by Desmond Cory
“Oh. That. Not as bad as maybe it looks. Three broken fingers and a bit of knuckle damage. It’ll mend.”
“Do you want me to take a look at it?”
“Oh, come on, Kate. I’m a doctor, too, you know.”
“You were a doctor.”
Even after all this time he hadn’t lost his old habit, she noticed, of throwing his head back and squinting down his nose at her and then looking away very quickly. It was a habit that had always mildly annoyed her and annoyed her still. “We needn’t go into the song-and-dance act, surely now? … After all these years? … Not everyone takes so narrow a view as the BMA, you know, they’re not so fussy about these things in the Middle East.”
“So I understand,” Kate said. “But even so, you haven’t been practising medicine out there for quite some while, from what I hear.”
“Ah. And what do you hear?”
“Just every so often from Brian Bone. I don’t know why he bothers. He should know by now I don’t care too much of a shit what you get up to, either way.”
“I know why he bothers. Quite keen on you in the old days, was Brian. But I haven’t set eyes on him in donkey’s years so he has to be passing on second-hand information, wouldn’t you say?” Kate shrugged. “It’s true, though, that part of it. I mean, one thing leads to another in that part of the world. You get put in the way of this line of business and that, you get drawn into it somehow, before you know where you are you’re running a business. Not that doctoring isn’t a business nowadays. I’ve come to realise that. That’s the American pattern and we’re the ones who’re out of line with it, still stuck in all that Fifties ideology and the National Health … Look, that’s going the way of Kinnock and you better believe it.”
“Why do you say we?”
“There you go. Force of habit, I suppose.”
“So what sort of business have you got yourself into? Not accident insurance, I don’t suppose?”
“I just arrange deals for other people. Quite influential people, some of them. You’d be surprised if I were to tell you—”
“I don’t think,” Kate said, “I’d even be interested.”
“No. Well, why should you? … And anyway, this wasn’t an accident, exactly. Someone closed a car door on me a little too quickly.”
“Painful.”
“Yes. Very. But the truth of the matter is, Kate, that someone’s trying to kill me.”
“At least you bring some good news.”
“I’m serious.”
“And I’m still not interested. And certainly not surprised. So whose wife is it this time?”
Coyle shook his head. More in sorrow, it would appear, than in anger. “Surely you can’t be holding that old business against me, after all this time? Now that you’ve got a nice little live-in boy friend of your own. I mean – what would the BMA have to say about that state of affairs, I can’t help but wonder?”
Kate stared at him. “Kevin …”
“Yes?”
“What do you want, exactly?”
“What do I … I don’t want anything at all. Just thought that while I was in the UK—”
“— You’d drop in and try to blackmail me into doing something, right?”
“Blackmail? What are you talking about? … Look, I don’t mind, Kate, really I don’t, about the … I mean, girls will be girls and all that, I only said—”
“— That the BMA mightn’t be any too pleased to learn that I’ve been screwing one of my patients. Well, they’re a bit more broad-minded these days than they used to be, but you’re right. I don’t suppose they would.”
“Kate, I didn’t even know the guy was a patient.”
“Oh yes, you did. Mind you, it’s a formality. There’s never anything wrong with him. He never gets so much as a sore throat.”
“Well, if so, then you’ve been a little bit careless, haven’t you? I mean, what’s sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose, don’t you think?”
“Kevin …”
Not staring at him this time, but looking tiredly down at the floor between her feet.
“Oh, I’ll admit the situation’s rather different—”
“That’s the trouble. It isn’t. Nothing’ll ever be different where you’re concerned. I don’t know what it is you came here for and I don’t care. Why don’t you just naff off?”
“Oh come on, Kate. You know you don’t really mean it.”
Beside the front door of the house a brass plaque said :-
DR CAITLIN COYLE
Consulting Hours
1000 – 1230
1700 – 1900
Dobie, fully familiar with the informational content of this inscription, didn’t even glance in its direction as he turned away from the door and walked off down the street, his shoulders despondently hunched in a correctly academic slouch. The tall man of rather more military appearance who was intently surveying the handwritten postcards sellotaped to the supermarket window,
PRAM FOR SALE
Very Little Use
had previously observed Kate’s rather – if only slightly – more imposing announcement and had found it of sufficient interest to make certain hurried entries in a small red notebook, the which he afterwards replaced in his hip pocket. This, mind you, some thirty-five minutes ago. Peter Crumb was a patient man (though his lady friend might have evidenced otherwise). He continued, after Dobie’s departure, to gaze mournfully into the supermarket window, in the plate glass of which the whole façade of Kate’s clinic was imperfectly but well enough reflected; only when Dobie, picking up speed, had rounded the corner into City Road did he once again take out his red notebook and scribble under his earlier entry the following gnomic words,
1815 hrs – big bloke wearing a Colombo raincoat
Given the prevailing temperature of 32 degrees centigrade and the spectacle of an achingly blue and cloudless sky extended over the narrow canyon of Ludlow Road, Dobie’s choice of apparel had struck him, a trained police observer, as being slightly odd. (In fact the raincoat wasn’t Dobie’s, properly speaking, having been purloined by him from a friend’s coatrack in mistake for his own; had Crumb known Dobie better, instead of not at all, he would have guessed that in a somewhat similar fit of abstraction the Professor had donned the raincoat instead of his sun-hat, being vaguely aware that he ought to put on something before sallying forth but being at the time unable to remember exactly what.) His (Crumb’s), in any case, not to reason why; his to carry out surveillance duties according to the officially accepted praxis. Having, then, once more replaced his notebook he continued carrying them out, with no very evident show of zeal. A doctor’s clinic seemed a highly unlikely place for his alleged drug-runner to make his anticipated preliminary contact, but reports have to be completed and filed whatever the circumstances and expert tail-jobbers (as Dim Smith would have called them) are men of strictly limited concerns, the exclusion of irrelevant detail and idle speculation from their minds being a vital element in their intensive training. Dobie, whose mind was at almost all times a veritable morass of irrelevant detail and idle speculation, wondered vaguely as he wandered along why the cop outside the supermarket should be interested in buying a second-hand pram, but soon abandoned this problem for more interesting and familiar lines of purely mathematical conjecture. Policemen presumably had wives and families, like everyone else. Or some of them did, anyway.
Detective-Inspector Jackson, for one. He just hadn’t seen very much of them lately, that was all.
“What is going on here?”
— Detective-Constable Wallace wanted to know.
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“No, sir.”
That, Jackson figured, figured.
“Well, there you go, Wallace. That’s the Special Branch for you. Everything on a need-to-know basis and you best get used to it.”
“What’s that mean, sir?”
Jackson wasn’t sure.
“It means we all sit her
e till the cows come home exercising constant invigoration, that’s what it means. This is a stick-out operation, Wallace, and you’d do well not to bugger it up since we’re directly under the Chief Constable’s orders on this one.”
Jackson’s usage of American idiom tended to be every whit as shaky as his command of the English language in general. “Don’t you mean a stake-out, sir?”
“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t and either way I’m not having any lip from you, lad. You’re on surveillance duty now and that’s all there is to it.”
“Yessir. What do I survey, sir?”
Wallace and his various equipment had been installed in one of the offices above the garage, from whence an under-manager had been temporarily ejected. It wasn’t ideally suited to the present purpose, being placed not directly opposite the Codron Corp block but a few yards further down the street – only a few yards, certainly, but a sufficient distance to prevent an observer from getting a direct view into Primrose’s office and apartment. This was a pity but couldn’t be helped, as the only ideal vantage point was occupied by a stretch of wooded parkland where the presence of a round-the-clock police O.P. would have attracted notice. From his present position, however, Wallace was afforded an admirable view into the northernmost flats on the ground and first floors and in any case, as Jackson was about to explain, his chief concern would be to make a careful check on those sundry persons making their entries and exits through the front door of the block, which wasn’t a particularly onerous task. It would have been unwise to entrust Wallace with any exercise of greater complexity; he was a zealous young officer but, in Jackson’s opinion anyway, about as thick as two short planks.
“You survey that there block of flats, Wallace, and make a note of all comings and goings. Both in writing and on this here tape recorder. That’s Special Branch practice, that is. Paying special attention to that top floor flat there what I have these binoculars trained on, that being the nature of our most particular interest.”
“Ah,” Wallace said. “People get run in, you know, for that sort of thing.”
“Don’t be bloody stupid, Wallace. We’re policemen. How’s anyone going to … It’s different.”
“Yessir. Someone going in through that door right now, sir.”
“Eh? … Ah. Oh. Yes.” Jackson made a grab for the microphone link-up. “Right, then. Yes. Here we go. Young-lady-middle-twenties-dark-hair-Continental-appearance-accompanied-bald-old-buffer-correction-gentleman-grey-suit-striped-regimental-tie-entering-premises. Ahhhh … Thirteen seventeen hours … Like that, see?” This last remark being addressed to Wallace, an attentive observer. He scribbled then some totally indecipherable entry in the notebook on the table in front of him. “In and out all the time, that girl. A brisk lunchtime trade, you might say.”
“Not to worry, skip.” Wallace appeared to have brightened noticeably. “Keep a weather eye open on ’em, I will.”
“No, you won’t. It’s that top-floor geezer you have to watch out for. I told you.”
“You didn’t say as it was a geezer, sir.”
“Well, it is. Familiarise yourself with the photograph in that folder so as not to make the usual balls-up of it. That’s our charlie.”
“Don’t recognise him, sir,” Wallace said, studying it.
“That’s why I said fam … famili …” Having successfully circumnavigated the word once, Jackson was reluctant to take the risk again. “Not one of our boys he isn’t. He’s up from London and he’s running that office set-up they’ve got over there and he’s all set to do a spot of trading, too, I’ve no doubt. But the less we know about that side of it the better, believe you me. Leave all that part of it to Crumb.”
“To what?” Wallace was startled. Of sound Presbyterian stock himself, he didn’t hold with the invocation of pagan deities, and he’d never suspected Jackson of being one of them Antiquarians or whatever they called themselves. It just goes to show, he thought. You never can tell.
“Detective-Inspector Crumb. The Special Branch wallah. You may spot him arseing around in that garage over there, disguised as a mechanic. Dirty overalls and a spanner sticking out of his trousers pocket. He knows what’s going on, or at least it’s to be hoped he does. I certainly don’t.” Jackson’s stomach emitted an ominous rumble as he rose to his feet. “Keep your eyes open then, Edgar. Foxy Boxy’ll be along to relieve you for the graveyard shift.”
Wallace continued to examine the three-by-four while Jackson was donning his jacket, prior to departure. There seemed to be nothing very striking about the Subject’s appearance. Dark curly hair, triangular features, slightly cleft chin, slightly protruding ears; not a face that would have stood out in a crowd. “Won’t be easy to pick him out after dark, sir. You’ll see a bloke like this going down that street every five minutes.”
“That’s your problem,” Jackson said. “And Foxy’s. Not mine.”
The legs made their way unhesitantly down the plastic-tiled passageway before turning sharply on three-inch heels and effecting an entry though the door marked NEWS ROOM. (This was, in fact, generally regarded as a somewhat quaint anachronism, any connection between the rubbish that the Daily Snipe saw fit to print and news, as commonly understood, being tenuous in the extreme.) The legs then continued their progress between the rows of occupied and unoccupied desks, laid out in the style popularised by various American TV serials though rarely employed by newspaper offices of more serious pretensions, and paused, though briefly, before the door of a peculiar glass-framed kiosk which bore the legend,
Ms. OLIVIA BOHUN
Ms Bohun, who was indeed the proud proprietor of the legs in question, thereupon flicked open the door catch with a practised stab of the elbow and entered forthwith her own demesne. Not in fact a very large demesne, some ten feet by six in total area but furnished nonetheless with two desks, four swivel chairs, a metal filing cabinet and a computer console … not large but nonetheless a highly desirable acquisition in terms of the Daily Snipe’s complex and at times incomprehensible hierarchical schema. Ms Bohun was still unable to repress a small sigh of satisfaction whenever she stretched out those remarkable legs under the desk and surveyed, through the glass window before her, the various beaverish scurryings of all those lower echelons in the News Room proper.
It wasn’t, after all, so very long since she had been a scurrier herself, composing lurid fantasies for the Snipe’s correspondence columns and offering herself a few words of singularly fatheaded advice at the end of them. Her highly-trained word processor had subsequently amalgamated the more offensive of these jeux d’esprit into a series of (mercifully) brief pornographic novels which, by dint of a considerable sale, had enabled her to claim consideration as a serious writer – “The Sleaze Queen of Sloane Street,” her publishers enthused – or, well, as a writer, anyway. Of “erotic fiction”, as it was called nowadays. A journalist always does well to do a little prestige stuff on the side, her Managing Editor had assured her. A journalist also always does well to heed the kindly advice of her Managing Editor and Olly always had, while naturally planning in the meantime to get the old fart booted out as soon as possible so that she could take over his desk.
This aim, unfortunately, she hadn’t as yet achieved but she had swiftly risen to the giddy heights of chief columnist on the Crime Desk. From that position, attained at the age of twenty-four, she had gone on from strength to strength. Refusing seats on the directorial boards of various publishing firms (for which posts she felt herself, no doubt rightly, to be somewhat elderly) and having turned down a number of alternative offers from other tabloids she believed – again no doubt rightly – to be no real match for the Snipe in the matter of uninhibited scurrility, she had successfully widened the whole journalistic concept of sleaze to incorporate within its scope all those forms of criminality and anti-social behaviour wherein sex, preferably in its bizarrer forms, might be held, however unconvincingly, to play some kind of a role – which is to cast the net wide indeed. Starting
off, modestly enough, with child abuse cases, drug addiction and the loonier antics of junior cabinet ministers, within the space of three years she had virtually made of the Snipe’s Crime Desk her personal fiefdom – though this, too, was about to become yet another anachronism with crime, as previously understood, having become in the late 1980’s an integral part of the British Way of Life – and had effectively rejuvenated it with a brand of shrilly ineffective feminism that had gone down, as the Managing Editor had jovially observed, a treat with the paying public.
If not with other of her colleagues.
It wasn’t Olivia’s habit, nonetheless, to waste time in self-congratulation and she didn’t do so this morning. No sooner had she parked her elegantly gift-wrapped bum on the swivel chair than she was stabbing a finger at the desk buzzer, thereby summoning to her presence her Principal Research Assistant, Columbella Watkins.
Columbella (wouldn’t you have guessed it) was yet another symbol of the feminist revolution on the Street of Adventure, being a grizzled veteran of twenty-one with a snub nose upon which was perched a trendily gigantic pair of blue-tinted specs. Through these, the contemporary equivalent of the old-fashioned sub’s eyeshade, she blinked respectfully down at Ms Bohun, who was now hurling flimsies contemptuously from one filing tray into another. “Well,” Ms Bohun said. “Wotta we got?”
“Not a great deal on the file. Not lately. Some bloke ran over his wife with a motor lawn mower.”
“No, no. I meant, out of the ordinary.”
“… Zilch.”
An editorial Research Assistant in these enlightened times is invariably an experienced computer geek and hacker, and Columbella Watkins was all of that. Or those. Her task on the Crime Desk had been greatly facilitated by Ms. Bohun herself, who had earlier that year persuaded Peter Crumb to divulge to her the access code to the Special Branch’s computer centre at New Scotland Yard – this by way of what is known in the trade as a ‘sweetener’. The sweetening effect had been immediate but not, to Mr. Crumb’s regret, long-lasting. If, howsomeever, CW said that there was zilch on the file, there was zilch on the file. Which was unfortunate.