Framed

4

Detective Inspector Jimmy Falcon and Detective Constable Donald Summers arrived at Malaga airport the following morning, along with a huge Saturday intake for the Costa resorts. Larry met them with the Suzuki and on the way back to Marbella he brought them up to date on the situation. Neither Falcon nor Summers missed the fact that Larry was agitated, bordering on hyperactive.

“Myers is at the gallery right now. I’ve got two locals covering the Monterey and the speed boat.” He shook his head like a man confronting something incredible. “He’s rolling in it. His villa’s worth two million, the boat’s worth three hundred and fifty grand, and wait till you see his women...”

His energized state persisted throughout a visit to the police station in Marbella. After that it began to drop away as the red tape piled up. They were eventually told they would have to pursue their business in deeper bureaucratic detail at a nearby government building.

Extradition, it transpired, was not straightforward. It began to look as if it belonged in the category of near-impossible procedures. One sheaf of paper promptly generated another, and each set of regulations they signed — without being offered options — effectively reduced their functional flexibility as police officers on foreign territory. After an hour in the government building Larry said he was going to call the Foreign Office in London and complain. Falcon restrained him.

“Come on now, Larry,” he soothed. “Calm down. We’ve got to go through the procedures—”

“But they agreed! It’s him!” Larry could see victory sliding out of his grasp. It was retribution, the penalty for being a fool. “How many more bloody papers have we got to sort through?”

The bureaucratic marathon finished a few minutes after two-thirty. As the three men were shown off the premises they were given a parting piece of information tailored to send Larry into a spiraling depression. Twenty minutes later, kneeling by Susan on the beach, he tried to explain.

“It’s unbelievable,” he told her, shaking his head. “They won’t let us arrest him. They have to—”

“I don’t want to hear.” She was on her belly, her bathing suit pulled down at the back. The skin across her shoulders had gone deep pink. “I just don’t want to hear. Have you got that?”

“Aw, come on,” he cajoled, “this’ll mean promotion. I knew it was him! I mean, just think what that’ll mean, me spotting him and setting all this in motion...”

DI Falcon appeared, still wearing his tie, carrying his jacket over his arm. He was a young man, only a couple of years older than Larry, with the tailor’s-dummy tidiness of the career policeman. He dropped down on the sand beside Susan, first slackening the knees of his flannels.

“These bastards have got it sewn up over here,” he announced. He had come from ten arduous minutes on the hotel telephone, being updated on the case by Comisario Dominguez. He squinted at Larry. “You remember they picked up Frankie Day? Six months they held him and then let him go. He was on that bullion raid — we know it, they know it, but he’s still here sunning himself. It’s a ruddy fiasco!”

“So what about Myers?” Larry said.

“They’re gonna get a search warrant, charge him with using a false passport. Shit, it’s hot...” Falcon thumbed open the neck of his shirt and flapped a hand in front of his face. “Whatever rap we’ve got, it comes second in line.” He frowned darkly at Larry. “I doubt if we’ll get him out, you know.”

“What?” Larry was incensed. “Myers doesn’t come under their extradition policy!”

“Just calm down.” Falcon said. “I think Dominguez is on our side.” He glanced at Susan and nudged her gently. “You’re looking a bit red.”

Susan rolled over, deftly covering her breasts with a towel. She sat up, scowling.

“It could be rage,” she said. “Larry, just see if the kids are okay, will you? They’re in the water...”

“And get your skates on,” Falcon added. “We’ve got to get back to the station — eef eet ees con-veen-yenti!”

“Don’t bother!” Susan snapped. She scrambled to her feet, furious because Larry still hadn’t moved. She hugged the towel about her. “Tony!” she screeched, marching off down the beach. “John!”

DI Falcon watched her go. He turned to Larry.

“Having a bit of aggro, are we?”

Larry started to say something, then he spotted DC Summers running toward them. Summers stopped in a flurry of sand, panting for breath.

“They’re going to pick up Myers,” he gasped. “The warrant’s been issued. They got guys going over to his villa right now...”

The ensuing operation, monitored at its various stages by the three British policemen, went moderately smoothly. In Von Joel’s study at the villa Spanish police officers carried out a thorough search in spite of noisy imprecations, dire warnings, and physical resistance from Lola. As one of the officers opened a hollow book from the shelf and took out three passports, all with Von Joel’s picture inside, Lola stopped abusing them. She ran to the door and screamed to the housekeeper to call Von Joel at the gallery in Benabana and tell him what was happening.

Events, however, were ahead of anything that could be improvised. Von Joel was in the middle of negotiations with Penaranda, the young Spanish painter whose exhibition had been held at Puerto Banus two nights before. When the housekeeper rang she told Von Joel that rooms at the villa had been searched by the police. Items had been removed, she said, and Lola had been arrested.

Von Joel was on the point of asking which rooms had been searched and what had been taken away when he glanced out of the window and saw two determined-looking police officers about to enter the gallery. He put down the receiver, asked Penaranda to excuse him, and signaled to Charlotte.

“Get back to the villa,” he told her. “Check the passports. You know what to do, just get them to my lawyer. Fast. The police have got Lola, they’re coming for me now, probably you too. Just keep your cool. Smile! That’s my girl...”

From outside the gallery Larry, Falcon, and Summers watched the two Spanish policemen confront Von Joel. He conducted himself calmly, shaking hands and smiling affably at the first officer to enter the gallery. The second one declined the handshake. He stood squarely in front of Von Joel and held up the three passports he had found at the villa. Von Joel took them, frowning delicately, examining them as if he were seeing them for the first time.

“Cool bastard, isn’t he?” Falcon murmured.

Von Joel handed back the passports.

“Come on, come on,” Larry muttered, his face almost touching the window. “Get the cuffs on him!”

Inside the gallery, in spite of Von Joel’s efforts to maintain a disarming calm, the atmosphere was tense. Charlotte, close to tears, was wrecking the mood. When she tried to stand close to Von Joel a policeman restrained her.

“Just a second,” Von Joel said, resting his hand lightly on the officer’s arm. “It’s okay, Charlotte...” He spoke firmly, almost imperiously, willing her to stay in control of herself. “Can you finish the arrangements with Penaranda? I want maybe three canvases a year — do it now, sweetheart!”

He turned to the policemen and asked them, in Spanish, if Inspector Carreras was in charge, and if he might give him a call. He took his wallet from his pocket, opening it and blatantly displaying a wad of money. Stiffly, the officer with the passports told him no, Comisario Dominguez was in charge, and it was not possible to make calls.

Von Joel pursed his lips, looking from one officer to the other, realizing he was against a wall.

“He’s fucked,” Falcon breathed.

As Von Joel was led from the gallery, without handcuffs, he looked directly at Larry. For a second Larry was the young uniformed constable again with his back pressed to the wall and there was that smile on Von Joel’s face. His eyes were terrifying, like the green ocean one minute, turned almost black with a controlled fury the next, but his voice was casual, mocking.

“This one down to you, is it?” he asked Larry.

A policeman pushed him gently from behind. He moved on, leaving Larry with the feeling he had been threatened.

That evening Comisano Dominguez explained to the Scotland Yard contingent what was happening. Von Joel, he said, was being held in the jail at Malaga, a deeply unpleasant place for anyone, but particularly so for a man accustomed to the finer things in life.

“He has asked to speak with his lawyer,” Dominguez said in his careful, deliberate way. “We hold Senorita Lola del Moreno and Senorita Charlotte Lampton also, as we want no one contacted.” He held up the three passports that were found in the study, spread out like a hand of cards. “These were taken from his villa. His photograph is on all three, so they are forgeries. His residency is illegal.”

“If you charge him,” Larry said, “he has to go through a court case...”

Dominguez nodded.

“But that could take months.”

“He is my prisoner,” Dominguez said flatly. “If you wish to have Senor Von Joel formally extradited, then we go by the correct procedure, but—”

“But we know he’s Edward Myers,” Larry cut in. “We’ve got proof.”

Dominguez blinked patiently. “Listen to me. Please. He was arrested in Spain, and legally you cannot just take him back to England...”

Larry threw up his hands and turned away, optimism and patience draining from him.

“It’s bloody stupid,” he said, walking along the beach ten minutes later with Falcon and Summers. He stopped, determined to impress on the other two just how preposterous the situation was. “They’ve got us by the short and curlies. Just picture it. How the hell do they think all the villains get to stay put out here? Legal crap can string us out for months, years. If they grant him bail, he’ll be out of the country like a shot. Have they impounded his boat? They should sort that.”

“Just shut it, Larry,” DI Falcon said, sounding weary. “He said Von Joel had asked to see a lawyer. He didn’t say he’d permitted it. He’s giving us a break.”

“Us? Eddie Myers, you mean.”

“No, us,” Falcon said, starting to sound angry. “I sussed out what he’s up to. He’s got Von Joel — or Myers, if you prefer — locked up in a holding cell. Nobody even knows he’s been nabbed, and they can keep him there. Understand? How long do you think he’s going to wait in that sweatbox?”

Larry was shaking his head, still unaware that anything subtle was going on.

“I just don’t bloody believe it. How long do we have to wait for them to make their minds up?” He almost wagged a finger at the DI, then thought better of it. “I’m warning you, they’re messing us about.”

“Oh, yeah?” Falcon stuck his face closer to Larry’s. “Let’s see how long the bronzed wonder can last in a bug-infested cell with two drunks, a druggie and one bucket to piss in!” He laughed. “Great frigging legal system! See — the Spanish authorities don’t want all the aggro of dealing with him, but they can’t legally release him over to us unless he—”

“He agrees to come of his own free will?” Larry said, catching on. “Right!”

Light dawned full and bright. All at once Larry felt better about everything.

By ten-thirty the sun had gone down and the only light in the cell was from a dim wire-caged bulb set into the ceiling. Philip Von Joel sat on a filthy blanket on the floor. In one corner behind him an alcoholic pickpocket slept unevenly, belching and coughing and keeping up a seamless monologue that was a shade too quiet to hear. It amused Von Joel — though not enough to make him laugh or even smile — that an alcoholic with a bad tremor and no discernible coordination had tried to make a living in a branch of crime that required, above all, slick timing and steady hands.

In a corner by the door the third occupant of the cell, a drug addict who was even smellier than the drunk, appeared to be asleep, too, although he groaned a lot and every two minutes or so his eyes rolled open and a sharp rigor took hold of his body, straightening his spine sharply and making his head strike the wall. He was incredibly thin, dressed only in cut-off jeans. His back, legs, and arms were covered with crops of circular purplish lesions; some of them were blistered, others bled from contact with the cement floor.

The fourth prisoner lay along the wall to Von Joel’s left, swathed in rags. He looked dead.

Von Joel sat erect, distancing himself from this place, separating his senses from the confinement and the squalor. It was not easy. He was a compulsively clean man, acutely fastidious in matters of health and hygiene. In his present situation he knew it would be a mistake to think ahead: it would erode his confidence in his own ability to survive the intentions of lesser people.

What he must do, first and foremost, was cling to his sense of himself. He must remain secure in the understanding that he was above matters of simple confinement. Liberty was his medium, he would gravitate to freedom because his karma was in balance. His fundamental condition could not be withheld from him for long, because such a denial went against nature.

It was hard though. The smells were like a fog seeping into his head, clouding his certainty. The filthiness of the cell was disheartening, and there was not one pleasant thing to look at. He closed his eyes tightly, making his breathing slow and shallow. He concentrated fiercely, remembering the primary code for those who would survive and prevail; he saw it printed in silver letters against the darkness of his eyelids:

Sense of self was hardest. In here, kept forcibly from all he loved and craved, it felt like old times, very old times, back in the days when he was the person they were calling him now, Eddie Myers. Those were the hardest days, days of spiritual darkness. They were gone. He was Philip Von Joel, that was his sole identity, his fresh incarnation.

He was a man of substance insulated from the world by deep, tight layers of culture and wealth. All former personas were dead and of no significance.

He closed his eyes tighter as the smell of excrement rose in a dank wave from the gurgling drunk behind him.

I am Philip Von Joel and I do not belong in this place...

The addict grunted sharply. Von Joel opened his eyes and saw him roll on his back, draw up his knees, then turn on his side again and vomit in a steaming gush on to the floor.

Von Joel jammed his eyes shut, trying not to breathe the stink. “Dignity.” He hissed, “Sense of self...”

He told himself firmly, over and over, just who he was, and that he didn’t belong in that place. He whispered his name and imagined his personhood protected by the force of his will.

The addict knelt up suddenly. His chest heaved, his wide eyes cavernous as empty sockets in the oblique light. He vomited again, spewing whatever he had left in his guts across and down his own skeleton chest. Von Joel watched the bloated insects biting, sucking, watched as the ants streamed over the puke, and swallowed, turning away. The stench was horrific, and the heat had to be way over a hundred and ten degrees. His whole body was drenched, his three-hundred-pound shirt dripping, the waistband of his tailored handmade trousers sopping. He could feel the perspiration trickle down from his neck over his belly, drip from his hair, slithering down his neck. He rested his head back against the brick wall, and then out of the corner of his eye he saw the fat cockroach crawling and inching its way along the wall toward him. He shut his eyes and his hands clenched together as he felt the insect moving onto his shoulder, but he made no move to swipe it away. As he felt its clawlike feet easing up his neck, he began to wait, timing it. Now it was crawling to his chin, positioned just below his lower lip... He waited, could feel the cockroach easing onto his lip, and he suddenly snapped his mouth open, biting the creature into two sections, then he spat it out. He had decided if he killed three, his time was up, but only on the condition he did not move a single muscle but his mouth... three: two more to go.

Susan got back to the hotel at half-past eleven. By that time Larry was pacing the floor. He had come back after nine to find the boys tucked up in bed asleep and no clue as to where Susan might be. When she finally swept in, dressed up in her best, her makeup carefully overdone, it was evident she had drunk too much. She closed the door and leaned on it, grinning lopsidedly at Larry.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “You left the kids on their own!”

“As I recall, you’re the one that said they would be fine, and anyway, they know to call down to the resident babysitter if they need anything.” Susan launched herself away from the door and struck a flamenco stance. “I’ve been to a nightclub.”

“Who with?”

“The waiter, the barman, and the swimming pool attendant.”

Larry did a swift reading of the pang he felt when she told him that. He decided it was annoyance, not jealousy.

Susan executed a couple of dance steps, then stopped, remembering something.

“Got a great joke,” she said, giggling in advance. “There’s these two old Jewish tailors, Morris and Izzy, who retire to Miami. Well, they get themselves all tanned up, looking at the young, sexy beauties, right?”

“You’re pissed as a newt.”

“So, every night Morris scores, but poor Izzy never gets a second look. ‘What am I doing wrong, Morris?’ he says. ‘I got the Bermuda shorts, the tan, the cigar — for what? None of the girls want to know.’ Morris tells him, ‘Izzy, this is what you do. Get two potatoes, slip them down your Bermudas. Okay? Just do what I say, and you can’t fail.’ So the next day Izzy gets two potatoes—”

“Oh, come on, Susie—”

“And that night he gets hold of his pal, he’s in a real rage, and he says, ‘Morris, I patrolled the beach all day with two King Edwards down my Bermudas, just like you told me to do, and all the girls did was laugh!’ Morris takes one look at him and he says, ‘Izzy, you’re supposed to put the potatoes down the front of your Bermudas!’ ”

Larry groaned. Susan began to stagger about, laughing.

“He had them at the back, get it? Like, like he’d done something in his pants.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” Larry said, talking through her laughter. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The telephone rang. As Larry turned to answer it Susan pushed him, her face angry suddenly.

“I’ve been waiting for you the entire vacation!” she said.

Larry jammed the receiver to his ear.

“Yeah, this is Jackson.” He listened, nodding, then his eyebrows went up a clear half-inch. “What? You’re kidding! Yeah, sure, I’ll be there. He didn’t last long, did he?” He put down the phone. “Got him!” he said, grabbing his jacket. “Eddie Myers wants to talk to us!”

Susan was at the mirror, plastering cream on her face, a preliminary to removing her makeup.

“Where are you going?” she asked coolly.

“Prison,” Larry said, opening the door. “See you later — Dolores.”

DI Falcon was covered in insect repellent, and Summers had to ease his shoes off, as his feet had swollen. They were waiting for Myers to be brought out of the holding cell. Larry banged in, sweating, his shirt clinging to him, but he was elated.

“They’re bringing him up now...”

Summers tried to get his shoes back on as Falcon pushed the knot of his sodden tie up to his neck and slipped on his jacket. They could hear the footsteps in the stone corridor, and then they were confronted by Edward Myers. His hands were cuffed in front of him, his shirt was filthy, as were his trousers, and his face was dark with stubble. The two Spanish police officers stepped back to allow him to enter the room freely. He had the audacity to lean against the doorframe. He was not in any way angry and there was not a hint of bitterness. He just lolled, as if he had entered someone’s drawing room for a party. He looked from Summers to Falcon, and lastly to Lawrence Jackson, Detective Sergeant Lawrence Jackson, and then he gave that strange smile.

“So, what’s the weather like in London then?”