Quantum of tweed

Chapter Four

Four days later, Albert responded to a knock at the door of his flat. His bed was covered with plans and diagrams, as well as the Collins Encyclopedia, volume four: ‘De-Es’. He opened the door cheerfully with a piece of buttered toast in his mouth and a cup of tea in his hand. When he saw that his visitor was a uniformed policeman, he choked on the toast so suddenly and violently that PC Thompson seriously considered calling for an ambulance.

After a good ten minutes of pounding Albert Rossi on his back and then supporting his red-faced frame, PC Thompson found himself in a small kitchen, settling the man into a chair and fetching him a glass of water, which Albert sipped while they waited for his eyes to stop bulging.

‘Sorry about that,’ Albert wheezed. ‘Went down the wrong way.’

‘Not a problem, sir. Are we feeling better now?’

‘ I am, officer. I don’t know about you, though.’

Albert smiled in a sickly way, hoping his terror at the sight of a policeman had been put down to inhaling toast and not considered suspicious behaviour. It did not help that this particular policeman looked exactly as Albert Rossi expected policemen to look. He was vaguely aware that they had done away with height restrictions, but PC Thompson was not only tall, he also had a neat and fairly bushy moustache. He was slightly red in the face, too, though Albert had to concede that it might have been from the exercise in the doorway. In short, George Thompson could easily have been cast as the serious, middle-aged policeman in any film about Sherlock Holmes. Albert became increasingly uncomfortable as the man pulled up his own chair and looked around.

‘Under normal circumstances, sir, I would have asked you to invite me in for a chat. I’m not sure you ever did that, with all the choking going on.’

Albert waved the idea away. He hoped the gesture would be read as both a welcome to his kitchen and a thank you for the man’s sterling efforts on his behalf, but PC Thompson only looked for the fly Albert was apparently trying to scare off.

‘How may I help you, officer?’ Albert tried as the silence stretched.

‘It’s probably nothing, sir, but if you’re sure you’re all right?’

‘All fine now, officer. Toast dislodged. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Not on duty, sir,’ Thompson replied, shaking his head sadly as if all the world’s ills could be laid at the feet of tea.

‘I have to open the shop in a minute,’ Albert prompted.

Thompson nodded and, to Albert’s silent horror, produced a notebook from his chest pocket.

‘This is only a routine inquiry, sir, if you understand. It’s just that your bank reported an unusual transaction. I was in the area and I said I’d pop in and have a chat about it. Nothing formal, Mr Rossi.’

‘A banking matter?’ Albert asked in surprise and relief. ‘Well! They have persecuted me for some years now, PC Thompson. I am happy to give my side of the story and perhaps you’ll appreciate then…’

‘It’s about the twenty thousand pounds in cash that you paid in the day before yesterday, sir, if you don’t mind,’ Thompson said, checking his notebook for a moment. ‘I’m sure it can be explained, but when large amounts of cash are moved about, it generates a warning flag at the Organised Crime Unit, sir.’ For an instant, the policeman’s eyes grew wistful. ‘They get all the bells and whistles, sir, money no object with them. As I say, I was just passing and I said I’d drop in and check it was all above board.’

Albert felt his eyes beginning to bulge again as his mind raced. The haunting strains of Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor seemed to fill his ears, somewhere around the bit with dramatic chords. It was not a pleasant sensation.

PC Thompson waited and the silence grew longer and longer. Albert’s mind was a complete blank. He couldn’t say it was his savings, after almost a decade of reporting losses on the shop. He toyed with the idea of saying he had found it, but he had a suspicion that honest subjects of the Queen were meant to hand large bags of cash to the authorities, not pay their debts with them. He opened his mouth slowly, in the hope that the action would force an idea out. What would a fellow assassin say to such a question? Did they even pay income tax? He thought it was unlikely. Suddenly, an idea tickled his forebrain.

‘Gambling!’ Albert Rossi said in triumph. He reached into his pocket for a large linen handkerchief, shaking it out with a flourish and wiping his forehead.

‘ Gambling, sir?’ PC Thompson replied. There was more than a hint of displeasure in those few words and Albert Rossi swallowed nervously.

‘In a casino!’ Albert added, knowing he couldn’t name the winner of any horse race. Roulette was the sort of thing he expected assassins to do, though he had only ever seen it in the films. He braced himself for more questions, knowing that his future depended on how well he remembered Ocean’s Eleven, a popular film about a casino robbery that he’d watched only for the suits. In fairness, the suits were the best bit.

‘I see, sir. So you’re saying you won twenty thousand pounds. In one evening, sir?’

Albert sensed the trap. For all he knew, casinos kept records of large wins.

‘Oh no, I only ever play for small stakes. It was over a year or two.’

‘You must have a system, sir. That’s a lot of money. Roulette, was it? Punto banco? Blackjack?’

Albert wiped his forehead again. He could feel his armpits getting damp. He’d never heard of ‘punto banco’. He imagined himself nodding happily and the policeman saying, ‘But actually, sir, a punto banco is a small fish from the River Amazon,’ or something like that. He decided to play safe.

‘Roulette, mostly.’

‘Sounds like a good club, sir. Which one was it again?’

PC Thompson leaned forward slightly in his seat, but Albert relaxed visibly. A few years before, he’d been caught short in London and had popped into a plush-looking establishment. He remembered the name.

‘The Ingot, in Quebec Street. Lovely place — very attractive dark blue carpet.’ He closed his mouth with a snap, aware that he’d gone a little too far.

‘Not many men notice the carpet, sir,’ PC Thompson said, frowning. To Albert’s relief, he began to put his notebook away.

‘I’m… an observant man, officer,’ Albert replied, trying a smile that he hoped looked more confident than he felt. He could hear a phone ringing in his bedroom, and his eyes swivelled in that direction. ‘If that’s all, Officer Thompson, I have to take that call.’

‘Some sort of waistcoat emergency, sir?’ PC Thompson said sourly. There was a hint of disappointment in his eyes.

‘Could well be, officer. You never know in this game.’

The policeman rose and carefully set the chair back in its place.

‘Well, I won’t keep you, sir. Gambling does explain how you came into possession of twenty thousand pounds in used notes, yes. I’ll be in touch if there’s anything else.’

The policeman didn’t sound satisfied, Albert noticed. There was a definite note of frost in the air as he left.

Harefield Hospital is an emergency facility on the north-western edge of London, specialising in the treatment of heart and lung ailments. Most of the patients are elderly and very often the task of the staff is simply to prevent imminent death and then send them off-site to other wards to recover from their ordeal.

John Halliday was not a normal patient in any sense. Not only was he younger than the others by about forty years, but his injuries had come from a car accident, or so the police claimed. Even they were not sure, as he had been found unconscious and badly injured on Hawthorn Avenue in Eastcote, some twelve days before. For six of those days he had hovered on the edge of death’s dark doorway — holding on to the handle perhaps, but with fingers slowly slipping. Then he had surfaced for a time and sheer rage seemed to aid his recovery from that point. He had a memory of talking to a well-dressed man in the road, then a vision of a Nissan Micra coming straight at him. As soon as he was awake, he had questioned the nurses and even read his own chart with a sinking feeling. The impact had created a blood clot in an artery. As a result, he’d had a heart attack and been rushed to Harefield.

Halliday had not been a pleasant man before the heart attack. On the morning of 11 September 2001, when planes were hijacked over New York, the last communications sent by mobile phone and picked up across the world were, with one exception, heartfelt and moving messages of love. That exception had been the one left on the answering machine of John Halliday. It had come from his own brother.

‘I haven’t got long now,’ his brother had said over the noise of roaring aero engines. ‘I just wanted you to know that you… are a complete shit.’

Being run over and suffering a heart attack had done nothing to improve the personality of a man already capable of inspiring such dislike. He had not seen a white light or spoken to an angel. If he had, he would have punched that angel in the kidney.

According to the nurses, the police still wanted to speak to him, though it seemed they thought of him as some sort of bizarre victim. It hadn’t helped that his false teeth had been knocked out in the collision with Albert Rossi’s Micra. A very young policeman had bagged them as evidence, much as an iPhone-using schoolboy might have regarded a relic from the distant past, like a codpiece, or a cassette player. Without the teeth, Halliday had experienced enormous difficulties making himself understood.

His mood had worsened still further when his dentures were finally returned. Some well-meaning soul had decided that they needed to be disinfected. Presumably they had been popped into a glass of neat bleach out of kindness, but the result was the pink plastic gums had whitened as much as the false teeth. When he smiled now, people backed away as if from a shark — perhaps even a shark in an advert for Colgate toothpaste, with real gleam.

Halliday did not understand why they hadn’t found his gun, but there was no police guard sitting by his bed, and over the previous week they appeared to have forgotten about him. As it happens, Halliday did not want to speak to the police at all. He might have vanished from the medical care unit on a quiet night if they hadn’t put him on a catheter. It worked a lot better than handcuffs, he discovered. You can wrench and struggle against handcuffs. With practice and skill, you can even pick the lock. A tube leading straight up your penis is quite a different matter.

He resolved to wait. Someone would pay for every humiliation. They would pay for the shockingly white smile, the bed baths and the bruises. They would pay for the irritating old lady across the room who kept throwing grapes at him. They would pay for every moment of pain and weakness he had suffered. He did not yet know the name of Albert Rossi. If he had, it would have given focus to waking moments filled with the desire for revenge.

Halliday could have made a certain phone call from the bed. He was not used to the idea of subcontracting work, but a single call could set very dark forces in motion. The idea was certainly tempting. However, this was personal, perhaps a more personal debt than he had ever known before. Halliday knew about debts. Up to that point in his life, he had settled every last one of them himself.

With cheerful thoughts of murder and Micras wafting through his head, he fell asleep once more.