The End Game

by Michael Gilbert

  “I remember him well,” said Blackett. “He was Julius Mantegna’s number-one boy. What happened to him?”

  “I’m afraid he went downhill a bit.”

  “And Morgan’s going downhill after him? This office must have a demoralising effect on its assistants. Hullo! You’ve still got that.”

  It was the newspaper cutting, stapled on to the inside cover of the file. Blackett read it through carefully, his face quite expressionless. Gerald had never been entirely at ease with Blackett. He gave off the disturbing radiation of power and money, but there was more to it than that. He had known other rich and powerful men and had been quite easy in their company. He was relieved when Sam Lyon came bustling in. Blackett said, “I gather you’ve been having a good lunch.”

  “A boring lunch, followed by an equally boring meeting,” said Lyon. “Shall we go along to my room?”

  Blackett took a last look at the file on the desk, as though he was committing something to memory, and then said, “Let’s do that.”

  It was nearly an hour later when Blackett left the office. He said to the chauffeur, who was holding the door open, “I want you to do something for me, Harald. Find our friend, Mr Trombo. He should be in his shop at this hour. Tell him I’ll expect a call at five o’clock exactly. A public box, the usual procedure. You can take the car. I’ll go on by taxi.”

  When Harald had driven off, Blackett stood for a moment, unmoving. Miss Crawley, from her upper window, thought, “What a terrible man. Doesn’t he look splendid. An emperor.” She followed him with her eyes as he moved off down the street.

  At the nearest telephone kiosk, Blackett dialled a number and spoke briefly. He said, “David Rhys Morgan. He used to work for my accountants, Martindale, Mantegna and Lyon. When they sacked him he got a job with Rayhome Tours. I want you to find out all about him. No action, just information. Where he lives. Girlfriends, present and past. Other connections. Right?”

  “Right,” said the voice at the other end.

  14

  The next French trip went off so quietly, and Collings was so relaxed, that it confirmed David’s guess. The heroin traffic was confined to Italy. This was logical. He knew that base opium was manufactured in Turkey and Afghanistan and was converted in small factories in Greece and Albania, first into morphine hydrochloride and then into the infinitely more valuable diacetyl morphine, popularly known as heroin. It would cross the Adriatic in fishing boats and be sold to distributing agents in Italy. This part of the organisation was a Mafia monopoly. The end market was Great Britain, where the sale of heroin was doubling every year.

  “And here am I,” said David, “a humble link in this profitable chain, and wondering whether I can keep a wee piece of the profit for myself. Does not the Bible tell us that it is lawful to spoil the Egyptians? Yes, indeed.”

  He was under no illusions about the risk he was running, and he made his preparations with corresponding care. He was staying at the time in a small hotel in a street on the Pimlico side of Victoria Station. Half the people there were more or less permanent residents; the other half were one-night stop-overs, travelling to or from the Continent. The proprietor was a genial Barbadian with one leg.

  David’s first job on the Tuesday morning following the French trip was to get rid of the man in jeans and a mock-leather windcheater who seemed to be interested in his movements. He accomplished this by waiting in Theobald’s Road until there was only one taxi in sight, hailing it and driving off.

  He dismissed the taxi at Bond Street Underground Station, took a bus to Piccadilly and walked down St. James’s Street. At the chemist’s shop halfway down on the left he presented the formula which he had scribbled on the back of an envelope. The assistant said, “Going in for home photography, sir?”

  “Indeed, yes,” said David. “An old-fashioned camera and an old-fashioned darkroom. None of your instant snapshots.”

  At a second chemist’s shop in Pall Mall he bought a large box of antihistamine tablets (“a sovereign remedy for all catarrhal afflictions”).

  “You want to be a bit careful with those jiggers,” said the young man who sold them to him. “Lay off alcohol when you take them, and lay off driving too, if you can. They make you very sleepy.”

  “Fortunately,” said David, “I am a rigid teetotaller and I possess no car.”

  At the next shop, which dealt in fishing accessories, he bought half a dozen plastic bags of the type used for live bait. A tube of clear adhesive from a stationer’s in Lower Regent Street completed his shopping, all of which went into his capacious briefcase. This, in turn, was deposited in the Left Luggage Office at Leicester Square Underground Station. After which he had a drink, a sandwich and several more drinks at the Chandos and spent the afternoon in a cinema which advertised French Fantasy Films—the “Ultimate in Erotic Titillation.” He fell asleep halfway through the first film and woke up at six o’clock, stared blearily at the screen, then at his watch, and remembered that he had a date with Paula and was already late for it.

  Paula had to be placated with drink and food. Towards the end of the meal, in one of the smaller Soho restaurants, he said, “You remember Moule?”

  “Dennis Moule. Yes. He got the push soon after I came.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Well, he was getting ever so queer. People said it was drugs.”

  “Poor Moule. He had a brilliant mind.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “We were at school together.”

  “He wasn’t Welsh.”

  “I didn’t go to school in Wales. My father wouldn’t hear of it. He said, ‘Before we know where we are, they’ll be teaching you to speak Welsh.’ So I was packed off to an English public school. That was where I met Dennis. He was my first and best friend. We spent hours in the school workshop turning pieces of metal.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “We made them just the right size and weight to fit a slot machine in the town that sold packets of cigarettes. We used to smoke them in a lonely barn. We had to stop when the farmer turned up unexpectedly and Dennis dropped his lighted cigarette into the straw. What a bonfire that was!”

  “And you were both expelled?”

  “Nothing of the sort. We slipped out at the back without being caught. Even at that age I had a talent for avoiding trouble. Since then I’ve developed it into a fine art.”

  “You’re a terrible liar. I don’t believe you knew Dennis at all.”

  “Certainly I did. And when I met him the other day, we recognised each other immediately.”

  “You met Dennis? I thought he’d be dead by now.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He was on drugs. People on drugs don’t last long.”

  “You surprise me. He looked quite fit, I thought. A bit thin. Maybe he’d taken a cure.”

  “He didn’t seem to me the sort of man who’d have the guts to do that,” said Paula. “But you never can tell. What’s he doing these days?”

  “He’s got a job selling encyclopedias. And he asked me to do something for him. He said that letters or parcels might be coming to the Rayhome office addressed to him. I didn’t absolutely follow it. Something about not having been able to give his own address to some people. I said, if anything did turn up I was sure you’d forward it. Send it care of Poste Restante, Burnt Oak.”

  “Poste Restante, Burnt Oak,” said Paula agreeably. “Okay. There doesn’t seem to be a lot left in that bottle.”

  “The deficiency shall be remedied at once.”

  On Wednesday morning, David saw the same young man propping up a lamp post outside the hotel. He looked dispirited. David put him down as a junior and not very experienced employee from a private enquiry agency and wondered who was interesting themselves in his movements. The most likely solution was that his Rayhome bosses were checking up on how he spent the intervals between trips. It would have been a sensible precaution.

  David used the back door of the ho
tel. It seemed to be unguarded, but he was taking no chances. There was a large supermarket in Wilton Road. He went in at the front, through and out at the back, boarded the first bus that came along, left it at a traffic light and nipped quickly down a side road. No one else got off the bus and no one followed him.

  He walked to the nearest Underground station, took the Central Line to Bethnal Green, changed on to the East London Section and got out at Surrey Docks Station.

  It was a beautiful morning, and even the desolate little streets and weed-grown wasteland seemed to be warmed and cheered by the genial sun. David had an out-of-date street map, but by asking his way of a number of children, who answered him in the almost unintelligible dockland twang, he eventually located Pipe Street.

  Unlike most South London streets, where houses seem to have been poured into a mould and turned out to cool, the houses in Pipe Street had been designed with flair. One had turrets, another had battlements, a third had a chimney shaped like the funnel of a ship. Number seven had a front garden the size of a billiard table, which was so crammed with models that the front path had some difficulty in finding its way between them. There were dwarfs, gnomes, windmills, castles, lighthouses, and helter-skelters; in a place of honour, a full-scale representation of the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  David picked his way up to the door and rang the bell. The door was opened by an elderly man with a brown face and white hair. Leonard Mullion had started life in the Docks Police, had retired early and was now the park keeper in charge of the smallest of the three Rotherhithe parks. He seemed to be expecting David and waved him into the front room. On the table was a peacock, cast in iron. Mr Mullion was decorating its tail, using a dozen little pots of paint of the type used for touching up the bodywork of motorcars.

  He said, “I got the room ready when I heard you might be coming in. At the back, nice and quiet.”

  “That’s just the ticket, Len. I don’t quite know when I’ll be needing it, but I guess it might be any day now. So what I’m going to do is pay you four weeks in advance and collect a key. When I do come, I might come in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Mr Mullion. “But if you turn up after dark, mind where you put your feet. The last man who had that room—he was a crane driver—he came home pissed one night and trod on the Mad Hatter.”

  “I’m a sober citizen,” said David. “I can only remember being drunk once in my whole life.”

  “That’s half the trouble. People don’t remember it.”

  “I was fourteen at the time. My da took me on a choir outing, and I was sick over the leading tenor’s boots. That’s not a thing you forget in a hurry, I can tell you.”

  When he got back to the hotel he went in again by the back door. The watcher was still standing about in the street in front. “He’ll get picked up for loitering if he doesn’t watch it,” said David. He did a good deal of talking to himself when there was no one else to talk to.

  “He did what?” said the head of Gowers Enquiry Agency.

  “Stayed in his room all day. Never came out once.”

  “How do you know he didn’t come out the back way?”

  “Not being able to be in two places at once,” said the young man aggressively, “how would I know if he came out the back way or not?”

  His feet were hurting him.

  “Something in that,” agreed Mr Gowers. It had been presented to him as a routine job, of no particular urgency. All the same, Randall Blackett was a man who preferred results to excuses.

  “If he really stays in his room all day,” he said, “he must do most of his business on the telephone.”

  “There’s no telephone in his room. He’d have to use one in the cabinet in the front hall.”

  “All right. We’ll see if we can lean on the nig who runs the place to get us a tap on it. There’ll be an extension in his office.”

  “Then I’d better spend the day sitting in his office,” said the young man hopefully.

  “No point in that. Tomorrow’s Thursday. He’ll be off on one of his Continental coach trips. We’ll get it set up for when he comes back.”

  The routine was by now so well established that David began to feel that he had been doing it all his life. He even recognised two members of his first contingent, a silent married couple called Longmore, who had come back for a second helping.

  On this occasion, their progress was even more leisurely. A night at Amboise, two days’ sight-seeing round the castles of the Loire, a night south of Poitiers and a third stop near Grasse. As August turned to September, the weather became wet and cold, but when David suggested that they ought to lose no time getting south of the Alps, Collings disagreed.

  It was plain that he was working to a carefully timed programme

  It was not until the evening of the seventh day that they reached Florence. They were booked into a large, modern hotel overlooking the Filippo Strozzi Park. The bedrooms had in-house television sets, drink cabinets (“Rings a bell downstairs every time you open it,” said Collings sourly) and a secure-looking built-in wall cupboard. It did not look the sort of thing which could be opened by any old key. Collings observed it with pleasure. He took charge of the black bag, locked it in and pocketed the key.

  “I guess you’ll be glad to forget about it for a bit,” he said.

  David agreed. He was finding that he could read Collings like a barometer. On the first two days in Florence the pressure was low and the weather was set fair. On the afternoon of the third day the needle began to creep up. He was not a bit surprised when, that evening, Collings suggested a night out together.

  David affected to think about it. He said, “All right. As long as you behave yourself this time.”

  Considered as a social event, it was not a wild success. Collings had clearly got orders to keep them both away from the hotel until after midnight. On two occasions, when David yawned and suggested that they might go home, Collings called for more drinks.

  “If this was his technique with my predecessors,” thought David, “no wonder they smelled a rat. Perhaps he simply explained the whole plot to them and cut them in for a share of the loot. Watterson might have agreed. Maybe Moule, too. Come to think of it, that was probably what started him on the downward path.”

  By the time they finally got back to the hotel, it was one o’clock, and Collings, in spite of his surprising capacity for absorbing alcohol, was as nearly drunk as David had seen him.

  He sat down on the end of his bed and started to take his shoes off. David said, “What about a nightcap?”

  “If you touch that bloody drink cabinet, you’ll have to pay for every bloody bottle in it.”

  “I wasn’t going to touch it,” said David.

  He opened his own travelling bag and extracted a half-empty bottle of Highland Malt whisky. Collings eyed it with approval.

  “That’s better,” he said. “We’ve had enough of that Italian muck. A glass of the old and bold. Just what the doctor ordered.” He took off his coat, removed his collar and tie, loosened his belt and belched.

  David fetched two glasses from the bathroom annexe, poured a generous portion into one of them and gave it to Collings, and a rather more modest one into the other.

  He said, “Water with it?”

  “Never insult a good whisky with water,” said Collings. He took a gulp and smacked his lips. “There are times,” he said, “when I think you’re a Welsh bastard. There are other times when I love you.”

  David grinned. He said, “I hope that’s not a proposal of marriage,” and went out to put some water into his own drink. He was a minute or two doing this. When he came back Collings’s empty glass was on the floor, and Collings was flat on his back on the bed. His face was bright red and his mouth was wide open.

  David looked at him anxiously. He was making a noise like a man who was fighting for breath and trying to snore at the same time.

  “I hope I haven’t overdone it,” said David.

/>   He slipped the braces off Collings’s shoulders and pulled off his trousers. Collings in underpants, shirt and socks was not an attractive sight. David covered him with a blanket and put a pillow under his head. He then extracted the keys he wanted from Collings’s trouser pocket, opened the cupboard, took out the black bag and set to work.

  By the time he had finished, Collings had rolled on to one side, and his face was a more normal colour. Three o’clock was striking as David undressed, turned out the light and climbed into bed. Even Collings’s snores failed to keep him awake.

  “Christ almighty!” said Collings. “What the hell did we drink?”

  “A bottle of lousy grappa, half a bottle of lousier ouzo, and a glass each of my good malt whisky.”

  “It can’t have been the whisky.”

  “You’re dead right it wasn’t the whisky. I’ve been drinking it for years. It was the mixture.”

  “I’ve got a head like a bloody dynamo.” Collings peered at him with bloodshot eyes which bulged from a face with a yellowish tinge. “You’re looking too bloody cheerful.”

  “I have a very peculiar constitution,” said David. “My microcosm synthesises with alcohol. I’ll have to be getting along now. I promised to conduct a party of our clients round the Uffizi.”

  Collings said, “Ugh,” and then, “I’m going back to bed.”

  That was their last full day in Florence. David noted with interest the care which Collings now exercised over the safety of the black bag. When they finally departed, he took it out of the cupboard and carried it down himself to the coach and placed it beside the driver’s seat, where it would be under his eye. At Calais and again at Dover, when David had to open the bag to get out the tickets and the passports, he could feel Collings breathing down his neck. He almost said something about it, but refrained. The charade was now so open, and he was so much a part of it, that any comment would have been superfluous.