Rough Treatment

Thirty-one

By the time details had filtered back from the hospital, Resnick had left his house for the station. Millington greeted him at the entrance to the CID room with a concerned face and a strong tea. It took less than five minutes to convey everything that was known.

“He’s going to pull through, Furlong?” Resnick asked.

“Looks like it, sir. Wouldn’t have stood much chance if they’d just done a bunk, that’s for certain.”

“No identification?”

Millington shifted his weight across on to his other foot. “Too early for that. Still, I don’t think there can be a lot of doubt, do you? All things considered.”

Resnick nodded agreement. The briefing was due to start in a quarter of an hour. Jack Skelton wasn’t going to be too happy that he’d pulled Patel off watch and not replaced him, beyond asking one of the night patrol cars to report the presence of Grice’s vehicle. Then that wasn’t all the superintendent was going to be unhappy about. Poor bastard! Resnick wondered if he should try and take him to one side, say something; then, what did you say, situations like that?

“Sir.” It was Naylor, face like a bleached sheet in need of ironing. He was waving a piece of computer printout close to Resnick’s nose. “Don’t know why it didn’t show before, probably asked the wrong questions; sorry, sir.”

“Come on, then.”

The DC stopped fanning the paper and held it across his chest like a shield. “I was just checking burglaries, that’s what it was, I suppose. Break-ins, security, that was the angle. I …”

“Kevin.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Stop fannying about.”

Naylor coughed, came close to blushing. He could hear Divine laughing at the far end of the CID room. “What I missed, Fossey was in trouble four years back. Before Sergeant Millington interviewed him. Motor accident. Someone ran into the back of him at a roundabout. Came out that Fossey was driving without insurance. He was told to report next day, but no charge was made. All blown over.”

“And now,” said Resnick, seeing the smile beginning at the back of Naylor’s eyes, “you’re going to get to the interesting part.”

“It was DI Harrison, sir. That Fossey saw.”

“Four years ago,” said Resnick. “I wonder if that was when he met Andrew John Savage? Insurance broker of this parish.”

This morning Jack Skelton looked as though he was held together by fortitude and shaving soap. His early glance seemed to say to Resnick, all right, Charlie, I know what you’re thinking, understood, but keep your distance. Resnick sat down between Norman Mann and Bill Prentiss from the Serious Crimes Squad. Tom Parker was there, exchanging pleasantries about DIY with Lennie Lawrence. Graham Millington kept opening his note book and closing it again, for all the world as if he were about to give evidence.

“Gentlemen,” Skelton said. His voice was pitched an octave lower and Resnick thought he’d aged ten years overnight. “I think you all know Bill Prentiss. Bill’s here because of some wider interest in our two rear-entry merchants. Bill?”

Prentiss was a Devonian who’d been promoted away from his home patch and kept inside his head a calendar on which he ticked off the years he could retire back there. Little place overlooking the sea near Lynmouth: on a clear day you could see the refineries at the other side of the Bristol Channel.

“We’ve got a lot of unsolved burglaries,” Prentiss said, “similar MO to your lads and stretching back, oh, six, seven years or more. Midlands, mainly, but moving up to the north-west. Nothing north of Manchester.”

“I’d always suspected that,” laughed Tom Parker. “Bloody sight more than south of Watford,” said Lennie Lawrence.

“Never got very close to them,” Prentiss went on, “never sure if that was down to their luck or whether they had themselves a good source.”

“You’re not suggesting,” interrupted Skelton, “that somehow this pair have got people across half the country peddling them information?”

Prentiss shook his head, lit a cigarette. “What seems to be the pattern, they move into an area, make connections, milk them for a year or two-not too greedy, never enough to let us get a good line on them-and then try somewhere else.”

“Last couple of years,” said Resnick, “we’ve been the lucky ones.”

“Bit like fleas,” said Prentiss, “they come and go.”

“Seasonal,” said Tom Parker.

“And we’ve got enough to tie them in with Fossey and Savage?” Skelton asked.

“Enough to bring them in and lean on them, sir,” said Millington. “I think once one of them goes, the others’ll cave in pretty sharpish.”

“What I’m still not happy about,” said Tom Parker, “is trying to fit Jeff Harrison into this.”

Resnick passed on to the meeting Naylor’s findings, Patel’s suspicions, the conclusions he had drawn himself as a result of the meeting between them.

“What I don’t see,” Lennie Lawrence leaning forward, uncrossing his legs, “is what Jeff reckoned he was getting out of this, always supposing Charlie’s right.”

They turned and looked at Resnick. “It sounds a cliché, but I think he’s disillusioned. Thinks any further promotion is blocked; considers he’s been shunted aside, whatever reason, good or bad. He’s been looking for a way out.”

“So he hooks up with this outfit for a few envelopes stuffed with flyers, that what you’re saying?” Lennie Lawrence shook his head in disbelief.

“I don’t think it’s that at all,” Resnick replied. “I doubt that he’s had any contact with Grice or Grabianski. I hope he’s never taken money from them. No, I think Fossey’s what interested him. Whatever else Fossey is, he’s a good talker. Eye very much on the main chance. If he saw the way things were going in the security business three years back, the spread of private police out into the general public, he could have got Jeff Harrison excited enough to want to keep him sweet.”

“What was he hoping to get from Fossey?” Tom Parker asked.

“Contacts. Names. Enough up-to-date information so that when he went in to talk to people he had it all at his fingertips. All his years in the force plus a good knowledge of state-of-the-art surveillance techniques.”

“In exchange for which,” said Prentiss, “this Fossey wanted the occasional favor.”

“A blind eye.”

“An investigation that stalled before it got out of the drive.”

“Like the Roy burglary.”

“Exactly.”

“Jeff would do what he could, not much skin off his nose, all the time waiting for the right moment to jump ship.”

Skelton was on his feet and walking, stiff-backed. “There’s an awful lot of conjecture here, gentlemen.”

“We’re not thinking of touching Harrison yet anyway, I presume,” said Tom Parker.

Resnick shook his head. “Not until we’ve lifted Fossey and Savage.”

Graham Millington allowed himself a short laugh. “See what happens when we shake their tree.”

“And Grice and Grabianski? If they find out we’ve moved in on their informants, they’ll be gone.”

“Grice we’ll take the moment he leaves his flat,” said Resnick.

“The other one? Grabianski.”

“Ah,” said Norman Mann, speaking for the first time, “your DI and myself, we’ve got plans for Mr. Grabianski.”

The unmarked car slowed to a halt fifty yards back from the Fossey house, the opposite side of the street. Millington leaned his elbows on the front seats and opened radio contact.

“In position?”

“Ready to go.”

“The back covered?”

“Three uniforms.”

Millington checked his watch, twenty minutes shy of seven o’clock. No indication that Fossey ever left the house before eight. The morning paper was still half in the letter-box, half out. Two pints of milk on the step. One of the advantages of living out here, Millington thought; we get ours in cartons and never till eleven.

Millington lifted the handset to check with Divine, on watch outside Savage’s house. “You’re sure Savage is inside?”

Divine used his elbow to shift condensation from the car window. “Far as we know.”

“How far’s that?”

“His car’s here.”

“Lights on in the house?”

“Nothing.”

“Jesus,” said Millington. “What we don’t need-one without the other.” He looked again at his watch. “Unless he tries to leave, give it a couple of minutes.”

“Right, sir,” said Divine and signed off.

Savage had a maisonette down at the fashionable end of the canal; young executives with over-powered motors and small boats moored in the marina. Divine guessed the narrow brick buildings would have been described as individually designed, architecturally enlightened. Not enough room inside to hoist a sail. Mind you, they wouldn’t hurt when you were trying to pull a bird. Waltz her straight out of happy hour in the Baltimore Exchange and on to the waterbed.

“What d’you think?” Lynn Kellogg asked, seated alongside him.

“Don’t know if I could get used to all that squishing.”

“Eh?”

“Waterbeds.”

“Savage, you think he’s in there?”

Divine cleared away a little more condensation; sixty seconds and they’d find out.

Graham Millington tapped Naylor briskly on the shoulder, nodding in the direction of the house.

“Sir?”

“Go.”

Naylor swung the car across to the other side of the road and brought it to a standstill at the end of the open path leading up towards the front door. As soon as the handbrake was set, he and Millington were smartly out and on their way. Less than five yards on and the door opened and Fossey’s wife was standing there, dressing gown over baggy silk pajamas, struggling to free the paper from the letter-box. She recognized Millington at the second glance and ran back inside, shouting her husband’s name.

Naylor was faster than his sergeant and had the underside of one foot wedged inside the door while Mrs. Fossey was still trying to push it shut.

“Lloyd, Lloyd! It’s the police!”

From inside there came the sound of at least two radios playing, tuned to different stations; a banging of doors and feet heavy on the stairs.

Naylor pushed his warrant card around the edge of the door. “I’m Detective Constable Naylor,” he said, “and this is Sergeant Millington. We have a warrant …”

“Watch it!” shouted Millington and landed his left shoulder midway up the door so that it sprang inwards, knocking Fossey’s young wife back to the foot of the stairs.

“Shit!” yelled Millington.

Fossey was on his way out through the French windows, still zipping up the front of his trousers. He had a briefcase under one arm, car keys in his hand and no shoes on his feet.

“Lloyd Fossey,” Millington began, but Fossey wasn’t listening. So much the better. The sergeant wasn’t as fast as five years ago, but over the length of your above-average suburban garden he was fast enough. One fist grabbed Fossey’s collar and jerked him back hard. Case and keys tumbled towards the winter lawn and Millington’s other arm tightened into a head lock.

Kevin Naylor had finished helping Fossey’s wife to her feet and guiding her in the direction of a box of multi-colored tissues; as he came down the garden, the cuffs were ready in his hand.

“What d’you reckon?” Divine asked for a third time, sullen-faced.

Lynn Kellogg shrugged and looked towards the upstairs windows.

Divine used the knocker sharply, pounded on the woodwork with his fist. The back door had yielded nothing either.

“He can’t have slept through this lot,” Divine said angrily.

“Doesn’t mean he’s not in there,” said Lynn, “hoping we’ll just go away.”

“Fat chance!”

He was giving serious thought to battering the door down when the black-and-white pulled up just ahead of the CID car and Andrew Savage got out.

“Look who’s back from a night on the tiles,” said Divine softly, the smile returning to his face.

Savage had taken a few paces away from the curb before he realized what was going on. The cab had begun to pull clear and Savage jumped back at it, waving an arm and shouting. He landed one blow on the roof as the driver gave him the finger and accelerated away.

Savage made a run for it, sprinting towards the bridge that humped over the canal. Car headlights drew gold and silver lines along the boulevard beyond. Already there were two fishermen hunched beneath green tarpaulin alongside the water. Divine loved all this. It was Saturday afternoon again and Savage was the opposing wing forward, desperate to make the winning try. Divine’s mouth was open in a full-throated roar as he dived, tackling Savage sideways into the railings of the bridge. No sooner were the pair of them down on the pavement than Divine was scrambling up again, knee hard in Savage’s groin, foot on his forearm, fingers poking straight for his face-all good sporting stuff.

Savage cried out and tried to wave his arms, signaling enough.

Divine hauled him up and whirled him round, throwing him smack against the upper railing, bending him down over it, one hand firm to the base of his neck while he wrenched his arms behind his back.

“What kept you?” he grinned to Lynn Kellogg over his shoulder.

Lynn looked at him and shook her head. Divine’s face was glowing. Once they were back at the station he’d sink two egg-sausage-and-bacon sandwiches and make the whole business sound like Twickenham or Cardiff Arms Park. Or South Africa.

By ten Grice was bored. The television was all men in corduroy jackets talking earnestly about amoeba or reruns of documentaries about New Forest ponies. Not even Playschool or some such, with young women in short skirts who bent their knees just enough and talked baby talk. A walk into the city would clear his head and he could stop by the video shop and take out 9¹/2 Weeks or that other one, where she walks away from the bandstand in that white skirt and it flaps open wide to her pants, the one where she’s getting her lover to kill her husband. He’d recognize it from the box.

If he still felt like it, he could even wander back into the estate agent’s and see if that woman was there, the one with the Aussie accent and the red heels. Grice wondered what it would cost to get her to pay a house call? He could provide the massage lotion and the towels. All she’d need to bring …

“Trevor Grice?”

Grice gave a little jump, hadn’t seen the man coming. Turning fast he was staring into this slim face. Asian, apologetic almost. Tall for their kind, wiry most likely. Grice was reckoning his chances as he made the unmarked car opposite, saw a uniformed officer hovering at the far end of the street.

“Yes,” Grice said. “What’s up?”

“I’d like you to come with me to the station,” Patel said.

“All right,” said Grice, starting to walk with him towards the car, “why not?”

As they drove off Grice looked back through the rear window and saw an old woman in gym shoes, standing in the middle of the road and cackling her head off. Stupid cow!