by Peter Tonkin
The tone chirruped five times before connection was made.
At once the room was filled with a creaking, clanking industrial background. Seagulls screamed in the distance. Some other bird called nearer at hand. Someone shouted. Someone shouted back.
‘Yes?’ said a voice in reply to the call.
They looked at each other, wrong-footed by the speed with which their own little gamble seemed to be paying off.
‘Yes?’ repeated the voice.
Jim dived into the silence. ‘Charles, is that you?’ he asked.
‘What?’
But the three words struck some chord deep in Richard’s massive memory. He knew that voice. He knew that voice. ‘Jones?’ he called. ‘Captain James Jones?’
There was a microsecond of further contact.
Then the line went dead.
‘That was him!’ said Richard. ‘It was Jones, I’m certain of it!’
‘Wait a moment!’ said Maggie. ‘Let’s be clear about this. Richard, are you saying that’s our Jones?’
‘Yes!’
‘Jones of the Goodman Richard?’ asked Jim, frowning.
‘Yes!’
‘The man whose death is the basis of the charge of Corporate Killing laid against you? That Jones?’ repeated Maggie slowly.
‘I’m certain of it! And if he’s alive after all, then I have no case to answer! We must get this all to the police. We must get it to the police at once!’
Five minutes after they had all left the office, the phone began to ring. It rang four times and then the call-minding cut in. Jim’s voice went out on to the whispering infinity of the line, saying, ‘This is Bacon, Constable Investigations, London. We cannot take your call at the moment, but if you leave your name and number after the tone, we’ll get right back to you...’
Chapter 22: Desperation
They took the information to Snow Hill. Logic - any pause for any thought at all, indeed - might have suggested that they should seek out the centre of the investigation into Edgar Smithers’s death, but Richard was so excited by the information he had found about James Jones that Snow Hill seemed logical to him.
It really never occurred to Richard to wonder what sort of reception they might expect. Had he stopped to think he might have seen the inevitability of what happened. After all, he was proposing to present an investigating officer with the thinnest possible ‘proof’ that the case he had been working on for the better part of a year was without foundation. And such proof as there was depended on an extremely questionable conversation with someone in a remote and mysterious location who had actually given away nothing tangible at all.
Finally, the source of this proof was a bundle of potentially important evidence removed from a possible crime scene.
Had Richard allowed Jim or Frances to get a word in edgeways. Had he paused to listen to Andrew or Maggie. Had he even paid more attention to Robin’s hesitancy, things might have proceeded differently. But he did none of these things and so they went from bad to worse.
Inspector Nolan was in, the desk officer told them. He rang through, then, after a short wait he said that the Inspector was available to see them. Richard and Robin went through alone. The others, suddenly reluctant, remained in the waiting area. Richard put the pile of letters and the supplement on Nolan’s desk and topped them off with the tape of the phone call. He could hardly contain the excitement he felt. This was it. He was vindicated. At the end of the tunnel. Out of the woods.
‘What is this?’ asked Nolan quietly.
‘All in all, it’s proof of my innocence,’ answered Richard. ‘This is the tape of a phone call...’
‘Where did these letters come from?’ Nolan had seen the address on an envelope.
‘Edgar Smithers’s boat Argo…’
‘Where did you get them?’
‘That’s not important. Listen. On the supplement here there’s a phone number-’
‘I think it is important, Captain Mariner. But we can discuss that when I understand exactly what it is you wish to show me. A phone number on a page of this supplement?’
‘Yes. The advert for tours of Australia...’ Nolan riffled through the magazine. ‘I see. This page? This phone number?’
‘Yes. We thought it must be Charles Lee’s...’
‘But clearly it wasn’t.’
‘That’s right. We phoned it and got through. Someone answered.’
‘I see. Who answered?’
‘Captain James Jones.’
There was a short silence. ‘I find that hard to believe, Captain. Mrs Mariner, did you talk to Captain Jones too?’
‘No. But we all heard him. It was on one of those answer-phone machines that broadcast incoming calls.’
‘And Captain Jones identified himself?’
‘Not in so many words, no. But Richard recognized his voice.’
‘It’s all on the tape,’ said Richard, unable to contain himself.
‘I’m sure it is, Captain. I’m just trying to prepare myself. Clarify what exactly I’ll be listening for.’
‘I see,’ said Richard, more hesitantly. Seeing, in fact, that things were beginning to slide off the rails here.
Nolan took the tape and, crossing to a tape deck on a side table, he snapped it in place. ‘And you got all this stuff from Argo?’ he continued conversationally as he fiddled with the mechanism.
‘That’s right...’
‘I got it,’ said Robin quite forcefully. ‘I talked to Dr Walton before he left for Rome and he told me about Mr Smithers’s boat. I went there and found this stuff. Then I found the body-’
‘Yes. I’m aware of that. You and Frances Bacon, an investigator. Didn’t Ms Bacon warn you that tampering with personal effects in a private residence like this was against the law?’ He made it seem like a tiny misdemeanour mentioned in a friendly discussion. He continued to fiddle with the recorder, looking away from them.
‘She didn’t see me take any of it,’ said Robin. ‘I know it was silly but I was desperate. We’re getting nowhere. And after so long-’
‘But you’ve certainly got somewhere now, haven’t you?’ observed Nolan quietly, his tone beginning to betray just the suspicion of a barb.
He pressed PLAY as he spoke and the room suddenly filled with the whispers and crackles of connection.
Then, a ring-tone. Five rings.
Connection. A hissing, bubbling overlain with clanking and crashing. Seagulls’ birdcalls closer. Shouting. An answer.
‘Yes?’
The bubbling. The clanking. A whirr of motors, a scrape of something being dragged or lifted. Bird sounds. A clapping.
‘Yes?’
Very loudly, ‘Charles, is that you?’ Drowning everything at the far end of the connection out. So loud it echoed for an instant.
‘What?’
Bird sounds. Clapping.
‘Jones?’ Again, very loud. Drowning out everything else.
‘Captain James Jones?’
A micron of time, filled with hissing, bubbling, the rest.
CLICK.
The hiss of empty tape.
Nolan let it play. One second; two; three. He snapped the recorder off. ‘That’s it?’ he asked. He sounded weary.
‘Yes!’ answered Richard. ‘That was James Jones. I’d swear to it.’
‘Of course you would. And I’m sure there are several other people who would swear to it as well. All right. This is the phone number?’
‘That’s it.’
Nolan punched it into his phone and flipped a little switch that broadcast the sounds of contact - just as Jim’s had done. Richard wondered whether it was taping the contact too. Then he began to wonder what else of what was happening in the room was being taped.
The hiss of connection broke.
For a heart-stopping instant Richard really thought it would ring; that Jones would answer again. But no. Instead of a ring-tone there was a hissing, burbling scream as though the handset at the far end were being boile
d in burning oil. The sound was so sudden, so loud, so painful that the three of them jumped. After three agonizing seconds, Nolan switched the speaker off. ‘It seems that number is no longer available,’ he observed quietly.
‘But we have the tape...’ Richard was at last beginning to feel just how far out of his depth he was here.
‘Captain Mariner, let me explain some things to you. First of all, your wife and Ms Bacon committed a trespass in going aboard the Argo. This is a serious offence exacerbated by the fact that the owner of the boat was a witness for the prosecution in a case against you. Secondly, at some time during the trespass they stole various goods and correspondence belonging to Mr Smithers. If they did this before they knew he was dead then it is just plain theft. If they did it after they knew he was dead then it was perverting the course of justice. You certainly knew he was dead before you opened these things and went through them. That is certainly perverting the course of justice. You have by some collective madness talked not only the two private enquiry agents but a solicitor and a barrister into conspiracy to pervert the course of justice along with you. And for what? What have you gained from this? A tape of a conversation that means nothing. With someone who could never be properly identified beyond a reasonable doubt. On a tape which has effectively been created as the result of a series of criminal acts. A tape whose provenance would be questionable unless you could prove without a shadow of a doubt that you really were talking to Captain Jones where and when you say - and that this is a full, undoctored recording of the conversation.’
‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘I see my mistake.’ The quiet tone of his voice warned Robin of his rage and she tried to stop him speaking with an elbow in his ribs - but it was already far too late.
‘I should hope you do,’ answered Nolan. ‘A whole catalogue of mistakes, in fact.’
‘My mistake was in assuming that you would be interested in the truth rather than in the case. In thinking that if I could bring you proof that Captain Jones was still alive, the provenance of the proof would not be important - because you would see that I had no case to answer!’
‘That’s not the way it works, Captain. Particularly as you have actually brought me no proof whatsoever. This situation will not go away in a puff of smoke. It is something you will have to face and deal with within the limits of the law. This isn’t some water-borne derring-do where you can pretend you’re James Bond and sort it all out with a Walther PPK and a dry martini. There will be no heroics, no “With one leap, Jack was free”. It doesn’t work that way at all!’ He paused. Took a deep breath, and switched his gaze to the naked desperation on Robin’s bone-white face. ‘But on the other hand there is no reason for institutional inhumanity.’
Without raising his voice he called, ‘Ragalski, get the others in here now please.
‘You see,’ he continued, ‘I ought to be arresting Mrs Mariner and Ms Bacon for trespass and theft. I should be arresting all of you for perverting the course of justice. Arresting you. And I wouldn’t even need to lean on the new arrest rules either. This would be a good old-fashioned “going down for five years and more” arrest. Prison terms served. Licenses revoked. Law Society and Bar Council hearings.’ The door opened and Ragalski ushered the other four in. He repeated himself with them standing there, like a weary headmaster addressing a bunch of recalcitrant students, and he lingered over the last three sentences.
Then he continued, ‘But what’s the point? The prisons are full enough as it is. You’ve done your selves and your case no good; but you’ve done no real harm either. I won’t even insult you with the You Should All Have Known Better speech. Just count this as a word to the wise. Legitimate enquiries. Proper case-making. No more gumshoe stuff and mysterious phone calls, or I will haul you all over the coals, and it won’t just be the Captain here who’ll risk seeing the inside of Belmarsh or Holloway. Leave the stuff from the Argo on your way out. I have colleagues down at the Kingston nick who need to see it as well.’
As soon as the desk sergeant rang through to say they had all left, the inner door into Ragalski’s office opened and Quentin Carver Carpenter came out. ‘That was an unexpected addition to our little prosecution meeting,’ the prosecuting counsel observed, ‘was it wise to be so lenient, Inspector?’
Nolan looked up at him coldly. ‘One: I’ll be watching them. Or Ragalski will with as much of a team as I can get the finance for. Two: consider the impact to your case if we throw the whole of the defence team in clink. I mean, do you want it done and dusted before you retire or do you not? Three: I thought you’d enjoy having Mizz DaSilva exactly where you want her. I mean, one of you’s going to make their name, their career and their fortune from this case, aren’t they? You have the whip hand now.’
‘And you, Mr Nolan, what do you have?’
‘Why, I have the satisfaction of knowing, sir, that I’m just an honest copper doing an honest copper’s job.’
And the way he said it, without inflection or intonation, left Carver Carpenter genuinely uncertain whether he actually meant it or not.
Chapter 23: Touch
‘The hell of it,’ said Richard, his voice trembling with sheer rage, ‘is that I know that was James Jones. The bastard’s alive out there somewhere. So it’s a racing certainty that everyone else in the lifeboat is OK too.’ The six of them were walking in a group back along Snow Hill in three close-bunched pairs.
‘But how are we going to prove it?’ asked Robin, soothingly, giving him a gentle, lingering hug. She hadn’t really thought her words through - she was just quietening him as she quietened the twins when they were sick as babies, by the tone of her voice not by what she was saying.
But Jim Constable answered her question. ‘We have the recording,’ he said. ‘We’ll start with that. If anyone has any kind of a record of Captain Jones’s voice we can do an audio match. They’re almost as accurate as fingerprints, retinal scans and DNA. Then we can see if there’s any way of beefing up the background. I know it’s a bit James Bond, but it’s doable. Places have sound signatures as individual as voices and if we can get a fix on where he was speaking from it’d be a good start.’
‘It was on board a ship,’ said Richard without thinking. ‘That much was obvious.’
‘Then maybe we can even work out where the ship is - or was when we spoke to Captain Jones,’ said Jim thoughtfully.
‘Cool,’ said Maggie. ‘Then I’d better get busy trying to support the provenance of our tape. Richard, what we need is some kind of recording of Captain Jones’s voice. If we can get that, then I know this professor who specializes in the field. Professor German-’
‘But what about Inspector Nolan?’ Robin almost wailed. ‘He told us to stay within the law! No more gumshoeing!’
‘Three things,’ said Jim. ‘One, this is within the law. Two, if I did everything the police told me I’d be broke in a week. Three, I am a gumshoe - gumshoeing is what I do.’
‘We,’ corrected Frances. ‘It’s what we are - what we do...’
‘Right,’ said Richard, beginning to spark again at the prospect of action. ‘What do we do first?’
‘Back to Heritage House,’ ordered Jim. ‘I would say the Inspector wasn’t just threatening us for fun. He said he’d be watching us, so I assume he is. We’ll lie low for a bit and then I think the girls ought to sneak out and do a little anonymous shopping.’
‘Wow!’ said Maggie. ‘It’s a while since anyone called me a girl.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of you,’ answered Jim. ‘You couldn’t do anything anonymously. And I’ll bet you don’t do the land of shopping I have in mind. Not in Tesco’s at any rate.’
‘Tesco’s?’ asked Maggie, her voice dripping with innocent ignorance. ‘What on earth is Tesco’s?’
The evening was clement and dry. It was hardly out of place that two of the kitchen staff from Heritage Mariner should pop out - still in their cover-alls - to pick up some extra supplies from the local Tesco’s. Almost immediately that t
hey did so, Maggie and Andrew came out of the side-door to the flat and hailed a cab. Then Richard and Jim came out of the main doors and went on down into the company car park. A few moments later Richard’s Bentley Continental eased out on to Leadenhall and cruised off towards Fleet Street, at a speed dictated by the evening traffic of little more than walking pace.
‘God,’ said Robin. ‘This is all a bit subtle, isn’t it? I mean Nolan specifically warned Richard that he shouldn’t be behaving like James Bond and here we are - pretending to be Plenty O’Toole and Pussy Galore.’
‘Listen, girl,’ said Frances. ‘Don’t fool yourself. In these overalls we look more like Rosa Klebb.’
‘So,’ said Robin with a chuckle. ‘We work on the assumption that Nolan’s men will watch our two cruising down Fleet Street while we sneak in from the back and raid your offices.’
‘Probably being over-cautious,’ agreed Frances. ‘But you never know. Like Nolan said, we’ve broken so many rules already he’d have no difficulty getting a warrant out of a magistrate - and the boys down in Kingston looking into Smithers’s death will want to be active too, remember. Once that happens, the discs and the tapes are all history as far as we’re concerned. And I agree with Jim: it’s only a matter of time before that happens. Better we have at least some copies they don’t know exist. Then we can keep working in quiet, eh? It’s the next step.’
‘And oh my Lord,’ said Robin quietly, almost mournfully, ‘do we ever need a next step...’
The back entrance to Bacon, Constable’s offices opened off Shoe Lane. The offices themselves were simply on the second floor of a large business premises, so the rear entrance was pretty well secured, Robin observed as Frances let them in. But, as with many such buildings, the security could really have done with some updating and a lot of strengthening. There was graffiti not only outside the doors but on some of the inner walls and passageways as well. One or two of the strip-lights were broken but the stairwells remained bright. ‘We could do with CCTV cameras at the back as well as at the front,’ said Frances, catching Robin’s look. ‘But the rent and maintenance charges are ruinous enough as it is.’