Stealth

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘We didn’t have anything to do with Morella,’ Patrick said.

  ‘You did. You gave him the kind of look that stopped him from throwing the pair of you in the harbour.’

  ‘Daniel Coates wasn’t responsible for his death?’

  ‘No, why would he be? Morella was his eyes and ears. I didn’t find that out until after I’d hired him to do a little work for me.’

  ‘But you wanted Coates framed for his attempted murder? No, don’t tell me, it was in the book.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t in the bloody book, you idiot!’ Hamlyn shouted.

  ‘Is Sonya Trent in the book?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘You haven’t killed her too?’

  ‘No, why on earth should I?’

  ‘But you did attack Morella,’ Patrick persisted.

  Hamlyn shot to his feet. ‘I’m going.’

  ‘You can’t until I say so,’ Patrick told him.

  Whereupon the man, his face twisted with rage, hurled himself at us and it took four of the remand staff who had been standing by outside the door to subdue him even after Patrick had been forced to defend the pair of us by hitting him hard with the flat of his hand around the side of the head.

  ‘Patrick, that man’s so dangerous he’s going to end up in Broadmoor!’ I said to him shakily afterwards, finding myself clinging on to his arm.

  Even so I was wondering what Hamlyn had meant when he said that wanting Coates framed for Morella’s attempted murder was not in his book. There seemed to be only one logical – if indeed anything approaching logic existed as far as Hamlyn was concerned – answer to that.

  The hoard of weapons, drugs, stolen property and money discovered in different parts of the Trents’ house was impressive, the currency in several different denominations so contaminated with drugs that it would never go back into circulation. Various hiding places, including the children’s bedroom, had been utilized but most finds were in Hereward Trent’s study: the money in a wall safe, and a medium-sized crate of assorted firearms and ammunition in a cupboard concealed behind a bookcase. Boxes containing stolen silver and silver-gilt items packed together with Chinese porcelain, the latter becoming increasingly valuable as the Chinese are buying back their heritage, were discovered in a garage.

  The search had taken all day, someone apparently having been overheard saying that the only police departments not involved in these cases now the Art and Antiques Squad had been called in were Human Resources and the stationery office.

  It was another three days before we formally interviewed Hamlyn in the extremely secure basement custody suite at SOCA HQ where suspects can be brought from either police stations or remand centres. Meanwhile, he had been assessed by a psychiatrist and found to be, in Greenway’s requested translation of the technical terms, ‘in cloud cuckooland, probably partly brought on by a serious alcohol addiction, in and out of a dream-world of his own but with a sufficient grasp of reality to remember what had recently occurred including his own actions. Caution is urged when questioning this man as he has the potential to be extremely dangerous’. This, I think, we were aware of already.

  In view of this the commander had asked me if I wanted to be present on this occasion.

  I told him I did, adding: ‘Unless you think my presence would be likely to wind him up so that he becomes violent again. And I would like to point out that Patrick can’t be expected to restrain him on his own if he does.’

  Although eight days of good home cooking had made a visible difference to Patrick, right now I was not sure if he was strong enough yet for his stamina to be sufficient for any further prolonged resistance to questioning. Signs of this were the fact that the blow around the head he had meted out to Hamlyn at the last meeting should have floored him and also his having asked Greenway if he would prefer to carry out the interview himself. Smiling, the commander had shaken his head and said, ‘No, you’re the interrogation expert.’ A touch of Daws’ ruthlessness or something quite the opposite?

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll only be in the next room with several other strong bods and the remand people who brought him will be on call as well. It goes without saying that he’s seriously mentally ill – what I really want to know is whether he’s behind all this and, if not, who is.’

  The interview room has the facility for other investigators to watch and listen to what is going on next door, courtesy of microphones and a window that appears to be a mirror on the other side. I had already known that Greenway would not be alone, present also would be CID investigators from the Met who were involved with trying to solve the various gangland murders, most of which, having occurred some time previously to Miss Smythe’s, had not come within SOCA’s remit. They would question Hamlyn later, but not necessarily all today. Such were the number of cases that a liaison officer had been appointed.

  When Patrick saw me making my way towards the interview room – he had been requested, by Greenway, to write a report on possible Met failings at Virginia Water – he asked me the same question as had the commander.

  ‘I want to see this man locked up forever,’ I told him.

  ‘And you are, after all, a formidable and beautiful woman,’ he said with a grin.

  Clement Hamlyn was already present when we arrived and subjected us to a black-browed stare, as though we had never met before. Patrick completed all the formalities, noted that the suspect had declined the presence of a legal representative, and switched on the tape machine. The interview would also be recorded using a concealed video camera.

  ‘It helps a lot that you’re still sober,’ was Patrick’s opening remark. ‘Most of our previous encounters have been marred by the fact that you were rat-arsed.’

  The author muttered a few obscenities and stared somewhere over my right shoulder.

  ‘And despite the fact that when we last met you virtually admitted killing any number of people what I said still stands and that conversation can’t be used in court as evidence against you. So now it remains to establish exactly how many you’ve murdered so you can be charged accordingly.’

  ‘I was unwell when I said all that,’ Hamlyn said. ‘That remand centre’s a real dump and I’d caught a bug of some kind.’

  Stolidly, Patrick continued: ‘Other people will question you about the deaths of those I’ll refer to as career criminals but I want to concentrate on the murder of Miss Rosemary Smythe at Richmond and the associated organized crime that it is connected with. I take it you have a fairly clear recollection of that.’

  ‘You’re wasting my time and I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘This all starts after she wrote around a dozen letters to us, SOCA, as she thought her neighbour, Hereward Trent, was involving himself with criminals.’

  ‘She wrote to you? God, she was an interfering old bat. Hereward said she was a neighbour from hell.’

  ‘Do I add him to the list, by the way?’

  The man’s gaze fixed on the speaker. ‘Trent? No, of course not.’ Then, ‘Why, is he dead?’

  ‘His body was found dumped at a nature reserve around ten days ago. Before you were arrested too. He’d been beaten up and then shot in the head. Threatened to turn you all in, did he?’

  ‘Look, I hadn’t even seen Trent since that night we—’ He abruptly stopped speaking.

  ‘Chucked the pair of us out of a van on the M40?’

  ‘I wasn’t there!’

  ‘Time will tell where you were, or weren’t, but you ordered it.’

  ‘I did not!’

  ‘So who’s the boss man? Thomas?’

  Hamlyn gazed despairingly at the ceiling for a moment and then said, ‘I can distinctly remember telling you that the man’s an idiot, thick. He just makes a living hiring out hit men even more stupid than he is. The boxing thing is just a front.’

  ‘And yet I saw him and his minder getting out of a car driven by you outside a pub in Shepherd’s
Bush.’

  ‘I was only giving him a lift.’

  ‘I’m glad you can recollect that. So who is in charge?’

  ‘Thank you, but I prefer to stay alive, even if I have to do time.’

  ‘You want to go down for life to protect this individual?’

  ‘No, but it’s necessary to protect . . . others.’

  ‘Claudia Barton-Jones, for example?’

  Hamlyn mutely shook his head.

  ‘We’re back in your novels again,’ I said. ‘You’re the kind of man to boil down his own mother for glue. Why did you kill Rosemary Smythe?’

  ‘Who’s saying I did?’

  ‘The Trents were looking for something in her house – you’d given them the keys that you’d tricked Jane Grant into letting you have. I have a theory that on the night you killed that old lady you were beside yourself because it was thought she’d gone off with something highly incriminating from the Trents’ garden that had been left lying around. You burst in through the back door, obviously well-fuelled on whisky, and demanded to know what she’d done with it. She refused to tell you and you then drunkenly rampaged around the house trying to find it but were actually too drunk to look properly. Failing to locate it, you lost your temper and threw Miss Smythe down the stairs. Then, discovering that she was still alive, you strangled her.’

  ‘Your books are lousy and so’s that fairy tale,’ Hamlyn sneered. ‘Two out of ten for trying though.’

  ‘But we found it,’ Patrick informed him. ‘In one of the attic rooms under a loose floorboard. A Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine gun. I understand from one of Miss Smythe’s letters that a Thomas thicko-for-hire had played soldiers in the garden with weapons. Was that the chap who sabotaged the tree house or did you do it?’ When Hamlyn remained silent he continued: ‘You’ve told us that Thomas is of no account and isn’t the one issuing orders so why protect him and those working for him? Are you intent on taking the blame for everything that’s happened?’

  Still Hamlyn remained silent.

  I said, ‘Someone’s well aware that you have an alcohol problem and most of the time have real trouble telling the difference between fact and fiction. He’s known that, and you, for a very long time and has been using you for his own ends, for money and to settle old scores. Some of the old scores could well have been yours as well so you were quite happy to go along with it to begin with. But then it all started to get out of hand and—’

  ‘Shut your idiot mouth!’ Hamlyn shouted at me.

  ‘We’re obviously getting somewhere,’ Patrick murmured. ‘It seems to bother you more that someone’s using you than I would have thought sensible. Who sabotaged the tree house? Was it you? D’you have a thick blue sweater with a hole in it after catching it on a rose thorn climbing over the wall or have you chucked it away?’

  ‘I—’ Hamlyn bit off the rest of what he had been about to say.

  ‘Chucked it away? I thought so. It’s just your style, that tree house. No trouble at all getting into that with your height and long arms. You’re probably a practical sort of bloke too and unlike Trent, Thomas and his assorted gutter rats you’d know where to saw and by how much. It’s possible it didn’t fall down with the old lady in it for a while so you had another go. She apparently heard someone in her garden one night.’

  ‘You can’t prove any of this.’

  ‘And then there’s the oil that a leaking mower had deposited on the Trent’s lawn that you walked through on the night you killed Miss Smythe that was deposited, together with grass cuttings, on her hall carpet. The shoes you were wearing will probably still have minute traces of oil on them and you probably won’t have thought of throwing those away.’

  The author pointed an accusing forefinger. ‘You’re just making all this up.’

  ‘Give me your story then.’ Patrick leaned back in his chair with a chilly smile.

  Hamlyn took a deep breath and then spoke angrily and jerkily. ‘All right. I admit I’m involved with these people. But only as a sort of observer. It’s research. But no one’s using me and I was not involved with any of the crimes that were perpetrated – by them.’

  ‘We’ve already established that you threatened Angelo da Rosta. He was alive without paying you a penny, you complained.’

  ‘You’ve established nothing. What I said the other day is anyone’s guess. You said yourself that what passed between us then can’t be used in court as evidence against me.’

  ‘He’s prepared to swear in court that you did.’

  ‘Any brief worth his salt’ll throw that out. It’s the word of a third-rate mobster against mine.’

  Here Hamlyn bared his horrible teeth at Patrick in a triumphant grin.

  I said, ‘It’s good to undertake research, isn’t it? Go to places, get the feel of the streets you’re writing about and beat up women so you know what it feels like. That’s why you asked Jane Grant if you could have a look around Miss Smythe’s house, because although you wanted to carry on with your search for the sub-machine gun a place like that is in your novel.’

  ‘You deserved a smack but basically, you’re right. And congratulations, you’re learning fast,’ Hamlyn said.

  ‘But then you gave the keys to the Trents as you’d had second thoughts about entering the house yourself in case you were seen.’

  He just stared through me.

  ‘Hereward Trent wasn’t behind all this, was he? His home was being used as a safe house.’

  ‘He was a pathetic fool and pathetic them. deserve to be used. I felt sorry for him – sometimes.’

  ‘The man was so nervous it was obvious he was under huge duress. Threats to his family?’

  ‘It’s always a weak point with fools, something I’ve discovered during my research. I can always influence them. I admit I leaned on him. I – er – was asked to as he seemed frightened of me for some reason.’ This with a smirk, craning his neck a little in the direction of the mirror as though he was trying to admire his reflection in it.

  ‘How did you find out about his spot of bother at the Essex golf club that was one of the reasons they moved to Richmond?’

  ‘Oh, that. Someone I know had heard about it.’

  ‘You used it to blackmail him.’

  ‘I’m admitting to nothing. Some bastard’ll only frame me for his murder.’ This with a contemptuous glance at Patrick.

  ‘It makes you feel big having a hold over others, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s professional. I like to get right under the skin of my characters.’

  ‘I understand you sometimes threaten people with rape.’

  ‘Why ask, d’you fancy it?’ the man retorted with a leer.

  ‘Your leading character does that too.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He’s a complete shit. Like you.’

  He actually gaped at me.

  ‘Did you rape Sonya Trent?’

  ‘I – er—’

  ‘Offer to get her out of the house in case a neighbour saw something suspicious and called the police? Drive her off in your car, did you? Take her to a quiet place where you raped her?’

  ‘Er—’

  ‘I think you did. I asked you this the other day. Where is she?’

  Hamlyn responded with an extravagant shrug.

  ‘You really don’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I don’t know where she is!’ Hamlyn shouted. ‘She – she ran off.’

  ‘After you’d raped her.’

  ‘OK, yes, but I really don’t know where she is.’

  ‘And you’re not really interested because, as you said last time, she wasn’t in the book either.’

  The man shook his head, eyes closed. ‘Now you’re deliberately trying to confuse me.’

  ‘No, I’m trying to get inside your crazy world. The other day you said – and you do seem to be choosing to remember some of what was said – that getting Daniel Coates framed for Alonso Morella’
s murder wasn’t in the book. If you don’t know where Mrs Trent is and that’s not in the book either it suggests that those are the things you have no control over.’

  ‘I could have said anything the other day. As I said before, I wasn’t well.’

  ‘You were examined by a doctor at the remand centre to see if you were fit to be interviewed and he reported that there was nothing physically wrong with you except symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. According to the psychiatrist who also saw you, you go in and out of a psychotic state so I suppose it’s a bit like using a revolving door. And when you’re like that you’re a serial killer – bragging about it too.’

  ‘Get this bloody woman out of here!’ Hamlyn bawled to Patrick.

  ‘She stays,’ Patrick whispered.

  I continued: ‘To you, sane or otherwise, everyone’s a fool, stupid, an idiot or an imbecile. That sounds like the reaction of a man who knows that, deep down, he’s the biggest moron of the lot for being outmanoeuvred by someone who’s got right inside his raddled brain. He’s controlling everything, and especially, you.’

  ‘This is all utter make-believe!’

  ‘Yes, despite what you said I’m quite creative too. But I think I’ve got this right. You need this person because he’s your mental prop to remaining the famous author who writes amazingly authentic novels. You have to keep him sweet or he’ll blow you and your illusions to bits by grassing on you to the police. And he’s playing with you: he made you go and find him in Cannes to get the money he owed you. I did a little bit of research and discovered that you haven’t bothered to attend a literary festival before. Too boring? Too many idiots there?’

  The crime writer leaned across the table towards me. ‘One day, I’ll find you, and then . . .’ With a triumphant smile he left the rest to my imagination.

  I smiled back. ‘There you are, Big Jake – that’s his name isn’t it? Big Jake, the all-powerful, right under the thumb of a shitty little mobster. I’m pretty sure it’s Daniel Coates – directing everything from his boat somewhere in the Med and on rare visits to this country using a stolen identity. Coates, showing you up as the truly pathetic man you really are.’