Corpse in Waiting (26 page)

‘Ever seen Daddy do that?' I asked grimly of him.

He nodded solemnly and then gave me Patrick's lovely smile.

The description did not match that of the man who had attacked me in Boyles House so, whatever the truth of Alexandra's past or present circumstances, she was a three-yob woman, at least. This one was fifty to sixty years of age, grey-haired but balding, of medium height and had appeared to be wearing a lot of gold jewellery. I sent the information listed on the sheet of A4, exactly as it was, to Greenway's work email address, there was no point in bothering him with it at home. I knew that his mobile was never switched off except when he was on holiday, presumably taken on an Antarctic ice shelf, but was determined to contact him only as a last resort. Having access to vehicle records I set about finding out to whom the Mercedes belonged. Anything I found out could be relayed to Patrick.

The car was registered to one Romano Descallier, his address in Berkshire. I ran the information through crime records and discovered that this gaming club and wine bar proprietor – he owned several businesses in London – had served twelve months for demanding money with menaces in his youth but had since matured sufficiently to be charged with tax evasion, GBH, of which he was cleared on account of witnesses failing to turn up in court, a hit and run offence for which he lost his licence and served two years, culminating in driving whilst disqualified and assaulting a police officer. This case was still on the book as he had jumped bail.

‘So he's another one who's fallen through holes in the system,' I muttered.

After checking on my family, Mark asleep in his pram in the garden just outside the window, Vicky awake but still on the sofa in the next room playing happily with her three Teddies, Justin in the dining room with me crawling around the floor with toy cars and spittily making all the sound effects, the elder two presumably picking over someone's rubbish, I rang Alan Kilmartin.

Why did my heart still thump madly every time I heard his voice?

‘Did Alexandra ever mention a man by the name of Romano Descallier?' I asked when we had exchanged greetings and I had told him that Patrick and the Met police were working on the phone call he had received from her.

‘Yes, she did. He was one of her clients.'

‘He may well be involved. Do you know what kind of staff she supplied him with?'

‘A butler, a nanny, I
think
, plus other people like gardeners and cleaners. It seems he was very fussy – always sacking his staff on excuses that Alex said were downright flimsy.'

‘It doesn't sound as though she liked him.'

‘He infuriated her but – and I might be quite wrong here – I think, on the quiet, she came to quite fancy him, perhaps on account of his being loaded.'

I filed that snippet away and said, ‘Do you know if she ever went to his house?'

‘We both did. We were invited to a Christmas bash one year.'

‘Look, I know you're terribly busy but—'

‘I'm not, it's Saturday and anyway there's nothing pressing.'

‘Would you write down what you can remember about this man, his home, any family, everything you noticed, and email it to me?'

‘It might be easier for me to come over – that's if you don't mind. I can do you a drawing of the place and a rough plan of the room layout as well if that might be useful to the police. He insisted on showing everyone round – a complete poser if you ask me.'

‘Please do, but as Patrick's parents have gone out for the day I have full charge of five children.'

‘Oh, I like kids.'

I then went into panic mode over what I could give everyone for lunch.

I need not have worried. From the moment he walked through the door carrying a large cardboard tube that contained sheets of drawing paper everything was in hand. First, we lunched on jacket potatoes with various fillings and salad followed by what was left of a large home-made chocolate gateau that Elspeth had won in a village raffle and had begged me to help them finish. Then, while I quickly tidied up, Alan Kilmartin spread a few sheets of paper on the kitchen table, together with some professional felt-tip pens in the most fantastic colours I had ever seen and got the three eldest busily designing their dream houses. Having already told me that his two sisters had babies he then dandled Mark, who had been squalling, on his knee. Vicky, bless her sweet little soul, was still having a quiet day, had eaten a large lunch and was, once again, asleep on the sofa.

We took our coffee, and Mark, into the dining room where I cleared a corner of my desk and Alan got to work.

‘How do you write in here?' he broke off to ask. ‘There must be far too many distractions.'

‘With difficulty,' I answered.

‘You ought to have your own space.'

‘That's why I wanted to buy a house in Bath. Unfortunately, you-know-who had seen it first. I've lost it now, she put in a higher offer.'

‘Don't give up hope. She often sees something she decides she wants even more and drops what had been the latest toy. Unless she's an innocent victim in all this she'll end up in court and probably won't need it anyway. Nasty of me, I know, but I rather hope she gets locked up.'

What he had said would be a rough sketch was turning out to be what looked to me like a finely executed and detailed plan.

‘Please be very careful over this Descallier character,' Alan said a couple of minutes later. ‘Since you rang I've been thinking about what went on that evening and have decided that my conclusions that he was merely a poser with very poor taste was because I had been looking at him through the bottom of a champagne glass for a lot of the time. There were some dodgy-looking people there with whom he seemed to have some kind of understanding.'

‘What else went on that made you suspicious?'

‘It was just the atmosphere. Convivial on the surface but with not too pleasant undertones. Meaningful looks, Descallier sending people off on some errand or other with a scowl and a jerk of his head, a general feeling of unease – hard to describe actually.'

An argument, Justin shouting, again, having broken out in the kitchen, Kilmartin left the room before I could move and I heard him point out that drawing offices were very quiet places and any real problems should be referred to the dining room. Silence fell.

No one, he went on to tell me, had been introduced to the guests as a wife or partner and no children or very young people had been present. There had been plenty of young women around though, some of whom had given the impression they lived there. The house was large, modern and situated close to Windsor Great Park.

‘Is your husband planning to break into this place and that's why you want the information?' he went on to ask lightly.

‘I don't think so, but he might when I tell him about it.'

Later, when he had gone, I rang Patrick and left a message, his phone being switched off, which I had half expected. There was no response until quite late in the evening when I was able to relax, Carrie having returned and happy to carry on with her duties.

‘We're in a pub,' was Patrick's first piece of news.

‘Fancy that,' I said.

‘We deserve a pint and something to eat. James broke all the speed limits except where there were cameras and we got here in time to take apart four one-time or active pimps who he knew about before they crawled back into their sewers. Another two were in prison and the last was dead. We didn't learn an awful lot but got the whereabouts of an old warehouse that's known to have been used to conceal female immigrants, legal and otherwise, and went there. The place is deserted but it's obvious that people have been living there quite recently. Boyles House was mentioned by one man but he didn't know any details. We'd called there on the off-chance on the way but Fred doesn't work nights. Then we had a kip in the car and now we're fuelled to follow another lead, an address in east London that someone swore is being used for what was described as a holding pen. What's this about something the kids have found out?'

I had not previously gone into details but did so now, finishing by saying, ‘In my view this would be a more profitable line of enquiry. This man could be the boss. He followed me to Warminster, and now he's back. Matthew and Katie saw him the day before yesterday.'

‘I don't like the sound of that. I'll ring you back when I've spoken to James.'

Quite a while went by before my phone rang again.

‘Understandably James doesn't want to get involved with breaking into a private house without a warrant,' Patrick said. ‘And I'll have to get Greenway on board, ditto. We're going to have a nose around the place in Chingford that I mentioned just now and then, if that doesn't lead anywhere call it a day. James will then drive back home and organize some surveillance around Hinton Littlemoor. I'll go to my club and contact Greenway. Would you email me the drawings and plans Kilmartin drew up?'

‘I can't, they're on A3 paper, too big to scan in to our machine. I'll bring them.'

‘There's every chance that Descallier, or one of his minions, will follow you.'

‘He might not be around at four in the morning if I leave then. If he is, or someone else is standing in for him and tails me I'll just shoot out his tyres.'

‘No, I think you should concentrate on losing him – we don't want this character to know we're really on to him.'

It was nice to know that he took my threat seriously.

Brave statements apart I still tended to unlock the Range Rover with fear gnawing at my insides. I had been keeping it parked as close to the house as possible so that if anyone approached it during the night the outside security lights would come on. Still not being able to recollect those few minutes of my life made it worse and every time I went anywhere near the vehicle I checked that there were no tell-tale drips of brake fluid on the ground beneath it.

Those still abed had been warned of my early departure and as the tyres crunched over the gravel of the drive I wondered if Matthew and Katie were now awake and this would be their new mystery. Perhaps Mike Greenway would permit us to show them a small part of SOCA's HQ next time we took them to London.

No black Mercs were parked in the High Street of the village and no one appeared to follow me. I had been on the road for over an hour, the sky lightening, before I saw a familiar black shape in my rear mirror. I was on the outskirts of a village and immediately turned left into a small housing estate where I did a U-turn and then parked, facing the way I had come in. Switching off the ignition and lights I waited.

Five minutes went by. Light traffic whooshed to and fro on the main road but no one came into this quite little enclave, not even a dog barked. I set off again, prepared for the vehicle to be similarly parked in a side road while the driver waited for me to pass. A few miles farther on I had not seen it and began to relax, chiding myself for having got in a mild flap over what had obviously been another black Mercedes, hardly an uncommon vehicle.

Patrick's club – a low-key, but frankly, sumptuous affair for ex-officers who have been severely injured in the course of duty – is in Chiswick and I got there just in time for breakfast. This, and my arrival, had previously been arranged, the club being sufficiently old-fashioned to prefer members not to have females arrive out of the blue. I had asked on a previous visit if ladies who fitted the criteria were allowed to join and had been told they were: it was just that there weren't any. And no, the place isn't one of those stuffy establishments where old fogies sit around dozing, waiting to die. Behind the scenes it is a meeting place, the heart of an information network, a grapevine, for MI5, MI6, covert police departments, including SOCA and Special Branch. Most of the people who go through its doors are not members at all, but, like me, ‘visitors'.

Patrick, who keeps a change of clothing on the premises as a certain standard of dress is expected, was waiting for me in the entrance hall, actually a large room furnished with armchairs and sofas with a coffee bar in one corner. When I first glimpsed him, standing by a table reading the headlines of one of the morning newspapers placed upon it, my heart turned over, as it usually does. Here, surely, was the other side of the coin to the man who had gone away just over twenty-four hours previously with murder writ large in his eyes. But not so, I saw when we were close: his smile when he looked up and saw me was genuine but he was as taut as a bowstring.

‘No luck then?' I said, after I had signed the visitors' book at reception and we had exchanged a quick kiss.

‘Yes, in a way. I'll tell you about it in a minute. Were you followed?'

I handed over the drawings in the cardboard tube that Alan Kilmartin had left behind for me to use. ‘There was a Merc behind me at one stage but it hadn't followed me from the village. And this man or his henchmen can't possibly wait for me to go somewhere around the clock.'

When we were seated in the dining room; heavy blue brocade curtains, gold-coloured carpet, marble fireplace, chandeliers, discreet bar, Patrick signalled to the waiter. Then he said, ‘I've been on to Greenway with your info. Descallier's hot. Friend of Cabinet ministers – on the quiet – financier of political parties, whichever one best suits his inclinations, racehorse owner and on nodding terms with minor royalty. There's no question that any vehicle registered to him – and it would have been driven by an employee – could have been remotely connected with what happened to you as it would retrospectively be reported stolen as he's a chum of a couple of top cops too.'