by Desmond Cory
“I ought to.”
“Yes. Well, Stainer’d’ve chewed up young Ivor before breakfast and spat him out the window, he’s got twenty Ivor Hallidays working for him up in the Smoke. And any one of them’d put a bullet through your guts soon as look at you, on Stainer’s say-so. Now you wouldn’t want to have one of those boyos giving you the good news that way, would you, Mr Dobie?”
“Oh, it won’t come to that,” Dobie said. “And if he’s indeed as influential as you say, in one way I’m relieved to hear it.”
“I don’t think you can quite have—”
“Kate should be reasonably well protected, wouldn’t you say? – if she’s got someone like that looking after her.”
Jackson stared at him. “Protected against what? Or who?”
“Obviously there’s someone around who wouldn’t at all mind slotting her. Given half a chance.”
“Slotting her? Where do you pick up these … But never mind that. Just explain to me what the hell it is you’re talking about.”
“Well, it’s a nice neat way of closing down a case, isn’t it? No point in investigating a murder if the murderer’s dead. That’s why I’ve been just a mite worried. But Stainer won’t want to do Kate any serious mischief until she’s told him what he wants to know, and of course she can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because she doesn’t know it.”
“I think,” Jackson said slowly, “I got a kind of a glimmer as to what it is you’re talking about. That drug shipment, right? She don’t know where it is, but her husband does. So …”
“Exactly.”
“That’s as may be, but the drugs are the Special Branch’s pigeon and finding Kate is mine. Because it was my shop she walked out of, don’t forget, and that after DI Crumb had signed the arrest sheet. I don’t say we Kairdiff cops are the hottest crime-busters this side of the Sunset Strip but we don’t like to be made to look that stupid. Except for the Super, of course. He’s used to it.”
Dobie said,
“You’ll need a warrant.”
“What?”
“You’ll need a search warrant. Have you got one?”
“I’ll have it within the hour.”
“Good.” Dobie looked at his wrist-watch. “An hour from now … Yes, that should be about right. But don’t go in too early or you may screw the whole thing up.”
“I’m not sure that I … At least I suppose … It’s a silly question, I dare say, but what are you planning to do in the meantime?”
“I told you,” Dobie said. “I’m going to have a chat with this Reggie Stainer.”
“You …?”
Jackson had to assume that he was serious. No one in his senses would joke about that sort of thing. No one in his senses …
H’mmmmm …
“It’s not a thing I fancy doing, Jacko. But if it’s got to be Kate or someone else, then I’m going to see that it’s someone else. Just get Kate out for me, Jacko, and tuck her away somewhere safe. I don’t know why it is, but I’m feeling just a little bit tired. It must be the heat.”
Guffin wasn’t his normal cheery self, either.
Standing alertly attentive by Stainer’s desk, he emitted so powerful an odour of disinfectant as to suggest that he’d recently passed through an American immigration screening after having escaped from Vietnam on a guano boat. This, however, Stainer knew not to be the case. “Fuck’s that smell?” Being on occasion a man of few words. “Lysol,” Guffin said.
He, also.
“What you … Corrrrrr! … Gossake open that window.”
Guffin did so.
“Where’s Merv then?”
“Right now he’s, er, indisposed, sir. I’m not feeling too good myself if it comes to that.”
It was going to be one of those days, as was obvious. “What the hell d’you mean, indisposed?”
“Well … Sort of rocky, like.”
“Ah,” Stainer said. Dangerously. “Rocky, eh? I see.”
Guffin recognised the need for specificity. “Seems he’s got a … Well, it’s shocking bad, what he’s got. And contagious. Spreads like anything. That’s why I made him burn all his clothes and sent him back to Merthyr, lots of nice fresh air there, see, up the Valleys.”
“Burn all his …?” Open-mouthed, Stainer recoiled. “You got a nerve, then, coming round here and breathing all over me when—”
“Burnt all my clothes, too. Be on the safe side.”
“I don’t find that as reassuring as you might suppose. What exactly … I mean, what does he …?”
“Well, it seems he’s got a lot of them flesh-eating microbes as you’ve read about and they’re breeding all over his … epiglottis, I think it was. I reckon they’ll soon be popping out of his tummy like that spider thing in Alien. Poor old Merv.”
“Been seeing quite a bit of him lately, have you?”
“Yes, well, we got him in to snatch that Dr Coyle for us, if you remember.”
“Of course I remember and what I want to know is—”
“Phoned down there not a half-hour ago, sir, and she hasn’t said nothing, not yet. I said to keep her on the hard stuff until this evening—”
“I think we’d better put an end to the treatment. Either she doesn’t know or she isn’t saying and in any case … we don’t want her talking to the wrong people. No. We’ll cut our losses and leave it at that.”
“You mean you want me to …?”
“Don’t have to spell it out, do I? A little bit extra in the syringe thing … That’s all it takes.”
“Yes, but—”
“Telephone.”
“What?”
“From now on, that’s what you do. Don’t come up here. Report to me on the telephone.”
“Yessir. If that’s how you want it.”
“That,” Stainer said, “is the way I want it and that’s the way it’s going to be. I don’t like the sound of those microbe things. A clean healthy onwards-striving organisation … That’s what I like. Don’t push your luck too far, Guffin.”
“Oh no, sir. Indeed I won’t.”
Always the same with locally recruited labour, Stainer thought sadly. You couldn’t rely on it. Sooner or later, of course, Dymond’s lot would be persuaded to see where their best interests lay, but in the meantime … And he had no very high opinion of Guffin’s capabilities, either. Running Primrose’s string of call-girls was just about his mark; as a rent-collector and duffer-up of obstreperous clients he no doubt made useful contribution to society. But there was no way he could be put in to run the show here, that went without saying. I’ll have, Stainer thought, to bring Bonner or maybe Carlos down from Manchester, though that’ll create problems because things are becoming difficult in Manchester, too, with certain gentlemen from South America getting ideas high above their station. Which was another excellent reason for justice, in that Coyle woman’s case, being seen to be done. You lose authority in one place, you lose it all over.
He got to his feet and took himself on another brief walking tour round Primrose’s office. The Scene-of-Crime contingent, who had vacated it earlier that afternoon, had made a good enough job of tidying up, though of course the wall-to-wall carpeting would need to be replaced; that large dark stain over by the window was definitely unsightly. A good deal of the firm’s money had been invested here already; the electronic sweeps, the soundproofing, the security alarms … Primrose had been an exceptionally cautious man. Which just went to show. The police would probably have carted away a fair amount of business documentation in their little plastic bags for forensic examination, but they wouldn’t have discovered any of those other little plastic bags used by Primrose’s couriers in the execution of their trade. And if the forensic people should by some remote chance come up with anything of interest, Stainer would be immediately informed of this by that very pleasant Special Branch officer, Detective-Inspector Crumb. On the whole he saw no reason why a fresh start should not be made here to quite
substantial profit and no reason why he himself should not return to London forthwith. He reached for the telephone with the intention of informing London of this decision.
London being, in the present instance, his brother Fred.
“… Looks like we’ve lost Primrose’s contact, is the only trouble. Seems pretty clear he got the frighteners and scarpered, so he’ll probably be looking for another buyer. Have to keep our eyes and ears open, that’s all. And I don’t see any point in hanging on to the woman any longer. If she was planning to meet up with her old man somewhere, stands to reason he won’t be keeping the date now. He’s too leery for that. So that’s it, then. We’ll get Carlos Aguileera down to watch the shop for the time being and if Bonner doesn’t like it, he can lump it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
If George Stainer was a man of few words, his brother was a man of fewer. The telephone clicked in Stainer’s ear and at almost the same moment someone knocked on the outer door of the office. A diffident tap, almost timid. Stainer had none of Primrose’s inhibitions about receiving unexpected visitors and anyway, it was probably Guffin. He hung up the telephone and went through into Guffin’s sanctum to open the door.
The man standing outside the door was a fairly hefty fair-haired cove of rumpled appearance; he looked, in fact, as though he’d been dragged at high speed through a waitabit clump after a courageous but misguided attempt to lasso a rhinoceros, his hair standing up at varied angles like quills upon a fretful porpentine. His glasses, moreover, appeared to have slipped down to the end of his nose, so that he peered towards Stainer over them rather than through them. This was nonetheless Dobie. Stainer recognised him almost at once. “Dr Dobie, I presume?”
“Er … yes. We haven’t met before, have we?”
“I think not. But your photograph appeared in this morning’s paper. Hardly a flattering likeness, but recognisable. Well … you’d better come in.”
The front page of that morning’s Snipe was indeed openly displayed on top of Primrose’s desk, where Stainer had left it. He picked it up and showed it to Dobie, smiling whimsically. “You’ll have seen it yourself, of course.”
“Er … Yes.” Dobie saw no harm in admitting it.
“All greatly exaggerated, no doubt. Like Lindbergh’s obituary.” He wasn’t at all perturbed by Dobie’s arrival. Unexpected visitors, in his experience, invariably wanted something, and the fact that they wanted something made them to that extent vulnerable. He didn’t suppose that Dobie would prove to be an exception. He waved Dobie towards a comfortably cushioned chair, which his visitor accepted.
“Perhaps not so much exaggerated as prejudiced,” Dobie said cautiously, as though anxious to start off on the right foot. “Capella got all the background stuff from a highly prejudiced source, you see.”
“Capella?” Another of those Mafia mobsters, Stainer supposed. They were everywhere these days. “Well, you could always consider suing him for defamation. I did that once myself to financial benefit. An out-of-court settlement, you understand.”
Dobie ran a startled eye over the headlines once again. “I’m not so sure that it could be claimed to be defamatory. I mean, it’s all so imprecise, it doesn’t mean anything to call someone a “death doctor”, unless you take it to be an allusion to her work as a forensic pathologist … which hardly gives grounds for a libel suit, surely. And where it is precise, it’s factually correct. “Evades arrest … Well, she did that, certainly.”
“And in fact is still doing it.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“While your own role in the matter is left conveniently obscure. As indeed is that of her husband, which is just as well. In fact …” Stainer tightened his already pursed-up lips in signal of disapproval. “I rather fancy we’ll have seen the last of Kevin Coyle for some little while. A pity, as there are certain matters I’d like to discuss with him. It’s a pity that people in my line of business have on occasion to hobnob with some highly undesirable characters. That may be one of the reasons why we tend towards the Conservative party’s view of things. The Tories often find themselves in just that same predicament.”
“I only met him once,” Dobie said, “and I wasn’t greatly drawn. Nor was he to me. But that I suppose is understandable.”
“He has a certain reputation, you know, in the Middle East and France. Indeed if he had shot my old friend Rodney Primrose I wouldn’t have been at all surprised, except in that I can’t see any reason why he should have done so. I’ve even been considering the possibility that he might have put his wife up to do it, he being a man of considerable powers of persuasion, but there again … Why should he have?” Stainer shook his head dismissively, prior to rubbing the palm of his hand against the back of it in apparent puzzlement. “The whole matter’s beyond me, I’m afraid, and perhaps best left to the police to disentangle. In my view, anyway.”
“I’m a little puzzled by it, too.” Dobie’s gaze, Stainer saw, had become oddly distant. Focused, you might have said, on far distant horizons, though that was maybe a side-effect of his weirdly dislodged glasses. “There’s the size of the entry wound, for one thing. And the lack of penetration for another. It’s really very perplexing.”
“I understand that the police believe that the bullet ricochetted. There’s certainly quite a deep scar on the wall just by the window.” He didn’t look towards it, and neither did Dobie. “And if so, that certainly shows a considerable lack of professionalism on your friend Dr Coyle’s part. It had only to be through sheer luck she hit Rodney Primrose at all. Bad luck, of course, from his point of view. But—”
“But a keyhole would have much the same effect.”
“A keyhole?”
“Yes.”
“But how could she conceivably have shot him through a keyhole?” Stainer shook his head again, this time in total bewilderment. “Being herself outside the building at the time … I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re getting at, not at all.”
“I didn’t mean through a keyhole. I was suggesting that the bullet might have been a keyhole. Or a tumbler, as I believe they’re also called.”
No. He could see that Stainer wasn’t with him. Fortunately, he was used to people being without him when he attempted even a perfectly straightforward explanation of anything. As now. In such cases, you just had to persevere till the penny dropped. “It’s when the bullet doesn’t go in a straight line, you see. It tumbles over in flight and strikes the target at an angle. Something like this …” Picking up from the desk Stainer’s extremely expensive gold Mont Blanc fountain pen.
“No, no, okay, at an angle, right,” Stainer said in great haste, rescuing the valuable object from Dobie’s nervous clutch. “But what’s that got to do with … I mean, why would a bullet do that? Bullets are supposed to go straight, aren’t they?”
“No. That’s what you might call a popular fallacy. In fact they never go straight. But they do normally retain their imparted axis of rotation, in other words their spin. That’s what the rifling in a gun barrel is for. It helps the bullet to go straighter than it otherwise would.”
“That much I knew already.” Stainer’s marmoreal gaze had suddenly developed a certain watchfulness, almost a wariness. He was after all in practical matters an uncommonly shrewd man, and it had dawned upon him that Dobie had something of importance to relate. At the moment, of course, it sounded like so much gibberish, but … “All right. Can we now come to the point?”
Dobie blinked at him. “But that is the point.”
“What is?”
“The bullet tumbled because it was fired from a gun that had a very, very short barrel and no rifling. If it had gone any distance, it’d have missed the target by a mile. Or anyway …” Dobie, ever a stickler for accuracy. “By quite a few feet.”
“And a whatchamaycallum, an Uzi … Doesn’t an Uzi have a rifled barrel?”
“Of course. But what I’m saying is that Primrose wasn’t shot with an Uzi.”
“�
�� Professor?”
“Yes?”
“One of us has to have a screw loose and I don’t think it’s me. He was shot with an Uzi, I’ve seen the police ballistics reports and—”
“Well, I say he wasn’t.”
“You … What was he shot with, then? By your reckoning? A crossbow, maybe?”
Dobie was impervious to sarcasm. Stainer should have realised that. “I’ve already told you. A gun with a very, very short barrel and no rifling. Ah!” Dobie clicked his fingers. An untoward recollection had just occurred to him. “Perhaps you were thinking of the Ancient Mariner. But he wasn’t shot with a crossbow, either, as I recall it. No. Quite the contrary. There was this albatross, you see, and he had to have it hung round his neck—”
“I’m beginning,” Stainer said, “to know how he must have felt.” It wasn’t just the things that Dobie was saying. It was his manner as well. Stainer found it profoundly irritating. These eggheads had a way of getting him quite annoyed. “So okay. Not a crossbow, then. We’ll rule the crossbow right out.”
Dobie took a handkerchief from his pocket and sounded a resonant trumpet-note upon it. In the course of his researches into the matter, he thereafter explained, he had discovered that the well-known arms firm of Smith and Wesson manufactured what they called a mini-gun, a pistol with a three-and-a-half inch barrel, expressly designed to fit into a lady’s handbag from whence it might be swiftly withdrawn to discomfit potential rapists. Or, indeed, just about anybody else, since it accommodated a husky nine-millimetre cartridge. As did the Uzi. That was, in Dobie’s view, the important thing.
“Why?”
“Because the bullet would have been used twice, you see.”
Bullets, to the best of Stainer’s knowledge, were never used twice. Amongst those of his more intimate acquaintance, once was invariably enough. He said so, a little testily. Dobie continued to maintain, however, that a bullet could be used twice, just as a fountain may use the same water over and over again. In the present instance, the bullet would have been fired initially into a sandbag, so that it might be easily recovered and its shape not be too badly distorted, then reloaded into a fresh cartridge-case and that was that. “It’s not difficult if you have a cartridge-loader. In fact the people who go in for that sort of thing often like to load their own cartridges instead of buying them ready-made. Hunting freaks and so on. And of course … once you’ve reloaded the bullet like that, it can be fired again from any other gun of the same calibre. But if it were fired for the first time from an Uzi, then a ballistics check would show that it had the rifling marks off the Uzi and not those of the second gun. A three-and-a-half inch barrel would be too short to leave any rifling marks at all.”