Injury Time

by Catherine Aird

  It, decided Sloan, then and there, wouldn’t do.

  No one was going to get away with that in his manor.

  Linthwaite turned to Sloan with a guileless expression and said, ‘You’ll want me to come with you now, Inspector, won’t you?’

  ‘We will.’

  He fingered his open shirt and pointed to a door on the far side of the room. ‘I’ll just put a tie on and get a few things together. I won’t keep you waiting.’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan flatly. ‘You’ll come with us just as you are.’

  ‘No?’ He looked surprised and a little pained. ‘I thought, Inspector, you could wear your own clothes on remand.’

  ‘You can wear whatever you like,’ said Sloan, adding meaningfully, ‘as you did this afternoon. But you’re not going to change your clothes until we’ve had a proper look at them.’

  Linthwaite started to sweat a little.

  ‘You murdered Carstairs,’ said Sloan, ‘because he’d discovered something all right, but it wasn’t the secret of memory. He surprised you in the clothes of your choice, didn’t he? Forget to lock your door, did you?’

  The man sank into a chair.

  ‘And he threatened you with exposure as a transvestite unless you paid him Danegeld.’ Nobody, thought Sloan, had summed up blackmail better than Rudyard Kipling.

  Linthwaite, in spite of his size, seemed suddenly diminished.

  ‘You were taken by surprise and killed him in a fit of unpremeditated anger,’ said Sloan inexorably, ‘and then before you could quite change back into your other clothes Professor Maple arrived and you had to send for us and cook up this cock-and-bull story about a scientific discovery.’ Sloan pointed to Linthwaite’s neck, where he had made a discovery on his own part. ‘You put a jacket on but you hadn’t time to put on a shirt …’

  Linthwaite put a hand to his throat.

  ‘What you are wearing,’ said Sloan, ‘buttons up the wrong way round. I think we shall find that that’s not a shirt at all but a woman’s dress you’ve got on under there …’

  SLIGHT OF HAND

  The premises of the Mordaunt Club were situated in one of the quieter streets of London’s district of St James’s. It was thus easily accessible from the higher reaches of Whitehall (in both senses), the Admiralty, the headquarters of certain famous regiments and New—or rather New, New—Scotland Yard.

  Membership of the club was open to all those of a similar cast of mind to Sir John Mordaunt, fifth baronet (1650–1721), except for active politicians of any—or, indeed, of no—party. This is because Sir John, although an assiduous Member of Parliament himself in his day, had promised to vote in the House according to the promptings of reason and good sense; in the ‘publick good’ rather than with selfish ‘interest’ as it had been put in the early day equivalent of an election address.

  Henry Tyler was wont to drift in to have luncheon at the Mordaunt Club at least once a week. Whilst it was perfectly possible to reserve a table there when hosting guests or even when dining unaccompanied it was the happy custom of the club that members themselves, if lunching alone, joined those eating at the long refectory table at the far end of the panelled dining-room.

  This was how it was that Henry Tyler came to be sitting next to Commander Alan Howkins, a senior policeman with much on his mind. It was a Monday morning and they were so far alone at the communal luncheon table.

  ‘Good weekend?’ enquired Henry Tyler politely. He was a little stiff himself from an excess of gardening at his home in the country and he was glad that the week ahead back at his desk at the Foreign Office promised to be less taxing—physically, at least.

  The Commander shook his head. ‘Rather disappointing, actually.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Can’t expect to win them all, I suppose,’ said the policeman.

  ‘True,’ observed Henry, projecting the proper sympathy due from a member of one of Her Majesty’s Offices of State to another. Lessons about not always winning had been learned at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office a long time ago and had been regularly reinforced by international events over the years.

  ‘But I don’t like being beaten,’ said Howkins with unexpected savagery.

  ‘Who does?’ said Tyler. Not that the Foreign Office ever admitted to being beaten—something which, quite typically there, they saw as completely different from ‘not winning’. What they did when it happened—for instance, in 1776—was to use another expression altogether. The Foreign Office was great on euphemisms.

  ‘Outwitted,’ said Howkins, tearing a bread roll apart with unnecessary vigour. ‘That’s what we were.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tyler. So Scotland Yard, then, didn’t go in for euphemisms …

  ‘Lost Mr Big,’ said Howkins briefly, turning to the hovering waiter. ‘I’ll have the whitebait, please, and the beef. Under-done.’

  ‘Tough,’ said Henry Tyler. ‘No, no,’ he said hastily to the waiter, ‘I wasn’t talking about the beef. I’ll have that, too.’

  (The letters between Sir John Mordaunt and his wife had frequently dwelt on game, brawn, pickled bacon and such-like country fare and a tradition of good cooking was maintained at the club.)

  ‘I suppose it’s always the big fish that get away,’ resumed the policeman, more philosophically.

  ‘No,’ said Henry kindly, ‘but you miss them more than the little ones when you do lose them and you remember them for longer.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Better luck next time, anyway,’ said the Foreign Office man.

  ‘That’s what the Assistant Commissioner said after the first time,’ said Howkins.

  ‘Like that, is it?’

  ‘And after the second time,’ murmured the Commander into his drink, ‘he said he hoped it would be a case of third time lucky.’

  ‘And it wasn’t?’ divined Henry Tyler without too much difficulty.

  ‘Slipped through our fingers again on Saturday night.’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘Oh, it can’t be luck,’ said Howkins at once. ‘He must have a system. The only trouble is that we can’t break it.’

  ‘His luck may run out, though.’ Henry Tyler felt he ought to make a pitch for Lady Luck, who had come to the aid of the Foreign Office more often than he liked to think about.

  ‘I’d rather ours held,’ said Howkins, demonstrating that policemen could play with words too. ‘I shouldn’t think we’ll get many more chances with this fellow.’

  ‘Slippery customer, eh?’

  ‘Let me tell you this much, Tyler …’

  Henry bent his head forward attentively although there were no guests within earshot. The Mordaunt Club members themselves had an unbroken history of total discretion which was implicit and not enjoined upon them. It was in the tradition of the seventeenth-century country gentleman after whom the club was named: and was one of the many points which figured in the thinking—if not in the Minutes—of the Committee during its deliberations on the ticklish question of the admission of women to the club.

  The Commander said, ‘It’s not every day we get a chance of picking up the real brains behind a drug racket right here in the middle of London, I can tell you.’

  ‘If criminals have got brains, then they use them,’ agreed Henry Tyler.

  ‘Let alone three chances,’ said the Commander, lapsing back into melancholy.

  It wasn’t a question of brains that was making the question of the admission of women to the Mordaunt Club so tricky. Diehards were insisting that the question was academic (since women per se were seldom of a sufficiently Mordaunt cast of mind to qualify for membership) and the views of Sir John Mordaunt himself on the subject unknown (but not too difficult to conjecture).

  ‘Ah,’ said Henry Tyler, himself cast in the mould of Dreier’s celebrated dictum of a diplomat being a man who thought twice before saying nothing. ‘Shall you get a fourth chance, do you think?’

  Howkins still looked depressed. ‘Well, so far we’v
e always known where to find him the weekend after a shipment comes in, which is something that doesn’t happen in every case.’

  ‘And do you always know when that is going to be?’ enquired Tyler pertinently.

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s no trouble. Thanks to your people, actually. The local Brit-bod in Lasserta usually tips us off in good time.’

  Something in Henry’s expression caused the Commander to rephrase this. ‘Sorry,’ he grinned. ‘That’s short-speak for Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Sheikhdom of Lasserta.’

  ‘Anthony Heber Hibbs?’

  ‘That’s him. He’s got a pretty good intelligence system going out there where they make the stuff so that’s no problem.’

  ‘So what is?’ Identifying the problem was always important. Even if nothing could be done about it. That was part of the working credo in Henry’s department.

  ‘Evidence, lack of and need for,’ said Howkins cogently. ‘It’s got to be stone-cold, straight-up and irrefutable evidence before we blow our cover or we’ve lost everything and then we’ll never catch him.’

  ‘You want him red-handed,’ said Henry, falling back on an earlier phrasing. It was one which Sir John Mordaunt would have understood.

  ‘We do.’ The Commander started on his whitebait. ‘And we want him rather badly.’

  ‘I can see you don’t want just small fry either,’ agreed Henry Tyler, who had opted for hors-d’oeuvres rather than whitebait. ‘Small fry aren’t worth losing your set-up for.’

  ‘Let’s face it,’ said Howkins. ‘Our cover can’t be all that good or someone wouldn’t be giving him the nod every time we close in but for what it’s worth we’d like to try to keep our cover and nobble whoever’s doing the Sister Ann act.’

  ‘What Sherlock Holmes would have called a three-pipe problem …’

  ‘More like half a dozen hookahs,’ said Howkins, getting pessimistic again. ‘I’ve been racking my brains all weekend.’

  ‘He—your chappie—can’t be too worried about walking into a trap, then, can he?’

  The Foreign Office man didn’t get a direct answer. ‘Have you ever heard, Tyler, of a famous restaurant in Manlow Street?’

  ‘“Mother Carey’s Chickens”? Oh, yes …’

  ‘Well, we established first of all that our man has regular meetings at “Les Poulets de la Mère Carey” there the week after a shipment of heroin comes in from the Sheikhdom.’

  ‘Then he is doing well, your drugs baron,’ said Henry. ‘It must be one of the most expensive eating places in Town.’

  ‘That’s what our auditors say, too,’ said Howkins. ‘They’ve even suggested we weren’t nobbling our suspect too soon because we liked eating there too.’

  ‘Men without souls, auditors,’ observed Henry.

  ‘If I could only work out how he knows when to walk out of Mère Carey’s empty-handed and when not to, then I’d be a happy man.’

  ‘Because you could then catch him dealing,’ agreed Henry.

  ‘Which he would only do if he didn’t know we were there.’ The Commander sounded injured. ‘It’s not only that. It’s the cocking a snook aspect that gets me, too.’

  ‘He’s doing a Queen Anne’s Fan on you,’ said Henry Tyler calmly.

  The Commander looked mystified. ‘I know she’s dead, Tyler, but …’

  ‘Putting your thumb to your nose with your fingers spread out is pure Queen Anne.’

  ‘Queen Anne?’

  ‘None other. Her reign was a time of much politicking and snoot-cocking, as our revered namesake Mordaunt found out.’

  ‘Really? Well, as far as I’m concerned the farther police are from politics the better.’

  ‘There weren’t any police then.’

  ‘No heroin either, though,’ said the Commander, still licking his wounds.

  The arrival of an ashet of rare beef temporarily put paid to conversation.

  ‘This man of yours …’ resumed Henry presently.

  ‘Sharp as a barrel-load of monkeys and the mentality of a buccaneer …’

  Yes, it would be the latter that rankled, thought Tyler to himself.

  ‘Carrying on his business in one of the best restaurants in London before our very eyes.’

  ‘Which means he has a high-class clientele.’

  ‘That’s part of the problem,’ said the Commander. ‘Before we know where we are, Tyler, we’ll be getting questions asked in the House. And you don’t need me to tell you where that can lead to.’

  ‘No.’ Howkins was talking to a man to whom the phrase struck home hard. Tyler glanced up at a portrait of Sir John hanging on the wall. Politics had been simpler in Mordaunt’s day. In the words of his biographer, ‘As a country squire, John must automatically have supported the one Established Church, agricultural rather than commercial interests, and peace rather than war.’ Parliamentary life wasn’t as uncomplicated as that any more.

  ‘We just can’t fathom who tips Chummie the wink,’ said Howkins, pushing his plate away.

  ‘The head waiter?’ suggested Henry, sometimes—but not always—a believer in going straight to the top.

  ‘Believe you me, Caesar’s wife is nothing in comparison,’ responded Howkins. ‘Hippolyte Chatout’s been with Mother Carey’s man and boy, and as far as we can make out he’s as honest as they come. Well,’ the Commander amended this thoughtfully, ‘as far as head waiters come.’

  ‘One of the other waiters, then …’

  Howkins sighed. ‘We’ve had a couple of those fancy microphones under the tablecloth of our laddie’s reserved table and never once picked up anything in the way of a warning.’

  ‘A message in the menu?’

  ‘Not that our cipher people can find,’ said the policeman wearily.

  ‘A message in a bottle, then?’ suggested Tyler. ‘By the way, will you have a spot more yourself?’

  The Commander shook his head. ‘Thank you, no. The sommelier’s French, too, and as clean as a whistle.’

  Henry Tyler, though a Foreign Office man through and through, let that pass. ‘He could have brought wine a when wine b had been ordered,’ he said.

  ‘We know it isn’t him,’ said Howkins, ‘because our chappie got away twice while the sommelier was off sick so he’s in the clear anyway.’

  ‘The hat-check girl?’

  ‘Our villain’s always already on his way before he gets near Monique.’

  ‘Madame herself?’

  Commander Howkins looked properly shocked. ‘Madame Therese de l’Aubigny-Febeaux feels very strongly the pleasures of the table to be superior to those of any drugs and in any case she insists that she has first of all her reputation to think of.’

  ‘Quite so,’ murmured Henry.

  ‘She has been most accommodating,’ said Howkins warmly, ‘and very co-operative with the Force …’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Henry, whose whole training was to prefer ‘entente’ to ‘détente’.

  ‘Most accommodating—except, naturally, in the matter of expenses.’

  ‘Naturally,’ agreed Henry Tyler, who in his day, had served time on the Paris desk in the Foreign Office. ‘Well, Howkins, then in my view that only leaves us, too, going the way of all flesh …’

  ‘What was that, Tyler?’

  ‘The way of all flesh,’ quoted Henry in a manner very similar to Sir John Mordaunt, ‘is to the kitchen.’

  ‘Pudding, gentlemen?’ The waiter at the Mordaunt had appeared at their elbows. The terms ‘sweet’ and ‘dessert’ were not used at the club. ‘There’s plum duff, raisin sponge and a very good blackberry and apple tart …’

  As soon as important decisions in this matter had been taken, the Commander returned to worry at his own private bone. ‘We’ve been over the kitchen staff, of course, but we just can’t see how they could get a message to Chummie anyway. They never go into the restaurant.’

  ‘But they know when you’re there?’

  The Commander nodded as he leaned a littl
e to one side to allow a plate of raisin sponge to be placed before him. ‘Bound to. It’s the only place from which we can watch him without him seeing us. We have a couple of our people dining at the next table to him, too, but the kitchen’s a line of escape we just have to keep covered.’

  Henry Tyler’s choice of pudding was an old-fashioned plum duff. ‘Tell me about the food at Mother Carey’s …’

  ‘Very good, unless you go in for the fancy stuff. You know what I mean—half an ounce of fish in a pretty sauce, five shavings of carrot, three peas and a tomato all looking more like a painting than a proper meal.’

  ‘Cuisine nouvelle.’ His dining companion, no lightweight, nodded sadly.

  ‘And what you might call “afters” is a slurp of syrup with three strawberries on a plate the size of your hand.’ The Commander was tucking into his raisin sponge with purpose.

  ‘So your man has a watcher in the kitchen, then?’

  ‘Seems like it,’ said the Commander, ‘but we can’t arrest the lot and anyway we need to know how the message is got across to catch our quarry. It’s him we want, don’t forget, and before he sees the writing on the wall.’

  ‘And who’s doing the cooking out there at the back?’

  ‘Four chefs, three assistants, a couple of vegetable cooks and a slip of a girl who does the sweet course and nothing else.’

  Henry considered his plum duff thoughtfully. Then he lifted his face, a seraphic smile on his countenance. ‘The writing isn’t on the wall, old man.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s on the Pave de Pastille or something very like it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m prepared to wager ten ecus to a brass farthing,’ said Henry grandly, ‘that your drug dealer got his warning in cream.’

  ‘Cream?’

  ‘Written with a little stick across the blackcurrant coulis or whatever. It’s not difficult …’