The Sweeney 03

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  The BMW tried, but didn’t make it. It passed the wallowing Mercedes and flew off down the main road, front end down, as the driver slammed on his brakes at ninety miles an hour. Regan got the Merc round the corner, but couldn’t quite carry the S-bend at the bottom of the lane.

  The Merc hit the stone gate of an exclusive villa at around twenty miles an hour. Regan was braced for the crunch and uninjured by it, but the whole front of the car was stoved in, the radiator split and steam from the overheated engine blew out everywhere. Regan got out, moved round to the other side of the car to open the door and pick up the Walther automatic which had slid off and under the seat with the collision impact. He couldn’t open the door. The flattening of the front of the Merc must have collapsed the metal door frame sufficiently to jam the passenger door. He started to move back round to the driver’s door again.

  He saw it – he hadn’t heard it. The collision must have taken place at the same time as he was grinding up the metal of the Merc. A pall of black smoke was suddenly rising above the main road a hundred and fifty yards away. The only explanation was the BMW must have crashed.

  If they’d crashed, they wouldn’t be in too great shape. It was a risk. But he felt they might be escaping on foot, and he couldn’t afford to spend minutes scrabbling around under seats trying to find the Walther.

  He ran up the narrow lane and reached the main road. The road surface was black-scarred with the geometry of the Mercedes’ drift. He started to walk into the road and halted dead.

  Fifty yards away, one of the men was out of the car, gun in his hand. He was the driver, the shorter man. He was pointing it at a startled Frenchman who’d just pulled up in his large Renault alongside the wreck of the BMW. The car’s engine was on fire, not a holocaust yet, but the flames licking along the engine compartment getting stronger. The other BMW occupant lay in the road, writhing and shuddering in agony. Regan made a long range diagnosis – it looked like the guy had busted his spine. Which gave the shorter man a real problem. How to get the screaming and jerking companion off the road and into the Frenchman’s car, being commandeered at gunpoint? Other thoughts would be going through the gunman’s mind, like what to do with a dying companion with a broken spine?

  The gunman had an answer. Maybe the decision was accelerated by catching a view of Regan a hundred yards away. He fired a shot at Regan. At that range with a pistol it could only be a warning to stay out of range. The driver solved his quandary in a brutal way. He went over to his companion and put a bullet in his head.

  Regan was staggered by this cold execution under the bright sun. The man who had occupied the passenger seat in the white Mercedes in London and in the grey BMW in Antibes was not going to be telling anyone anything about himself or his friends.

  The rest was almost in slow motion. The BMW driver pointed the gun back at the appalled Frenchman and gestured to him to get into his Renault. The BMW driver got in alongside, his revolver still angled at the Frenchman. The Frenchman then did a slow three point turn and headed off at a steady speed up the road towards the promontory leaving the dead man, the car now blazing from stem to stern, and Regan standing there for one moment, impotent, in the middle of the road.

  Regan speculated as Hijaz tried to get a decision, or a solution, from his own pacing up and down. It had obviously all gone wrong for Hijaz. His face was white with worry and anger. It seemed that most of the anger was about to be directed at Regan.

  ‘Give me their descriptions again.’

  ‘One of them is still lying up the road two minutes from here. The other I’ve described.

  They were in Hijaz’s suite on the third floor. They were alone. Regan wondered about that. Wondered what would happen if the fury that the Bahrain cop was trying to control got out of hand.

  ‘In Allah’s name why did you not recover the Walther before going to see what had happened? You describe how their car was driving very fast. Could you not assume a crash would incapacitate them just long enough for you to find the gun? Events proved this to be the case. If you had done this, Inspector Regan, we would now have both men!’ The final sentence ended almost as a shout.

  Regan let the man’s anger die away for a second. He repeated quietly, ‘Hijaz, I think you have some idea of who those guys are or were. How can I stay alive long enough to identify the Haffasa killer if you won’t even give me the vaguest directions about where the bullets are coming from?’

  The fury renewed itself, mounting the colour up into Hijaz’s face. ‘You are calling me a liar? Are you calling me a liar!?’

  Regan saw the computations going on in the man’s wild eyes. Hijaz was trying to wring the balance between needing Regan for some purpose, some desperate purpose, and wanting to hit him. ‘Who were they?’ Regan asked.

  Hijaz exploded in gesticulations. ‘Who else, you fool! They were part of the team who killed Haffasa. There were three of them. You saw only one that day.’

  Regan held up a hand to calm and contradict. ‘The guy in the maroon Jaguar tried to kill me. Not these two. They chased that man in the Jag. They were in pursuit of him. When the Jag smashed me against the wall and I went down on my knees, those men in the Mercedes could have followed through, finished off the job. But they wanted the guy in the Jag. Who are they, Hijaz?’

  The temper had gone out of the man as quickly as it had come. He was left glowering at Regan. Regan walked past him, across the room to the balcony. He stood there and looked down at the half dozen official cars that had arrived in the forecourt of the hotel in the last half hour. Hijaz, almost as if on some impulse, came slowly over to the window and joined him, and looked down.

  ‘At the end of this corridor is one of the most powerful men in the Arab world sitting talking to the French Foreign Minister. I’m responsible for their security. Those men in the BMW were crucial to this security problem. You can see, then, why I am disappointed in your actions...’

  Regan himself had arrived at a verdict and decided that Hijaz should have it. ‘I’m going to fall back a bit, keep my distance. The fact is I don’t trust you or your friends any more. I’ll go through the motions. Every time Sheikh Almadi leaves the hotel, I’ll be there. But I’ll be making certain new arrangements for myself.’

  ‘Like what?’ Hijaz asked sharply.

  ‘I’ll probably be moving out of this hotel. You see, we mustn’t forget a key element in this business. I saw a killer. I have to protect myself. From now on I’ll operate separately.’

  ‘Your second mad mistake in one day,’ Hijaz said softly, then drank down the rest of his scotch.

  ‘It’s an interesting performance,’ Regan thought, ‘well done but still one hundred percent phony. Not only the sentiments, but the man.’ Regan felt sure that Hijaz knew the identity of the two in the BMW. Anybody else would have rushed out there to study the face of the corpse lying with a bullet in its brain. But Hijaz hadn’t. That begged a sizeable question. There were a hundred answers, but the one that would be head and shoulders above the rest in Regan’s mind was the simplest one. Could it be that Hijaz’s job, far from protecting one of the most important men in the Arab world, might be the opposite, finding the appropriate occasion to put assassin and sheikh together?

  He was uncertain of the French cid’s investigation procedures in dealing with a man with a bullet hole in his head on the Boulevard du Cap, Antibes. There were a series of huddles in the hotel, first Almadi and the French Foreign Minister who just happened to be with him when the man was being shot. They, on the Minister’s advice, both talked to the local cid chief of the Nice Prefecture, a tall man named Guignard with light grey hair and boot-black eyebrows. The Foreign Minister in the presence of Guignard phoned the Justice Ministry in Paris and found a bigwig to talk to Guignard and order him not to bother Almadi or his entourage under any circumstances, but to supply any information to the sheikh that he required. The next huddle involved Guignard, Hijaz and the sheikh. The third huddle involved Regan, Guignard and Hijaz. By now
the time was four-thirty in the afternoon. Outside the world was turning colder and greyer. Inside Regan was getting tired of hotel corridors and rooms and waiting for results of meetings. At four-thirty precisely the local prefecture received the news that the murderer had got the unwilling Renault owner to ferry him along the coast, up the N7, and left to Marseilles. Regan reckoned on that particular route they must have passed at least a hundred French cops, each furnished with a description of the wanted car, either sprawled on their mobikes, or lounging on corners picking the remnants of garlic cloves out of their teeth. The news supplied by the owner of the Renault, who’d raced into a Marie in a suburb of Marseilles, took exactly forty minutes to percolate through the French police and phone systems to Guignard pacing out the lobbies of the Hotel du Cap. Guignard went into a tirade. He had two junior detectives with him. As he had no one else to shout at, he shouted at them.

  Regan thought Guignard a bright guy. He had moved his end fast. The guy shot dead, by the burning BMW had, it turned out, no papers on him, no labels in his clothes. Guignard had the dead man’s clothes driven high speed into Nice which conveniently had a small forensic laboratory in the police headquarters in Rue de France. They ripped the clothes to pieces. The man’s shoes had been Italian, obtainable in any capital city in the western world. But when the label-less jacket was cut apart with scissors, the stiffening canvas material inside the collar had a strip of small stencil markings on the canvas. The markings simply repeated ‘W3’. The prefecture at Nice called Paris Central Police Headquarters who keep a register of French clothing trademarks and laundry marks. The marking ‘W3’ was not known. Without reference back, Paris HQ contacted Scotland Yard who also keep lists of clothing trademarks and laundry marks. ‘W3’ stood for ‘Willerby’ – an English multiple clothing store manufacturing men’s suitings. ‘W’ stood for ‘Willerby’, ‘3’ stood for the third quality of canvas used as a collar liner.

  This news came, via Guignard, to Regan at five p.m. Regan was pleased to hear it. Any information that suggested that the two men, first inhabiting the Merc in London, then in the BMW in Antibes, anything that showed they had a connection to England was good news. It suggested that eventually he’d identify a London end to the investigation. There had always been the problem in the Haffasa case that the killing had involved people, and issues, that had absolutely nothing to do with the United Kingdom. It was likely he’d been wasting his time investigating people who would be found to be at loose in the world at large.

  At six-fifteen Regan met the French Foreign Minister. The top politico had had his meeting with Almadi, then gone away to confer with some colleagues on the end of a telephone, then come back for another meeting with the sheikh. Almadi meanwhile had called Regan in to hear his version of the incident.

  Regan told the story to Almadi simply and without embroidery. The sheikh had echoed Hijaz’s words. ‘A tragedy you did not recover the Walther automatic before you ran to the main road.’

  Regan shrugged. ‘There are an increasing number of regrettable elements in this case.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Almadi asked, the hood-lids of his eyes lowering a fraction, making his face even more of a mask.

  ‘I’ve concluded that the feedback from you people,’ Regan turned to defer the accusation in the direction of Hijaz, ‘is often lies. I don’t believe in the blackmailer killing King Feisal. I don’t believe your life is being threatened for money.’

  Hijaz had said nothing. Almadi’s face remained expressionless for a long moment. Then he said, ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘Well, I’d like a complete story, and no lies.’

  Almadi pondered that, almost as if he was playing blackjack at the Monaco casino, and the decision was to turn a card, or stick.

  Regan listened to the gravel of the man’s deep voice clearing itself and the sheikh spoke.

  ‘You’re perceptive, Mr. Regan. Yes indeed, the truth is you haven’t been told the truth. You may reject us and return to London. Alternatively, if you will have patience enough to bury your questioning for a few more hours, I promise then you will be told everything. Obviously I need you because you are the man who saw the assassin. The fact is I cannot tell you the whole truth for perhaps twenty-four hours. The choice is yours.’

  Regan gave it a slow once-over in his mind. There was no decision, twenty-four hours was neither here nor there. ‘Okay, I’ll give you a day. Then Hijaz will tell me who these men in the BMW were.’

  ‘You think we know?’ Almadi looked first at Regan, and then at Hijaz.

  ‘I know he knows,’ Regan said. But he suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that part of his calculations might be wrong – this new assumption was that Almadi and Hijaz were equal parties as liars. Now maybe not, maybe Hijaz was on his own. Maybe Almadi was ignorant of everything, ignorant and totally in Hijaz’s untrustworthy care.

  It was at this point that the secretary entered and spoke to Almadi in Arabic.

  Hijaz translated. ‘The Foreign Minister has returned. We will now leave, Inspector Regan.’

  ‘Stay.’ Almadi said it sharply, with a look to Hijaz that might be some kind of warning to the Bahraini cop to remember who gave the orders.

  The Minister, Monsieur De Laubenque, was a dapper man, light-blue-suited, with matching blue eyes that looked down for two reasons. First, because he was tall, and second, because he was the possessor of a personality that looked down on people.

  Almadi rose from behind the solarium desk and crossed to the tall man, shook his hand for what must have been the second time this day. Almadi indicated Regan and introduced him. ‘From Scotland Yard, Inspector Regan. The man who has seen the enemy who murdered Ibn Haffasa.’

  That struck a note with Regan – why had Almadi mentioned his name previously to De Laubenque – an innocuous conversation, or something else?

  ‘I hope you are getting all the cooperation you need from the Nice prefecture,’ De Laubenque said, looking down at Regan. The man’s English was faultless. ‘I regret the incident here in Antibes this afternoon, but I believe the clothing now identifies one of the persons as probably English.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Regan said.

  De Laubenque looked sour. ‘I said probably, Inspector. I hope you will prevent Englishmen or anybody else from any further incidents during our honoured guest’s visit.’

  Almadi decided the conversation had reached a conclusion. ‘I will be going to the restaurant “The Oasis” at La Napoule – at eight o’clock tonight – a brief meal. I trust you will accompany my party,’ he said to Regan.

  ‘I’ll be among your escort.’

  ‘Then I will see you later, Inspector,’ Almadi said.

  Regan nodded, and then nodded to the French Minister, turned and walked to the door of the solarium and out. As he paced down the corridors and out of the suite, he could hear Hijaz’s soft footsteps on the carpet behind him. But he didn’t look back. He took the elevator down one floor to his room.

  It was to turn out to be a depressing evening. Four cars made the trip from Antibes along the coast road the forty kilometres to La Napoule. Hijaz with a chauffeur in the first car, Almadi and two of the girls in the second, a Mercedes 280 sec, then Regan and a chauffeur in a third car, and then a social secretary and a couple of French civil servants in a fourth Mercedes.

  Regan’s depression was filed under two categories. First, the coast roads were heavily trafficked. Every half-collapsed Deux Chevaux and pensioned-off Citroen behaving like a Ferrari – the hit-and-run approach of these cars down the side of the stately cortege of Mercedes’ would resemble the sort of approach that the BMW killer would make. Secondly, the Oasis Restaurant was half full and taking bookings at the door. Regan had assumed that any up-market restaurant Almadi and company would choose would at least have an elementary security screen in only accepting phone bookings. But people were wandering in and out of the place like a public toilet. As he sat outside the restaurant, he could see that any
asshole with a gun would have little trouble getting past the screen of himself and Hijaz if he was determined to make an attempt on Almadi.

  Regan had stationed himself alone in his car in the kerb outside the restaurant. The Oasis was spread out behind a high wall with a wide porticoed entrance leading into a cobbled courtyard. There was floodlighting down from trees on the yard which had an ornamental fountain. The main restaurant lay behind sheets of plate glass so guests could overlook the cobbles and the fountain. Almadi’s party couldn’t have made better targets if they had been individually stood under a spotlight. Regan decided on a car-bound seat outside, covering the entrance. Hijaz was at a table just inside the front foyer. Almadi and his French guests, and the two girls, had a window seat. One was the German girl, Elke, the other was Jo.

  She was looking more beautiful than ever. The dress blue, silky, diaphanous, falling as lightly around the curves of her figure as her laughter – he could hear her laughter through the open restaurant doors. There was nothing fake there, she was enjoying herself. The French civil servants spent the two hours offering as much to her and her needs as to Almadi, and when they were not singling her out for their probes of witticism, Almadi was talking to her, carefully, earnestly, as if it was almost husband and wife, this member of the world’s super-rich caring for her, studying her needs, snapping his fingers for more attention for her from the waiters. She was in her element, and Regan watched it, the performance, and wondered about the quality of his own madness – that he had thought that he could compete here, a burnt-out London cop so punch-drunk with his collisions with life that he had nothing to offer her and especially not his future.