Stealth (6 page)

‘I'm staggered that he told you so much,' was Patrick's first comment.

‘I don't think it was his first drink of the day – and of course he loathes Hamlyn even more now.'

‘Mike'll give you a gong. But you took a hell of a risk.'

‘Just stay right by my side for the rest of the time we're here, please.'

‘I will. Some of the things he said: running a garage, Hamlyn working for him valeting cars and looking him up in a casual way because he needed money have to be discounted. I rather admire the guy for thinking on his feet like that. But why did he start talking to you in the first place?'

‘Loneliness? Full of grievance after having had to part with so much money, possibly a large chunk of available funds and unconsciously wanting to tell someone about it? Needing female company? There didn't seem to be any evidence of another person on board. He admitted spending money on tarts.'

‘I have to confess that I don't know whether to get the police on to him or not.'

‘Phone Greenway.'

This he did. The commander responded by saying that he would relay the information to those SOCA personnel involved with Operation Captura and would mention to them that if Coates left Cannes he could well head for St Tropez. We were to forget about him, although, in view of what he had told me, exercise all due caution as he had a record for committing firearms offences. Greenway then went on to say that he would like us to attend the banquet that night in order to observe Clement Hamlyn, assuming that he would attend, and then return to the UK, as planned, early the following morning.

Still not happy about being in a position to openly watch this man I urged caution, whereupon Patrick said he would think of something.

We duly presented ourselves – slightly pretentiously it was black tie – at the appointed hour, seven thirty, my companion succeeding, I thought, in not looking like a minder. There appeared to be far more people in the large, quaintly old-fashioned but sumptuous dining room than had attended the conference during the past couple of days, but I then remembered that we had been promised the presence of various
glitterati
literati
for this final evening. I recognized no one and it made me feel out of touch and hopelessly provincial.

‘Why should you know who they are? They probably all run bookshops or write very bad poetry for the local rag,' Patrick declared robustly when I had voiced my gloom. All the ex-choirboys I have ever known possessed a carrying sort of voice and this one is no exception.

‘There's Hamlyn,' I said, spotting the man on the far side of the room.

Patrick took a couple of glasses of orange juice from a waitress's tray and handed one to me. ‘So it is. Heading straight for the bar too, so there's a surprise. Keep close.'

We set off through the throng that was packed into the space surrounding the long table laden with flowers, glassware and silver cutlery – plated, I had a surreptitious look – in the centre of the room, this particular author wondering how closely he intended to ‘observe' his quarry. Fairly snuggly, by the look of it. There was also the possibility that the foray was nothing at all to do with work but merely the action of a man furious with someone who had hurled obscenities at his wife. I felt a regrettable
frisson
of girlish excitement.

The bar was extensive, a curving affair taking up one whole corner of the room with a small section at one end reserved for serving coffee. It was furnished with several small tables and dinky little chairs, at one of which Hamlyn was sitting, uncomfortably, a large whisky in front of him, accompanied by the woman who had introduced herself to me as Alice but Patrick was convinced was Claudia Barton-Jones. He leaned on the nearby bar, drank half his juice, dumped it down on the counter and subjected the writer to a steady stare. There is a good repertoire of these, ranging from amused curiosity at one end of the scale through open derision to penetrating malevolence at the other. I was standing next to him, but on the leeward side, so could only guess which particular one had been selected. At a guess it was the second most likely to hit the mark.

But I was wrong, completely, utterly and absolutely wrong.

‘Do I know you?' the author enquired heavily.

Patrick cleared his throat and when he spoke it was hesitantly with a mid-West American accent. ‘I just wanted to apologize to you, Mr Hamlyn. I mean, for the other day. When you – you thought I was tailing you, kinda lurking around. But I wasn't. I don't do things like that. Folks from where I come from know how important privacy is to important people like yourself.'

Hamlyn's face sort of cracked into an expression that had every possibility of being a smile. ‘That's all right. I have to say though that when I first saw you I did imagine you might be after my wallet. That was before I learned that you were Miss Langley's – er – friend.' Here he looked right through me. ‘Is that all you wanted to say?'

‘Gee, y-y-yes,' Patrick stammered. He turned and hurried away. I had no choice but to follow.

‘Remind me to lift his wallet before he goes,' Patrick said under his breath, handing me a glass of wine.

‘Well, you already have in a way and that was quite the right thing to do,' I soothed, giving him one from the same tray while really, really needing to give Alice's/Claudia's smirking face a good smack.

‘Damn the man – but I was hoping he'd come out of his shell a bit. We might have learned something.'

‘I don't think we would have done. Just call it damage control.'

‘But did he swallow it?' Patrick persisted. ‘Be honest.'

I gave it thought. ‘No, possibly not.'

We spent a fruitless evening. Hamlyn and the female went from sight so either ate at a nearby restaurant or in their room. Patrick slipped back into his role of escort to medium famous novelist, chatted to all and sundry, applauded the speeches, even a closing one from the interminable and impenetrable Norwegian author and we finally got to bed at just after one a.m.

‘Look, I don't expect every moment of your time working for me to be loaded with incredible breakthroughs and mass arrests,' Commander Michael Greenway said after Patrick had voiced his general disappointment in the results of our mission.

Greenway is head of the small team of which we are peripheral members. As we work directly for him and are not part of day-to-day enquiries we rely on him, or his assistant, Andrew Bayley, to give us the latest findings and it is vital that nothing we do interferes with the team's investigations. This means that we are on first-name friendly terms with them but hardly ever confer unless it is during a general meeting. This is just as well and I am sure a deliberate move on SOCA's hierarchy's part, who are no doubt worried that some of Patrick's MI5-style methods of working might prove dangerously catching.

‘I'm actually very interested in what you did discover,' the commander continued. ‘To re-cap, you saw Hamlyn going on board a boat belonging to Daniel Coates, a wanted mobster – he's left Cannes, by the way, and they're watching out for him in St Tropez – who gave him money, or at least said he did, a large amount of which was in Hamlyn's room safe. I think we can gold plate that even though it might not stick in court. Coates also revealed that Hamlyn bragged to him that he was associated with a man who lives a whiter-than-white life in Richmond. That has to be Hereward Trent. Hamlyn's been seen at his house. That's real evidence. The woman, Barton-Jones . . . are you sure it was her?'

‘Around ninety-nine per cent sure,' Patrick answered.

‘But as she called herself Alice when talking to Ingrid, and others, she must have been travelling incognito. Why?'

‘Perhaps because she has a husband. I seem to remember reading it in a newspaper article in connection with her being investigated for expenses irregularities. He's something in the City.' Then, to me: ‘Did she mention him that evening?'

I shook my head, loving him to bits for not adding: ‘You got stoned.'

Greenway said, ‘Coates came up with quite a lot, didn't he? Even if we factor in the possibility of Hamlyn being all mouth and not much substance he did tell him that Trent, or rather someone we must assume is him, has a drug-running business and associated money laundering schemes, which I'm inclined to believe.'

‘I think we still have to treat any information from Coates as potentially iffy,' I cautioned.

This Greenway acknowledged.

‘What does Trent do legally for a living? Do we know that?' I asked.

Patrick said, ‘He's boss of a small chain of car dealers, mostly located in the wealthy London boroughs. Top-of-the-range stuff.'

‘I find it a bit of a tall story that the stealth boat was all part of the Trent empire and had been sent into port to put the frighteners on Coates,' Greenway commented. ‘And Coates did say that he didn't think Hamlyn was sober.'

‘Well, the boat was there,' Patrick said. ‘And left, shortly before Ingrid went on his catamaran. But, as you say, Hamlyn could have made that up in order to put extra pressure on Coates to give him the money.'

‘Or
some
money, as he corrected himself,' I added. ‘A rather obvious lie. It must have been, as was first suggested by you, Mike, a debt for services rendered sometime in the past.'

‘And Miss Smythe appears to have paid the price for her public spiritedness,' Greenway mused. ‘God, how I hate these bloody mobsters.'

London was warm with bright sunshine, a contrast to central France which, when we had flown over the country very early that morning, had been white with overnight frost. The commander had met us at a little bistro around the corner from SOCA's HQ, saying that he was desperate to get out of the office.

He went on: ‘The Met were delighted to hand over everything in connection with the Rosemary Smythe case and let us handle it as now there's a strong link to organized crime. They've absolutely nothing on Hereward Trent, not even points on his licence for driving offences, but of course Records is much more useful when it comes to Hamlyn and Coates. The pair of you need to acclimatize yourselves with all that info and then read the letters that Miss Smythe wrote to us over a period of several months before you do anything else. Then we'll have another get-together. But keep me right in the picture.'

We decided to work from home. Other than a hard copy of the Met's file – the case had been handled by a DI Branscombe – which Greenway had arranged to be printed off for us, plus handing over the keys to Miss Smythe's house, all the information and things we needed could be gleaned from various password-protected police websites. Patrick also has access to most MI5 files, hardly any of which, needless to say, were relevant or, for that matter, available on the internet. Provided one has clearance they may be viewed at appropriate establishments. This being likely to take far too long – he was keen to discover what, if anything, was known about Trent by the security services – Patrick suggested, before we headed west, we pay a visit to a man who, with regard to what can loosely be described as national security is known by insiders as the keeper of all grapevines. That was if he was free to see us.

Colonel Richard Daws, 14th Earl of Hartwood – although he does not use his title for everyday matters – at one time Patrick's boss at D12, the department we used to work for in MI5, had been one of the chief advisers when SOCA was first set up. He still works one or two days a week in this capacity and when in London stays at a small apartment he has retained in Whitehall. As it happened he was neither there nor in his office on the top floor of the SOCA building but on his way to give evidence at a parliamentary committee meeting. If we cared to meet him at his club afterwards . . .

‘If he's successfully chewed up the committee he might treat us to lunch,' Patrick said, having also relayed to me Daws's rather open-ended final remark.

As I am married to one I did not need to be told that senior army officers, both serving and retired, tend to loathe politicians of all hues. I also knew that the club in question was quite close to the Houses of Parliament, being situated just off Smith Square, and was glad the pair of us had decided to dress fairly formally for travelling as we were reporting to HQ.

We had a fifteen-minute wait for Daws in a tiny visitors' lounge at the club before he breezed in. I could not say that I had ever seen him breeze before and could only assume that he had had a very satisfactory morning. He looked hardly any older, his once-fair hair now grey but still with a tendency to flop over his forehead so he had to scoop it back with one hand – a lifetime's gesture.

‘Good, you made it,' was all he said to begin with, giving us a swift appraising glance while shaking our hands.

We followed him up a wide, deeply-carpeted staircase to a broad landing where he buttonholed one of the stewards.

‘Anywhere quiet where we can talk, Edwards?'

‘There's no one in the Lord Nelson Bar at the moment, sir.'

We went in and sat down. Daws ordered drinks from the same steward who was discreetly hovering and there was a little silence. I reminded myself that this man, who emerged from early retirement at his family seat, Hartwood Castle, to take up his part-time post, has in the past treated Patrick very harshly, even to the extent of having had him ‘tested' by a group of Royal Marines to see if he was fit, both mentally and physically, for the job being offered to him by D12. Strictly speaking he had not been but as the Marines caught up with him at my cottage on Dartmoor he had had very minor reinforcements: a poker and me. After a short but bloody war in the barn we had sent them on their way with one broken wrist, a couple of broken noses and several split lips.

Patrick and I have been married twice, the newly published author finally ridding herself of the insufferably superior and arrogant man her husband had become after one last, huge row. The divorce papers had come through when he was serving with Special Forces just before an accident with a hand grenade had resulted in him sustaining severe injuries. Eventually, the lower part of his right leg had had to be amputated and he is now active thanks to a man-made substitute with a tiny internal computer and lithium batteries that cost roughly the same as a medium-sized family car.