The Sweeney 03

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  The phone by the bed rang. Regan debated whether to pick it up. It could only be more bad news. He picked it up. It was Carter with bad news.

  ‘Evening guv. I hear you topped some fucking Arab this morning...’

  Regan let the opening remark fall into a silent void of its own making. He was in no mood for chat. Then he said, ‘Not me, George. Some other buzz...’

  ‘Why kill him guv?’

  ‘Shut up. What d’you want?’

  ‘I hear they’ve got you breaking stones. It’s SB. Got to be. How come you got lumbered?’

  ‘Farce. It’s an outside contract. Everything arranged over a coffee table in Geneva or Abu Dubai...’

  ‘Sounds a turd.’

  ‘Right. What d’you want?’

  ‘I want to know that I’m not in it, guv. I want to hear you say it. I want to inform you with precision that I don’t want to go down with your millstones...’

  ‘Hold on.’ Regan dropped the phone on the bedside table to deliver an electric-powered clout to Carter’s inner ear, and emptied some more Bell’s into his whisky glass. The gesture from the bottle to the glass rim was a little imprecise, some whisky hit the carpet. Regan realized he was drunk. He took two gulps disapproving of them and himself and resumed the phone. ‘George, you were saying...?’

  ‘I don’t like the idea that you’re home in your flat, guv. You’re saddled with a bastard and I reckon you’re sitting there with a bottle of Bell’s, working out all sorts of demoniacal bother involving me. I’m telling you, I don’t want six months up a cul-de-sac. I wasn’t at the Wellington Clinic. I don’t want to be saddled…’

  ‘George, in future say fucking sir when you’re talking to me...’ Regan dropped the phone back in its cradle, and pushed the whole lot on to the floor. He lay back in his bed and studied the Bell’s. There was exactly, he calculated, eleven-fifteenths of the bottle left. Was that enough to sustain his ruminations for another hour before he passed out, or should he get up and get another bottle from Augustus Barnett? No, he decided, the quantity would last one more hour while he worked out a few calculations. If the ACC had decided to fuck him up for months to come, then he could be bloody sure that he was going to pass some of the aggravation on down the line. He began to ponder a number of candidates who existed, almost by definition, to be screwed.

  He emerged from the twelve-hour untypical morass of self pity at nine the following morning. Yesterday the passive victim, today he would make action. He would make it hot for a selected few. He boiled himself three eggs, sat down behind them, and instead of reading his morning Daily Mail, started drawing up mental shortlists.

  He was stuck with the Haffasa assignment, so in the spirit of the late Bernard Law Montgomery, he’d turn historical defeat into victory. He knew he’d lost Carter. The Commander of the Flying Squad would be annoyed enough about losing his top DI to a pointless murder hunt, without also throwing in a leading DS for good measure. Of course he could summon assistance when required, but it would not be top calibre. Carter was the only DS of his acquaintance in the Yard that he could a hundred per cent rely on.

  Four things to be done. Revisit scene of crime, talk to the chief soco. Check whether the ‘Special Enquiry’ had turned up the cabby that had driven the killer away. Check Interpol for anything on Haffasa. Then to the Bahrain Embassy – but he’d have to organize a telephone introduction from the corridors of power before checking in there. Meanwhile gather a list of every passenger leaving Heathrow Airport from noon yesterday. Haffasa was killed at 10.45. The killer who took the cab could have been on a plane out of London by midday. The passenger lists from midday to midnight might produce ten thousand names. The lists would be irrelevant at the moment, but later on he might have the clue of a name to check against them.

  He got on the phone and called Airport cid at Heathrow. The Met had recently taken over London Airport, but for some reason a gruff-sounding sergeant suggested that if he wanted information-gathering of traffic lists, then there were some lads in West Drayton who’d sort that out faster than Airport cid. Regan thanked him coldly for nothing, and phoned West Drayton nick and got one of the dc’s there. He was promised passenger lists delivered to the Yard within three hours.

  Regan checked with the Yard, DI Herrick, recently of Number Nine Regional Crime Squad, now with Special Branch, had apparently been hanging around the scene of the crime at the Wellington Clinic. He located Herrick in Special Branch section. Herrick said there were a couple of items on the soc worth a chat, and Regan said he would be in to the Yard, after a short detour to the Clinic.

  He took the Westway route through the morning rain and traffic to St. John’s Wood. It was the fourth consecutive day of rain in London, not fulsome showers but just depressing, persistent drizzle with motor car wipers in the traffic crawl along the Westway all turned to low speed. Behind the wiped commuter screens the grey faces as depressing as the weather. Regan’s face similar, but thoughtful as he queued his way on to the Marylebone High Road and took a left up Lisson Grove for the woods of St. John.

  It was as if he had absorbed all the facts and now, in the slow process of degustation, was finding something in the mix that upset his stomach. It may have been something to do with the speed with which the Assistant Commissioner Crime had assigned him a roving commission on the murder – simply on the basis that he’d taken an elevator ride with the killer. This was a Special Branch case. The ACC had told him that Haffasa was a VIP oil sheikh and political figure visiting England. So if Haffasa was so important, why wasn’t he under surveillance by the Special Branch yesterday morning? Or was he? Was Regan now to be a fall guy for SB ineptitude? Or had Special Branch surveillance turned a blind eye while a guest with an M38 made a brief appearance? Or were there other ramifications, as yet unmentionable, whereby Regan, the wrong man by his own admission for the job, had been put on the job? Had he been given the Haffasa killing solely because he wouldn’t be able to solve it? And next, what to do with all these propositions? Go into the Yard and talk to his boss, Chief Inspector Haskins, or Commander Maynon? Haskins was four years from his pension, Maynon two. Haskins’ shifting eyes would say, ‘If the ACC’s put you on this bash for no good reason except a number one blow-out, then get on with it.’

  He drove off the main road and turned his Cortina into the front entrance of the Wellington Clinic. He looked at his watch. It had been almost twenty-four hours since he’d last been here to tell Harvey Cantwell about his girlfriend’s post mortem. He climbed out of the car into the rain. He looked up at the building. He didn’t expect to find much here. It was almost as if already he knew a part of the score. Intuitively he knew somewhere along the line someone was ahead of him loading the dice. First he must overtake that someone. He shrugged his raincoat collar up and buttoned it against the wet and headed across the tarmacadam into the Clinic.

  The nurse was attractive enough to be disturbing. In the intimacy of the empty elevator bound for the third floor Regan felt the almost overpowering need to reach out and grab her huge tits, or run his fingers through her magnificent auburn hair. ‘I’m getting old,’ he thought. ‘Fantasies are taking over. She’s probably a Black Belt judo.’ The elevator pulled in at the third floor and the beautiful nurse stepped out and pendulumed her hips off down the corridor. Regan decided she was one of those rare birds who look as attractive from the back as from the front.

  They reached Haffasa’s suite. The nurse produced a key and unlocked the door. She turned and smiled at Regan. ‘Shall I give it to you?’

  ‘I’d very much like you to give it to me.’ Regan’s voice low and hot with double entendre.

  Her face dropped. She pushed the key into his hand and walked off high-headed down the corridor.

  ‘Thanks,’ Regan said sharply. She didn’t look back.

  He stepped into the room. The place had been cleaned up by a bunch of British constables – everything removed including the mattress. And yet the room was still somehow untidy
. Regan guessed the line of fire was from the door. The suite had bedroom and sitting room adjoining it, but it was entered by the bedroom door. So it was different from Harvey Cantwell’s suite at the bottom of the corridor. To get to Cantwell’s bedroom you entered through the sitting room.

  Regan marvelled at the punch of the M38. The wall behind the bare steel bed frame had five deep cavities in it. It could have taken an Irish navvy an entire day with a bottle of Powers and a masonry drill. Presumably two of the excavations were made by bullets that had passed first through Haffasa, terminating his aa consumer rating, before they hit the concrete. The bullet holes had been chalk-circled on the wall by Herrick or his men. What was left of the bullets would of course be in the Yard’s forensic laboratories.

  Regan really wasn’t interested in that kind of line. He’d come to the Wellington Clinic for one reason. To see if Haffasa’s suite was in any way overlooked. Could Haffasa have been under routine surveillance by the Special Branch?

  He crossed to the windows and studied out across the wet playing fields of Lords, his eyes finding the buildings beyond. The suite on the south side of the Clinic was curiously isolated. There were possible sight-lines to the third floor from, say, a bedroom in the new Westmoreland Hotel at the bottom of Wellington Road or the building next to it, Lords Towers, apparently built for cricket freaks, overlooking the stadium. Either sight-line didn’t offer itself as an easy surveillance roost, but Regan knew that the Special Branch had recently, at some cost to the nation, picked up the latest 500mm SMC’s for their Pentax’s – sharp close-ups on photographic surveillance over half a mile. The SB could have had the suite easily under photo-surveillance from Lords Tower or the Westmoreland. Regan studied the two buildings. He was wondering, although it was feasible, whether it was likely. He came to no conclusions.

  For the next fifteen minutes he looked in the suite for bugs, either listening devices in situ or visual evidence of the one-time presence of a bug or bugs. He found nothing.

  He went to the window once more, stood there looking out into the rain, eyes defocused, trying to work over combinations of ideas. Then he stopped for the moment, struck by how odd it was that what he was in fact doing was trying to calculate the degree to which his brother officers in Special Branch were lying through their teeth.

  The United Kingdom has had a Special Branch, meaning secret police, for over a hundred years. Currently there were about two hundred officers in the Branch. Their base, like most UK specialist units, was the Yard. They were just plain cops, and a half dozen of them were Regan’s good friends. Their business was the business of any country’s secret police, they arranged security for important politicos, they infiltrated subversive organizations after defining secretly and within their own infra-structure such words as ‘subversive’. Regan didn’t mind the guys, thought on the whole they did a good job, with the occasional and memorable slip. Why was it then, Regan asked the low cloud scud back of Lords Pavilion, why was he thinking that they were at this moment screwing, or trying to screw, him? He couldn’t put his finger exactly on it. There was the too-obvious fact – the shooting of Haffasa was a prima facie SB case and yet he was assigned to it. Why? Most professional cops would say that the fact that Regan had accompanied the killer down the elevator was neither here nor there. The killer had to be traced by painstaking investigation – then when he was near to being nabbed, Regan could be brought in for positive identification.

  He left the suite, found the attractive nurse again, returned the keys to the room. She was still looking angry, but circumspectly, like she had placed him in the number of crude men of her acquaintance, and found he was not so wanting. He thought if he could hang some chat on her for ten minutes he’d probably make headway. But then he didn’t feel in the mood. He stepped out into the rain again, and got into the Cortina. He drove out of the hospital and south towards Westminster and New Scotland Yard. There was a time element involved. If he could get to grips with just the first round of general inquiries on this Haffasa case, then he reckoned he’d hit the snag that would either stop the case and get him off the hook, or tell him the answers to the key question – why had the ACC shoved him on this ride?

  He checked into Squad Office on the fourth floor of Scotland Yard, told the sergeant on the switchboard to get him dc Carter, to trace Herrick and to shut his mouth to anyone else that he, Regan, was on the premises. The sergeant found DI Herrick in Number Nine Regional Crime Squad offices. Regan left Flying Squad office and went on one of his longest corridor walks in England, three hundred yards of corridor at the bottom of which the RCS were housed.

  Herrick was a tall Scotsman who smiled at the end of his sentences. Someone must have told him it improved his hang-dog face. Regan didn’t know Herrick well, the odd nod in the Tank (the pub club within the Scotland Yard building), but he knew his reputation. Herrick was a good detective, probably too good a detective, which begged the question. Regan asked him the question. ‘Why have you been hanging around the Wellington Clinic?’

  ‘Just wiggling my thumbs, idle,’ Herrick said, and smiled. ‘Come to my office.’

  He had a small office with a desk piled high with the junk of a half dozen cases pending, buff files with their CRO numbers and contents spilled out. ‘Sit down,’ Herrick said. He offered Regan a full Embassy pack. ‘You smoke?’

  ‘I drink. The Tank’s just opened.’

  ‘I don’t drink.’ Herrick grinned this time.

  Regan shrugged. ‘You mentioned some joke items on the soc.’

  ‘A couple.’ Herrick didn’t sound too interested.

  ‘What?’

  ‘First the gun. The M38. The lab believes it was brand new. They say two things. The bullet sides have burn traces of molybdenum packing grease. The Remington manufacturers have only been using moly greases to protect the metal work on new guns for the last six months. Also on the bullets, microscopic traces of metal scarf, you know, tiny traces of metal dust that results from machining. These traces are usually shot out of the barrel within the first clip fired.’

  ‘Add it up for me.’ Regan didn’t see any significance in what he had been told.

  ‘The point is that the serial numbers on barrel and stock had been carefully removed.’

  ‘Where’s the M38?’

  ‘On a plane back to Remington in the States. A long shot to see if they can see anything about it that could trace its recent purchaser.’

  ‘More like a waste of time than a long shot.’

  Herrick gave a large open smile.

  ‘How much of the clip did the assassin fire?’

  ‘Half.’

  ‘Any markings on the clip?’

  ‘Lab says nothing interesting. But phone them.’ Herrick reached for the phone.

  ‘No, later,’ Regan said.

  Herrick was already talking into the phone. ‘Sarge, tell Superintendent Maynon, Squad Office, that DI Regan is leaving me now and on the way to him...’ He replaced the phone.

  Regan gave Herrick a long poisoned look. ‘I didn’t want to see Maynon.’

  ‘That’s what the Super told me.’

  ‘Thanks for fuck all,’ Regan said.

  ‘Any time,’ Herrick offered, and the hang-dog face split into a final seraphic smile as it witnessed Regan stamp out of the room and slam the door.

  ‘Sit down, Jack.’

  Maynon was fifty-one. He had made it to the rank of Superintendent Flying Squad at forty-three. That was young – and there was a reason. He was a very clever man. He had been a brilliant and active crimebuster for the first twenty years of his police life. Then he’d done what most intelligent cops do, mellowed into a thinker rather than a doer. There’s every reason for crime, and a specific reason for each individual crime which can be mostly thought through. It is possible to sit in that consulting room in Baker Street and solve the bones of it with the odd excursion in a hansom cab into London fog. Over the last five years Maynon had reached that state. He would sit in hi
s desk job in the Flying Squad office, inscrutable and few-worded, but mind working overtime. In the twenty-three years of his police history his name had been associated with the detection of some of the most headline-catching crimes in the Metropolitan district.

  Regan sat.

  Maynon took up his pipe from his empty ‘In Tray’ and lit it with a couple of Swan Vesta’s pressed together. He studied Regan through the smoke. ‘I’ve had some flak about you...’

  Regan gave a noncommittal shrug.

  ‘The Haffasa case. Most folk round here when assigned a roving commission on a murder grab it. What’s the headache?’

  ‘You know,’ Regan said quietly.

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Maynon’s eyes narrowed, either the beginnings of anger, or the intensifying of concentration.

  ‘The Assistant Commissioner Crime puts me on a Special Branch case. There has to be a reason. I don’t mind politics. But I have to be told the score. So who’s telling? I don’t want to waste two, three, four months pissing against a solid brick wall for who knows whose amusement....’