Seven Days to a Killing

by Clive Egleton

  McKee smiled at him and said, ‘That’s right, I’m thinking of starting a war.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said McKee, ‘don’t look so worried, it was only a joke.’

  The guns seemed to have a curious effect on Ruth Burroughs. Her eyes were on McKee, and reading the expression on her face, Calvert thought that if he were Paul Burroughs, he would make a point of keeping a watchful eye on his preserves.

  *

  They had reached the point where their lives were now dominated by a few pounds of plastic, copper wire and cheap metal. The telephone was no longer a means of communication but was instead an efficient apparatus for extortion. Wray and Harper joined them shortly before seven, and they sat in anguished silence waiting for its harsh summons. It rang at 7:15 pm and Tarrant answered it.

  Drabble said, ‘I don’t want to speak to you, put Harper on.’

  Harper said, ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Good; now perhaps we can get down to business. Did you get the bill of sale?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Now that really sounds too glib. I mean, it isn’t every day of the week that you spend half a million, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, all right then, let’s be a little more precise. What have you done with the diamonds?’

  ‘I have them in my office safe.’

  Drabble said, ‘They should be safe enough in there for the time being. Now all you have to do is post the receipted bill to 268 Upper Street, Wealdstone, and make sure it gets there by the second delivery tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s impossible, we’ve missed the last collection.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you can do better than that, Harper. The last collection in your area is seven-thirty and there is a pillar-box a few yards from the house. You’ve got nearly fifteen minutes to make it. I’ll call you tomorrow as soon as I have the bill of sale.’

  ‘What was that address again?’

  ‘You must think I was born yesterday. You already have it on tape.’

  Harper said, ‘One other point, before we go any further—we want proof that David is still alive.’

  Drabble said, ‘You know, I expected you to bring that up. Listen to this.’

  The tape hissed briefly and then David said, ‘We listened to the news on BBC 1 at five-fifty tonight. There was a bank raid in Croydon; five masked men armed with pick helves, a sawn-off shotgun and ammonia dispensers got away with twenty thousand pounds.’ The tape ended, the line was disconnected.

  Tarrant said, ‘Thank Christ, he’s still alive.’

  ‘Yes, at least we have that to be thankful for,’ said Harper. He avoided Tarrant’s eyes and looked up at the ceiling. ‘And it will also be interesting to see how Drabble intends to make the collection.’

  Wray said, ‘I don’t believe he’ll be that stupid, but all the same, we’ll throw a tight surveillance net around the address in the hope of getting a lead.’

  They might have been discussing which horse they should back in the two-thirty and he heard Alex draw in her breath sharply and her hand sought his wrist and her nails bit into the flesh.

  Tarrant said, ‘Let’s be clear about one thing, I don’t give a damn about catching Drabble, I just want to get my son back.’

  ‘It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?’ Harper said mildly. ‘After all, if we don’t catch him, what guarantee have you that you will ever get your son back alive?’

  Wednesday

  FOURTH DAY

  5

  IT WAS JUST LIKE ANY OTHER HIGH STREET IN THE SUBURBS WITH ITS BOOTS, Sainsburys, United Dairies and Co-operative Society. Number 268 Upper Street, which was four doors along from the Midland Bank, belonged to a newsagent who provided an accommodation address. Plain-clothes men were keeping the shop under surveillance from the Linden Cafe on the opposite side of the street and the adjacent side roads. With the co-operation of the owner, a man had also been placed inside the shop itself. Two Q cars, one facing north, the other south, were in a position to shadow the suspect in case he should use a vehicle. The surveillance team was operating on a special net which had been allocated its own frequency so that, being divorced from normal police radio traffic, control became much tighter and the risk of intercept was minimised.

  Wray was sitting in a Ford Escort which was in a parking bay a hundred yards up the road from the shop. The time was eleven- thirty and the second postal delivery was almost due. The street was crowded with shoppers, mostly women.

  CID had objected to his presence on the grounds that the investigation of a kidnapping was not his concern, and on the whole, Wray was inclined to agree with them. Relations between CID and the Special Branch had never been exactly cordial and the Tarrant affair had merely exacerbated the situation. The fact that only Wray and a constable from the uniformed branch were allowed to be present when Drabble called and that CID had been shut out for reasons which the Assistant Commissioner had failed to make entirely clear, had already led to a drying up in the exchange of information between the two departments. No one regretted this more than Wray.

  Some eight months previously, Special Branch had received a tip that Penfold was The Contractor. The tip had come from a low grade source and had been provisionally graded F6—informant unproven and possibly unreliable, information unconfirmed and probably untrue. Nevertheless, for the next three months, Wray had kept the Swiftsure Detective Agency under observation before he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that the provisional assessment had been right. But now he was not quite so sure; for quite illogical reasons, he had a hunch that there was a connection between Penfold and the two, as yet, unidentified men who had been murdered on the A170. It was no use crying over spilt milk, but Wray wished that he was still being kept informed of the progress of the investigation into both killings.

  Wray opened the glove pocket, took out his pipe and carefully filled it from the tin of Three Nuns tobacco. He struck a match and held it over the bowl; spittle bubbled in the pipe stem and then a plume of blue-grey smoke rose up and hung in a thin veil below the curved roof. He wound the window down on his side and allowed it to escape. Smoking, he maintained defensively, always helped him to think more clearly.

  He was slowly coming round to the view that Chesterman was probably wasting his time prying into Tarrant’s personal affairs. There might have been some point in going on with it if they had been able to show that Drabble’s letter had been typed on Tarrant’s portable, but such was not the case. And now all they had to work on was the fact that Tarrant had been, and possibly still was, on intimate terms with a woman called Barbara whom he saw regularly for lunch. Colonel Mulholland had told Harper that, as far as he knew, Tarrant’s lunch break rarely extended beyond an hour and a half, and in view of this time factor, it seemed reasonable to assume that they met locally and that the woman was also employed in the Ministry of Defence. Chesterman was faced with the task of checking out an army of civil servants to find one who answered to the name of Barbara and who had red hair.

  The silent radio net came to life. A voice said, ‘Zero, this is watchdog one—the post has just been delivered to this location but no letter addressed to the suspect has been received. Please advise, over.’

  Control, like Wray, was at a loss to know what to advise. It seemed strange that the letter had failed to get there on time unless it had been wrongly sorted, but since it had been clearly addressed, this didn’t seem a likely explanation.

  Watchdog One came up on the air again. He said, ‘I’ve just been checking with the proprietor—he tells me he’s never heard of Drabble.’

  Wray emptied his pipe into the ashtray, started the car and backed out of the parking bay. He thought it was about time he had a chat with the local postmaster.

  Their short talk was to prove interesting. Drabble, sure of how the police would react, had filled in a change of address form so that, although Harper had sent the bill of sale to 268 Upper Street in accordance with his
instructions, the sorters at the local post office had automatically redirected it to the new forwarding address at 57 Maple Drive.

  *

  57 Maple Drive was a business premises belonging to a Mr Roscoe of Roscoe Motors. One look at the place was enough to convince Wray that it was bent. A large detached house had once stood on the site of number 57 but in October 1940, a lone Heinkel 111 which had drifted away from the main bomber stream, decided to go for the railway line and released a stick of six 250 kg bombs. Three fell on the embankment, three didn’t, and one of those which missed the target neatly levelled the house. Two months later a bulldozer arrived, and after it had filled in the crater, a long pre-fab hut was erected, and the bomb site became an Emergency Ambulance Station. After the war, the site had had a checkered history, becoming a junk yard, a builder’s yard and finally, Roscoe Motors.

  Roscoe specialised in rebuilding insurance write-offs. From two wrecks costing about fifty each, he would produce one road-worthy car which, after respraying, was sold at an average profit of three hundred per cent. He was the sort of man who had several bank accounts and excited the curiosity of the Inland Revenue. By the time Roscoe acquired the site, the original hut had already suffered a number of structural alterations, and the changes he made only added to the general air of delapidation. His office, separated from the workshop by a hardboard partition, was chaotic. Letters, bills, invoices and consignment vouchers littered the top of the worm-ridden desk.

  Roscoe was short, dark, stockily built, thirty and very fly. He had so far managed to stay on the right side of the local law, who suspected that he was about as straight as a corkscrew.

  Wray showed him his ID Card and said, ‘I have reason to believe that a letter addressed to a Mr Drabble was delivered here this morning.’

  Roscoe smiled warmly. ‘That’s right,’ he said cheerfully, ‘he collected it about half an hour ago. He arrived minutes after the postman. I thought it funny at the time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It wasn’t the usual arrangement; normally I opened his mail for him.’

  Wray said, ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Straight up,’ said Roscoe. ‘It was part of the arrangement, squire, he didn’t want any letters reaching him from a certain party—he’d put some bird up the stick and didn’t want a maintenance order slapped on him. Anyway, he would call me each morning, ask if there was anything for him, and if there was, I had to read it out to him over the phone.’

  Wray said, ‘Apart from this morning’s letter, how many others did you receive and read?’

  ‘Only one, from a bird called Doreen something or other.’

  ‘Have you still got it?’

  ‘It’s here somewhere on the desk.’ He rummaged through a pile of invoices and came up with an envelope. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘read it for yourself if you don’t believe me.’

  The envelope was postmarked Wembley and the letter had been written on a single sheet of cheap, lined paper. The longhand was backward sloping and untidy and the biro had left smudges all over the text. There was no address at the top and the letter read:

  Dear Ted,

  I expect your surprised to get this but your landlady told me you was working for Roscoe Motors now, so I hope this letter finds you. I don’t know what you think your playing at Ted, but like I told you I’m pregnent and I want to know what you’ll do about it. I shall have to stop work in a couple of months and then there will be no more money coming in and my mum and dad cant suport me and the baby. You know he only works part time now on account of his bad heart. Its no good saying its not yours because it is and I want you to do something quick.

  Love,

  Doreen

  Spelling was not her strong point and the grammar would have pained Fowler.

  Wray tucked the letter back into the envelope. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you went to all this trouble for a complete stranger?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a favour,’ said Roscoe, ‘he tipped me a fiver to do it for a month, and he wasn’t exactly a stranger either—he used to work for me.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘About a fortnight—casual labour, see. Look, I’ve got to be honest with you, I employ a lot of moonlighters, blokes who take a second job at nights, and they want paying in cash, see, because that way they don’t pay any tax, and I don’t mind because I don’t have to bother with insurance stamps and the like. So this Drabble says he’s a panel-beater and I take him on, and I was sorry to lose him when he had to leave.’

  ‘Describe him,’ Wray said impatiently.

  ‘Well, he was a short, thickset man—had ginger hair, a bit ugly like what with that wart on his eyelid. I’d say he was over forty.’

  ‘And he put this Doreen in the club?’

  Roscoe grinned. ‘What’s age got to do with being randy?’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ said Wray, ‘put your jacket on and let’s go.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I’m taking you round to the local nick.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Roscoe, ‘that’s what comes of doing a favour. Will I be there for long?’

  ‘About thirty years if I have anything to do with it,’ said Wray.

  *

  Tarrant was beginning to live a lie, and the cause of it was the small package nestling in his jacket pocket. It had arrived by second post addressed to him in an unfamiliar hand and Tarrant had thought that strange since very few people were aware that he was staying with Alex. Some instinct had cautioned him to open it in complete privacy, and like a guilty schoolboy smoking his first cigarette, the lavatory had seemed the safest place.

  The small, brown paper parcel had contained a compact C-30 cassette and a brief note which read, ‘You want to be alone in a quiet place where no one can disturb you when you play this back.’ The note was signed by Drabble and the postmark was illegible.

  He had thought of his Japanese Hit Parade tape recorder in the flat off Thessaly Road, and somehow he had managed to pick his way through lunch when all the time he had longed to get away and play the tape, and he had racked his brains for an excuse to leave Alex, and finally he had told her that he needed to pick up some clean shirts and underwear, and he had known from the expression in her eyes that she had been unconvinced.

  Tarrant drove badly through the early afternoon traffic, and he was a long way from being alert, and because his mind was on the tape, he failed to notice that he was being followed. Yesterday, Special Branch had used a Vauxhall Viva, today it was a Morris 1100.

  Tarrant parked the Zephyr in the basement garage, took the lift up to the eighth floor and entered his flat. He made straight for the tape recorder, placed it on top of the writing desk, inserted the cassette and then punched the button marked play back.

  Drabble said, ‘You don’t want the volume up until I tell you. I’ll give you just ten seconds to tone it down.’

  It was the longest ten seconds of Tarrant’s life. The scream came high and ended in a fit of sobbing, and then a terrified boy said, ‘Please, please, Mr Drabble, please don’t do that again.’ The tape hissed briefly and then the scream came again, and this time it was even worse.

  In Aden he had seen a petrol tanker go up with the driver still trapped inside the cab and the man had screamed like a demented animal as the flames consumed him, but bad as that moment had been, it was now insignificant when measured against David’s cry of agony. The sweat ran down Tarrant’s face and the bile rose in his throat; it was as if someone had kicked him in the testicles. He failed to hear Drabble’s command to turn up the volume and, missing the first part of the message, he was forced to rewind and start again.

  Drabble said, ‘David’s fingernails hadn’t been cut for a week or two, so it was really quite easy to break the heads off two safety matches and wedge them under the nails against the quick. We lit them with another match, Tarrant, and I regret to say that his nails might have to come off. Of course, whether he keeps the other six and hi
s thumbnails is entirely up to you.’ Drabble cleared his throat. ‘You’re going to Paris tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Harper won’t like it, but after I’ve spoken to him, he won’t raise any objection, even though you will be carrying half a million pounds worth of diamonds on your person. He’ll insist on providing an escort, but that isn’t going to worry you, Tarrant, because you will give them the slip on the Metro at Chaussee d’Antin. You’ll make your way to Rolands—it’s a bar in the Rue de Tanger just off the Place Stalingrad. Don’t be in a hurry to get there, take one hour to cover your tracks from the time you give them the slip on the Metro.’ There was a very brief pause and then Drabble said, ‘I don’t have to tell you what will happen to your son if you foul this up. I want you to get the details clear in your mind and then you will wipe this tape clean.’

  He sat there staring at the now silent tape recorder, unable to move, unable to think clearly, unable to feel anything except a numbness such as is induced by a shot of cocaine into a nerve end. And then presently, he lit a cigarette and played the recording again and yet again until he knew exactly what was expected of him, and then, being sure, he wiped the tape clean and put the recorder away.

  Tarrant got up and walked into the bedroom and stripped off, hurling his clothes on to the floor. He went through the chest of drawers looking for a clean change of socks and underwear and a sharp point pricked his thumb, and there they were—four medals on a bar.

  And now he saw again that day in Queen Arwa Road when the blazing sun had turned the township into a furnace, and he was pinned down behind the riddled Land-Rover with his driver and wireless operator lying dead in the deserted street. And he couldn’t radio for help because the set was smashed, and the back-up Land-Rover had been hit by an RPG 7, and the hidden snipers were going to stay and fight this one out because they knew that Tarrant was alone. And he had been forced to crawl out into the open to recover the phosphorous grenade from the dead operator because he needed something to blind the snipers if he was going to get out of the ambush alive, and he had been lucky, for in their excitement, the guerrillas had fired wildly. And then he had thrown the grenade at the houses facing him, and under cover of the thick white smoke, he had dashed across the street, ripped open the shutters on the ground-floor window and gone in head first. And he knew that they would try to get out on to the flat roof, and when he reached the landing the first man had almost disappeared through the trap-door, and the second man, whose back had been used as a springboard was still bent double when Tarrant thrust the rifle into his open mouth and squeezed the trigger. Above him, two spindly legs thrashed the air in wild panic as the first man attempted to lever himself up, and Tarrant had shot him without compunction, and then he had killed the frightened boy who had run out of the room behind him and who, at the last minute, had tried in vain to surrender.