The Chalon Heads (6 page)

‘Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. What was true was that old Charlie Starling didn’t live much longer than his wife, and the little orphan Sammy was taken in by a family called Hubbard in the same housing scheme, off the Brixton Road. He was never formally adopted, just taken in, the way people did in those days. Sammy China, the kids called him, a bit of a novelty. Later on, two of the Hubbard boys ended up working for Sammy, and the youngest girl, Sally, became housekeeper to him and Brenda. You met Sally? No? Quite a character, she is.

‘Sammy was a bright little kid by all accounts, and the Hubbards did their best for him. They were a good, solid, working-class family, and it wasn’t them taught him to be a villain. I used to think he was more a cuckoo than a starling, a cuckoo in the Hubbards’ nest. If anyone did the teaching, it was Sammy, who began to make a bit of a name for himself in the black market after the war. I think it’s in their blood, don’t you? Dodgy trading . . .’ He saw the look on Kathy’s face and realised he was on shaky ground again.

‘Anyway,’ he went on hurriedly, ‘for a few years he operated on his own in a small way, supplying the market for goods in short supply—forged petrol coupons, unlicensed building materials, scarce car components recycled from proud new car-owners who hadn’t intended to part with them—small stuff, but enough to maintain a certain lifestyle for a young fellow on his own. He had one or two frights from the law, but he was nimble on his feet, and operating on his own, it was difficult to pin him down without actually catching him in the act. And then, all of a sudden, he met and married Brenda.

‘Now Brenda was something special—not a beauty, but a character, and sharp as a needle. Her family had well-established criminal connections, see—there’s a whole special shelf of the NRO devoted to that family tree. And it was then that Sammy’s criminal career began to become altogether more serious, and more ambitious.

‘That was the time when the Kray twins were beginning to make a name for themselves, the late fifties, and Sammy got drawn into the edge of their circle. He would have been a couple of years younger than Ronnie and Reggie Kray, and for the sake of moving into a bigger game he made himself into a good and useful servant, the way Brenda told him. Sammy knew them all—the Krays, Frank Mitchell the mad axe man, Jack “the Hat” McVitie, the Richardson gang—all crazy, violent bastards.’

‘Was Sammy violent?’ Kathy found it difficult to imagine, yet she had misread that bland childlike face several times already.

White shook his head scornfully. ‘Never. Just being in the same room with Ronnie Kray made some men wet themselves, but Sammy Starling never had the bottle to frighten a mouse. He was more devious, sneaky. He’d fix you with that smiling moon face of his and slit your wallet, not your throat. Money was what he was good at. Where they were wild and greedy and impulsive, he was sly and cautious, and kept out of the limelight. They frightened him, and after a bit he wanted out. There was an incident . . . You’ve noticed the back of his left hand, have you? Yes, well, he decided to change the company he kept. And I suppose you could say that he had a certain vision.’

‘What was that?’

‘You’ve got to remember what it was like then, Kathy. In 1960 there were no more than two or three hundred drug addicts known to the Home Office in the whole of England and Wales. Think of that! Today there’s probably more than that in Budleigh Salterton. And those addicts were mostly old folks who had become dependent on their pain-killers. The number had been steady for years. Ten years later there were thousands, almost all of them under the age of thirty. Sammy spotted that. He saw what was coming, a new and lucrative market that was barred to legitimate businessmen. So he got to know the new people, made new friends, and made himself useful to them by finding ways to recycle all that fresh new cash they were suddenly awash in. I have to admit that it took us a while to figure out what he was doing—he was way ahead of us, see.’

White put the first volume of his Starling file to one side and opened the second.

‘Then we had a stroke of luck. In 1972 a teenager named Carole Sykes died in a road accident on the M6.’ White began thumbing through the oldest pages of the file to find the reports of the case. He had recovered his spirit, Kathy saw, like an old retriever, hunting through the documents. ‘Here. She was travelling with two boys from the same part of South London to a party in Manchester. Their cylinder head gasket blew near Stoke, and they had to pull on to the hard shoulder. Next thing, the two lads saw Carole wandering off into the traffic lanes, waving at the pretty trucks. She was run over by at least eight heavy goods vehicles before the traffic came to a stop and they managed to attract the attention of a patrol car in the southbound lanes. The post-mortem established that Carole had been high on LSD at the time of her death, and for once we were able to establish a clear trail back to the supplier, and from there to the supplier’s banker—Sammy Starling. We actually found the cash that Carole had paid in Sammy’s possession. Even so, and despite the publicity surrounding the case, he got away with just three months inside. That’s what I mean, you see, when you ask if Marty Keller’s actions were excusable. Keller didn’t kill anybody, did he? And yet he did nearly nine years.’

‘He did try to kill Sammy, though, didn’t he?’ Kathy said, recalling Brock’s summary of the case. ‘He was found guilty of attempted murder.’

White snorted dismissively. ‘On Sammy’s evidence, mainly.’

‘Is there anything else on Sammy’s record?’

‘No. To this day, that’s his only conviction, apart from a couple of minor misdemeanours when he was a teenager. The effect of his conviction was only to make Sammy more careful. When he came out he restructured his business, as any businessman might do after a setback, and went on as before. No matter what we did, we couldn’t corner him after that. His great strength was that he was never too greedy. As more and more money and profits drew more and more greedy people into the drugs game, Sammy’s profile seemed relatively insignificant by comparison.’

‘You don’t sound convinced, Peter.’

‘No, I was never convinced. I knew our man. But when it came to allocating priorities for Criminal Intelligence, Sammy became less and less important. Then, in 1983, something happened that changed things for Sammy.’ White turned the pages until he came to a series of newspaper articles from that year. ‘He had a son, Gordon, sporting type, good-looking lad. In July that year he drowned, water-skiing in the Mediterranean. Brenda was devastated. What made it worse was a report in
Paris Match
a couple of weeks after the accident. I’ve got it here somewhere . . . Yes, here it is. Written by their top crime reporter. It refers to Sammy’s career and conviction after the Carole Sykes death, and it claims that the autopsy on Gordon had revealed that he had been taking cocaine before his fatal accident. The parallels are discussed at length. “Divine retribution” is one of the phrases used, as I recall.

‘The revelation was especially telling to those of us who had followed Sammy’s career, see, because he had made it an iron rule that the people around him should never touch the merchandise. The people he worked for might supply anyone, from the richest to the poorest, the oldest to the youngest. But if they touched it themselves he’d drop them flat.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Immediately after the funeral, he and Brenda went on a world cruise for three months. When they came back, he put out the word that he was retiring from the business. They bought a house out in the country, and sold up everything in town. Sammy even sent me an invitation to his retirement party, cheeky bastard.’

White turned to a page on to which was stapled a silver-printed invitation to ‘Detective Chief Inspector and Mrs Peter White to celebrate the retirement of Sammy and Brenda Starling”, at their home at the Crow’s Nest, Poacher’s Ease, Farnham, Surrey.

‘Did you go?’

‘Certainly not.’

All the same, Kathy thought White showed a certain pride in showing her the invitation.

‘Tom Harley got one of these, too. He’d been trying to get Sammy on his financial dealings—foreign-currency transactions and the like. He showed me his invitation. He was outraged. I remember him saying that the day he accepted a drink from Sammy Starling would be his last. One day, he said, Sammy was going to pay.’

He stared grimly at the invitation for a moment, then whispered, ‘Only he was wrong. He was the one who paid.’

‘Did Starling really retire, do you believe?’

‘Yes, yes, I do, in point of fact. If it hadn’t been for Gordon I would have had my doubts, but I saw them when they came back from their cruise, and I could see there had been a change in both of them. That didn’t stop me hoping we could still find a way to punish him. By that stage I’d been following Sammy Starling’s career for twenty-five years. It wasn’t easy to break the habit of a professional lifetime. And I knew Tom Harley was still investigating the fraud angle, and from time to time I was able to give him a bit of help and advice.’

White stopped and stretched and looked around the room as if returning from some other place. ‘You didn’t realise what you were letting yourself in for, Kathy, getting me to open all this up again. Your tea’s cold. All this talk . . . Maybe you’d join me in something stronger?’

‘I’m fine, thanks, Peter. But you go ahead. You’re the one doing the talking.’

He went out of the room briefly, returning with a very large tumbler of whisky. He took a deep swallow, put it down beside his files and cleared his throat. ‘Where had we got to?’

‘You were saying that the Fraud Squad were still interested in Starling.’

‘Tom Harley, yes. By 1986 he reckoned he was getting close, too. That’s when Sammy realised that Tom wasn’t going to leave him alone, retired or not.’ White took another gulp of the whisky. ‘I have to say, Kathy, that he did a very professional job—Sammy, I mean. It was a lesson to us all. After a couple of decades as an active detective in the force, you’ve lived through plenty of rough patches. You’ve upset people, made errors of judgement, said things in anger that were better left unsaid. That was as true of Tom as of any of us. It could have been me, or Brock, or the Commissioner himself. But it was Tom that Starling set his sights on. Like any businessman faced with a dangerous rival, he set about gathering the knowledge that would give him the advantage. He focused on Tom’s rough patches from five, ten, twenty years before. Where he couldn’t reach the information himself, he hired consultants, ex-coppers or civil staff who could access the files and the gossip that has that peculiar edge of truth about it, that irresistible authenticity. And then he hired other people, more imaginative than himself, scriptwriters and professional story-tellers, to weave the innocent facts of Tom Harley’s life in with the less innocent dealings of Marty Keller and Jerry Stringer—both men whom Tom distrusted instinctively, but had to work with, day on day. And so Sammy fabricated a story of such
corrosive
plausibility and corruption that nobody could dare gainsay it, see.’

With each gulp of whisky, White was becoming more animated and loquacious.

‘But you blame Brock, especially, do you, Peter? For giving credit to Starling’s plot?’

‘Yes! I warned him, didn’t I? He didn’t know Sammy the way I did. He thought he was small beer. He accepted everything, hook, line and sinker, because he knew that Keller and Stringer were suspect, and Sammy’s story was so good. I warned him, but he didn’t listen—thought I was a boring old fart, didn’t he? Until it was too late, and Tom was dead and gone, and Keller and Stringer were doomed, and Sammy was free as the birds in spring . . .’ Another bitter pull at the whisky.

‘Is that where your files stop, Peter?’ Kathy asked. ‘In 1987?’

White gave her a conspiratorial look. ‘Oh, no, Kathy. An old Starling watcher like me can’t help himself, see.’ And he pushed aside the second file and opened volume three.

‘This one is much more speculative,’ he said slowly. ‘There are no official police reports here, see, ’cos Sammy stopped being an official subject of Criminal Intelligence in 1987. This file is all cuttings from magazines, and company reports, and travel records, and the like.’

‘No
official
police reports, you say.’

White grinned. ‘Tom Harley’s old mates in the Fraud Squad were always willing to pass me the odd note when it seemed relevant. Nothing wrong with that.’

‘And after you retired?’

White waved airily.

‘So, how does the story continue?’

‘The eighties weren’t kind to Sammy, despite his managing to wriggle out from under the Fraud Squad investigation. The year before Tom Harley decided to go for him, his wife died. She’d never got over their son, and now Sammy had lost them both. He still had Sally Malone looking after the house for him—that was the Hubbard girl I mentioned before. She’d been with them for years, started out babysitting for them, and then, when she was widowed young, she moved in with them and became their housekeeper.

‘So Sammy wasn’t left alone, as a widower . . .’ White continued, unconsciously stressing the word ‘alone’, ‘. . . but it hit him hard all the same. He realised, I suppose, how much he’d relied on Brenda. Then in ’eighty-seven, in the thick of the trial, there was the stock-market crash, and he did badly out of that. So for several years after that he became reclusive, see. Hardly got out at all.’ He turned pages until he found a copy of a passport-renewal photograph of Starling from that period. The face scowled into space beyond the camera, grey and unfocused, the hair lank.

‘Would that be when he started collecting stamps?’

‘Stamps?’

‘Yes. He claims to be a philatelist.’

‘Does he now?’ White screwed up his nose, thinking. ‘Do you know . . . I do recall something about stamps . . .’ He started thumbing through the file until he found a photocopy of a computer printout. ‘Yes, this is it. A request from Cabot’s Ltd of the Strand, London, for a credit check on Sammy. Four years ago.’ White beamed at Kathy, pleased with himself. ‘Cabot’s are auctioneers and dealers in rare stamps.’