Stealth (2 page)

‘Ingrid Langley, by all that's holy,' he had said just loudly enough so that those at the nearby tables would be able to hear.

‘That's right,' I had responded.

‘May I join you?'

‘Only if you don't have squid,' I hissed.

‘Not even snails?' he replied in an anguished whisper.

‘
Especially
snails.'

‘OK.'

‘Delighted,' I had cried.

Patrick had seated himself, still acting. After this first light-hearted exchange, he had become quiet and eaten, sparingly, with no appetite. For security reasons we had arranged that for these four days we would not be Mr and Mrs, and we were not even sharing a room. But by that time the dining room had been emptying and there was no need for over-caution. Nevertheless, he had carried on acting, playing a part, almost like a stranger to me right through the rest of the evening.

I turned from looking out of the window when there were taps on my door in a certain sequence. ‘Who is it?' I called, just to make sure.

‘Simple Simon.'

I let him in, commenting that it had been a name he had used when we worked for D12.

‘It's as good as any,' Patrick said. ‘And I know you have a good memory.' He flopped on to the bed, laid back and closed his eyes.

‘Didn't you sleep well?'

‘I hardly ever do now.'

‘Still having the nightmares?

‘Yes, but not quite so often. It helped – you writing it down like that for me.'

Then I had printed the reasons for his nightmares and handed the sheets of paper to him. He had read it through and, at my urging, had then screwed it up and, his face grim, thrown it into the flames of the log fire. Home-grown psychology.

‘Is there any tea?' he wondered aloud.

‘One tea bag, no pot, plastic milk.'

‘In a hotel like this, too. Bloody France.'

‘How about coffee? Instant, obviously.'

‘That might be more drinkable.'

‘Look, I thought we weren't supposed to be—'

‘I know.'

I filled the little kettle in the en-suite bathroom and switched it on, making no comment.

‘Mike rang me.'

Mike is his boss in London, Commander Michael Greenway.

‘There have been developments.'

‘Oh?'

‘She's been found dead.'

‘Who, Rosemary Smythe?'

Patrick sat up. ‘Yes, yesterday afternoon. She was found at the bottom of the stairs in her house by her niece, Jane Grant. As you know, Miss Smythe was in her early eighties and to begin with it was assumed that she had fallen and it was an accident. But the PM revealed that she'd been strangled. There was bruising to the body – old people bruise easily – that suggested she'd been grabbed and pushed or thrown down the stairs either before or just after death.'

You suffer when you write and my imagination immediately presented me with the horrible scene.

Patrick continued: ‘The house had been turned over as though it had been burgled but the Met sergeant who attended started to change his mind as he walked around – had a gut-feeling that something wasn't quite right – and called in his boss.'

The police forces are always receiving letters from members of the public and SOCA is no exception. Many are from those who write at length on such subjects as imagined conspiracies, malicious gossip involving celebrities, and to report that their neighbours are aliens from Venus. Miss Smythe had had a lot to relate about one of her neighbours. According to her they, or at least, the man of the house, were criminals. She had watched them for months, she said, using binoculars from an attic room and also from a tree house in her garden. The latter had eventually fallen down, with her inside it, and she had broken her left leg and suffered cuts and bruises. Undeterred, she had carried on with her surveillance when out of plaster. The neighbours had noticed her activities and after the woman had taken to lurking in their back garden she had eventually been served with an ASBO, an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Infuriated that no one believed her, Miss Smythe had started writing to SOCA, in impeccable English too: she was a retired schoolteacher from a highly-regarded girls' boarding school in Surrey.

One of the problems with the accusation was that her neighbour, Hereward Trent – this was leafy Richmond – of necessity a wealthy man to be able to reside in this area, was highly respected, chairman of various worthy committees and generously supported local charities. He had a beautiful wife and two beautiful children and initially had been very forbearing with regards to the cranky old lady next door. But everything had got out of hand and when, after being given several police warnings, she had been caught peering in through the kitchen window one night when someone had left the rear gates to the garden open, he announced that his patience had snapped – to one of his friends who was a very senior CID officer.

All this had somehow landed in Mike Greenway's in-tray, possibly because the senior policeman in question had recently been discovered to have quite the wrong sort of cronies and was now the subject of an urgent internal investigation. One of these associates, some kind of boxing promoter and also a director of a London football club, was known to the police on account of having connections with others involved in serious crime and was not thought to be squeaky clean himself. This web of various people, which Greenway was insisting on calling ‘a rats' nest', was exceedingly complex.

My brief with SOCA lay with another of Miss Smythe's neighbour's associates, a successful crime writer, Clement Hamlyn, who was staying in this hotel for the festival. The name was, apparently, a pseudonym: his real identity I had not been able to discover and he had used several in the past, under one of which he had served three years for GBH – grievous bodily harm. I had not read any of his books but they were, I understood, very realistic, or ‘gritty', as they say in the trade.

Patrick broke into my thoughts. ‘There's absolutely nothing to connect her neighbour with the death.'

‘Well, there wouldn't be, would there?' I snapped. ‘He was probably in Bermuda at the time.'

‘Skiing with the family at Klosters, actually.'

‘You were feeling down last night?' I said after a short silence.

‘Yes, sorry.'

‘Patrick—'

‘Yes, I know. I shall have to get over it soon or go and see a shrink.'

After a longish silence, I said, ‘What does Greenway want you to do now?'

‘About Miss Smythe? Nothing for the moment. The Met's on the case and we'll get the info when we return. We're to drop the travelling separately bit and I'm to move in with you. He doesn't like the look of this crime writer he's asked you to watch and wants me to keep a closer eye on you in view of what's happened. You do seem to have the knack of stirring up mobsters in general.'

I took that as a compliment.

Miss Smythe had mentioned Hamlyn, spotting him at dusk one summer's evening staggering drunk and urinating against a tree in her neighbours' garden during a party, which, judging by loud music and the sound of cars revving late at night, they gave quite often. She had recognized him only because she had seen him on TV the previous week taking part in a books programme talking about his latest publication, a crime novel set in wartime London that included a murder that had taken place in Richmond, not far from where she lived. It was soon to be dramatized for television. This, I thought, could have made an elderly lady feel uneasy, imagining him loping the streets near her house to get the feel of the location. Hamlyn was a giant of a man with a deep, booming voice, a mane of black hair and an eye that was half closed by a scar across his face as a result of a car crash some years previously. Someone, another author, had once said to me, waspishly, that his grim looks alone probably sold thousands of copies of his work and the man seemed to be aware of this and played on it.

His revolting social lapse had not been the sole reason for Rosemary Smythe bringing him to SOCA's attention, although she had seemed to know about his criminal record. She had already reported that he was a frequent visitor to the house next door and usually arrived with a woman, possibly his girlfriend, who she recognized from the television news as a councillor in another London borough who had been suspended during an investigation into allegations of expenses fraud and irregularities concerning council contracts. No, later that same day, after it had got quite dark and she was watching the house through binoculars from the tree house she had seen several men including, she was sure, Hamlyn, in what she had an idea was Hereward Trent's study, handling weapons: handguns, she thought. As if feeling an outsider's gaze on them, someone had wrenched the curtains across the window.

I said, ‘I only know the main details of what Miss Smythe wrote as I read a heavily edited version. How many letters were there?'

‘At least a dozen,' Patrick replied. ‘We do need to look at them in detail. Have you spotted Hamlyn yet?'

‘No. Perhaps he's having his meals in his room. Does Mike really think he's going to make contact with one of the Met's Most Wanted hiding here in the South of France?'

‘He was linked with a gang when he did time when the boss was a bloke calling himself Cat Danny on account of his burglary days. Danny went on to specialize in the vice trade and drug dealing and eventually fled to Spain. He was sent on the run again by Operation Captura, which as you know we, SOCA, are working on together with Crimestoppers to arrest British criminals living on the Costas. Danny – the name he mostly uses is Daniel Coates – is now thought to be in this area – Cannes. Mike's theory is that he might owe Hamlyn money, his share of whichever scam he missed the pay-off due to having been inside.'

‘Does Hamlyn need money?' I asked dubiously.

‘You're normally good at criminal profiling. Think about it.'

OK, never open mouth before clutching in brain. ‘He would want what he probably regarded as compensation for the time he spent behind bars.'

‘Correct.'

‘Are you going to search his room?'

‘I am.'

‘And follow him when he goes out?'

‘That, too.'

‘I take it he's arrived.'

‘Late yesterday afternoon. I had to get the hotel manager on board. Luckily for me his son's in the local
gendarmerie
and he was delighted to cooperate once I'd produced my ID card. I just hope he doesn't gossip.'

‘The man might have gone out already.'

Patrick looked pained. ‘He hasn't. While you were stuffing your face last night I was watching him in the bar. He drank enough Bourbon to drown himself in and then reeled off to bed.'

‘It's a wonder he has enough brain cells left to be able to write.'

‘You could always ask him about that.'

C
lement Hamlyn remained elusive, not appearing for breakfast that morning, for the short opening ceremony or the address by the Norwegian author. He may well have been forewarned as the latter was so stupifyingly dull I will not bother the special characters application of my computer in order to type his name. Afterwards, everyone seemed to be drinking coffee and chattering with huge relief. I glanced around but failed to spot the black-haired Hamlyn. Surely he would tower over just about everyone else? I had made sure that I was on the same panel as he was – we were both, after all, crime writers – and made my way to the room set aside for it.

The whole affair was still giving the impression that the visitors to the festivals of Cheltenham or Bath had been picked up, wholesale, and dumped down on the south coast of France. Most of the voices I heard were British, seemingly from every possible region, very few speaking English with foreign accents.

‘Are you still giving a reading?' asked a woman suddenly appearing at my elbow.

I turned to see someone I knew to be one of the organizers: slightly out of breath, glasses awry, her long fair hair escaping from an untidy bun on the top of her head.

I told her that I was, at two thirty.

She frantically scrabbled at the papers attached to her clipboard. ‘Oh, God, I've got you down for three.'

‘No, it's definitely two thirty, with Ian MacBride and Stephanie Blackwood.'

‘You are Barbara Somerville, aren't you?'

‘No, Ingrid Langley.'

‘Oh, oh, sorry. You won't be late, will you?'

‘I'll try not to be,' I replied evenly.

‘They're complaining already, you know.'

‘Really?'

‘People always complain. I really don't know why I do this year after year seeing as . . .'

Still talking she rushed off before I could ask her if Clement Hamlyn was still expected on the panel session. To my disappointment, as I had been hoping to find out something about him for the commander, he did not appear. His place was taken by a volunteer from the audience, a young writer who had had two crime novels published, modestly hoped to learn something and, not having thought of himself as sufficiently famous, had not put his name forward. As it happened he was very articulate and amusing and when it was over I congratulated him.

‘Thanks – but what happened to the big man?' was the blushing response.

‘Size isn't everything,' I told him and went off to look for Patrick, not expecting to find him and more than a little desperate to know what was going on. True enough, I failed to locate him, met Alan and we went in to lunch together.

He looked ghastly, the once tubby and frankly, sleek and self-satisfied man now gaunt and hollow-eyed. Despite his assurances – he has always been a very positive soul – that he was recovering after two major operations, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, I feared for him.

‘You're with Berkley Morton now, aren't you?' he enquired after some general conversation, not really eating what was on the plate in front of him.