her parents.’

  ‘Does she work?’ I wondered.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. They’re loaded, aren’t they?’

  ‘Women with wealthy husbands often have paying interests,’ I reflected. ‘Some are into interior or garden design or even carry on with their professional careers as doctors, dentists, judges, civil engineers, television presenters, chefs, you name it. Some have been known to write books.’

  My husband performed an abject grovel on the table before him, hands over his head.

  ‘You can come out now,’ I said, when I could speak for laughing.

  When enlarged and digitally tweaked, the photograph of Anthony Thomas that Patrick had taken with his phone proved to be good enough to be used for general identification purposes and was duly placed in relevant files. Otherwise, routine work went on. Findings on the strands of wool that had been removed from the rose thorns in Hereward Trent’s garden were quite detailed but not a lot of use. The wool was from Scottish sheep and likely to have been machine, rather than hand, knitted due to technical characteristics that I could not make head nor tail of. I gathered that the lab had had expert opinion on this. This person had gone on to report that the dye was not of vegetable origin but of a commercial type not commonly used by the main manufacturers, such as Pringle. He, or she, had tentatively suggested that the garment, probably a man’s due to the weight of the wool, had been made in Scotland at a small mill, and possibly bought there. The lab reported that there was no definable human DNA on the sample.

  My next contribution to the investigation, there not being a lot else I could do right now – we still had no real leads – was to grit my teeth, go out, buy and begin to read Clement Hamlyn’s books to try to find out more about him. There were five: four best sellers, the fifth published only a week previously and rapidly heading in that direction. In order of publication they were: Chill, Heat, Blood, Burn and Rage. It was Burn that had been dramatized for television; the others, I knew, were to follow, and as it was set in wartime London I was assuming that the title referred to the Blitz. No, wrong, it was hatred that burned, I would discover, not buildings.

  Patrick walked into Greenway’s ‘snug’, the room adjoining his office that I was being permitted to use, where, on rare occasions, the commander relaxes, just in time to have Chill whistle passed his nose and thud into a far corner. Heat and Blood rapidly followed. ‘Not quite your thing?’ he hazarded, an eyebrow raised.

  ‘They’re unreadable,’ I raged. ‘Sorry, but it’s beyond the call of duty.’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘I know, but the violence is sickening, the language revolting and it’s making me feel like a middle-aged ninny for being disgusted by them.’

  ‘Good plots?’

  ‘Yes, not bad – as far as I can tell.’

  He gathered up the paperbacks and tucked them under one arm. ‘Lunch?’

  After refreshment I tackled Burn. I had more interest in this one due to the Richmond connection. The storyline involved a detective sergeant in the Met whose house in Islington was bombed, killing his wife and baby son. At this time he was working on a murder case, a bank manager in Richmond having been found stabbed to death in Richmond Park. It was left to the reader to work out for themselves whether at this point the DS loses his sanity and blames the killer for the death of his family, but he commences an obsessive and almost frenzied hunt for him. This takes him deeply into the London criminal underworld.

  I skipped most of this, unable to stomach the way this crazed cop rapes, batters and even murders his way to get to the man he hunts – finally, having narrowly failed to find his target and been badly injured in a fight with a gang boss and his honchos, he becomes delirious and wanders the streets of Richmond close to the house where the murder victim lived, hoping for inspiration. He meets an old woman who tells him that on the night he was killed she saw the banker with a man she knew had ‘business dealings’ in the area but refuses to tell him his name, panics and runs back into her house, slamming the door. He breaks in through the back.

  I read on, not even aware for a little while that I was no longer alone in the room.

  �
�Time to knock off for the day?’ Patrick suggested quietly.

  I laid the book aside, realized that it was getting dark outside and took a deep breath before saying, ‘It would appear that Hamlyn acts out his plots.’

  ‘Before or afterwards?’

  ‘As far as this one’s concerned, afterwards. His main character, a cop, loses his temper and throws an elderly woman down the stairs when she refuses to tell him the name of a potential murder suspect, discovers she’s still alive and strangles her when she still won’t, or can’t, speak. Great detection work. I think the man’s as mad as this character he writes about.’

  Patrick’s mobile rang and I guessed it was Daws as Patrick called him ‘sir’. Greenway put a stop to the courtesy as far as he himself was concerned a while ago, adding: ‘You used to be a lieutenant colonel, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Patrick commented after the call ended. ‘Although Hereward Trent has never officially been in trouble with the police there was a hushed-up scandal at a golf club he used to belong to when they lived in Essex – funds going missing when he was club treasurer. I say “hushed up” but Daws has discovered that because the club practically went bankrupt because of it, it made the local papers, only Trent’s name wasn’t actually mentioned. Everyone in the district knew who was responsible. It put an end to his position on the town council as well and he and his wife moved away – to Richmond.’

  ‘How on earth did Daws find all that out?’

  ‘I never ask. But he does know more people than Moses.’

  ‘That could be the skeleton Trent has in the cupboard that Hamlyn’s found out about.’

  That night I finished reading, at speed, the book but found no further parallels to the murder case. It was with some trepidation the next morning that I began Rage. Having already discovered that if I skipped most of the dialogue, which Hamlyn was very bad at writing as it was stilted and a large proportion of the adjectives and nouns represented by profanities, never mind all his characters sounding the same, and concentrated on the descriptive passages, vividly portrayed, a real picture began to emerge.

  This novel was set in present-day London, written in the first person and concerned a crime boss endeavouring to enact revenge on other mobsters with whom he had had quarrels in the past, owed him money and, in his view, had ‘done the dirty on him’. Again, the theme was revenge. I became very bored very quickly with the ambushes in back alleys, car chases, general sexual abuse of prostitutes, drunkenness and finally the showdown when our hero slowly and messily tortures the last subject of his ire to death, finally slinging the blooded remains into a stolen car and tidying everything up with a well-aimed petrol bomb. The book ends with our ‘hero’ setting out to drink himself into oblivion.

  Hamlyn, then, still seemed to be living the storylines of his books.

  ‘What I simply don’t understand is how he has the nerve to make threats in public,’ I said, later that day. ‘I mean, the man’s appeared on television. Is he super-confident that he can frighten people into silence should they recognize him?’

  ‘Da Rosta seemed pretty scared,’ said Patrick. ‘Or perhaps Hamlyn kills those who guess who he is anyway, no bother.’

  ‘I want to know what he’s doing right now,’ I said.

  ‘Writing-wise, you mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All we have to do then is break into his place, work out the passwords on his computer and have a read.’

  I ignored the slight sarcasm – no, the full-blown sarcasm – and said, ‘I had another go at the first three novels and they were either just pure imagination or based on his past; the fourth, if one gives credence to the Miss Smythe connection, is about his immediate past, the fifth, if our hunches about him are correct, concerns the present. He’s completely hooked on what he’s doing, living the dream and making money out of it; it’s an addiction, like alcohol. So what’s next?’

  I had a terrible feeling that Hamlyn would create the future and then make it happen.

  TEN

  As far as Patrick and I were concerned the next three days were about to be as good as wasted as he had to attend a residential course at another hotel, the subject matter of which was the new National Crime Agency. Initially, I saw little point in remaining in London – the commander had said he did not want me ‘going off into the blue’ working on the case on my own – as it would then be the weekend and, depressed and frustrated because Greenway’s fears of the case going cold seemed about to be realized, I’d told Patrick that I would go straight home.

  Then, disastrously, I changed my mind.

  The keys to Rosemary Smythe’s house were still in the drawer of the desk we use, together with the case file and my task would be to place everything in the safe before we left or hand the items to another member of the team if they needed them. I asked around and no one did so into the safe it went, but minus the keys.

  Patrick had asked me to take the car home and put some of his belongings in it in order to travel light. He was not looking forward to being stuck in a hotel although they had been promised some kind of relief in the shape of a morning’s ‘leadership training, team bonding and outdoor activities’. Ye gods, my imagination ran wild. Scampering around Hyde Park frightening the horses? Crossing the Serpentine in boats fashioned from empty oil drums and bits of fallen trees? Had they known what they were doing when they ordered Patrick along? Would he pop the instructors into a sack and take everyone else off to the nearest pub?

  My mood instantly sobered as I approached the rear of Miss Smythe’s house. On foot, that is: I had left the Range Rover several streets away. I had used the time, waiting for it to get dark, by first walking down into Richmond to have something to eat. It was drizzling with rain, again and, afterwards, with the hood up on my dark anorak I had made a short detour to walk by Jane Grant’s cottage. The place had been in darkness but whether the windows had really thick curtains, I could not remember, or she was out was impossible to judge.

  OK, this did sort of come under the heading of ‘going off into the blue’ and I was slightly breaking the rules as far as my working partner was concerned as well but there could be no harm in a little quiet observation of Hereward Trent. I had no intention of climbing the oak tree again and had spotted on our previous visit a set of aluminium steps in an outhouse where gardening tools and so forth were kept.

  No one had re-bolted the gate and it opened smoothly, no squeaking hinges, after I had unlocked it. I left it unlocked, switched on my tiny torch, shielding the light with a hand so I did not inadvertently shine it up in the air, and made my way down the garden. It was not yet absolutely dark and there is always a glow in the sky in large cities anyway from street lights and others so I only needed the torch to prevent me from tripping over something. Beneath the oak, and careful not to walk into the remains of the tree house, I paused to look and listen, switching it off.

  There were lights on in the house, one downstairs and another on the first floor. As I watched, the latter went out and the one in the next room was switched on.

  This was something I had not expected but there was no reason why, the place no longer being a crime scene, that someone like Jane Grant should not be there, perhaps checking that all was well or sorting through her aunt’s papers as she was executor to the will.

  I muttered something regrettable. All I had wanted to do was fetch the step ladders from the outhouse and have a look over the garden wall into next door, staying no longer than half an hour or so. Now, to struggle with an awkward aluminium contrivance likely to clatter noisily into anything and everything it encountered in the dark seemed a bit pathetic and, if heard by whoever was indoors, I would have some difficult questions to answer. And as my mentor has been known to warn, always stay on the right side of bloody stupid.

  I remembered that there was a little garden seat in an arbour quite close by, found it and sat down, needing to think things through. There were aspects of this set of cases, which w
e were assuming made up one complex whole, that were puzzling from the point of view of the suspects involved.

  First there was Hereward Trent, a man known to have embezzled money from a golf club, and reputed, no proof forthcoming whatsoever, to be some kind of crime boss. Patrick and I had interviewed him and what had been before us was someone nervous to the point of rudeness, alone in the house with no staff or anyone who might act as his bodyguard, a vital necessity for someone involved in serious crime. I had already come to the conclusion that there was every possibility he was being blackmailed to provide his home as a safe house, a place to stash weapons and stolen property.

  Then, Anthony Thomas – an actor probably with criminal connections in his native country – requests for details to Moscow police had, so far, gone unanswered – who now lived a shady but no doubt more financially rewarding life in London. The photograph of him showed a man with quite heavily Slavic features – he had probably been quite good looking once – but it was not an intelligent face. Did he provide the ‘personnel’ for what we were assuming were well-organized criminal activities?

  Third in the mix was the bent cop. I could not remember his name and SOCA was not involved, although being kept in the picture, with that investigation. He might have been the source of police intelligence, providing the names and addresses of witnesses and other vital information. Why? Did Hamlyn have some kind of hold over him too?

  Last but definitely not least was Clement Hamlyn himself, plus Claudia Barton-Jones, the latter in trouble with the law in connection with unrelated matters. Or were they? As to the crime writer with a criminal record whose old associates were going down like ninepins, the darkly glowering oaf who now appeared to act out his plots and I guessed lived in a kind of drink-fuelled fantasy world, driven by his need to make more money to pay for it . . . Well, he was as mad as a box of spanners, wasn’t he?

  Who the hell was orchestrating this poisonous bunch?

  Someone else.