No Sleep for the Dead

Chapter 10

The man whose name and phone number Riley had found on a card in Palmer’s Rolodex was waiting for her in the foyer of the Mandeville Hotel, just off Wigmore Street in London’s West End. Charlie, who did not offer his surname, was a former army colleague of Palmer’s. Riley had never met him before, but his appearance fitted his own description: pale, thinning and out of condition, all brought on by too much work, a killer mortgage and a serious lack of sunlight, something which went with his job as a civil servant. She was aware that his job description wasn’t quite as bland as he made out, and that he had some connections with the security authorities, so was therefore to be approached cautiously. But he was a friend of Palmer’s and that was enough for her.

He had agreed with a mild show of reluctance to meet her for coffee, but on the condition that it was away from his normal place of work in Whitehall. Riley recalled Palmer once describing his friend as one of the Ministry of Defence’s tunnel rats working in military records, and therefore security-conscious by instinct and training rather than paranoia.

She knew Palmer had once used him to check on some military personnel records when they had first worked together investigating a gangland feud. The men involved, all ex-soldiers, had been recruited by John Mitcheson, then a former officer, who had unwittingly been used by the men when they were caught up in a smuggling racket in Bosnia. It had been Mitcheson’s speaking up for them that had ended his promising career, although it had not stopped him helping them again when they needed jobs outside the confines of the army.

She shook her head and focussed on the here and now. There were other things to worry about, like finding Palmer. She nodded at Charlie and sat down across from him.

‘Miss Gavin.’

‘Call me Riley, please.’

He was about to speak, but stopped as a couple of guests dropped into armchairs just across the foyer within earshot. He glanced towards the door and gestured behind him. ‘There’s a bar in back. It’s quieter there. We can talk.’

Riley followed him through to a bar, which was deserted except for a yawning young man in a waistcoat and black uniform trousers, polishing a wine glass with a cloth. He clamped his mouth shut with a muttered apology and put down the cloth and glass.

Charlie looked questioningly at Riley, who said, ‘Coffee, please. I need the caffeine.’

He placed their order and joined her at a corner table. He sat facing the doorway, then leaned on his elbows and looked at her. ‘Frank speaks very highly of you. What’s up?’

Riley was surprised by his directness, but appreciated him getting to the point. It was better than going round the conversational houses and wasting time on banalities. It also sounded about as close to approval as she could get.

‘I might be jumping the gun,’ she began, already feeling foolish at dragging Charlie away from his desk. ‘But I’m worried about Palmer. I’ve been trying to get hold of him for a couple of days, but his mobile’s switched off. I’ve checked his office and flat, but there’s no trace of him.’

Charlie sat back as the bartender brought a pot of coffee and put it on the table, along with milk and sugar. When he was out of earshot, the former army man said, ‘Could be he’s on a tricky job. You know Frank — he goes into operational mode sometimes. Or maybe he’s got a new girlfriend. It happens — even to Frank.’

‘I’d have known. Believe me.’

Charlie poured coffee for them both and stirred sugar into his own cup. She caught him taking a surreptitious glance at his watch. ‘What makes you think there’s anything to worry about? He’s been okay otherwise, hasn’t he? Not ill, I mean?’

Riley bit back a retort that she wouldn’t be wasting her time here if she thought he was lying in a hospital somewhere. Charlie, after all, was merely reacting the way any reasonable person would. Which, on the face of it, was more than she was doing. And how many days had Palmer been out of contact? She shook her head doggedly. ‘I’d have known about that, too.’ When he looked doubtful, she explained, ‘Love and illness to some people aren’t very different. Anyway, Palmer’s not that much of a dark horse. If he was unwell, I’d have spotted it. He’s a man, and you lot don’t hide your problems as well as you think.’

Charlie grunted good-naturedly. ‘Point noted. So what do you know for sure?’

She told him about her visit to Palmer’s flat, which revealed he had not checked his mail recently. She also described her impressions of his office. ‘I got the feeling someone had been in there recently. Someone other than Palmer, I mean.’

Charlie looked sceptical about both, but she sensed he was wary of upsetting her by being too dismissive.

‘Palmer doesn’t do horticulture,’ she said, after describing the state of the pot plant. ‘He’d only water that damned thing if I was standing over him with a gun. Yet the soil was wet, and someone had cleaned up afterwards. I know you army boys can be fastidious, but this is Frank we’re talking about. And he doesn’t employ a cleaner.’

He said nothing for a long while, idly drumming with his thumb on the table. ‘Okay. So he hasn’t been home in a while, nor checked his mail. He’s not at his office, yet he’s either broken the habits of a lifetime by watering a pot plant you bought him, or somebody did it for him while he’s away. Is that it?’

Riley felt ridiculous hearing it laid out in such stark terms. ‘God, you make it sound so wet. I’m sorry.’ She began to think that she’d been too quick to cry wolf. What the hell was Charlie going to say to Palmer when they met up next?

‘Don’t be,’ he replied, surprising her. ‘It’s the mundane that often hides something. If the fact that he’s not shown up is unusual, then where is he?’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Anything else strike you as unusual? Daft or not,’ he added kindly. ‘Makes no difference.’

It was sufficient to make Riley grasp at her last straw. ‘Only that his computer was switched off.’

Amazingly, Charlie frowned. ‘Bloody hell. That is unusual.’

‘Are you taking the Mick?’ She glared at him, but he raised a defensive hand.

‘No, straight up. That’s Frank — he never switches anything off. At least, he never bloody did it when I worked with him. He was always walking out and leaving electric fires on. I told him he’d have a blaze on his hands one day, but it never made any difference. What else?’

‘His office looks dusty. Okay, it’s always dusty, but this is worse than usual — especially the desk. At least when he’s there it gets stirred up a bit. I don’t think he’s been in since I dropped him back three days ago. And Palmer enjoys sitting at his desk, especially for his morning coffee. It’s one of his… his things.’ She felt disloyal, describing this as if it was some odd quirk of his character that was best left unsaid. But Charlie merely nodded, eyebrows floating upwards.

She described how her card had fallen out of the Rolodex, that it hadn’t bothered her before, but thinking about it now, why would Palmer have needed to look at her card? He knew the details by heart.

‘And he’d had a woman visitor recently. I could smell the perfume. And before you say a girlfriend, this was an older woman’s scent. It was sickly sweet. Expensive.’

Charlie sipped the last of his coffee. ‘Could be a suspicious wife wanting a round-the-clock check on an errant hubby who travels. That’d certainly keep Frank busy enough. Standard work for someone in his line of work. Maybe he got a friend or neighbour to pop in to water the plant. Does Frank know any older women who like gardening?’

‘I’ve no idea. I doubt it. The other thing is, a local shopkeeper mentioned seeing a large car out front the other evening. He said a tall black man with dreadlocks went in first, followed by an older woman. He couldn’t see enough detail for a description, though, and couldn’t swear that they went into the office.’

‘Could have been anyone.’ Charlie pushed his cup away. ‘Pity you haven’t got more. I mean, you and I might think it’s odd, but it’s a bit thin.’

Riley thought about the business at the office block where Palmer had seen the familiar face from his past. She still wasn’t convinced it was anything other than coincidence, but in her experience, it was ignoring the apparent nothings which often led to mistakes.

‘There’s one other thing.’ She told Charlie about their visit to the office in Harrow, and Palmer’s reaction. ‘It was immediately after seeing some men in the lift. He got slightly weird after that, and went quiet on me. When I asked him about it, he said he’s had a flashback. ‘A ghost’ was the term he used. He tried to brush it off after that, but he didn’t sound convincing.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘Yes. I don’t know if it’s connected, but I found this in his office.’ She took out the sheet of paper from Palmer’s office notepad and unfolded it. Seeing it now, it simply looked like a sheet of paper covered in doodles, and she wanted to snatch it back.

Charlie scanned the sheet, eyes flicking across the doodles. When he reached the bottom, he went very still.

‘What is it?’

He shook his head. ‘Dunno. ‘Sgt’ is an abbreviation for sergeant. ‘Reg’ could be short for regulation. But ‘Paris’? There’s only two of those that I know of: one in Texas, the other in France. Frank has been to neither, as far as I know, unless it was on a dirty weekend.’

‘What about Meiningen? I haven’t had a chance to check, but could it be a place name?’

Charlie nodded and folded the paper, sliding it into his inside pocket. Something in the casual way he did so made Riley feel uneasy.

‘What? What is it?’

But his face was expressionless. ‘It sounds German. Frank spent some time over there, that’s all. I’ll look into it.’

She realised that was all she was going to get out of him and decided not to press him further. ‘I feel disloyal talking to you like this,’ she said, wondering if he thought her actions were crossing some invisible line of confidentiality between colleagues. ‘Like it’s private.’

‘Rubbish,’ Charlie replied bluntly. ‘Just because Frank’s a secretive, obstinate git, doesn’t mean we have to be.’ He chewed his lip. ‘This Gillivray character you called on in Harrow; could he have got heavy with Frank for dropping papers on him? Gone after him, I mean?’

‘I don’t know. I doubt it. Frank didn’t seem worried. He said he was a low-level conman, but maybe there’s more to him than that.’ Riley ran through the possibilities in her mind. She hadn’t given the idea any serious thought, principally because Palmer had seemed so relaxed about it. She was pretty sure that if he’d thought there was any chance of heavy retaliation, he never would have involved her in the first place.

‘You’re probably right.’ Charlie glanced at his watch and said: ‘I’ve got to go.’ He levered himself out of his seat and smoothed down the front of his jacket. ‘Look, don’t worry. I’m sure Frank’s okay. But I’ll see what I can come up with. If you think of anything else, give me a call.’ He dug out a card and scribbled down a phone number. ‘That’s my mobile. If he turns up in the meantime, give him hell.’

He gave a reassuring smile and disappeared through a side door into the street.

Later, Riley was in her flat finishing some preparatory notes on the annual migration of fruit pickers and their gang masters, when her phone rang. It was Charlie. The sound of traffic was heavy in the background, accompanied by the noise of a roller door closing nearby and the harsh clatter of a motorbike engine.

‘You should go into business with Frank full-time,’ he told her. ‘You’ve got a good eye for detail.’

Riley felt her stomach tense. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Those doodles you found on the notepad in Frank’s office. I fed the words into a database, and came up with some hits. By themselves, the words meant exactly what we thought they did, which was ‘sergeant’, ‘regulation’ and the French capital. Meiningen is a small town in what was eastern Germany, just over the border.’

‘Oh. I wondered if it might be significant.’

‘It might well be, but I haven’t figured out why yet. I’m sure I’ve heard of it before, but it could be through work stuff. When I put the words together, I still got a lot of odd hits, but then one connection jumped off the screen at me. There was no link to Meiningen, but the most obvious hit for the others was that in February eighty-nine, a Sergeant Reginald Paris, RMP, was killed in an RTA on the autobahn near Frankfurt. That’s about the same time Frank was in Germany.’

Sgt. Reg. Paris. It explained the notes Palmer had made. Riley said, ‘He must have served with him. But why would he be thinking about him now?’

‘No idea. Before my time, I’m afraid. I was hoping there would be some notes to go with it, but there’s nothing other than the report of the death. The bloke’s officially dead — recorded and confirmed.’

‘Could there have been a mistake?’ Riley’s immediate thought was that Reg Paris and the man in Harrow were one and the same, as wild as that sounded to her. But Charlie’s response seemed to counter it.

‘I doubt it. The army doesn’t make mistakes like that, not when it comes to paying out pensions and stuff.’

‘How did it happen?’ Riley wondered if Palmer had been involved, which might explain his reference to ghosts.

‘His car was totalled by a Merc transporter travelling in the same direction. The report says Paris was driving a pool Opel and must have wandered across the lanes, like he’d fallen asleep. Some of those pool cars weren’t that good; they got hammered to a standstill, mostly, so there wouldn’t have been any speed under the foot, see, to get out of the way. The truck couldn’t stop and went through him like wet paper. The civil cops had to make the identification from army records. It couldn’t have been pretty.’

‘Was anyone else killed?’

‘No. He was travelling solo.’