by Bill James
Contents
Cover
A Selection of Recent Titles by Bill James from Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Footnotes
A Selection of Recent Titles by Bill James from Severn House
The Harpur and Iles Series
VACUUM
UNDERCOVER
PLAY DEAD
DISCLOSURES
BLAZE AWAY
FIRST FIX YOUR ALIBI
CLOSE
HITMEN I HAVE KNOWN
Novels
BETWEEN LIVES
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
MAKING STUFF UP
LETTERS FROM CARTHAGE
OFF-STREET PARKING
FULL OF MONEY
WORLD WAR TWO WILL NOT TAKE PLACE
NOOSE
SNATCHED
THE PRINCIPALS
HITMEN I HAVE KNOWN
Bill James
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First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
Copyright © 2018 by Bill James.
The right of Bill James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8866-2 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-990-0 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0202-4 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
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ONE
Iles said: ‘Assistant chief constable (Operations)’, except that, as always, he loaded several more ‘s’ sounds front and middle to ‘assistant’ so that it came out as ‘assssissstant’, fizzing with hate and disgust for his own title and job. Iles was the assistant chief constable (Operations). This he could not deny or alter, to date at least. Instead, he’d invented a contemptuous, brush-off style for naming his rank.
The bumper quantity of these s’s didn’t signal dangerous aggression, like the hiss of a snake or cornered alley cat, but echoed their slimy use, double or single, in words like ‘subservient’, ‘slavish’, ‘subordinate’, ‘servile’.
‘Assssissstant chief constable (Operations),’ Iles said. ‘What does it mean? At root, what does it mean?’ Iles freighted in bags of modest puzzlement to his tone.
‘That’s certainly a point, sir,’ Harpur suggested.
‘Above an “assssissstant” chief constable there obviously has to be a topmost officer, a chief constable, for the assssissstant chief constable to be assssissstant to. Right?’ Iles said. ‘This figure – the chief – has been appointed because he or she is deemed to have great personal, indeed unique, qualities of leadership, isn’t he or she?’
‘Few would deny this.’
‘Which fucking “few”?’
‘Leadership is quite a topic,’ Harpur replied.
‘The chief, he or she, is different from all his or her colleagues. It’s why he or she is chief. So, how can one of those colleagues, from whom the chief is different, help – assssissst – him or her to become even more different from and better than the person trying to help – assssissst – him or her with qualities which the assssissstant supposedly hasn’t got or he or she would be not just an assssissstant?’
Once in a while, often unexpectedly, Iles liked to analyse his situation as an assistant in what seemed to Harpur this kind of thorough, merciless, half-barmy fashion. He would seem dogged by unanswerable questions.
Harpur said: ‘My mother often remarks without the least prompting that life’s full of conundrums.’
‘Does she, Harpur?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Occasionally, or even more often than that, they mean well,’ Iles said.
‘Who?’
‘Mothers.’
‘Comments,’ Harpur said. ‘These are what she likes to make, sometimes on quite big problems. Show her a problem and most likely she’ll comment on it, one way or the other, full blast without prejudice.’
‘Which kind?’
‘Which kind of what, sir?’
‘Prejudice. Which kind of prejudice is it without?’
‘I don’t mind, regardless,’ Harpur said.
‘Cardboard,’ Iles replied.
‘In what sense, sir?’
‘My rank, my post, Colin,’ Iles said. ‘No substance. Flimsy. What can it do for me when I am badgered by crisis, encircled by enemies? Answer? Little, or less. In fact, one could say that it’s on account of this very rank and position that I’m threatened now – so vindictively threatened now. Have you heard, Col, there might be some sort of television thing about it?’
They were talking in Harpur’s room at headquarters. Iles would sometimes look in if he was feeling low or enraged or troubled by pubic lice. Because he might have had the room bugged, Harpur was always careful about what he said during these visits. He did frequent searches for any listening mics, but had found nothing. Iles was clever, though. There were numerous pieces of electronic and other equipment in the room and he might have found a way of concealing something tiny and super-efficient.
Of course, the bug, if it was there, would be meant mainly to record conversations Harpur had with others, not with Iles. There’d be no obvious point in recording talk between Harpur and him because Iles had taken part in the talk and knew what was said. In that alert, hugely untrusting, creative mode of his, though, Iles might want to replay
and re-replay the chat, and search for hidden, unconscious give-aways in the word order, volume – or lack of it – and timbre of what Harpur said.
Harpur had found that the best way to counter this was extreme terseness or its opposite: rambling, verbose, trite, massively irrelevant digressions, such as Harpur’s mention of his mother just now. He was a detective chief superintendent, head of Iles’s staff, and knew the assistant chief constantly feared Harpur or someone else – but especially Harpur – might get ahead of him in knowledge of one or more of the cases they handled. Iles believed important information was often held back from him. Harpur knew this to be very shrewd and very reasonable in Iles, because he did at times hold back important information, particularly information that was not only important but exceptionally important. Good policing demanded subtlety and constant self-protection. And so the search for bugs, the wise rationing of disclosures, and the delivery by Harpur of truisms, clichés and general windbaggery.
The assistant chief was sitting on one of the two easy chairs in Harpur’s room. He was slim bordering on thin, mid-height, though exceptionally proud of his legs, his very blue eyes brilliantly alight with egomania and insolence. If they were going to get an actor to play him under a disguised name in this ‘television thing’ he’d spoken about, the eyes would be very hard to mimic. He was wearing his grey hair quite long at present after a spell en brosse, copied from Jean Gabin, the French actor, in old films on The Movie Channel. Iles must have tired of that. There was a kind of refinement to his face, a radiantly dodgy kind. He had his chin slightly lowered so as to cut off Harpur’s sight of the ACC’s Adam’s apple, which he regarded as unmatched for ugliness among the Adam’s apples of the world, and a monstrous, undeserved blight. There were rumours that Iles had made inquiries about cosmetic surgery to rid him of this blot but hadn’t proceeded with it so far. Iles had what Harpur regarded as a kind of obsession about Adam’s apples. He used to mock a previous chief’s because it was too bulky and angular. But Harpur thought this was only an attempt by Iles to switch people’s attention from his.
Iles said: ‘They want to prove I murdered two villains who’d dodged a murder conviction a while ago, one a garrotting with rope and a bit of broken broom handle inserted between the two strands for tightening through a seven- or eight-minute period, the rope fairly thin so it can bite into the neck, but, obviously, strong enough to sustain the unyielding, essential pressure.’
‘Yes,’ Harpur replied.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘What the hell are you getting at, Harpur?’
‘Getting at in which respect, sir?’
‘The “Yes”. Its category.’
‘Category?’
‘Are you saying to me, “Yes, you did see off two villains a while ago”?’
‘My daughters tell me it’s popular in The Godfather, a quite well-known film about gangsters,’ Harpur replied.
‘What is?’
‘Garrotting.’
‘Your daughters are children. Why would they discuss something so distasteful?’
‘These films come up on The Movie Channel, like the Gabin pics, or there are DVDs,’ Harpur said.
‘As a matter of fact, some countries used garrotting as their method of state execution,’ Iles replied.
‘It’s reasonably easy to organize. A scaffold not needed.’
‘Not at all,’ Iles said.
‘Most probably you’ve given it some thought, sir, over the years when it came up in cases.’
‘Given what some thought?’
‘Garrotting,’ Harpur said.
‘We’re talking about one garrotted, one shot, aren’t we? They’re going to do some sort of telly documentary on it.’
‘But obviously they won’t be able to say you did them, sir. That would be stark libel. Plus, another reason, they’re not going to say it because, of course, it can’t be true,’ Harpur said.
‘Can’t be?’ Iles replied.
‘You’re an assistant chief constable. Officers of that rank don’t go around garrotting people, no matter how much those people fooled the courts and deserved garrotting and/or getting shot. But the TV boys and girls like a good tale, don’t they, sir? It would be quite a thing for them to show someone of such high position and esteem as an ACC – though an ACC with a telly-script fend-off name and nature – performing that sort of neck job, plus another killing.’
‘That’s why I said my title and rank are a bugbear,’ Iles explained. ‘They invite loathing and malice and doctoring of the truth.’ He switched to a kindly, sweet lilt. ‘But fret not, Col. With those clothes and Palookaville haircut, you’ll never reach this rank and all its hazards yourself and I congratulate you on that.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
TWO
Harpur had a call from Jack Lamb, the art dealer and world-quality informant. Although he undoubtedly was world-quality, the world got no tip-offs of any quality at all from him. Harpur did. Only Harpur did. Jack spoke secrets to nobody else. This defied the rules. These were very specific, and very purposeful. They lay down that an informant did not belong to any individual officer but to the whole detective force. Not Jack. The arrangement was one to one, strictly one to one: Lamb to Harpur, Harpur to Lamb. Harpur’s daughters had some idea of what went on and the older one, Hazel, had asked, ‘Is that why you have such big, flappy ears, Dad, so he can whisper sweet somethings confidentially into them?’
In tune with this long-term understanding between him and Lamb, Harpur had decided a good while ago that it would be stupidly officious and tactless to ask ticklish questions about the legality or not of Jack’s business. Most probably parts of it were absolutely legit and Harpur made do with that. He didn’t know much about art but he knew what he liked, and what he liked was for Jack to be accessible and ready with his kind of special revelations, not in the clink.
This kind of concealed, illicit, personal connection between a successful officer and his/her informant was probably not unique. Harpur didn’t feel certain about this because secrecy had to stay absolute. Harpur knew that Lamb would have refused to operate in any other way. He’d most likely regard a relationship with the entire Criminal Investigation Department as sluttish. Sensitive information had a value and, like everything else in the market, its value increased with scarcity. And so Jack made his information not just scarce but entirely absent for everyone except Harpur.
This didn’t mean Harpur slipped him big payments or any payments at all, but guaranteed a friendly failure by Harpur to not question where some of the pics and sculpts Jack traded with came from, and where they went, but especially not where they came from. Villains used fine art to launder drugs money, protection money, fraud money, general racket money. It would probably surprise great painters that their works could be evaluated in terms of snorts. Crooks bought pictures and sculptures, held them for a while then put them up for apparently innocent re-sale. Harpur followed a ‘Don’t ask’ policy. This was close to complicity. He knew it and for now put up with the conditions. These were complex and not always very wholesome.
Lamb wanted a meeting. Jack would use the phone to name a place and time but not for anything longer. Informants risked their safety and tried to keep that risk small. He considered phones, landline or mobile, as ‘spewers’, liable to be overheard throwing up classified facts.
Harpur and Lamb varied their rendezvous locations, and had a code name for each. Lately, they’d added a new one to their three rotating regulars because … because they had become regular and that worried Jack. Perhaps someone would notice a pattern, and that someone might not be a helpful someone. Unhelpful someones abounded. The three meeting spots were:
(a) An old wartime concrete defence post on the foreshore, still waiting for enemy landing craft;
(b) A side-street laundrette where each would arrive with a bag of washing and talk quietly while watching through the glass panels their stuff slither and plunge and sidle;
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(c) Another wartime relic – hillside remains of the anti-aircraft gun emplacements built to knock down raiding Heinkels and Dorniers in the 1940s.
Now, they had a (d): the privately run rubbish and recycling site on the almost rural western edge of the city. In the evenings it was closed and they could park alongside each other at its gates. Harpur wondered whether they might look like a couple of ‘doggers’, together for random, anonymous car sex, but they’d chance it. A notice fixed to the gates’ iron struts said that 78 per cent of the items dumped there in the previous three months had been successfully recycled as metal, wooden and horticultural material. Harpur thought that perhaps Jack wanted some of this positive atmosphere to reach their meetings when he suggested the new venue. Many regarded informing as deeply and unambiguously odious. A link to something good and constructive such as recycling might help correct this.
Very occasionally, Harpur already knew from another source, or other sources, the information Jack brought him, though he would never let Lamb realize this. It would damage his pride. He had to be sheltered and cherished. This was one of the unspoken conditions of their unwritten, unpermitted, undisclosed contract. Harpur wanted it undiscovered, unendangered and unterminated.
They were in the front seats of Jack’s crimson Lexus. He had on what Harpur guessed to be the striped uniform of the Vatican Swiss Guard: blue, red, orange, yellow, but with a British commando green beret. Jack liked military surplus clothes, though he didn’t care about accuracy. Harpur thought it a weird taste for someone so keen on security and concealment. But Jack was 6 foot 5 inches and more than 250 pounds, so possibly he didn’t really believe he could ever go unnoticed, anyway.
Tonight felt to Harpur like one of those instances when he’d be told something he didn’t need to be told. Harpur couldn’t have explained why, or not very clearly. He feared it might be vanity. Was he coming to believe he’d been at this game for so long that he probably knew now by gifted instinct everything he ought to know? First step towards megalomaniac lunacy?
Jack said, chattily enough, ‘There seem to be a lot of investigations at present of what are called “historic” offences, don’t you think, Colin? Mainly sexual, but other kinds, too, men – it’s always men – men charged with crimes committed – allegedly committed – years ago, and stars many of them?’