The Sweeney 3: The Deal of the Century
Sheikh Abu Hasif died on the third floor of the Wellington Clinic in London on Monday 12th April, 1976. His assassin emptied a whole clip from an M38 submachine gun into the man. It took off most of his head and right shoulder and left the bed headboard and part of the floor and walls reworked in technicolour.
Detective Inspector Jack Regan of the Flying Squad begins his investigation with a search for a group of mysterious murderers among the rich of Belgravia and the richer inhabitants of the high life of the French Riviera At first sight it appears that leading Arab oil sheikhs and entrepreneurs have been murdered to warn others of their kind to pay over multi-million dollar blackmail sums in order to stay alive. But with Jack Regan digging deeper, the truth turns out to be something else again...
This is the third of three Sweeney novels published at the time of the original series. The others are: ‘The Sweeney: Regan’, and ‘The Sweeney 2: The Manhattan File’.
Ian Kennedy Martin is the creator of Thames Television’s enormously popular TV series.
www.iankennedymartin.com
© 1976 Ian Kennedy Martin.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner.
Sheikh Hamid bin Haffasa cashed in his oil wells on Monday, the 12th March, 1976, on the third floor of the Wellington Clinic, Lords, London. The deux ex machina of this sudden demise was an M38 sub-machine gun in the hands of a cool assassin. A whole clip of ammunition had taken off most of Haffasa’s head and right shoulder, and reworked the bed headboard and the floor and walls of the room in technicolour. The noise disturbed fourteen other millionaires who were losing their prostates in the privacy of one hundred-pound-a-day suites. They all rang their bells simultaneously. It sounded like an Italian town on an Easter Sunday – not at all appropriate for a Mohammedan Croesus taking his final bows and heading for that last great gas station in the sky...
Detective Inspector Jack Regan of the Flying Squad, New Scotland Yard, heard a noise like a muffled jack-hammer, being drowned out by the heavy truck traffic up Wellington Road. Afterwards, he was to wonder why he hadn’t identified it as gunfire. As a Metropolitan CID detective he had to check in every four months at the Lippets Hill police range and fire at least a hundred rounds during a whole day’s gun practice. But he’d never heard the ultra-fast bark of an M38 before. And maybe the acoustics of the hospital had distorted the sound.
Regan was visiting the private suite of a West End villain named Harvey Cantwell whom he’d known for some years. Cantwell had had a skiing accident, a broken leg which had been badly reset by a Swiss doctor. He’d been in the Wellington to sort that out. Cantwell’s suite was at the north end of the long third floor corridor. Sheikh Haffasa’s suite had been down the other end of the corridor and round the corner, with a perfect view down over the felt flat acres of the green turf of Lords cricket ground.
For some days afterwards Regan was to rethink over and over again exactly what he did from the time he heard the jackhammer sound, said his good-byes into the ill face of Harvey Cantwell, and walked from Cantwell’s bedroom, through his living room, into the corridor, and down the corridor to the elevators.
At the elevators Regan met the murderer of Sheikh bin Haffasa. He was lighting a cigarette. He seemed relaxed, a man of medium height, neat, dark complexion, fortyish. He’d left the M38 with his fingerprints on it in the victim’s room. He’d pressed the button for the lift, and with a slight nod bowed Regan into it when it arrived. The cigarette the man lit must have been the last one in a Benson & Hedges packet. Regan noticed and remembered that the man dropped the empty packet on to the floor of the elevator. The fingerprints on the cigarette packet matched the fingerprints on the murder weapon. There was no record of the fingerprints in the Yard’s files.
Regan rode from the third floor down to the ground with the killer. He remembered the man had gone out of the building to the kerb and waved down a cab. That detail stuck in his mind as a measure of the murderer’s cool. The neat-looking gentleman had entered the Wellington with the M38, assassinated Haffasa, lit a cigarette, taken the elevator, and then wandered out into the street, apparently relying on the exigencies of the London taxi service for his getaway. The man who had butchered Haffasa had not calculated it would be necessary to make any particular arrangements for a speedy exit – like, for instance, a hired car.
He’d killed and then looked for a cab. That suggested to Regan that he was dealing with either an amazing professional, or a maniac. And this was to concern him directly. Two hours after the coincidence of his being present at the Wellington Clinic, he was called in by the Assistant Commissioner of Crime, Scotland Yard.
The ACC’s message was curt. ‘Regan, DCI Mellin, St. John’s Wood nick, is notionally in charge. But I’m allocating you to his Murder Squad on a roving commission. Mellin’s the boss, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re the joker who’s going to comb the country and locate this chummy.’
‘With respect sir, I don’t think this man’s in the UK. I think this is the kind of contract that’s been fixed in the Lebanon for some gun-crazy Cypriot or the like, to come into this country, in and out on a twenty-four hour hit. And in my experience, sir, the motives for killing a black gold Arab this rich are never simple...’
As it turned out, Regan was wrong in his first observation, and right in his second.
‘The nose was thinner,’ Regan told the sergeant operating the photofit.
The sergeant looked in the little compartments of the kit to sort out a pile of nose varieties. He showed a sample to Regan.
‘No,’ said Regan. ‘A thin nose, but the nostrils more flared. Imagine a white-skinned version of an adolescent Negro. You know, before he becomes all arms and the proboscis thickens up...’
The young sergeant looked put out and started to skip through another half dozen nose profiles. Regan stood up and moved to the window of his office and looked out into the death of another London day, its dusk, the shadows sharpening as the neon offices switched off, the start of the commuter crawl out of the buildings in the shadows of Scotland Yard, the beginning of rain.
He could see all that, and he could also see his face superimposed, back-lit, on the window pane. The reflection looked like a photofit picture, a sum of parts, not a cohesive whole. Regan was five foot ten, had thin hair which was curly and sandy, blue eyes filmed with red lines from an early start this morning after a sleepless night. Two overnight bags under the eyes that would have done a Roman emperor proud, and six o’clock shadow turning into stubble across the work surfaces of his face. He knew he looked a mess. He knew he was looking less and less like the leading detective in the ‘Sweeney’ – the nickname for the Met cid’s crack ‘Flying Squad’. The leading detective because he had the track record, the highest statistics of arrests and convictions, to prove it. He was famous as a thief taker, infamous as a cavalier. The new-look Metropolitan Police of the ‘seventies was run on the principles of committees, shared responsibilities and work loads. Inspector Jack Regan was a cop of the ‘fifties, of the old school, of a personalized list of selected targets, of the virtuoso performance in thief taking. He ran against every grain in the woodwork of Scotland Yard. But he could get away with it, because he made it work. When a job file fell on the desk of the Superintendent, Flying Squad, and it was a tough job, requiring perspicacity, wit, courage, brilliance, the file went to Regan. But equally, someone in that establishment, or more than one because he had many enemies, would be collecting a list of his minor mistakes – he had not yet made a
major one. Someone would be assembling a list, waiting for the day, the year, when he did make the first major mistake.
The night stretched before him void of plans. It was Monday and he had been Duty Officer last week, and somehow he’d forgotten to get something together for his evenings this week. For a month he’d been toying with a new girl, Sylvia, in Hammersmith, good looking with lots of past and no future. She lived just around the corner from his own digs off Chiswick High Street. Very convenient. He’d given her a couple, and then had been bringing her along, coaxing her to relax and make him enjoy life a little. Underneath the horror show of her life – she was a mid-sixties hippy whose mother had killed herself – she seemed a reasonable kid and was born in bed. But then last week she’d suddenly opened her mouth. She started to verbalise a skein of complaints on a variety of subjects, especially himself. ‘Why do all men only want one thing from me?’ she kept asking Regan as he tried to sleep after he’d got it. It was a question which was puzzling him less about her. No, she’d have to go.
She’d delivered a philosophical diatribe last Friday at four in the morning. The subject was the history of the decline of Western Civilization as seen through the collapse of the National Health Service, an event chaperoned into existence a month before when her local GP refused to prescribe any more Valium.
‘Look,’ Regan had told her, ‘just think of life as mildly therapeutic. Don’t get that worked up about it.’ But he had already made up his mind to exit.
So Monday had been for Regan, like the Arab sheikh in the Wellington, a lousy day. It was now 5.15 and he was waiting for the nervous photofit sergeant to get a face together, and waiting for a call from Special Branch, to be followed by a spectral evening, a six-pack of Watney’s Pale, to damp down a few more hours of depression, and tv, before a lonely bed. A healthy anger was boiling up in him. How the Hell could the ACC not know that a killing like Haffasa’s would not be made in Britain? No English-based artist would have relied on London taxicabs to get him from the crime scene. The killer hadn’t even looked English.
The phone rang. The photofit sergeant answered it. ‘DI’s office?’ He and Regan were alone in Regan’s office. ‘Oh, yes sir.’ The sergeant turned to Regan. ‘Commander, Special Branch, sir.’
Regan took the phone. ‘Evening, sir.’ He said the words gently – he knew the SB Chief and liked him. ‘Look sir, I was in on this charade at the Wellington Clinic this morning, all quite by accident. I actually accompanied chummy, who did the dirt, down the lift to the ground floor. You heard?’
‘Yes?’ Commander Millward, head of England’s so-called secret police, the Special Branch, replied. ‘What d’you want Regan?’ His voice was guarded, like he knew a request was in the offing.
‘Look sir, when I walked into the Wellington this morning I had plenty on my plate. I don’t need this. I don’t need to waste the next six months of my life chasing around London looking for a killer who lives in a bedsitter in Beirut or Bangkok.’
‘What are you asking, Regan?’ Millward’s voice was hardening.
Regan was not in the mood for diplomacy. ‘You know what I want, this is your lot sir. This has got SB written all over it. I want you to phone the ACC. Tell him it’s ninety-nine one-hundreth’s that the Haffasa killing is an outside gb contract, politically motivated, and the fact that I saw some gook in a lift is neither here nor there…’
‘Have we got an assassin’s description – our SB lads?’
‘Not yet sir, I’m working on a photofit.’
‘Photofit I don’t want. Have you got a police artist there?’
‘We couldn’t get our hands on an artist this afternoon.’
‘I’ll get hold of one now. I’ll get him immediately to you.’
‘Are you saying, sir, that you’ll straighten the ACC?’ Regan was unsure about what the SB Chief was up to.
‘Bugger off, Regan. You try a taste of it. We spend all our days chasing gooks, wogs, spicks and spoofs. You’re the only man in the world who can positively identify the murderer. You also happen to be – the story goes, and you tell it more than anyone else – the best DI in the Yard. I see why the ACC put you on it. For our records I want a police artist’s drawing of chummy. In future don’t ask me to intercede between you and an ACC order. You should know better.’ Millward replaced the phone.
Regan, angry, replaced his, rubbed Millward’s name off his mental list of Yard friends, and said, ‘Fuck.’ Not only was he stuck with a photofit sergeant who was going to take another two hours to sort out a face that would look nothing like the killer’s, and a face that was already on a plane bound for the Galapagos Islands or points west, he was now going to have to spend hours with a bloody Yard artist.
He went to the Hospitality Cupboard, took out the keys, unlocked the door, reached in and took out the bottle of whisky. It was 5.30 in the afternoon. The unwritten rule in the Yard is no one opens a Hospitality Cupboard until around six. But Regan’s depression was beyond rules. He was the top Flying Squad detective, his particular specialty the inner workings of the London criminal world. He didn’t know anything about oil sheikhs, except that he didn’t like them. He knew that his kind of feelings were not translated into action by any London criminal element to the extent of assassinating a sheikh. He knew this case would take six months, long exclusive months before the ACC admitted defeat and took him off it – a sheer waste of time in an otherwise useful existence.
He unscrewed the cap from the Teacher’s bottle. He turned to the photofit sergeant. ‘Get me a paper cup from the bogs, sergeant,’ he said. And he added, ‘... It’ll be the only useful thing you’ve done this afternoon...’
He changed brands. He’d started in Scotland Yard on Teacher’s. Now it was Bell’s. He lay on top of the bed in his Hammersmith flat, watching the telly, picture only, sound turned off, watching occasionally too the level in the glass of his third large Bell’s’. On the telly, Panorama, one of the endless breed of Dimbleby’s, jawing dark political portents at the greatly tolerant English public. Sound was unnecessary. Doom-laden expressions were enough, with occasional cuts to maps of Africa or the Middle East. He’d hardly mulled that one into existence when the Dimbleby did turn to a map of the Middle East. Regan’s eyes focused in on the bottom right hand corner of the telly screen, the Persian Gulf. He wondered where Haffasa had hung out. He wondered when the Hell he was going to face the fact that he was on this case and there was no way out. He reached for the bottle of Bell’s and topped his glass to the half-way mark.
He thought of Carter, Detective Sergeant Carter, his assistant. Carter had been in court all day giving evidence against a six foot seven inch West Indian pimp who couldn’t keep his girls and had turned to ripping off customers, stealing wallets and belongings, in a couple of 24-hour sauna shops he ran. Carter had other things to do after the court and had said he’d check into the Yard after nine. Carter had not been assigned to the Haffasa case. Regan ran through the possibilities of some ways to involve Carter in the case. If he was going to be screwed himself for the next couple of months he’d like a joker like Carter to share the shit. But Carter would be too smart for that, would see the danger and hightail. He was on his own.
He thought of food, then he thought about the autopsy of Harvey Cantwell’s girl, and his stomach turned over a quarter revolution. He’d been nearly seventeen years in the Met cid, and had probably attended in that time over two hundred post mortems, but this morning’s had been the worst. Harvey Cantwell had a girlfriend called Gloria Milan. She was an ex-stripper, twenty-eight. She’d died on Saturday. She’d been drinking and she’d taken some sleeping pills, not enough, as the autopsy suggested, to have indicated suicidal intent. Somewhere during Saturday night after the booze and pills she had felt ill. Getting out of bed she’d collapsed and fallen on the electric fire, which she had left on. By the time she was discovered, seven Sunday morning, by neighbours attracted by the smell, the middle part of her body had been thoroughly burned.
Gloria Milan had a CRO file, gained from years in prostitution, and a cross-reference on her file to the boyfriend, Cantwell. A Coroner’s Office check with Cantwell’s CRO produced a note to the effect that in his long career in crime he’d occasionally done a few favours, with information passing to the Yard and, notably, to DI Regan of the Flying Squad. Regan was requested to attend the autopsy.
It had taken place at six a.m. at Paddington General Hospital. The pathologist was a small man called Arps. Regan had witnessed his examinations before, but nothing quite like this morning’s performance. The man had dug about in the corpse and come across the burned kidneys. He’d beamed a grin at his cold-faced assistant and at Regan. ‘Just how I like them, crisp on the outside, underdone in the middle.’ He’d finished the autopsy and given Regan his verdict: death by natural causes, aided by alcohol and pills. Then he’d asked Regan, ‘What are the funeral arrangements?’
Regan had glanced at the Mortuary Card. The hospital had already been in touch with Cantwell for his wishes. ‘She’s to be cremated.’
Arps surveyed the burnt corpse. ‘There’s a good chap, tip her relatives the wink. The job’s half done. They should get a discount...’
Regan had gone on from Paddington General to the Wellington Clinic. Thank God Haffasa’s death MO was not in question, otherwise he might have to attend another of Arps’ sessions. St. John’s Wood, bordering the Paddington district, shared the services of the ghoulish little pathologist.
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