The electrodes were this time connected to each of his nostrils, a strip of gaffer tape wrapped around his nose for insulation. Panting out of his mouth, he closed his eyes in readiness. With the water on his face, his nose taped up and his eyes closed, it was a new sensation, like drowning. Drowning or burning. He was sure that, as a kid, he and his friends had discussed, if push came to shove, which kind of death they would choose over another. And he was sure it would have been a unanimous vote for the drowning over burning. So, to honour old playground friendships, Vince went along with the drowning and closed his mouth. His mind searching for prayers, looking for redemption? Looking for forgiveness? But he couldn’t think of anything to say, or even think. But whatever thoughts were going through his head, they were quickly abandoned when he heard clattering sounds. Something was wrong. He heard the mackintosh men leaving the room and slamming the door shut behind them. Vince opened his mouth and gulped down some air.
There were raised voices, and other people now in the adjacent room. There was a panic setting in, shouting, threats. Then there was gunfire, three reports. Each seemed not to hit its intended target because Vince didn’t hear the yelps and cries that usually accompany getting shot – no matter how tough you are. Or maybe they were dead. No, because there was more talk, though it was quieter now. The gunplay seemed to have got things under control. The sound of those interminable crickets returned, the volume slowly rising till he couldn’t hear anything that was happening next door.
Vince shook his head vigorously to rid himself of the towel, a painful move because he could feel and hear the blood sloshing about as though in a barrel. He wrenched open eyes that were gummy with congealed tears, just in time to see two men emerge from the light of the adjacent room and take their place in front of him – their shooters drawn. Vince took them in. These men didn’t share the uniform duality of the mackintosh men, for they were both wearing different coats. One had on a brown leather flying jacket, the other wore a check topcoat. But, on further inspection, things still didn’t look too promising, for they didn’t look like the Red Cross. One was compactly built with a tufty flat-top style haircut, a pug’s nose, and what looked like shiny pink lines down his cheek, three of them about two inches long, looking like someone had raked a claw made of razors down his face. The other fellow was taller, younger and looked more alert, more in charge. He had thick wavy black hair swept back from a widow’s peak. His black brows slanted sharply down over quick eyes that were as narrow as a Chinaman’s. Everything about his face was shaped like a sharply suspicious V. His eyes scoped the room, burning through it, looking for more trouble. Vince got the feeling that he liked trouble, and was disappointed not to find more of it but just to find him here: naked, beaten black and blue, and for all the world looking as though he was about to die. Satisfied there were no more mackintosh men, they pocketed their shooters.
‘They did a job on you, that’s for sure,’ said the tall one, looking Vince over. It was said in a tone of professional appreciation for the work done, not necessarily pity for who it was done on. The squat flat-topped one nodded in agreement. He too seemed to be weighing up and admiring the mackintosh men’s handiwork, and looked as if he was about to break out in a smile and opine, ‘Nice work.’
The tall one broke him out of his reverie by saying, ‘Let’s get him out of here.’ They grabbed Vince under the arms, lifted him out of the chair and carried him through to the next room. His rescuers – or new tormentors – muttered words he couldn’t comprehend, because his ears were howling due to the blood swilling around his head. But the expressions on their faces and the way they held him at a distance, like a soiled rag, spoke volumes.
In the next room he saw a big open fire that looked as though it was used for cooking as well as heating the place. Copper pots and pans hung over it, and there was a long wooden farmhouse table with chairs around it. And the most important detail, the one he was really searching for, the two mackintosh men. They were face down on the stone floor, their hands and feet solidly bound together with the same black gaffer tape they had used on him. Their mouths were taped too. He wanted to see their faces, get a good look at the bastards, so he’d know them, so he could hunt them down and return the favour. He wanted some answers. But most of all, he wanted to stop feeling like a wretched animal, to stand up straight like a man and get the smell of piss and shit and sweat and blood and fear off him. But he couldn’t do any of those things. So he passed out instead.
He woke up in the back of a travelling car. A coarse tartan car blanket was covering him. He looked out of the window at bright lights and cars rushing by on a dual carriageway.
The dark-haired gunsel with the quick eyes was sitting in the passenger seat. Hearing Vince groan on waking, he glanced round. Vince saw a smirk on his cocky-looking face. The squat flat-topped one driving peered at him in the rear-view mirror. He too had a smug satisfied look on his face. Maybe having a beaten-up and broken copper on the back seat was their idea of fun.
The tall dark one said: ‘What did they want with you, pal?’
Pal? Had ‘Pal’ now replaced ‘Friend’? Was he out of the frying pan and into the fire or vice versa? Either way, the frying pan was travelling at speed, and he didn’t fancy jumping out of it himself.
‘Who do they work for?’
‘Come on, talk to us, brother.’
Brother? Had that replaced ‘Pal’? It would seem that you couldn’t pick your own family any more than you could pick your friends, or your pals.
‘Why won’t you tell us?’
Vince stopped listening and started planning. His feet and hands weren’t bound now. Flat-top had his hands squarely on the wheel, concentrating on the road, going at a steady 50 mph. The gun was no longer in the dark one’s hand.
Vince suddenly sprang forward and threw himself on to the steering wheel. That sent the car veering to the right. The horn went off, along with a chorus of other horns from the cars swerving around them as they veered across the lanes to avoid them. Some were more successful than others. Brakes being slammed on, screeching tyres, the sound of crashing and crunching metal. Inside the car, alarm had set in. The cool cats with the shooters weren’t smirking smugly now; they were screaming like schoolgirls going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. With Vince now covering the steering wheel, they yanked at his arms, pulled his legs, pummelled his back and tore at his hair. But still he stuck limpet-like to the wheel. There was a screech of tyres around the careering car as it broke through the barrier of the central reservation.
‘Brake! Brake!’ was the call going up from the tall dark one to the flat-topped driver, who in his panic had forgotten that he still had power over the pedals. He braked. He braked too late. The white lights filled the windscreen.
CHAPTER 38
Vince had been here before. The familiar pall of bruised flesh, bones that ached as if they’d had the marrow scraped out of them, and broken and twisted blood – or at least that’s how it felt as it coursed through his body. Nothing was easy, everything hurt. A good motto that, he thought; he’d put it on his gravestone. He’d been out of it for four days. Not in a coma, just drifting in and out of consciousness. Splayed out on the bed, unable to move as his body tortuously repaired itself.
The doctors told him that, apart from one cracked rib, there was no lasting damage. The cut lip, cut eye and bloody nose would eventually heal to nothing. The bruising would fade. It had been a professional job, his torture, painful, but leaving no lasting damage. Nor had the electric shocks damaged any internal organs. Vince imagined his insides resembling a mixed grill of sizzled liver, fried heart, smoked lungs and devilled kidneys. Not so, said the doctors.
He was now sitting up in his bed in a private room in the hospital, with windows just big enough to shoot arrows through. Mac had brought him a bunch of grapes. Vince still had teeth, he’d checked, but he wasn’t eating. A grape would feel like swallowing a cricket ball. As Mac polluted the room with the familiar p
ungency of his well-tarred pipe, Vince filled him in on what had happened to him, from his questioning of Bernie Korshank in the Camden Town club to being snatched and tortured somewhere in the countryside, to being dragged out of the farmhouse by the tall boy and flat-top. Then the car crash. The Wolseley 610 (stolen) Vince was travelling in had gone into a tailspin, probably due to the tall one pulling on the handbrake, resulting in them just missing the oncoming truck. The two gunsels had run off, abandoning Vince, who quickly passed out.
As the older detective listened, he never changed his expression, and seemed to barely modulate his breathing, even at what Vince considered the most breathtaking parts of his account. When Vince was done, Mac filled and tamped his pipe again before letting out a sustained ‘Mmmm . . .’ He then smiled as he broke the news: ‘You’re relieved of all duties pending an inquiry.’
It was delivered with the calmness of someone who assumed the recipient was expecting it. The recipient was indeed expecting it, but couldn’t really bring to mind one single event that might have tipped the scales against him. But he knew such ‘events’ were there in legion, and bunched together like the grapes that Mac himself was now devouring. Take your pick of any number of indiscretions, disobediences, liberties and overstepping the marks he’d made on this case. But, deep down, Vince still knew he was right to have made them. They might punish him for his actions, but he could not chastise himself.
Once the news had been given time to digest, Mac asked: ‘So who were they, Vincent, the two that snatched you?’
Vince gave a wary smile, then wished he hadn’t, for he could instantly feel the sutures in his lip, and his cheekbones ached. He knew he’d have to talk like a ventriloquist and keep his expression in neutral for a while. Torture for him now would be merely some form of tickling. Vince said, ‘Is this a police officer asking a civilian?’
‘I’d like to think more of a friend asking another friend. You want them caught, don’t you?’
‘Spooks.’
‘MI6?’ asked Mac.
‘They had an accent.’
Mac laughed. ‘Russians out to exact revenge for comrade Bernie Korshank?’
Vince didn’t laugh, and not just because his face ached. ‘South African makes more sense – from what we learned from Dominic Saxmore-Blaine, and about their dealings in Africa.’
‘The coup?’
Vince nodded, or gave what he thought was an approximation of a nod, seeing as he was as stiff as a park bench.
‘Talking about Saxmore-Blaine, we got the autopsy report. That was no cry for help. He’d severed main arteries, both his wrists. But there was a third, his penis. He’d severed the artery on that too. Doc said it looked as though he’d tried to cut it off completely. It was hanging on by a thread.’
Vince didn’t know if he had it in him to cross his legs, but mentally he did.
Getting off this uncomfortable subject, Mac said: ‘Back to the South Africans. Did you get a proper look at them?’
‘No, but I’m sure they were the two men I saw at the Imperial that time. Which means they were the same ones who garrotted Ali Azeem. I only spotted them from behind as they were leaving the hotel, but they were wearing beige macs, trench-coat style.’
‘Macs are popular. I’ve got one myself. Sorry, Vincent, but we’re going to need more than that.’
‘They obviously didn’t want me to see them, and they were professional, so I didn’t. What can I say?’
‘How about the two that saved you?’
‘Get a sketch artist, I’ll draw you a picture. Better still, show me some mugshots and I’ll pick them out. I’m sure they’ll turn up somewhere. Those two weren’t spooks. And they were very English, very London. I’ve a feeling I’ve seen them before – or maybe just the type.’
‘So you get snatched by spooks and saved by villains?’
‘Hardly saved. They wanted the same as the spooks. Answers I didn’t have for questions I didn’t understand.’
‘Think about this, Vince. Maybe you’re not supposed to have the answers. Someone else will have them, but not you.’
‘If you insist on being so enigmatic, Mac, I’ll call the nurse in for my bed bath.’
‘I’ve seen your nurse, pretty little thing; I’d take one myself.’ Mac reloaded his pipe, loaded it with stringy-looking tobacco, tamped again and fired her up. ‘I’ve told you that I play the markets, juggle the stocks?’
‘With some success, I hear.’
‘I’ve done okay over the years. I put my girls through a good school on it. I’ve made money because I’ve received good advice from one particular man, and I’ve taken it. I’ve known this fellow for over thirty years, and I started out with him when he first started in the business, as one of his first clients. And he’s done very well for himself since. He outgrew my level of patronage a long time ago, but we remained friends and I’ve taken care of a few parking tickets for him over the years.’
‘What else are friends for?’
‘And this fellow has told me to steer clear of the Montcler set, because nothing is going to stick on them. Not now. They’ve got patronage from high up.’
‘How high?
‘Try the PM himself. Harold Wilson’s looking to change the image of the Labour Party. Ditch some of the cloth-cap mentality and reposition themselves as the friends of big business. Cultivate middle-class aspirations, if you will. To do this, he wants to cosy up not only with the respected old-guard captains of industry, but with the emerging young bucks such as Simon Goldsachs. The days of this country making stuff out of pig iron and digging up coal are on their way out. Pretty soon, practically everything we buy is going to have Made in China stamped on it. It’s the markets that are the way forward, and we’re talking about making money on a global and grander scale. And the men who play at the tables of the Montcler – men like Simon Goldsachs, especially Simon Goldsachs, are leading the way.’
‘They can make lots of money, but can they get away with murder?’
‘No one’s saying that, Vincent. But that little coterie at the Montcler have a lot of political firepower. They’ve got friends in both the Lower and Upper Houses. Practically every peer of the realm who likes to gamble, and most do, have dealings in the Montcler. Five or six key Cabinet members, a dozen or so in the Opposition. Even our own Commissioner has been known to play a hand or so. As for Beresford’s joke with Dominic Saxmore-Blaine, about taking over a small country in West Africa, it’s not looking so funny now.’
‘It never did. Nicky DeVane told me that Beresford’s father served with Sir David Stirling, the Scottish laird who organized the SAS.’
‘Of course.’
‘Beresford was a failed SAS man himself. He couldn’t make the cut, but he still had the ambition.’
At this, Mac smiled and shaped his mouth for a silent ‘Ahhhh’. It was clear that he and Vince were reading from the same manifesto. Mac said, ‘Britain’s no longer a real power on the world stage, as we don’t have the firepower. It’s America and Russia that are the top dogs now. They’re the ones who came out as the real victors in the Second World War, and they’re the ones who shout the odds. So what do we do instead?’
‘Complain about the weather?’
‘Private forces. And by that I mean privately funded armies going into countries that are strategically or economically profitable to us, and stirring things up among dissatisfied locals. That’s what Stirling and his band did in the Yemen. It was public knowledge, if you bothered to look.’
‘And you did?’
‘Since this case came up involving the Montcler, and from what my friend in the City told me, I thought it was worthwhile getting into. Just to see what we’re up against. From what I can tell, they’re working on behalf of the British government with the implicit dictate that if it all goes wrong, they’re on their own and the government can’t be blamed. Big wars are too expensive, and failure too humiliating, but small privately backed ones where Britain benefits, a
nd gets to reinstate some of its power and influence in the world, that’s the way things are going. And the kind of men who can provide such backing gather around the tables at the Montcler.’
‘Your friend told you all this?’
‘He told me some of it. The rest gets backed up by history and economics. All of which I take an interest in.’
‘So Beresford was killed because he was drunk and began opening his big mouth about the coup?’
‘If there is a coup, then, yes, that seems as likely a scenario to me as any other. But I’ve got a feeling this is nothing you hadn’t thought of already, right?’
Vince emitted a meditative humming sound, then said clearly, ‘My money is on the two mackintosh men killing Beresford. If they are South African secret service, it fits in nicely. Maybe they were working alongside the British spooks?’
‘Vincent, we could speculate like this till our heads dropped off.’
To get that on the way, there followed some considered nodding of heads from the two detectives as they surveyed the territory they were in. Sex, death and power; the messy prints of a British political scandal were all over this case. Like the Profumo stink-up of a few years back, but without the iconic photography and the snappy one-liners. And with far more corpses.
‘So now, Vincent, the thing to do is for you to prove it’s not all a joke gone wrong, and maybe bring down a government whilst you’re doing it.’
Vince stared at the older detective, pipe jammed in mouth, and saw he was being deeply ironic with that last statement. His was a long gaunt face that suited irony.
‘So what’s the alternative, let them get away with murder?’
‘There is no them, Vincent. Asprey, Goldsachs, Ruley, DeVane – it goes beyond them. You’re up against the grey men. I mean the grey men stalking the corridors of Whitehall, making decisions and reaching out to their old-school-tie friends for support. They’ve got more power than the men at the dispatch box, because the men at the dispatch box come and go. But the grey men are always there, keeping the whole thing ticking over.’
Gilded Edge, The Page 29