Gunrunner

by Graham Ison

  ‘And now,’ I said, ‘we will arrest Charlie Pollard.’

  ‘Oh, not you again.’ Charlie Pollard, barefooted and wearing a kaftan, answered the door. ‘We’re in the middle of having lunch,’ she protested.

  ‘Charlie Pollard,’ I said, stepping into the hall, ‘I am arresting you for the constructive possession of twenty-four automatic pistols. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if when questioned you do not mention now something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence.’

  Kate Ebdon stepped forward and laid a hand on Charlie’s arm as a token of arrest.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ screamed Charlie. ‘I haven’t got any pistols. Have you gone raving mad?’ She attempted to shake Kate’s hand away from her arm. ‘Leave me alone,’ she cried.

  ‘Inspector Ebdon will escort you to your bedroom, Miss Pollard,’ I said, ‘and you can change into something more suitable.’

  ‘Unless you want to come like that, ducky,’ said Kate, waving a hand at the woman’s kaftan.

  ‘What on earth’s happening?’ demanded Erica Foster angrily, who’d appeared in the hall to see what all the fuss was about. ‘We’re having lunch.’

  ‘I should stay out of this if you want to be a clever little sheila,’ said Kate.

  ‘I want a lawyer, and I want one now,’ shouted Charlie and, breaking away from Kate’s grasp, ran into the sitting room, presumably with the intention of making a phone call.

  ‘You’ll have every opportunity to send for a solicitor from the police station,’ I said to the woman’s retreating back.

  ‘Well, I’m not coming, and that’s that,’ exclaimed Charlie.

  Kate raced after Charlie and, seizing her in a crippling hammerlock and bar, forced her up against the wall by the door. ‘Don’t be a drongo, mate,’ she said, putting her mouth close to Charlie’s ear. ‘You’re coming with us, like it or not. But if you want to make a blue of it, I’ll get my big sergeant here to pick you up and carry you out. Not that I couldn’t do it myself, but I wouldn’t give you the pleasure.’

  Charlie Pollard twisted her head round to glance apprehensively at Dave. ‘I’ll go up and get changed,’ she said.

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Kate, and followed the woman upstairs.

  In the meantime, Dave and I sat down and waited.

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong, you know. Charlie doesn’t know anything about guns,’ said Erica.

  It was a comment that we ignored, mainly because I didn’t think it was true.

  Had Charlie Pollard not made such a fight of it, I might’ve believed her to be an innocent party in all this.

  But that apart, now that I’d arrested her, she would have to be taken to a police station, and the nearest was at Victoria Park Square in Bethnal Green. I left Dave and Nicola behind to conduct a thorough search of the Argus Road house.

  ‘We searched your store in Sastow Road earlier today,’ I began, once Kate and I were settled in the interview room with Charlie Pollard.

  ‘That place is nothing to do with me,’ said Charlie with a churlishness that attempted to disguise her apprehension.

  ‘But it’s rented in your name,’ said Kate. ‘And in it, we found the twenty-four automatic pistols that Mr Brock mentioned earlier.’

  ‘I don’t care what he says you found,’ said Charlie, ‘but I’ve never been there.’

  ‘If that’s the case, why did you rent it?’

  There was a long pause, during which time Charlie fiddled with her necklace. ‘Because Kerry asked me to,’ she said eventually.

  ‘You do know Kerry Hammond, then,’ I said. ‘When I asked you previously, you said you didn’t.’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘So I lied.’

  ‘Did Kerry say why she wanted this storeroom?’

  ‘She said she wanted to keep some old furniture there. She said she wasn’t using it any more, but didn’t want to get rid of it.’

  ‘But Kerry Hammond lived in Barnes. Didn’t it strike you as odd that she should want to keep furniture in a store that was some thirteen miles away?’

  ‘I thought it was a bit strange and I wondered why she didn’t rent it in her own name, but it was her business.’ Charlie paused. ‘But now I know. She wanted to keep guns in it.’ Suddenly the full impact of Kerry Hammond’s betrayal became apparent to Charlie Pollard. ‘That bitch bloody well framed me,’ she exclaimed furiously.

  I was inclined to agree, but kept that opinion to myself until I’d discovered why Kerry should’ve wanted to frame Charlie. ‘Did you ever visit the storeroom?’ I asked.

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘What exactly was your relationship with Kerry Hammond?’ asked Kate.

  ‘We were lovers,’ said Charlie. ‘Why? Are you interested in a little get together?’

  Kate just laughed. ‘You said “were”. Does that mean that the relationship ended before she died?’

  ‘Died?’ Charlie looked aghast. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Kerry Hammond was murdered on Christmas Eve at Heathrow Airport,’ I said.

  ‘Oh my God, how awful,’ said Charlie.

  ‘When did you split up with her?

  ‘In November. She said she’d found someone else.’

  ‘I understand that you and Kerry went to a nudist colony in Switzerland on one occasion,’ I said.

  Charlie laughed nervously. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘A conversation you had some time ago with Bernard Bligh at Kerry Trucking.’

  ‘Yes, well, it wasn’t true. I was just trying to make trouble for her because she’d ditched me. I knew she was the boss of this big company, and I thought I’d put the bubble in to get back at her. But I’m sorry I did it, now that you tell me she’s dead.’

  There was little else to be gained by questioning the woman any further, at least at present.

  ‘Very well, Miss Pollard, you’ll be bailed to report to Charing Cross police station in one month, unless we send for you earlier. Meanwhile, further enquiries will be made in connection with the weapons we found at Sastow Road.’

  ‘But I knew nothing about the guns,’ protested Charlie. ‘You’ve got to believe me. What would I want with guns? It was all to do with Kerry, the bitch.’

  SIXTEEN

  Nicholas Hammond was at home when Kate and I called at Elite Drive on the Sunday evening. He was casually dressed in rust-coloured trousers and a London Welsh rugby shirt, although I doubted he was a member of that prestigious club; he hadn’t the physique. He was holding a copy of yesterday’s Guardian; presumably he was catching up on old news in a paper I wasn’t surprised to find that he read.

  ‘Have you discovered who murdered my wife yet, Chief Inspector?’ he asked, tucking the newspaper under his arm.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said, as Hammond showed us into his sitting room. ‘But I have one or two questions to put to you.’

  ‘Fire away.’ Hammond waved a hand at the armchairs. ‘Do sit down. May I get you a drink?’ he enquired, as he took off his horn-rimmed spectacles. He made to slip them into the pocket of his shirt, only to realize that there was no pocket. He fiddled aimlessly with them before putting them on a table.

  ‘No thanks. By the way, this is Detective Inspector Ebdon,’ I said, indicating Kate.

  ‘How d’you do, Inspector?’ Hammond nodded briefly in Kate’s direction.

  ‘Ripper, thanks,’ replied Kate who, despite years in England, had yet to grow accustomed to that quintessential English greeting.

  Hammond looked surprised at Kate’s response; he obviously had as much trouble with Australian vernacular as I did.

  ‘Were you aware that your wife was conducting a lesbian affair with a woman called Charlie Pollard?’ I could see no point in pussyfooting around the reason for our visit. Anyway, I wanted to check whether Bernard Bligh had in fact told Hammond of the relationship.

  ‘Yes, I knew all about that. As a matter of fact, Bligh made a point o
f telephoning me one day to tell me about Kerry’s affair with her. I don’t know why he should have felt it necessary to inform me; spite of some sort, I suppose. I know he resented the fact that Kerry had taken control of the business when her first husband died, and I think he derived a measure of delight at knowing something he thought I wasn’t aware of. But I knew already, and the Pollard woman wasn’t the first. Before that she had a fling with someone called Erica Foster.’ Hammond was quite unembarrassed by his disclosure, and ran a hand over the arm of his chair, as if caressing it.

  That was an interesting revelation. Charlie Pollard had told us of her sexual relationship when we’d interviewed her, but had said nothing about Hammond knowing. But perhaps she didn’t know that he knew. If she was as vindictive about Kerry as she’d implied, I’d’ve thought she’d’ve told the husband rather than Bligh. That Erica hadn’t mentioned it either really came as no surprise.

  ‘Didn’t it concern you?’

  ‘That she was bisexual? Not really, no.’ Hammond spoke in an offhand sort of way. ‘To tell you the truth, Kerry and I didn’t have much of a marriage; in fact, it didn’t take long for either of us to realize that getting married had been a terrible mistake. As a consequence each of us tended to go our own way, if you take my meaning.’

  ‘Were you surprised that Kerry had left you the haulage business in her will?’ I asked.

  ‘Very surprised, yes. Mind you, we’d never thought much about dying and wills and things like that. As with most people of our age it wasn’t something that was uppermost in our minds; it was all something that was going to happen in the distant future.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about your late wife’s relationship with Charlie Pollard, Mr Hammond.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. She told me about it one day after we’d had a bit of a disagreement. “Threw it in my face,” is the common term, I think, but at the time I couldn’t’ve cared less. For some months, I’d been involved with a rather attractive girl who worked in my department at . . . well, you know where.’

  It was typical of a Security Service officer that, even though he knew that I knew where he worked, he still found himself unable to mention its title aloud.

  ‘Talking of which, Mr Hammond,’ I said, ‘was your wife aware of your clandestine occupation?’

  ‘Good heavens no!’ Hammond sounded genuinely shocked at the very idea that he should have told his wife what he really did for a living. ‘In the Service we tend not to tell even our nearest and dearest what we do.’ He shot a glance at Kate, presumably wondering if she’d seen through his euphemism. Not that he seemed to care any more.

  ‘Nearest and dearest’ was an interesting phrase for Hammond to have used; his wife might have been his nearest, but from what he’d said earlier, she was certainly not his dearest. And presumably Kerry was persuaded to invest in his failing estate agency so that she wouldn’t query where the money had come from if MI5 had injected capital. It seemed a complicated way to carry on, and a quite unnecessary one in my view.

  ‘Are you still involved with this woman from your office?’

  ‘Actually, my section head had a quiet word in my ear. He said that the Service strongly disapproved of extramarital relationships, especially with someone who worked in the same office. I’m afraid she was transferred elsewhere as a result of our rather obvious liaison. But we still meet whenever we can; most of the time she comes here, but occasionally we stay at a hotel.’

  ‘Was that the woman called Natasha Ellis you introduced us to the last time we were here?’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Hammond promptly. ‘She was going to stay the night on that occasion, but I suppose she took fright when you turned up. She probably thought it unseemly for anyone to suspect that she was sleeping with a recently widowed man. She’s very discreet. Well, she has to be; she’s married as well.’

  Hammond didn’t seem to care about revealing details of his sexual adventures or those of Kerry, but I was not altogether surprised by his openness. Over the years, I’d found that people will happily discuss their sex life with a complete stranger while jealously guarding it from friends and family.

  ‘We’ve uncovered evidence that your late wife was involved in gunrunning, Mr Hammond,’ said Kate, speaking for the first time.

  ‘What?’ Hammond’s jaw dropped. ‘You must be joking, surely?’ Kate’s statement, and the direct way in which she had made it, had clearly shocked him, and he passed a hand across his brow. The gesture was almost theatrical. ‘How the hell could she have been doing that under my very nose?’ As the spectre of terrorism entered his mind, I imagined that he was concerned that his wife had been engaged in something that was justifiably within the purview of his organization. Therefore, as a Security Service officer, he should have known about it. And secondly, he was probably contemplating the embarrassment it would cause him once that fact became known to his superiors. ‘I suppose there’s no doubt.’

  ‘None whatsoever,’ continued Kate, with more confidence than I felt. ‘Furthermore, she involved Charlie Pollard in her enterprise.’

  ‘Mind you, I’m beginning to think that Miss Pollard was unaware of this whole business,’ I commented. That was true. The more I looked into the matter of the smuggled firearms, the more I was inclined to the view that Charlie Pollard had known nothing about the real reason for Kerry persuading her to hire the self-storage facility in Bethnal Green.

  That Kerry Hammond had persuaded Charlie to rent the lock-up was an example of her deviousness. No doubt Kerry’s thinking was that if the wheel came off – and it had – it would deflect suspicion from her. And perhaps, in her innocence, Charlie had just complied with Kerry’s request without enquiring too deeply into what was, by any standards, a somewhat specious reason for wanting a store room miles away in Bethnal Green.

  ‘D’you think that someone involved in this gunrunning was responsible for Kerry’s murder, Chief Inspector?’ The question was put wearily, and Hammond suddenly sounded very depressed at this latest revelation about his dead wife.

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said cautiously. I was not about to tell him that several people were in custody in connection with the matter. I had yet to rule out the possibility that Hammond himself had had some hand in his wife’s murder, despite his apparent indifference to her infidelity. Neither was I convinced that Natasha Ellis was the attractive woman from his department that he’d mentioned; MI5 officers tend to be secretive even when there’s no need. Furthermore, it would not be first time that an outraged husband, upon discovering that his wife was a lesbian, had read into it some inadequacy on his part, and had murdered her; either from disgust or jealousy.

  ‘I think it’s more than possible,’ said Hammond. ‘In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest it’s highly likely. From what little I know of gunrunning, there are some very unsavoury people involved in it.’

  ‘Have you met Bernard Bligh?’ I asked. ‘I know you’ve spoken to him on the phone, but have ever met him in person?’

  ‘Yes, at one of the firm’s Christmas parties.’

  That, at least, confirmed what Bligh had told me, and I was beginning to suspect that he genuinely knew nothing about the firearms racket in which Kerry had been involved. But that still didn’t solve the question of the wine importation; there was something odd about that business, but right now it took second place in our investigation. Nevertheless, it prompted a thought.

  ‘Did you know that Kerry was running a wine importation business, Mr Hammond?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Hammond raised his eyebrows at this further revelation.

  ‘I don’t suppose Bligh’s too happy about Kerry leaving you the company in her will, either,’ I said.

  ‘He needn’t worry,’ said Hammond. ‘I’m going to hand it over to him as soon as we can arrange for the solicitor to prepare the paperwork. What the hell would I do with a haulage firm? Apart from which, the Service doesn’t allow me to have private interests. It’s a case of choo
sing between the two and, quite frankly, I don’t fancy giving up my job to learn a new trade at my stage of life.’

  And with that view, I was inclined to agree. Hammond certainly wasn’t cut out for the hurly-burly of the commercial world. Kate and I stood up. ‘Thank you for your candour, Mr Hammond,’ I said. ‘Sadly, it doesn’t get us very much further forward in our search for your wife’s killer.’ I paused at the front door. ‘There is one other thing. We have your late wife’s address book.’

  ‘Oh? Where did you get that from?’

  ‘It was in her luggage when we found her body at the airport,’ I said. I had no intention of telling Hammond that I’d taken it from a desk drawer in his house on Christmas Day; that, after all, had been an illegal seizure. ‘Do you know if she had another address book?’

  ‘Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. I found it when I was going through our safe the other day. We keep things like passports and birth certificates in it. D’you think it’ll be of interest?’

  ‘I’d certainly like to examine it, Mr Hammond,’ I said. ‘It’s just possible that it might contain the name of your wife’s murderer.’

  ‘Good grief,’ exclaimed Hammond, ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ He left the room, returning minutes later with a leather-bound Filofax. ‘There you are, Chief Inspector,’ he said, handing it to me.

  On Monday morning, I set Dave Poole and Colin Wilberforce the task of discovering everything they could about Charlie Pollard and Erica Foster. I’d been particularly interested in Hammond’s statement that Foster, who was now living with Pollard, had once been in a relationship with Kerry Hammond.

  ‘Kate, go out to the Dixons’ address at Hardacre Street, pick up Sonia Dixon and bring her to Westminster magistrates’ court. I want her to take a look at Michael Roberts.’

  ‘What about her children, guv?’

  ‘Take one of the women DCs. She can look after them until Sonia gets back.’

  ‘That’ll please Sheila,’ said Kate, having decided to give DC Armitage the babysitting job.

  ‘Good practice for the future,’ I said, and received a frown that implied I’d been guilty of sexism.