‘Real tears,’ I commented.
‘Because all the plans are coming apart, or am I being a nasty old cynic?’
‘One of the oracles of murder,’ I continued, ‘is, who stands to gain? She already gains by being the main beneficiary in her aunt’s will. Why involve others?’
‘She might have been forced to.’
‘In which case, surely she would have bared her soul to us when she knew the truth. My only reservation is that I can’t understand why she was remotely charmed by Hamlyn in the first place. Unless she’s so desperately lonely that anyone will do.’
‘Patrick?’ Greenway invited.
Patrick rose stiffly and went for a little walk around the room to loosen up. ‘Does it matter? She’s only a small player even if she is involved. I’m actually more interested in why Hamlyn seems to want to lie low at her place. My gut feeling is that he doesn’t.’
‘What does he want then?’
‘To kill her.’
‘Living in his plot again perhaps,’ I murmured. ‘Our hero is on the run from the cops and outwitting them all, planning to finish off the last person who stands between him and some kind of insane, ghastly, self-righteous, blood-boltered glory.’
‘God, how I wish you could write the end of his damned book and make sure he’s banged up for just about ever!’ Greenway burst out with.
‘It wouldn’t stick to the rules,’ I said, having to smile at his fervour. ‘Fiction hardly ever does.’
‘What rules?’
‘Real-life police rules.’
The man in charge thought deeply for a full half minute. Then he said, ‘How far would you want to bend them?’
He was not talking about fiction this time.
‘Up to national security standard – perhaps a fraction more.’
‘You mean you’d like to work as you did for MI5?’
‘Yes.’
I feel bound to make it clear at this point that my husband was drinking in my every word.
The commander thought about it again, probably desperately missing his paper clips. ‘In my opinion these people require different measures,’ he concluded finally. ‘But I doubt whether—’
‘Sir!’ came an urgent call from upstairs.
‘Yes?’ Greenway yelled.
‘We’ve found a sub-machine gun, sir – a Heckler and Koch MP5. It was under a loose floorboard behind an empty chest of drawers.’
The commander swore and then, already halfway to the door, said jubilantly, ‘We’ve got them!’ He came to a sudden halt, turned, and added: ‘Finish his book, Ingrid. You can begin, if you feel well enough, by being present when we arrest him tonight.’
The old long case clock in Jane Grant’s hall had quite a loud tick, audible over the radio in the living room which was tuned, quietly, exactly as it had been left by its owner, to Radio Four. The clock struck the half hour, eight thirty, and automatically I checked my watch, having to turn it slightly to the light provided by one of the two small table lamps, this one on a bookcase in an alcove by the fireplace. The other was on a small table at one side of what I assumed was Jane Grant’s favourite armchair.
I was seated on the sofa. It was on the same side of the room as the window, the archway into the hall being over to my left. The heavy curtain that could be drawn to keep out draughts had been pulled across. It was a very dull evening, a mist seemingly having drifted up from the river, swirling in almost Dickensian fashion around the trees on the tiny church green nearby when we arrived. I got up to close the curtains, careful not to place myself right in front of the window as I did so.
My worry was not that Hamlyn would arrive early, as he might, hoping to catch the occupant unawares, but that my working partner was simply not yet fit enough to carry out what we had decided to do. I was not sure of my own ability either as the room was warm, the slow tick of the clock hypnotic, the music on the radio soothing and I had just caught myself beginning to doze off.
Half an hour later I was still sitting there, the church clock having just accompanied the grandfather in the hall in striking the hour. I was wide awake now with the jitters because the radio, which we had switched on to make everything sound normal, was making it hard for me to listen for anyone coming in. The only real change we had made in the room was to shift an antique card table out of range of possible damage should there be any violence.
How can thirty minutes seem like an eternity?
Another ten went by: he was not coming.
Patrick appeared through the curtain. ‘Shall we give it a bit longer?’
‘Please switch off the radio. My heart almost stopped when you came in.’
In the end we waited for almost another hour: nothing.
THIRTEEN
‘It was a bit of a long shot and he must have suspected something,’ Greenway commented as we walked back to the cars, the crew of an area car that had been brought along as back-up in our wake. Patrick and I had not known that he would decide to be in the vicinity. ‘But I can’t see it being too long before Anthony Thomas is picked up and he might know where he is. Thomas is going to be charged with the attempted murder of you two for a start so can be neatly filed on remand awaiting the rest. The Met have two of his yobs already who might be persuaded to drop him in it in exchange for a lesser charge – the ones who were arrested after the pub brawl.’
‘The real brawl took place in an alleyway at the back,’ Patrick reminded him.
‘You love starting fights, don’t you?’ his boss observed with only a hint of disapproval.
‘It mostly happened because the bloke I had won a lot of money off pulled a knife, wanting his cash back, but it was one of the first things I was taught in training for Special Services and can get you out of real trouble.’
‘But you still got yourself arrested.’
‘And your point?’
‘Oh, I see.’ Greenway chuckled.
‘Sonya Trent,’ I brought them back to earth with. ‘Where is she?’
‘Was she in the van?’ the commander wanted to know.
‘No,’ Patrick answered. ‘Although I can’t say for sure. I heard Thomas’s voice and am certain he was shouting from the cab. So if he was driving with Trent in the passenger seat and both yobs were in the back with us there wouldn’t have been room for her, unless she was somehow jammed in the driving cab. I find that unlikely. Hamlyn had stayed behind, at the Trents’ place.’
‘Yes, with Sonya,’ I said. ‘I have a horrible feeling he raped her – turned on by the violence.’
Greenway said, ‘Although the house wasn’t treated as a crime scene for reasons I think you already know about someone did have a careful look round and reported that there was no sign of anything like that having occurred. He could have taken her off in his car though. He must have known that the nanny and children were in the house.’
‘If he went on to kill her . . .’ I muttered.
‘He’s had plenty of time to dispose of the body. But I suggest we remain optimistic and work on the assumption that the woman’s still alive and try to find her.’
‘Will you give it priority?’ I persevered. ‘Even if it means using members of your team for that rather than first looking for Anthony Thomas?’
We had reached the vehicles. Greenway found his cars keys in his pocket and paused with them in his hand. ‘I think I’m prepared to give it two days – but no longer. And you? Are you fit to do a little, less stressful, routine work? It was a pity your MI5 approach with Hamlyn came to nothing before it even got off the ground.’
‘We haven’t started yet,’ Patrick said. ‘We’ll find Thomas.’
‘He’s not at his place in Barnes,’ Greenway said. ‘Sorry, I should have mentioned earlier that it was searched this morning.’
‘According to his website Thomas’s interests are classical music and going for long country walks,’ I said, back at our hotel. ‘I thought that was hogwash when I first read it and I do now.’
‘But he is Russian,’ Patrick demurred. ‘They wrote some of the best classical music in the world. And just because he looks a bit stupid and his grasp of English might not be too good – I heard him talking in the pub – it doesn’t mean he fails to appreciate the finer things in life.’
‘So we comb London listening out for Borodin and Rachmaninov?’
Patrick impatiently shook his head, thinking my joke sarcasm. ‘You probably don’t read the sports’ pages of the newspapers, but I do. He’s livid right now. Another Russian’s bought the football club he was one of the directors of and he’s been slung off the board, the new owner saying he didn’t want any connections with mobsters. Obviously word gets around.’
‘He’s presumably still involved with boxing.’
‘And the last thing I want to do at the moment is present myself at a place where there are any number of super-fit younger blokes, thank you. No, we get him right where he lives – in every sense of the expression.’
‘Dinner?’ I queried, interrupting what had every appearance of developing into a dark brood and praying that the final showdown in Sussex was not still preying on his mind.
‘Good idea. Fuel for a nocturnal venture.’ I must have looked a bit pained at this for Patrick added: ‘Your idea, working as we did for D12.’
Ye gods, I did not want to go out again tonight.
No, I would not go out again tonight.
I was surprised then when, after we had eaten and gone back to our room, I thought for him to change into something more suitable – I had not told him yet but was damned if I was going out again tonight – he appeared to be getting ready for bed. That is, removing all his clothes and staying that way.
‘Change of plan?’ I wondered aloud, aghast at the still black and blue state of him.
‘No.’
‘When’s the nocturnal venture then?’
‘Now.’ This with a big grin.
‘You appear to be fully prepared,’ I commented, getting undressed – nay, stripping off – with scant regard to a rather good dress.
He was, magnificently so.
I suppose at this stage that if I had been writing one of my novels I would have composed a few slightly raunchy lines about my heroine’s sensations before leaving everything to the reader’s imagination. In real life, however, my only reaction to events right now was to be totally gobsmacked at the miracle wrought in my man by fillet steak and chips.
It has to be said that we made love very, very gently.
The Met removed their surveillance of Anthony Thomas’s house in Barnes, partly because he had never shown up there but really due to overtime costs and a lack of personnel. With regard to the protracted no-show, it had occurred to us that the owner of the property opposite, from the loft room of which the watch had been carried out, might not be a disinterested party. We proposed to find out.
First reactions would be important.
‘Serious Organised Crime Agency,’ Patrick said crisply to the middle-aged, pyjama-clad man who answered the door holding a brimming mug of sludge-coloured liquid that might have been tea.
‘They’ve gone.’
‘Who’s gone?’
‘The cops who were watching the place opposite.’
‘I know. May we come in?’
‘Is it important?’
‘It might be.’
Grudgingly the door was opened a little wider and the man slouched off, his slippers scuffing along the carpet. We followed him into an untidy, stale-smelling living room where he flung open the curtains, shifted a couple of empty ash trays from the arms of chairs on to a side table and dropped with a heavy sigh into a sofa.
‘What’s it all about then?’ he wanted to know.
Patrick introduced us, as usual giving the impression that I was merely his minion note-taker, established that the householder’s name was Norman White and then said, ‘Do you know the man who lives over the road, Anthony Thomas?’
‘I was asked that. I only know him by sight.’
‘D’you know anything about him at all?’
‘Not a thing. They asked me that too.’
‘He doesn’t appear to have turned up the entire time the place was watched.’
‘A waste of public money then, wasn’t it?’
‘Before the police were here how many times had you seen him?’
‘Only now and again.’
‘Was he alone or with other people?’
‘Sometimes on his own, once or twice with a few blokes. They were quiet, not the kind of folk to make a nuisance of themselves.’
‘Has there been any kind of activity since the police went?’
White began to show signs of impatience. ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’
‘Did you know that he’s Russian?’
‘Well, he has quite a heavy accent so—’
‘You have spoken to him then,’ Patrick interrupted, having hooked his fish.
‘Er – once now I come to think of it. He asked me about the refuse collection day when he first came here.’
‘When was that?’
‘Around a year ago.’
‘I suggest that he might have told you quite a bit about himself. I have an idea he could be a charming character when he so chose.’
‘He didn’t tell me anything – but was pleasant enough when he asked about the bin day.’
‘He’s involved with boxing promotion and until very recently was the director on the board of a football club. Before that he was some kind of film star. I’ve no doubt he’s a good actor.’
White shook his head. ‘That’s all news to me.’
‘You seem to have a photograph of the football team signed by the players on the DVD storage unit over there. They can’t be all that easy to come by.’
‘So I – I – support that team,’ White blustered. ‘It’s not against the law, is it?’
‘I suggest you tell me the truth before I arrest you for being an accessory to serious crime.’ Patrick followed this up with one of his stock-in-trade star-of-Jaws lookalikes.
‘I’ve heard about cops like you!’ White said hotly. ‘And on the telly. Bash the door down and frame some poor sod for any number of crimes.’
My husband tends not to get really nasty with those he has wrong-footed who are middling stupid. ‘Mr White, Anthony Thomas, once known as Anatoli Tomskaya, is wanted for attempted murder. If it’s found that you’re protecting him—’
‘He said the cops’d say he was wanted for something,’ White triumphantly butted in with. ‘So he was right.’
‘Why did you believe him?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Especially if you accepted a handful of tenners as payment for the nod if the police came nosing around looking for him.’
‘No!’ White shouted.
‘I’m utterly fascinated by this. What was the reason he gave you that the police would lie to get their hands on him?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ White muttered.
‘Why not?’
A woman wearing a pick fluffy dressing gown came into the room. ‘Norm, I heard you shouting. What’s going on? What do they want?’
‘It’s a different lot of cops. They’re on about Thomas – the bloke over the road,’ White told her. And on an afterthought, ‘My wife, Debbie.’
‘Tony?’ She rounded on us. ‘You can’t leave him alone, can you?’
‘You seem to be on first name terms with him,’ Patrick said.
‘No, not – not really. We just wave if we see one another . . . outside, you know, parking our cars.’
Patrick looked from her to the pot-bellied, unshaven ruin on the sofa and back again and smiled a little smile, a good paragraph’s worth of insinuation. Then he said to White, ‘Answer the question – how did he explain his statement that the police would lie in order to arrest him?’
‘As I said, I can’t tell you.’
‘I insist that you do.’
‘I can’t! It�
�s sort of – secret.’
‘Like the secret services, you mean?’
‘Yes. I can’t tell you. He made me promise. I’m the only person who knows other than his . . .’ White shook his head. ‘I’m not saying another word.’
‘Handler?’ Patrick asked sharply.
‘You know about such things then,’ White said in surprise.
‘Yes, we used to work for MI5.’ Patrick leaned forward and spoke in a whisper. ‘Look, we’ve both signed the Official Secrets Act. You can tell us.’
‘You’re not the only person,’ the woman said indignantly to her husband. ‘He told me too – said I was the only one who knew.’
‘While he was screwing you?’ White bawled. He had not missed Patrick’s little bit of theatre – not that it had been intended he should.
‘I have not been carrying on with him! How the hell could I? He’s hardly ever at home. We’ve just had a couple of little chats, that’s all.’
‘Has this man told you both that he’s some kind of spy?’ Patrick asked, an edge to his voice. When nothing was immediately forthcoming he bellowed, in his parade ground voice, ‘Tell the truth!’
They both started violently and then White blurted, ‘I knew you were a bloody bully! All right, he said someone’s reported him to the security services as one, industrial secrets and all that. But he’s a double spy and MI6 know all about him. He said I was serving my country by helping him.’
‘Did he offer you money?’
‘Yes, but I refused it. I used to be in the Territorials so wouldn’t take money for something like that. But I accepted the photo of the lads at the club. They’re real signatures, not photocopies.’
‘You’re not going to believe me if I tell you that he left Russia with the Moscow police after him and is now on the Metropolitan Police’s Most Wanted List as he’s a mainstream mobster, are you?’
White, looking completely baffled, remained silent.
‘No spy of any kind would have given you all that information about himself,’ Patrick pointed out.
The woman sighed. ‘He seemed such a nice bloke and we have a little chat and laugh about our secret and he asks me how I am and . . .’ She tailed off and then snapped, ‘But he lied, didn’t he? About me being the only one who knew. And when men lie about one thing they’ve probably lied about loads of other stuff as well.’ This with a glance at her husband and the certainty of bitter experience.
Stealth Page 16
