‘So?’ he said. ‘So?’ As if he’d found on it some affront: an insulting anagram or a sneer on the mouth of my identity photo.
‘So nothing,’ I said, but he was unappeased. He pushed aside heaps of dead paperwork, reshuffling bits of it almost without noticing. ‘The Bentley.’ He found a sheet of paper and read from it. ‘Two forty-five ack emma?’ He was that kind of policeman. Not only ack-emma, but skull-close haircut, and shoes polished on the sole.
‘That’s it.’
‘And you are acting … ?’
‘For the driver – Toliver.’
‘Unconscious.’
‘Yes.’
He read his papers carefully and looked up. ‘All that …’ he screwed up his face trying to think of a word. ‘All that … spy-now-pay-later, credit cards …’ he flicked a finger at my pocket where I’d put the card. ‘That cuts no ice with me. Nor does it being a Bentley.’ He waved a hand, to tell me he hadn’t finished. ‘I’ll tell you as much as I’d tell the kid on the local rag. No more, no less.’
A policewoman came into the room. She brought two mugs of tepid tea. His mug had a coloured photo of the Queen, mine had Peter Rabbit. ‘Thanks, Mary.’ He shuffled the papers again, hiding behind them coyly, like a flirtatious Edwardian opera-goer. ‘Container lorry in collision with green Bentley …’ He stopped reading and looked up. ‘There’s no mystery story. Traffic signals, hydraulic brakes, car driving too close – it happens a dozen times a day, and night.’
‘You are not making it a police job?’
He looked at his watch. ‘You people really earn your money, don’t you. It’s only ten past eight. I thought coppers and burglars were the only people up this early.’
‘Are you?’
His voice rose a fraction. ‘A police job? How could we? The breathalyser was OK, licence, insurance, hours on duty, all OK. The lorry was halted at the red light, the damage to the Bentley was the offside front wing. Front wing speaks for itself, doesn’t it? If your boss Toliver sent you down here to save his no-claim bonus he’s unlucky, forget it.’
‘Toliver is unconscious.’
‘That’s right, I forgot. Well, the answer’s still the same.’ He read a little more from his script and broke it down into baby-talk for me. ‘The constable took the names of the lorry drivers but you can tell your boss he’s wasting his time. The court will always take the policemen’s evidence in a case like this, and they’ll say your boy was following too close. If there was a careless driving charge to be made, he’d get it.’
‘This could be more serious than just a traffic accident,’ I said.
He whistled softly – to feign amazement. ‘Are you trying to tell us something, Mr Armstrong?’ The way he said ‘us’, it meant the police forces of the Western world.
‘I’m trying to ask you something.’
‘And I’m not getting it. Yes, I’m very dense this early on a Thursday morning.’
‘But this is Tuesday.’
‘No, it’s not, it’s … ah, I thought you’d turn out to be a comedian.’
‘Sergeant, a ten-ton truck stopping hard in front of a car would be a good way of killing a man, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would be a risky way of killing a man, Mr Armstrong, for a number of reasons. Motive, for a start: a fatality like that attracts enough paperwork for the connection to be noticed. Hell, we get enough allegations from strangers in collision.’ He grabbed his thumb to tell me that was his first reason. ‘I won’t mention the traffic lights again but I will remind you that your boss is not dead …’
‘He’s not my boss.’
‘Whoever he is, he’s not dead. That’s what proves it wasn’t some maniac trying to kill him. They must have put the brakes on carefully enough or he would have been buried somewhere inside the mesh of the lorry’s differential. So don’t tell me murder.’
Davis had mentioned the same flaw in Ferdy’s allegation that I’d seen. There was no arguing it. Attempted murder was a possibility but a damned slim one. ‘There was a Humber Estate just behind him.’
‘Yes, a whole procession of people driving up and down … Half the bloody world drives round London all night, didn’t you know that? Beats me why they don’t want to go home and get some sleep, but there they are every night. Anyway, all this lot arrived too late to see anything.’
‘Did they?’
‘What am I supposed to do, give them the water torture?’
‘But if anything new turns up, you’ll phone me?’
‘OK, Philip Marlowe, leave your name and phone number with the desk sergeant.’
‘You are going to make it a traffic statistic, come what may, aren’t you?’ I said.
He looked through all his pockets for a cigarette but I failed to respond to my cue. Finally he had to walk across the room and get his own packet from his raincoat. He didn’t offer them. He took one out and lit it carefully, held up his gold-plated Dunhill and snapped the top closed at arm’s length. Then he sat down and almost smiled. ‘We have a witness, that’s why, Mr Armstrong. Fair enough? Can I get on with my work now?’
‘What witness?’
‘There was a lady in the car with Toliver. She signed a statement for us before the doctor gave her a sedative. It was an accident – no panic, no murder, just one of those traffic statistics you mentioned.’
‘Who?’
He took out a little black book. ‘Miss Sara Shaw, The Terrine du Chef – a French restaurant, sounds like, eh? You go and put your foot in her door but watch out that she doesn’t send for the police.’ He smiled. ‘Put your foot in it but don’t put your foot in it, if you see what I mean.’
I got to my feet and waved goodbye. ‘You didn’t finish your tea,’ he said.
He’d pulled that damned witness out of his helmet and now he was very pleased with himself. I said, ‘Can I have the names and addresses of the lorry drivers?’
‘Now, you know I’m not supposed to do that,’ but he turned the sheets of paper over to find it. Then he twisted the page round so that it faced my side of the desk and got up and walked away so that I could read it.
‘They were catching the boat,’ he said from behind me. ‘You wouldn’t think it would pay a Polish meat-canning firm to send truck and drivers all the way here and return empty, but I suppose they know what they are doing.’
‘Maybe it’s a nationalized industry,’ I said. It was a long Polish name with an address in London Wall.
‘You didn’t drink the tea,’ he said again.
‘I’m trying to give it up,’ I said.
‘Stick with the tea,’ he advised. ‘Give up playing copper.’
11
Intelligence and espionage (in plus and minus categories) are programmed according to Section 9 of the STUCEN Programming Manual. Commanders are solely responsible for information, false or otherwise, collected outside game time, i.e. in off-duty hours.
RULES. ALL GAMES. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON
I was half inclined to give the sedated Miss Shaw a miss, but it would only give Ferdy another excuse for a long whine. The Terrine du Chef was a converted shop in Marylebone. ‘Restaurant Française’ had been gilt-lettered across the old shop window and the interior obscured with a large net curtain.
A menu was jammed into an illuminated holder in the doorway. It was handwritten, in the crabbed calligraphy that the English believe to be a hallmark of the French restaurateur. There was a ‘Closed’ sign behind the glass panel in the door but I pushed and the door swung open. I reached up to catch the sprung bell before it announced my arrival.
It was a cramped place. An odd collection of bentwood chairs were dancing on the table-tops. The dining-room had been dressed to look like a Paris bistro of the ’thirties, with enamel Suze adverts, marble-topped tables and fancy mirrors on every wall. A debris of corks, paper napkins and cigarette ends had been swept to a neat pile in the corner under the serving hatch. On the counter there was an array of cutlery, a line-up of old bottles stuck
with coloured candles and a pile of freshly laundered red check tablecloths. There was a smell of burned garlic, ancient cigars and freshly peeled potatoes. I walked through to the kitchen. From a tiny dark yard beyond it I could hear a young man’s voice singing softly and the noises of buckets and metal lids.
Down two stone steps from the kitchen there was a large pantry. A freezer was humming to a tin hip-bath, full of peeled potatoes. Alongside there was a large plastic sack containing dry ice, its smoke moving around inside the clear plastic like a restless grey cobra trying to escape. A scrubbed table had been cleared to provide room for an electric sewing machine plugged into the overhead light socket. Hanging over the back of the kitchen chair there was a man’s dark jacket. But it wasn’t the jacket that caught my attention: it was a manilla file. It had been pushed under a folded length of lining material, but not pushed far enough to conceal it completely. I pulled it clear and flipped it open. On top there was a drawing of a splay-armed figure, its measurements noted in neat red ink. The rest of the contents were photographs.
There were a dozen photos, and this time they shook me more than the ones in my flat. It was the same man that I’d seen pictured with my car, and with my parents, but these were better photographs and I could see his face in greater detail than before. He was more than five, perhaps even fifteen years, older than me, a barrel-chested man with a full mop of hair and large stubby-fingered hands.
There were no other papers in the file, nothing to tell me about his job or his family or what he liked for lunch. Nothing to tell me why someone had chosen to sit him in my car wearing my clothes, or pose him with my parents or frame the prints and position them carefully in my old flat. But these pictures revealed something about the people who had arranged this business. For the first time I realized that I was up against someone of considerable power and wealth. And it had all the clumsy power of a security department: a Russian security department for example. For reasons that I was unable to fathom, they had gone to all the trouble of dressing my Doppelgänger in the uniform of a rear-admiral of the Soviet Navy before having these photos taken. In the background on one of them there was a blurred but unmistakable flush-deck profile of a Tallinn Class destroyer. Was the photo taken on a sunny day at some British port, or could I recognize the waterfront of Alexandria or Malta’s Grand Harbour?
There were footsteps on the creaking wooden stairs. The sound of a cold room door and the clatter of footsteps on tiles. I closed the file and pushed it back under the lining material where I’d found it. Then I stepped quickly back through the door but grasped the edge, and peek-a-booed round it in what I hoped was the manner of a salesman.
‘Who are you?’ She was standing in the other doorway. Beyond her there was a food store. Through the open door I could see the entrance to the cold room. There was a rack of vegetables and a marble slab upon which some charcuterie had been sliced and arranged on plates and garnished with twigs of parsley. The movement of air activated the cold room thermostat, and the refrigeration system started. It was a loud vibrating sound. She closed the door.
‘Who are you?’ I said. It was the unsedated, fully dressed Miss Shaw, and I had made the right decision. She was a shapely blonde in her middle twenties. Her long hair was parted in the middle so that it fell forward framing her face. Her skin was tanned, and she needed no makeup and knew it.
She was so unexpected that I hesitated for a moment while I looked at her in detail. ‘It’s about the accident,’ I said.
‘Who let you in?’
‘The door was open,’ I told her. A willowy man in flared denims came to the top of the stairs and paused for a moment. He was out of her sight but she knew he was there. ‘Did you leave the door open, Sylvester?’
‘No, Miss Shaw. The fellow with the frozen pork loins.’
‘That explains it,’ I said. ‘These guys with frozen loins …’ I gave her a smile that I’d kept unused for a year or more.
‘The accident,’ she nodded. ‘Go and make sure it’s closed now, Sylvester.’ A yellow tape measure hung around her neck and in her hand there was the dark-blue sleeve of a uniform jacket. She rolled the sleeve into a ball.
‘Yes, the police sergeant phoned,’ she said. She was slim, but not so slim that she’d slip through your fingers, and she had this incredible pale-blue cashmere sweater that exactly matched her eyes. She wore a carefully fitted dark tweed skirt, and strap-across low-heeled shoes that were suitable for long walks in the country. ‘He said to throw you out, if you were a nuisance.’ I was expecting a high voice but it was soft and gentle.
‘He spoke to you like that?’
‘Policemen are so much younger these days.’
‘And stronger, too.’
‘I don’t seem to get many chances to find out,’ she sighed. Then she put the blue uniform sleeve aside with far too much casualness, and she raised a hand to shoo me back into the kitchen. All the time she was giving me back my super smile, returning it tooth for tooth, chewed thirty times just like nanny had told her.
In the kitchen she took two chairs and placed them to face each other. She sat in the one that faced the door. I sat down. She smiled, crossed her legs and smoothed the hem of her skirt, just to be sure that I didn’t get a glimpse of her knickers. ‘And you are from the insurance?’ She embraced herself as if suddenly cold.
I reached for a small black notebook and creased the pages open with my thumb as I’d seen my insurance man do.
‘And that’s the little book in which you write it all down?’
‘It’s really the one I use for pressing wild flowers, but my wristwatch tape recorder is on the blink.’
‘How amusing,’ she said.
The blond man came back into the kitchen. From a hook behind the door he took a bright pink apron and put it on carefully, so as not to disarrange his hair. He began to place pieces of limp lettuce in wooden bowls. ‘Leave that for now, Sylvester. We’re talking. Do the wine.’
‘I’ll need warm water.’
‘Just get the bottles up from the cellar. We won’t be long.’ Reluctantly he went out. His denims had bright red patches sewn on the behind. He went down the stairs slowly.
I said, ‘What’s he going to do with the hot water? Put Mouton Rothschild labels on the Algerian?’
‘What a good idea,’ she said, in a voice calculated to prove that the cashmere had been chosen to match her blood.
‘You were with Mr Toliver when the accident happened?’
‘I was.’
‘And you and he were … ?’
‘I am a friend.’
‘A friend, yes.’
‘One more wisecrack like that and you will leave.’ But she gave me the inscrutable Snow-queen smile to keep me guessing.
‘You’d been out to dinner?’
‘With friends – business associates I should say – we were on the way back to my apartment. It was the North Circular Road where the accident happened – or so they told me later.’
I nodded. She wasn’t the sort of girl who’d recognize the North Circular Road and admit it.
‘The lorry driver pulled over too soon. He misjudged the distance.’
‘The police said the lorry was stopped at the lights.’
‘Sergeant Davis is driving me down to collect the Bentley this afternoon. I’ll clear it up then. He said it’s only a routine thing – thirty minutes or so and he’ll bring me back.’
Lucky old Sergeant Davis. If she’d been an old-age pensioner maybe he would have let her go down to collect the Bentley by bus.
‘What colour was the lorry?’
‘Maroon and beige.’
‘And there were two lorry drivers?’
‘Two, yes. Would you like some coffee?’
‘That would be great, Miss Shaw.’
‘Sara will do.’ She unplugged a machine and poured two bowls of coffee. Then she put the jug under a large cosy. The kitchen was a narrow place with many machines. All the dish towels were p
rinted with coloured pictures and recipes. On the wall there was a cross-reference chart that I thought was an analysis of the hydrogen atom but on closer inspection became herbs. She put croissants, butter and jam on the table beside me. Her hands were elegant, but not so well cared for that she might not have done her own washing-up and sweeping. I bit into one of the croissants while she warmed the milk and checked through a spikeful of bills. I couldn’t decide whether she was wearing a bra.
‘You don’t seem too upset,’ I said.
‘Does that offend you? Ben was a friend of my father’s. I saw him only two or three times a year. He felt it was a duty to see me eat a meal but we had very little to talk about except my parents.’ She flicked some crumbs off her sweater, and gave a sigh of irritation. ‘Messy sluts like me should always wear aprons.’ She turned to me and held her hands up. ‘Look at me, I’ve only been in the kitchen two minutes.’ I looked at her. ‘You don’t have to look at me like that,’ she said. A buzzer on the electric oven sounded and a red light switched on. ‘You’re not really in insurance, are you, Mr …’ She put some ready-cooked pizzas into the oven and reset the timer.
‘Armstrong. No, I’m a leg-man for Sergeant Davis.’ She shook her head; she didn’t believe that either.
‘It was an accident, Mr Armstrong. And quite frankly it was Ben’s fault. He was driving very slowly, he thought he could hear a whining noise in the engine.’
‘People with Bentleys get that way about engines.’
She didn’t encourage my generalizations about people with Bentleys. She probably knew more of them than I did.
She reached over me for a croissant. I watched her in that way she hadn’t liked.
‘The street was dry and the lighting good?’
She swallowed some coffee before answering. ‘Yes to both.’ She paused before adding, ‘Do you always look so worried?’