Read (2013) Collateral Damage Online

Authors: Colin Smith

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(2013) Collateral Damage (9 page)

BOOK: (2013) Collateral Damage
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When Dove left the club he bought an evening paper at the kiosk
by the underground station. Most of the front page was covered by a headline which
read: 'Cabinet minister's daughter arrested in anti-terrorist swoop.'

 
 

 

9. A Sensitive Matter

 

Koller was in Paris, having arrived there via Amsterdam, by the
time the police called at Ruth's flat. The news of her arrest did not altogether
surprise him. When he left he had noticed something he had not even considered they
would bother to use against her. Across the street from the entrance to the basement
flat, attached high up on a concrete lamp-post, was a small video cassette television
camera, with its stubby wide-angle lens trained on the door. No attempt had been
made to disguise it. For most people the very brazenness of its position would be
disguise enough; if it registered at all on the untrained eye it might be assumed
to be some esoteric part of the street-lighting equipment, perhaps a time-switch.

For a moment he had debated going back and telling Ruth, but
easily decided against it. She would panic, demand to go with him. And that was
impossible.
If they came, he mused as he walked away, she would
be surprised, to say the least, when they found the gun.
He considered climbing
the lamp-post and destroying the camera but dismissed that idea too, on the grounds
that it might be fitted with an alarm that sounded at the local police station.
Moreover, there was always a chance that some policeman might happen by while he
was unarmed and halfway up a lamp-post. It would be a very humiliating way to be
captured and he was not unconscious of his position in the hierarchy of wanted men.
He guessed that the camera was probably fitted with an infra-red lens for night
filming and that somebody came along, disguised as a municipal workman perhaps,
and changed the cassette once a day, most likely shortly after dawn, which would
explain why he had not noticed this activity.

At Heathrow the German encountered no problems in leaving the
country. This was despite the presence of those Special Branch officers regularly
assigned to airport duty whose hopeless task it is to scrutinize travellers' faces
and compare them to memorized mug-shots in the few seconds the immigration officer
takes to flip through their passports.

Nevertheless, he took certain precautions. First, using a Swedish
alias, he booked himself on to a flight to Vienna. As an added precaution he even
checked a suitcase, containing a dozen or so paperback books and a few clothes,
on to this flight. He then walked over to Terminal One and, posing as a Dutchman
called Van Freyberg, bought a ticket on a British Airways flight to Amsterdam. The
Swedish alias he had used before and it was possible that it was on Scotland Yard's
computer. His Dutch identity - passport, driving licence, credit cards - was a new
one. From Schipol Airport he took a taxi into Amsterdam, spending most of the night
in a small hotel in the red-light district where motionless whores display themselves
in artfully spot-lit bay windows, like a tableau at Madame Tussauds. Before he went
to bed Koller spent twenty minute; and a few guilders trying to bring one of those
figures to life in her little room backstage.

 

Ruth sat just as still as one of the window ladies at a plain
wooden desk in the police station's bleak interviewing room. There were two other
people in the room. One was a woman police constable, who stood with her back to
the wall near the barred window. The other, seated across the desk, was Detective
Chief Inspector John Fitchett of Special Branch, who glared at the young woman through
a smoke haze, a strand of tobacco hanging from his lower lip. Next to a crowded
ash-tray in the middle of the desk lay Koller's Browning and a spare magazine, still
inside the polythene bag they had been found in. Attached to the bag was a brown
cardboard police exhibit tag on which was written the designation 'A.l.'. The weapon
had been wiped clean, but Forensic had found prints from the German's right thumb
and forefinger on some of the bullets in the magazine. The West German police had
made his prints available to police forces all over Europe some time ago.

'You're in a lot of trouble, young lady,' the Detective Chief
Inspector said, 'and the only way you can get out of it is to help us as much as
you can.'

'Look. I've told you. He was a manfriend. Yes, OK? We cohabited
sometimes, we slept together,
we
even made love. OK? We
liked to smoke dope together. I know that's an offence, but I'll admit it. I USE
DOPE. The stuff you found was for my own personal consumption. I'm not a pusher.
I don't go down the local comprehensive and hawk it around the playground.'

They had been questioning her for five hours now, off and on,
and she was getting tired. Since she had played a leading role in the Pure Earth
Republican People's Party's campaign against the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary
Provisions) Act 1974, the beginning of the police state they had called it, she
was dismally aware that she could be held for questioning for forty eight hours.
Another forty-three to go.
After that, under Part Three
of the same Act, they could keep her for another five days if the Home Secretary
was minded to sign a Detention Order. He wouldn't, of course. He was a friend of
Daddy's.

'I'm not saying you are a pusher,' said Fitchett, almost kindly.

'I'm not all that interested.' He tapped the pistol. 'What about
this?'

'How many times do I have to tell you? I never knew about the
bloody gun. I've never seen it before. If I'd have known I'd have thrown him out.
You tell me his name was Colour or something and he was a terrorist. As far as I'm
concerned his name was - is
-
 
Erich
Galland and up until now I was always
under the impression that he had something to do with the travel business and lived
in Paris.'

'Where in Paris?'

'I don't know.
Hotels.'
The policeman
sighed.

Ruth thought she was doing bloody well. Let them have their pound
of flesh on the dope and deny the gun. What a bastard Hans was leaving it there
without telling her, but
forget
about that now. Just concentrate
on denying the gun. Soon they would have to let her see a solicitor and then everything
would be all right. Or nearly all right. There was still Father to face. Christ!
He was going to be livid. The publicity would kill him. And her party would almost
certainly ask her to resign from the central committee. They might even expel her.
She didn't know whose anger she feared most.
Theirs or her parents.
Forget about that too. Stick to the dope. Nobody got anything more than a small
fine for a couple of ounces of hash nowadays.

 
It was almost midnight.
They had come armed and with a search warrant at 6.30 that evening, just as she
had finished washing her hair under the shower. It had taken them that long to get
around to processing the film from the morning collection and even then if a Detective-Sergeant
from the Branch, whose mind happened to be on Koller and his associates, had not
chanced to wander into the photographic department it might have taken a couple
of days for someone to spot the identity of the fair-haired man staring up at the
camera. The terrorist had been right. She was not under very close surveillance.
It was simply that they had a batch of newly issued video cameras to play with.
It had only been installed twenty-four hours before. Had they had it sooner they
would have seen Koller entering the flat and been able to nab
him.

Ruth had answered the door in a white towelling dressinggown,
her wet hair tied into a towel, to find no one there. As she took a tentative step
beyond the threshold she was grabbed by one of the two detectives standing either
side of it. At the same time the other police, in the lead a uniformed dog-handler
and his German
Shepherd
, charged into the flat. Two of
them had drawn their revolvers and one of them, a nervous young man, but deadly
on the range, came very close to putting a shot through the kitchen door, which
slammed shut in the draught. At the tail of this posse came a policewoman who told
Ruth to sit down in one of the kitchen chairs and stood there with her hand on her
shoulder, almost as if she was comforting her, while the flat was searched. The
dog sniffed around and then yawned and pissed over the sitting-room table. It took
them
about three minutes to find the dope hidden in a plastic
bag under the mattress in her bedroom.

'Never seen it before,' she said when they showed it to her,
fiddling with the belt around her wrap. Once she had got over the shock she became
very conscious of the fact that she was naked underneath, and the towel she had
knotted around her head had come off so that the wet hair hung down the sides of
her face like rats' tails. It took them a little longer to find the automatic where
Koller had left it in the lavatory cistern. 'I suppose you've never seen this before
either?' said the Detective Chief Inspector. That was the first time that evening
she had occasion to think what a bastard Hans was, but all she said was: 'Can I
have a cigarette?' 'I don't think we've got the sort you smoke,' leered the young
detective who had almost put a shot through the door. He had recovered his nerve
enough to be nasty. Fitchett scowled at him and gave her one of his own untipped
Senior Service and lit it for her. He also allowed the policewoman to take her into
the bedroom here she put on a faded pair of jeans and a sweater. He didn't intend
to take any chances. Everything was going to be done by the book and more so. The
head of the Branch had told him to make damn sure nobody was going to be able to
scream 'police brutality' and had made it plain that the Commissioner himself was
taking a keen personal interest in the case, as well he might with a peerage coming
up. Her father was bound to raise hell even if he wasn't in that faction of the
Cabinet who thought they were all fascist pigs.

Fitchett himself had all the physical equipment to make him appear
a bullying, ham-fisted sort of man which was deceptive because, as his superiors
had come to realise rather late in his career, he had an ice-sharp analytical mind
that went some way beyond the native guile normally associated with successful policemen.
He was in his early fifties, was at least a stone overweight, drank more whisky
than his doctor advised and, when he was working or drinking, chain-smoked Senior
Service which he lit with
an old
petrol lighter fitted
with a wind shield. His face was a monument to his pleasures, being red and full
of broken veins and teeth stained an awful yellow. He had been squeezing blackheads
out of his nose since adolescence which, together with the gallons of spirit that
had drained through his system, had turned the ruddiness of his face to the characteristic
boozer's strawberry. He had a showy amount of nasal hair and, as with many intelligent
men,
his ears had also burst into foliage. His black hair,
turning grey, was longer than one would expect to find in a man of his age and position.
It partly covered his ears and a lock of it hung down over a high forehead. As if
to compensate for this physiognomy he was fussy about his clothes and dressed like
a successful lawyer in well-cut three-piece suits, for which he paid more than he
could afford, and striped shirts. His accent was the diluted cockney of the South
London lowermiddle class peppered with criminal argot, so that a car was always
'a motor', a bribe 'a drink', his boss 'the governor', and a gun 'a shooter'.

Basically, Fitchett was a contented policeman and would have
probably remained one if the cabinet minster's daughter had not become his case.
The trouble was he didn't like interrogating a suspect, particularly a suspect he
knew he had bang to rights, as if he was walking on egg-shells. What's more he didn't
have the forty-eight hours the Terrorism Act said he did because his Governor had
made it quite dear earlier, when he was summoned upstairs to the floor with carpets,
that if a confession had not materialized by midnight he was to stop. 'After all,
we don't want her saying she was deprived of her sleep or you dropped LSD in her
coffee, do we?' the Commander had said. He was everything Fitchett wasn't.
Lean, urbane, practically teetotal and not as clever.

'But if we can keep her incommunicado for forty-eight hours Koller
might come back to the flat,' Fitchett had objected.

'You don't really believe that do you?'

'No. I think he's scarpered. Apart from the shooter and her cannabis
the place was dean. No shaving tackle; no clothes.
Nothing.
The gun makes me believe he's left the country.
Didn't want to
risk carrying it through airport security.
We're checking out his known aliases
with the lads at Heathrow and Gatwick now. But someone else from his mob might turn
up. Someone we don't know about. It would be worth sitting on that gaff for as long
as possible. Do the Funnies know?'

It was a good question. MI5 would have wanted to play it Fitchett's
way. Keep the arrest quiet for a day or two, post some men in and around the flat
and see what turned up. If you don't go fishing you won't catch any fish.

'No, I haven't informed the Security Service yet,' said the Commander,
standing on his dignity. He prided himself on never using slang.

I would have bet a thousand quid on that, thought Fitchett. But
all he said was, 'Oh?'

'Look, John,' said the Commander, fiddling with his pipe, 'you
know there are special problems here.'

'I know the law is supposed to be the same for everyone,' said
Fitchett. He decided to play stupid. Make the gutless, arselicking bastard spell
it out for him.

BOOK: (2013) Collateral Damage
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