The Shy Traffickers (Professor Dobie Book 4)

by Desmond Cory

  Opening her eyes after a while, she saw that Dobie had now seated himself opposite her and was frowning down at the toecaps of his shoes. He seemed to be discomfited. “Well, that may not be so easy.”

  “I know. He could be anywhere in Cardiff. But I’ve got to—”

  “In fact that’s the one place where he almost certainly isn’t.”

  “What?”

  That made it Dobie’s turn to explain. He obscurely sensed that this might not be easy, either, and moreover that Kate mightn’t after all take as kindly as he’d hoped to the news of her husband’s unostentatious departure. She didn’t. “Dobie, I don’t … You picked him up … You mean you were there? … When it happened? … And you took him … But what were you doing there? … I never told you, I never said a word, because I specially didn’t want you to get mixed up in this and now you say … I don’t understand it.”

  “Yes,” Dobie said. “It’s all very simple, really. That’s what makes it difficult to explain. You see, there was this girl, I think the name was Mulliner or something like that—”

  But Kate’s train of thought had skittered off elsewhere and seemed, indeed, to be in danger of running right off the track. This wasn’t surprising. Dobie’s had left the rails some little time back. “… And Kevin told you someone had shot at him?”

  “He did say that, yes.”

  “But that’s not possible. It was someone else who got shot. In the upstairs flat. Look, I saw the corpse.”

  Dobie pondered. “He might have thought the shot was meant for him. He didn’t know some other guy had been shot. I mean, I didn’t know anyone had been shot.”

  “Well, no, you wouldn’t have. Unless whoever it was fell dead at your feet. But I couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away from you at the time … and from what you say I must have been even closer to Kevin … but I couldn’t see either of you because of the trees, I couldn’t see anything at all or anyway I didn’t … and then there was this bang … You didn’t hear it?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if I—”

  “It wasn’t all that loud but it sounded awful close. And I was sort of looking round to see where the noise came from and next thing I know this bloody part-time cop comes charging along down the path and collars me and grabs that bag and of course I’ve got Kevin’s fucking gun in it so he puts two and two together and makes sixteen. Then by the time they’ve taken me in to the shop and Pontin’s got hold of it, it’s all adding up to thirty-two. I mean, it looks bad, I can see that …”

  “It does, rather,” Dobie said.

  He could see that, too.

  With the return of the Scene-of-Crime squad and the arrival of the firearms expert, it was getting to look worse and worse.

  “Not much to be said,” the firearms expert said, “about the pistol you found in the desk drawer.” His name Jackson understood to be Ferguson but he might have got that wrong; the guy was an SB consultant who’d just driven in from Bristol and Jackson had never met him before. “Charter Seventy-Nine K, West German model, probably illegally imported but that’s not to the point. Or I assume it isn’t. Point three-two ACP calibre, seven-shot magazine fully loaded and probably kept that way because the magazine spring’s been slightly weakened. Otherwise it’s in sound working order but it hasn’t been fired recently and the lab tests will quite certainly confirm that.” He pushed the pistol across the demo table with a gesture suggestive of slight impatience and turned his attention to Kevin’s offensive weapon, now free of its sheath of transparent plastic.

  “Okay, you’ll be rather more familiar with this one, I imagine. Uzi pistol, of course, Nine-millimetre Parabellum, Israeli job, thousands of them floating round the Middle East. I’d say it’s seen a fair amount of use, maybe a range practice model … but it’s still perfectly effective. Magazine holds twenty rounds normally, but it’s currently carrying nineteen. Closed bolt action, floating firing pin, which means …” Turning Foxy’s discovery over and over in his fingers. “… Characteristic punch mark on the detonator cap. You’ve got that characteristic here. Unfortunately any number of other models might produce that kind of a mark so I can’t draw a definite conclusion from that. But of course … if you have the bullet as well as the cartridge case, that’ll be the clincher.”

  Jackson nodded glumly. “Pathologist’s working on it now.” Paddy Oates, though, was notoriously a slow worker. Kate would have done the necessary a great deal quicker. But …

  “Prints’ve come through,” Foxy said, sotto voce. “Deader’s on the pistol, Kate Coyle’s on the Uzi. No one else’s. I can’t make head or tail of it, sir, and that’s a fact. Unless she—”

  Unless she did it. Quite. Well, Kate was behaving very oddly. Running away like that. It was almost midnight now and they still hadn’t brought her in and Jackson was beginning to feel tired. But he could see the way things were going just as clearly as could Foxy and even without the Special Branch putting the squeeze on him, he could have perceived no way of gainsaying this kind of evidence. “Yes,” he said. “That’s all very clear. How accurate would that thing be, sir, say from fifty yards range?”

  A forlorn hope, of course. The expert seemed to consider it as such. “It’s not a target pistol or anything like it. But it does the job, it does the job. Fact is that whether you’re pushing a heavy, slow bullet like, say, a 45 ACP or a lighter projectile at a higher velocity doesn’t greatly affect the issue one way or another, except maybe with regard to the penetration factor. With an Uzi I’d hope to average out at maybe one MOA or a little over. We’re talking about optimum conditions, of course.”

  That was good to know, because otherwise Jackson wouldn’t have been at all sure what the expert was talking about. The guy was almost as bad as Professor Dobie, but then all these eggheads (in Jackson’s opinion) were brushed with much the same kind of tar. There was one thing, though, that he’d said … “About that penetration thing …”

  “Yes?”

  “Would it go through a man’s head? At that range? The bullet?”

  “It certainly might be expected to. That’s the argument of those who favour the heavy bullet … its stopping-power … but the truth of the matter is that the science of small arms terminal ballistics is really very imprecise. If the target’s wood, metal, paper, anything like that, then you can usually work out enough empirical data to suit your purpose … but a human target, that’s another matter. Too many imponderables. Anything can happen and does. No need to ask me that. Ask any coroner.”

  Jackson seized the only certain fact he could detect in all this rigmarole. “Because in this case, it didn’t.”

  “So I gather. Well, once the bullet’s been recovered, I can maybe hazard some kind of a guess as to why that happened, but until then … Was there anything unusual to be noted about the entry wound?”

  “Well … It seemed very large … But when we get the pathologist’s report—”

  “An indirect entry’s a possibility, then. Such as you would get from a ricochet. Or now and again you get a deviation. That might account for it.”

  “A deviation?”

  “… A wobble, if you like. When the point of the bullet deviates slightly from the true and the bullet twists in its flight. A fault that the rifling of the barrel is supposed to check but sometimes doesn’t. And since there’s no actual distortion of the bullet in such cases, the fault isn’t always easy to detect. But,” the expert said with undiminished cheerfulness, “we’ll just have to wait and see. Won’t we?”

  Not for very much longer. At that moment Paddy Oates, green-jacketed in the police morgue, was allowing a small metal object to drop with a tinkle from the forceps into the waiting metal tray. Paddy might be a little slow, but he got there in the end.

  Dobie, of whom the same might be and often was said, was finding himself more at ease than he’d expected in the Radyr flat. And concretely in the bedroom. Less than three years ago he’d found his then wife’s corpse there, a sufficiently tr
aumatising experience for him to have given the place a very wide berth ever since; but for the sad state of the housing market he would indeed have sold the joint and got rid of it for good and all. Okay, he was funny that way. But now that Kate was stretched out, fully clothed, on the bed in question and seemingly fast asleep, that small dark-haired ghost appeared at long last to have been banished from his mind and he was even able to ransack the airing-cupboard for a blanket and to cover Kate’s recumbent form with it while retaining throughout a state of equanimity. Not, of course, complete equanimity; but such concern as he now felt was directed towards Kate’s present vicissitudes rather than towards the past. He couldn’t help feeling that she’d been a little unwise.

  “Warm enough?” he enquired, not expecting an answer and mildly surprised when Kate emitted a confirmatory snore. Satisfied on this score, he went to the French window and opened it a few inches; the room was warm all right, but somewhat musty. Outside, a clear and windless night, the outlines of the roofs of the neighbouring blocks silhouetted against a star-sprinkled sky. It was warm enough all right. He was even sweating lightly. He left the room and made his way to the kitchen, still familiar territory. He had the idea that on one of his rare duty visits he’d observed a sealed jar of coffee in the cupboard. He had not, he was pleased to see, been mistaken. He felt like a cup of coffee. He made one.

  This, as a necessary preliminary to leaping into action. The inner man had after all to be considered on these occasions, and leaping into action … No. Not exactly Dobie’s forte. Got to find Kevin, yes, but how? … He didn’t have the faintest idea. Besides, he wasn’t sure that much would be gained by it. Kate seemed to think that if her husband could be persuaded to admit ownership of the gun and indeed of the whole contents of the bag she’d been carrying, that would solve the problem. Dobie couldn’t see it. Ownership of the gun wasn’t the point at issue. She’d had the gun when the damned thing had been fired and moreover she’d previously handled it, as he could well recall; she’d even have left her prints on the magazine. Of course that fellow in the upstairs flat, whoever he was, had to have been shot with a completely different weapon, that was obvious, and when they got around to examining the bullet that fact would surely be definitely established. He wasn’t an expert on ballistics or anything like it, but at least he knew there were methods of determining … that sort of thing. Tests and so forth. And then, presumably, Kate would be in the clear. That was why she’d been unwise, in Dobie’s opinion, to skedaddle. But there you go, she had skedaddled. So now he had to do something. Something a little more effective than tucking her up in bed. But what?

  Perhaps if he …

  No.

  … Or if he instituted inquiries. That was what the police were doing, after all. Finding out this and that. He vaguely remembered having seen an all-night garage not very far from the scene of the crime, and where you had an all-night garage you usually had an all-night caff. He could go there and show people photographs, like they did on the TV … Except that he didn’t have any photographs. A pity. He didn’t even know what the murdered man looked like. He couldn’t right now recall what anyone looked like. Except Kate, of course. Kate he remembered perfectly. But he went back to the bedroom anyway, just to remind himself.

  Yes. Kate looked nice. Especially asleep, with her mouth open. But she also looked a little bit older than usual, with the tiny creases of her forehead deepened by the shadows. It wasn’t right, Dobie thought, that she should have to put up with this sort of thing. He was feeling rather tired himself, but he had to do … well, something. He adjusted the folds of the blanket around her small shoeless feet and then went back to his car, closing the front door carefully behind him. It was like leaving the flat in the old days, really.

  Or, no. No, it wasn’t. It was very different.

  8

  She had expected things to happen all right. But she’d never expected things to happen so quickly. And now that they had, she was practically drenched in adrenalin. No question of going to bed, much less going to sleep, with a story running as white-hot as this one. Instead she prowled up and down, up and down, setting almost every other word in italics as she composed one lapidary phrase after another and jotted them down in her notebook. It was better, as she knew from past experience, to sketch out interview material well in advance, just in case the subject of the interview didn’t say the right things or didn’t show up for the interview at all … as was likely to happen in the present case. NUT SCREWS COPPERS AND BOLTS might well be an appropriate sub-head. “… An’ you ain’t got a glimmer as to where she’s gone?”

  Crumb was sitting slouched down in the armchair, his feet pushed out some four or five yards across the carpet. He wasn’t on an adrenalin high, far from it. He looked indeed to be well and truly knackered. “How would I know? Leave all that stuff to the local pinheads. They’re the ones messed up the pavement. They can dam’ well pick up their shovels and clear it up.”

  And grumpy with it, Olly thought. The pace of events no doubt had left him a little befuddled, too. Or more than a little. The truth was that no one could have supposed that the Ludlow Street hit team would go into action quite so rapidly; it went to show that there was plenty of kick in the private business sector yet, despite the recession. “… And no one seems ever to have even suspected ’em,” Crumb said. “That’s the trouble.”

  “Ain’t so surprising. Like, a University professor and a lady doctor, that’s some cover, huh? … We done real well to flush ’em out, if you ask me.”

  “Not just a doctor, either. She’s the district police pathologist, believe it or not.”

  “She’s like what?”

  “She does the post mortems round here, for gossake. Look, they’d have put her in on this one if I hadn’t stepped in. Then she’d have had him officially dead of a cardiac arrest or something like that and we’d’ve been screwed, right? … Got themselves a pretty neat set-up, those two. I mean, they got Ivor Halliday’s girl friend down as an accidental death when it’s obvious that Dobie guy bumped her. And Ivor, too, likely as not. What beats me is why no one got onto it earlier.”

  “Lotsa people think he murdered his wife.” Olly suppressed another delicious frisson which in any case would have gone unremarked by Peter Crumb, who was plainly in an abstracted, not to say unreceptive, mood.

  “Right, and that got shoved under the carpet pretty dam’ quick. No one ever got charged, far as I can see … and no one’s going to finger him this time, either, he’s got himself the goddamnedest alibi you ever heard of, with a whole sodding police surveillance team to back him up. I don’t know,” Crumb complained, “how he does it.”

  “I tell you, that’s one cool trader,” Olly said admiringly.

  “Don’t know that I’d put it that way but I don’t see how I or anyone else can stop him from walking again. Unless, of course, the lady friend talks but she won’t do that if the interrogation I just sat in on is anything to go by. She had that prat Pontin tied up in knots, if he wasn’t running round in circles before she started. Still, we got her to rights and she knows it, else why would she skip?”

  “Well, not to worry. You got the Snipe on the trail as well, or you will have come tomorrow morning, first edition.”

  “I don’t find that particularly encouraging.”

  “Well, you should do,” Olly said, advancing upon him. “The Snipe’s always prepared to back up the forces of law and order, in cases like this. Fancy a bonk?”

  “Oh Christ.” Crumb, seated as he was in the armchair, was unable to effect a retreat but he managed instead a sort of recoiling or fainting-in-coils motion, like that of a disgruntled boa constrictor. This in itself, as he knew full well, was unlikely to prove effective, since Olly in one of her sexier moods was capable of taking on anything in the way of ophidians that a herpetologist could come up with, provided she could secure a good firm hold on its ears. “I got to get back there, Olly, you know that. And when I do, I’d best be still breat
hing, see what I mean? All the boys in the shop are still waiting—”

  “So am I. I dunno why it is,” Olly said, breathing heavily, “that organised crime has this effect on me, but I guess that has to be why I … luvvit …”

  “Hey now, look, Olly … Why’n’t you save all that stuff for Dobie? Get an interview with him instead and show him what you … You might get something interesting that way. I mean … he’s a human being after all …”

  “Who says?”

  “A male human being. And with his girl friend on the run … See what I’m getting at? The human interest angle, that’s what the public wants.”

  “Yeah,” Olly said, zipping up again. “You could be on to something there. Only thing is … that geek really gives me the shivers …”

  A faint smile disturbed the otherwise smooth impassivity of her countenance. Oh he did, he really did. Just looking at him you got the collywobbles all over. And when you’re out on a story like this one was turning out to be, hey what the heck, a girl has to make some sacrifices for her art. Crumb, while she was considering the implications of his suggestion, rose hurriedly from his chair. “You can safely leave the lady friend to us, I reckon. Once we got a match on the bullet we’re home and dry. There’ll be an all-stations alert out for her by the morning and you can bank on it.”

  He would also have normally banked on ET’s phoning home before the night was out but if she did, PC Norsworthy would be as a broken reed. Whoever had vandalised the surveillance van had made sure of that. In the circumstances, it was just possible that Olly in her Mata Hari role could be of assistance to the police in their enquiries. Or if not to the police, then to him anyway.

  “A dragnet, huh?”

  “You could call it that if you wanted.”

  “I just might.” Dragnet Out For … For … And then there was the way he looked at you, those cold cold eyes fixed on you from behind those unrevealing lenses … Of course, if you didn’t know the guy was a natural-born killer, you’d have said he looked maybe more like a cocker spaniel on the make but the Snipe wasn’t interested in cocker spaniels, except on the pets page, and ipso facto she wasn’t, either. Of course the story the Snipe would be running in the morning edition might make for a little awkwardness initially. Well, perhaps they’d both have a little chuckle about that together, if she got to stay alive that long. Oh but he wouldn’t. Surely he wouldn’t …