Stealth

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘Lie still!’ a man’s voice rasped.

  I wriggled away a bit more when he spoke again, seemingly behind him to someone in the driving cab, to ask for a cigarette and turned my head slowly to look around me. This seemed to kick all my perceptions awake and my head exploded with pain, the ghastly sensation almost making me vomit. My eyes still would not focus properly but I could just make out a dark shape lying near me. I blinked a few times, inwardly raging with frustration, convinced it was Patrick and not just a pile of sacks, or whatever. It was: after a few minutes my vision had cleared a little and I recognized his gold watch on an outflung arm only a matter of inches from me. By the light of the sudden flare of a match I saw that he was completely still, perhaps unconscious.

  The van picked up speed. Where were they taking us? Had we just joined a motorway? The lights of other vehicles, behind and coming from the opposite direction, formed an almost hypnotic rhythmic pattern on the roof of the van. Perhaps I was hypnotized as I drifted off into a kind of fuzzy blackness for a while. Or perhaps it was for days. Or weeks. Or this was hell and it was for ever and ever.

  No, no, I inwardly railed, my fuddled brain producing the notion that this couldn’t be hell or Patrick would not be right here with me. But hang on, another part of me argued, he has killed quite a lot of people. Soldiers do that, stupid, I argued back, they obey orders. The Devil’s advocate came back with, you’re completely blinkered by your love for this man, he’s killed people without being ordered to. The fact that he’s a clergyman’s son doesn’t mean anything at all.

  ‘Shut up!’ I heard myself yell out loud.

  ‘You shut up!’ a man bellowed almost in my face.

  That they were going to kill us finally dawned on me.

  The van roared on and I finally did vomit, the stench of rubber, fish, diesel, cigarette smoke and sweat, never mind anything else, my undoing. This probably proved to be the deciding factor as far as our captors were concerned for it was very shortly after this that they shoved us out of the moving vehicle on to a motorway.

  My only recollections of those last few moments before oblivion were the repeated shouted requests to the driver to slow down by whoever was struggling to open the rear doors, followed by the squeal of tyres as the vehicle veered violently to the left, the driver shouting that a car was right on his tail. Then, brakes were slammed on and I received a rough manhandling. There was an appalling impact and then I was rolling over and over in the road. Headlights, more squealing tyres, wheels missing me by inches. Then, most peculiar this, the sensation of being slowly towed, feet first, along the tarmac.

  ‘The M40 can be a bloody dangerous road at night,’ a man’s voice said. ‘They were damned fools to try to cross it.’

  I reasoned from this idiotic remark – surely all motorways are dangerous to cross whatever the time of day – that there were still two of us. But he had not said anything about both being alive. My present environs, judging by the warm fug with tinges of antiseptic and less pleasant smells, was a hospital.

  I opened my eyes and fixed the speaker, who must have addressed someone who was passing as there was no one else in my line of vision, with a stare. He had two heads, both with auburn hair, and four eyes, all blue. His mouth was a long slit with a ginger fur roof, a bit like a heavily underlined sleeping cat. This all being a bit wrong, I firmly shut my eyes and then opened them again and everything resolved itself into a weedy-looking individual with a moustache and wearing some kind of green uniform.

  ‘Is my husband alive?’ I said, or rather whispered.

  ‘The bloke you were found with?’ he queried lightly. ‘No idea.’

  ‘Please find out for me,’ I begged.

  ‘Sorry, not my job.’

  ‘Then what the bloody hell are you doing here?’ I hissed at him.

  ‘I’m a porter and have just brought you to this ward with Joe, over there.’

  He strolled away.

  Just a little contrite at the way I had spoken to him, I undertook a personal assessment. Other than everything aching as though I had been trampled on by an elephant, a headache that was off the scale and a mouth suddenly feeling several sizes too large, nothing drastic seemed to have happened to me. No bandages, drips or bits of sticking plaster, no splints or Nil by Mouth notices – that I could see anyway. Tomorrow though, I had an idea I would hardly be able to move.

  I must have dozed off again at this stage – it did not occur to me that I been given painkillers – and woke up at some indefinable time later, although the ward lights were on this time so my sluggish brain deduced that it was night. It came home to me then that I had been dosed because the medication had spectacularly worn off. The first thing I wanted to do was scream but the five other patients in the little ward appeared to be asleep. Then for some reason I burst into tears, tried to sit up to find some kind of bell push to summon a nurse and knocked over a water jug on the bedside cabinet.

  Someone came, a large black woman who made soothing noises and did not mind when I clung to her sobbing, listened to my agonized babbles, prised my fingers from her arm and went away for a few minutes, an eternity, during which time I latched my hands into the sides of the mattress instead. An orderly arrived to mop up the water.

  ‘Please tell me that Patrick isn’t dead,’ I can remember loudly wailing, to my shame, when the nurse returned with salvation in the form of an injection.

  ‘I don’t know about him but I’ll find out,’ she promised, painlessly sliding in the needle.

  Darkness enveloped me.

  Daylight, bright sunshine on a wall in a different place, drip apparatus in one hand, and the other arm, lying on the coverlet, slightly swollen and with huge hatching bruises. I lay there, trying to think straight and for some reason worrying about looking utterly gormless because that was how I felt. There was a slight movement to my immediate right and I looked round, which hurt.

  ‘Hi,’ said Patrick. He was sort of crash-landed in an armchair, staring at me, looking appalled. ‘God, you’re in a mess.’

  My tears took me unawares, again, and we both leaned towards one another and hugged as best we could. We remained like this until I had to disengage to repair the damage from crying with my one usable hand, he handing me a tissue.

  ‘How badly are you hurt?’ I asked him, seeing a large graze on the side of his cheek. A shock, too, to see at least four days’ growth of stubble on his face. Had we really been here that long?

  ‘Battered and bruised but mobile, after a fashion,’ he replied. ‘You know me: Sir Bouncealot.’

  This set us both giggling, mostly, on reflection, due to the drugs.

  ‘As far as everyone at home’s concerned we’ve been in a car accident,’ Patrick continued. ‘In an unmarked vehicle. It’s not far from the truth.’

  ‘And you’ve told them?’

  He nodded. The anger was there, the need to go and find Clement Hamlyn and do him untold damage.

  ‘I’m really sorry. This was all my fault.’

  ‘Don’t think like that. We’ve got them. Arrest warrants are out for Hamlyn, the Trents, Thomas, and that pair of oafs with him – for attempted murder. Other investigations will automatically follow.’

  ‘Could you identify them then – in the dark?’

  ‘No, I played possum when they jumped me outside and lugged me into the kitchen. It wasn’t worth getting seriously beaten up with those kinds of odds – and I wanted to find out what had happened to you. But someone still kicked me in the head when he could see what he was doing.’

  ‘I take it you weren’t armed.’

  ‘No, and I should have made the time to go to my room to at least get the Glock, but I didn’t. So it’s my fault you’re hurt.’ He paused and looked away. ‘I’m thinking of resigning. I can’t carry on exposing you to this kind of danger.’

  ‘Please don’t resign,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t. It’s my choice. Anyway, I don’t have to be in on your cases.’

  ‘It
sounds very cold to say I can’t work efficiently without you but it’s true. I think you know what I mean.’

  I hoped my swollen face assumed a smile for him, really hoped.

  ‘Greenway made the decision not to call the Trent’s place a crime scene after what happened to us hoping that they’ll return home thinking they’ve got away with it. If they see their house is draped in incident tape they may well disappear for ever. He’s the sort of bloke to have funds hidden away.’

  ‘What about the children and the nanny?’

  Patrick made a visible effort to find the energy to reply. ‘By amazing fortune they heard nothing that went on that night as their rooms are in an annex. Arrangements have been made for the two little girls to be taken to their maternal grandmother in Dartmouth, Devon, and there was no reason why the nanny should not go home to Poland, her contract having ended. As far as the girl knows, her replacement had not been arranged. D’you feel like telling me what happened?’

  It was a sign of how fuddled I was that I had forgotten he did not know why I had ended up where I had. ‘Can I tell you a bit later?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll leave you to sleep.’ Unsteadily, he got to his feet.

  ‘When can we go home?’

  ‘I’m working on it. I’ve been told I can be discharged tomorrow but I’m not leaving you here on your own. They don’t seem to want the bed. Oh, and Greenway sends you his love.’

  Painfully, like a sick man in his eighties, Patrick made his way out, holding on to things to steady himself. I was weak with relief that he was not more seriously hurt, or worse, and at the same time trying to remember what I had wanted to tell him after I had paused to think about the case in Miss Smythe’s garden.

  Greenway had sent me his love?

  That same day I had to have a couple of X-rays, which, together with the results of previous blood and other tests, revealed that no serious damage had been done, either internally or to my bones. There remained the question mark of how we were going to get home, from Oxford, as neither of us was in any shape to drive. Having arranged for our car to be collected from Richmond – amazingly, it was still there – Greenway solved the problem for us by organizing a driver and, with superlative generosity, invited us to stay at his own home in north Ascot for a few days. Having checked with the medical staff as to our exact condition he told us, ‘You’ll frighten the living daylights out of your kids if you go home looking like that.’

  Also, of course, he wanted the full story straight from the horses’ mouths.

  The commander carried on being patient and gave us a further twenty-four hours in which to recuperate a little more before asking any questions. By this time the two of us were moving around unaided, albeit hobbling a bit, although Patrick was having to help me shower, which provoked more giggles. As far as the black and blue stakes went, I was the easy winner. The swelling to my face had gone down quite a lot thanks to ice packs, or rather several sessions with a bag of frozen peas.

  ‘I simply don’t know how we weren’t killed by being run over or when we hit the road,’ I remarked at one point.

  ‘Me neither. But the van braked quite hard and the driver was forced over into the slow lane by a vehicle’s headlights behind being flashed before we were chucked out so that might have helped. I have a vague recollection of grabbing you by anything I could – it might have even been your hair – and towing you on to the hard shoulder before I passed out.’

  ‘It was my feet. Who called the police?’

  ‘God knows. But someone in another vehicle must have witnessed what happened.’ We had been told that the motorway had been closed for seven hours.

  We discovered at a later date that the front seat passengers of two cars had reported ‘suspicious and large items of rubbish’ being dumped by a vehicle that braked hard in the slow lane and a lorry driver had dialled 999 as he was convinced it had been people who had been thrown out. On Greenway’s instructions the media had been given the story with the added information that there had been two fatalities but the victims’ identities would not be released until their next of kin had been informed.

  Greenway gazed at me gravely. ‘I have an idea you were very fortunate not to have been raped by Hamlyn.’

  I was, but at no stage had Hamlyn been alone with me.

  ‘They’ve all gone off the planet,’ were the commander’s next words at this debriefing in his study. He had made a brew of coffee, his wife, Erin, having gone to her French class. Otherwise she might have been sitting in with us as she used to be a detective sergeant with the Met. She is Greenway’s second wife. His teenage son by his first marriage, Benedict, was at boarding school.

  Greenway resumed with, ‘Hamlyn’s house is being watched and there’s no movement, nor at the Trent’s place.’

  ‘No one at Anthony’ Thomas’s house in Barnes either?’ Patrick queried.

  ‘Not a sign of life, according to the Met. Oh, I forgot to mention it, the van was found burnt out but with one readable number plate. It had been stolen from outside Billingsgate Fish Market that same night.’ He turned to me. ‘Care to fill us in on what happened to you? Take your time, Ingrid – no one’s blaming you for anything. At least we’ve got a nice big charge we can hang on the bastards now.’

  ‘I was supposed to be going home,’ I began ruefully. ‘Well, actually I fully intended to do that but decided, as I had the keys to Rosemary Smythe’s house, that I would go and have a quiet snoop over the wall at the Trents first, just watch for a while. I’d noticed a set of step ladders in the outhouse. But there was a light on at Miss Smythe’s. It was the Trents, and I’m still sure they were looking for something.’

  I then related the conversation I had had with them as well as I could remember it and what happened afterwards, finishing by admitting miserably, ‘It was stupid, stupid, stupid of me.’

  Greenway was not interested in my self-flagellation, staring at me intently and saying, ‘Obviously the story of checking the house and not having had time to look at a leak in the loft was a load of cobblers and I get the impression from your mentioning that Trent kept looking at the clock that he was expecting Hamlyn and co. to arrive shortly. D’you reckon he strung you along, saying he would cooperate to waste time until they turned up?’

  ‘Yes, on reflection he may well have done that.’

  ‘Yet it would appear that Sonya Trent was dressed to go out for the evening.’

  ‘She and her husband might have been going out for a meal with Hamlyn,’ I suggested. ‘And there was to be some kind of meeting first. No, that can’t be right as she had her evening bag with her. She might not have been told they were coming.’

  ‘Did she look surprised or alarmed when Hamlyn appeared?’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t notice. But she was already very upset.’

  ‘What d’you reckon they were looking for next door?’

  ‘It’s only a tentative theory.’

  ‘I really like your tentative theories.’

  ‘It’s possible Miss Smythe wrote another letter to us, which she either hadn’t finished, or not posted, or – as how would they know what she was doing? – it’s slightly more likely she might have removed something from next door, or their garden, that was hugely incriminating, as proof they were up to no good and they noticed whatever it was had gone missing.’

  ‘A weapon?’ Patrick put in. ‘A load of money? Drugs? Stolen property?’

  Greenway was getting really fired up. ‘Which Hamlyn, if he did personally kill her, was searching for when he turned the place over.’

  Patrick said, ‘But according to scenes of crime people he didn’t touch the loft, which might be just the place she’d conceal something like that for a short while.’

  ‘He might have been disturbed, say by someone at the door collecting for charity,’ I said.

  Greenway leapt for a notepad and pen and scribbled rapidly. ‘We’ll find out – ask the local vicar, he’ll know. I really like the sound of all this!’r />
  Patrick then gave his account of events finishing by apologizing for his unprofessionalism in not going armed. Greenway showed no interest in his regrets either; in his mind, I was convinced, he was already rummaging in Miss Smythe’s attic.

  ‘It’s not quite the end of my daft ideas,’ I said into the silence that followed.

  ‘Say away,’ Greenway encouraged.

  ‘I almost rang you about this when I was sitting in the garden,’ I said to Patrick. ‘If I had, mentioning that there was a light on in the house, you’d have come straight over, wouldn’t you? Another bad mistake I made.’

  ‘Most probably as the single malt was particularly good I would have strongly advised you to leave everything very much alone and go home and then called out the cops to deal with it,’ Patrick said with a big smile. ‘Hindsight’s no bloody good, ever.’

  ‘It occurred to me that this group of crooks could each supply something for the whole – for want of a better word – business,’ I resumed, knowing he was being kind. ‘Trent with his house for meetings, a safe place to store booty and so forth, Anthony Thomas for providing hit men, and Hamlyn as he knows the people they’re targeting and also his way around in criminal circles. But he’s a heavy drinker and appears to live in his plots, Trent’s pathetic and Thomas doesn’t seem all that bright. Who’s in the driving seat and organizes all this?’

  ‘That is really worth considering,’ the commander murmured.

  ‘The senior cop in a spot of bother?’ Patrick offered.

  ‘No,’ Greenway said quietly. ‘He was found hanged in his garage three days ago. There was no point in bothering you with it until now.’

  Another death, another victim.

  ‘Did he leave a note?’

  ‘He did,’ Greenway said. ‘Admitted receiving payments in cash from criminals in exchange for information – no details unfortunately – and that he couldn’t live with the shame of letting down his colleagues any longer. His wife said she knew nothing about it but wasn’t all that surprised, in her words: “Recently he’d become unrecognizable as the man I married”. He’d refused to talk about what was worrying him but they already had money problems as he’d been a compulsive gambler for years and apparently she’d been planning to divorce him over it.’