Thief Taker

by Alan Scholefield

  “We’ll get to that.”

  “Is this your boat?” Silver said.

  Harris nodded.

  “Why d’you call it the Passion Palace? The others up there are called Windrush or Willow…names like that.”

  “It’s just a joke.”

  “Doesn’t seem to go with the boat.”

  “Yeah…well…”

  “Do you know Mrs Robson Healey?” Macrae asked.

  “I…yeah…I know her. She’s got a cottage. That one over there.”

  He pointed to a small white-washed cottage crouched against the side of a low hill about half a mile from the river.

  “Does she like boating?” Macrae said.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How do you know her then?”

  “I met her one day. She was walking along the towpath. I was working on the boat. We chatted. Listen, this is about the murder, isn’t it? I mean I read all about it in the press. It was on the television.”

  “That’s right,” Macrae said.

  “But that’s got nothing to do with me, for Christ’s sake! I mean I never even knew him. What’re you writing down?”

  ““I never even knew him,”” Silver read from his notes and smiled at Harris.

  “Oh.”

  Macrae leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. The air was warm and he’d been up since five-thirty. He was feeling sleepy and had an overwhelming desire to climb on to the double bed. He said, “She says she was at her cottage last weekend, and that you can corroborate it.”

  “That’s right. She was down.”

  “How d’you know?” Silver said.

  “She came and asked if I’d do something for her in the cottage. I’d helped her once or twice before.”

  “What had happened?”

  “Couldn’t get the electrics to work. Main fuse box kept on tripping. I found a faulty plug and fixed it.”

  Macrae said, “She’s a good-looking woman.”

  “Yeah. Bit long in the tooth for me.”

  “You like them young, do you?”

  “Hey! Don’t get me wrong. I’m not into kids. Nothing like that.”

  “When was this?”

  “Saturday evening, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah…Saturday evening.”

  “What about Sunday evening?”

  “No, it was Saturday evening.”

  “Where were you on Sunday evening?”

  “Sunday…let’s see…”

  Macrae said, “You’re not a partner, are you? Nothing like that?”

  “You mean with Sammy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No. I look after the boats. Engines mainly. I’m good with my hands.”

  “You mind if I look round?” Silver said. “While you talk to Mr Macrae.”

  Silver turned and ducked through the doorway.

  “Hang on, I didn’t say — ”

  Macrae said, “So if she was here on Sunday evening you couldn’t have known? Is that right?”

  He looked over his shoulder “Listen he’s got no bloody — ”

  “Is that right!”

  “Yeah…yeah…”

  “Don’t worry about my partner. He won’t break anything.”

  “I don’t like people — ”

  “Let’s go back to Sunday. The day Robson Healey was killed. You say she wasn’t here on Sunday?”

  “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “You’re mixing me up.” Again he swung his head round to look for Silver.

  “I wouldn’t want to do that,” Macrae said. “Take your time. Get it straight.”

  Macrae picked up one of the empty champagne bottles, looked at it carefully. “Bollinger ‘78,” he said. “Good stuff. I’m thinking of having a little celebration myself. What’s a bottle like this cost?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Vintage always costs more. I usually buy non-vintage myself. Can’t afford stuff like this on a copper’s salary. Must be thirty or forty quid.”

  “It was a present.”

  “Both bottles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who from?”

  “Grateful customer.”

  Silver came back into the saloon. “Very nice,” he said. “We were talking about champagne,” Macrae said. “How much would you say that was worth?”

  Silver looked at the label. “I’m no expert, guv’nor, but it’s got to be thirty pounds a bottle.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He turned to Harris. “So you’ve done work for Mrs Healey in the past?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But not on Sunday afternoon or evening?”

  “No.”

  “You just fixed her electric plug on Saturday and you didn’t see her again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where were you anyway on Sunday evening?” Silver asked.

  “I…on the boat…yeah…on the boat…”

  “Where?”

  “Downstream. Near Send.”

  “By yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Well, who were you with?”

  “You know how it is, chief…”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Well, I had this girl on bo — ”

  “Girl? How old?”

  “No! No! Christ, I told you. I call her girl but she’s nineteen…twenty.”

  “What’s her name?” Silver said.

  There was a fractional pause and then he said, “Pamela. Yeah. Pamela.”

  “You don’t sound too sure.”

  “It’s just that I don’t know her last name.”

  “Or where she lives?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “Was she the one who gave you the champagne?”

  “That’s right, chief.”

  “You have lots of women aboard? Is that why it’s called the Passion Palace?”

  “That’s right, chief.”

  Macrae rose slowly. “AH right, Harris. That’ll do for now.” A look of relief crossed the man’s face. “You don’t mind if I have one of these, do you? Remind me of what to buy.” He lifted one of the champagne bottles by putting his fingers in the neck.

  “Don’t go away without letting the local police know where you are.”

  “Why? I’m telling you I haven’t done a thing.”

  “And Pm telling you,” Macrae said.

  They went back to the car.

  Silver said, “He’s got three wrenches in the engine compartment the same make as the one we found at Healey’s house.”

  “Good lad. Keep an eye on the boat. As soon as you lose sight of it tell me. And Eddie, you stop the car.”

  Silver watched out of the back window as Eddie slowly ground along the towpath. A bend in the river and a stand of trees blocked out his view of the boat and he told Eddie. The car stopped.

  Macrae said, “I want to see what our friend does.”

  Silver followed him to a patch of scrub willow from which they could see the boat. They hadn’t been watching for more than a couple of minutes when Harris left the boat and began to walk towards Mrs Healey’s cottage.

  He reached the front door, looked carefully around, and opened it with a key he had taken from his pocket.

  “I thought so,” Macrae said.

  Keeping to what cover there was, the two reached the cottage. The windows were heavily barred. Standing close to the walls they could look into the ground-floor rooms.

  Everything was expensive, from the luxury kitchen to the grey and white living room with its smoked glass coffee table, white tufted carpet, and black leather sofas.

  Charles Harris was emptying ashtrays and dropping bottles into a large plastic refuse bag. He wiped the ashtrays, then the surface of the table. He was looking round to see if he had missed anything when Macrae opened the front door and walked in.

  “More champagne?” Macrae said. “Another gift
from someone who’s last name you can’t remember and whose address you don’t know?”

  He took the refuse bag from Harris and fished out a bottle and said, “Bollinger”78. You’re a lucky man, Harris. And what’s this?” He pulled out a bottle of Russian vodka and turned to Silver. “This is the real stuff, laddie. Khrushchev used to get pissed on this.” He shook the bag and several other bottles clinked together. “It must have been quite a party. Sit down, Harris.”

  Harris sat on one of the leather sofas, the two detectives sat opposite him. Macrae lit a thin panatella and leaned back. “You’ve been a naughty boy, Harris. You’ve not been telling the truth. Now let’s go back to the beginning.”

  Harris looked down at his big hands. Oil and grease were permanently imbedded in the quicks of his fingernails.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “Through his partner.”

  “Whose partner?”

  “Robson Healey’s.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Howard Rollins. He used to hire one of the boats. She used to meet him here.”

  “Go on…”

  They talked until the light began to fade. By this time Harris had lost much of his self-confidence, and when Macrae reminded him, as they left, not to go anywhere without leaving his address with the local police, he nodded quietly and said, “Okay, chief.”

  Night came to the forest.

  Rachel had always been afraid of the dark.

  Night…the dark…death…decay…

  Even the words frightened her and usually she loved words.

  She lay in the caravan with the hissing gas-light hanging from the roof. She had been lying like this for hours, trying to make up her mind what to do. She was no nearer a decision. She wanted to leave. She wanted to stay.

  As dusk had entered the forest she had thought she had seen a man walking towards her. But then, when she looked again, he had vanished.

  It might have been a trick of the light. The movement of a branch.

  But there were people who lived in the forest. She was sure of that. She had heard them singing.

  This was an old forest, part of the Great Forest that had once covered England in Saxon times. Then it would have been filled with lepers and gangrels, witches and spirits, thieves and robbers and murderers. Over the centuries trees had been felled for building houses and ships and making charcoal. The forest was not what it had been but the old magic was there still.

  Was that singing she heard now?

  She felt a tightening of her chest as she listened.

  Bye baby bunting…Daddy’s gone a-hunting…Gone to get a rabbit skin…To wrap the baby bunting in…

  Her nanny had sung it to her as a child. Even then it had made her uneasy. She remembered that.

  Now, of course, it wasn’t the rabbit skin that worried her. It was the rabbit itself. The red rabbit…

  She sat up and tried to clear her chest.

  She listened. But all she could hear was the hissing of the gas.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Leo Silver was never quite sure why Macrae used the Goodwood Sporting Club. His sister Ruth said it was because police and criminals shared the same desires and the same world. If she was right then it fitted, for the club, in spite of its grand name, was used solely by London villains.

  It was where they came to relax, to play kalooki, to show off their “wedges” — the tightly packed wads of ten and twenty-pound notes kept together by silver clips — to smoke their expensive Havanas, to flaunt their solid gold bracelets and rings, and their mohair suits and vicuna coats, their Gucci watches. It was a mutual admiration society housed in a building between The Strand and the river.

  No one had ever asked Macrae to join. Silver wasn’t even sure there was a membership system apart from the general membership of the criminal fraternity. Macrae simply used the place and Silver had never seen anyone object.

  The crowded room, with its choking layers of cigar smoke, the sporting prints on the wall, and the statue of the jockey at the door, reminded Silver of a scene from an old movie. He watched Macrae shoulder his way to the bar.

  Those at the top of the tree, the strong men from the East End, the inheritors of the Krays and Richardsons, who liked to trace their criminal lineage as far back as Jack Spot himself, watched Macrae with open hostility. But the lesser villains, the con artists and the pickpockets, greeted him deferentially.

  Was this why he came, Silver wondered? The need for reassurance? Or was it all part of Macrae’s special relationship with the Metropolitan Police?

  Silver knew the lonely life he led in Battersea, he knew about the tarts who came in as surrogate wives, the drinking bouts that lasted a full weekend. As Silver had tried to get him to bed after one such binge, Macrae had talked of his background and Silver had sensed he was terrified of ending up an alcoholic like his father.

  The police force was his family and his crutch. It was possible that to Macrae the Goodwood was just an extension of the police; the dark side, the underbelly. It was a fact of life that he was happier in the company of either fellow officers or criminals than members of the general public.

  They had come back late in the afternoon from Surrey and had gone into Cannon Row police station. Macrae had read all the messages from the incident room, the most important of which was a brief report confirming that the wrench was the weapon that had killed Robson Healey. But there were no prints on it nor had it ever been used for its original purpose.

  There was also a message saying that Lysander Goater had been located and they were bringing him in.

  “Who’s Lysander Goater, guv’nor?” Silver had asked Macrae.

  “Rambo put me on to him. He runs a string of high-class girls in the Chelsea area.”

  Then Silver had asked the desk sergeant to check on the whereabouts of Ronald Arthur Purvis and they had come on to the Goodwood.

  Silver watched the big man pick up the drinks and come across the room.

  “Pint for you…pint for me…dram for you…dram for me…” He raised the shot glass of whisky to Silver.

  “Slàinte.”

  “Cheers.”

  They drank.

  Macrae swallowed a third of his pint and then sat back, lit a slim panatella and said, “What d’you think of Harris, laddie?”

  “He’s a liar and a fornicator,” Silver said. “But then we all are from time to time and you can’t charge a man with that.”

  “Yes, but was he lying the second time round?”

  The three men had eyed each other, Silver and Macrae on one cream leather sofa, Harris on the other.

  “Tell me about this Howard Collins,” Macrae had said.

  “I only know what I heard and saw. I didn’t know at the time who he was. She told me later.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Like any other punter who comes to hire a boat. I mean we get quite a bit of the dirty weekend trade. It’s not all families and kids. When you think about it, what could be safer? You’re miles from anywhere, no one in sight.”

  “Every weekend?”

  “Only the weekends her husband was away. He was doing it somewhere else, see? Had his own plane. He’d hop over to France for a weekend. Take his own party, his own floozies. Have a ball. And she was left alone. Not surprising she wanted some fun for herself.”

  “You say he was Healey’s partner?”

  “Yeah, not now, but back in the early days. I didn’t inquire. You don’t. Then after a few months he got tired of driving boats through locks and along canals just for a bit of the old humpy-bumpy. So he bought this cottage.”

  “She used to come here?” Macrae said.

  “Yeah. She’d come to the marina and leave her car there and I’d drive her along the towpath the way you came. There’s a back lane to the cottage but she didn’t like to take it. But even so her husband found out. I mean if you’ve private detectives watching you it d
oesn’t really matter where you leave your car. She didn’t think about that, see. She thought he was having his own good time and he wasn’t really bothered with her any longer. But blokes like Healey…when they get married…the wife becomes a possession like a car or a boat. Anyway, Healey sent down a couple of blokes to have a chat with Collins. Warn him off, like. I was down on the boat testing my engines when she comes running down screaming that they’re killing him. By the time I get there they’re gone.”

  “You didn’t hurry,” Macrae said.

  “I’m not looking for a medal. Anyway, Collins is lying on the floor, blood all over his face.”

  “Is that why you’re so scared?” Silver asked.

  Harris’ head came up sharply. “Scared?”

  “You’re frightened.”

  He wiped a hand over his face. “Well it’s…it’s unsettling. And Healey isn’t the sort of bloke you mess around with.”

  “He’s dead,” Macrae said. “He can’t hurt you now. How did you and she — ?”

  “Well, Collins wasn’t having any more after that. When he recovered he took off for Spain. Healey bought him out. He still had the cottage though. She rented it from him. Only bought it later, after she and Healey had split up.”

  “You took Collins’ place, then?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Does he still live in Spain?”

  “I dunno. He had a place in London as well. Bayswater, I think.”

  “Tell us about Sunday night,” Macrae said. “You were here, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Saturday night on the boat. Sunday night here.”

  “She likes partying, then?” Silver said.

  “Does she ever!”

  “You see her in London?”

  “Never. Only here at weekends. She always telephones, tells me what to buy. I mean food-and drink-wise.”

  “You’re a sort of caretaker, then?” Silver said. “Does she pay you? I mean a wage.”

  “Listen, I’m not her bloody fancy-man if that’s what you think. I don’t get paid by the inch. I get paid for looking after this place.”

  “Did you get drunk on Sunday?” Macrae said.

  “Yeah. We had a party at lunchtime. Can’t remember a bloody thing after that. Not until I woke up about ten that night.”

  “Was she here?”

  “I dunno. I woke up on this sofa. She may have been in the upstairs bedroom. All I wanted was my own bed so I went down to the boat.”