Deep Cover

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘No thanks,’ Vicary replied to an empty room.

  Mrs Maas returned some five minutes later in the company of a woman in her forties, who seemed curious and also pleased for the break in her day that Vicary’s visit had caused. ‘This is Sandra Winthrop. Do take a seat, Sandra.’ Mrs Maas sat behind her desk, as Sandra Winthrop sat in a chair adjacent to Vicary. They smiled and nodded at each other.

  Mrs Maas opened the discussion. ‘Well, it seems you have good fortune and also bad fortune, Mr Vicary. Mrs Winthrop here tells me that while she remembers Rosemary Halkier, perhaps the person you really need to talk to is on sick leave, so she is accessible but not at this location. I took the liberty of phoning her and she says she would be pleased to receive you, but you will have to visit her.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Vicary replied, ‘but if she is unwell . . .’

  Mrs Mass smiled ‘Broken arm, so not unwell as such.’

  ‘Ah . . . I see.’ Vicary turned to Mrs Winthrop. ‘You knew Rosemary Halkier?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sandra Winthrop was a warm-faced woman with short black hair. She wore a blue blouse and a long blue skirt.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘No, sir, not very well at all. The person whom you need to talk to more than I is Rachel Pontefract, as Mrs Maas has just indicated.’

  ‘The lady with the broken arm?’

  ‘Yes, she was Rachel Graff in those days but she knew Rosemary very well. They were very good friends. They were known as the “Rolls-Royce Crew”, double “R”, you see . . . Rachel and Rosemary.’

  ‘Got you.’

  ‘I was a sort of hanger-on. The three of us went for a drink after work each Friday. We called it the “Friday Club”.’

  ‘Alright, I am particularly interested in her life outside her employment. Any male friend you know of?’

  ‘She was separated.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, but we believe she had a male friend.’

  ‘She did have a significant other, yes. He lived in the south.’

  ‘The south?’

  ‘South of the river. He wasn’t married and that attracted Rosemary because her husband wasn’t much of a provider . . . but her enthusiasm seemed to wane.’

  ‘Really . . .? That is interesting.’

  ‘So it appeared. Initially, she was very enthusiastic about this fella, but then she seemed preoccupied, as if good living came at an unexpected price, as if she was worried about what she had got herself into.’

  ‘Did she elaborate?’

  ‘Not to me, but she might have taken Rachel Pontefract into her confidence.’

  ‘We’ll find out, I dare say. Did she mention a name?’

  ‘Again, not to me, but her worry . . . and it might have been fear she was experiencing . . . it seemed genuine. It was about that time that she disappeared.’

  ‘Did you tell the police that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I was never asked, none of us were, she was a missing person, so there was no investigation.’

  ‘Of course, we would only investigate missing children.’

  ‘Why the interest now, may we know?’ Mrs Maas glanced at Sandra Winthrop and then at Vicary.

  ‘Yes . . . her body has been found. There has been a partial press release about a body found on Hampstead Heath.’

  ‘Oh . . . I saw that.’

  ‘All London did.’ Mrs Maas sighed. ‘But she was unidentified.’

  ‘She has now been identified. Her next of kin have been informed and we will be making another press release in which we will name her and ask for information. If you could let me have Mrs Pontefract’s contact details?’

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Maas replied with a shaking voice.

  Frank Brunnie travelled to Kilburn police station. He entered by the main public entrance and went to the enquiry desk, where he showed his ID to the duty constable and asked for DC Meadows. Two minutes later he and Meadows were walking down the CID corridor towards the detective constable’s room. Upon entering the rectangular room, Brunnie noticed that it was crowded with desks, some occupied, others vacant, but all appeared to be in use. Meadows led Brunnie down to the far corner of the room and sat at a desk, and then pointed to the opposite desk. ‘Take that seat, please, that guy’s in Tenerife right now.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, my detective sergeant is due back from there soon – tomorrow, possibly.’ Brunnie sank into the chair. ‘He says it makes sense to go to Tenerife at this time of the year.’

  ‘That I can readily go along with, Tenerife and the Med are too damned hot in the summer, but January and February, well, they’re pleasant months to go south of the fiftieth parallel. I learned the hard way – went to Crete in June once a few years ago, spent the days aching for the night to come, then you only had mosquitoes to deal with . . . but the temperature became bearable. So, what brings New Scotland Yard to our little hole?’

  ‘J.J. Dunwoodie.’

  ‘Oh, you have an interest?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Brunnie glanced round the office. Neat and functional, he thought. ‘Well, yes and no. What I mean by that is that we have little or no interest in him, but more with his employer.’

  ‘WLM Rents?’

  ‘Yes.’ Brunnie paused. ‘And I fear I may be responsible for the attack on him.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. If you tell me what happened, I’ll tell you why I may be responsible.’

  ‘Simply, the poor lad got duffed up. I mean, well duffed up . . . well and truly rolled.’

  ‘Yes, I visited the hospital. You have him under police protection.’

  ‘Yes.’ Meadows opened a case file. ‘We have a witness to the incident. Too frightened to talk, certainly too frightened to give a statement or go into the witness box, and she also seemed to have something to hide. I mean, this is Kilburn, if it breathes it’s probably known to the police.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it was getting gentrified, that’s what WLM Rents are pursuing – extending the concept of Maida Vale and Hampstead to include Kilburn.’

  ‘If that’s the case, then take it from me, they still have a long way to go. In the evenings the streets round here are still full of urinating Irish women or brawling Irish men.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘Anyway, the witness, a young black female, saw Dunwoodie being bundled into an alley at the end of his working day yesterday. It was dark by then, and two huge geezers set on little J.J. Dunwoodie.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘They proceeded to give him a right hiding and this wench, the witness, was watching as the turn went down. She was a few feet away, hiding behind a wheelie bin. She was skip-dipping, looking for food. The supermarket dumps all its goods that are past the sell-by date into the wheelie bins in that alley.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘If they can, they give it to hostels and the Salvation Army and such like, but they have to do that before midnight of the sell-by date – just one day beyond the sell-by date and it goes into the skip. It’s still perfectly edible, but in these claim-culture days no chances are taken. Such a waste, it annoys me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunnie said again. ‘Just twelve hours flying time to Ethiopia, where folk are starving, and we chuck food out, and do so in massive quantities. Madness.’

  ‘So that’s what our witness was doing – living a feral existence, tearing into packets of teacakes she had found in the skip, when she saw Dunwoodie getting kicked. In the gloom she was well camouflaged – she is black, like I said, Afro Caribbean – and had on dark clothing: shoes, trousers, jacket, hat . . . all dark. She shrank into the shadows and waited till they had finished, and then she phoned us.’

  Brunnie smiled. He enjoyed Meadows’ dry sense of humour.

  ‘Anyway, she is crouching there frozen with fear, and when it seems safe, she phones us. Good lass . . . good for her . . . anyone else would have scarpered, jus
t melted into the night and left him to die, or left him for someone else to find, whichever happened sooner. We got there with the paramedics and they put him straight into the ambulance and took him to the Westminster Hospital. We spoke to the witness and she said she heard one of the attackers say, “That’s it. He’s dead”.’ Meadows consulted the case file. ‘And the second attacker she heard say, “We’d better make sure”, to which the first attacker said, “He’s dead I tell you, no one could survive that. I’ve done this before, Rusher, so have you”, to which the first attacker, one “Rusher”, said, “The boss was clear, he wants him chilled”, to which the second attacker apparently said, “He’s chilled, let’s get off the pitch. We have to get well clear.”’

  ‘Hence the protection?’

  Meadows nodded. ‘Hence the protection. This was no random attack. We’ll wait until he wakes up and then see what he can tell us. So where does New Scotland Yard fit in?’

  ‘In respect of his boss, who gives his name as William Pilcher. We have good reason to believe William Pilcher is involved with the murder of the woman whose body was found in a shallow grave on Hampstead Heath.’

  ‘Interesting . . . I read the report in the Evening Standard; heard about it on Radio London as well.’

  ‘So we want to talk to him a bit more. He lives in a pile in Virginia Water . . . some pile . . . I mean, a serious pile.’

  ‘Virginia Water? It would be very handsome; only big money camps in Virginia Water.’

  ‘We visited, and believe me, one copper to another, he had “nasty” written all over him.’

  ‘I know what you mean, squire, I well know what you mean.’

  ‘He hummed of suspicion . . . reeked like you wouldn’t believe . . . or maybe you would believe. Ran a trace but we have no record of him, not by the handle he gave.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So . . .’ Brunnie shuffled in his chair, leaning forward with hunched shoulders, ‘this is where it gets uncomfortable . . .’

  ‘Go on, you’re among friends.’

  ‘I . . . well . . . a colleague and I visited yesterday, looking for something he had touched . . . Pilcher had touched during one of his visits to WLM Rents.’

  ‘To get his prints?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Unorthodox but it happens all the time.’

  ‘Yes . . . I know . . . I know . . . but not with these consequences. You can’t use the prints obtained in that way to prosecute but you can identify the person concerned – let’s us know who we are dealing with. Anyway, it turns out that Pilcher is a bit of a green-fingered sort of geezer – a lot of nasties have a soft side . . . dogs, cats, pigeons. It seems that in Pilcher’s case, he likes plants, and he waters the potted plants in the offices of WLM Rents with a little red watering can . . .’ Brunnie took a deep breath. ‘So I bullied J.J. Dunwoodie into letting me take the watering can away and told him to get another one, an identical one; told him his boss would be no wiser. He said he couldn’t do it, and I said he could and took the can. Called this morning to find that he had been replaced by a hard-nosed looker who works in another of Pilcher’s little enterprises – an import/export outfit down the East End. She was there filing her claws ’cos Dunwoodie had “gone sick”, she said. Then I saw a green watering can.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Meadows caught his breath. ‘I see your problem.’

  ‘Yes, so at some point Pilcher visited, probably noticed the red can had been replaced by a green one and asked questions, and Dunwoodie told him. Dunwoodie seemed to worship Pilcher for some reason. He might even have told him about the watering can before Pilcher noticed it had been replaced.’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘Not good at all; not good for Dunwoodie’s health, not good for my promotion prospects and very not good for my conscience. I have made a few mistakes I have to live with and I am trying not to accumulate any more.’

  ‘Reckon we are all in the same boat on that score.’

  ‘So if Pilcher is a nasty, and I believe he is, he’ll want a victim . . . and I—’

  The phone on Meadows’ desk warbled. He let it ring twice, and then picked it up, identified himself and listened attentively, a worried look appearing on his face as he did so. Eventually he said, ‘Thank you, you’d better get back here.’ He replaced the handset gently. ‘Well, Pilcher got his victim alright.’

  ‘He’s dead!’

  ‘Yes, they called it about ten minutes ago – massive heart attack brought on by the assault.’

  ‘So it’s murder?’

  ‘Yes.’ Meadows sat back in his chair. ‘We’ll be passing the file to your boys now.’

  ‘Yes, but I’d better come clean with my boss.’

  ‘There’s things we have to do yet, so you’ll have time . . . wrap up the paperwork, get a copy of the death certificate, notify his widow.’

  ‘Yes, that will give me time.’

  ‘I’ll have to record your visit. I’ll say you were enquiring about his employer, but anything about the watering can and removal of same—’

  ‘Don’t compromise yourself, so record what it was I told you . . . everything.’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, I am sure. I’ll get to my governor first; make sure he has the full S.P. before the file arrives.’

  ‘But he gave you the can . . . Dunwoodie I mean . . . he gave you the watering can.’

  ‘Yes, though it was more in the manner of me bullying him into letting me take it.’

  ‘But he did not prevent you from taking it, or say you could not remove it from the premises.’

  ‘No . . . no he didn’t.’

  ‘Reckon you’re covered. If he was stupid enough to tell his governor what had gone down, then it’s his lookout.’

  Brunnie stood. ‘Even so, even so. I’d better go back to the Yard and talk to my governor.’

  Tom Ainsclough glanced at the computer screen and smiled, ‘Well, well, well, that’s a turn up for the books and no mistake.’

  ‘What is?’ Penny Yewdall turned away from the window, where she had been pondering the dull, overcast weather which had settled, stubbornly it seemed to her, over London town, and smiled at Ainsclough. ‘What’s a turn up?’

  ‘Pilcher. Frankie Brunnie’s guess was correct, he is a felon.’

  ‘The prints from the watering can?’

  ‘The prints from the watering can . . . and I mean, is he known or is he known?’

  Yewdall walked from the window and sat in her chair opposite Ainsclough’s desk. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘Yates . . . he is yclept Curtis Yates.’

  ‘That name rings bells.’

  ‘So it should. He’s done time . . . murder reduced to manslaughter . . . he got out after doing five of a ten stretch; that’s what you get for volunteering to clean the toilets and joining the Christian Union.’

  ‘Cynic.’ Yewdall smiled. ‘Probably quite true but you’re a cynic just the same.’

  ‘He was part of a team who robbed a security van taking a payroll to a large company – killed a security guard. Poor guy had only been in the job for a few weeks. That was fifteen years ago. He’s been off the radar since then but he’s flagged up as being of “great interest” – believed to be behind a lot of high-profile jobs in the Greater London area.’

  ‘Mr Big?’

  ‘Seems to be.’ Ainsclough continued to read the computer screen. ‘His wife disappeared shortly after he was released from Wandsworth ten years ago.’

  ‘That’s also about the time Rosemary Halkier disappeared.’ Penny Yewdall sat back in her chair and absent-mindedly straightened out a paper clip.

  ‘So it is, both women went missing at the same time. He has a neat way of getting rid of unwanted partners. Oh, my . . . one Charlotte Varney . . . she was reported missing before he went to prison, but she is cross-referenced to him because she was his partner at the time.’

  ‘Three women!’

  ‘One of whom is known to have b
een murdered. There’s a long list of criminal associates, one of which is none other than Slick Eddie “The Dog” Vasto and another is “Fulham Fred” Morrissey.’

  ‘Eddie “The Dog” Vasto – he was believed to be responsible for the building society job down in Kent a few years ago, I’m sure it was him.’

  ‘It was. Twenty million smackers and it’s still missing – won’t turn up now it’s been well laundered – and if I am right, “Fulham Fred” Morrissey was thought to be the brains behind the bullion robbery at Stansted Airport. If he’s moving in circles like that, explains why he doesn’t like coppers.’

  ‘What explains who doesn’t like coppers?’ Frank Brunnie entered the room, peeling off his raincoat as he did so.

  ‘This does.’ Ainsclough jabbed a finger in the air towards the monitor screen. ‘Your guess was right . . . well done.’

  Brunnie stood beside Ainsclough, bent forward and read the screen. ‘I see . . . I see . . .’ he murmured, ‘a breakthrough, but I have little to smile about.’

  ‘Why? You got a result.’

  ‘Possibly, but it was at the cost of an innocent seeming office manager being battered to death.’ He sank into his chair.

  ‘Who?’ Yewdall gasped.

  Brunnie told Yewdall and Ainsclough about J.J. Dunwoodie, and a silence fell on the room. Eventually Yewdall said, ‘But he let you take it. I said in the car that I wasn’t happy with what you did, but he didn’t protest or put up any objection. I witnessed that. Alright, you pressured him, but he still allowed you to remove the watering can from the office.’

  ‘That’s true, but I am still pushing the envelope of reasonable conduct . . . fair play. I am going to have to tell Harry Vicary. Is he in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When is he due to return?’

  ‘Not known. May not be until tomorrow now, he’s making enquiries in respect of Rosemary Halkier.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Just background information – not interviewing anyone as such.’