The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  George could not see where this was headed.

  “We gotta do two things, see off old Boris and put the other Horsfield in the frame. Give ’em the Horsfield they wanted in the first place.”

  “Oh God.”

  “No … listen … Boris thinks he’s been dealing with Lt Col. Horsfield. What we gotta do is make the Colonel think he’s dealing with Boris … swap him for you and then blow the whistle.”

  “Or let the whistle blow,” said George.

  “How do you mean?”

  “If I understand that cunning little mind of yours aright you mean to try and frame Horsfield.”

  “’S right.”

  “I know H. G. He’s a total bastard, but he can’t be scared or intimidated. We make any move against him, he catches even a whiff of Russian involvement, he’ll blow the whistle himself.”

  “Y’know, that’s even more than I hoped for. Let me try for the full house then. Is he what you might call a ladies’ man?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, no offence, Georgie, but you was easy to pull. If I was to try and pull H. G., what would he do?”

  “Oh, I see. Well if office gossip is to be believed he’d paint his arse blue and shag you under a lamp-post in Soho Square.”

  “Bingo,” said Donna. “Bingo bloody bingo!”

  * * *

  They dipped into the wardrobe money for the first time.

  “I can’t do this myself, and I can’t use the room in Bridle Lane. I’ll pay a mate to do H. G., and I know a house in Marshall Street that’s going under the wrecking ball any day now. It’ll be perfect. I get a room kitted out so it looks like a regular pad and then we just abandon it. The grey area is knowing when we might get to H. G.”

  “It’s Ted’s birthday next week. Bound to be a pub and club crawl. I could even predict that at some point we’ll all be in the same club you found me in.”

  “What would be H. G.’s type?”

  “Now you mention it … not you. He goes for blondes, blondes with big …”

  “Tits?”

  “Quite.”

  “OK, that narrows it down. I’ll have to ask Judy. She’ll want a ton for the job and another for the risk, but she’ll do it.”

  * * *

  Ted’s birthday bash coincided with George’s Boris night at the Berwick Street caff. Something was going right. God knows, they might even get away with this. “This” – he wasn’t at all sure what “this” was. He knew his own part in this, but the initiative had now passed to Donna. She had planned the night’s activity like a film script.

  He slipped away early from Ted’s party. Ted was three sheets to the wind anyway. H. G. was in full flight with a string of smutty stories and the only risk was that he might get off with some woman before Judy pulled him. As he was leaving, a tall, busty blonde, another Jayne Mansfield or Diana Dors, cantilevered by state-of-the-art bra mechanics into a pink lambswool sweater that showed plenty of cleavage and looked as solid as Everest, came into the club. She winked at George, and carried on down the stairs without a word.

  George went round to Bridle Lane.

  It was a tale of two wigs.

  Donna had a wig ready for him.

  “You and Boris are about the same size. It’s just a matter of hair colour. Besides, it’s not as if H. G. will get a good look at you.”

  And a wig ready for herself. She was transformed into a pocket Marilyn Monroe.

  He hated the waiting. They stood at the corner of Foubert’s Place, looking down the length of Marshall Street. It was past nine when a staggering, three-quarters pissed H. G. appeared on the arm of a very steady Judy. They stopped under a lamp-post. He didn’t paint his arse blue, but he groped her in public, his hand on her backside, his face half-buried in her cleavage.

  George watched Judy gently reposition his hand at her waist and heard her say, “Not so fast, soldier, we’re almost there.”

  “We are? Bloody good show.”

  George hated H. G.

  George hated H. G. for being so predictable.

  Donna whispered.

  “Ten minutes at the most. Judy’ll pull a curtain to, when he’s got his kit off. Now, are you sure you know how to work it?”

  “It’s just a camera like any other, Donna.”

  “Georgie – we only got one chance.”

  “Yes. I know how to work it.”

  When the curtain moved, George tiptoed up the stairs, imagining Boris doing the same thing all those months ago as he prepared to spring the honeytrap.

  At the bedroom door he could hear the baritone rumble of H. G.’s drunken sweet nothings.

  “’S wonderful. ’S bloody amazing. Tits. Marvellous things. If I had tits … bloody hell … I’d play with them all day.”

  Then, kick, flash, bang, wallop … and H. G. was sprawled where he had been and he was uttering Boris’s lines in the best Russian accent he could muster.

  “You have ten minutes, Colonel Horsfield. You fail to meet me in the Penguin Café in Kingly Street, this goes to your wife.”

  He was impressed by his own timing. The Polaroid shot out of the bottom of the camera just as he said “wife”.

  H. G. was staring at him glassy-eyed. Judy grabbed her clothes and ran past him hell-for-leather. Still, H. G. stared. Perhaps he was too drunk to understand what was happening.

  “You have ten minutes, Colonel. Penguin Café, Kingly Street. Das Vidanye.”

  He’d no idea why he’d thrown in the “das vidanye” – perhaps a desperate urge to sound more Russian than he had.

  H. G. said, “I’ll be there … you Commie fucking bastard. I’ll be there.”

  Much to George’s alarm he got up from the bed, seemingly less drunk, bollock-naked, stiff cock swaying in its frenchie, and came towards him.

  George fled. It was what Donna had told him to do.

  Down in the street, George arrived just in time to see Judy pulling on her stilettoes and heading off towards Beak Street. Donna took the Polaroid from him, waved it in the air and looked for the image.

  “Gottim,” she said.

  George looked at his watch. Didn’t dare to raise his voice much above a whisper.

  “I must hurry. I have to meet Boris.”

  “No. No, you don’t. You leave Boris to me.”

  This wasn’t part of the plan. This had never been mentioned.

  “What?”

  “Go back to the party.”

  “I don’t …”

  “Find your mates. They must be in a club somewhere near. You know the pattern, booze, booze, strippers. Find ’em. Ditch the wig. Ditch the camera. Go back and make yourself seen.”

  She kissed him.

  “And don’t go down Berwick Street.”

  * * *

  Donna stood awhile on the next corner, watched as H. G. emerged and saw him rumble off in the direction of Kingly Street. Then she went the other way, towards Berwick Street, and stood behind one of the market stalls that were scattered along the right-hand side.

  She could see Boris. He was reading a newspaper, letting his coffee go cold and occasionally glancing at his watch. He was almost taking George’s arrival for granted, but not quite.

  She was reassured when he finally gave up and stood a moment on the pavement outside the caff, looking up at the stars and muttering something Russian. Really, he wasn’t any taller than George, just a bit bigger in the chest and shoulders. What with the wig and flashbulb going off, all H. G. was likely to say was “some big bugger, sort of darkish, in a dark suit, didn’t really get a good look, I’m afraid.”

  That was old Boris, a big, dark bugger in a dark suit.

  Her only worry was that if Boris flagged a cab and there wasn’t one close behind, she’d lose him. But it was a warm summer evening, and Boris had decided to walk. He set off westward, in the direction of the Soviet Embassy. Perhaps he needed to think? Was he going to shop George for one no-show or was he going to roll with it, string it and G
eorge out in the hope of keeping the stream of information flowing?

  Boris crossed Regent Street into Mayfair, and headed south towards Piccadilly. He seemed to be in no hurry and paid no attention to cabs or buses. Indeed, he seemed to pay no attention to anything, as though he was deep in thought.

  She matched her pace to his, trying to stay in shadow, but Boris never looked back. In Shepherd Market he turned into one of those tiny alleys that dot the northern side of Piccadilly and she quickened her step to get to the corner.

  The light vanished. A hand grabbed her by the jacket and pulled her into the alley. The other hand pulled off her wig, and Boris’s voice said, “Don’t take me for a fockin fool. Horsfield doesn’t show and then you appear in a silly wig, trailing after me like a third-rate gumshoe. What the fock are you playing at?”

  It was better than she’d dared hope for. She’d been foxed all along to work out how to get him alone, this close, in a dark alley. And now he’d done it for her.

  She pressed her gun to his heart and shot him dead.

  Then she leant down, tucked the Polaroid into his inside pocket, put her wig back on, walked down to Piccadilly and caught a number 38 bus home.

  * * *

  The first George heard was from Daft Elsie, pushing her trolley round just after eleven the next morning.

  “Can’t get on the fourth floor. Buggers won’t let me. Some sort of argy-bargy going on. I ask yer. Spooks and spies. Gotta be a load of old bollocks, ain’t it?”

  “Two sugars, please,” said George.

  “And I got these ’ere jam donuts special for that Colonel ’Orsepiddle. ’Ere love, you have one.”

  “So.” He tried to sound casual. “It all revolves around the good colonel, does it?”

  “Let’s put it this way, love. ’E’s doin’ a lot of shoutin’. An’ it’s not as if he whispers at the best of times.”

  So – H. G. wasn’t so much blowing the whistle as shouting the odds.

  After lunch Ted dropped in, dropped the latest, not-yet-late-final-but-almost edition of the London Evening Standard on to his desk.

  George pulled it towards him.

  “Soviet Embassy Attaché Shot Dead in Mayfair.”

  George said nothing.

  Ted said, “Could be an interesting few weeks. Russkis play hell. Possibly bump off one of ours. A few expulsions, followed by retaliatory expulsions … God, I’d hate to be in Moscow right now.”

  “What makes you think we did it? I mean, do we shoot foreign agents in the street?”

  “Not as a rule. But boldness was our friend. I gather from a mate at Scotland Yard that they’re clueless. No one saw or heard a damn thing. Anyway … change the subject … what was up with you last night? Throwing up in the bogs for an hour. Not like you, old son.”

  “Change it back – does this have anything to do with the hooha going on on the fourth floor?”

  “Well. Let me put it this way. Be a striking bloody coincidence if it didn’t.”

  * * *

  It became received wisdom in the office that the Russians had tried to set up H. G. and that he would have none of it. Less received, but much bandied, was the theory that rather than keep the meeting with the man attempting blackmail, H. G. had simply rang MI5 who had bumped off the unfortunate Russki on his way across Mayfair. That one Boris Alexandrovich Bulganov was found dead within a few yards of MI5 HQ in Curzon Street added to veracity, as did a rumour that he’d had a photograph of H. G. in bed with a prozzie in his pocket. Some wag pinned a notice to the canteen message board offering £10 for a copy but found no takers.

  Ted was profound upon the matter, “Always knew he’d end up in trouble if he let his dick do the thinking for him.”

  It became, almost at once, a diplomatic incident. Nothing on the scale of Profumo or the U2 spyplane, but the Russians accused the British of assassinating Boris, whom they described as a “cultural attaché”. The British accused the Russians of attempting to blackmail H. G. Horsfield, whose name never graced the newspapers – merely “unnamed high-ranking British officer” – and George could only conclude that neither one had put the dates together and worked out that they had been blackmailing an H. G. Horsfield for some time, but not the H. G. Horsfield. If they’d swapped information, George would have been sunk. But, of course, they’d never do that.

  H. G.’s “reward” was to be made a full colonel and posted to the Bahamas. Anywhere out of the way. Why the Bahamas might need a tactical nuclear weapons expert was neither here nor there nor anywhere.

  George never heard from the Russians again. He expected to. Every day for six months he expected to. But he didn’t.

  * * *

  Six months on, Boris’s death was eclipsed.

  George arrived home in West Byfleet to find an ambulance and a crowd of neighbours outside his house.

  Mrs Wallace, wife of Jack Wallace, lieutenant in REME – George thought her name might be Betty – came up oozing an alarming mixture of tears and sympathy.

  “Oh, Captain Horsfield … I don’t know what to …”

  George pushed past her to the ambulancemen. A covered stretcher was already in the back of the ambulance and he knew the worst at once.

  “How?” he asked simply.

  “She took a tumble, sir. Top o’ the stairs to the bottom. Broken neck. Never knew what hit her.”

  George spent an evening alone with a bottle of Scotch, ignoring the ringing phone. He hadn’t loved Sylvia. He had never loved Sylvia. He had been fond of her. She was too young, a rotten age to go … and then he realized he didn’t actually know how old Sylvia was. He might find out only when they chipped it on her tombstone.

  Grief was nothing, guilt was everything.

  Decorum ruled.

  He did not go to Henrietta Street for the best part of a month.

  He wrote to Donna, much as he wrote to many of his friends, knowing that the done thing was the notice in The Times, but that few of his friends read The Times and that the Daily Mail didn’t bother with a Deaths column.

  When he did go to Henrietta Street, he cut through Covent Garden, fifty yards to the north and bought a bouquet of flowers.

  “You never brought me flowers before.”

  “I’ve never asked you to marry me before.”

  “Wot? Marriage? Me an’ you?”

  “I can’t think that ‘marry me’ would imply anything else.”

  And having read the odd bit of Shakespeare in the interim, George quoted an approximation of Hamlet on the matter of baked meats, funerals and wedding feasts.

  “Sometimes, Georgie, I can’t understand a word you say.”

  She was hesitant. The last thing he had wanted, though he had troubled himself to imagine it. She said she’d “just put the kettle on” and, when she had, seemed to perch on the edge of the sofa without a muscle in her body relaxing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “If … if we was to get married … what would we do? I mean we carried on … once we got shot of the Russians, we just carried on … as normal. Only there weren’t no normal.”

  George knew exactly what she meant, but said nothing.

  “I mean … oh … bloody Nora … I don’t know what I mean.”

  “You mean that serving army officers don’t marry prostitutes.”

  “Yeah … something like that.”

  “I have thought of leaving the Army. There are opportunities in supply management, and the Army is one of the best references a chap could have.”

  The kettle whistled. She turned it off but made no move towards making tea.

  “Where would we live?”

  “Anywhere. Where are you from?”

  “Colchester.”

  Colchester was the biggest military prison in the country – the glasshouse, England’s Leavenworth. Considered the worst posting a man could get. He’d never shake off the feel of the Army in Colchester.

  “OK. Well … perhaps not Colchester …”

&
nbsp; “I always wanted to live up north.”

  “What? Manchester? Leeds?”

  “Nah … ’Ampstead. I’d never want to leave London … specially now it’s started to … wotchercallit? . . swing.”

  “Hampstead won’t be cheap.”

  “I saved over three thousand quid from the game.”

  “I have about a thousand in savings, and I inherited more from Sylvia. In fact about seven and a half thousand pounds. Not inconsiderable.”

  Not inconsiderable – a lifetime of saving roughly equivalent to a couple of years on “the game”.

  “And of course, I’ll get a pension. I’ve done sixteen years and a bit. I’ll get part of a pension now, more if I leave it, and at thirty-five I’m young enough to put twenty or more years into another career.”

  “And there’s the money in the bottom of the wardrobe.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “I counted it. Just the other day I counted it. We got seventeen hundred and thirty-two pounds. O’ course there been expenses.”

  Donna was skirting the edge of a taboo subject. George was in two minds as to whether to let her plunge in. Who knows? It might clear the air.

  “I give Judy two hundred. And there was money for the room … an ’at.”

  George bit, appropriately, on the bullet.

  “And how much did the gun cost you?”

  There was a very long pause.

  “Did you always know?”

  “Yes.”

  “It didn’t come cheap. Fifty quid.”

  In for a penny, in for a pound.

  Marry without secrets.

  George cleared his throat.

  “And of course, there’s the cost of your return ticket to West Byfleet last month, isn’t there?”

  He could see her go rigid, a ramrod to her spine, a crab-claw grip to her fingers on the arm of the sofa.

  He hoped she’d speak first, but after an age it seemed to him she might never speak again.

  “I don’t care,” he said softly. “Really I don’t.”

  She would not look at him.

  “Donna. Please say yes. Please tell me you’ll marry me.”