A Conflict of Interests (23 page)

"Run and phone for an ambulance," Patterson snapped. "He's going to die if we don't get him to a hospital."

Drobnowski hesitated, then nodded his head and moved toward the door. As he did so, Patterson stuck out a leg to send him sprawling onto the floor. In one fluid motion, Patterson came up into a crouch, swung around and threw himself on top of the Pole, both knees slamming into the small of his back. Virtually paralyzed from the waist down by the savage impact on his kidneys, Drobnowski moaned in agony and tried to reach behind him to relieve the pain. Still pinning him down with both knees, Patterson swiveled around until he was sideways to the Pole, then, using the outside edge of his right hand like an axe, he chopped down, delivering one rabbit punch after another until he finally succeeded in breaking Drobnowski's neck. A few feet away, Mace lay motionless on his back, mouth open, tongue protruding, eyes glazed and sightless.

Patterson sank back on his heels. Out of necessity he had killed two men in a little over a minute, but if one threat had been eradicated, another was just around the corner. Sooner or later, Mrs. Drobnowski would undoubtedly drop in to see how her husband was getting on with the rewiring. Exactly when this might happen depended on whether or not she was expecting him to come home for lunch and at what time. Twelve-thirty? One o'clock? What the hell did it matter? Neither possibility afforded him enough time to make a clean getaway; his only hope was to make her think her no-good husband had sneaked off to have a drink somewhere.

Patterson straightened up, grabbed Drobnowski by the heels and hauled him into the ground-floor flat. That done, he returned to the hall, dragged Mace into the same room and then searched through Drobnowski's pockets. One yielded a handful of loose change, a pack of John Player filter tips and a box of Swan Vesta matches, while in the other, he found a bunch of Yale keys. There was also a small imitation-leather wallet in the hip pocket containing twelve pounds, a dog license and a selection of creased snapshots. He took the money, ripped up the license, scattered the snapshots around the body and tossed the wallet onto the floor. He did the same with Mace, except that in his case, he turned all his pockets inside out and kept the warrant card. For good measure, he also stamped on the Parker fountain pen, reducing it to fragments.

The scene he'd arranged was intended to give the impression that robbery had been the prime motive and, with any luck, it would buy him a little more time. Unless Mace was known to the local CID, there was also reason to believe he would not be immediately identified. Locking the two men inside the room, he opened the street door again and then went on up to his apartment on the first floor.

Patterson could not recall a previous occasion when he had been in such a tight corner. He had arrived in Britain with two Canadian passports, one made out to Oscar Pittis, the other in the name of Oliver Pearce. Both were now useless, because Mace had succeeded in tracing him to Linsdale Gardens. Just how and why the police had linked the two names was beyond his understanding and wholly irrelevant at the moment. Right now, his number-one priority was to disappear without trace, and that presented certain difficulties. His only fallback was a West German passport and the open-ended return half of an airline ticket from Munich to London. Herr Otto Prole wore spectacles with thick lenses, had a facial blemish, blue eyes, bushy eyebrows and fair hair the color of pepper and salt. The spectacles and contact lenses were still in his possession along with the partly used cachets of hair dye, but he'd ditched the rest of his disguise at Heathrow on Saturday, flushing it down the toilet. An adhesive bandage in the right place would take care of the facial blemish and with a certain amount of improvisation, he was sure he could do something to his eyebrows to make them appear thicker than they were.

Aware that every minute counted, he lifted his suitcase down from on top of the wardrobe, dumped it on the bed and then cleared everything out of the closet, the chest of drawers and the laundry basket. He packed hurriedly: spare suit, clean shirts, underpants and socks at the bottom, shoes and dirty linen on top, the video cassettes in between and around the edges. Any nosy customs officer at Munich who wanted to examine his baggage would now have to sift through a pile of dirty laundry before he reached the tapes and the sight of all that soiled linen might deter him from going any farther. Although nobody would arrest him for bringing a collection of porno movies into the Federal Republic, cops were the same the world over; whatever their nationality, they were just naturally inquisitive and he wasn't anxious to get into a hassle with them.

Patterson glanced around the room to make sure he hadn't overlooked anything. The movie equipment he'd purchased yesterday was a dead giveaway and would have to be abandoned together with the Mini on the way to Heathrow. Although the car was bound to come to their notice in the end, he saw no point in making things easy for the police, and anything that helped to snarl up the manhunt was a bonus. Leaving the suitcase open on the bed, Patterson collected the adhesive he'd used to compile the montage of film clips, went into the bathroom and stripped to the waist.

He tore a strip from the lavatory roll and placed the toilet paper on the glass shelf above the pedestal washbasin. With a pair of nail scissors, he then took several clippings of hair from around his ears and carefully placed them on the toilet paper. Next, he smeared both eyebrows with a thin coating of adhesive, moistened his fingertips under the tap and painstakingly transferred the minute hairs to both eyebrows, thickening them up until he achieved the effect he wanted. While the adhesive was setting, he worked on his hair, diluting the blond tint in the washbasin before applying it with a nylon brush. Then, he emptied the concentrated tint into a tooth mug, dipped a comb into the dye and ran it through his hair, paying special attention to the back and sides, where the pepperish coloring would be more noticeable. Finally and very gingerly, he colored his eyebrows, using a toothbrush to press the tint right down to the roots.

There remained only the facial blemish, described in the passport as a reddish-brown birthmark on the right cheekbone. Pinching the flesh between forefinger and thumb to bruise it, Patterson nicked a V in the cheek with a razor blade, gritted his teeth and deliberately shaved off the top layer of skin. The blood welled, coursed down his face and dripped into the washbasin. A facecloth pressed over the wound stemmed the flow long enough for him to fish the Ronson lighter out of his pocket and cauterize it with the naked flame. The pain was agonizing and he could feel the bile rising in his throat as he staggered into the room and returned with a tin of brown shoe polish. Hand shaking, he rubbed a smear of polish into the seared flesh, staining it a reddish brown, then covered the greater part of the mutilation with an adhesive bandage. Later on, when the wound had cauterized, he would remove the sticking plaster. In the meanwhile, it would look as if he'd nicked his face when shaving.

He stepped back a pace, looked down and saw that he'd forgotten to replace the floorboard and linoleum after he'd removed the video cassettes from their hiding place. He knelt down, reached inside the cavity and brought out the Iver Johnson .22 caliber revolver in its leather hip holster. A feeling that he would be naked without it was counterbalanced by the knowledge that the chances of getting the revolver through the security check at Heathrow detected were virtually nil. Patterson weighed the revolver in his hand, finally decided to leave the handgun behind and shoved it between the joists. He replaced the floorboard, stamped on it to drive the nails home and quickly relaid the linoleum.

A glance at his wristwatch showed that it was past one o'clock and the cool head which had carried him thus far began to desert him. Fear took over and everything he did from there on became a frantic race against time. Mind in a whirl, he crammed the shaving tackle and used cachets into the washbag, emptied the tooth mug and rinsed the basin. Grabbing the shirt, he went next door and dressed hurriedly, his fingers all thumbs as he struggled to button the shirt collar and knot the tie. Stay loose, he told himself, sound advice that went unheeded when he discovered the goddamned contact lenses weren't in the jacket pockets. Close to despair, he searched the chest of drawers again and eventually found them under the paper lining of the bottom drawer.

Passport, spectacles, airline ticket, folding money? He ran his hands over his body, checking to make sure he had them, jammed the trilby on his head, then grabbed hold of the suitcase and emptied half the contents on to the bed as he lifted it up. "Shit!" He screamed the word aloud, stuffed the clothes back inside any old way and snapped the locks. The executive briefcase? He whirled around, delved under the wardrobe and pulled it out. Remembering to open the door first, he picked up both pieces of luggage, ran down the staircase and stowed them in the back of the Mini, then returned to collect the movie equipment.

Calmer now, Patterson got into the car, switched on the ignition and cranked the engine. Shifting into gear, he pulled away from the curbside, went on up to the junction and turned left into Richouse Terrace. Instinct prompted him to look in the rearview mirror as he neared the Clapham Road and his newly found air of confidence immediately evaporated at the sight of Mrs. Drobnowski striding purposefully toward Linsdale Gardens. He realized then that when her husband failed to answer the door, she would undoubtedly look through the window and see the two bodies lying on the floor inside the flat.

Just how much leeway he would have before she called the police was problematical, but it was essential he ditch the Mini and fast. With that thought in mind, he abandoned the car in Elm Lane and walked the rest of the way to Kennington Underground station. The Northern Line to Leicester Square, then out to Heathrow on the Piccadilly. It was the only solution, but the journey would take well over an hour and he had a nasty premonition that time was running out for him.

17.

Caroline Brooke added a period to the sentence she had just typed, realigned the carriage to begin the next paragraph and found she had reached the bottom of the page. Thanks to Vaudrey, who'd hacked the original to pieces with his corrections, the second draft of the so-called Libyan scenario was taking her much longer to complete than she had anticipated, and there was still some way to go. Operating the shift lever, she released the typescript from the carriage, extracted the carbon and placed the original and top copy in her pending tray. She slipped the carbon between another two sheets of A4 size paper, fed them into the Olivetti and typed the figure 4 at the top of the page, more or less in the center. Then she leaned back in the chair and took a bite out of the ham sandwich one of the clerks had brought in for her. Her mouth was still half full when the telephone rang.

The contact at Scotland Yard was a Lowlander from Motherwell whose Scottish accent after living in London for the past eighteen years had been subdued to a mere rolling of the r's. It was, however, apt to surface and become very noticeable whenever he became excited or angry. The brogue was so evident on this occasion that she surmised he was both angry and excited.

"Oliver Pearce," he snapped. "Does the name mean anything to you?"

"Not in the least," Caroline told him, but the alarm bells were ringing and it wasn't too difficult to guess what was coming next.

"It will. We believe he's also known as Oscar Pittis and he's the number-one suspect for the Whitfield/Leese killings. As of now, we're crediting him with another two, Leopold Drobnowski and Detective Sergeant Mace. The bastard tried to make it seem as though robbery were the motive, stole all their cash and lifted the sergeant's warrant card, but overlooked the snapshots in his wallet. Among them was a photograph of a celebration dinner held by the CID officers of V District. That's how we identified him so quickly."

"I see."

"Do you, Miss Brooke?" His voice was sharp, the tone cutting as a claymore.

"Not really," she lied. "I'm afraid it was an automatic response."

"You're fencing with me, lassie, and it won't do you any bloody good. You've been tapping me for information ever since the Whitfield case broke, for reasons you've never fully disclosed. Now the boot's on the other foot and I'm coming to you for information. My superiors are saying that you people have a shrewd idea who this Oliver Pearce really is."

"That's nonsense," Caroline told him firmly.

"Don't give me that."

"I'm sorry, but it happens to be true. If you don't believe me, I suggest you get in touch with Nicholas Vaudrey."

"I don't know Mr. Vaudrey from Adam and I've no intention of making his acquaintance right now, Miss Brooke. You're the one I'm used to dealing with and you've got exactly one hour from now to come up with his name. If I haven't heard from you by three-fifteen, someone's head is going to roll."

There was a loud clunk as he hung up on her. Replacing the receiver, she buzzed Vaudrey on the office intercom, then remembered he'd gone out to lunch. He was a creature of habit, so she assumed Vaudrey was lunching at his club and dialed 930–9721, only to discover that he wasn't lunching at the Army and Navy. She rang the flat in Cheney Walk, got a long continuous burr which indicated the number was out of order and wondered if Nicholas was at home or whether his housekeeper had simply unplugged the phone, as she was apt to do when she didn't want to be disturbed. Getting nowhere fast, she tried every section head in DI5 and those contacts of Vaudrey's in other government departments that she knew of, but to no avail. Finally, Caroline rang the flat again and found the line was still allegedly out of order.

It had been a really excellent lunch, mainly because the duck pâté, fresh salmon, strawberries and cream had been ordered from Fortnum and Mason, and they had therefore been spared the culinary efforts of Vaudrey's housekeeper. Two large gin and tonics, a bottle of Muscadet and a very agreeable liqueur brandy with their coffee and cigars had contributed to Walter J. Zellick's affable mood and sense of well-being. If the American was intrigued to know why Vaudrey had phoned him the previous evening to invite him to lunch, he had succeeded in concealing it up to now. A small furrow and the way he was contemplating his cigar told Vaudrey that he would be unable to contain his curiosity much longer.