Lovegod took his hand from his pocket and put down on the table between them a Walther PPK automatic. It clunked, as it touched the glass table top.
“Yeah,” said Carver unemotionally. “I guessed you might be tooled up when I came in. What now?”
“Where will you go to find Irene?”
“Last picture I saw of her she was in Carcassonne. I could start there. If she’s in the hands of some ring, there must have been some reason for taking her there. Why?”
“Don’t go there,” said Lovegod. “Start in Paris.”
“Why Paris?”
“Because that’s where I’ve arranged for you to meet Amy Varzon. I want you to do a job for me, and you can find Irene at the same time.”
“Listen, I don’t have any time to waste. I can’t...”
“Aren’t you going to ask me what the job is?”
“I can’t...”
“I want you to track down these bastards who are taking kids off our streets and stop them,” said Lovegod, simply. “This is the most important job you will ever have.”
“You can afford me?” asked Carver curiously. “I cost a lot.”
“The fee is your liberty.”
“That’s a lot,” conceded Carver. After Beirut, it was riches.
“You betcha. You’re the best ferret I’ve ever come across, and I’ve met some real bastards. I’m sending you down the pipe and when you get to the other end I expect to see you with your mouth full. Right?”
“Right,” said Carver, for once at a loss.
The policeman stood up again and pulled back the curtains. Outside the night was warm and velvet black. He stood for a while staring down into the street.
“I’ve been trying to crack this one for years, Carver,” Lovegod said quietly. “Years of fighting men who aren’t fit to dig my bloody garden, never mind run a police force. It’s not that they can’t find out what’s happening. They don’t want to. Someone in the job is keeping things nice and quiet, and I seem to raise a storm no matter what I do. And not only in the job, either. You met Ben Johnson. He knows somebody’s taking those kids, but he doesn’t want to admit it. So they remain absconders. And the statistics back him up. But some clever bastard’s doing it, Carver. I know it. Some clever, greedy, sadistic sod is taking little girls and boys away from here and selling them. Alison Sugrue’s right. What I need is a real bastard with a personal reason for finding them. And that’s you, Carver.”
Carver watched him warily. Whatever else he may be, Lovegod was a tricky, devious man and there was always the chance that to get out of the country, Carver might yet find himself climbing over rooftops and dropping slates on police cars.
“Or else?”
“Or else I’ll come down on you like a boot-lid, my son. It’ll all go dark and you’ll wonder what happened. It’s not loaded, by the way.”
“No, I know,” said Carver, putting the Walther back on the table. He had never needed a gun at close quarters anyway.
There had been no temptation to use the Walther – and he would not have shot the policeman even if pushed. But there was no reason why Lovegod should know that.
Quite apart from his liking for Lovegod, he knew perfectly well that if he shot a policeman his chance of escape would be nil. People who believe the British police are soft have never been interrogated by a really bitter Detective Sergeant in the Met.
“You’d better tell me who Amy Varzon is,” he said.
A great weight seemed to drop from Lovegod’s shoulders, and when he turned from the window his face was almost cheerful.
“Amy Varzon is the Parisian version of Alison Sugrue,” he said refilling his glass. The pure spirit was having no noticeable effect on his voice or his manner. It simply soaked in like water into sand.
“She looks after the investigations at the Paris end, and I have been corresponding with her for a long time. She’s getting much further than I am, though. She was introduced to me by Alison, and she’s about as far into the slave trade there as it is possible to be. She’s agreed to meet you and help you. In Paris. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yup.” Lovegod fumbled in his wallet and passed over a slip of paper which had been torn off the bottom of a notebook page. It contained a phone number.
“When you get there, book into a hotel and ring that number, she’ll be waiting.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“When I asked for your help last night, Luther,” said Sigmund Dark mildly to the man sitting at the opposite side of his rosewood desk, “I assumed that your reputation for speed and inventiveness was matched by at least some measure of efficiency.”
The thin man with the hard eyes shrugged the shoulders of his pale grey suit.
“Your customer isn’t walking around this morning shooting his mouth off, right? I’d have thought the sight of a police informer carrying his head under his arm would have made the front page of The Sun even if it didn’t appear anywhere else, squire. And there’s nothing about that, right?” he said.
Sigmund Dark leaned his head forward and peered at his visitor over the top of gold rimmed half glasses. Not for the first time, Luther was struck by the incongruity of name and man.
Dark had been sculpted by nature into a Father Christmas figure.
He was big in every sense of the word. He must have weighed eighteen stone and topped six feet six. His mane of once-tawny hair was now prematurely white, as was his carefully trimmed beard. His skin was tanned, his cheeks ruddy.
But it was his eyes which made his presence truly compelling.
A light, bright gold in colour, they danced with sheer enjoyment of life.
When Sigmund Dark was in the room, neither men nor women noticed anybody else. Without effort, his personality filled the place. His voice was vibrant and pleasant, his laughter deep and infectious.
He never boomed or bellowed, made no apparent effort to dominate, was never seen to make any effort to attract a woman.
Yet women sought him out as sunbathers seek the sun.
It would have been easy for men to envy and resent him, yet he was as popular among them as he was among their women folk, though for a very different reason. Sigmund Dark was a man in whom nobody would have dreamed of finding signs of questionable sexuality.
Watching him across the desk now, Luther was reminded of a former schoolmaster, peering benevolently over his glasses at a favoured but wayward pupil.
“You told me last night – nay, you assured me – that my little irritation had been taken care of, did you not?”
“Yeah.”
“And I believed you, Luther. I really did.”
“Well, it’s true. I cut his head off. Right?”
“Yes. So you said. Would it therefore surprise you to hear that this cadaver this morning crossed the Channel and is at this moment driving out of the Pas-de-Calais on his way to an assignation in Paris with an official of the French police? An unusual achievement for a headless corpse, would you not say, Luther?”
The eyes twinkled, the full, red lips curved, and there was laughter bubbling behind the words. Luther found himself unconsciously, beginning to smile in return.
“Surprise me?” he said. “It would bloody shake me rigid. I used the chainsaw myself.”
“And yet, despite your assurances, this has come to pass,” said Dark, silkily.
Luther felt the chill behind the urbanity in the pleasant Voice.
“A man in a black leather suit outside the French Bar in Jermyn Street, right?” he said.
“Not just any man, Luther. The man with the diary in his pocket,” said Dark. “Did he have the diary, Luther?”
“Well, no...”
“So did that not at least hint to you that you might have the wrong man, Luther?”
“Why should it? If he knew you were after the diary, he probably stashed it somewhere. Makes sense. I would. But if he was a loner, like you say, i
t doesn’t matter whether he stashed it or not. He won’t be going back for it.”
“You killed the wrong man,” said Dark quietly. “The police are today tearing up the pavements round Millwall football ground looking for a new gang of football hooligans, otherwise I promise you, Luther, I would have had you dealt with before morning. Permanently.”
He stood up, and Luther repressed the nervous spasm in his stomach.
But Dark was only going to the long rosewood sideboard under the five feet square painting along one stark brick wall. He selected a cut glass tumbler the size of a small plant pot, polished it fastidiously with a linen cloth and filled it with ice and orange juice from an insulated jug. Nobody including himself was ever offered alcohol in the home of Sigmund Dark. He was a man of inflexible principle.
Seen across the width of the big penthouse room, Dark seemed more in proportion with his surroundings. It would have been surprising had he not done so, for he had designed the room himself, conscious of the effect of his size on others and of the dominance it gave him.
The room had been carved out of the top of a converted warehouse in a part of London Dockland which was taking its turn at being gentrified into one of the most exclusive residential areas of London. Where once dockers and stevedores worked, played and slept, now Cabinet Ministers and rich businessmen walled themselves into the red brick warehouses, and travelled through the surrounding sprawl of terraces and tower blocks in well-insulated chauffeur driven capsules.
Where once, pilfered imports pocketed by dockers had been the currency in pub and club, multi millionaires now murmured billion pound deals into “secure” telephones, and ignored the original population they were helping to drive away from their mean, familiar streets.
It was an area emerging in turmoil from poverty into plenty – and the pickings were not for the poor.
Within this boiling storm of social change the East End gangs went about their business as usual, the traditional birds of prey in the modern rookery. But their day was dying.
Above their heads, from their overdesigned nests in the sky, infinitely more powerful and ruthless birds were turning calculating eyes on the undeveloped flatlands of the East End and estimating development costs and profits.
In Sigmund Dark’s own eyrie, strangely, the fabulous view which he might have enjoyed down the Thames towards the sea had been ignored. No windows pierced the red brick. The walls remained intact and the light came through sloping rooftop windows.
“Other men may build picture windows and put themselves in a display case,” he remarked cheerfully to a former Prime Minister neighbour. “I prefer to be overlooked only by God.”
His neighbour had echoed the laughter sincerely enough but the remark had made him thoughtful and a few weeks later, when a tower block being built nearby had suddenly been topped off prematurely to the surprise of local people, he had noted that, apparently quite coincidentally, the building had been truncated just short of the level at which it might have overlooked Sigmund Dark’s rooftop windows.
The fact made him reappraise his already high estimate of his neighbour’s power. And that in turn made him more thoughtful than ever. He was a man who respected power.
Luther stirred restlessly in his chair as Dark returned to the desk.
His background was in the streets of the East End, though his slightly whining working class accent was a conscious affectation. His parents had paid considerably over the odds to have him educated at a minor public school. Their money had been wasted, for he emerged from the experience having earned no qualification save the reputation for being an inventive and foul-mouthed bully.
For one thing, however, he was ideally suited. When Sigmund Dark heard of Luther’s reputation for handling awkward customers in the brothel in which he worked, he had promoted him to manager.
The brothel had profited greatly under Luther’s enthusiastic management. Somewhat to the surprise of his new employer, the former public schoolboy turned out to be a workaholic, spending most of his waking life at work. His staff were miserable, his customers resentful, the girls loathed the sight of him, but the profits soared.
Promoted to charge of a district, he had produced the same kind of financial magic. Within a year, he was Dark’s strong right hand in London and his employer was now hoping to train him to handle the overseas interests of his empire.
Only one thing prevented him: the man was obnoxious.
Sigmund Dark preferred to have people about him who were congenial. Men of culture and taste who would appreciate his conversation and admire his sculptures and paintings.
Above all, men with charm.
As a social companion, Luther was a dead loss. His voice grated, his deliberate and constant vulgarity abraded the nerve ends, his conversation was as ugly as his profession, and he made no attempt to conceal his contempt for what he called “the punters”.
“World’s made up of fuckin’ punters, innit?” he was wont to say when taxed on his behaviour. “Stupid, greedy, too dumb to get up out o’ the shit and take what they want. Let ‘em fuckin’ stay there, then. Screw ‘em. Right?”
Until now, though, he had been efficient. His mistake of the previous evening was uncharacteristic, and Sigmund Dark was a cautious and sensitive man. Uncharacteristic behaviour generally had its roots in something deeper, and he was determined to get to the bottom of Luther’s change of character before he allowed him, unsupervised, to penetrate any further into the organisation.
On the other hand, someone needed to be in France to oversee the business interests which he had there, as well as to ensure that the plans which he had made for the future of the irritatingly persistent Carver went properly.
He sat down in the black leather chair behind his desk. The chair creaked as his weight settled into its frame.
“I think that we had better go to Carcassonne and supervise the next sale ourselves,” he said thoughtfully. His eyes noted over the half-moon spectacles the flicker of satisfaction which passed over the thin face opposite.
“We will take the Lear. Tell Albert we will be going tomorrow afternoon. Perpignan. Ask Leonie to phone the house in Bram and warn them we are coming. You have casual clothes, I imagine? No? Then buy some. In a suit and tie you will look incongruous among my guests, and incongruity breeds curiosity. Go to Simpson’s and spend freely. Take their advice. Do not be flamboyant.”
Luther was on his way across the room before Dark had finished speaking. There was excitement in the way he walked, and his employer felt a momentary twinge of sympathy for the girl who shared his bed that night. In moments of high excitement, Luther inclined even more than usual towards inventive sadism.
The polished mahogany door sighed closed behind Luther’s retreating back, and Sigmund Dark took off his half moon spectacles and polished them absent mindedly on a square of cloth from his top drawer. His face was a model of serene self possession, but behind its mask his mind was seething.
The cause of his unease was the absent Carver.
*
A country away, Carver was also experiencing deep unease.
Sigmund Dark had been correct in essence about his whereabouts.
He was in France. But he was already in the outskirts of Paris, not in the Pas-de-Calais. And he was experiencing the kind of personality crisis which comes upon most non-Parisians at the first whiplash of Paris traffic.
Normally a confident and expert driver, Carver was handling a vehicle relatively new to him after two years of enforced idleness. It was not a formula calculated to make him expert in the most overcrowded and homicidal traffic system in the world.
Baron Haussmann was from the point of view of city architecture an undisputed genius, and present-day Paris is in its beauty and elegance a monument to his ingenuity and vision.
But he never heard of the internal combustion engine. And in Paris, it shows.
Carver at least knew enough about the city to avoid
the notorious stock-car race the Parisians call the Périphérique, which efficiently sends passing traffic around the outside of the city, but at the expense of sanity and safety.
He plunged instead into the city via the Porte de Saint-Ouen, was swept down the Avenue de Saint-Ouen and was sucked inexorably into the Avenue de Clichy.
His view of the traffic from the high driving seat of the Daihatsu did nothing to reassure him. Ahead, a carpet of cars, tightly interlocked as a jigsaw puzzle, swept down to the heart of the city, an armoured column constantly quartered by the flying outriders on that form of motor scooter peculiar to France and apparently powered by a bumblebee with a peculiarly high pitched buzz.
He passed the Place Clichy, roared down the Rue d’Amsterdam, fought his way through a network of tiny streets populated almost entirely by Arabs, and eventually emerged, surprised, at the front of the Gare Saint-Lazare – and, thankfully, recognised where he was.
Within half an hour he was signing the registration card at a tall, narrow hotel in a small road not a hundred yards from the Arc de Triomphe.
The harassed woman who sat knitting behind a surprisingly smart reception desk assured him that there would he a telephone in his room, and there was.
There was also a colour television set, and to his delight a mini-bar. He peered from the window to see that his own car was almost directly below him in the street, and mixed himself a drink which, he felt, his nerves had richly earned.
The voice which answered the number Lovegod had given him was husky and warm.
“A French version of Alison Sugrue,” Lovegod had said. She sounded younger, and if Alison Sugrue could have injected as much sex into her voice she could have made a fortune dubbing films for Brigitte Bardot.
Carver introduced himself warily and was reassured when she instantly recognised him.
“Yes, I have been expecting you to call today,” she said easily. “How may I help you?”
“Did my friend not explain the problem?” Carver asked cagily.
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