Hell's Mouth

by BATEMAN, A P

  “So what is all this about?” Ogilvy asked incredulously. “You show up at a private gathering with my ex-lover, my wife at the door. I take it making me feel ill at ease is part of some elaborate plan or other?” He watched as Clive Gowndry walked away. He clicked his fingers at a waiter and the man walked over with a tray of champagne-filled flutes. Ogilvy took one and handed it to Sarah. She accepted it and took a sip. He took two more and handed one to O’Bryan. He watched as O’Bryan accepted it, but held it away from him, looked for somewhere to put it down. “Bottoms up,” Ogilvy said, eying him closely. He smiled and looked at the waiter. “Kindly take that off my guest and go and fetch him an orange juice,” he said curtly. “He obviously doesn’t seem to appreciate the finer things in life…” He manged to end his sentence looking at Sarah.

  O’Bryan put the glass back on the tray. He could feel the heat rising in his neck. He looked towards the staircase, noticed Pete Mitchell walking down in an ill-fitting grey suit. Mitchell smiled back at him and waited at the foot of the stairs.

  “You don’t own people,” O’Bryan said, looking back at Ogilvy. “You had your fun. You had an affair and got caught.”

  Ogilvy shrugged. “What was the price of convenience?” he asked, looking at Sarah. “What did you get from our little dalliance?”

  “You covered my mother’s bills in The Richmond,” she replied. “It wasn’t the price of our affair. It was because of what I found one day. I went to visit my mother and she had messed herself and was sat in her own faeces and still in front of the previous night’s empty dishes at eleven in the morning. She had been calling for attention for hours! I told you all of this, explained that her finances were in a state and you offered her a room in one of your homes…”

  “My finest home,” he interrupted.

  “This was months after we started seeing each other! Some girls ask for jewellery and clothes and expensive gifts when they have affairs with married men. I never asked you for a thing! I shared this with you because I was so upset and you jumped straight in and offered to give her a place at The Richmond. After what I’d seen of the state-funded home, what was I going to do?”

  Ogilvy laughed. “It’s not my problem!”

  “She never said it was,” O’Bryan said coldly. “What is your problem is the enforced slavery you have kept her in since. An unwilling participant to the sex trade.”

  “What!” he exclaimed, then looked at them both conspiratorially as people started to look over. “I’ve never heard such rot!”

  Mitchell walked over. “Trouble, boss?”

  “None I can’t handle,” Ogilvy said dismissively.

  “I’ll wait around,” he said. “Just in case…”

  “We’re really scared!” Sarah said, but she’d managed to make it sound like something a teen would shout in the playground.

  “You should be…” Mitchell smirked. “I’ll bloody-well make sure of it.” O’Bryan took a step forward, but Mitchell smiled and closed the gap. “Anytime, mate…”

  O’Bryan stared the man in his eyes, in the light of the great hall, he could see the man’s affliction to his eye. The condition was called coloboma and the misshapen iris was clearly visible. There was no doubt this was the man who had held him at gunpoint, beaten him in Hemingway House. “It will be different if I’m not tied up and you’re not pointing a shotgun at me,” O’Bryan growled.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Mitchell sneered back. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “Thank you, Pete,” Ogilvy said hastily. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” O’Bryan snapped. “I’m a police officer making inquiries into an investigation…”

  “Who has wantonly broken my business associate’s finger in front of me,” Ogilvy chided. “You could lose your job for that kind of assault.”

  “I’ve done worse…”

  “Oh, we all know that, DCI O’Bryan. I’ve seen the news footage. You did a pretty terrible job of saving that suspected terrorist fellow.” Ogilvy held up his hands and smiled. “Don’t get me wrong, you should still have got the medal for drowning him…”

  “He wasn’t a suspected terrorist. He killed people, maimed others and stabbed me…” O’Bryan stared at Ogilvy, whose expression had changed suddenly. O’Bryan turned around and saw why. Lucinda Ogilvy was walking towards them, a frown upon her face. He looked at Sarah then back at Charles Ogilvy. “This should be interesting.”

  Ogilvy looked at them both. “Whatever this is about, I’ll talk it through in my study,” he paused, glancing at his watch. “Say, in half an hour?”

  “Works for me,” O’Bryan said. He held out an elbow and Sarah wrapped her arm into it. “Let’s get a drink,” he said, then smiled. “Scrap that, let’s find some better company…”

  They found Gowndry at the self-service bar. Most of the people were still on the champagne in the great hall and hadn’t made it this far into the house. A man was leaving with two orange juices and nodded at them both as they walked in. Gowndry had his finger in a glass of ice and three-finger’s worth of single malt in his other hand. He sipped it and stared at them as they approached.

  “Sarah won’t be doing that kind of work again,” O’Bryan said. He picked up a can of Diet Coke, pulled the tab and poured it into a glass. He took a glass of white wine off a tray and handed it to Sarah. “So how does it work?” he asked. “Ogilvy buys out the old and infirm from their homes for next to no money and a place in one of his residential homes. You get the houses developed or decorated and refurbished and rented out, or sold. But either way, you have a list of vacant properties to run as pop-up brothels. You know where will be empty and where will be most convenient. Unhurried sex in luxurious, safe surroundings.”

  Gowndry sneered. “It’s not technically illegal. If only one woman works there, the sex is consensual and only one punter, or client, attends, then it’s not classified as a brothel. He can give money to whom he likes as a gift.”

  O’Bryan balled his fist, Gowndry noticed and stepped backwards. O’Bryan had him pinned between the self-service bar and the corner of the room. “So help me, I’ll knock your bloody block off… It’s not consensual when blackmail is being involved.”

  “Hey, I just provide the properties!” He looked at Sarah. “That’s all I do. I get a call, I’m given some locations and I come up with the property. I meet the girl and give her the keys. I don’t arrange anything else.”

  “What’s your cut?”

  He shrugged. “Twenty-five percent of the take.”

  “Which adds up to what?”

  “I think I need to talk to my lawyer.” He took out his mobile phone and dialled. “If I’m under arrest…”

  The phone rang and both Clive Gowndry and Sarah looked at O’Bryan. He looked at Gowndry and slowly took the ringing phone out of his jacket pocket. He looked at the screen. It identified Clive Gowndry on the caller ID.

  Gowndry hung up. He frowned and asked, “What the hell are you doing with John’s phone?”

  “We met earlier,” O’Bryan said casually. “So he’s your brief?”

  Gowndry nodded. “I don’t understand why you have his phone though,” he said.

  O’Bryan shrugged. “We met earlier. I’ll be getting it back to him later,” he said. He thumbed the screen and scrolled down, pressed the call button. Sarah’s phone rang in her purse. He looked at her as she reached for her phone, she hesitated. “Go on, I want to see the ID.” She took out the phone and showed it to him. Her ID simply read: The Bastard. “Well, well. I take it this is your fixer? Or pimp, would be a better description.”

  “It is,” she said coldly.

  O’Bryan thought about the man in the suit with the hundred-thousand pound Porsche and the watch which probably cost more. He thought about the axe in the man’s hands and what he was going to do to him. Then he thought of the man’s face, battered and bloodied. His body lying deathly still. “So your, pimp,” he said to
Sarah, then looked at Gowndry, “And your solicitor are the same guy?” Gowndry looked worried. Sarah just looked confused. “I don’t think the Law Society would like the idea of a lawyer forcing a woman to have sex in return for simply keeping her mother in a care home. No, I think that would be frowned on very much indeed.”

  “He’s a lawyer?” Sarah asked.

  “Looks that way.”

  “But he worked for Ogilvy. He’s the one who said my mother could continue to stay at The Richmond, but only if I did that for them.”

  “And that was your price?” Gowndry looked at her incredulously.

  “No,” she said. “He said that my mother may well come to harm if I didn’t. That a pillow could be put over her face in the middle of the night, or an accidental overdose of painkillers might be administered if I didn’t keep doing it.”

  Gowndry smirked. “And the money didn’t hurt either,” he scoffed.

  “I never saw a penny,” she said curtly.

  Gowndry sneered. “Well, if you ever fancy a quick fifty-quid…”

  He never finished the sentence. O’Bryan punched him straight in the nose with a right jab, followed it up with a left hook and a right cross. Gowndry was out cold and fell down behind the bar, wedged against the wall. There was a table nearby, O’Bryan supposed for empty glasses, and he whipped off the table cloth and draped it over Gowndry’s unconscious body.

  “Right, let’s go and talk to Ogilvy,” O’Bryan said decisively.

  31

  Sarah knew the way to Ogilvy’s study, naturally. She led them through the great hall, where Lucinda Ogilvy was talking to small groups and the party was in full swing. It had been billed as a business networking evening and charity auction. The charities were a local children’s hospice, a local woman’s refuge and the Red Crescent’s campaign to help people in Syria. O’Bryan struggled not to find any irony in the choices, but supposed Lucinda Ogilvy was organising this night and he had no reason to believe she was involved in anything untoward.

  A wood-panelled corridor led off the far end of the great hall and the entire length was lined with paintings of the estate and various portraits of its former keepers. Ogilvy was old money and the manor had been rebuilt in the Georgian years after being ravaged by fire. Sarah was full of facts and O’Bryan guessed that when she was with Ogilvy, she had been genuinely in love. She hesitated at the door. It was a double oak door over eight-feet high.

  “It’s okay, I’ll go in,” O’Bryan said. “You wait here.”

  She looked a little relieved, but said, “I want to see his face. I want to see what he has to say.”

  “No. Let me keep it calm.”

  “Like you did with that rodent Clive Gowndry?”

  O’Bryan shrugged. “Nevertheless, give me the chance to get through to him.”

  He didn’t bother to knock, simply pushed the right-hand door. It moved inwards and he saw Ogilvy sat at a large curved desk some twenty-feet in front of him. The polish was high, the wood dark. O’Bryan thought it to be mahogany, but he knew for sure that it hadn’t come from Ikea. Nor had the collection of shotguns on the wall behind him. Each one was secured with a lockable clamp through the trigger guard. There would have to have been fifty of them spread into a fan. A whole semi-circle, a half-moon of exquisitely engraved metal and highly polished walnut, barrels of blue, black, stainless steel and the brown patina of Damascus steel.

  “You like?” Ogilvy turned and looked at the collection.

  “They’re better on the wall than pointed at somebody, I suppose.”

  Ogilvy chuckled. “Some of them are worth a quarter of a million, perhaps a little more. Holland and Holland and the odd Purdy mainly. English only, nothing foreign.” He smiled as he turned back and looked at him. “So, DCI O’Bryan, how can I help you?”

  “I think you know,” he ventured.

  “I know Mitchell is up to something,” Ogilvy said. “But I don’t know what. That rat-like creature Clive Gowndry too.”

  “Then why haven’t you tried to find out?”

  “I’ve rather blotted my copybook, so it would seem.”

  “Meaning?”

  Ogilvy leaned back in his chair, held up his hands in a gesture of accepting a mistake. “I haven’t been whiter than white in business. Some of my dealings have left me compromised, to say the least.”

  “How so? Start with Gowndry.” O’Bryan stood a few feet from the desk. He didn’t look for a chair, the stance was domineering and he wanted to keep the man off balance.

  “I haven’t declared my interest in Clive and Gowndry. I’m in for a huge sum of VAT and tax. We also skirted a few planning issues and bribed some of Cornwall’s more susceptible planning officers and parish councillors. Not merely a bung, more like a bloody fortune.”

  “But that would affect Gowndry.”

  “When I say we…”

  “Gowndry will claim he knows nothing?”

  “I rather showed off at first,” Ogilvy shook his head. “Bloody stupid, I know. We shared the same lawyer, he introduced us.”

  “John Pascoe?”

  “Yes! How did you know?”

  “I know things. Go on.”

  “I’m up to my bloody eyeballs in corruption. Gowndry knows it, so we continue to buy out the people no longer able to live on their own. I use the places in my care homes as part of their payment. Gowndry has off-set profits and bought his way into most of my residential homes.”

  O’Bryan nodded thoughtfully, then asked, “Is there a correlation between deaths in your homes and you buying them out? A higher percentage of residents dying who have released their equity as a care package?”

  “Oh Jesus…” Ogilvy put his elbows on the desk, bowed his head into his hands. “I can check. I never thought…”

  O’Bryan nodded. “What about the sex trade?”

  “The what?” Ogilvy looked up, his expression one of confusion.

  “You know about Sarah Penhaligan’s mother, don’t you?”

  “Look, my wife went bloody ape-shit when she heard I had been cheating on her again. There would be no second chances, and she has the majority share in Malforth, so what could I do? I ended it, but kept Sarah’s mother in The Richmond. I felt I owed her something.” Ogilvy held his hands up again. “What’s this about the sex trade?”

  “I think, or rather I know, that Clive Gowndry and your solicitor, John Pascoe are running prostitutes out of vacant properties throughout Cornwall.”

  “What?”

  “Sarah has been forced into the sex trade to keep her mother in luxury living at your care home, but it has been more than merely hinted at by Pascoe that harm would come to her mother if she did not do as she was told…”

  “Oh, my poor dear…” Ogilvy shook his head, his eyes looked moist and his lips trembled slightly. “The bastards! I never knew, I swear.”

  “So what has Mitchell got on you?”

  Ogilvy scoffed, then sighed. “I have allowed that man too much freedom. I have used him in the past as a…” he hesitated.

  “An enforcer?”

  “Sort of,” Ogilvy sighed. “He was a strong arm in some tough times. I have had many facets to my business dealings. Mitchell was a constant companion, and I confided in him from time to time. The man just had a nasty little habit of remembering everything. I know he is in with Clive Gowndry and John Pascoe. I just don’t know what.”

  “I think I do,” O’Bryan said. “Tell me, why did you take that shot at us?”

  “It was Mitchell.”

  “But you had the rifle.”

  “I took it from him. We were looking for an injured buck. A poacher took a shot at it and left the beast injured. Blew most of its snout off. Now it can’t eat or drink. Who the hell takes a head shot at a bloody deer?” O’Bryan shrugged. He had no idea, but guessed it was a no-no. “Mitchell carried my rifle on the shoulder sling. He had his shotgun with him to pop a couple of pigeons afterwards. We never found the buck. Mitchell saw you and t
ook a shot. He was trying to scare you off. He takes his role as gamekeeper a little too seriously. He got off another before I managed to snatch the rifle off him, gave him a bollocking, for what it’s worth, and came down to talk to you.”

  “It felt like you were warning us off.”

  “You were with that female detective sergeant. I’ve had a few dealings with her, don’t like her much. No leeway. By the book and be damned with it. That’s not how it should work down here. There should be some leeway, a slap on the wrist, no harm done. She’s in it for promotions. Ladder climber, that one.”

  “What were those enquiries for?”

  Ogilvy shrugged. “Farm labourers. We have a lot of Polish, and they’re great workers. But we’ve had some Romanians and they were quite a savage bunch. They fought, fucked and stole everything they could. And they weren’t strictly legal either.”

  “You mean illegal,” O’Bryan stated.

  “You’re as bad as she is,” Ogilvy chided. He saw the seriousness of O’Bryan’s expression, then added, “Mitchell is in charge of that aspect, the casual labour. The estate owns over five-thousand acres throughout the Duchy. We grow daffodils and vegetables mainly. That requires labour and lots of it, but on a casual basis.”

  O’Bryan nodded. “Do you know about the smuggling cave, or tunnel near where you saw us near the creek?”

  “Of course!”

  “When did you lock it up?”

  Ogilvy pondered. “I suppose, ten years ago. Maybe a dozen years. We had some kids discover it from over in Point Geddon and Barlooe. They turned it into a sort of den. It was innocent at first, swallows and amazons stuff, but then a year or two later it was all fags and booze, then drugs and sex… It got to the point that they were practically holding raves in there. I had it sealed and bolted because some of the parents said I was encouraging illicit behaviour. I had some workers patrol around so that they got the message.”

  “Well, it’s been in use recently,” O’Bryan said. “The hinges are well oiled, the padlocks look new to me, and there’s signs of the ground being walked on.”