Return

by Brian Freemantle

  As he did so Janet said, ‘Everything’s too quick – too new – but there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure about. That’s that you’re not a monster.’ Her eyes filled and then overflowed and she sniffed and scrubbed at her nose and face with her hand. ‘Shit, I haven’t got a handkerchief!’

  ‘Too soon to be so definite,’ he said, handing her his. He’d have to remember to throw it away.

  ‘I know!’ She turned and he steeled himself to kiss her as open mouthed as she kissed him.

  He’d be glad – relieved – when he didn’t have to do that any more. ‘How was the service?’

  ‘It would have been better with you there.’

  ‘Next week.’ The congregation would be saying different, special prayers then.

  ‘You staying until next Sunday!’

  ‘Don’t you want me to?’ he said, with mock offence.

  ‘Oh yes, darling. Please, yes.’

  ‘I’d get to know your mother better. She might not accept me.’

  ‘That’s my choice. Only mine.’

  ‘I keep telling you, you might change your mind.’

  ‘Do something for me?’ asked Janet, urgently. ‘Come into the hospital this afternoon. Be with me when I tell Mother.’

  There’d be smells. Germs. ‘She might not like me seeing her in bed.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind. Please, darling! Please!’

  ‘If you want me to.’ He was becoming tired of this game. He was having to make too many concessions.

  ‘Got it!’

  There were only the two of them left in the incident room and Powell had been half dozing. He jerked awake at Amy’s triumphant shout. It was ten minutes short of the 4 a.m. deadline he’d imposed upon her finishing. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve broken the law, from a traceable Bureau location.’

  ‘What?’ he repeated, impatiently.

  ‘He’s got a bank-issued Visa card. I’ve hacked into the mainframe and got the number!’

  ‘I thought you’d checked credit card companies, already.’

  ‘It’s newly issued. Hasn’t been used. And the stupid fucking Army split Samuel Hargreaves’s testimony from the Myron Nolan archive. Gave it a separate file. Hargreaves was the British Army pharmacy asistant who sold the bad drugs to Nolan. Did an immunity deal, just like Durham. Became chief prosecution witness at the Berlin hearing.’

  ‘I’m personally going to see you get the transfer,’ declared Powell.

  Amy made no reaction to the implied praise or to the promise. She said, ‘Hargreaves didn’t get any sympathy from the tribunal. Got the hardest time from a Major Walter Hibbs. Who was a British member of the court-martial: the clinic where the kids died was in the British sector.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The operation shifted perfectly into gear, Malcolm Townsend and Henry Basildon compatibly driving, each confident of more than sufficient personal reward to be shared between them, with enough left over for their supporting inspectors, if they got it right. Which made getting it right the only consideration. Their support officers agreed. It created an absolutely committed control team.

  By eight-thirty that Sunday morning Townsend had alerted the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Basildon his Chief Constable – interrupted on the way to their respective golf clubs – and two hours later all ten Surrey detectives summoned by Basildon arrived at the conveniently centralized joint incident room at New Scotland Yard. The matching ten Yard officers were already waiting. Three were women. By then the publicity-conscious Paul Stanswell had been personally traced by Bennett to confirm without doubt that the younger of the video pictures was that of the man he’d carried with Beryl Simpkins – although he failed to recognize the older man – and been convinced that the Hackney Carriage licence for his taxi would be permanently withdrawn if he told the press. The timid hotel night manager, Keith Mason, hadn’t been able to tell Pennington if either man had been Beryl’s customer.

  At eleven the two chief superintendents stood side by side before their assembled squad to share the briefing.

  The different faces from the videos – already enlarged and pinned on display boards – had initially to be ignored: the Americans didn’t understand them and neither did they. Nor the fingerprints of a man supposedly dead. Total concentration had to be upon what they did know, which was a lot.

  They knew Harold Taylor, who sometimes used the alias Maurice Barkworth, had arrived at Heathrow airport three days before Beryl Simpkins died. They had Stanswell’s positive identification. The fingerprints and DNA from their two murder scenes matched the FBI’s irrefutable forensic evidence against Taylor for four identical killings, three of the victims involved in a military tribunal in Berlin in 1949 at which Samuel Hargreaves had been the chief prosecution witness against Myron Nolan, which almost squared the circle. The missing element was a British major, Walter Hibbs, who had served on that tribunal as a representative of the Four Power Control Commission. Their greatest advantage was having the number of a Visa credit card issued by Taylor’s Washington bank, although he was believed to be travelling with a substantial sum of money. Almost as important was Washington’s belief that the man had no idea how much they knew about him and wouldn’t suspect a British hunt.

  ‘We believe it, too,’ said Townsend, when it was his turn to speak. ‘It’s going to stay that way. Which means no-one whispers a word to any friends in Fleet Street. I’ll make a necklace from the bollocks of anyone I find leaking and that includes you, girls.’

  It wasn’t intended as a joke and no-one laughed.

  ‘A disadvantage is that today’s Sunday,’ picked up Basildon. ‘If Hibbs is still alive, we’ve got to keep him that way. But we haven’t any idea where, in all of England, he lives; if he’s still alive, even. Which hardly matters because Taylor hits relatives, too. And we can’t get into the Ministry of Defence archives until tomorrow. I don’t know what records, if any, there might be to trace Hibbs, but the Imperial War Museum, which is open, is the only idea we can come up with for today. Anyone any better suggestion?’

  ‘Hibbs’s regiment, if we know it,’ said a London detective in the front row.

  ‘We don’t,’ said Basildon, at once. ‘And don’t trust the rank, either. He’d be a regular soldier, on a military tribunal of this importance. He’d have been promoted, since 1949.’

  ‘Telephone books?’ said one of the women.

  ‘The name’s too common, without at least a region or county in England,’ said Basildon.

  Townsend said, ‘We’ve posted an immigration red alert in the name of Barkworth as well as Taylor and Myron Nolan at all the Channel ports and at all airports. We want every – and we mean every – airport in Britain, not just Heathrow and Gatwick, checked for departures in the last three days and for any reservations in the coming weeks. Ferry ports are a weakness. Britain abandoned exit passport checks last year, although Immigration is still supposed but don’t always examine those of non-EC nationals. If he gets aboard a ferry, we’ve lost him.’

  ‘Which brings us to something you’ve all got to understand,’ insisted Basildon. ‘If Harold Taylor is still in England, we’re not going to lose him. Any questions?’

  ‘What if we don’t get him?’ asked someone at the back of the room.

  ‘Rodgers, isn’t it?’ asked Basildon, recognizing one of his own men.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You don’t want to know the answer to that question, Rodgers.’

  The combined squad was the best that Townsend and Basildon knew and their support officers could recommend and they were divided into teams with matching care, usually split equally between Surrey and Metropolitan officers. Because it was their equipment and facilities, all the technical staff were Yard employees.

  As the teams dispersed to their assigned functions Basildon said, ‘It seemed as if we had a lot, until we spelled it out. Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘You think of anything else?’

  B
asildon shook his head. ‘Just a feeling that he’s out there somewhere.’

  It was the threatened Rodgers who jerked up in triumph from a desk halfway down the room, an hour later. He shouted: ‘Taylor’s booked on an American Airlines flight out of Gatwick, eleven o’clock tomorrow night!’

  ‘Yes!’ said Pennington, matching the enthusiasm. ‘We’ve got him!’

  More soberly Townsend said, ‘It also means he’s got Hibbs. Or the family.’

  The old lady was dressed and in her wheelchair beside the hospital bed, a crocheted shawl around her legs. Her head was forward on her chest but came up as they approached. She frowned when she saw Taylor.

  ‘A visitor you didn’t expect,’ Janet greeted her mother, stooping to kiss her.

  Edith Hibbs straightened further, shrugging a cardigan around her, straightening the shawl. Taylor offered the chocolates Janet had insisted he carry in and said, pointlessly, ‘For you.’

  There was a wavering smile. She said ‘Thank you’, and looked curiously at her daughter.

  Janet said, ‘We’ve come to tell you something. A surprise: a marvellous surprise.’

  ‘For us all,’ he said. He wanted to reach out to touch the scrawny throat where he was going to make the incision. The ward was extremely clean and the odour was of disinfectant but he still sat further away from the woman than Janet, on the edge of the bed. He liked the conformity of the tucked-in sheets and blanket.

  The bewildered look remained.

  Janet said, ‘We’ve come to like each other, Mummy. Like each other very much.’

  ‘I’m not going back to America as soon as I planned,’ he said, playing his part. ‘And I’ll be coming back very regularly. As often as I can.’

  The lined face opened, into a hesitant smile. ‘But that’s …’

  ‘I know,’ said Janet. ‘I can’t believe it either.’

  ‘Nor me,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re as excited about it as we are.’

  ‘I am! Of course I am. But it’s so quick. I know nothing …’

  ‘What would you like to know?’ he asked, words mentally rehearsed during the drive from the house.

  ‘Everything. I mean …?’

  In the beginning it was easier to tell the truth, because in this life he had been reborn, in Lowell, the only son of one of Massachusetts’s leading architects whose wife’s health had never properly recovered from the difficulties of his birth and who had died when he was only five. His father had never remarried although the man had screwed the housekeeper, always in the missionary position and usually on Wednesdays and Saturdays because he’d regularly watched them through the hole he’d bored from the adjoining box room, although he didn’t recount that to Edith Hibbs. His father’s supposed wartime experiences in West Sussex were all fantasy – the man hadn’t volunteered – but it was true again that as the only son he’d been left wealthy from investments and insurance and the sale of the family house: his father had been a miserly man, as well as a hypocrite. His lies resumed with the invented years studying business economics at Harvard, because he’d never bothered with university, preferring to initiate and then pursue the torture of James Durham and locate the participants in the tribunal, like Hargreaves and Hibbs himself, two whom Durham couldn’t find. Throughout, Janet listened as intently as her mother, believing she was learning for the first time about the man she stupidly believed loved her.

  ‘You can’t be sure, not yet,’ insisted the old lady.

  ‘We’re not going to rush into anything,’ promised Janet. ‘We haven’t really accepted it ourselves yet.’

  I don’t need to believe it at all, thought Taylor. ‘There’s no hurry, about anything. That’s one of the troubles about my country. It seems there are more divorces than there are marriages.’

  ‘I must get better. I will get better,’ determined the old woman, abruptly. ‘I’ve lost so much I refuse not to see my daughter be happy.’

  You’ll see a lot more than you expect a great deal sooner. He said: ‘That’s how we want it to be. How it will be, the three of us all together.’

  When they arrived, Janet had confirmed her mother’s release for the following day, arranging too at Taylor’s urging that they would personally collect her the next afternoon.

  ‘Are you always this considerate?’ asked the old woman.

  ‘Always,’ insisted Janet, before Taylor could speak.

  ‘I think you’re a very unusual young man,’ she said.

  ‘So do I,’ smiled Janet.

  You’ll see, he thought. The second night’s restaurant was one Janet had been to before, in Hoyle, and the meal – goose, with red cabbage – was better than the previous one. She lapsed into even longer silences than before on their way home, almost irritably insisting there was nothing wrong but at first he didn’t recognize it, too preoccupied with his own uncertaintly, knowing none of the lust he’d felt that morning in the garden. It was only when they got into the hallway, looking at each other again, that Janet said, ‘I’m sorry, my darling. It has happened.’

  Again she’d cheated him, he thought at once, his own doubts forgotten. She was unclean, filthy. But she’d expect him to share the same bed. ‘Me last night, you tonight. We’re doomed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

  ‘It’s no more important to me tonight than it was to you last night. One of those things. Do you hurt?’

  ‘No. I’ve always been lucky like that. We can still sleep together … if you don’t mind, that is.’

  No! he thought. ‘Of course I want to,’ he said.

  Of all the things he’d had to force himself to do since this had begun the most difficult was to reach out and hold her to him, physically to feel her leaking body against his when she got into his bed, beside him. But as he did so he realized, astonished, that he had become aroused, prodding into her and that she could feel it, too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. The bitch! He could have done it! Fucked her blind, like he’d planned.

  ‘There is a way,’ she said, quietly. ‘That is, if you want …’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like that. If it doesn’t offend you …?’

  ‘No,’ she said, sliding down beside him. ‘I like it.’

  Wesley Powell had again managed only three hours’ sleep but today there was too much adrenalin for any tiredness. Nor was he depressed by the ferocity of the personal attacks upon him in the New York and Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post’s Sunday editions, and on all three television majors, all of which, in varying ways, demanded his replacement.

  He’d fully staffed the incident room but hadn’t expected Clarence Gale to be there in the early hours of a Sunday and was surprised at the summons. He was surprised, too, at Harry Beddows already being in the Director’s office, although he supposed he shouldn’t have been. Beddows nodded, for the Director’s benefit. Powell ignored him.

  ‘The British absolutely sure about tonight’s flight?’ demanded Gale, at once.

  ‘Positive,’ said Powell. ‘I’ve spoken twice already to their guys, Townsend and Basildon. The panic is to get to Hibbs or his family, if one or all of them aren’t already dead.’

  ‘Whether they find Hibbs or not, they’re sure to get Taylor when he arrives at the airport?’

  ‘According to my last conversation with Townsend they’ve already formed a task force with the local police. He claims the airport’s sealed. The danger is they’ll overkill and Taylor will recognize something’s going on.’

  ‘And they’ll lose him?’

  ‘Townsend says it won’t happen.’

  ‘We could get there ourselves by Concorde!’ said the Director, enthusiastically.

  ‘Townsend says the British Home Secretary was talking to the Attorney-General, reminding us of jurisdiction.’

  ‘A warning?’ queried Gale.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘There’d be no risk of losing him if they let him get on the aircraft. He’d be trapped then. We coul
d meet it with a SWAT team.’

  ‘They won’t let him walk away,’ insisted Beddows, speaking for the first time. ‘He’s killed two people there: more if he’s found Hibbs. No force – no country – knowingly lets a multiple murderer go, no matter how much more certain an arrest is elsewhere.’

  ‘You see the papers and television this morning?’ Gale demanded, of Powell.

  ‘Some. Heard about the rest.’

  ‘It’s our case,’ insisted the Director. ‘The British wouldn’t have got near him without us. I’m going to talk today – now – myself to the Attorney-General. And to the Secretary of State. I take your point, Harry, about in situ jurisdication, but I want everything done to get him back, to face our courts. I want our guy …?’

  ‘Jeri Lobonski,’ supplied Powell.

  ‘I want Lobonski at the airport. As soon as the British detain Taylor we’ll make a full media release. Ensure Lipton at Public Affairs is fully briefed, ready. The emphasis is that it’s our success, understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ accepted Powell.

  ‘And I want you and the girl …?’ again he paused, inviting.

  ‘Amy Halliday.’

  ‘You and Amy Halliday given every credit. In fact, after you’ve given Lipton everything he needs tell him to come here, talk to me. You’ve done well, Wes. Damned well. People are going to know it.’

  The tight-faced Beddows wheeled upon Powell in the corridor when he considered they were far enough away from the Director’s office. ‘Motherfucker!’

  ‘Damn!’ exclaimed Powell, mockingly theatrical. ‘I forgot to mention the British developments, didn’t I? But then you were busy, fastening your zipper.’

  ‘It was a cheap shot, asshole!’

  ‘But with a purpose,’ insisted Powell. ‘What Ann tried with Beth last night wasn’t a good try, either. An even cheaper shot. So listen up, Harry, because neither of you listened well enough yesterday. You tell Ann – tell her so that she fully understands – that as long as Beth has to live in that apartment she treats her like she should: like a daughter, difficult though that seems for Ann. Beth’s sacrosanct: untouchable, in every way. I’m going to speak to Beth every day and if I so much as suspect she’s getting a hard time I’ll go ahead with the civil suit against you, personally, as well as filing an internal complaint. I’ll get you fired and I’ll enjoy doing it and you and Ann can live happily ever after on Welfare. You tell her that with my love.’