A Conflict of Interests (10 page)

"Not a lot," said Coghill. "Make a note of these figures — 850, 2300, 12,000, 1750, 5000…"

He called out the opening debit balance at the top of each page, reached the J's, then paused, his eyes drawn to the symbols below the code word
Miranda
: a palm tree, an oil derrick, two stars and a crown. The desert, oil and a full colonel? Libya? Colonel Qadhafi? No, that couldn't be right; Qadhafi hadn't set foot in London and, according to the letter code, this character was a transvestite who enjoyed corporal punishment and being sodomized by a woman equipped with a dildo. He stared at the hyphen between the oil derrick and the badges of rank and wondered if this was meant to show the client was related to Qadhafi.

A discreet cough from Mace ended the speculation and he continued to read out the debit figures right through to the end page. Then he told Mace to start adding and browsed through the address book again, recording Ashforth's details and such telephone numbers as were listed on a separate sheet of notepaper, while he waited for the grand total.

"I make it a hundred and eighty-five thousand," Mace finally announced.

"Well, well." Coghill leaned back in the chair and smiled bleakly at Quainton. "That's some inheritance."

"What?"

"You told me Karen was able to find the deposit on the shop in Fulham because her parents had left her a large house in Tonbridge which she'd sold at a considerable profit."

"Yes, that's what I was led to believe." Quainton cleared his throat noisily. "I'd no reason to think she was lying. One has to take a certain amount of information on trust."

"I doubt if the Fraud Squad will have much difficulty linking this blackmail racket to Karen Boutiques Limited."

"I'm sure you're right, but I can't see how that should concern me. I've never had anything to do with the company."

Coghill raised a quizzical eyebrow and turned to Whitfield. "I guess that leaves you holding the dirty end of the stick, Trevor."

"Me?"

"You're the sole surviving director."

"I thought…" Whitfield swallowed nervously and tried again. "I thought it had been agreed you wouldn't press charges."

"We were talking about blackmail and living on the immoral earnings of a prostitute," Coghill reminded him. "Nobody said anything about offenses under the Companies Acts."

"That's not what you gave me to understand, is it, Stanley?"

"You couldn't have been listening properly," Quainton said.

"You told me I had nothing to lose and everything to gain if I was completely frank about Karen's affairs." Whitfield shook his head. "That's some advice I'm paying for," he said bitterly.

"Well, obviously you weren't frank enough," Quainton observed coldly.

"It's not too late to get out from under, Trevor." Coghill passed the address book across the table. "There are half a dozen clients listed in there who are AC/DC. You put a name to them and we'll forget about any funny business with the company."

"I've told you before, I'm not gay."

"Maybe you didn't have much choice." Coghill lowered his voice so that the security guard in the adjoining strong room shouldn't overhear. "You were a graduate just down from university, but the business world didn't want to know and the only job you could get at the time was with some potty, little back-street travel agency. They didn't pay you enough to keep body and soul together, but one day you happened to meet this girl, Karen, and she seemed to like you. I think she could see you were having a hard time and she slipped you some pocket money. Then, later on, when you got to know her better and things were still as difficult as ever, she told you how you could make a little extra on the side and you sort of went along with the idea as a favor to her. Isn't that how it was, Trevor?"

There was a long pause. As usual when he was under stress, Whitfield raised a hand to his mouth and nibbled at the thumb for comfort. Finally, like a man closeted with a priest in a confessional, he felt compelled to tell the whole sorry story and somehow justify himself in the process. Much of what he said was pure hocus-pocus, but Coghill waited patiently for the inevitable crunch point and allowed him to ramble on in a breathless voice.

"Gervase, Dudley, Joshua, Lawrence," Whitfield said. "I only know their first names, except for Harold Egremont."

"What does he do for a living?"

"Egremont's retired now, but he used to be a bigwig in the Ministry of Ag and Fish, or so he told Karen. I think he lives in Guildford."

"Can't you be more specific?"

Whitfield frowned and made a great show of racking his brains. "I'd like to be more helpful, really I would, but it all happened such a long time ago."

One name, one very incomplete address; Coghill could have wished for more, but he guessed it was all he was going to get. Turning to Mace, he said, "I think that about wraps it up, Harry. You'd better take the Volvo and run our friend back to Wimbledon. I'll cadge a lift from Kingman after the conference."

"Right."

"When you've done that, go and see the exchange supervisor and ask her to check these numbers out." He leaned forward, passed the sheet of notepaper to Mace. "I want the names and addresses of the subscribers."

"A question," Quainton said. "When can my client expect to take possession of the safety-deposit box?"

"I'm impounding the address book. The cash stays where it is until the Fraud Squad has examined the accounts."

"That's what I thought you'd say." Quainton pushed his chair back and stood up. "I assume I'm no longer required?"

Coghill nodded, said he was free to go and thanked him for his help. Quainton said it had been a pleasure, but made no effort to sound as though he meant it.

Patterson left the Metro at St. Michel and headed toward the Quai de Montebello and the bookstalls on the Left Bank. Although, on Orlov's instructions, he had phoned Trinité 001764 earlier that morning, he hadn't expected anything to come of it. Nothing was ever straightforward when the KGB was involved, and he'd figured they would spend several days figuring out all the angles before giving him a definite yes or no. But instead of the usual stall, Moscow had evidently given Orlov the green light, and he found their prompt response vaguely disquieting.

Some Russians you could trust, but not the faceless men in Dzerzhinsky Square; they would send their own mothers to the Gulag Archipelago if it suited their purpose. Maybe they were planning to double-cross him? After all, why should anybody pay good money for the video tapes when, with a little forethought, they could get them for nothing? The cassettes weren't the only negotiable items either; both the CIA and the FBI would like to lay their hands on him. Patterson supposed he could walk away, forget the whole deal and be safe, but there was a cool half million at stake and nobody ever got rich without taking a few chances along the way.

Patterson stopped at the first bookstall, scanned the crowded shelves as though looking for a specific title among the secondhand books and old magazines on display, then moved on to the next kiosk. In no apparent hurry, he drifted from vending stall to vending stall, checking every now and again to make sure no one was following him. Approaching E. J. Vannier et Fils as casually as he had the other curbside traders, he searched the shelves for the book he'd been told to buy. Spotting it between old copies of
Paris Match
, Patterson asked the elderly woman behind the counter for the only copy she had of Jean Moulin's
Premier Combat
. The purchase made, he then crossed the Pont de l'Arche Vêche, turned into the Esplanade Notre Dame and sat down on a park bench.

The paperback, published by Les Editions de Minute, was a factual account of the Resistance Movement in Chartres during World War II, with a preface by Charles de Gaulle. According to the inscription on the flyleaf, the book at one time had belonged to a Denise Rousell of 116 Avenue de la Liberation in Nice. The telephone number of the contact in London was disguised in the postal code.

Patterson thought there could only be two reasons why the contact number had been passed to him in such a complicated fashion. Either the KGB had wanted Denise Rousell to have a good look at him before they eventually met in London, or else one of their photographers had been quietly taking his picture from among the crowd of tourists aiming their cameras at Notre Dame. The latter possibility was certainly ominous, but he doubted if Moscow would sell him out before the video tapes were in their possession. Nevertheless, it was better to be safe than sorry. He had traveled to Paris on a Canadian passport under the name of Pearce, and the hotel registration slip he'd completed on arrival would now have been collected by the local police and lodged in the Pantheon. To cover his tracks, he would catch the first available flight to Munich, collect one of the duplicates from the deed box he'd deposited with the Dresdener Bank and return to England as Herr Otto Prole, sales representative for I. G. Farben.

The conference was held in Franklin's office on the eighth floor. It was chaired by the deputy assistant commissioner (crime), but apart from introducing Detective Chief Superintendent Tucker from the Regional Crime Squad, he left it to Charlie Franklin to go through the agenda.

Rowntree, the burly Yorkshireman from S District, led off and gave a lucid account of the Leese investigation to date which, it transpired, had made some progress. The postmortem had placed the time of death between eleven A.M. and five P.M. on Wednesday, the thirtieth of June, approximately twenty-four hours after Karen Whitfield had been murdered. The pathologist had found two entry wounds but only one exit, which accounted for the fact that only the fragments of one soft-nose bullet impacted on the floor had been recovered from the scene of the crime. The second bullet had been deflected into the lower jaw and was lodged behind the left incisor. Although its shape had been distorted, Ballistics had identified it as a .22 caliber rimfire. Finally, British Airways had confirmed that Leese had been a passenger on Flight 228 from Amsterdam arriving Heathrow at nine A.M. on the day in question, and one of the neighbors in Brompton Mews had supplied a vague description of a man who'd been seen leaving the mews flat at approximately eleven-thirty.

"It would take Leese the best part of an hour to get to his flat from Heathrow." Tucker sucked his teeth, then said, "This visitor was pretty quick off the mark, wasn't he?"

Rowntree shrugged. "It could just be he was lucky to find him at home."

"I don't believe chance has anything to do with it. This murder has all the hallmarks of a professional hit and it's reasonable to assume the killer arranged to have the flat kept under surveillance."

"We've questioned all the residents and they don't remember seeing anybody loitering in the neighborhood." The Yorkshire-man glared at Tucker, his jaw set and bristling like a bulldog. "Furthermore, on-street parking is not allowed in Brompton Mews and the surrounding area is regularly patrolled by traffic wardens."

"I was referring to electronic surveillance, Superintendent."

Tucker was cool and disdainful. No two men could have been less alike: Rowntree the epitome of the gruff, hard-nosed detective, the other slim, distinguished-looking and easily mistaken for a Foreign Office diplomat in a well-cut suit that fitted him perfectly. It was obvious
to
Coghill that there was no love lost between them, and he wondered if they had crossed swords at some time in the past or whether they had simply taken an instant dislike to one another.

"You mean the place was bugged," Rowntree said in a flat voice.

"I think so."

"There was no sign of forcible entry."

"So what? The device was probably outside the flat, attached to the wall under the window ledge."

"We went through the flat with a fine-tooth comb, inside and out. And you know something, Chief Superintendent? We didn't find a bloody thing that bore the slightest resemblance to a bug."

The atmosphere was explosive. Franklin clucked his tongue, then glanced pointedly at the deputy assistant commissioner. Oblivious to what was going on around him, Kingman continued to doodle away in the notebook he was balancing on his knee. Out of the corner of his eye, Coghill watched him draw a large mushroom-shaped cloud.

"I suppose there's no harm in going over the place again," Franklin murmured.

"Provided it's done with a fresh eye."

The deputy assistant commissioner smiled at the girl from the typing pool who was recording the minutes of the meeting, and told her he was of course referring to the Regional Crime Squad. Having settled that point, he then asked who was going to bring them up to date on the Whitfield case.

"I think Tom should," Kingman said. "You'd only get it secondhand from me."

"Where would you like me to begin?" Coghill asked.

"With the safety-deposit box," Tucker said curtly.

"We found it contained nine thousand eight hundred and seventy-five pounds in cash." Coghill reached into his jacket pocket and brought out the address book. "In here are the code names of thirty-seven clients from whom Karen Whitfield was planning to collect close to two hundred thousand. Eleven of these can be eliminated, because they paid her off and presumably recovered the incriminating material she was holding on them. Moneywise, at least twelve among the remaining twenty-six are considerably better off now that she's dead, but this could be misleading. It's possible the man we're looking for had an entirely different motive."

"Like what?"

"Well, he could be a VIP who would be thrown out of office or compelled to resign if the seamy side of his life-style got into the newspapers."

"It's an interesting theory, Inspector, but can you prove it?"

"I think so. There are various symbols below each entry which suggest Karen Whitfield used a form of shorthand to describe her clients. It's not the easiest of ciphers to crack, but the hall porter at Abercorn House gave me a name and it checked out."

"Oh yes? What was the name?"

"Ashforth," Coghill said, "Jeremy Ashforth. He's represented by a quill and a box which I took to be a TV screen."