Star Trap (23 page)

Perhaps it was the sea-front in winter that made him so introspective, but he found big questions looming in his mind, big unanswerable cliché questions, all the
whys?
and
why bothers?
and
what does it matters?
Life was very empty.

There was a man walking along the street towards the Villiers Hotel. Charles stiffened. Here at last was something, something real and tangible.

The man he saw was bald, with big ears. When he had seen them in Leeds, Charles had thought the ears looked like handles of a loving cup. The man had hardly registered in Bristol, Charles had just thought he looked like the one in Leeds, but now seeing him for the third time there was no question. It was the same man.

And each time the man had appeared near Christopher Milton's hotel early in the morning. Charles felt he was near to solving the mystery of who did the star's dirty work.

He crossed the road and followed the bald man into the Villiers Hotel. He hadn't really planned his next move, but it was made easy for him. There was temporarily no one in Reception. The bald man rang for a lift. Charles stood by his side, assessing him. A bit old for a heavy, but he was well-built and had the bear-like shape of a wrestler. His mouth was a tight line and the eyes looked mean.

The lift came. The bald man got in and asked for the fourth floor. Charles, who hadn't acted in fifties detective films for nothing, also got in and asked for the fifth. There wasn't one. ‘Oh, so sorry,' he said, feeling that this wasn't a very auspicious start. ‘I mean the fourth – third.'

The bald man did not seem to notice his companion's gaucheness and Charles was decanted on the third floor. It was a matter of moments to find the stairs and scurry up to the fourth. He hid behind the fire-door and watched the bald man walk along the corridor to room 41, knock and enter.

Charles followed, treading noiselessly in the soft pile of the expensive carpet. He stopped by room 41 and put his ear to the door. He could hear two voices, one of them recognisably Christopher Milton's, but they were too far away for him to distinguish the words.

Anyway, he was in a rather exposed position for listening. A Hoover stood unattended in the corridor and muffled singing also indicated the presence of cleaners. He'd have to move quickly.

The cleaners had left a key with its heavy metal label in the door of room 42. He opened the door and sidled in.

He had expected an immediate confrontation with a suspicious cleaner but miraculously the suite was empty. He moved to the wall which was shared with room 41 and put his ear to it. They were still talking, but, though the speech was clearer, it was again impossible to hear individual words. The effect was of badly tuned radio.

Remembering another movie, Charles fetched a tooth-glass from the bathroom. Pressed against the wall it improved the sound quality, but still not enough to make it intelligible. People who paid for their privacy at the Villiers Hotel did not waste their money.

He was almost despairing when he thought of the balcony. A sea view was another of the perks for those who were prepared to pay the astronomical rates charged for a fourth-floor suite at the Villiers.

He slid the galvanised steel door back. The cold slap of air made him realise how grotesquely over-heated the hotel was.

The balcony of room 42 adjoined that of 41. Only a bar separated them. By sliding along the wall of the building, Charles could get very close to Christopher Milton's window and still remain out of sight from the room. The window was slightly open in reaction to the central heating. Charles could hear what was being said inside quite clearly.

He stood high above the sea-shore on a cold November morning in Brighton and listened.

Christopher Milton's voice came first, strangled with passion. ‘. . . and I can't stand the way they are always looking at me, always assessing me. I hate them all.'

‘What do you mean, you hate them?' The other voice was toneless, without any emotion.

‘I mean I want something to happen to them.'

‘What?'

‘I want them out of my way. The others went out of my way.'

‘Yes.' The dry voice gave nothing. ‘What do you want to happen to them?'

‘I want them to die. I want them all to die.' He could hardly get the words out.

‘Who are you talking about?'

‘All of them.'

‘Not all. We can't just kill them all, can we? Who do you really want dead?'

‘Charles Paris.' The name was hissed out. ‘I want Charles Paris dead.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AT THAT MOMENT someone came into the room behind Charles and let out an incomprehensible shriek. It was one of the cleaners, a slender Filipino girl in a blue nylon overall. She looked at him with widening black eyes. He had to think quickly. ‘Room 32?' he offered. And then, to cover himself in case she knew the occupant of Room 32, ‘Toilet? Toilet?' Unaccountably the words came out in a comedy sketch Spanish accent.

‘Toilet,' the girl echoed, as if it were a word she had heard before, but did not understand.

‘Si, si,' Charles continued insanely, ‘dondo este el toilet?'

‘Toilet,' the girl repeated, now uncertain whether she had actually heard the word before.

‘Si, toiletto.' He thought adding the final ‘o' might help, but it didn't appear to. The girl looked blank. Charles pointed to his fly as a visual aid to the word ‘toilet'.

This time the girl understood. Or rather she misunderstood. Throwing her hands in the air, she cried ‘Rape!' and rushed out into the corridor.

Charles followed at equal speed. He too wanted to get away in a hurry. Unfortunately the Filipino girl took his movement for pursuit and redoubled her screams. They rushed along the corridor in convoy, because she had chosen to run in the direction of the lifts. Doors opened behind them and bewildered faces stared. Charles decided he couldn't wait for the lift and took to the stairs. He managed to get out of the building without being stopped.

He sat in the shelter opposite the Villiers Hotel and tried to control the breath which was rasping in his throat. It wasn't only the physical effects of the chase that made him feel so shaky. It was also the unpleasant feeling which comes to people who have just heard a contract being taken out on their lives. He gasped and trembled and, although a diluted sun was now washing the sea-front, the morning seemed colder.

The two old men were still sitting in the shelter, overtly ignoring him, but with sly side-glances. They didn't depress him now. They were part of a humanity he did not want to leave. Dr Johnson's adage about the proximity of death concentrating the mind wonderfully was proving true. The depression he had felt so recently seemed a wicked affront to life, to all the things he still wanted to do. And yet within fifty yards of him a lunatic was giving a paid killer instructions to murder him.

It was ridiculous. He had that feeling he could recall from prep school of getting into a fight and suddenly realising that it was becoming more vicious than he'd expected and suddenly wanting to be out of it. Like a recurrent nightmare in which, after a long chase, he always capitulated and apologised and pretended it had all been a joke. But this was not a joke.

The question of what to do about the whole case had now taken on more than a dilettante interest. It had become an issue of red-hot urgency. But the answer didn't come any more readily.

Though the sequence of Christopher Milton's (or his hit-man's) crimes and their motives were now clear as daylight, Charles still had no real evidence. Just the gin bottle, the airgun pellets and the liquid paraffin, but none of those could be pinned on the criminals and none related to the most serious crimes.

He still needed positive proof of wrong-doing, Or, since he was apparently the next person to be done wrong to, positive proof of the intention to do wrong might be preferable. He decided to follow the bald man in the hope of catching him red-handed. (The details of how he would himself catch red-handed someone whose criminal mission was to eliminate him he left for the time being. They would supply themselves when the occasion arose.)

He counted his advantages and there weren't many. First, he knew they were after him, so he was on his guard. Secondly, he was in disguise and so could spy on them without automatic discovery. Not much, but better than nothing.

At about five past ten the bald man came out of the hotel. He walked without suspicion, no furtive glances to left and right. Charles had the advantage of hunting the hunter.

The bald man was an ideal candidate for tailing. He walked straight ahead at a brisk pace, not stopping to look in shop windows or dawdling aimlessly. All Charles had to do was to adjust his own pace to match and follow along about fifty yards behind. Brighton was full of shoppers and the pursuit was not conspicuous.

It soon became clear that the man was going to the railway station. He walked briskly and easily up the hill, fitter than his appearance suggested. Charles thought uncomfortably of the strength he had seen in middle-aged wrestlers on the television. If it came to direct physical confrontation, he didn't reckon much for his chances.

The man didn't stop to buy a ticket. He must have a return, because he showed something at the barrier. He went on to Platform 4, for trains to London. At first Charles was going to buy a single, but that showed a depressing lack of faith in the outcome of his mission, so he got a return.

He also bought a
Times
for burying his face in. Tabloid newspapers, he decided, must be unpopular with the criminal fraternity; they hide less.

The train came soon, which implied that the bald man knew the times and was hurrying for this specific one. Charles began an irrelevant conjecture about the idea of the commuting assassin, always catching the same train. ‘Had a good day at work, dear?' ‘Oh, not too bad. Had a bit of trouble with one chap. Had to use two bullets. Still, always the same on a Friday, isn't it?' But the situation was too tense for that sort of fantasy.

The assassin got into an open-plan carriage, which was ideal. Charles went into the same one by another door and positioned himself in a seat from which he could see the man's leg and so would not miss any movement. He opened
The Times
, but his eyes slipped over the words without engaging or taking them in. He turned to the crossword on the principle that mental games might take his mind off the icy trickling in his stomach.

‘I know that death has ten – several doors / For men to take their exits – Webster (8).' The fact that he recognised the quotation from
The Duchess of Malfi
and could fill in the word ‘thousand' gave him small comfort.

He felt ill, on the verge of violent diarrhoea. He could still see the man's leg round the edges of the seats. It didn't move, but it mesmerised him. He tried to imagine the mind that owned the leg and the thoughts that were going through it. Was the man coolly comparing methods of killing, trying to come up with another crime that could look like an accident? Had his paymaster given him a deadline by which to get Charles Paris? The word ‘deadline' was not a happy choice.

Come to that, if his quarry was supposed to be in Brighton, why was he going to London anyway? Charles' fevered mind provided all kinds of unpleasant reasons. There was some particularly vicious piece of killing equipment that had to be bought in London. Or the job was going to be subcontracted and the bald man was on his way to brief another hit-man with the details. Even less attractive solutions also presented themselves.

The pressure on his bowels was becoming unbearable. He'd have to go along to the toilet at the end of the carriage.

That meant going past the bald man. Still, it might be useful to get a closer look. Charles walked past. The man did not look up.

His reading matter was unlikely for a hired killer.
The Listener
was open on his lap and a
New Scientist
lay on the seat beside him. Obviously a new class of person was turning to crime. Presumably in times of rising unemployment, with a glut of graduates and a large number of middle-aged redundancies, the criminal social pattern was changing.

Charles felt a bit better after he had used the lavatory, but the face that stared at him from the stained mirror as he washed his hands was not a happy one.

The Alfred Bostock disguise made him look seedier than ever. The pebble glasses perched incongruously on the end of his nose (the only position in which they enabled him to see anything). The make-up on his jowl looked streaked and dirty. The bright tie mocked him. What was he doing? He was forty-eight, too old for this sort of masquerade. What was he going to do when he got to London? He couldn't spend the rest of his life following the bald-headed man. The confidence that he would know what to do when the, occasion arose was beginning to dissipate.

The journey to Victoria took just over an hour and during that time the assassin sat quietly reading
The Listener
. Charles supposed that one would have to relax and behave normally in that line of work or go mad. ‘His own
Times
lay unread on his knee and no subsequent crossword clues were filled in.

At Victoria the man got out and gave in his ticket at the barrier. Charles tried a little detective logic. If the man had a return ticket and yet was carrying no luggage except his newspapers, it was possible that he had started from London that morning, gone down to Brighton just to get his instructions and was now returning to base. This deduction was immediately followed by the question, ‘So what?'

The bald man walked purposefully to the Underground with Charles in tow. He bought a 15p ticket from the machine and Charles did likewise. The man went on to the platform for the Victoria Line northbound. Charles followed.

They travelled in the same compartment to Oxford Circus. The bald man was now deep into his
New Scientist
, apparently unsuspicious.