(2013) Collateral Damage (12 page)
'Nothing yet.
The locals are still making
enquiries. It would have helped if he'd got his car number. He said something about
him having big shoulders.'
'Hmm.
According to the governor the Funnies say he wasn't one of theirs.'
'And they've never been known to lie,' said the younger man irreverently.
Fitchett frowned. 'Don't be bloody silly. They'd have to admit
it eventually. Her father's hopping mad.'
'I don't blame him.'
'Well it's
his own
damn fault. If he
hadn't thrown his weight around she'd be safely locked up and none of this would
have happened.'
'If it wasn't the Israelis who do you think it could be?'
'The Palestinians.'
'But this guy her father saw with the Cortina was white?'
'So, they've got helpers. Who do you think Koller is?
The Sheikh of bloody Araby?'
The Sergeant began to catch up. 'You think the other Palestinians
have hired some heavies as well?'
'Why not?
Fight fire with fire. I think
we'd better go and have a chat with that publisher Koller was after.'
'Both of us?'
'Yes. I thought you'd like to see exactly how an old pro operates.
Part of your education.'
'Thanks very much.'
'Don't mention it,' said Fitchett who, like many people who are
good at handing out sarcasm, was quite impervious to counter-attack. 'We'll leave
in about fifteen minutes unless we hear anything from the girl before. Draw yourself
a shooter won't you?'
'Oh,
it's
personal protection duty is
it?'
'I'm a valuable man.'
Just then the telephone on his desk rang. The switchboard operator
told Fitchett that he had a caller who claimed that he probably knew the identity
of Ruth's attacker. Did he want to speak to him personally?
'Who is he?'
The operator gave the publisher's name. 'Put him on.'
The Palestinian explained who he was and Fitchett said 'Oh yes,'
in a manner which indicated that he had some dim recollection of him.
'I have just been reading about the attack on Koller's girlfriend,'
lied
the publisher. He rose early and had read it hours
ago; he had been wondering what to do about it ever since. 'I think the man who
did it was a schoolteacher called Stephen Dove. His wife was killed by the bomb
Koller meant for me.'
When he had finished explaining why he had come to this conclusion
Fitchett said: 'Do you mind if we come round and take a statement?'
'Not at all.
To tell you the truth,
Inspector (it is Inspector isn't it?)
,
I'm surprised you're
not already here. In the circumstances I thought that the first people you would
suspect would be me and my friends. That's why I'm telling you this. I rather like
living in London.'
'Very pleased to hear it, sir.
Are you
at your home address? We'll be round in about twenty minutes.'
'Smooth bastard, wasn't he,' said the Sergeant, who had been
listening on an extension.
'By your standards, son, he was practically the Pope.'
The Sergeant coloured. The old fart was always telling him what
a bonehead he was. If he was so clever why wasn't he more senior?
Fitchett was back on the telephone, asking the operator to connect
him with the head of West Midlands Special Branch at his office in Sutton Coldfield.
He told him about Dove. Then he and the Sergeant went downstairs where a car was
waiting.
The publisher repeated to the policeman what he had told them
on the telephone. He didn't tell them of the addresses in Beirut he had given the
schoolteacher. He simply wanted to cover himself; he had no particular interest
in seeing him caught. When Fitchett returned there was a telex message waiting for
him from the West Midlands office. It confirmed that Dove had taken leave of absence
and told friends he was taking an extended holiday which would probably include
a tour of the Middle East. 'For Christ's sake, why didn't somebody stop him?
',
Fitchett asked.
A check on airline offices revealed that an S. Dove had been
a passenger on a flight to Paris on the evening of the attack on the cabinet minister's
daughter.
A cross-check with Immigration at Heathrow, who had
a note of his passport number, confirmed that this was the same Stephen Dove.
Further investigation showed that he had caught an Air France flight from Charles
de Gaulle to Beirut that morning. The policeman looked at his watch. If the flight
was on schedule he had landed half an hour ago. They checked again. It was. Interpol
was informed and, because he always suspected that years of Parisian lunches had
slowed down those bureaucrats, Fitchett also asked the Lebanese embassy in London
and the British embassy in Beirut to encourage the Lebanese police to find Mr Dove
as quickly as possible. He didn't really hold out much hope. After the civil war
a gendarmerie as such had practically ceased to exist in Lebanon.
When they had finished doing all this it was early evening and
Fitchett was lost behind a smoke-screen of his own making, his jacket over the back
of a chair, his sleeves rolled up,
a
full ashtray by the
telephone. Like most Special Branch officers, he had spent most of his career in
the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan police and had never taken
a bribe although he had frequently heard of them being taken and kept his mouth
shut. He had first served in the Branch some twelve years before, recruited mostly
on the grounds that he had learned German as a Military Policeman in occupied Germany,
but he had to go back to the CID or he would have missed a promotion. When the Branch
expanded as a result of the Irish troubles and a general increase in terrorism,
there was a job waiting for him. He accepted immediately and hoped to stay with
them until retirement. He was different from most of his contemporaries in that
he preferred pitting his wits against well-educated politicos - he had left school
at fifteen himself - than against the 'ordinary decent criminals'
some of them pined for
. And thanks to Koller and people like him, the Branch
had far more scope than it had when he first served in it.
In those days, its main function was to be the executive arm
for the mysterious gentlemen in MIS, the security service, who would tell them to
follow people about or arrest them. To a certain extent they still worked for the
'Funnies', as Fitchett called them. But nowadays they had more autonomy. They initiated
far more of their own investigations and had the funds for a much larger network
of informers than they ever had before. They had even taken onto the payroll a member
of the central committee of the Pure Earth Republican People's Party, though Fitchett
thought it was the biggest waste of public money since they started keeping murderers
alive.
The Sergeant brought in two plastic cups of steaming tea. He
was feeling quite pleased with himself. It wasn't the Palestinians. It was a lone
nutter. The old fart was wrong.
'It seems the Dove has flown, then,' he said. He had been rehearsing
the line.
'I was hoping, I was really hoping,'
sighed
Fitchett, 'that you weren't going to say that.'
The schoolteacher's photograph arrived on his desk. Copies of
it were to be wired to Interpol and Beirut. A note came down from the head of the
Branch directing that nothing should be released to the press for the time being.
T'he Commander thought there would be considerable public sympathy for a bereaved
husband and it could get in the way of the investigation. 'Some hope,' thought Fitchett.
Every popular newspaper in Fleet Street had a paid informer at the Yard.
The detective held Dove's photograph, it was a blow-up of his
passport picture, in his two hands and studied it carefully. 'You silly bugger,'
he thought.
'You poor silly bugger.
If you get anywhere
near Koller he'll spit you out in bits.'
He looked again. 'He won't be expecting you though, will he,
lad,' he said aloud. 'He won't be expecting you.'
Graham Le Poidevin, the waiter used as the cut-out, lived some
distance from his place of work in a grey, highrise block in one of Paris's newer
suburbs. It was, thought Koller, of
the we
-knowwhat's-best-for-you
school of architecture: the middle class deciding how the workers should live.
It had not been difficult to follow the waiter home on the Metro
at the end of his day-shift. The fat man was relaxed, unsuspicious. He rightly regarded
his involvement in Koller's demi-monde as peripheral and didn't want to know what
the coded messages he passed on were about. This attitude left him with a certain
peace of mind; he did not feel the need to look over his shoulder.
The tailing went very smoothly for the terrorist until he entered
the stained lobby of the apartment block just in time to see the waiter squeeze
himself between the closing doors of the lift. There were ten floors and as Koller
watched, hands jammed into the pockets of a zippered leather jerkin, the lights
on the floor indicator showed that the lift was stopping at every one.
Koller was very cross with himself. He should have closed up
over the last two hundred yards. He estimated that there were at least one hundred
apartments in this particular rabbits' hutch. Across the lobby, with its faint smell
of disinfectant and municipal indifference, there were row upon row of scratched
green metal mail-boxes with the name and flat number of a tenant on every one. The
trouble was he didn't know the waiter's name.
Koller retraced his steps to a bar he remembered seeing almost
opposite the exit of the local Metro station. Inside it was dark and furnished in
the half-hearted mid-Adantic style typical of the Fifth Republic. There was a long
bar along which were a row of stools on stainless steel stems. There
were
also round, formica-topped tables and in a corner an illuminated
juke-box playing a country-and-western weepie. Around the juke-box were seated three
youths, more or less identically dressed in olive-green anoraks and jeans, drinking
beer. The biggest had his feet up on a chair and was practising blowing cigarette
smoke down his nose. They gave the German a hard look when he first came in, but
seemed to think better of it and concentrated again on their manly props. They were
the only other customers. He ordered a large cognac from the Algerian barman, who
surfaced reluctantly from the Simenon he was reading, asked for the telephone directory
and looked up the cafe where the waiter worked. There was a pay-phone on the wall
at the end of the bar and the Algerian gave him a couple of jetons.
It was a long time before anyone bothered to answer Koller's
call and then he had to shout over the buzz from the evening's trade at the other
end of the line. 'One of your waiters lent me his lighter this afternoon,' he said
in his accented French. 'Yes, that's right, a lighter.
A gold
one - a Dunhill.
I'm afraid when I left I rather absent-mindedly picked it
up with my cigarettes. Look, I'm leaving Paris tomorrow, but I'll post it back to
him. Yes, I'll post the lighter back to him.'
There was no sound-proofing around the telephone. He was conscious
that the music had stopped and that the yobos in the corner and the Algerian behind
the bar were listening to his unlikely story.
'Could you tell me his name, please? Yes, I'll tell you what
he looks like. He's a big man, a bit fat,
about fifty I
suppose.
Combs his hair straight back.
Who? Le Poidevin?
An Englishman?
Oh, I see.
A Channel Islander.
Is he there now? Well, please tell him it'll be in the post. Thanks.'
He put the receiver down, took another sip of his brandy and
pulled a packet of cigarettes out. The Algerian proffered a light from a packet
of book-matches. 'No Dunhills here,' he grinned. 'Very wise,' said Koller, controlling
his temper and taking the light. The mini-thugs in the corner were still staring
at him. He could see they were thinking they had misjudged him. Anyone soft enough
to return a gold lighter to a complete stranger was probably worth taking on.
Ordinarily Koller would have enjoyed it. He would have loved
to see the pain and surprise come over their mean little faces as he taught them
a thing or two about unarmed combat. But this evening he had work to do and he had
already attracted enough attention. He finished his brandy and turned to the barman.
'Where's the nearest Metro?'
The Algerian looked surprised.
'Across the
road.'
'Of course.
Seems
to be my day for forgetting things.'
He paid for the drink and walked towards the door, trying not
to make any eye contact with the trio in the corner. He noticed that the biggest
one, the one with his boots on the chair, was now drinking his beer from the bottle.
Outside, Koller hesitated for a moment and
then walked alongside the bar window in the direction of the Metro.
Next
door to the bar there was a recessed shop doorway that went back about six feet.
He went in there and waited with his back against the glass door of the shop, which
he noticed was a men's boutique called Carnaby. From it he could look through the
shop, behind the clothes in the window display to the door of the bar. Presently
the smallest and, judging from cheeks that looked as if they had never felt a razor,
the youngest of the teenagers emerged. He stood with his thumbs hooked over the
waistband of his jeans and a fresh kingsize smouldering between his lips.
