Confirm or Deny (Gaffney and Tipper Mysteries Book 2)

by Graham Ison

  “And if we find her?” asked Mackinnon.

  “You won’t. I know where she is. But if any of you find that she was working for them, let DS Mackinnon here know.” He switched his gaze back to the sergeant. “Then you see the informant and get as much background as you can. And let me know, step by step.” The sergeant mumbled. “What did you say?”

  “I said it’s going to be an interesting job, sir.”

  “No it’s not,” said Tipper, grinning, “but when you’re a DCI you’ll be able to get someone to do these little jobs for you.”

  *

  “Barbara Rigby appears to be clean, sir,” said Tipper. He put a sheaf of papers on Gaffney’s desk, and lowered himself wearily into the easy chair. “That’s the report.”

  GafFney glanced at the opening paragraph. “What does it say?”

  “Very briefly, born twenty-five years ago in Woodford, Essex. Went to a local comprehensive and got three indifferent CSEs. Left school at sixteen and got a job in the City as a clerk-typist. At eighteen, got a job with an airline based on Stansted. After two years at that, got a job with the same airline as a stewardess through the good offices of her manager.” He grinned. “Moved to her present airline at Heathrow about three years ago. Has a reputation for putting herself about a bit; in short, she’s anybody’s.”

  “That it?” asked Gaffney.

  “More or less,” said Tipper. “Likes men, discos and parties, in that order. Seems harmless enough. There’s certainly nothing to indicate that she’s anything more than she seems.”

  “Just a bed-hopper?”

  “That’s about it, but that could make her dangerous. There again, none of the men she’s been with seems to be interested in anything but her body; it’s certainly not her brains. Incidentally there’s a married police sergeant from the uniform branch at Heathrow on the rather lengthy list of her boyfriends, past and present, that forms an appendix to that.” Tipper pointed at the report and laughed.

  “Has he been interviewed?”

  “Yes,” said Tipper, “By me.”

  “Any joy?”

  “Not on his part, guv. I reminded him of that bit in the Discipline Code about a married officer consorting with a woman not his wife, whereby complaint was made. He didn’t laugh.”

  “Looks as though we can put that enquiry to bed, then.”

  Tipper laughed. “Unfortunate choice of phrase, sir, but yes, I reckon we can.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It took three weeks to trace Julia Hodder’s employment with an African-based charity. Three hard weeks of footslogging, frustrating and at times disappointing enquiry. It is one of the sad aspects of the influence of television that young men aspiring to the Criminal Investigation Department tend to think that all crime enquiries are naturally condensed into fifty-minute blocks. But as DCs Henley, Bishop and Cane discovered, such episodes in the romantic life of a detective took no account of the stairs – all charities, it seemed, had their offices on the top floors of old buildings that had no lifts – the unhelpfulness of some people, or the difficulty of parking a police car, detectives not being exempt from the vexations of driving in London.

  “Yes,” said the woman who had introduced herself as the organizer, “a Julia Simpson worked for us in Ethiopia about eleven years ago.” She had obligingly searched the records of her charity which, unlike some of the other organizations they had visited, were quite well ordered.

  “Do you have a date of birth?” asked Bishop.

  “Yes I do,” she said with a maternal smile. “According to my list it was 7th July 1952. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No,” said Bishop, “but I think my sergeant would like to come and talk to you.”

  “Of course,” she said. “We’re always willing to help the police.” That bit was like television.

  *

  The follow-up was a disappointment. The woman confirmed what she had told Bishop. Had the young detective asked just one or two more questions, he could have saved Mackinnon a journey, but conscious of the strictures his chief inspector had placed upon him, he did not do so.

  “I’m afraid that she’s just a name in our records, Sergeant. There’s no one here who would have known her. We’re only the London administrators. I’m afraid you’d have to go to Ethiopia, and even then you might not find anyone who knew her. The people who work for charities tend to be a transient group. A lot of young people, you know – Americans mainly – it seems to be part of growing up these days.”

  “Can you at least tell me how long she worked for you, then?”

  The woman looked pensive. “Just a moment,” she said, and crossed the room to a filing cabinet. After one or two false starts, she extracted a file. “From the beginning of 1975 to about the middle of 1977, it looks like,” she said. “But there’s nothing here to say where she came from – or where she went.”

  “A photograph, perhaps? Or anything to say that she lost both her parents in 1975?”

  The woman closed the file, dropped it into the cabinet and shut the drawer. “I’m sorry, no,” she said. “I’m afraid our records are a bit sketchy. So often in this business you’re living in the back of a truck, and you’d be surprised how often trucks – and records – get lost, blown up, burnt – so frequently in fact that it seems a waste of time ever putting things on paper.” She sat down at her desk again. “We’re accused of creating great mountains of paper here in London, but it doesn’t help to feed the starving millions,” said the woman with a sigh. “That’s what our workers in the field tell us – they get a bit cross about it all at times.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Mackinnon.

  *

  “A bloke called Naylor rang from the FCO, guv’nor,” said the reserve sergeant as Tipper came out of the lift at Scotland Yard. “Says would you ring him back.”

  Tipper preferred face-to-face enquiries once he was into an investigation; preliminairies were all right on the phone; they could save a lot of time. He went back into the lift, rode to the ground floor and walked round to Naylor’s office.

  “I’m afraid we’ve drawn a blank on your Julia Simpson. I’ve just got a signal from the High Commission. None of the charities operating in Nigeria have heard of her.”

  “I’ve got the answer to that,” said Tipper, “or some of it – she spent a couple of years in Ethiopia apparently.”

  “Oh good.” Naylor said it as though Ethiopia was the place to be, and Tipper thought he was about to get another little homily, this time on Addis Ababa. “What they did say now…” He rooted about among the papers on his desk and picked up the signal. “What they did say was that there’s a chap living just outside Brighton who was there with the Simpsons. The High Commissioner knows him personally it seems – retired now, of course, but he thought that he might be able to help. Rather good of him, really.”

  “Very good of him,” said Tipper. There was no sarcasm in his comment; it was the sort of assistance that often helped to speed up an enquiry enormously. “You have the name and address there, I hope?”

  “There you are,” said Naylor, handing him a piece of paper. “All written out for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Tipper, “You’ve been most helpful.” And he meant it.

  *

  It was about the most complicated surveillance operation that could have been staged. Following a vehicle for two hundred miles is extremely difficult, even for the most skilled of operatives. The least observant of drivers will notice when one particular car is following him, even if he glances in his rear-view mirror only occasionally. It was for this reason that Tipper arranged to have six vehicles of various types, none of which looked anything like a police car, and three motorcyclists standing by at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. Even so, Gaffney was beginning to have second thoughts, not because it could prove to be a futile operation, but because it was going to be a very expensive one. One of the quirks of police administration is that they’ll
swallow the costs of a success; but they make a terrible fuss if they think that money has been wasted.

  The mobiles were not, however, needed for the first part of the observation. At five o’clock precisely, Selby left the gray, concrete pile that is the headquarters of MI5 and made his way through the side-streets of Mayfair until he reached Green Park tube station. There he caught the Piccadilly Line train and changed at South Kensington, waiting until a Wimbledon train arrived, which he boarded. It was apparent that Selby had no idea that he was being housed; nevertheless, to follow someone on the underground system, particularly during the rush-hour, is extremely difficult, the more so when he changes trains at a busy station.

  At half-past five, Selby emerged from Fulham Broadway station and walked the short distance to his flat. His arrival was reported to control both by the team who had followed him and by the team which had been watching his flat since four o’clock. Now came the waiting. Gaffney and his officers still didn’t know for sure whether Selby would stay in Fulham for the night, or travel down to Devon that evening. He certainly hadn’t telephoned the mysterious Rita, at least from any of the phones being intercepted by Special Branch. Gaffney’s guess was that Selby, despite his offhanded and languorous attitude, had been shrewd enough to make that call from a public telephone, if he had made it at all.

  The short space of time which Selby spent in his flat almost caught the watchers by surprise. They estimated that he had been indoors exactly seven minutes before striding briskly from the building carrying a nylon holdall. A three-man team, adopting the usual ABC pattern, immediately covered him for the short walk to a lock-up garage, from which he drove, shortly afterwards, in a rather anonymous-looking Ford Cortina.

  “Well at least he won’t be going very fast in that, thank God,” said the policeman who was driving the souped-up transit van that was the first to fall in behind Selby’s car. They were afraid that he might have owned a Porsche or something similar. That, on his wages, would have been interesting, but would also have made him extremely difficult to follow.

  It was the first time that any of them had seen Selby’s car, despite all the efforts that Tipper had made. There were certain things he would dearly like to have done to it to make it easier to follow, but he hadn’t been able to. He briefed a motor-cyclist to undertake one of them at the earliest opportunity, which entailed that particular policeman stopping off at a DIY store and purchasing a hand-drill and a couple of slender bits. Following suspect vehicles in daylight was difficult enough, but following them at night was extremely hazardous for the surveillance drivers who tended to take risks in order not to lose their quarry. One set of rear lights looked much like another in the dark, particularly on a crowded motorway. And darkness regrettably ruled out the use of a helicopter.

  Gaffney had decided to spend the evening sitting in the operations room in Special Branch at Scotland Yard, where he could listen to the transmissions. He had a feeling that the whole thing was a complete waste of time, but there was something about Selby that made him feel uneasy; something that didn’t gel, even allowing for the fact that MI5 seemed to have more than its fair share of individualists. It was a view shared by the people he worked with; even Hughes and Craven, in their own way a little unusual, had not been very happy about him, although none of them was able to be specific. He didn’t know what Selby’s colleagues called it; but policemen called it gut-reaction.

  It was rush-hour. That presented a plus – and a minus. The plus was that Selby couldn’t go very fast; the minus was that the density of traffic made it impossible at times to get through to where you wanted to be. That, of course, was where the motor-cyclists came into their own.

  The first report to reach Gaffney was that Selby was mobile and crossing Putney Bridge. A little while later they had him on the A316 Chertsey Road. “Making for the M3 I should think,” said Gaffney.

  “Sorry sir, do what?” The operator lifted one of his earphones.

  Gaffney waved an apologetic hand, realizing that he had distracted the man. “Sorry,” he said, “Not you. I was talking to the skipper.” He turned to Claire Wentworth. ‘M3!”

  She nodded. “I heard you, sir.”

  It looked as though Gaffney was right and Selby was making for Devon. He was now clear of London’s rush-hour traffic, but motorways presented problems of their own. He put on a spare set of headphones in time to hear the driver who was on Selby’s tail saying that he wished he was still in traffic division. “He’s doing bloody ninety in that crate; he’ll fall apart if he’s not careful.” Gaffney took the headphones off again, preferring not to know what was going on; the consequences of a pile-up on the motorway, involving his surveillance team, were too horrific to contemplate, not only, he had to admit, because of the possible injuries to his men, but the certainty that it would blow the whole operation. Someone would be bound to ask if it had been worth it.

  Later on, a motor-cyclist reported that Selby had stopped at Fleet services on the M3, and added that he’d fixed the lights. It was not until the following day that Gaffney found out what that meant; the motor-cyclist who had stopped to buy the drill had used it to make a small hole in Selby’s rear lights. Following the Cortina had been considerably easier after that.

  Selby left the M3 at Junction 8 and drove through Sutton Scotney on the A30. From then on, it was fairly straightforward, with regular reports of his having passed through Yeovil, Honiton and Exeter, where he dropped south to Ashburton on the A38. Then, rather riskily, Gaffney thought, he crossed Dartmoor in pouring rain.

  Just before midnight, Tipper telephoned the operations room and spoke to Gaffney: “We’ve arrived, guv’nor. It’s a pig of a place. There’s nowhere to set up an obo, short of leaving a vehicle at each end of a fairly long country lane; and that’d stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “Leave it, Harry,” said Gaffney. “You won’t learn anything else. Pull off the obo. Get the lads billeted for the night down there – the local old bill will know somewhere – and I’ll see you tomorrow. And thank the team; they’ve done bloody well.”

  Gaffney dismissed his people at the Yard and went home. He just hoped that it had been worthwhile, but admitted to himself that he had probably achieved nothing more than to identify yet another adulterer.

  *

  Harry Tipper was back at Scotland Yard by noon. “It was a non-starter from the obo point of view, sir. It’s a large house – looks like an old farmhouse, converted, I should think. It’s been nicely tarted up. But it’s in a lane, south of Dartmoor, east of Tavistock. There isn’t another house within sight. It’s just outside a small village called Bere Watton.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Harry. I never intended that you should maintain observation once you got there. You did a bloody good job in taking him all that way, incidentally. I never thought you’d pull it off’

  Tipper chuckled. “Piece of cake, guv,” he said. “Mind you, it did get a bit hairy once or twice on that bloody A30. I think our blokes may have committed one or two offences of dangerous driving and failing to comply with traffic lights. Never mind; all in a good cause. What do we do now?”

  “I’ll get Devon and Cornwall Special Branch to make one or two enquiries – see if we can identify the mysterious Rita. Then we’ll take it from there.”

  “Are you going to ’front him with it?”

  “Depends what we find out. If it’s just a straightforward case of cherchez la femme, I don’t think we’ll bother.”

  Tipper nodded. “Selby’s a complete prat in my book, sir, but I still don’t see him as our man. Frankly, I don’t think he’s got the stomach for it.”

  “We’ll see, Harry, we’ll see. Spies are funny creatures. They’re often driven by ideology. Bit different from the criminal fraternity; I don’t think I’ve ever met an ideological villain.”

  *

  The Special Branch of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary is only a small unit compared with that of the Metropolitan Police, but no
less efficient. Detective Inspector Joe Partridge was the officer responsible for the investigation of subversive and related activities in the vast area which included Tavistock. Gaffney had had dealings with him in the past, and very helpful he had been, too.

  “Joe?” There had been the usual difficulties of ensuring that Partridge was in an office that had a scrambler on the telephone so that Gaffney could talk with a reasonable measure of security. “We’ve got a little job running up here that has put Tavistock in the frame.”

  “Oh, right, sir. What can we do to help?” Partridge’s soft Devon accent seemed to bring the freshness of the moors over the line and into Gaffney’s office.

  “It’s a farmhouse on the edge of Dartmoor. A woman, first name Rita – no further particulars – lives there apparently. It’s near a village called Bere Watton, and the house is called Tanglewood.”

  “I’ve got that, sir. What d’you want us to do?”

  “A few discreet enquiries, Joe, if you can, without alerting the occupant – or anyone else. Is that possible?”

  “Don’t you worry, sir – we’ll find out what we can. Will I ring you back?”

  “No, don’t bother, Joe. I thought we’d have a run down next Tuesday. D’you think you’ll have something by then?”

  “Oh, I should think so.”

  “Good. Well I’ll see you at Tavistock nick on Tuesday. I might even let you buy me a pint of that lovely Devon cider.”

  Partridge laughed. “Don’t want to drink that, sir, it rots your guts — better off with Scotch. See you on Tuesday.”