The Chalon Heads (43 page)

‘You were a party to the kidnapping of Mrs Starling.’

‘No!’

‘What about the business of switching envelopes that morning at Cabot’s, before the auction?’

‘Oh—you know about that? You have found Starling, then, haven’t you? He’s told you.’

McLarren gave no response. Waverley took a deep breath before continuing. Again he blinked at the sleeve of Brock’s shirt, trying to make out if he was hurt.

‘I have the greatest admiration for Raphael, you know,’ he said, with some little defiance. ‘Whatever else he may have done, he is an absolute angel when it comes to forging postage stamps. I think I would have kept quiet even if they hadn’t offered me money, just to see what else he’d come up with. And I just loved the story, didn’t you? The love affair, and all that. And everything was going along just fine, until, what, a week, ten days ago? Is that all it was? It seems so much longer.

‘Anyway, I got a phone call from this character, who said he was representing somebody who wanted me to authenticate a stamp for them. I said fine, and asked who had recommended me, and he said Mr Raphael. That stopped me short, as you can imagine. Then he mentioned one or two names, Pickering and Starling and Chalon Heads, and the way he said these things was quite intimidating. The nub of it was that he knew exactly what was going on, and the price of his silence was my co-operation and confidentiality in the matter of his client’s business.

‘At the end of last week, Friday it would have been, I think, he contacted me again, and asked if I’d had anything to do with Mr Starling recently. I was very surprised, because I’d just spent the morning talking with you and Mr Starling about the third ransom note, and about the possibility of making a copy of the Canada Cover. I mentioned something of this to him, and he was extremely interested. He insisted on our meeting, which we did later that afternoon, at a place in Hyde Park which he nominated.

‘He made me go through everything again, every detail. He wasn’t a very impressive character, yet he was extremely intimidating, mainly because he knew so much about me and about the business with Pickering.’

‘What was his name?’

‘He said just to call him Ronnie. He gave me the number of his mobile.’ Waverley took his wallet from his pocket and handed over a card on which a number had been written.

‘His phone rang, actually, when I was there, and he told whoever it was on the other end what I’d been telling him. At the end of it he told me that his client would require my services on the following afternoon, to authenticate a special stamp, and that’s when I realised that he must be referring to the Canada Cover, and that these must be the kidnappers.’ He shook his head. ‘That scared me stiff, I can tell you. He saw that, and he threatened me, said that his client wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if I messed it up or breathed a word to anyone. I had no choice, you see. I had to co-operate.’

Waverley paused for a drink of water, his hand shaking as he lifted it to his mouth.

‘That night he phoned me again. I was at the forensic science laboratories at the time, and I was terrified, taking his call there of all places. He asked me how the copy was going, and I said it looked as if we could have something good enough by the next day, in time for the auction. Then he said he had two instructions for me. The first was that I had to make sure that the copy wasn’t used, by throwing doubt on its quality when we met to make the final decision next day. The other, which terrified me even more, was that I had to make sure that Chief Inspector Brock took charge of the copy, and to exchange it at the last minute for an identical but empty packet. When I asked why, he said they were going to make it look as if he had stolen the real stamp, and that would take the heat off them.’

‘It had to be Chief Inspector Brock?’ McLarren asked.

‘Yes, no one else.’

‘And presumably they paid you for this little service.’

‘They . . . promised me payment, yes. But I never received it, under the circumstances.’

‘How much?’

‘Fifty thousand, once they had sold the Canada Cover on to this buyer they had lined up.’

‘Well, that must have made you feel a wee bit braver. What do you mean, under the circumstances?’

‘Well, because of what happened—I mean, it all went so amazingly well, at first. I was absolutely petrified, in a room full of police, that someone would see me switching the packages, but they didn’t. I gave Chief Inspector Brock the empty packet and kept the copy to hand over to Ronnie later that afternoon, when I had to meet him to authenticate the Canada Cover that Mr Starling had delivered to the airport. But later, at lunchtime, when I looked in my bag, I was stunned to find that the envelope had gone.’

‘Oh, yes?’ McLarren said, keeping his voice neutral.

‘And how did you account for that?’

‘I couldn’t! I was absolutely dumbfounded. And frightened, too, about what Ronnie’s client would say. It was only when I met Ronnie later that afternoon that I realised what had happened.’

He took another gulp of water.

‘Go on,’ McLarren urged impatiently.

Waverley glanced nervously at Brock, who had said nothing at all, had just sat there observing him balefully, like Moses in a bloodstained shirt. ‘Er . . . Yes, that afternoon, I met Ronnie in a quiet back-street in Southall. I had some portable equipment in the car—a small microscope. I got a shock when I studied the cover and realised that it was the copy that had gone missing from my bag. And then I understood what must have happened. It was obvious. When we met that morning at Cabot’s, there had been an expectation that we would use the copy to fool the kidnappers. Sammy was keen on the idea. But after I’d given my opinion on the copy, that all changed and the police wouldn’t agree to it. Sammy left the room at that point, and he didn’t see me hand the package over to Chief Inspector Brock. When he returned, we broke up to get coffee, and he, assuming the copy was in my bag, must have taken it. Then later, on the way to the airport, he exchanged it for the real cover, hoping the kidnappers wouldn’t be able to tell.’

He shook his head. ‘It was a tragic miscalculation. Ronnie was beside himself when I told him. He went off in a fury, warning me to keep everything to myself. Later, when I heard what had happened to Mrs Starling, I realised just how savagely they had reacted to Sammy’s attempt to cheat them. My God, I had no idea things would go so far. But I couldn’t say anything, could I? I was implicated by then, wasn’t I?’

He stared at them both, vainly seeking some kind of sympathy, the limp lock of hair over his right eye left untouched.

‘You were indeed,’ McLarren said grimly. ‘So where is the real Canada Cover now, Dr Waverley?’

‘Why, Sammy Starling has it, doesn’t he? He never handed it over.’

Later that morning they pulled Ronnie Wilkes off a flight bound for New Zealand, where his sister lived. He had turned up at Heathrow not long after the morning news bulletin broke the story about the murder of Sammy Starling, and booked the first available flight. The plane had already taxied to the end of the runway, and Ronnie was safely strapped in his seat, relief soaking through him, when the main cabin door was reopened and the detectives came aboard and arrested him. The anticlimax at the end of all that nervous strain made him throw up as soon as his feet touched the ground, and he made little attempt to deny the accusations that McLarren levelled against him in the Heathrow police station.

Ronnie had been approached, he said, a couple of years ago, by someone acting for a former police officer, who had a grudge against Sammy Starling. This man knew that he worked for Sammy, and also knew about Ronnie’s gambling, and that he had been lately getting badly into debt. He had offered money, a little to be going on with, and the promise of a lot later, if Ronnie would give him information about Sammy. It had been innocuous at first: the man, who called himself Mr K, would ring him up every few weeks, they would chat about the details of Sammy’s life, and a few days later an envelope would arrive for Ronnie with some money.

Then gradually Mr K began to focus on Eva’s trips to town. He insisted that Ronnie clear with him what he would report to Sammy about Eva’s movements, and when he discovered her association with the stamp dealer Walter Pickering, and began to suspect her drug habit fed through the Cinema Hollywood, Mr K had instructed him to say nothing of these things to his employer. He had never been entirely sure what Eva, Pickering and Waverley were up to, but from the way Mr K spoke about it he began to feel that he knew more, and was following up these leads himself, letting Ronnie know only what he thought necessary.

Several times he had thought of telling Sammy what was going on, but he’d needed the cash, and the longer it went on the more difficult it was to come clean. The crunch came when Mr K instructed him to steal three stamps from Sammy’s collection. He had been very particular as to which ones he wanted, from some country Ronnie had never heard of. He’d had to wait several weeks before the opportunity presented itself, with Mr K phoning him up every other night, ranting away at him to do what he was told or else. That’s when he’d first begun to realise that Mr K was a nutter, and that it might be dangerous to cross him.

‘So who was this Mr K?’ McLarren demanded.

Ronnie had never met him face to face, and was never given a phone number or address. But when Sammy told him one day that he wanted him to follow an ex-copper whose name was Keller, he’d put two and two together. When he’d reported this to Mr K, the man had laughed, and told him what to tell Sammy, and not to bother following Keller.

‘But Marty Keller didn’t get out of jail until this last April,’ McLarren objected.

‘Yeah, well, it was his brother, Barney, wasn’t it? Getting things ready for when Marty came out. Stands to reason. Must have been him.’

‘And where is Marty Keller now, Ronnie? Where can we find him? He’s not been seen at his flat in days.’

‘He rents a mechanic’s workshop in Wembley. That’s where he keeps his gear. There’s a bed there, and a toilet. It’s where he kept Eva. That’s where he’ll go to ground. Only you won’t take him. He told me he wouldn’t go back to jail again.’

Ronnie was right. Marty Keller fired just one shot when armed police surrounded the workshop. The police doctor pronounced him dead at 1307 hours, killed with the same rifle and in the same manner as Sammy Starling.

Once he was certain that Keller was dead, Ronnie Wilkes informed police that Keller had told him that he had buried Eva’s body somewhere in the woods above Sammy’s house, the Crow’s Nest.

Jock McLarren felt ambivalent about his triumph. On the one hand he had solved both the most notorious murder of the year and the most significant philatelic fraud of the decade. On the other, his famous Raphael had turned out to be a risible opponent, and the prosecution of the pathetic figures of Sally and Rudi was going to provide plenty of opportunities for snide jokes at his expense within the corridors of Cobalt Square and New Scotland Yard. Of their surviving victims, Cabot’s, as inheritors of one of the finest collections of classic stamp forgeries, were inclined to play down the affair, leaving only the Fitzpatricks. Their best interests seemed to lie in some form of private reimbursement of their lost funds by the forgers. So many key witnesses were dead, or, in the case of Walter Pickering, unlikely to survive a trial. On balance, McLarren thought he might use every bit of his influence to encourage the Crown Prosecution Service to the view that the case against Sally and Rudi might be difficult to pursue. In the public interest, of course.

Having come to this decision, McLarren was persuaded that they had won, on the whole, a glorious victory, and he told his secretary to round up a few of the key players for celebratory drinks in his office at seven that evening, and especially those, like Brock and to a lesser extent Kathy, towards whom he had an uneasy sense that he had behaved badly.

Brock spent most of the afternoon fussing over Leon Desai’s accommodation in hospital, and the prognosis for his severe concussion, suffered, like the broken jaw and cracked ribs, when Starling had inadvertently pushed him down a flight of stairs during their forced entry at Myatts Grove. Kathy passed her time following up a number of loose ends in the case to be mounted against the surviving perpetrators.

At 7.10 p.m., Kathy opened the door to McLarren’s office. The men were in shirt-sleeves, McLarren, Brock, Hewitt standing by the windows looking out over Vauxhall station, drinks in hand. A knot of others from McLarren’s team stood on the other side of the room. There was a companionable murmur of relaxed conversation, of tension easing away.

‘Come in! Come in, lassie!’ McLarren waved a hand at her. ‘What are you drink—?’ He stopped in mid-sentence and stared in surprise at the person Kathy was leading into the room.

‘Sir, I hope you don’t mind, but Peter White has been helping us, and I thought it might be appropriate if he joined us.’

‘Well . . .’ McLarren recovered quickly. ‘Why, certainly, of course! Come away in, Peter, old friend.’

White ducked his head in an embarrassed little bob. ‘I really didn’t think it proper for me to be here, Jock, but Kathy insisted . . .’

‘Of course you should be here! She was quite right. What’s your poison, eh? As if we didn’t know.’ He clapped White on the arm and led him to the drinks. It was apparent to everyone that the retired chief inspector couldn’t hide his pleasure at being there. His face glowed pink and freshly shaved, and he had dressed carefully, a little too formally, his best suit and best tie, now five or six years out of fashion.

Kathy went over to the group of lower-ranking staff on the other side of the room and spoke for a while to DC Colleen Murchison, with whom she had spent part of the afternoon.

Conversation became louder as the drink flowed, and then McLarren’s voice rose above the hubbub to make a short and good-humoured speech, thanking them all, and most particularly their comrades from SO1 and laboratory liaison. Toasts were proposed, a couple of jokey remarks tossed around, and conversations resumed. Kathy watched the triumvirate across the room: Brock, White and the ebullient McLarren, three old hands congratulating each other, yarning about old times, and felt profoundly depressed. Something made McLarren look up at that point and he caught the expression on her face, and thought that, despite his generous words of thanks, he had perhaps failed to please her, although God knows he had tried. And so, with a little spurt of gallantry he called to her across the room, rather too loudly, so that conversations died away again, ‘Kathy! You look low in spirits, lassie. Come and let me replenish you!’