The Brief

by Simon Michael

  ‘I’m tooled,’ warned Charles. ‘And not just the knife.’

  The man looked Charles in the face for the first time. ‘Easy…easy. If I was gonna grass you, why’d I come over?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Derek’s in trouble -’

  Charles interrupted him. ‘Well, perhaps you’ve clocked it, but I’ve got problems of my own right now.’

  ‘I know that. But I wonder if they’re not connected. You hear about Robbie Sands?’

  ‘Sands? Derek’s co-defendant? No. Why?’

  ‘He’s out. 10 days ago. Got hisself into a fight with a nonce and did a runner on the way to the hospital.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s connected to my… troubles?’

  ‘He’s been bothering Derek. And your name was mentioned.’

  Charles studied the other man’s open face, and decided that he was telling the truth. He tried to remember the details of Plumber's case and realised he had not seen reference to it when going through his notebooks. So, that accounted for the the missing books. And then, like a sudden flash of light, he remembered: a cut throat defence. A cut throat.

  'I need to go,' said Charles, urgently. 'Where does that leave us? What are you going to do?'

  ‘About seeing you? Nuffink. Not my business. I’ve never had form, but I still don’t talk to rozzers. The family’d never forgive me. But go and see Del, eh? He’s in a right state. He wants to get away, but there’s no way.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Charles, but the other didn’t reply. He was pulling a Rizla cigarette paper from a packet and writing on it with a stub of pencil taken from behind his ear. He slid it across the table.

  ‘That’s the address. Have a shufti.’

  Without another word he got up and brushed past Charles, causing the table to wobble and some of Charles’s beer to slop over the edge of the glass. Charles watched him in the mirror as he rejoined the man he’d been talking to, laughed and slapped him on the back, and then disappeared through the throng. Over the heads of the traders and butchers Charles saw the door of the pub open and close again. He looked at the wafer of paper in his hand. The address, in Limehouse, was only a mile or two to the east. Charles slipped it into his pocket and resumed his breakfast.

  •

  Charles brought the Austin Healey to a halt outside a Georgian house in Narrow Street, Limehouse. He could smell the river on the other side of the houses – less than 100 yards to his right – and two seagulls screeched, flapped and squabbled over something dead in the gutter opposite him.

  The pavements were quite full as people hurried to work and more than one person noted the Austin Healey and looked into its windows as they passed. Charles realised that he needed to move. The house he was looking for was two doors down from The Grapes public house, a well-known dockers' watering hole. Charles got out of the car and approached a faded blue door. Tacked to the door post was a dog-eared index card with a message in block capitals: “PLEASE KNOCK AND WALK UP.” Charles knocked, flakes of peeling blue paint falling to his feet as he did so, then turned the handle and opened the door. A narrow wooden staircase faced him. He climbed to a small landing at the top from which another half-glazed door opened. A radio could be heard through the door. He knocked on the glass and waited. There was no answer so he pushed the door open. He was assailed by the sharp odour of urine and he wrinkled his nose. He was in a large kitchen. This was a poor household, but despite the smell it was immaculately clean and tidy. The room had once been elegant, with tall ceilings, a large intact plaster ceiling rose and an imposing fireplace which now housed an electric two-bar radiator. The floor was covered in lino and there was a scrubbed pine kitchen table. The previous night’s dishes were dry on a metal drainer.

  Charles followed the sound of the radio which came from another room leading off the kitchen. He knocked on the door, twice, with no response. He opened the door slowly.

  The room beyond was in darkness and here the smell of urine was stronger still. Charles paused to allow his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. There was an unusually high narrow bed against the far wall and a hoist attached to the ceiling hanging over the bed. The room’s curtains were closed. Then Charles saw two dark shapes on the floor. He took a couple of steps to the window and pulled the curtain nearest him. Light entered the bedroom. Derek Plumber lay on the floor, unconscious, face down with his knees drawn up under him. His pyjama trousers were saturated with urine, and his right arm was outstretched, as if reaching for something on the dressing table. Beside him, on its side, was a wheelchair. Charles righted the wheelchair and bent to lift Plumber back into it. As he did so Plumber’s pyjama legs flapped emptily and Charles realised with a shock deep to the pit of his stomach that the man had no legs below the knees. He held Plumber under the armpits, a deadweight. He changed his mind and instead of putting him into the wheelchair from which he might simply slide back onto the floor, Charles managed to swing him partially onto the bed. He then turned and rolled the unconscious man into a more secure position. It was only as he was straightening Plumber that Charles realised there was another strong odour in the room. It took him a moment to recognise it so incongruous did it seem, and then he remembered the smell from Henrietta’s dressing room: nail varnish remover.

  Charles looked round at the dressing table against the wall; it was almost completely covered with bottles and boxes of medications, and Charles’s eye was immediately caught by half a dozen ampoules of clear liquid and an open box of disposable syringes. Charles picked up one of the ampoules: insulin. He looked back at Plumber.

  ‘You poor bastard,’ he said softly. ‘You couldn’t reach.’

  Charles returned to the bedside and tried to rouse Plumber, shaking him and slapping his face once or twice, but he knew he was wasting his time. Plumber was in a coma from diabetic ketoacidosis, which explained the nail varnish remover smell on his breath, and he needed an ambulance, and fast. His breathing was fast and shallow and his face the colour of wet concrete.

  Charles raced to the door, across the kitchen, and down the stairs. He scanned the road – no phone boxes – and turned around to the shut door of The Grapes. He hammered on the door with increasing urgency. Eventually a sash window on the second floor was thrown up.

  ‘We’re closed!’ shouted a man in pyjamas.

  ‘I know. Call an ambulance, quickly! The man two doors up needs help.’

  ‘What, Derek?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Righto!’ said the man, and his head disappeared back inside.

  Charles retraced his steps to Plumber’s bedroom. He only had a few minutes. For the first time he looked around at the otherwise very tidy home and saw that the bedroom was the exception. All the drawers and cupboards were open, some of their contents strewn on the floor. Someone’s gone through the room before me, thought Charles. But what for?

  A sudden noise startled Charles and he whirled round to see a short young woman in nurse’s uniform enter the bedroom. She halted in surprise.

  ‘Who are you? What’s going on?’ she demanded. Then she saw Plumber. ‘What have you done to Derek?’ she demanded, brushing past Charles and going to the bedside. ‘Oh, Jesus!’

  ‘I found him on the floor with the wheelchair turned over. I got him back into bed and asked the landlord of The Grapes to call an ambulance.’

  The district nurse was taking Plumber’s pulse. ‘Oh Jesus!’ she repeated. She whirled on Charles. ‘He’s got DKA. Was it you on the phone last night?’

  ‘Me? No.’

  ‘One of his friends said he’d stay with him and that I needn’t come. Said he was a doctor and he could do the insulin.’

  ‘Not me. Was he a Scotsman?’

  The nurse frowned at him. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Educated guess. That Scotsman was no doctor, believe me. Did Derek have anything of value here?’

  ‘I doubt it – though he keeps his rent and housekeeping for the carers in the bottom draw
er over there.’

  Charles followed her gaze and opened the bottom drawer of a small chest behind the door. He found assorted underwear and two spare pairs of glasses, but no money. ‘Not any more, he doesn’t.’

  The bell of an ambulance could be heard approaching.

  ‘I’ll go and direct them up,’ offered Charles. He went back through the kitchen. As he was stepping through the door onto the landing, he registered a notepad by the telephone fixed to the wall and a pen hanging from a piece of string next to it. He broke his stride and stepped back into the room. On the notepad were the initials “CS”, a telephone number and an address in west London. Charles ripped off the top page with the details and raced downstairs. As he emerged onto the pavement an ambulance was approaching from the far end of the street. He got into the sportscar and drove off in the opposite direction.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Detective Constable Sloane knocked on the door of Superintendent Wheatley’s office, and was told to enter. The room was neat and tidy to the point of obsession. The desk had two files on it, positioned perfectly parallel to the desk edge. Four sharpened pencils were placed in a line, like a musical stave, at the top of one of the files. The Superintendent’s coat was folded on a small table as if just unpacked from the cleaners, but Sloane knew that an hour ago Wheatley had been wearing it when he came in. He folded it that way every time he took it off.

  ‘I thought you ought to know immediately, sir,’ he said, standing to attention in the doorway. He had once been deemed to be slouching in the same doorway and had been bawled out for ten minutes.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘We’ve just had a phone call from PC Blake, the local bobby at Putt Green. He’s been away on honeymoon. The police house was supposed to be monitored by someone from the adjoining village but….’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He just got back and found a note from Mrs Holborne, saying that her husband’s Jag had been stolen.’

  ‘Stolen? When?’

  ‘The note’s not dated – but probably early last week. And the note said something about the car not running.’

  Wheatley leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach, staring at the ceiling. He shook his head and opened his eyes. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘But it corroborates Holborne’s story.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. There’s no reason he couldn’t have taken the car to fix it – if he wanted it as a getaway after the murder.’

  Sloane frowned. ‘But it doesn’t make sense. Are we saying he snuck up in the night, rolled a broken down car out of a garage, somehow got it to somewhere he could fix it, and then silently put it back? Why? All that effort – why did it have to be that car? Surely he’d want to use a car that was not immediately linked to him. Someone wanted everyone to think it was Holborne.’

  ‘I said forget it,’ repeated Wheatley. ‘We’re stretched enough as it is without running round chasing loose ends. We’ve a cast iron case; leave it that way,’ he ordered.

  Sloane stared at his boss for a moment and then nodded. ‘As you like, sir.’

  The DC closed the door behind him and walked thoughtfully back down the corridor to his desk. He sat for a moment, staring out of the window, ignoring the ringing phones and banter going on around him. Then he reached over and lifted the phone.

  ‘Ross? It’s Sean. What was the name of that garage in Putt Green? On the other side of the green to the Holbornes’ place?’

  •

  Charles pulled up at a telephone box and got out of the car. He opened the telephone box door – urine again, he noticed – cleared a space to stand amongst the cigarette ends, crumpled chip bags and other detritus on the floor, and dialled the number torn from Plumber’s pad. After a couple of rings an Irish woman’s voice announced that he had reached the Oaks Lodge Boarding House and Charles hung up, satisfied. He got back into the car and drove the remaining couple of miles to the address, making a stop at a supermarket on the way.

  He parked the Austin Healey in a space on the suburban road, shifted down in his seat and pulled his hat over his eyes. From his vantage spot he could see the stone steps leading up to the “Oak Lodge Boarding House.” A sign swung gently in the front window informing the world that there were still vacancies.

  The weather had turned cold and blustery, and within an hour Charles had identified the half a dozen or so gaps in the roof of the Austin Healey where the wind whistled in. Sips from the half-pint of whisky snuggling in his jacket pocket – courtesy of the Krays’ shooter’s donation – and two cheese sandwiches apparently made of cardboard kept him tolerably warm for the next few hours.

  Dusk gathered over the Edwardian houses and the pavements became busier as people returned home from work. The Irish landlady closed the curtains on her ground floor sitting room, and smoke began to emerge from the chimney, but no there was still no sign of Sands.

  By 7:30 pm all the children had returned from school and people from work, and the streets were again emptying. Most of the houses now had lights in their rooms, some curtained, some shuttered and a few revealing the movements of their occupants as they went about their cooking, homework and other domestic dramas.

  Charles’s legs were stiff and, despite the whisky, his hands and feet were cold. He got out of the car, closed the door quietly, and crossed the road toward the building house. He climbed the steps and rang the bell.

  The outline of a woman could be seen approaching down the corridor and the door opened a couple of inches.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m looking for a room. Just for a week.’

  The woman looked Charles up and down. She had sharp, dark eyes, and straggly black hair streaked with grey. ‘No luggage?’

  Charles nodded across the road. ‘In the car,’ he explained.

  ‘Just you?’ she asked. ‘This is a respectable house,’ she added.

  ‘Just me. And I can pay a week in advance, right now.’

  ‘I’ve only got a single room left.’

  ‘That’s fine. Although I’d like to see it first, please.’

  The woman sized Charles up for a few moments longer and then opened the door fully to admit him. Charles entered the hallway and stood waiting on the polished tiles for the woman to shut the door behind him. A coin-operated telephone was attached to the wall at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said, and she led Charles past a closed door from which emanated the sound of a radio, and up the stairs. Charles played a hunch.

  ‘A colleague of mine told me about your boarding house. A Scotsman. I think he might be here now. His name’s Robbie?’

  ‘Mr Smith? That’s his room,’ and she indicated a door on the first landing as she went past it. Charles glanced down. A thin band of yellow light escaped from underneath the door.

  They reached the head of the stairs and the landlady opened a door and stood back. Charles cast his eye around a small attic room with a single bed, a sink in the corner and a tiny wardrobe large enough to accommodate two or three hangers at most. Charles sat on the bed experimentally, bounced once and rose.

  ‘This’ll be perfect,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘I’ll get my bag from the car, and pay you. Where can I find you?’

  ‘Downstairs in the front sitting room. Just knock on the door. You’ll need to register, Mr ….’

  ‘Collins,’ replied Charles.

  ‘Well Mr Collins, the rent’s six shillings for the week, with a further one and six security deposit. No food allowed in the room, no guests allowed after 9 o’clock, and no female guests allowed at any time. Understood?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  The landlady gave him one last searching look and returned downstairs, leaving the bedroom door open. Charles waited until he heard the footsteps reach the hall and the sitting room door close. He crept back down two flights and stood outside the room below, putting on his gloves. He took the pistol out of his inside pocket and leaned with his ear against the
door. At first he could hear nothing except the occasional car passing outside and the ticking of a large clock from somewhere downstairs but, then, there was a new sound. It was like the noise of a kettle before it boiled – a steady bubbling – but, as Charles concentrated on the noise, it paused. There was a gurgling noise for a second, and then the bubbling sound resumed. Charles gently took the door handle and tested it. It turned silently, and the door moved inward slightly; not locked. Charles held his breath, turned the knob fully, and launched himself into the room.

  There had been no need for surprise. Facing the door was a small couch on which Robbie Sands sat, wearing an overcoat and a hat. He looked comfortable, his hands in his lap and his chin resting on his chest, as if he had just come in from a walk and was taking a rest. His chest rose and fell regularly. But where his weight created a depression in the couch seat there was a pool of dark shiny liquid. Sands’s overcoat was open and the top of his torso was a slowly expanding circle of dark red in the centre of which was a black hole. It was just at the top of his sternum, slightly off centre and immediately below his left clavicle. With every gurgling breath another small gobbet of blood pulsed out of the hole, ran down his saturated shirt, and joined the growing puddle in which he sat.

  Charles took a further step into the room and noted the dark drips of blood leading from the door to the couch. So, he wasn’t shot here, thought Charles. Another thought occurred to him, and he put his head back out into the corridor. He bent down and looked carefully at the carpet. It was dark brown in colour but looking carefully Charles could see the drips of blood heading not towards the front of the house, but towards another door Charles hadn’t noticed on the way up. A fire escape?

  He stepped back into the room and closed the door quietly. The gurgling suddenly stopped as the dying man coughed gently. Blood suddenly appeared between Sands’s lips, and his head lifted. He looked straight at Charles, and his mouth widened into a black grimace. He tried to speak but the effort simply brought more blood from the hole in his chest and through his teeth.