by Desmond Cory
“… Columbella?”
“Hi,” Columbella said.
“Oh hi. Listen, have you got that address?”
“Right here. Twelve Ludlow Road. It’s a clinic.”
“It’s a what?”
“A doctor’s clinic. Name of Coyle. A lady doctor. Your feller rents a room on top of it, far as I can make out.”
“Kind of an unusual set-up, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, that’s what our informant says he is. Unusual. Not to say a weirdo. What would you expect?”
“Just that. I suppose.”
“Seems to be kind of a loner otherwise. Got some kind of a job at the local university, he’s a professor like what I said, but Howell says right now he’s not too sure—”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, I know the type. Hip pocket brigade, right? I’ll betcha.”
“Either way,” Columbella said, “I’m sure you can cope.”
Olly pursed up her lips and made furtive kissing noises into the carphone. “Don’t come the acid with me, darling, I’m only putting a straightforward business proposition before him after all, and not of the kind you’re accustomed to. No harm in asking a man for a little confidential information now, is there?”
“Not so long as he comes across with it.”
“He just better had,” Olly said, replacing the carphone and staring glumly at the trees and sheep and weird green things flicking past her at a rate of knots. Newport coming up. Despite her show of assurance she was now entertaining certain doubts about this whole enterprise. What in her News Room cubbyhole had appeared to be an agreeably adventurous excursion seemed very much less so out here in the open and she had to suppose that all this alien greenery now surrounding her went on all the way into Wales. Most people find London oppressive when sweltering under a heat wave. Not Olly. She was wishing herself back there already.
But this Dobie story wouldn’t write itself, no indeed, and her lips began to move again as she silently began to rehearse to herself suitably intriguing opening leads.
GUN FOR HIRE …
sort of thing, though she had a vague idea that someone else had thought of that one already. Then she’d have to bring the DEATH CLINIC angle into the picture somehow, all kinds of things went on in clinics these days with organ transplants and things like that and odd bits of people’s anatomy popped into freezers. It would be nice, she thought, if Peter Crumb’s organ could be popped into a freezer for a spell but that was wishful thinking. She didn’t go in for wishful thinking as a rule and since he’d undoubtedly be waiting for her in Cardiff she’d probably do well to have the business-as-usual sticker prominently displayed on her jumper when she arrived. Something for nothing had never been her motto and it certainly wasn’t Peter Crumb’s, either.
Nor in all probability would it be this Professor Dobie’s slogan. But, Olly thought, I’m not asking him for information. I’m proposing to pay for it. Imagine, though. Negotiating with a real live steely-eyed professional killer … A little shiver of anticipatory excitement ran up Olly’s abruptly-tautened spine and she closed her eyes briefly with a sigh of contentment. Not a very wise thing to do, perhaps, when driving at eighty miles an hour along a crowded motorway, but she opened them again in time to avoid slamming into the back of a conservatively plodding family saloon filled to bursting-point with horrorstruck children and whizzed past it unperturbed, raising the old two fingers in casual salute as she did so.
Olly greatly enjoyed living dangerously …
Not so Primrose.
He wasn’t a steely-eyed professional killer. Nothing of the kind. He was a business man. A company director. He had cards in his Gucci pigskin wallet that said so. He had an office to prove it. Several, in fact. And a small factory outside Newbury that produced coloured plasticine and modelling clay for use in primary schools throughout the South-Western region. Codron Corp rented space in carefully selected warehouses in the area to accommodate its products, alongside neatly-packed consignments of good quality Middle Eastern heroin. Codron Corp was doing all right, despite the recession. Primrose was a business man working for a pre-eminently well-run organisation within the fast-growth sector. Primrose was making lots and lots of money.
That was what Primrose greatly enjoyed.
Undeniably, though, the game had its dangerous side. As with Olly’s tabloids, you had to keep things moving to stay alive; you couldn’t stand still for more than a moment. You had, in a word, to expand. Which nowadays meant moving in on someone else’s territory. You didn’t make takeover bids in Primrose’s line of business, you just took over. If you could. You needed brawn as well as brain. Muscle, in fact. That was why Primrose worked with the Stainers. They had muscle and everybody knew it.
It made things easier.
You could even say that things had gone pretty well these past few months, with the big wheel Dai Dymond doing time and Ivor Halliday tucked comfortably away in a nice cosy cemetery somewhere off the Caerphilly Road. Primrose had made his contacts and three or four of the hard boys from Bayswater had made a few friendly calls and most of the taffies had gone along with the new distribution plan and an added five per cent on the payroll. All but a few old lemon-squeezers who’d quietly dropped out of the reckoning and taken early retirement. Yes … But you had to keep pedalling. That was the snag. The more outlets you made for yourself, the more sources you needed. And the less time you had available to work the supply routes. Primrose stared at the wall calendar beside his office desk and drummed with his bony knuckles on the desk’s smooth teak surface. Problems, problems …
Besides an office in Cardiff, he had a secretary. His secretary’s name was Nicholas Guffin. A karate expert, among other things. Nicholas Guffin came into the office while Primrose was still staring at the calendar, clutching a small plastic bag in his karate-hardened fingers. This he tossed casually onto the desk. “Report just came in,” Guffin said.
“Yair?”
“From the analyst.”
“Ah yair?”
“Good quality stuff, he says.”
“Yair, well, he would say that. Wooden he?”
Strange Higginsian secrets lurked behind Primrose’s refined Bayswater accent. Shades of Newcastle, of Bruggagem, of Bristol, even a suspicion of his native Slovakia. Since leaving it, he’d been around. Seen a bit of life, you might have said. And he had, of course, changed his name. More than once, in fact. He had started out, so to speak, as plain old Rodno Przymesl and anyone would want to change a name like that.
“I reckon old Sharky knows his onions”
“As may be,” Primrose said. “S’fifty fuggen kilos we’re talking ’bout. An’ a geezer as I don’t know setting up the deal. Makes me nervous, that does.”
“His refs are all right. Called up Damascus, dincha? Okay, so we know the sources, what more d’you want?”
“Makes me nervous,” Primrose said again.
His eyes remained fixed on the wall calendar, which portrayed, as Guffin had previously noted, a young lady, possibly of Scandinavian ancestry, attempting to push her considerable bosom into, or possibly out of, a see-through blouse. A somewhat pointless activity, one might have thought, since there didn’t seem to be any conceivable way in which she could subsequently have buttoned it. “Reminds me,” Primrose said. “That Melanie downstairs. Give her a ring see can she fix me up say some time after lunch. Say three o’clock, maybe. Likes to help me out, Melanie does, when I get to feel a bit nervous. The friendly sort, see.”
Guffin, personally, preferred the unfriendly sort but then there was no accounting for tastes. “You got that other bird coming round at four o’clock, mind. The one with the country club outlet.”
“Should maybe be feeling better by then. Anyway, she can wait.”
“And you can’t.”
“Ezzackly.”
Guffin’s expression of disapproval deepened. Scowling deeply, he departed.
Primrose sucked noisily on his protuberant lower lip for a fe
w seconds, then pushed his chair back and walked across the room to stand by the window. Breaths of warm summer air were wafted up to him from the street outside, tainted with scents of petrol and of motor oil from the garage opposite where neatly-aligned rows of QUALITY USED CARS sparkled invitingly in the sun. Primrose surveyed them with no particular disfavour; his own unassuming Ferrari had lost much of its sales value since some misguided person had put a bomb in it but he had no grudge against car sales tradesmen as such, who, despite the recession, hadn’t yet adopted such extreme methods, as far as he knew, and had hence to be accounted innocent of the outrage. In fact the Finlays people didn’t seem to be doing at all badly; they had a nice out-of-town location on a popular motorway feeder in a pleasantly countrified setting and the cafeteria place had quite a few customers sitting outside around red plastic tables, enjoying the sun. A bit of activity, in short, a bit of coming and going. Primrose approved of this, though unable for the nonce to do much coming and going himself. Bombs are not the only means by which one can dispose of a despised antagonist; there are guns, knives, things like that. He considered that he had every right these days to feel nervous and to take due precautions. So he did.
Primrose’s small eyes wandered once more across to the garage courtyard, where a man wearing a blue baseball cap and blue coveralls was peering mournfully under the lifted bonnet of a dilapidated Vauxhall. An honest British workman about his business, no doubt. But an unfortunate reminder. Mechanics, now … He sucked on his lower lip again. There were rumours that Dymond was bringing in a mechanic. Credible rumours, in that this was probably what Primrose would have done himself, in the circumstances. He had done that himself, in the past. But then he had the Stainers behind him and they had the resources. Where was Dymond going to get a mechanic from? … There aren’t many about these days. Real pros, that is, as opposed to the red-haze merchants you couldn’t trust further than a midget can heave a grand piano. McIndoe … in semi-retirement, soaking up the sun on the Costa del Sol. Besides, Mac was strictly political, or so they said. Starshine and Mikhail Drobny, even further away somewhere in Israel. Demirel … Funny, when you thought about it, how many of them were of Central European origin. Like himself. And Demirel, when you thought about it further, wasn’t available. Demirel was dead. And from then on, you were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Maybe that was what Dymond was doing. You don’t have too much choice, when you’re in quod.
Nor did Primrose, if it came to that. He didn’t like living dangerously, but he had to. His was a precarious profession. He didn’t like living the life of a recluse, either, but at times it pays to take special precautions. He had his commodious bedroom-and-living-room suite here on the top floor right next to his office, he had his secretary-cum-bodyguard in the anteroom to vet and check out his visitors, the access door to the top floor was reliably security-locked and the walls of the entire block were soundproofed and regularly bug-swept to ensure the confidentiality of his many private discussions. He cooked his own meals in his well-appointed kitchenette and his more specifically carnal needs were catered for by one or other or (on special occasions) two of the admirably-stacked young ladies who nominally rented the four downstairs flats from the Codron Corp but who in fact paid a high percentage of their very substantial earnings over to the Corp’s local representative, i.e. Rod the Sod himself. In his line of business, such precautions as these were considered to be in no way excessive. Unfortunately you may take all the proper precautions and find that it isn’t enough. Demirel had taken the proper precautions.
Demirel was dead.
The trouble was, the pressure. Always the pressure. It’d be nice, Primrose thought, to be able to cancel this coming deal. Then he could spend an enjoyable afternoon with Melanie and relax in the evening, watching the TV. But the Stainers wouldn’t like it if he did, they wouldn’t like it at all. There were fifty kilos of top-quality shit at stake, waiting for an immediate buyer. If he didn’t get it, someone else would. And then the Stainers would be very annoyed. That’s business for you. That’s life. Supply and demand.
And it’s tough at the top … where as yet he wasn’t. But one day he would be.
“… Can’t say as I’m greatly enamoured of the way you’ve handled this, old dear,” Dim Smith said. “The old blunder wagon’s been rolling again, by the look of it. T’ck t’ck t’ck.”
Crumb was in no wise prepared to concede the point. “I can’t imagine why you should think that, sir. All stations are go as far as we’re concerned.”
“Well, that’s fine so long as your charlie hasn’t already blasted off. Surveillance was the order, son. Surveillance was the ticket. Nothing was said, as I recall, about sending out warning signals to all and sundry. Mission could be aborted already, for all we know. And that’d be unfortunate, most unfortunate.”
“We’ve no reason to suppose that anything like that has happened.”
“Haven’t we now? … Well, look at it this way. Here’s your charlie been lugging round what you describe as a handbag—”
“A handbag?” Jackson cried in ringing tones, regrettably evocative of Dame Edith Evans attempting to upstage everyone else and inevitably succeeding. “That’s a bit of a mis-moaner, sir, if I may say so. More like a travel bag, I would say. Certainly not a handbag. Something altogether more capacitatious.”
“As you will, as you will. A capacitatious travel bag, then, that for all we know is stuffed right up to the zippers with boogie juice. Now your charlie being no doubt the cautious type, he’s gone and left same in safe keeping, which is just what he’d naturally do if he had any reason to think he’d been rumbled. Leaves it with his wife, if you’re to be believed, which I’m sure you are. And what happens next? … Don’t tell me. Along comes Detective-Inspector Crumb, the pride of the Specials, evincing polite professional interest in the said property. Questioning your charlie’s wife, for God’s sake. No way that I can see the lady isn’t going to tip him off. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Or does it? … Don’t all speak at once …”
“We didn’t know she was his wife. Not at the time. And in fact she isn’t, except in a technical sense. She’s living with some other feller, university professor or something like that, and has been for years, apparently. So what we thought at the time—”
“Can’t see that what you thought affects the issue, chum, it’s what you did that’s got me worried. All she has to do now is pass the word on to hubby—”
“In fact,” Jackson said, “it doesn’t seem she’s proposing to do that. Not on the evidence of that tape Norsworthy’s got. You’ve seen the transcript.”
“Yes, I have. Not too sure what we ought to make of it, though. That address he appears to have given her—”
“Primrose’s office,” Crumb said. “We’ve had it staked out these past four days.”
“Yes. Maybe that’s the RV site for the handover, as we always suspected. So it looks as if he’s having her bring the stuff in, in which case … he’s being really cautious. But of course—”
“Then he’s not handling fifty kilos,” Jackson said, “or anything like it. Not that it matters. It’ll still be a good bust, even if she’s only carrying the samples. Only thing is …”
“Go on. Spit it out.”
“She’ll be an accessory, won’t she? … Look, this is Kate Coyle we’re talking about. I’ve known her for years. She’s one of our pathologists, damn it. We can’t let her go walking into a drug bust just like that.”
This wasn’t the only thing that was bothering Jackson. He was worried about that telephone transcript. It had to have come from a bug, that was obvious, and bugging telephones was illegal. He knew, and had also been told (by Pontin) that the Special Branch had their own ways of doing things, but those same things could sometimes spring back and catch you a nasty one right across the chops. Which was something worth bearing in mind.
“I don’t see anything to worry about there,” Crumb said. “She’ll be an innocent accessory,
won’t she? Always assuming she doesn’t know what’s inside that bag when she takes it in.”
“It might be difficult for her to prove that, mightn’t it? It could sink her, this business, professionally. Even being called as a witness … It’d damage her standing, if you see what I mean.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“We could … take her into our confidence, like. Explain the situation and … She’s a responsible professional woman, after all.”
“But if she doesn’t take the bag in, then bang goes our bust. No, no,” Crumb said. “I’m against it.”
“She could still take it in … but as an undercover operative. With police protection. Then she wouldn’t have to give evidence at all.”
“She can’t be made to give evidence, anyway. The guy’s her husband.”
“Yes, but—”
“And I’ll tell you something else. Women are funny. I mean, if she knew we were planning to grab her husband’s collar … can you guarantee she wouldn’t tip him off? See what I mean?”
“Yes.” There was a pause, during which Jackson scratched the tip of his nose thoughtfully. It was true there was a difficulty here. Kate was loyal to a fault. “Dunno that I could go so far as to guarantee it, no.”
“We’ve still got no guarantee,” Dim Smith said, “that she won’t tip him the wink anyway. As I said before. But it looks as if we just have to take a chance on that and spring the bust anyway. If we miss, we miss. It’s happened before.”
After Jackson had returned to the stake-out room Dim Smith crossed his legs elegantly and said,
“Bit of a moral problem, then, to his way of thinking.”
“Not to mine,” Peter Crumb said.