Stealth (16 page)

‘How on earth did Daws find all that out?'

‘I never ask. But he does know more people than Moses.'

‘That could be the skeleton Trent has in the cupboard that Hamlyn's found out about.'

That night I finished reading, at speed, the book but found no further parallels to the murder case. It was with some trepidation the next morning that I began
Rage
.
Having already discovered that if I skipped most of the dialogue, which Hamlyn was very bad at writing as it was stilted and a large proportion of the adjectives and nouns represented by profanities, never mind all his characters sounding the same, and concentrated on the descriptive passages, vividly portrayed, a real picture began to emerge.

This novel was set in present-day London, written in the first person and concerned a crime boss endeavouring to enact revenge on other mobsters with whom he had had quarrels in the past, owed him money and, in his view, had ‘done the dirty on him'. Again, the theme was revenge. I became very bored very quickly with the ambushes in back alleys, car chases, general sexual abuse of prostitutes, drunkenness and finally the showdown when our hero slowly and messily tortures the last subject of his ire to death, finally slinging the blooded remains into a stolen car and tidying everything up with a well-aimed petrol bomb. The book ends with our ‘hero' setting out to drink himself into oblivion.

Hamlyn, then, still seemed to be living the storylines of his books.

‘What I simply don't understand is how he has the nerve to make threats in public,' I said, later that day. ‘I mean, the man's appeared on television. Is he super-confident that he can frighten people into silence should they recognize him?'

‘Da Rosta seemed pretty scared,' said Patrick. ‘Or perhaps Hamlyn kills those who guess who he is anyway, no bother.'

‘I want to know what he's doing right now,' I said.

‘Writing-wise, you mean.'

‘Yes.'

‘All we have to do then is break into his place, work out the passwords on his computer and have a read.'

I ignored the slight sarcasm – no, the full-blown sarcasm – and said, ‘I had another go at the first three novels and they were either just pure imagination or based on his past; the fourth, if one gives credence to the Miss Smythe connection, is about his immediate past, the fifth, if our hunches about him are correct, concerns the present. He's completely hooked on what he's doing, living the dream and making money out of it; it's an addiction, like alcohol. So what's next?'

I had a terrible feeling that Hamlyn would create the future and then make it happen.

A
s far as Patrick and I were concerned the next three days were about to be as good as wasted as he had to attend a residential course at another hotel, the subject matter of which was the new National Crime Agency. Initially, I saw little point in remaining in London – the commander had said he did not want me ‘going off into the blue' working on the case on my own – as it would then be the weekend and, depressed and frustrated because Greenway's fears of the case going cold seemed about to be realized, I'd told Patrick that I would go straight home.

Then, disastrously, I changed my mind.

The keys to Rosemary Smythe's house were still in the drawer of the desk we use, together with the case file and my task would be to place everything in the safe before we left or hand the items to another member of the team if they needed them. I asked around and no one did so into the safe it went, but minus the keys.

Patrick had asked me to take the car home and put some of his belongings in it in order to travel light. He was not looking forward to being stuck in a hotel although they had been promised some kind of relief in the shape of a morning's ‘leadership training, team bonding and outdoor activities'. Ye gods, my imagination ran wild. Scampering around Hyde Park frightening the horses? Crossing the Serpentine in boats fashioned from empty oil drums and bits of fallen trees? Had they known what they were doing when they ordered Patrick along? Would he pop the instructors into a sack and take everyone else off to the nearest pub?

My mood instantly sobered as I approached the rear of Miss Smythe's house. On foot, that is: I had left the Range Rover several streets away. I had used the time, waiting for it to get dark, by first walking down into Richmond to have something to eat. It was drizzling with rain, again and, afterwards, with the hood up on my dark anorak I had made a short detour to walk by Jane Grant's cottage. The place had been in darkness but whether the windows had really thick curtains, I could not remember, or she was out was impossible to judge.

OK, this did sort of come under the heading of ‘going off into the blue' and I was slightly breaking the rules as far as my working partner was concerned as well but there could be no harm in a little quiet observation of Hereward Trent. I had no intention of climbing the oak tree again and had spotted on our previous visit a set of aluminium steps in an outhouse where gardening tools and so forth were kept.

No one had re-bolted the gate and it opened smoothly, no squeaking hinges, after I had unlocked it. I left it unlocked, switched on my tiny torch, shielding the light with a hand so I did not inadvertently shine it up in the air, and made my way down the garden. It was not yet absolutely dark and there is always a glow in the sky in large cities anyway from street lights and others so I only needed the torch to prevent me from tripping over something. Beneath the oak, and careful not to walk into the remains of the tree house, I paused to look and listen, switching it off.

There were lights on in the house, one downstairs and another on the first floor. As I watched, the latter went out and the one in the next room was switched on.

This was something I had not expected but there was no reason why, the place no longer being a crime scene, that someone like Jane Grant should not be there, perhaps checking that all was well or sorting through her aunt's papers as she was executor to the will.

I muttered something regrettable. All I had wanted to do was fetch the step ladders from the outhouse and have a look over the garden wall into next door, staying no longer than half an hour or so. Now, to struggle with an awkward aluminium contrivance likely to clatter noisily into anything and everything it encountered in the dark seemed a bit pathetic and, if heard by whoever was indoors, I would have some difficult questions to answer. And as my mentor has been known to warn,
always stay on the right side of
bloody stupid.

I remembered that there was a little garden seat in an arbour quite close by, found it and sat down, needing to think things through. There were aspects of this set of cases, which we were assuming made up one complex whole, that were puzzling from the point of view of the suspects involved.

First there was Hereward Trent, a man known to have embezzled money from a golf club, and reputed, no proof forthcoming whatsoever, to be some kind of crime boss. Patrick and I had interviewed him and what had been before us was someone nervous to the point of rudeness, alone in the house with no staff or anyone who might act as his bodyguard, a vital necessity for someone involved in serious crime. I had already come to the conclusion that there was every possibility he was being blackmailed to provide his home as a safe house, a place to stash weapons and stolen property.

Then, Anthony Thomas – an actor probably with criminal connections in his native country – requests for details to Moscow police had, so far, gone unanswered – who now lived a shady but no doubt more financially rewarding life in London. The photograph of him showed a man with quite heavily Slavic features – he had probably been quite good looking once – but it was not an intelligent face. Did he provide the ‘personnel' for what we were assuming were well-organized criminal activities?

Third in the mix was the bent cop. I could not remember his name and SOCA was not involved, although being kept in the picture, with that investigation. He might have been the source of police intelligence, providing the names and addresses of witnesses and other vital information. Why? Did Hamlyn have some kind of hold over him too?

Last but definitely not least was Clement Hamlyn himself, plus Claudia Barton-Jones, the latter in trouble with the law in connection with unrelated matters. Or were they? As to the crime writer with a criminal record whose old associates were going down like ninepins, the darkly glowering oaf who now appeared to act out his plots and I guessed lived in a kind of drink-fuelled fantasy world, driven by his need to make more money to pay for it . . . Well, he was as mad as a box of spanners, wasn't he?

Who the hell was orchestrating this poisonous bunch?

Someone else.

I wanted to share this with Patrick but could hardly sit nattering on my phone in a garden in which, strictly speaking, I was trespassing. And, having just arrived for his course, leaving work behind for a few days, he would probably be disinclined to hear my musings on that subject right now. But my guilt at acting alone caught up with me and I rang his number. All I got was the answerphone. So be it.

Another thought . . . In none of her letters had Miss Smythe mentioned going next door and peering in through the kitchen window, or lurking in the garden generally, again presumably when the gates had been left open perhaps because more ‘guests' were expected, the reason she had been given the ASBO. Embarrassment? According to her niece she had not been too bothered about it. What else had she done? Her last letter had mentioned that she still hoped to provide evidence, that all-important word.

Evidence. As we had already noted, all the letters had been about things she had seen with her own eyes. Not hearsay, no gossip. If that was the case, on the occasions she had been in the Trent's garden or looked through windows she had seen nothing that furthered her cause. The events she had mentioned had occurred when she was in the tree house. I found myself asking if, after she wrote the last letter SOCA received, Miss Smythe had investigated further but not lived to tell us about it. It was only a theory but I did wonder what, if anything, this lady could have seen or done that forced them finally to kill her. Something highly incriminating to them. Hard evidence.

I simply had to know who was in the house.

The moon, not full but almost so, made up my mind for me by appearing through a large gap in the clouds and I did not need my torch to walk down the rest of the garden. I took a narrow meandering side path, the tall shrubs on either side of which would conceal me from the house. The realization went through my mind that if a new lock had been fitted to the back door I would not be able to get in. But I did not really want to get in, just find out who was inside.

The light was on in the kitchen, blinds up. Standing to one side of the back door and endeavouring to mask my face with the ivy growing thickly on the wall by it I looked in the window. No one was in the room but through the open doorway I could see that a light was on beyond. Moving carefully – there were plants in pots everywhere here – I turned to the door and, praying that it would not squeak, turned the heavy knob. There was just a tiny click and the door began to open under the slight pressure of my hand. All remained silent within the house.

Then, I heard the clack of high-heeled shoes on the tiled kitchen floor and quickly pulled the door closed, praying that the inner door of the little lobby was shut so whoever she was would not notice. I waited, only realizing that I had been holding my breath when I had to gasp for air. Then, I risked another peep, moving very, very slowly, peering through the ivy.

In the room a slim, fair-haired woman stood with arms akimbo, her pretty face like thunder, nervously biting her bottom lip and looking towards the open doorway into the hall. She was well-dressed as if going out for the evening in a grey sparkly top and black trousers, a small beaded evening bag clutched in one hand resting on the opposite arm. There was a slight tremor about her as though she was either tapping a foot – I could not see – or shivering.

‘For God's sake, hurry up!' I distinctly heard her say in a loud stage whisper.

At a snail's pace I moved back, not daring to remain where I was any longer in case she spotted me. Moments later I heard other footsteps, probably a man's, and there was a heated, whispered conversation of which I could only catch the odd word.

‘So
now
what do we do?' the woman finally asked, louder.

‘We'll have to come back later,' the man replied.

Furiously, the woman said, ‘But we can't keep coming in here! Someone'll see us!'

‘Keep your voice down!'

I decided that I had every right to join in this conversation, opened the outside door, pushed the inner one wide and went in. For a moment they were so engrossed in their argument they did not notice me. When they did, their expressions were ones of total shock.

‘What the hell are
you
doing here?' Hereward Trent shouted.

‘Do keep your voice down,' I said, soothingly.

‘Who is this?' Sonya Trent demanded to know of him, her mind, I was convinced, racing more along the lines of ‘other woman' than anything else just then.

He momentarily lost the ability to speak, so I replied for him. ‘I'm with the Serious Organised Crime Agency and please leave out all the stuff about being good neighbours checking on the empty house next door or thinking you saw a burglar in here.'

‘But we are checking that all is well with the house,' Trent protested.

‘You're lying! You didn't care a toss about this old lady when she was alive!' I raged at him. ‘How did you get in?'

Sonya Trent burst into tears.

‘It's no good cracking up now!' her husband bawled at her, shaking her by the shoulders and making everything worse as he was hurting her.

I thrust him aside – I loathe bullies – saying, ‘It's too late for lies, posturing and denials. Who gave you the key? What are you doing here? What are you looking for?'