Flawed (31 page)

‘One of the more prominent local businessmen offered to deal with the problem. He invited the nasty little Serb out for a day's sailing – sun, sea, a good lunch, a decent bottle of Chablis and a little chat. Well – maybe
invite
isn't the right word. Actually he didn't have the option of saying no, and the two large friends he wanted to bring were unavoidably detained round the back of the shower-block, but still…

‘After lunch, the prominent local businessman explained to the nasty little Serb the error of his ways. That, in this country, prostitution and slavery are two different things. That you treat the girls as employees, not a product. And you don't – you really don't – nobble somebody else's stable.’

There was a long pause. Then the other man on the park bench said, ‘So you did. You took him out into the Channel, shot him and chucked him overboard.’ The tone was almost expressionless. There was nothing recognisable as censure in it. Perhaps because it was what he'd suspected all along, and he'd had time to come to terms with it. To work out what he had to do next.

The first man clucked in mild disapproval. ‘This isn't about
me,’ he said patiently. ‘It's a story, Johnny. A work of fiction. And every good story needs a twist in the tail. You don't just shoot someone in the middle of the Channel, however much they deserve it. Where's the wit in that?

‘No, when you've finished the last of the Chablis you explain to your guest just how unhappy you are about recent events. Now, this is a hard man, yes? Even alone, on somebody else's boat in the middle of the Channel, he's not going to roll over and play dead. To start with he tries to bluff it out. Reminds the prominent local businessman how many large cousins he has back home in Serbia, and how quickly they can get here in the back of a cabbage transporter. Apparently, this sort of talk goes down well in the Balkans.’

The little dog had left its elderly owner and come to see if the men on the bench would amuse it. The ground was littered with sticks from the beech trees. The first man threw one for it. It brought it back. He threw it again, further, and waited till it was out of earshot before continuing. From habit, presumably.

‘You know what it's like when alien cultures meet. It comes down to whose customs are the strongest. He's the outsider, he should be at a disadvantage, but he wouldn't be here at all if he hadn't the strength of will to mould the world to a shape that suits him. You have the home ground advantage, but he's the one who brought the fight to you. He thinks the cousins with the cabbage truck is a winning argument. He still thinks you're going to back down.

‘When he realises you aren't, and that any number of large cousins in Serbia are no use to him here, in the middle of the sea on somebody else's boat, he reconsiders his approach.
Even offers a grudging apology. But it's too little, too late. You try to explain to him that it isn't personal. You talk of the need to make an example. Point out that there are a lot of nasty little people around, not only in Serbia, and a lot of poor and hopeful girls, and if they all thought the streets of Dimmock were paved with gold there'd be no work left for the local talent.’

The dog had brought the stick back. The first man took it, and leant down. ‘This is the very last time,’ he said firmly; and the second man would have sworn he saw the dog nod. The first man hurled the stick and the dog sped after it, ears flying in the wind.

The narrator returned to his story. ‘About now the apologies start sounding rather more sincere. The hard man softens his attitude, promises not to do it again, at least not in your town. Offers to take his face where you'll never see it again. And he means it – you know he means it. But then the image of other faces floats before your eyes – familiar faces, pretty faces once, now damaged beyond repair. And you don't really care what he will and won't do in the future. You want him to pay for what he did in the past.’

His tone remained light, almost playful. Except for the fact that the other man knew what he was capable of, there was nothing to suggest he was describing a cold-blooded murder. ‘The thing about a boat is, you've always got a couple of beefy crewmen handy. Ignoring his pleas and struggles both, you tie his hands behind his back and produce a length of chain, the last few fathoms knotted into a ball. You shackle the chain round his leg. You drink in his expression like vintage champagne, then you pull a bag over his head.
‘By then, the hard man's screaming. Pleading, and screaming. Which is fun,’ he remembered with a muffled grin, ‘but you can have too much of a good thing so you hit him a time or two to shut him up. Finally you pick a nice quiet spot and heave to. You express the regret that things have come to this, but you don't offer him any last wishes because obviously he'll ask to live till he's ninety. You have your beefy crewmen lift him over the rail, chain and all, and drop him in the sea.’

A leaden silence descended on the park. Fifty yards in one direction some young mothers were playing ball with a gang of pre-schoolers. Fifty yards in the other the old lady was calling the spaniel in increasing desperation – ‘Bonny!
Bonny!’
– while the dog carried its trophy off towards Brighton. None of this impinged on the tiny world of the park bench and its sole inhabitants. Their silence may have been limited geographically, but it went all the way to the core.

After perhaps a minute the second man, believing the story was complete, drew a weary breath to speak. But the first held up a gloved finger, indicating there was more to come.

‘But you don't sail away. Not for a minute – not when there's entertainment still to be had. You listen to him screaming and yelling, and feeling the weight of the chain drag him down. You hear him choke on a couple of waves. And then things go kind of quiet because, even in the state of shit-scared panic he's now in, finally it strikes him that iron chain heads for the bottom in pretty much a straight line and he shouldn't still be bobbing around.

‘It takes him another minute to work out that the chain's already on the bottom, and actually so is he – the reason he hasn't sunk is that he's standing in four feet of water. And the
tide isn't coming in, it's going out. An hour from now he's going to be dragging a length of chain up an isolated Normandy beach, wondering how to explain his situation to the first people he bumps into in such a way that they don't immediately call the
gendarmes. That's
when you sail away. Chuckling.’

His story was told. The visible strip of the first man's expression was content.

The second man was thinking. Finally he said gruffly, ‘And yet Achille Bellow is dead.’

The first man nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘They found his body on a Normandy beach at the end of June.’

‘Towing a length of chain?’

‘Shot full of lead.’

‘Well, there you go,’ said the first man wisely. ‘Obviously he'd had time to go home and change.’

The second man hung onto his temper, though the effort dilated his nostrils. ‘He was seen boarding
The Salamander
on June 24th.
Salamander
was observed off the Breton coast on the 25th, and Bellow's body was found on the 26th. He didn't have time to go home.’

‘He wasn't seen boarding
The Salamander
on June 24th,’ the first man corrected him.

‘We have witnesses…’

‘They're mistaken.’

‘You filed a sailing plan!’

‘Indeed I did. For the 24
^th
to the 26
^th
, which was the trip my solicitor came on. I believe you know him – big chap, not much of a seaman but useful as ballast.’

‘Achille Bellow was
seen…’

‘Tell me,’ said the first man, ‘and this is just a guess, but the witnesses who saw him board
The Salamander
– they weren't a couple of old guys from down the pontoon, last sailed with Captain Cook?’

The second man was immediately guarded. ‘I'm not going to divulge…’

‘Because everyone knows,’ the first man went on unconcerned, ‘that the Hawkins brothers have no concept of the passage of time. Why should they? They do the same things every day of their lives, but with an extra sweater on in winter. If the bunting's flying they know it's regatta week, otherwise they can tell you the wind force and the state of the tide but don't even ask them what day of the month it is.’

There was a pause as he considered just how forthright he could afford to be. Then he said, ‘Johnny, I'll tell you straight because I know you need to know. They
did
see Achille Bellow board
The Salamander.
But that was the previous weekend. I didn't file a sailing plan for that trip, for fairly obvious reasons. I put the fear of God into Bellow the way I told you, and I left him on that beach in Normandy, alive. In need of a change of underwear but unharmed. I confidently expected that would be the last I'd see or hear of him.’

The second man was taken aback. And yet he reckoned he knew when he was hearing the truth. ‘Well –
somebody
shot him!’

‘Do you want to know what I heard?’ The second man nodded. ‘I can't prove any of this, but I heard it from usually reliable sources and I believe it to be true. When
Salamander
sailed away, Bellow hauled himself out of the water, found a
rock to break the padlock, trudged up the beach and started hitching his way home. It's – what? – about six hundred miles from Normandy to Marseilles, he probably got in late the following day. By which time he was very tired and very angry. Way too angry to do the sensible thing, which was put it down to experience and find another bit of Green & Pleasant to set up shop.

‘He called his backers together – the people who found the girls, the men who owned the trucks and those who put up money for the passports – and told them they'd all been made fools of by some jumped-up local pimp. That the gravy-train had been derailed, and if they didn't want to kiss their investment goodbye they'd have to deal with the guy responsible.

‘They talked it through and agreed there was no point trying to expand further until the man to blame for their current predicament had been disposed of. So they took him back to the beach and shot him.’

The second man stared at him in – not in disbelief, perhaps in amazement. ‘His own backers shot Achille Bellow?’

‘He wasn't doing much of a job for them, was he?’ asked the first man mildly. ‘Costing them money, causing all kinds of ructions… They needed someone to do their trafficking quietly and efficiently, not cause mayhem wherever he went. They retired him. With, er…’ He'd forgotten the expression.

‘Extreme prejudice,’ supplied the second man, deadpan. ‘Wait a minute, though. They left him on the beach in the hope that the blame would rebound on you. But then, how did the account – even a slightly garbled account – reach…?’ He stopped abruptly short of an indiscretion.

The first man was used to this form of conversation. ‘Another of your witnesses?’ he postulated smoothly. ‘That depends who we're talking about. Only two groups of people could have known about Achille Bellow's little voyage of self-discovery – people I told and people he told. The only people I told were those whose discretion I rely on every day. And you,’ he added, beaming invisibly into his scarf. ‘I imagine Bellow was equally circumspect about who he talked to.’

‘You're saying…’ He had to stop and work it out. ‘You're saying that…’ Oh, discretion be damned! ‘You're saying Leslie Vernon had it from someone who had it from Achille Bellow himself?’

‘Leslie?’
exclaimed the first man. ‘Oh, that explains it. He works for Joe Loomis. You do know that? That's why I dispensed with his services – too many things I said to Vernon were finding their way to Joe. And it was Joe who was handling the girls Bellow brought in.’

‘Loomis?
Joe Loomis ran Achille Bellow's Dimmock operation?’ The second man was shaking his head despairingly. It was bad, but not in the way he'd been expecting. It was bad because a more competent investigation wouldn't have left him to hear what really happened from the prime suspect. On the other hand, he wasn't going to suffer the embarrassment of watching his old adversary taken down by the serious and organised DI Hyde.

The first man nodded complacently. ‘He needed someone on the ground here, someone with experience in the business, to mind the girls when he was off trafficking. Who better than Joe? The proverbial bad penny. No trade too low for him, no
gutter too dank, and there isn't a slum in England he couldn't lower the tone of just by moving in.’

‘And it really
was
Adam Selkirk on
The Salamander
that weekend. He wasn't lying. It wasn't a handy alibi run up for the occasion.’

‘Of course it wasn't,’ agreed the first man, slightly miffed. ‘Hell's teeth, Johnny, you're not talking to a two-bit crook here. If I need someone to lie for me, I don't ask my lawyer. The guy who might one day have to convince a judge and a jury that the police have got it wrong, that I'm an honest upright citizen who's been misunderstood. A man like that, his credibility is what you employ him for. You don't compromise it. Not when it would be as easy to pay someone who'd never hold your future in his hands.’

‘You're saying, the more dishonest the client, the more honourable the lawyer needs to be.’

The first man laughed. ‘No, I am most specifically
not
saying that! Of course, if that's what you're hearing there isn't much I can do about it.’

The second man was still shaking his head in a kind of wonder. ‘Joe Loomis. It's time I did something about Joe Loomis, isn't it?’

‘Probably,’ agreed the first man. ‘You don't want to give people the idea this is a town where gangsters run around with impunity.’

The second man said nothing. But if thoughts counted for anything there'd have been a flash of lightning and a smoking hole in the bench beside him.

Voss tidied up his desk. He tidied up his office. What he couldn't do was tidy up his mind. It was still in a state of confusion at eight o'clock when he headed for home.

By eight-fifteen he was still in the upstairs corridor, physically leaning against the wall opposite the CID squad room (a.k.a. the Bear Pit), mentally on another planet entirely. There's no knowing how long he'd have remained there if Deacon hadn't passed him and, receiving no response to his growled, ‘Night, Charlie,’ turned back at the top of the stairs to find out why not.