McGregor sighed. ‘Ladies, you have my full attention. What is it?’
Mirabelle strode into the cell and motioned towards the door, which McGregor closed. ‘What we’ve come across is dangerous information, Detective Superintendent. It was only last night I found out precisely how dangerous. So, first of all, before I tell you what I know, I need reassurance. We have to contain this information. A man’s life is at stake. Can we trust you?’
McGregor sat up straight. ‘Is it Ben? Do you know where he is?’
Mirabelle shook her head. ‘Ben’s the reason I’m here, though. Inside this police station, well, it’s a rat trap, isn’t it? There are leaks all over the place. But you knew Ben and you were kind enough to try to find him. So, I’m giving you a chance. Can we trust you?’
McGregor took off his hat. The woman was being logical, at least. ‘Look, I know people don’t always trust the police in these parts and that working for McGuigan you might well have been exposed to some of the more unreliable elements of the Sussex Constabulary. But you two are no housebreakers, I know that. And Ben is still missing. I’m hoping this information of yours isn’t just some histrionic female story. Because so far none of what you’re intimating makes any bloody sense. So, yes, you can trust me but it’s up to you whether you choose to do so.’
Mirabelle’s eyes betrayed only the merest flicker of annoyance. Then, from the bed, Vesta’s voice rang out. She had snapped. ‘It does make sense! Really it does! Everything we’re on to! Mr McGuigan isn’t missing, Detective Superintendent. He’s dead in a false grave. They buried him,’ she said, standing up straight as a rod. Like a kid explaining a dream to her parents, the words came burbling out all at once, spilling over each other. ‘These people are monsters. And Mirabelle wanted to handle it on her own, but we can’t. We’re just two women. And this is a whole lot of trouble. Insurance fraud and all sorts. And there are all those coins. These people, they just make up other people – a complete fake identity that they can kill off if they want to – you’ve no idea! All for money! And now they’ve kidnapped Father Sandor from the Church of the Sacred Heart and they said if we went to you they’d kill him. But they are going to kill him anyway, aren’t they? That’s the truth. And we tried to find him last night and Mirabelle almost got caught, but we’re out of leads and we can’t do it on our own – I mean, that’s what we were trying when your constable pulled me in, but God knows where they’ve got him. Lisabetta has a gun! And I’m supposed to be back at my desk in the office at one so they can phone me and let me speak to Sandor. And I’m worried, petrified, actually. I don’t think you’re bent. I think you’re a decent bloke. Promise me you’ll help because I don’t want them to kill Sandor. Not after everything else!’
Mirabelle’s eyes burned. ‘Vesta!’ she spluttered. McGregor would never take them seriously now.
But, to her surprise, the detective superintendent moved across the cell and checked outside the door before closing it again firmly. ‘Lock this, will you?’ he said to the guard through the grille. ‘I’ll bang when I want out.’
McGregor waited until the guard had moved back to his post at the end of the corridor. Then he sat down at the end of the bed. ‘Right, Miss Churchill, that’s a lot of information all at once and I’m not really following it. Did you say Father Sandor? Because that’s the priest who was reported missing yesterday by one of his colleagues at the church. How is he caught up in all this? Why don’t you just tell me everything you know, from the very beginning? Slowly.’
‘You think you might be able to stop them killing him?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Because they killed Ben McGuigan. They strangled him, and it’s difficult to kill a big man like that, even if you get behind him,’ she burbled.
‘You’re sure Ben’s dead?’
McGregor turned to Mirabelle, in search of some sense. She nodded agreement, her head bowed. ‘Yes, I think they murdered Big Ben because he was onto what they were doing at the racecourse,’ she confirmed sadly. ‘It’s a very long story, I’m afraid, Detective Superintendent.’
‘Well, let’s give it a try. You couldn’t do a worse job than Miss Churchill here.’
Vesta sighed, frustrated, and slumped onto the mattress as Mirabelle took a deep breath.
‘It’s a criminal operation – clever and very complex. First of all they’re involved in prostitution but that isn’t where the real money is. That’s only a sideline. Really they are accommodating ex-SS men, political refugees, collaborators – anyone with money who has to get out of Europe. Señor Velazquez – he was SS. He was the Commandant of a concentration camp. I don’t know which one.’
Vesta squealed. ‘You mean they were Nazis! And I walked right into it. Shit, look at the colour of me!’
‘Well, so far,’ Mirabelle pointed out, ‘we’ve only found one Nazi and he’s dead, but I think there have been others. Lisabetta is at the head of it. She provides papers and more importantly a clearing house for dirty money and stolen goods. Very high end. They’re laundering the money at Fairfield Road through Manni Williams. Ben was onto them. That’s why they killed him. So the scam at the races isn’t really about making money at all – it’s about cleaning dirty currency and giving it back as a payout minus Manni’s fee. And there’s something going on with gold coins, too – there are gold coins everywhere. Anyway, these people come to London then Lisabetta and her team clean them and send them on their way, for a hefty percentage, of course. And now she’s pulling out and we got entangled. It’s the end of her operation, here at any rate. She’s leaving.
‘When we first got onto it Ben had an enquiry on a defaulted loan. It was fake. The whole point of it was to legitimise a payment that Lisabetta wanted to be made to a guy in London. Bert Jennings. Bert is a legitimate creditor on the estate of one Romana Laszlo. Romana didn’t exist – she’s just an insurance scam on a life policy. Fake lying in, fake death – everything. And Ben ended up in Romana’s grave – easy for them to dispose of him that way. His body is in the graveyard at the Church of the Sacred Heart and the priest – Sandor, the guy that’s missing – they kidnapped him to stop Vesta blowing the whistle. I found the place last night where they’d been holding him. It’s on Hangleton Road, on the A2036. There’s a foundry there where they’ve been smelting gold, I expect, and minting those gold coins. Sandor was gone and the place was deserted. I thought he might have got away but if he had turned up back at the church you’d know by now, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d hope so,’ McGregor said. ‘So, let’s get this straight, shall we? Do you know where Sandor is?’
‘No,’ Mirabelle shook her head.
‘As far as you’re aware, who last saw him?’
‘Vesta and Manni – Manni was the one who kidnapped both of them, on Lisabetta’s say-so. Then he let Vesta go to legitimise the claim at the insurance company.’
‘And who else is involved?’
‘Dr Crichton, Lisabetta – I don’t have a last name – and Bert Jennings. And Manni Williams. That’s all I know.’
‘Dr Crichton? At the head of it? And that woman who is staying at his house?’
‘No, the other way round – Lisabetta is in charge. I think Crichton fell foul of her. Last night she drugged him and she may have driven his car off a cliff along the London Road. I couldn’t stop her. She’s pulling out – I heard her phone London and arrange for her things to be sent down to Brighton on the first train this morning. She’s going to leave the country. Soon.’
‘Right.’ McGregor held out his hand to stop Mirabelle saying anything else. He was thinking. He stood up and paced backwards and forwards beside the bed. Then he turned and stared at Mirabelle. It seemed unlikely that an elegant and rather fetching woman like Miss Bevan would know about these things but you could tell straight away that she was at home in this environment. There was something impressive about her. And, his senses tingled, if what she said were true, this would be the biggest case he’d ever hand
led. He could shine but he had to be careful to qualify what was and wasn’t accurate. Women, after all, tended towards the vibrant imagination and some of these ideas were, well, vibrant in the extreme.
There was one thing Mirabelle and Vesta were definitely right about, though. Whatever he did, he’d have to use men he could really trust. Then it came to him. McGregor smiled. For once it would be easy. Anyone he wasn’t sure of he could send to Fairfield Road and then he’d put together a small team to verify Mirabelle’s information. They could work down here, to start with. Out of the way. He’d only speak to the guys he knew were absolutely straight. There could be no leaks and no backhanders. Too many criminals had got away with too much in Brighton. That was set to change. And now he could prove that his men could be effective despite the corruption – the Sussex Constabulary was already miles ahead of the shambles it had been in when he first arrived.
‘So,’ he said, ‘if I’m understanding you correctly, priority number one is to find Father Sandor and then arrest Lisabetta, Dr Crichton if he’s alive, Manni of course and this ...’
‘Bert Jennings,’ Vesta chipped in helpfully.
Mirabelle nodded.
With a stern expression McGregor banged for the door to be opened. He called for the duty sergeant who’d worked at the station for twenty-five years – one of the few men who hadn’t been implicated in the scandals. He’d suffered for it, too – McGregor had heard he’d been beaten up a couple of times for refusing to turn a blind eye.
‘Simmons,’ he said, ‘I’d like the file on that missing priest – everything we’ve got. I need a uniformed officer to go over to the train station and find out everything that came down on the early train from Victoria by way of cargo. I want a comprehensive list. Early papers, the lot. Check out any complaints or disturbances on the Hangleton Road over the last few months. And I’ll need Gourlay Michaels and Richardson down here, please, but first everyone else can go to the racecourse. Get them on the case up there, and then we’ll get cracking.’
‘I think you should run Lisabetta’s details through the ICPC,’ Mirabelle said.
McGregor looked up. ‘Bit young,’ he pointed out, ‘but then, if this is all true, she started young, didn’t she?’
‘What’s the ICPC?’ Vesta piped up. Ever since Mirabelle had said the word ‘Nazis’ she had sat on the bed feeling rather shellshocked.
‘International Criminal Police Commission,’ McGregor told her. ‘I suppose it would do no harm.’
‘I’m sure she’ll have changed her name several times,’ Mirabelle conceded, ‘but you never know.’
‘Good idea. And we can try this other identity – Romana Laszlo – too. Who knows which name Lisabetta was using first. Simmons, could you get Gourlay to do that? And send down some tea and bacon rolls, would you? Miss Churchill appears to be on the verge of starvation, poor thing.’
As the door closed he turned to the women. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll send you home soon and we can get on.’
‘Don’t you need our help?’ Vesta insisted.
‘We need information, Miss Churchill, but this isn’t a job for amateurs. There is no point in you sitting in the station all day.’
McGregor took out a pen and paper and began to chart Lisabetta’s operation. ‘They’d need a lot of people to pull all this off, you know. Are you sure that Lisabetta is capable of being at the head of it?’
Mirabelle nodded. ‘Pretty sure.’
‘I met her at the Grand, you know. She cried,’ McGregor recalled. ‘She was crying about the Spaniard who died. Friend of the family.’
Mirabelle stared at him with naked derision. ‘You think there’s a man in the background? You think that with a pretty girl there has to be. When I worked in the service some of our best spies were women. Don’t guess what a woman is capable of by the front she shows you, Detective Superintendent. There may be a man behind Lisabetta, I have no idea, but there needn’t be just because she’s young and pretty. God knows what she has done. By my reckoning she was in her mid-teens towards the end of the war – looking like she does, stuck somewhere near Poland, if my reckoning is right on her accent, when the Russians rumbled through. If she got out of the country, that alone makes her very tough. No, she’s more than capable of running this on her own and I’m sure the ICPC will have a file on her.’
McGregor nodded curtly. He had to admit it. He’d never met a woman like Mirabelle Bevan before – she was quite remarkable. Inspiring, even.
He turned around his notebook and showed Mirabelle what he’d sketched – a charge sheet in the form of a flow chart with money coming from prostitution, sale of false papers, insurance fraud, laundering of illegal currency and valuables, involving murder, kidnapping and blackmail.
‘You’ll find the proof. You’ll see,’ she said. ‘There are lists of missing Nazis where I used to work at Whitehall and there are agencies still looking for them. I worked on the files for Nuremberg. Velazquez will be on one of those lists. You can track him down from there.’
There was a sharp knock on the cell door. Sergeant Simmons entered with a plate of bacon rolls in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. Behind him three men were waiting in the narrow passageway.
McGregor acknowledged them and then cast his eye over the notes.
‘We’re going to work down here, sir?’ one man questioned. ‘In the women’s cells?’
‘For now,’ McGregor said sternly. ‘Yes.’
Vesta took a bacon roll from the pile and chewed it methodically, perched on the edge of the bed.
‘Looks like you’re right,’ McGregor said to Mirabelle as he carefully checked his notes. ‘The ICPC is sending two officers from St Cloud. They have a couple of possible pseudonyms for Lisabetta. Nothing arrived on the early train from London though apart from newspapers and a couple of deliveries from Selfridges – furniture and such. Oh, and there have been several complaints over the last few months about hammering noises at your premises on Hangleton Road. Claims to be a foundry making iron railings that opened in January. Originally they were working at night. Looks like they’ve been at it for some time. Do you have any idea where else she might have been operating?’
‘I know she was in Amsterdam, and she said she had been shopping in Paris, but she comes from Eastern Europe, though probably not Hungary, where she claims. I can’t tie down her accent, but it seems more Austrian or Eastern German – maybe somewhere on the Polish border. My guess is that her background will be in prostitution – it’s a way into this whole world, isn’t it? It would only take one client to make her realise she can charge through the nose. She seems obsessed by money – and, well, that’s prostitutes for you.’
Vesta looked at her feet and Mirabelle thought she detected a blush.
‘Right, well, I’m just about ready to brief everyone, I think. First priority will be to find the priest.’
‘We want to help, you know ...’ Mirabelle offered. ‘You’re short-handed, and both Vesta and I would willingly volunteer.’
McGregor shook his head and a dark look crossed his face. It was similar to the look Ben McGuigan had when he last left the office, Mirabelle thought. Perhaps McGregor was trying to protect her, just like Ben.
‘You’re two ladies,’ McGregor said.
‘Two ladies who figured the whole thing out and handed it to you on a plate,’ Mirabelle remonstrated.
‘You never heard of Mata Hari?’ Vesta chipped in. ‘She’s got nothing on Mirabelle. Didn’t you hear where she used to work?’
‘No,’ McGregor repeated, ‘and I’m sending you two home. You’ve done enough. You could have got yourself killed last night, both of you – housebreaking and God alone knows what else. It’s too dangerous. I won’t be responsible for civilians. And I need to get to the racecourse if we want to get Manni in the cells. Simmons, send these two home, would you? We’ll call if we need you, ladies. And we will need you – only later.’
25
X2: th
e counterintelligence and agent-manipulation branch of the Secret Service
In the back of the car on the way to the Lawns Mirabelle couldn’t stop thinking about Jack. He always said you couldn’t predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people. ‘If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.’
Mirabelle had only been seeing Jack for six months and that night, back at his quarters, they had been drinking Campari. It was dreadful stuff but the whisky had run out. Jack promised he’d cook dinner and then arrived home with a brown paper bag containing six precious eggs. He’d planned to whisk them into an omelette with an onion and some thyme, which grew plentifully in a herb box outside the window. He often came back ‘all thinky’ from work and as he spoke Mirabelle presumed he was trying to explain some of the acts of bravery that had helped the Allies. She sipped the vivid red drink in her highball glass sparingly.
‘People fall in love, you see,’ Jack continued with a cheeky grin, ‘and then they don’t behave logically. Have you ever heard of David Hume?’
She was taken aback. Jack hadn’t said anything about love before. Mirabelle shook her head.
‘Hume’s a Jock philosopher,’ Jack continued as if this wasn’t a landmark. ‘He said that you can see a thousand white swans but you still don’t know that white is the only colour of the swan. You can see white swans all your life, and the more you see, the more you’re sure, statistically, that all swans are white. It’s logical. You think you can rely on it. But all it takes is one black swan and everything changes. It’s a bolt from the blue. Something you aren’t expecting and you have to start from scratch. You’re my black swan, Belle. I love you. And now things will never be the same for me.’
She hadn’t been able to speak. She’d just wrapped her arms around him and, as far as she could remember, they ended up having the eggs for breakfast the following morning.
Brighton Belle Page 18
