A Killer for a Song Page 7

  “Of course,” she inclined her head. Impeccable, thought Boysie: great breeding and great breeding stock. She would make a super wife for one of the chinless wonders one of these days, but some lucky lover would pilfer the erotic profits.

  “See you then,” he scooped up his key and left.

  The walk from the Palace to La Mansion took only seven minutes, but Boysie was sodden by the time he reached the pavement across the road from the hotel’s facade, the rain coming down straight, in big drops as though some archangel had opened a stop-cock on the celestial shower bath.

  There were lights on and no sign of life - except for the car out front: a grey Citroen, the DS 19, with someone at the wheel.

  Boysie sank back into what shadow there was, sank being the operative word for the water, bouncing up from the pavement, had slurped into his shoes. It was like walking in a paddling pool.

  The Citroen should not have been there; nor the man at the wheel, a bulky man, Boysie judged in the poor light, fat, squat and, probably, short.

  The second hand on his watch was sweeping the seconds and minutes away. Time was irreversible for Pinkney, Defoe, and, though he did not like the thought, Boysie.

  The fat man in the Citroen started the motor, his head turned towards the plate glass and steel-framed doors to the hotel’s lobby.

  More movement: someone coming out, walking in a determined manner, then breaking into a trot, presumably to avoid the drops, between which you could not have got a matchstick. The man coming out was wearing a white suit and there was a flash of red coming from the shirt neck. The guy did not have much taste in ties. Dark hair, slick; swarthy face, Boysie doubted if he could ever pick him out again.

  The car pulled away, the expensive engine note dropping as he turned the corner, the plashing whisper of rubber on the wet road diminished until all was quiet again. Boysie’s watch showed two minutes past five.

  Without rushing it, he crossed the road, wiping his face with a handkerchief as he came into the protection of the concrete awning above the glass entrance doors.

  The lobby was deserted, though there was a small light flashing red on the switchboard visible behind the reception desk. At the far end, the lights above two elevators showed that both cars were down.

  Boysie screwed up his discipline, willing his legs to go slow, stopping himself from breaking into a panicky run to the reception desk. He was half-a-dozen paces from it by the time he saw the key, lying forlorn on one of the three blotters. He reached forward, scooped it up, moving to the right and heading towards the elevator.

  Inside the car, with the button pressed to six, Boysie realised that his breathing was laboured, hands unsteady and his own heartbeat over-riding everything else. The tic in the left corner of his mouth was fully active and he now knew that he could not rely on Montezuma having been overcome by the local brandy.

  The sixth floor corridor was deserted - a bad sign. Cursing, he realised that he should have taken a few seconds longer in reception, to peek at the guest list and see if Griffin was registered. But there was not time for that now. He was committed; if Griffin had not done it, then Boysie would have to force himself. He felt dangerously sick.

  There was a pair of shoes, brown and ranged hopefully outside room sixty; there was no sound from inside. Boysie clutched the key in his left hand and let his right curl around the Luger, still entrenched in the pocket of his raincoat - a misnomer, obvious from its sagging impregnated condition.

  He slid the key quietly into the lock, turning clockwise until he felt pressure. As he drew the Luger out of his pocket, surplus rainwater ran in rivulets down the barrel.

  He slid the safety off, holding the weapon close to his body, the muzzle angled towards the door.

  Fear, like a clutch of tarantulas, crawled up the back of his neck and the nausea rose in his gorge. Then, a deep breath, all muscles tense: thumb and forefinger twisted on the key and he pushed forward, the Luger raised and ready as he moved, his left hand reaching out to where he supposed the light switch would be.

  There was no need for the switch: the lights were full on. Neither was there any need for the weapon. The occupant of room sixty was already dead, smashed across the bed with his head back and a wound the size of a tangerine in his throat. There was a lot of blood and the room smelled foul.

  Boysie threw up.

  It took only a few seconds for him to wipe his mouth and back out of the room, removing the key and leaning against the wall outside, but it seemed like an hour.

  “You got here then.” Griffin was standing about five feet away, between the rooms.

  Boysie’s gun hand came up, then relaxed. He breathed out, expelling the air from his lungs, ridding himself of tension. “You did it then?”

  “What?”

  “Rooms sixty and sixty-one.”

  “Just going to, I’ve had hell’s own job getting a pass key. Almost had to go a full five rounds with a bloody nympho chambermaid. But it’s okay now,” Griffin brandished the fruits of victory.

  About twenty seconds passed before the truth dawned. “Someone’s done it,” said Boysie.

  “Not you?” Griffin asked, suspicion edging into his voice, creased round his eyes.

  “Not on your ... No. But someone’s done that one. I don’t know about the other.”

  Griffin eyed the Luger with even greater mistrust. “Better have a look.”

  He turned to the door of sixty-one, slipping the key into the lock, working with surprising speed and silence. Boysie saw the glint of something in the undertaker’s right hand, then Griffin was inside the room.

  “Bloody scab labour,” he said emerging with a hurt expression, closing the door behind him. “It’s all tied up. I’ve come all this way for nothing.”

  “Best get out then,” Boysie had jammed the Luger back into his pocket. “See you back in London.”

  “You’d better. I expect the rest of my cut.”

  They left, fast and separately, Boysie going first. There was nobody watching: not that he spotted anyway. Nor did he meet anyone on the way back to the Palace; and there was nobody in his room when he finally closed the door behind him, feeling the jelly in his legs and the hornets idling their motors in his guts. The sweats were back and he leaned heavily against the door. But there was no Joan Palmer to ease him into the bath and lift the depression by letting him try to make it back to the oblivion of the womb.

  He cleaned himself up and tried for sleep, but it came only in small gobbets, the darkness punctuated by sudden startled alertness in which he was aware of his heart thumping against his ribs.

  Mostyn came in at eight. “I gather it all went off very well,” he said as if talking of some cocktail party, or Queen Charlotte’s Ball.

  Boysie preferred not to answer. Mostyn could believe what he liked.

  “Time for the histrionics, then,” Mostyn chivvied as Boysie climbed into his clothes, ran a razor over his chin and splashed his face with aftershave.

  They walked over to La Mansion, retracing the route Boysie had taken during the night. The place was alive, cordonned by fat and corrupt-looking coppers with their weaponry slung low. Others were arriving in large American cars, and there was a crowd of rubberneckers.

  They made it look good, for the sake of any French or American markers who might have been gathered for the big match. Mostyn made a bit of a bru-ha-ha and Boysie ran interference. There was some pushing and general unpleasantness.

  Back at the Palace, where they were joined by Grenot and Smith, the real row began. The Frenchman and American became white-faced and tight-lipped at first. Boysie thought that it was going to be all right, but the scene began to build once they were all in the car, on the way back to Mexico City.

  To start with they blamed Mostyn, but he turned all their assaults neatly, and in the end they blamed each other. Mostyn, persistent to the finish, let it be known that in his opinion the whole thing was down to Smith and the Americans.

  “It bea
rs the stamp of your lot,” he snarled angrily. “Things get difficult and you panic. You brought your triggers in didn’t you?”

  “What about the goon you’re carrying?” Smith spat back.

  “I’m a bring ‘em back alive boy,” Boysie said coolly, proud of himself.

  “Don’t worry. I know about you,” Smith countered.

  The last half-hour of the journey was conducted in granite silence strong with unspoken threats. Forty-eight hours later they were back in London where Boysie collected his usual bonus, dropped Griffin’s money off in their safe letterbox and swanned away on a private idyll with the dusky Vita whom he rescued from the jungle of Notting Hill Gate.

  In eleven years the operation had never been backtracked. He saw Joan Palmer a couple of times, dined her once at Chez Solange and did not seek the comfort of her body. He bumped into Herbie Goldfinch on several occasions in the corridors of power, and was involved in one operation that also included Lavenham.

  But nobody mentioned Mexico. Not until now.

  VIII - LYRIC

  Words of a song: originally vocal with lyre

  The silence in Mostyn’s room was almost tangible. It took Boysie a second or two to pull himself out of the time warp into which his mind had been deflected. He looked at each of the faces in turn: Mostyn, Charlie Griffin, Lyric Lavenham, and Couperose. This was Paris, not Puebla; 1975 not 1964. Eleven years after.

  “Eleven years,” he said aloud and softly.

  “Over a decade,” Mostyn echoed. “A decade and seven lives.”

  “How did they get clobbered?”

  Mostyn lit a cigarette, taking his time. Griffin was up and going towards the drinks trolley again; Lyric did not move, and Gerard Couperose appeared to shift his weight from one buttock to the other.

  Boysie took a deep pull at his drink.

  “It started about a year ago,” Mostyn began. “Joan Palmer was working for the section in New York. She shared an apartment with another girl-from the embassy. The roommate came home late, from a date, one night, and found the door lock smashed. Joan was in the bedroom. Drowned.”

  “In the bedroom?”

  “It had been done in the bath. They had dried her off, dressed her and laid her out. That was why it didn’t seem political at the time : a standard maniac freak killing.”

  “Jesus,” breathed Boysie. The image of Joan Palmer’s face floating above him in the hotel room at Puebla, her body, enthusiasm, and the darkness on which she had insisted.

  “We didn’t know for certain until Bob.” Mostyn at least had the grace to shoot a respectful look towards Lyric. “But he was the fourth. Nick Holborn and Herbie Goldfinch were the next. They were working together, a routine matter for DI6 last May, in London. They went back to Herbie’s place off the Fulham Road, for a drink about eleven one night when they’d finished. They didn’t check in for a couple of days and their head of section sent a legman round to see what’d happened. Nobody’d heard a bloody thing, but there they were, sitting in easy chairs looking surprised. They each had a bullet straight through the throat, fired at close range.”

  “Then Bob Lavenham?” asked Boysie. He knew about bullets through the throat; he had seen one in La Mansion, Puebla.

  Mostyn gave Lyric a quick look again. She nodded, acquiescently.

  “Last September, in his Knightsbridge flat. Unpleasant. I won’t go into details, but the joker was beginning to leave clues. There was a tape on his stereo machine. Copeland’s El Salon Mexico: Utah Symphony Orchestra.”

  “Smith came from Utah. I remember that.”

  “I wish somebody else had. He got aerated with a scatter gun on the steps of a rooming house on the West Side of New York a month later.”

  “And Martin?”

  “Poor old Martin. He took his car straight off the M1 and into a flyover support.”

  “Not an accident?”

  “Someone had syphoned off his brake fluid.”

  “Always a good way unless someone bothers to look,” Griffin muttered professionally.

  “Then last December, here, in Paris, someone got at Grenot: with a knife. They found him leaking all over his living room. And that, Boysie, leaves two little Indians, you and me - if you don’t count Charlie Griffin.”

  “And I’d rather not be counted, Colonel Mostyn, thank you.” Griffin looked serious.

  Boysie leaned back and closed his eyes. When he spoke it was as though his voice had somehow become detached from his body. “No clues? No leads?”

  “The various police departments, and forces, concerned have swapped notes. There appear to be some similarities. Yes, Boysie, it could well have been one man, with suitable back-up operators and a control. That’s really the first thing we have on the agenda.”

  “Sleuthing?”

  “A small matter of interrogation.”

  “Yes?” Boysie looked up. Mostyn was on his feet, and Couperose had lifted himself from his chair. He was approaching Boysie with some menace.

  “Now look here,” Boysie was slow, but not that slow. “If you think I had anything to do with ...”

  “Just shut up and answer a few questions.” Couperose looked really unpleasant.

  “I haven’t been out of England since that last bloody stupid airline thing.” Boysie bridled, rising and taking up a belligerent stance. He was a big man and knew the tricks. He was always ready to push it if roused. For some reason Couperose roused him.

  “Steady on,” Mostyn surprisingly cool. “Nobody’s making accusations. But the killings have all got style, élan. You’re in the business, you know the form. We simply want to know if anyone’s approached you.”

  “Nobody approaches me, except you. Other people get approached though. Christ, Mostyn, think about it. In my early days you even fingered Griffin for me. You were high and bloody mighty then: you said the Department needed an unknown. Griffin was known. You want to ask Griffin who approaches him.”

  “Don’t think we haven’t.”

  “I’m in the clear.” Griffin looked decidedly pleased with himself.

  “Well, nobody’s been in touch with me. You have my word. I reckon it’s Chiliman you ought to sniff out. He stood to lose most.”

  “More than you know.” Mostyn was subsiding again, though Couperose still hovered. “It’s the obvious conclusion: the revenge motif. Don’t worry, Oakes, we’re looking for Chiliman, and while you’re at it, I’d advise you to show a mite of respect. I could have left you out there in the cold. Just let Chiliman and his goons catch up with you. You could have ended up on the slab, Boysie, my lad, with the same surprised look as the others, wondering who had done you and why.”

  “Maybe I would have preferred it that way.”

  Mostyn took no notice. “Instead of which, I take the trouble to bring you in, warn you, put you with friends. At least in a small pack we stand a little chance.”

  Boysie grunted. “Do we have to attend this conference?”

  “Not really. Only as a token.”

  “Then why Paris?”

  “Because this was the spiritual home of Clambake and because we think Chiliman might just be here. He would hardly let an opportunity like this slip through his pudgy little fingers, would he?”

  “That’s all really cheerful. You have to bloody con me, Mostyn, in your usual slimy creeping way. You couldn’t just come to me and tell me someone was going to hit me. Now that would have made sense. I could have got the hell out.”

  “There’s no place to run to anymore.”

  “I’d have found somewhere. How about Scunthorpe? Nobody in their right mind would have searched for me in Scunthorpe.”

  “We’re not talking about anyone in their right mind.” That put a stop on the conversation. Boysie saw the eternal wisdom of the remark. If Chiliman, or whoever it was, had a mind to obliterate everyone concerned with the Puebla business, nothing would stop him now.

  “What was Clambake anyway?”

  “A lot of operation.”
<
br />   “But what?”

  Mostyn looked nervous. Boysie suddenly felt happy. He did not remember when he had seen Mostyn looking so twitchy.

  “It must have meant one hell of a lot to old Chiliman if he’s flipped over it.”

  “His entire career, I should imagine.”

  “Yes,” Griffin looked sad. “He started a new career, didn’t he? Liquidating you lot.”

  “An enormous grudge, Colonel,” Couperose shifted again - left buttock to right. “Do you know why? Can’t you give us any detail? Or haven’t we been cleared?” He sneered, “Or, perhaps it is Oakes who gets cleared.”

  Mostyn twitched again. “Maybe he does. But I’d have to get authorisation. Maybe I’ll call London.” He wrinkled his brow as though in deep and difficult thought. “Yes, Boysie, you should know about Clambake. You should know why Chiliman - if it is Chiliman - wants to get rid of us.”

  Boysie was suspicious. Mostyn just did not behave like this : it was not his style.

  “Well, I’m off to see an old mate,” Griffin rose. “That is if it’s all right by everyone else.”

  “Keep your eyes open.” Mostyn closed and opened his own lids like a lazy reptile.

  “And I must check in,” Couperose shrugged. “You know the arrangements. We have experienced agents looking out for all of you. They are very discret. I will return in an hour or so. You will be all right?”

  “I’ve been all right for more years than I wish to remember,” Mostyn sounded a shade sharp. “I can do without a nanny for a few hours. In any case, I’ve got some calls to make.”

  Couperose nodded.

  “And I’m going to have a bath,” announced Lyric.

  Boysie felt uneasy. This was not the first time Mostyn had set him up. Instinct told him this could be another set-up and he did not like it. Certainly he did not feel like sitting in the room they had given to him: too many overhanging buildings. Whoever had done the others was very good and an overhung hotel bedroom would present little difficulty.

  “Think I’ll do the same,” he said aloud and cheerfully. “I feel a bit sticky.”

  He hung his hands, rubbing the palms with his fingers to indicate the need for bathing. Surprised, he realised that he did need a bath: he could feel the sweat building in his armpits, beginning to trickle down his side.