The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19)

by Philip McCutchan

  “One of six,” I said unnecessarily, “around the world. Bonn, Brussels, Paris, Santiago, Washington.” They had been more recent disappearances and they had all been high-ranking diplomats. 6D2 had been called in to help – not me personally, I’d been on another assignment, but it had been a very big thing and among some of the others I’d known Neskuke personally. He’d been a good type, steadfast in the line of duty – I’d never believed the defection theory. British through and through, Eton and Oxford, a short service commission in a Guards regiment before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Old county family with traditions of service.

  “You’re positive it’s Neskuke?” Max asked.

  “I’m positive.”

  “What a place for him to turn up! Have you any theories, Shaw?”

  “None.”

  “Why the 6D2 brand, for God’s sake? He never had any connections with us!”

  “Not directly, no.”

  Max nodded. There was always a kind of interflow, a communication with the FO and other departments of state. 6D2 could rub off onto diplomats of many nationalities. I said, “There is something else, though, obviously relevant even if at the moment I can’t see the wood for the trees.” I told him about the face in the porthole, presumably a crew member. I said that my search in the computerised gadgetry had given me his identity, which against the backdrop of the Zonguldak was surprising enough. I passed it to Max.

  “Louis Leclerc?” he repeated.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Not offhand. Fill me in, Shaw.” Max looked at his wrist-watch, a heavy gold affair that I happened to know had been given to him by the wife of a titled brigadier whose life he had saved as a young officer in the closing stages of the Second World War. “Fast. I’ve an appointment.” He didn’t elaborate.

  I said, “Louis Leclerc was the man behind the scandal in the French Ministry of the Interior, a few years ago – ”

  “Ah, yes. Bribes, and a sexual matter. I’ve got there, Shaw. Leclerc’s involvement got him a life sentence. He escaped. Since when he’s managed to vanish pretty successfully.”

  “Until now, yes. He’d sworn to kill me. I’d been the one who’d nailed him. So far as I know, he never in fact tried.”

  Max smiled. “But now you don’t feel too secure?”

  “No,” I said. “But that’s not my main worry. The point is, what’s the connection now?”

  “You’d better find out, Shaw. Have you any theories?”

  “None, at the moment. Leclerc was a member of the French National Front,” I added.

  “So?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t see any political involvement, I admit, but it could be relevant.” Politics, in fact, were almost always relevant to 6D2’s operations so far as I was concerned.

  Max, eyes screwed up in thought, said, “Wasn’t he once a naval officer – Leclerc?”

  “Yes,” I said. Leclerc had left the French Navy for a career in the civil service. That meant he wouldn’t have found it too difficult, after his escape from prison, to pose as a seaman and get a berth as such. Handy enough for him when he wanted to move on – presumably under a new identity, but he didn’t seem to have bothered about any disguises, any plastic surgery. Leclerc had been a clever man but a greedy one: he’d taken bribes and he’d offered them and the sex scandal had been particularly nasty, involving a wide cross-section of Paris life, very respectable citizens who’d paid Leclerc handsomely for services rendered, for various delights provided in the utmost secrecy. Then Leclerc had gone in for blackmail in the interest of getting fellow members of the National Front into some key posts in the various ministries.

  After that there had been the murders. There had been men and women that Louis Leclerc had found it better to dispose of before they talked. He’d done it in various ways, all of them nasty. Shootings in the back in the night alleys of Paris had been about the cleanest. The others had involved incarceration in blocks of cement, chains and big iron balls attached to legs prior to being cast into the Seine, poisoning and so on. Not only in France: a British cabinet minister, a frequent visitor incognito to Paris, had been knifed and virtually disemboweled on the pavement outside his Chelsea house. Just, it was presumed, to make Leclerc’s point that there was no safety for those who didn’t play things his way. It was also a lesson to the Establishment: don’t go anywhere without informing the minders. That cabinet minister had died regretting the fact that he’d had no armed plain-clothes man in attendance.

  Max asked, “What’s your next move, Shaw?”

  I said, “A request. I’d like the Zonguldak held in Shoreham if it becomes necessary. Not at once – I don’t want to alert Leclerc.”

  Max nodded. “She’s due to leave the day after tomorrow -right?”

  “Right,” I said. “For Cherbourg.” I paused. I’d had a sudden idea. “Change of mind,” I said. “Cancel the stop order. Instead, I’ll meet the ship in Cherbourg.”

  Max raised his eyebrows. “Meet?”

  “Not meet exactly. Just be there, just be around to watch.”

  “Your use of English, my dear fellow, is not always very good. And in the meantime?”

  “Back to Sussex,” I said. That was all; I didn’t mention the girl, the young doctor once at Worthing Hospital. I happened to know that after her GP training was complete, she’d joined a practice in Worthing as a junior partner. She might be useful as cover; also, she was good-looking and we’d got on well. I didn’t say any of this because Max and I had never agreed about the mix of women and duty. Felicity Mandrake, who’d so often worked with me in the past, was a case in point: Max always suspected my motives in asking for Miss Mandrake to be allocated to me. In point of fact he hadn’t been far out, though neither of us had ever allowed the personal relationship to get in the way of the operation in hand. But this time Miss Mandrake wasn’t available: she was on an assignment in Mexico, working with the FBI on something to do with the drug traffic over the frontier.

  *

  “Dr Askew?” I asked on the phone from a call-box outside the main post office in Worthing.

  “I’m sorry, Dr Askew is in surgery. Do you wish to make an appointment?” The voice was full of asperity: I’d got a dragon, a doctor’s iron shield. “There’s nothing until – ”

  “No appointment,” I said. “What time will Dr Askew be free?”

  “Really, I’ve no idea. Is this call of a personal nature?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The doctor’s surgery is not the place for personal calls,” the dragon said, and I had the phone banged down on me. I shrugged and drove from where I’d parked to the surgery itself, got out and looked at the hours on the plate outside. I looked at my watch: the surgery would be finished in half an hour and so I went back to my car and sat and waited. In the event I waited a full hour while patients, mostly geriatric – Amanda Askew hadn’t after all made any escape from that – came and went again, clutching prescription forms and on the whole looking worse on coming out than going in. As Dr Askew walked towards a car, I got out of mine.

  “Hullo,” I said with a big smile.

  She stopped dead, staring. “You!” she said.

  “Me, Mandy.”

  She said, “Oh, darling/” and took my hand. The darling didn’t mean much, not necessarily. She’d called me that right from the start, as if she were an actress – as a matter of fact she’d had a number of actor friends from the Connaught and the Brighton theatres. She asked what brought me to Worthing.

  “You,” I said.

  She didn’t believe that. “Come off it. There’s nothing like the truth.”

  “Or such of it as can be told.” When I’d last known her, I’d let her guess my job and she’d come up with journalist and I’d settled for that. It gave me quite a lot of scope one way and another. Now, she said, “You’re on a Fleet Street job. I do read the papers.”

  “Which one in particular, Mandy?”

  “I’m s
peaking of the Brighton Argus right now. Body aboard a ship in Shoreham. I see a connection, darling.”

  “You do, do you. Happen to have a copy?”

  “Yes, in the car.”

  “Get it,” I said. I’d talked with Max about putting a muzzle on the press but it was already too late. Some reporter who meant to go places had got onto the story. Apart from not releasing any word about the 6D2 brand mark, the police had seen no reason not to co-operate. As I’d reflected earlier, bodies are not that unusual and the official view had been that to try to hush this one up could lead to undue speculation that wouldn’t be good for security: in any case, you can’t keep much from the press and you certainly can’t stop them speculating. It was there, and it was accurate so far as it went. Quite a story: there was something ghoulish about a body in a ship’s funnel, fumed to death. They speculated as to why the man hadn’t got out as soon as the first of the diesel fumes rose up around him. Maybe he’d been injured when climbing in – I knew he hadn’t – maybe the fumes had acted too fast, maybe he’d not thought them dangerous to life and hadn’t wanted to show himself while the ship was still inside the port of departure, and so he’d taken a risk. Maybe to get out was harder than to get in: getting in would have involved only a simple slide down to the ledge, but the funnel being smooth would have precluded the man getting a grip for an upward climb, and the stowaway had been a short man. As for me, I reckoned Cherbourg was in fact more likely than Malta as a departure port for poor Neskuke. Coming across the Bay of Biscay from the Gibraltar Strait the ship would almost certainly have rolled, and Neskuke, unless he’d been firmly wedged, could have fallen farther down and ended up somewhere even nastier.

  I handed the newspaper back to Mandy Askew. “Interested?” I asked.

  She said she was. She also said she knew the Shoreham police surgeon. I asked, “Are you on whatever it’s called, duty?”

  “Call. Not tonight. Why?”

  “There’s a nice little pub overlooking the docks. Big windows. A drink and a pub meal?”

  She said she’d like that. We drove, singly, back to a small house in West Worthing. She had just bought it on mortgage, she said when we got there. She garaged her car and transferred to mine and we drove out to Shoreham. In the pub I bought drinks and ordered supper and we sat and looked out over the docks. I could see the Zonguldak under yard-arm groups, big lamps lighting her decks like day as her cargo of containers was lifted aboard by the cranes, a lot of overtime being worked. I saw men on deck but no sign of Captain Kubat whose bulk would have been recognisable across the water. No doubt he would be otherwise engaged. I saw a police car making along the dock wall and stopping alongside the ship: an interruption for the good captain, and more scowls from his fat wife. Fifteen minutes later, as Mandy and I chatted about times past, the police car left. It was moving very fast, dangerously so in the dock area. It was easy enough to go over the side and drowning apart, conger-eels lived in the water of Shoreham Docks, big ones. There were warning signs about their presence.

  Mandy noticed the speed, too. “Something happening?” she asked.

  “Could be.”

  She gave me a hard look. “Shouldn’t you be out there, journalisting?”

  “I’m not a reporter.”

  “Editor?”

  “Correspondent.”

  “Oh, well.” She dropped it. She wasn’t anxious for me to rush off with poised notebook in any case. As far as I was concerned there was no panic. The police guard would be effective enough, I knew from the superintendent that no one was being allowed ashore other than Captain Kubat when he needed to leave the ship for official purposes. The cop car could have been hurrying for any number of reasons, another call in for another death, say, or just because the driver and his mate wanted to get home for a meal. But I took more notice when, through the opened window, I heard a cop car which might not have been the same one haring down the road past the pub, its siren blasting out into the evening air, in a devil of a hurry.

  I caught Mandy’s eyes. “Don’t let me stop you,” she said.

  “I won’t.” We’d just about finished our meal – it was little more than a snack. I hustled the girl out to my car and we drove for the police station. I left Mandy sitting there and hurried inside. I asked the desk sergeant if there was any connection between the siren and the Zonguldak.

  He recognised me from my earlier visit. “Yes, sir, there is. A man’s jumped ship.”

  I swore. “In spite of the police guard?”

  “Similar things have happened before, sir, in the docks. Don’t forget a ship has two sides.”

  A man could lower himself into the water and swim for safety; the conger-eels, like the police, couldn’t be everywhere at once. Alternatively, containers and cargo slings left ships, and it’s not too hard to secrete oneself away. I didn’t criticise the police; I asked if the name of the ship-jumper was known. The superintendent came along at that point and said the man was named Alphonse Freyard.

  “Alias Louis Leclerc,” I said sourly. “Or I reckon so.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man I caught a glimpse of this morning. A man who once threatened to kill me if he got the chance.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “It is, isn’t it? For me. Look, Superintendent, do you know how long he’s been on the loose?”

  “No, I don’t. He was missed only when the crew of my mobile went aboard – ”

  “For what purpose was that?”

  “Precisely to have the crew mustered. Just as a precaution. Are you certain that the ship-jumper’s the one you saw, Commander?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t be, can I? But it’s a hundred pounds to a penny in my view. If you haven’t already got a full description of him, I can give you one from personal knowledge some years ago. Also, a run-down of his life story, which isn’t nice. I trust all the stops are being pulled out, Superintendent. He’s got to be arrested soonest possible.”

  I put through a call to Focal House. Max wasn’t there; I asked for the word to get to him fast, wherever he was. Then I went back to my car, where Mandy was waiting. She asked what was happening. I told her briefly. “I’m going aboard the ship,” I said. “You wait in the station. I may be a long time – I can’t say. If I’m too long, ask the superintendent for – ”

  “I’ll come with you,” she interrupted. “I’m interested. It’s not often I get a chance of seeing a journalist in action.”

  “All right,” I said. I was in a hurry and I didn’t expect danger, certainly not in the vicinity of the ship that my man, if it was him, had deserted. I got on the move fast, breaking the speed limit, back to the dock entrance, still taking it fast after entry, just like that police mobile’s earlier exit. I had got to a particularly nasty turn and had slowed a little so as to take it, as I thought, safely when shooting started, what sounded like a pump-action gun. My windscreen shattered and a cry came from Mandy, and I felt a graze across my shoulder. The car went out of control, slewed right round, hit a high brick wall, my door burst open and I fell out. The car went sideways, still moving fast, and went over into the water.

  I did what I could. I dived in. There was no more gunfire, though I hardly registered this at the time. Had I thought then, I would have realised that the gunman had fired from the top of the wall and as soon as he’d seen the result of his shooting he’d have dropped down the other side and made his getaway, thinking I’d had it – he wouldn’t have lingered long enough to see me fall out from the burst door.

  I didn’t find the car quickly. When I did my lungs were making things impossible and I was forced to the surface for a gulp of air.

  Then down again. I got my body, with difficulty, through the wrecked door. Mandy was slumped in the passenger seat, her clothing lifting gently in the water that I disturbed. There was a bullet wound in her forehead, another in her throat. She was almost certainly dead but she just might not be. I fought to free her from her seat belt, then
was again forced to the surface. When I broke through I found the emergency services already there, or anyway the police part of them. The superintendent was there himself. He shouted at me, but I went down again. I was joined by two policemen who’d just stripped off jackets and boots and gone in. None of us had any luck, and we surfaced to find an ambulance had arrived plus the police diving section, frogmen pulling on their wet suits. They went in and came up again. I heard one of them report to the superintendent.

  “No good, sir. We’ll have to wait till the vehicle’s lifted out. There’s conger-eels gathering.”

  The superintendent came across to me. He said, “That wasn’t very clever, Commander Shaw.”

  “No need to stress the point,” I said. I was assisted into one of the mobiles – there were three of them present by this time – and driven to police HQ where they gave me strong coffee from the canteen and rustled up some dry clothing. I tried not to think about Mandy, what she would look like now. She’d been young and beautiful, at the threshold of her career, one of the caring professions, a loss to more than her family and me. Of course, I blamed myself: I should have been firm. I simply hadn’t seen any danger. I hadn’t even been sure that the deserter was Louis Leclerc. Many men desert from ships, for any of a hundred reasons. Now, of course, I was sure but it had still to be confirmed. When I’d drunk the coffee I asked for transport back to the Zonguldak. I went aboard and demanded Captain Kubat. In his cabin I showed him a photograph of Louis Leclerc that the backroom boys had given me in Focal House.

  I asked, “Do you confirm that this is the man calling himself Alphonse Freyard, Captain?”

  He took the photograph in pudgy hands, gave me a quick glance, and frowned. “No, no. No, this is not Freyard.”

  “Not the deserter?” I asked blankly.

  “No, no.”

  “Who is he, then?”

  Captain Kubat tapped the photograph. “This man is another of my deckhands, another Frenchman, Jean Bois, who has not deserted.”

  My mind was in a whirl. “He was present at the muster recently?”