The Sweeney 03

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  It was 9.45 p.m. There was nothing much for Regan to do now except to drink the scotch and say his goodbyes. He asked, just so that he could note on any subsequent report, for facilities at some time in the near future, to interview the Wellington Clinic killer. The man’s name was now known – at least he carried a passport issued to a ‘Ben Allon’. Regan requested to interview Allon briefly and was surprised to find that the eight men had in fact not been brought to the Nice prefecture, but were apparently overnighting it in the cells in Beaulieu gendarmerie.

  ‘We had a big drug bust earlier today, fifteen arrests in Nice, four in Cannes,’ Guignard told Regan. ‘Our cells are full.’

  ‘I should see Ben Allon. I should identify him face to face before extradition.’

  ‘Okay tomorrow? There’s no hurry. You won’t get your extradition papers for some time.’

  Regan left the Nice prefecture with an unresolved worry about the evening’s proceedings. He was concerned about the legal technicality of starting the process of extradition of a man whom he hadn’t actually spoken to yet.

  He could have stayed the night in La Reserve, he’d already paid for the room. But he went back to Hotel du Cap, because it was nearer to Nice, and he felt like running up a few more expenses on Almadi’s bill. Also he wanted to check on Hijaz. Hijaz had been electrically conspicuous by his absence at the villa raid tonight. Guignard had told Regan that he’d warned Hijaz, as well as Regan, off. Regan was surprised that Hijaz had obeyed the order.

  He drove the Mercedes back to Hotel du Cap and dumped it in the forecourt. It was ten p.m. when he walked into the foyer of the hotel. The clerk gave him his key and a single sheet of paper. On it was scrawled, ‘Miss you. Where are you? Jo,” and the day’s date. He’d totally forgotten her, written her off. He’d decided she was unobtainable and yet here she was, leaving a note for him. He’d dismissed her last night as he sat in the car in the kerb outside the restaurant, ‘L’Oasis’. Evidently his cursory addition sum of the fors and againsts had come out wrong. Why had he made such a decision? He picked up the house phone and dialled her extension. At least he hadn’t forgotten that. She answered the phone immediately, like she had been waiting there to pounce on it. ‘It’s me, Jack.’

  ‘Terrific,’ she said very softly.

  ‘Can you get away?’

  ‘Your room. Five minutes, okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ He replaced the phone.

  She was there in four minutes.

  He opened the door, she walked in, turned and moved into his arms. They kissed. She held him, tightly at first, then relaxed.

  ‘I should have phoned. I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t talk before we’re in bed.’ Then suddenly she looked anxious. Maybe she thought she’d come on, opened, too strong.

  She was wearing a simple green silk dress. It looked very expensive. It looked like something she couldn’t have afforded, so perhaps it was a gift from her Arab mentor. It had six silk-covered buttons running down between her breasts. Regan undid them, then helped her step out of the dress.

  They made love quickly, like a warm-up. Then Regan drank scotch after it because he was parched. They made love again, this time with the windows open and the half moon witness to acts of virility and powers of charm. Somewhere else in the hotel the howls of some other girl not taking it comfortably lying down, winding up in a murderous scream that started a dog hotel guest barking. Regan and Jo almost unaware of anything extraneous to their four walls, their own hard haul, and Regan’s gentle deaths on top of her. The whole performance virtually wordless from the moment she walked into his parlour, his arms.

  She turned on the light to study his naked body as he got up. He poured another scotch and lit a smoke. He nodded towards the toilet facilities. She shook her head.

  He sat down by her on the bed. She borrowed a pull on his cigarette, then a sip of his drink.

  ‘I watched you in that restaurant the other night . .

  ‘Oasis?’

  ‘You looked so beautiful. I gave you up. A lost cause.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Her fingernails began to stroke in around his thighs.

  ‘Almadi of the solid gold prick all over you. That’s your speed. The world’s top millionaires just to sweep the court for your play. So what the fuck are you doing in bed with me?’ He asked it like it was a purely practical question.

  ‘Well, you work it out...’ She was smiling, a genuine happy look. ‘I like you. You want something, you go and get it. You wanted me, you took me. These people are just spenders. Nothing else. From my point of view that has more limitations than attractions. There’s a high turnover of girls in this Almadi type of world. They come with nothing, have a helluva time, go with nothing. At least I have a house in Pinner.’

  ‘Pinner? What d’you mean, house in Pinner?’ Regan was puzzled by the sudden change of tack. Pinner didn’t seem to have anything to do with the conversation.

  ‘I got something out of it for my old age. I took their money and I bought a house in Pinner, northwest London, suburban housewife belt...’

  ‘I know Pinner.’

  ‘You bloody well would.’ She laughed. ‘You bloody well would know Pinner. How many raids have you carried out on the mid-morning widows of Pinner with a Durex grabbed from the husband’s store...?’

  Regan gently pushed her back on to the bed. ‘That’s criminal libel,’ he said, teeth clenched. ‘I want to come and live with you in Pinner, or wherever.’

  ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Now just shut up and be physical.’

  He knew the signs. It would become serious. So he should decide now, eleven p.m. at night. Pull out tomorrow, never see her again, or take the plunge, commit the lot. He hadn’t met a girl quite like this before. That gave him an unusual problem, confusion.

  They were getting up and getting dressed because he had decided this late to go into Beaulieu to the police prefecture and see Ben Allon. She had decided – he was against it – but she had decided she was going with him. They were quiet, stumbling into clothes, drunk on physical exhaustion. He was aware of her body as she put on, or pulled up, the bits and pieces to re-cover her nakedness. She was beautifully made, faultless. There was no other verdict.

  They were quiet too in the Merc on the way into Beaulieu. She put her head against his shoulder and may have dozed. He concentrated on the mix of his driving, and thoughts of her.

  Well, it hadn’t been the first time in his life that he’d collided with a beautiful girl. There’d been his wife. People were always surprised about that, especially his superiors at the Yard, that he’d got it away with a bitch as classy as that one. A body that stuck out in exactly the right places within millimetres of perfection. English rose face, pert and fresh and full of youth. That was before the baby. One baby and the face had put on eight years. Nonetheless Kate was still good looking.

  There had been Christa on that case in New York a year back, a bird of sexual ambivalence who nevertheless he could have straightened out if his personal history had been stabilized at the time. But no, he was in the normal quandary of his life with the added problem that the New York case had specialized in the kinds of straws that break camels’ backs. Christa had been lovely, but always unobtainable. A Gringo career bird as undetachable from New York as an ancient mess of fly swat on a wall. Jo was different. First of all he could understand her. Sure, she was living the fantasy of heavy money and the sheikhs of Araby. But it was a practical fantasy. She was charging a fee. London was populated by Toms who did it for nothing, for a meal, sometimes just breakfast or a roof over their heads for the night. There were two ways of describing the girl whose head rested on his shoulder. She was a whore, or she was someone who’d got it together, collected the cheques, saved for the future, and meanwhile managed a variation on the life of Riley. Regan’s mind was on that bent.

  The car moved down the back of Nice, heading right and for the coast road again, and he realized he was on the wrong track.
The only thing that concerned him really was whether it was a going proposition. He now wanted it to be. The simple question was whether a girl like this would want to settle in with him? There would be problems. Problems now, and future problems. But nothing was ever insuperable while it worked, whilst there was care and need. The main thing was that she’d seriously said yes, that she wanted to see him a lot back in London. She, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, he’d never asked her age, wanted him, a guy decompressing fast into the forty-year-old diver’s bends and black-out, where the enemy is not that there’s no youth in the morning, but less wish for it, less capability to cope with it, outright failure of a forty-year-old cop to amaze and entertain a girl almost half his age, the age of a daughter. Regan knew in his water it’s not possible to fob a young girl off – ‘I’m working late tonight, big thieving job in Peckham, enjoy your knitting.’ He’d kicked a marriage in the face with those type lines. So what prospects, he asked himself as he nosed the Merc through the late night motorised drunks circling the port, heading themselves out for Villefranche, Beaulieu and Monaco. What prospects for the cop and the beautiful whore in Pinner? It was the limbs, legs, hands, the heart. Senses rather than sums, intuitions not equations. All those said yes, any madness is possible. He confessed to himself now, on an ill-lit road somewhere in darkest France that for years he’d been looking for a girl to really live with. Well, he’d found her, this head on his shoulder. And he was suddenly sure he would find the ways to make it work.

  Later he was to try and remember the sequence of what exactly happened second by second from the time they arrived at the prefecture in Beaulieu to the moment the shooting started. There were reasons for this. First, he’d have to make detailed reports for the Yard, line up the facts along a time sequence. Secondly, the French police at a later date required his facts for their investigation. Thirdly, he needed the sequence of times and decisions for his own purposes. He needed to know, because he was going to have to live with the nightmare for the rest of his life, what he could have done to have prevented it, curtailed or confined it when the killings started. What exactly did he himself do second by second, and which if any of his moves was critically culpable. It had started so fast, doors had burst open, windows had exploded, lacing their glass on to lino floors. There were probably, in combination, a hundred things he could have done had he selected certain decisions. And yet they died, all of them. He needed the sequence to answer the question – had he fucked up? A vitally important, private question. Ever since he’d joined the Flying Squad he’d been aware that a metronome paced the seconds, and somehow they were all borrowed. And one day the ticking would stop. Then the brief pause before the time bomb went off. In the midst of a thousand violent situations in his eighteen years as a cop, he had made his decisions. But he’d always known one day one decision would turn out his personal disaster. When that happened, and if he survived, he knew he’d make the decision to leave the police. The events in Beaulieu prefecture that night put him closest ever to that decision.

  Other reasons why he later had to make a sequential spilt second breakdown of events. It was to be a big story, the Beaulieu raid. It would make some part of the front page of most world newspapers. The French Justice Ministry wanted his role made clear. The crime related to a Scotland Yard investigation into a killing in London – the Midi police were unprepared because they were uniformed, their confreres in London had failed to wise them up. So he would go back over the events at Beaulieu many times and for different reasons. How it started was not difficult to recall. What exactly happened to everybody inside the prefecture from the moment the balloon went up was more difficult if not impossible to get exactly straight.

  He and Jo had arrived at the prefecture at about eleven p.m. The prefecture was next to the railway station in the lower of the town’s two squares. Regan parked alongside the Tourist Information hut. He chatted to Jo for a minute about protocol. He told her he thought the best thing was for her to wait for the moment in the Mercedes. He’d go inside, check that Ben Allon and the seven other Israelis were still in the cells. Then he would mention to the incumbent inspector that a woman who was germane to the case was sitting in a car outside and he’d like permission to bring her in. He said he didn’t anticipate any problems. He just felt it was bad form for a Yard inspector to walk unannounced into a French nick with a beautiful girl on his arm. Very French, but not good form.

  Jo agreed and Regan got out of the car. He walked the fifty paces to the front door of the double-storied building. The doors were closed. He went up four steps and rang a bell. There was an inquiry in French. He gave his name. The doors opened. He walked inside.

  A young sergeant led him to the Duty Room, four doors down the hall on the left. Other doors were open. He reckoned there were about six cops in the place. Another sergeant in the Duty Room made an internal phone call and he was then taken upstairs to an office immediately at the top of the stairs and introduced to a Chief Inspector Lassigny. The French detective spoke good English. Regan told him he wanted to make a quick pass at the prisoner Allon, inform him of the extradition charges pending, and ask him a few questions which would probably gain nothing in the way of answers, but would give him, Regan, a chance to size up the bloke, see if he could spot the pressure points. He hoped that Lassigny could help him with facilities for a lengthy interrogation session tomorrow.

  Lassigny looked more like a French Para Brigade man than a cop. His face was hard, the eyes coldly alert and glinting as if they contained slivers of steel to catch the light. He walked in measured steps with a stiff back. He walked Regan down to the cells, guarded by an old sergeant with food stains on the collar of his blue serge uniform. Somehow Regan didn’t want to start the Jo number on Lassigny. The French cop would likely gather that Jo was no more than Regan’s girlfriend and would not be impressed at the Yard man’s mixing pleasure casually in with this most important case.

  There were eight cells in the Beaulieu prefecture, which suited the Nice HQ requirements after the villa raid. One man to each cell. The retired sergeant with the food stains on his clothes sat at a trestle table by the door. A submachine gun leaned against the wall by him. With a bunch of keys that looked like something out of a medieval castle, Lassigny opened the door to Allon’s cell. He gestured Regan to go before him into the cell.

  Regan entered. The man was lying on a brick and tiled bench with a wooden slat top. He sat up, looked them over and said nothing.

  Regan checked the memory image of his last view of this man the elevator in the Wellington Clinic. It was Haffasa’s executioner. ‘You speak English?’ he asked.

  The man shrugged.

  ‘You know what you’re being charged with?’

  ‘I have committed no crime in France.’

  His English was good, the voice softly made, like his career had been spent persuading rather than ordering people.

  ‘You’re to be extradited to London where you’ll stand trial for the murder of a man called Haffasa.’

  Allon gave Regan a practical look. ‘When?’

  ‘A few days. Meanwhile you’ll be answering a few questions I’ll be putting to you...’

  The man smiled.

  ‘I’ll want to know about your group. Whether you acted independently, or whether the Clinic killing was a conspiracy.’

  ‘I’m not much of a talker,’ Allon said gently.

  ‘I’ve never interrogated a man who thought he was going to tell me something. You’ll talk to me. We’ll do some kind of deal, and you’ll talk. Tomorrow we’ll talk.’

  The man shrugged.

  ‘See you in the morning,’ Regan said quietly.

  He and Lassigny left the cells and climbed the stairs to the mezzanine. ‘I’d like an office for tomorrow.’

  ‘Follow me,’ Lassigny said.

  They moved down the corridor to the last room on the right.

  They went inside. It was a bare room, windowless, one battered folding table, one ch
air, and a single overhead bulb.

  ‘So what d’you think of Allon?’ Lassigny asked.

  Regan hadn’t made up his mind. ‘Not a thug. Educated. He’ll be a problem. But we’ll solve it.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll talk.’

  ‘He’ll talk,’ Regan said matter of fact. ‘When d’you put his friends on a plane to Tel Aviv?’

  ‘In the morning. 0800 hours.’

  Suddenly there was the noise of all Hell breaking loose in the hall outside. The sub-machine guns started firing together, barking out their own noise and the screamed whines of ricocheting shells and splintering wood. It must have been that Lassigny couldn’t believe that his prefecture was under attack, the man must have thought that for some bizarre reason it was cops out in the hall, shooting into the street.