Mistress Murder (4 page)

He chewed his lip as he polished up the plan that had been born when he helped the giggling Rita from the club the night before.

When the pieces had all fitted into place in his mind, he swung himself off the bed to dress. As soon as dinner was over, he went out into the bright lights of the city. After walking a little way from the hotel, he hailed a taxi. Using good French, with a deliberate German accent just to confuse the trail in the unlikely event of there ever being one, he gave directions to the driver. The car turned into the Boulevard Leopold and ran parallel to its overhead viaduct for some distance. Then they cut across in the direction of the Gare du Nord. Outside the station, Paul paid the man off and walked into the station entrance. As soon as the cab drove off, he turned sharply to his right and walked up the Rue de Brabant.

Some distance up, he turned off into a side street and, after a few more right-angled turns, found a shuttered bakery on the comer of an alleyway. The cracked paint above the front of the shop announced that it was Emil Corot et Fils. He dived into the gloomy tunnel alongside the shop and found a door, almost invisible in the darkness. Paul rapped hard on the peeling panels. Three heavy knocks, a pause – three more knocks, softer this time.

After a long delay, there was the sound of bolts and a chain being unfastened. The door creaked open, but no face appeared. Jacobs stepped inside and walked down a short passage to another door, which led to a dimly lit storeroom, filled with sacks and cardboard cartons. A thick powdering of flour lay over everything.

He turned inside the room and waited to greet an old man who shuffled after him from the passage. They spoke in French, but the bent old baker had little to say. He had red, inflamed eyes and a drooping moustache. Like his storeroom, he was covered in white dust.

He slouched across the room to a pile of cartons marked
Syrian Figs
. Opening the tops of two of them, he took out a layer of cellophane-wrapped cooking figs, each parcel being about half a kilo. Beneath this layer was a layer of thin plastic bags containing white powder. There were several dozen in all and the old man carefully took them out and stacked them on top of a box.

‘I've already unpacked them from the figs,' he muttered unnecessarily. Paul was not interested; he knew well enough how the drugs had arrived from the Levant. Each carton contained fifty kilos of figs, a hundred packets in all. In certain marked cartons, the fig packets one layer deep in the box had a plastic bag of heroin or morphine embedded through the fruit.

Old man Corot shuffled in his senile way to a large cupboard against the wall. He took out two smart fawn-coloured suitcases and brought them over to the pile of drugs.

‘They were brought here last week,' he grunted, ‘Just like you said.'

Paul's organisation had worked smoothly again. The special cases had been made in Antwerp and delivered to Corot pending his arrival.

‘You'd better do it, I don't understand these things,' grumbled the baker, standing back.

Paul opened the cases on the floor, threw the lids right back and began fumbling with both the locks and the lid hinges. In a few seconds, the whole of the taffeta lining came out in a single piece, stiffened beneath by a layer of fibreboard. Between the lining and the leather of the case, there was sufficient room to stack the thin plastic envelopes of drugs and still have room to spare.

He stowed his illegal imports away and slid the linings back into place.

‘OK, Papa … ready for another trip.'

He picked up the light and apparently empty cases and made for the door.

Without a word of farewell on either side, Jacobs left the alley and walked back to the Gare du Nord where he caught another taxi back to his hotel.

Next morning he went down to the garage behind the hotel and looked out the foreman mechanic.

‘I'm having some trouble with my carburation,' he lied, patting the vast bonnet of the Jaguar. ‘Do you think you can get the Jaguar agent to check the carburettors while I'm away? I've to go to Liège for a night, but I can easily go on the train. I want the car perfect for the trip back to England.'

With a few words more and a liberal tip, he had given himself a first class excuse for being away from the hotel without the car for the better part of two days.

Collecting his cases, which he filled with some of his clothes and an assortment of stuff brought over in the car, he went by taxi to the airport.

Here he caught a plane for Paris and Dublin, booked weeks earlier in yet another name.

The amount of forward organising he had to do was immense. He worked out the details of each trip for a couple of months ahead, never using the same method or route more than once a year. It was the regular travellers that attracted the attention of the Customs, especially in the winter season. Every time Paul was in London, or abroad, he spent a great deal of time booking planes, rail tickets, hotels and arranging delivery of drugs. In fact it was like any other import business, but made more difficult by its clandestine nature and the sweat of having to do all the ‘office boy' routine himself.

Before he boarded the plane for Dublin, he put on a Germanic-looking raincoat and armed himself with a German newspaper and magazine. He used a passport, forged in Whitechapel, made out for Hans Korb, a textile representative from the Federal German Republic. There was such a boom in German-Irish industrial relations that such visitors were ten-a-penny in Eire and on arrival at Dublin, and the Immigration and Customs gave him the most cursory looking-over. They idly turned over the cloth samples that he had carefully provided himself with before leaving London then made the magic chalk marks on the cases.

He had a meal in a hotel, shed his German coat and identity, and caught a train to Rosslare. The journey via the Fishguard ferry and train to Paddington took him all of the rest of the day and much of the early hours of the following morning.

When the train approached Cardiff, though it was the middle of the night, he retired to the toilet and afterwards kept a wary eye out for anyone who might recognise him. There was no one, and he arrived in London tired, but undetected, with his precious cargo. At the station, he took a taxi to Bloomsbury and got out near the University Union. The streets were deserted and he went as near as possible to his second hideout to reduce the risk of a strolling constable getting suspicious about his cases.

He walked to a block of service flats in Fenton Square and let himself into one on the third floor. This was his other pied-a-terre in London, known only to himself and Snigger. Rita Ronalde had no idea it existed and it was from here that Paul did all his narcotics distribution, with the help of the barman at the Nineties

He pushed the cases wearily under the bed, set the alarm for 8 a.m., and had a few hours' sleep in the single bedroom. All too soon the clanging of the clock woke him. He washed and shaved, then emptied the clothes from the fake cases into a similar pair of normal ones.

He made his way back to Euston, had some breakfast and caught the Irish Mail to Belfast travelling via Holyhead. From there he crossed the border into Eire and went back to Dublin. As far as the border officials were concerned, he was Arthur Graham, an English textile representative. They had never seen him or his samples before and he aroused no interest.

All the times had been carefully worked out many weeks before, so that he arrived at Dublin airport a mere hour before the take off. He became Hans Korb once again and arrived in the Belgian capital late on the Thursday evening.

Next morning, the garage foreman sorrowfully explained that nothing could be found wrong with the carburettors of the Mark X. Another large tip helped him to get over his grief and, by mid-morning, Paul Jacobs was thundering back over the auto-route towards Ostend, the car seeming none the worse for having its carburettors disembowelled for nothing.

At the Dover end of the trip, he had the most rigorous Customs examination of the whole trip. Whether the officers happened to pick on him as someone on whom to vent their mid-winter boredom or whether they had any reason to suspect him, Paul did not know.

He stood by the car with the complacency of an easy conscience as they spent twenty minutes looking through all his luggage and examining every nook and cranny of the car. An officer in overalls even crawled beneath the car with a torch to see if anything was strapped to the half-shaft housings or steering gear.

They eventually waved him away with that stony stare that only Customs Officers and police constables can generate. By five o'clock on the Friday evening, he was putting the Jaguar away in the garage behind Newman Street.

Rita was expecting him this time and had carefully left off her jeans to please him. To please him even more, she was wearing a negligee and a pair of earrings – nothing else. Within ten minutes, she had taken off the earrings and he had attended to the negligee. He was so occupied for the rest of the evening that he had no opportunity to get to his hidden recorder.

Next morning, Rita went out to look for a new dress in Oxford Street, in preparation for his promised celebration next evening. As soon as she was well clear, he squatted down on the bedroom floor and took out the machine. Sure enough, there was an inch thickness of tape on the spool. The unwelcome voice of the ‘cuckoo in the nest' grated on Paul's ears when he played it back. Again, there was nothing to give away the man's identity. Rita infuriated him by using strings of mushily endearing names, but never once his real one. After some archly suggestive byplay, the voices got down to business.

‘I still haven't found a thing to show who he really is,' complained the woman.

‘You must do … for God's sake, Rita, he must have some steady pad somewhere … look, stop messing about and find out.'

‘I tell you I can't,' she stormed angrily. ‘You don't know him; he's as tight as a bloody oyster. No papers anywhere, no nothing.'

They carried on in this way for a few minutes, the man complaining and the girl making excuses. Then they calmed down and the last few feet of the tape were more semi-erotic slush.

Paul punched the stop button with vicious finality. He replaced the equipment, but didn't bother to set it ready again. Its job was done, he thought, as he tightened the screws and rearranged the dresses over the floor.

Rita came back about twelve and he took her out to lunch, keeping his mood exactly as usual in spite of the slow burning fury at this silly little fool for putting his whole way of life in danger by her petty love affairs. In the afternoon, she went off to do some work for a photographer, which gave him time to prepare the next phase of his scheme.

As well as this type of work, she had been a club hostess, a stripper, and part of a cabaret act in the ten years since she had come from Trieste as the bride of an English soldier. She had left him after three months in England and had kept herself by means of these various jobs, all of which depended on her face and her figure, as well as her wits.

The photography that she posed for was for the mildly obscene
Cheese Cake
magazine – known to the local police as the ‘garters and gum boots' business. It paid well and gave her something to do when her man-friend was away.

After Rita had left, Paul went by Tube to Shepherd's Bush and called at a car hire firm. He picked an inconspicuous grey Ford Anglia and hired it until Monday morning, giving a totally fictitious name and address to the salesman. He drove off along Western Avenue, keeping on until he reached open country beyond Denham. Then he turned off into a series of minor roads for another ten miles until he came to Cuckoo Hill, well out in the countryside.

Jacobs pulled up at the top of the hill and sat looking down the road with approval. He saw the long straight slope with a sudden bend at the bottom where the road turned right across a bridge. Below a low parapet, there was a deep drop into a ravine where a stream flowed beneath the road.

His survey completed, he turned and drove slowly back until he came to a small side road about half a mile from the hill. A few hundred yards along this lane, he came to a rough lay-by, where road menders had dumped heaps of gravel.

Pulling the Ford well off the road, he took out the jack and removed one of the rear wheels. Leaving the car jacked up, he put the wheel in the boot and locked everything up. Now he had a means of getaway all laid on, the missing wheel being a camouflage for any nosey-parker who happened to come by during the Sunday.

He walked away in the opposite direction to a village a mile away that he had seen on the map. Here he caught a Green Line bus back to London and his flat.

The stage was set for the following night's drama.

Chapter Three

‘I'm sorry, Mr Laskey, but as her husband you are the next-of-kin; the responsibility is all yours.'

Mr Smythe, the Oldfield coroner, looked over his steel-rimmed spectacles at the indignant husband of the late Rita Ronalde. Her real name had been Laskey, after the soldier who had brought her from Italy.

‘But I haven't seen her for nine years. Why should I have to pay for burying her now?'

Laskey stood aggressively before the coroner. He was a short, ugly man in a shabby suit.

Mr Smythe sighed and shuffled his papers.

‘I'm sorry, but there it is. Either she's your wife, or she isn't … if she left any money, you might get something that will more than cover the funeral expenses.'

Laskey's eyes opened a little wider.

‘She wouldn't leave a bent ha'penny to me,' he said suspiciously.

‘If she hasn't left a will, you'll be entitled,' countered the shrewd country solicitor, knowing that that would strike a sympathetic chord in the scruffy man before him.

Laskey sat down thoughtfully and waited for the coroner to finish scrabbling through his papers.

This was the day following the discovery of the wreckage of the Sunbeam. Mr Smythe was holding a preliminary opening of the inquest at the local police station. The County Constabulary wanted the usual week or ten days to make inquiries, so to dispose of the body in the meantime, the coroner had to take evidence of identity from a near relative before giving the order to allow burial.