The Chalon Heads (37 page)

‘It was a nickname of his,’ Kathy said.

McLarren nodded. Did you get out of Pickering what happened, Tony?’

‘He lives above here, alone. He said that this Sammy called on him at about midnight, and insisted on seeing him in the shop. Sammy was a regular customer, and Pickering, of course, didn’t know that he was on the run, though he had read about his wife’s murder. Pickering is an old man, not very strong, and Sammy had no difficulty in overpowering him and taping him to the chair, where he proceeded to torture him in order to get information about forged stamps Pickering had been selling him.’

‘Pickering admitted that to you, Tony?’

‘Yes. He said that Sammy knew he had supplied them, and he was very angry about it. He wanted to know who else was involved, and eventually, with some persuasion, Pickering told him that his wife Eva had been a party from the beginning, and had taken a share of all proceeds.’

‘How did Sammy take that, I wonder?’

‘Not well, although Pickering said he thought Sammy already suspected, or half knew. Then Sammy wanted to know where the forgeries came from, and who had been behind it all. He demanded a name, but Pickering said he didn’t know—he told me he was too scared to tell Sammy. So Sammy said they would discover the name one letter at a time. He cut off one of Pickering’s fingers, and Pickering gave him the first letter, R. Sammy wrote it up, threw the finger away, and cut off another one. He said if the name was very long he’d have to go on and use other body parts, but if Pickering told him quickly, before the blood in the fingers dried up, he might get more than one letter out of each. I gather Pickering gave him the name pretty fast after that, sir.’

‘Aye, no doubt,’ McLarren said indifferently. ‘What about an address, Tony? Did he tell him where he could find Raphael?’ He leaned forward eagerly.

‘’Fraid not, sir. He said he passed out at that point, and I can believe it. He’d lost a bit of blood, apart from the shock. I’m surprised his ticker stood up to it.’

‘Och, laddie!’ McLarren said in disgust. ‘You should have cut off a few more of his fingers yourself for it!’

‘Yes, sir. I think the ambulance blokes might have objected.’

McLarren paced over to the wall and glared balefully at the large letters. ‘Are you sure, Tony? Are you sure he didn’t tell him?’

‘Can’t be certain. He was confused and pretty incoherent. But that was my impression. One thing I thought he did say was that Raphael and Eva were lovers.’

‘Indeed!’ McLarren’s face lit up. ‘How long before we can get to work on Mr Pickering ourselves, would you say?’

‘Couldn’t say. Days, most likely.’

‘What about the house, upstairs?’

‘Yeah. I haven’t been up there yet, but the lads say it looks as if Sammy went upstairs after he’d done Pickering over down here—there’s signs of bloody footprints on the landing, and some disturbance to drawers and things.’

‘I wonder if he found it . . . Well, we must hope he did not, and that we shall! Full-scale alert for Mr Starling.’

‘Done, sir.’

‘And a complete search of this building, every floorboard and every inch of pipe it contains. We must have Raphael’s location, ladies and gentlemen, before Sammy does, and before Raphael hears what’s happened to his retail outlet.’

He turned to Kathy and added, ‘Some people, you know, still doubt the very existence of Raphael. What will they make of this, I wonder?’

‘It’s a strong message, sir,’ she said, unable to think of anything else to say.

‘Aye, a strong message,’ he repeated. ‘A strong message.’ And then, in a melodramatic voice, with heightened rolling of his Rs, he intoned,

‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half
-
a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

‘Is that not very much the case, Kathy? The literal case.’

The house was not large, but its rooms were so crowded with years’ accumulations of junk that they were extremely difficult to search. It was impossible for more than one or two people to get into each room at a time, and all of this slowed down the hunt for any secret records, correspondence or diaries that the dealer may have kept. A similar search was going on downstairs in the shop and storerooms, but after several hours no reference had been turned up that could be linked to the name Raphael. New faces arrived, and McLarren, disappointed but even more determined, nominated a number of people to go home and get some sleep, Kathy and Desai among them.

They walked together down Shepherd’s Row, and Desai said, ‘I feel filthy after that.’

He did look crumpled, and weary, and not at all his usual smooth self. He looked as if he needed someone to say, ‘Come on, I’ll take you home with me and give you a nice bath and then we’ll see . . .’ She examined him out of the corner of her eye, his dark features shadowed in the light of the street lamps, and allowed herself a moment of fantasising. But something, the smell of burnt cardboard hanging in the air, perhaps, made it impossible to rid her mind of Pickering’s store-room, so that the two thoughts— having her way with Desai, and Starling’s handiwork with a razor—became unpleasantly mixed.

They stopped at the end of the lane, his car one way, hers the other.

‘Well, take care, then,’ he said gravely. ‘I mean it.’

She smiled. ‘You too, Leon,’ and turned away.

It was only when she had reached the next block, and found herself quite alone, that the thought of walking up the dark side-street to her car made her hesitate. Somehow she had never quite believed that Starling had been capable of cutting off his wife’s head, until tonight. She still found it difficult to reconcile the mental picture of someone deliberately removing an old man’s fingers, one by one, and the chubby smiling face of Sammy Starling.

Desai had had similar misgivings. He slammed the car door shut, put the keys in the ignition and started up. Then he thought he would turn and drive back to check that Kathy had reached her car safely when some movement in his rearview mirror caught his eye. He glanced at the wing mirror to get a better view back down the street, not realising that the movement had been inside the car. Then the glistening blade of an old-fashioned cut-throat razor passed in front of his eyes and he felt it come to a rest, cool, against his throat.

A voice close against his ear whispered. ‘No sudden moves, copper, or I’ll have your head off.’

Brock returned to his home in London early the following morning. Shortly after ten he took a call from McLarren.

‘My dear chap,’ the Scotsman declared jovially, as if the two of them were old golf-club pals. ‘I wondered if we might meet?’

Brock mentally checked the immediate possessions he might need for a spell in interrogation. ‘What had you in mind, Jock? Dinner at your club?’

McLarren chuckled. ‘Something more immediate, I fear. You are at home?’

You know I am, Brock thought, glancing through the window at the car parked at the end of the street. ‘Yes.’

‘My lads will pick you up in, shall we say, one minute?’

He hung up, and Brock continued looking at the car, which showed a puff of white breath from its exhaust and began to move forward.

They took him, at what Brock considered quite unnecessary speed, not to Cobalt Square but to a run-down sixties office building half a mile away. The wood-grain laminate in the lift was chipped and scratched, the vinyl floors marked with black streaks, and the paint of the partition walls shabby with years of abuse from sticky tape, drawing-pins and fading sunlight.

‘Dear Lord, how did we put up with places like this for so long?’ McLarren sighed, offering Brock a worn metal chair at the table in the otherwise bare room. One wall was almost covered by a large, tattered map of London, the black congested pattern of its streets overprinted with another pattern, in red, of the boundaries of the eight police areas, and within those broad lines the finer pattern of the divisions, each with its two-letter code.

Brock sat down reluctantly. He was surprised— shocked—to see Kathy there, looking pale and tense, and he began to feel angry.

McLarren’s crew withdrew, all except Tony Hewitt, leaving just the four of them.

‘I can’t offer you anything, Brock,’ McLarren said. ‘We have absolutely no facilities, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t even know if the water in the toilets is turned on. But I thought this would be neutral and discreet, under the circumstances, and given the short notice—’

‘What’s this in aid of, Jock?’ Brock said bluntly.

‘Ah, well now . . .’ McLarren spread his hands and examined them thoughtfully. ‘We have a wee problem, Brock. And I would like to ask for your help.’

Brock assumed that this was his convoluted way of introducing a threat, one that presumably included Kathy in some way. ‘What problem is that?’

McLarren checked his watch. ‘Some fifty minutes ago, your friend Sammy Starling placed a triple-nine call on his mobile. He advised the police operator that he has DS Leon Desai as his prisoner. He further advised that he will cut off Desai’s head at dawn tomorrow, unless you and the forger Raphael present yourselves, handcuffed together, at a location which he will nominate some time tonight.’

‘Good grief,’ Brock whispered. ‘You said a
wee
problem.’

‘Aye.’ McLarren flexed his eyebrows and gave a grim smile. ‘Several problems, in point of fact. One of which, of course, is that we still haven’t the faintest idea who Raphael is or where we can find him. We’ve been hunting him for over two years now, and hardly seem likely to pin him down within the next eighteen hours for Mr Starling’s benefit.’

McLarren sketched in the events of the previous night.

‘Are you sure Sammy has got Leon?’ Brock asked.

‘We’re checking, but he’s not at his home. Kathy was the last person to see him, last night.’

‘Sir. It would have been about four thirty a.m.,’ Kathy said. ‘We both left together. We walked to the bottom end of Shepherd’s Row and then went in opposite directions to our cars. Leon said his was parked fifty yards to the east. That’s the last I saw of him.’

‘We’re searching for his car now,’ McLarren said. ‘And I’m getting the tape of Starling’s phone message brought here for us to listen to. They can’t say at the moment what area the call came from, but they’re working on it.’

Brock pondered. ‘Presumably, if he wants us to bring Raphael in, he doesn’t know his identity either.’

‘Possibly. Maybe he just can’t find him. Maybe he assumes that, with more time to work on Walter Pickering than he had, we may get more information out of him.’

‘Yes, well, we should,’ Brock said.

‘Unfortunately, that’s another of our wee problems, Brock. Pickering is in a coma, in intensive care. His condition is deteriorating, it seems, and it may be days or weeks before he can talk to us, if ever.’

‘Grief . . . What exactly did he tell Sammy, do we know?’

‘Tony’s the only one can tell us that,’ McLarren said cautiously. ‘Eh, Tony?’

Hewitt straightened in his seat. He looked exhausted, eyes unnaturally bright. ‘I can’t say exactly. He was in a bad way, dopey one minute, crying the next. Half the time I had to get information from him by suggesting something, and him agreeing or disagreeing. He would be lucid for a bit, and say a few things, then he’d fade away. Then the ambulance guys arrived and started touching him, and that got him all upset and he wouldn’t listen to me.’

He sighed and rubbed his face. ‘I reckon he could have babbled anything at Starling at the end, and he’d have forgotten by the time I got to him. Just before they strapped the oxygen mask on him, I asked him who Raphael was, and he just stared up at me. I don’t even know if he knows himself.’

Brock scratched at his beard distractedly. ‘What’s Pickering’s background? Is he known to us?’

McLarren passed him a couple of sheets of paper. ‘Small-time crookery—receiving, handling, offences under the Companies Act, tax evasion.’

Brock studied the record. ‘Started out south of the river, like Sammy.’

Kathy said, ‘Last night, Tony, you said he called his attacker Sammy China. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘Interesting,’ Brock said. ‘That’s what they used to call Sammy way back. I haven’t heard him called that in years.’

‘Well, now, Brock,’ McLarren said, ‘that’s the story. I’m going to make sure this has the very highest priority, of course. By midday every available officer in the Met will be out on the streets looking for Leon’s car, and searching for Sammy’s hideaway. We’re questioning neighbours, tracking down Pickering’s relatives and associates. So, have you any thoughts yourself? Any inspiration?’

‘What about Pickering’s records, Jock?’ Brock said slowly. ‘Surely there must be something there? Money, large amounts of it, changed hands.’

‘Oh, aye, we’re on to that all right. But remember, Brock,’ he reached forward and tapped the paper in Brock’s hands, ‘tax evasion! This fellow had already had a taste of the Inland Revenue. If I know my man, he’ll have gone to some trouble to hide his money trail, see?’

‘Yes,’ Brock agreed gloomily. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

There was a pause that became heavier as McLarren gave no sign of breaking it.

Then Kathy said, ‘One thought, sir.’

‘Aye, aye.’ McLarren turned to her.

‘There could have been others involved, couldn’t there? In the fraud. Apart from Eva, Pickering and Raphael.’

McLarren frowned. ‘We have no indication of it, as far as I know.’

Kathy hesitated, then said, ‘Well, this is just a suggestion. I haven’t been able to check it. But yesterday Toby Fitzpatrick mentioned that when he bought his forged stamps, they came with a certificate of authentication. I spoke to him again last night and asked him if he still had it, but he said he’d given it to Eva with the stamps. But he remembered the name of the expert who’d authenticated them. It was the same one we’ve been dealing with. Dr Waverley, Cabot’s consultant.’

McLarren’s frown deepened, ‘Ye-es . . . And where does that take us, exactly?’

‘So we know that Waverley certified at least one lot of fakes as genuine.’