Policeman's Progress (19 page)

Alec was thinking of sea or air fares for the two men.

‘Quite a packet. He always carried a roll of notes, just to impress people when he flashed them. Then there would be a big cash float in the club, for the croupiers every night. That would be kept in the safe in his flat at the Rising Sun.'

‘About how much?'

‘At least a couple of hundred quid.'

Bolam sighed. The safe in the Bigg Market club had been found open, with nothing inside but ledgers.

‘Has he got a gun?' was the next question.

She shook her head decisively. ‘He wasn't that sort. Always boasted that he could do more damage with his fists.'

‘Or his feet,' added Bolam grimly.

The girl's eyes suddenly filled with tears and she nodded jerkily.

‘These protection boys – Papagos and Casella – did you see them at any time?'

‘Only when they came to the club – Jackie threw them out.'

‘But you say Hansen went to see them yesterday in Darlington, to fix this blackmail of Stott over the bag of clothes?'

She bit her lip and for the first time began to see that she and her boyfriend – if he lived – were not going to get out of this scot-free.

‘Do you know where they were staying?'

‘No – Thor dropped me to look at the shops for half an hour. Must have been near the town centre, he wasn't gone long.'

She seemed to have no more to tell him and he left her to make another pilgrimage to the hospital.

‘What are we going to do about Papagos and Casella?' asked Jimmy with curiosity.

Bolam scratched his head. ‘Leave that to Uncle Mac and the DPP. They're a tricky bunch of monkeys. We should have the drop on them this time, but let's see if Hansen is going to be able to speak first.'

They drove away from the station, wondering where the devil to start looking for Jackie Stott and Joe Blunt.

At six o'clock that evening, the two men in question walked warily out of the hotel in Darlington and made their way to a small car hire firm in a back street.

Abel Lupin had left them some time earlier, to catch a train back to Durham; he little suspected that he had been sitting with two wanted men these past few hours.

While Joe Blunt went into the car rental depot, Jackie waited in the yard and thought about the transaction he had just made with the Soho crime kings. The Greek had unflinchingly stuck to his price of thirty thousand pounds. Jackie fumed and raved for a time, but Papagos was unmoving as the Rock of Gibraltar. If only he had known that several thousand police were outside looking for Jackie, his price – if any at all –would have been far lower. Stott was only too well aware of this to be in a bargaining position and eventually he had to capitulate.

Abel Lupin protested loud and long about the skimped legal formalities, but had to agree with Papagos that the draft agreement he produced was perfectly binding for all its brevity.

In essence, it transferred all the stock, equipment, staff contracts and goodwill of Jackie's business interests to Papagos for the cash sum of thirty thousand pounds.

The contract was signed and witnessed, then the Greek produced a suitcase filled to the brim with bundles of five-pound notes.

‘Here you are, sixty bundles of a hundred notes each … check it if you like, but I wouldn't twist you. I might burn your place down and Bruno here might stick a knife in your ribs, but I wouldn't stoop to fiddle you over cash.'

He said this half in jest, but Jackie believed him. He was past caring, anyway. When Joe Blunt hefted the case and stood up Jackie was already on his way to the door.

‘I thought Thor Hansen would have been in on this,' said Kostas Papagos.

Jackie's brow darkened. ‘We don't exactly see eye to eye – not since I found he was a stoolie for you!' he growled. Stott was no great actor, but he carried this off quite well.

Leaving the Greek and his partner with their makeshift contract, the two Tynesiders had slipped out into the gloom with their precious case, to risk the hazard of the Darlington streets. Now Jackie waited impatiently for Joe to fix up the car, keeping his back to the gateway leading to the police infested roads.

To his relief, a three-year-old Vauxhall with his henchman behind the wheel appeared from the garage and stopped to pick him up.

‘Right – back to Newcastle, the long way around!'

Joe set off on a devious route that more than doubled the distance, going away from the Great North Road into the moorland country that led westwards to the Pennines. They aimed for Bishop Auckland, Tow Law and the more pastoral parts of the upper Tyne valley, to circle north and approach the big city from the opposite direction.

During the long journey, Jackie took the opportunity to count the bundles of notes in the dim light from the dashboard.

‘That bloody wop was right – there's exactly thirty grand here – not ten bob more or less!' he grunted to Joe, whose piggy eyes were squinting ahead at the deserted road.

‘It looks OK?' growled the old sparring partner.

Jackie sniffed. ‘I'll lay evens that it's “hot” … all used and dirty notes. But the numbers are all over the place, none consecutive, so it's sure to be untraceable.'

‘Think they'll be all right?' persisted Joe, in a worried voice, swinging his big head to look at the cash.

‘Keep yer flaming eyes on the road,' snapped Jackie. ‘You get us in the ditch now and we won't be needing any bloody money for the next fourteen years or so.'

He clicked the case shut and dropped it between his legs. ‘Yes, it'll do … we'll be changing it bit by bit all through Holland and down France into Spain.'

Joe digested this in silence. Then he said, ‘I haven't got a passport. Never bin outta the country before, see.'

Jackie sighed. ‘I said I'd fix all that, din't I? We take the boat into Amsterdam and I contact this chap I know, runs a casino there. He'll flog the boat for us, fix us some fake passports and get us a good car with the proceeds. He's a real villain, do anything for me – I knew him in the war.'

Joe still sounded dubious.

‘Then what we do? Neither of us speak the lingo. We'll get picked up, sure as hell.'

Jackie snapped at him. ‘Bloody moaner, you are! Look, that boat of mine will cross the North Sea as if it was a duck pond. We'll be in the south of Spain inside a week.'

‘Then what?' Joe sounded unconvinced.

‘Tangier, boy! I had a holiday there, a coupla years back – smashing place, plenty of graft, no questions asked, no extradition. We can grow ourselves a couple of beards, nobody'll know us from Adam. With this thirty thousand we can get set up in a little club. Start modest, we could clean up a fortune in a year or two. Better off than doing fourteen years in the nick, I tell you.'

They drove on in silence for some miles while Jackie's brain tried to work out all the angles and possible snags in his bid for freedom and one of the first he spotted was fuel.

‘Stop at the next filling station,' he ordered and, at a garage in a lonely hamlet, they drew up at the petrol pumps. After having some in the tank of the Vauxhall, Stott asked the attendant if he had any empty oil drums that could be filled with diesel fuel. ‘Need it for our farm generator up at Allendale,' he explained.

The man produced two ten-gallon drums and filled them from the DERV pump, Jackie managing to stow them in the boot. At another garage ten miles further on, they repeated the process, this time putting three drums on the back seat.

‘That should be enough to get the
Bella
to America, let alone the Dutch coast,' exaggerated Stott in satisfaction, after they had driven off. ‘Her main tank is full – that's fifty gallons – and I've already got a couple of spare drums aboard.'

Eventually, they approached Newcastle and began cautiously to enter the suburbs from the west. Jackie took over the driving, telling Joe to lie flat on the floor at the back. The police might be looking for two men leaving Newcastle, but Stott calculated that they would be much less interested in one man entering the city. He found an old pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment and, after pushing the lenses out, wore the empty frames as an apology for a disguise.

Sedately, they travelled through the streets without challenge, the Vauxhall making its way steadily towards Scotswood, about two miles upstream from the bridges between Newcastle and Gateshead.

Here, at a dismal mooring between two factories, a dozen private craft dozed on the black water. Some were lifeboat conversions, used mainly by fishing parties, and others were proper motor cruisers.

The biggest and best was Jackie's boat, the
Bella
. She was not a heavy-weather boat but, as long as the present weather held, she could cope with the crossing to Holland.

Jackie ran the car down a lane between high walls and coasted quietly to the wharfside. The
Bella
was moored twenty yards from the bank, to be out of the reach of marauding children. There was a ‘pram' dinghy belonging to one of the other boats tied to the quayside and within a few moments, Jackie had paddled out and hauled the cruiser to the wharf. The tide was high and the strong arms of the two ex-boxers soon dumped the oil drums down on to the deck.

Jackie's seafaring eye looked them over critically. ‘Better lash them together on the after-part of the deck – they'll keep her bottom well down in the watter!'

He left Joe doing this while he reversed the Vauxhall well back into the shadows on the quay. When all was secure, they went into the cockpit and a moment later the whine of the electric starters and the splutter of the cold engines broke the late evening silence of the river.

The diesels fired and began to run smoothly as they warmed up. Jackie switched the navigation lights on and gently moved astern from the moorings, into the main stream of the Tyne.

‘Cheerio, England – and bloody good riddance,' he muttered, patting the suitcase that lay on the locker alongside him.

Chapter Twelve

‘Everything is going perfectly,' growled MacDonald. ‘Hansen seems to be pulling through; we've got a solid case against everyone concerned – the only small point is that the two principals involved have vanished from the face of the blasted earth!'

He spoke through the window of his car, just before driving off from Headquarters. Bolam and Grainger stood outside and raised their hands in a salute of farewell as he drove away.

‘He's right, you know … I didn't think those two thick bastards would have the savvy to keep out of sight as well as this,' said Jimmy, as they went back into the building.

‘Jackie's not thick, not by a hell of a way,' corrected Alec. ‘Granted, Joe Blunt is a bit of a zombie, but Stott's as cunning as they come. He's arrogant and vain and thinks he's too clever to be caught … but where the blazes
are
they?'

It was late evening by now and the two detectives went to the canteen for tea and biscuits. One of the photography sergeants was there and they began the inevitable discussion on the case.

‘Where would
you
go if you were wanted for murder, Sam?' asked Jimmy.

‘A long way abroad – South America or Canada, to join the Train Robbers,' said the other sergeant promptly.

‘Come off it, Jackie's only got a few hundred quid, not a few million.'

‘Well, anywhere abroad – you can get all over Europe for that sort of money.'

‘The singer girl suggested Ireland,' put in Bolam, thoughtfully. ‘We've asked for a special watch on the Irish packet terminals and the airports … two big thugs like them could hardly go unnoticed.'

‘The Met are keeping an eye on King's Cross and places like that, but it's a hell of a job to watch everywhere,' added Grainger.

‘What about passports?' asked the photographer. ‘Jackie's is missing from the safe, according to the Levine woman. Joe never had one, by all accounts.'

‘They must be holed up somewhere – probably under our noses in Newcastle.'

‘What about this taxi driver who says he took them to Durham this afternoon?'

‘Beats me … I can hardly believe it, to be honest,' sighed the chief inspector.

‘The cabbie seemed definite enough, but why the hell would they pick Durham?'

There was a silence, broken only by munching and sipping.

Neither Bolam nor Jimmy felt like going home. They somehow felt that by staying on, they might charm events into going right for them. Alec had no particular wish to go back to face a barrage of questions from Vera about Betty's lost hours the previous night. The girl herself had become withdrawn and silent since she returned – the brief period of tenderness with her father had been short-lived but her infatuation with Freddie seemed to have vanished and Bolam prayed that the experience hadn't twisted her against men permanently.

He went back to his office, and for a time there was a brooding silence in the room, until it was broken by the clamour of the telephone.

‘Leadbitter here – Tyne Division … switchboard told me you were still in.'

‘Ernie … what the dickens are you doing this time of night?'

‘Changed shifts – doing a spell of nights while Andrews gets his haemorrhoids fixed … Jimmy Grainger rang up earlier today and left a message asking about tide times on the day Geordie Armstrong was killed.'

‘That's right – we found the clothing and we wanted to check that it could have been retrieved at the time Hansen was supposed to have found it on the mud bank.'

The River Sergeant quoted some times over the phone and Alec jotted them down.

‘No sign of them villains yet, sir?' asked Leadbitter, conversationally.

‘Not a trace, Ernie … they're bound to surface sometime, though. We had a suggestion that they might have stowed away on a ship from the Tyne … any Dutch or German coasters in the river tonight?'