A Conflict of Interests (28 page)

"What you're asking for is out of the question," Jalud protested.

"I want confirmation that a Piper Cherokee is on standby by 1130 hours tomorrow," Patterson said, shouting him down.

"I'm not sure ECAS will be able to do that; they may have other commitments."

"Don't give me that shit; you've only to snap your fingers and that fucking bush pilot will drop everything—" The blips started up again, another coin went down in the box and Patterson came back at him, taking up from where he'd left off. "No buts, no arguments, just get on the goddamn phone and fix it the moment I hang up. You read me?"

Jalud glanced at Coghill, seeking guidance, and got an affirmative nod. "All right," he snapped, "all right, I'll do it."

"Now you're being sensible, Raschid. I like that."

"You would," Jalud said bitterly.

"One more thing. I think you need a rest and a change of scene. Take the day off tomorrow and go down to Southend. I want to hear the sound of a Cherokee running up when I call you at 1130 hours."

The time-up signal cut in yet again, then the bleeping note changed to a continuous burr and the line went dead.

"End of conversation," Coghill said. "You can hang up."

Jalud replaced the receiver. "What happens now?" he asked in a surly voice.

Coghill glanced over his shoulder. Caroline Brooke and two men from the surveillance detail had closed in on the phone booth while Jalud had been talking to Patterson, and they were now standing outside the door to discourage anyone else from using the pay phone.

"You can tell me about ECAS Limited," he said. "Who they are, where they hang out and what they do."

ECAS, it transpired, stood for Express Customized Air Service, an airline that had one Piper Cherokee and two short takeoff/ landing obsolete Pioneers, one of which had been cannibalized to provide spare parts. The chairman of the board, major stockholder with controlling interest, operations officer and chief pilot was a former Australian citizen called Bernie Urquhart. ECAS operated from a grass strip on the outskirts of Southend and boasted they were prepared to fly anybody, anything, anywhere, any time. In the circumstances, Coghill could readily understand why such a firm would suit Jalud down to the ground.

"Anywhere, any time," he mused. "In my book that means you know how to contact this Bernie Urquhart during out-of-office hours."

"Yes." There wasn't much else Jalud could say.

"Right, just hold on a minute." Coghill opened the door, told Caroline Brooke what he had in mind, then instructed Jalud to contact Urquhart and warn him to have a Cherokee on standby from 1130 hours.

"Who'll pay for the charter?" he asked.

"I'll give you one guess," Coghill said.

Vaudrey fixed himself another whiskey and soda, walked over to the window and stood there gazing at the lights in Battersea Park across the river. It had been a long, tiring, but thoroughly satisfactory day. Coghill, Jalud and Patterson; each man had responded in exactly the way he had predicted. And Zellick was back too, suffering from jet lag, the memorandum signed and sealed though not yet delivered. A minor disappointment there, but nothing to worry about. Good old Walter was merely exercising a little native caution. What was it he'd said? "You know the old saying, Nick, seeing is believing. So I'm holding on to the agreement until I'm sure you've got our dissident spook." Then Zellick had asked how the manhunt was going and had sounded completely flat when Vaudrey had told him Patterson had been sighted as far afield as Bristol, Liverpool, Hull, Plymouth and Southampton.

Releasing the Photofit had been the biggest mistake the police had made so far and it had proved an unexpected bonus for him. The response from the public had been quite astounding and the provincial forces had been inundated with information, all of it misleading. Vaudrey smiled; had he planned it himself, he could not have asked for a better or more confusing diversion.

20.

The house was called Deane Cottage, which Patterson thought a typical British understatement, considering the residence had four or five bedrooms upstairs and at least three reception rooms on the ground floor. It was situated in the middle of nowhere, eleven miles southwest of Norwich and midway between Old Buckenham and Tacolneston, whose combined population probably numbered less than two hundred. The property sat well back from the minor road to Tacolneston and was largely hidden from the south and west by a kidney-shaped wood. Immediately behind the house was a large field of pasture which he thought would make a passable landing strip, and the sole access to the cottage was a narrow lane that meandered through the wood and came to a dead end at the front door. The only other residence in the vicinity was an equally isolated farmhouse, and that was a good half-mile away.

It had been his intention to use the derelict World War II airfield near Thetford that he'd passed yesterday afternoon, but in the light of subsequent events, he'd changed his mind. "Never retrace your steps, make sure the route back is different from the route out." That was a lesson he'd learned the hard way in 'Nam and the habit acquired in combat had become second nature. Yesterday evening after the second phone call to Jalud, he'd caught a bus going to Diss, gotten off at Long Stratton and headed cross-country toward Old Buckenham. Then, half an hour before last light, he'd come across a small signpost planted in the grass verge by the roadside which pointed toward Deane Cottage. The surrounding countryside and a brief glance at the map had convinced him it was worth making a detour to see if the place had possibilities. The moment he saw the isolated house from a vantage point on the forward edge of the kidney-shaped wood, Patterson had decided to forget the derelict airfield.

Soon after dark, he'd worked his way forward to take a closer look at the cottage and the cars parked in the driveway. The dinner party which he'd surmised the occupants were giving had finally broken up around eleven-thirty. As the guests drove off in their respective cars, he'd seen the host and hostess silhouetted in the headlights. Both husband and wife were fairly plump and in their late fifties or early sixties. The man was a couple of inches taller than himself but nowhere near as muscular, and when they'd turned about to go back inside the house, Patterson had noticed he dragged his left leg. That, plus an obvious impediment in his speech when he'd called goodnight to the departing guests, suggested he'd had a stroke which in turn could have led to a premature retirement. From close observation, Patterson had also discovered they lived alone in the cottage, with only an old black Labrador for company.

If the location had looked good then, there was even less reason for him to change his opinion of the place in the cold gray light of daybreak. He was hungry, bone weary, chilled to the marrow from sleeping rough and almost flat broke; the cottage offered a refuge, a safe hideout where he could rest until Urquhart arrived to collect him. Patterson lifted the rucksack, slung it over one shoulder and moved out of the wood, stealthy as a hunter closing in on its prey. When he reached the narrow lane, he picked his way across the gravel, walking on tiptoe like a ballet dancer, and made his way around to the back of the house.

Some householders barricaded themselves in at night; others, who lived in areas where there was very little crime, were apt to be more complacent. The couple who lived in Deane Cottage obviously belonged to the latter category; before retiring to bed, they had drawn the curtains back in the lounge and deliberately left one of the fanlight windows open to ventilate the room. Patterson set the rucksack down, removed his shoes, climbed up onto the sill and raised the fanlight to its fullest extent. Boosting himself up until his head and shoulders were inside the room, he reached for the catch and unlatched the side window. It swung open on oiled hinges and, stepping down from the sill, he passed his shoes and rucksack into the lounge, then climbed in after them.

The debris from the night before was still in evidence: the remnants of salted peanuts and potato chips in silver dishes, ashtrays brimming with cigar and cigarette stubs, dregs of coffee in small cups and empty glasses on the mantelpiece, in the hearth and on the occasional tables beside the armchairs and settee. The dining room across the hall from the lounge was in a similar state: placemats for ten on the table, crumpled napkins, wineglasses, some bearing traces of lipstick and containing a few drops of Beaujolais, and a decanter of port.

Patterson backed out of the room, raised a squeak from a loose floorboard and froze. A minute passed, then another, the silence broken only by the Labrador snoring peacefully in the kitchen and the ticking of the grandfather clock at the far end of the hall. Eventually satisfied that no one had heard him above the other sounds in the house, he padded toward the front door in his stockinged feet and checked out the study opposite the downstairs cloakroom.

From the photographs on the wall and the assorted trophies, it was evident that the man had spent a lifetime abroad with the regular army both in peace and war. He'd been everywhere — India, Malaya, Africa, Italy, France and Germany — and along the way, he'd shot everything that had moved, from big game to man. There were two signed photographs in silver frames on the desk, one of Field Marshal Montgomery, the other of Dwight D. Eisenhower, inscribed "To my very good friend, Brigadier Rupert Deane." To the left of the door, two 9mm Berettas, a Luger automatic, a .30 caliber Winchester carbine and a Schmeisser submachine gun were exhibited in a display cabinet fitted with steel bars and wired to a burglar alarm.

Brigadier Deane also possessed an expensive fishing rod and an even more expensive-looking 12-bore shotgun which, in contrast to the firearms, he merely kept in a leather gun case on top of the display cabinet. Patterson eyed the desk, decided Deane had probably locked the cartridges away in one of the drawers and picked up the paperknife that was lying on the blotting pad. There were five drawers in all, but the one above the kneehole was too shallow for anything other than stationery. Right side or left? He plumped for the former on the grounds that since most people were right-handed, a normal person would find it easier to open and close the drawers on that side. Inserting the blade in the crevice, he pried it upward and forced the drawer open.

The cartridges were in an unsealed box right at the back between a spare fishing reel and a pair of pruning shears. According to the label, the nylon line had a breaking strain of twenty pounds and he could tell the shears were razor-sharp. He tucked both items inside his shirt, broke the shotgun open, loaded it and then went upstairs.

The Deanes occupied the room above the porch, a fact that Patterson had discovered the night before from watching the lights go out one by one. Turning left at the top of the staircase, he crept along the landing and quietly opened their door. As he stepped inside, the grandfather clock down in the hall started to chime the hour and Deane suddenly reared up in bed. For a moment he seemed unsure where he was, then he saw the 12-bore shotgun leveled at his head and his eyes mirrored disbelief.

"No heroics," Patterson told him softly. "It's loaded." Deane nodded. His wife beside him stirred and murmured his name in a sleep-laden voice. "Wake her up, but do it quietly. I don't want any hysterics."

Deane turned over onto his left side and gently shook his wife. "It's all right, Anthea," he said, trying to reassure her in a halting voice. "Don't be frightened, I'm here."

Her throat worked overtime swallowing air and there was an expression of pure terror in her eyes, until Deane took her hand, squeezed it tenderly and gradually managed to calm her down.

"That's more like it," Patterson said.

"What do you want with us?" It was a struggle for Deane to get the words out and his impediment was more noticeable than before.

"I want you to keep your mouth shut, turn over on to your stomach and cross both hands behind your back." Patterson reached inside his shirt and tossed the fishing line onto the bed within reach of Anthea Deane. "Tie him up," he snapped, "ankles, knees, wrists, elbows." The pair of shears followed, landing an inch from the reel. "And no half measures. As long as he can breathe, that's all that matters."

"My husband has a bad heart," Anthea said, with a flash of defiance.

"And it could get a lot worse if you don't get on with it." Patterson backed away from the bed and sat down on a chair. After watching her carefully for a while, he said, "You got anything special planned for today, Anthea?"

"What?" She looked up, startled.

"Are you expecting any visitors? Or going anywhere?"

"No." She shook her head, cut another length of nylon line from the reel and tied her husband's ankles together. "No, we were going to have a quiet day at home and do some gardening."

"There'll be a lot of phone calls though, won't there? Your friends ringing up to thank you for the dinner party?"

"Perhaps."

"You've left the lounge and dining room in a mess," he continued. "You got somebody coming in to clean it up?"

"Yes, the daughter of one of our local farmers. She lives about half a mile away."

"You'd better phone and put her off." Patterson got up again, walked over to the chest of drawers and found a silk scarf. "I don't care what excuse you give her, just make sure it's something she'll believe."

"I'll try."

"You certainly should, your life could depend on it."

"I won't give you any trouble," she whispered.

She wouldn't, either. In her anxiety to placate him, she had tied the line so tightly round Deane's wrists that his fingers were already beginning to swell. "You've done a good job," Patterson said, handing her the scarf. "Now gag him."

Tears welled in her eyes and began to run down her cheeks as she fumbled with the scarf and knotted it at the back of her husband's head.

"Save your tears," Patterson said roughly. "Get dressed and then you can cook me some breakfast. I'm going to be around until nightfall, and whether the day seems long or short is entirely up to you."