Mistress Murder (12 page)

‘I'll have to go this once to get Silver's order … after that I'll avoid it like the plague. You'll have to do the go-between business for me where Silver is concerned.'

‘Where are you going tomorrow – Brussels again?'

‘No, Munich this trip.' Paul Jacobs wearily smoothed back the hair from his forehead. He felt like chucking the whole game up and going straight back to his nice comfortable house, his placid wife and his genuine antique trade.

But he knew he never would. The little devil deep inside him would always prod him into just one more venture and he couldn't really afford it, anyway.

He slumped down beside Snigger and poured another pair of drinks.

‘You think he's after me because he believes I killed Rita?'

‘Yes – I dunno if he wants to erase you altogether, but I'd say he wants to let his boys rough you up until you weren't fit to walk for a month. That's more his mark … he does it to his non-paying clients – more effective than dragging them to court.'

Jacobs got up from the settee and went to the window. He stared out pensively at the white tower of the University. ‘He's the only one who knows about me being involved in drugs?'

‘And Ray Silver – and Irish O'Keefe – and me,' he added as an afterthought.

‘Silver will keep his trap shut – it pays him to. You're OK and O'Keefe I can't do much about. But it's Draper who's the danger … he sounds cracked enough to cause me real trouble.

Later that evening, Paul slipped as unobtrusively as possible into the Gerrard Street club and made his way straight to the back office. He found the tubby owner adjusting his bowtie before a mirror, in preparation for the announcement of the first cabaret act.

‘Can't spare you more than a minute, Golding.'

The Portuguese-Chinese mixture in Silver's blood seemed more than usually prominent tonight, thought Paul. The fat man appeared even more uneasy and twittery than usual.

‘I won't spoil your big moment, Ray,' he growled. ‘Just give me your order and I'll be off – I don't want to hang around myself, as it happens.'

Silver turned from the mirror and lifted his shoulders in supplication. His sweaty palms were turned to Paul in an age-old gesture of sorrowful regret. ‘Sorry, I can't take anything this time.'

‘What the hell d'you mean? You always want something!'

‘I'm pretty well stocked up … and the bobbies have been a bit too active this last day or two, since your girlfriend got herself killed. I'm laying off for a bit. I don't want to be turned over by the police and have them find drugs on the premises.'

Paul shrugged in annoyance.

‘OK … so you don't want anything?'

The Eurasian's eyes took a crafty glint that was not lost on Jacobs. ‘Not this time, but I might be wanting a special order soon – quite a big one. May be before you show up again, so can you give me an address or phone number where I can get you, huh?'

Paul ignored the artless attempt to get hold of something to buy off Draper. He went to the door and flung a parting shot over his shoulder.

‘I hope you're not going to back out altogether – it costs a packet to organise these trips to the continent and a few duff orders like this knocks all the profit out of it.'

Silver did some more hand spreading. ‘Sorry, but I'm playing it nice and safe. Where are you going tomorrow that's costing you all that much?'

‘All the way to Munich … a hell of a long train journey just to buy stuff that I may not be able to sell when I get back,' snapped Paul. He cut short the club owner's fawning apologies and stalked away in a bad temper.

Jacobs climbed the stairs to Gerrard Street and went back to his flat. Fifteen minutes after he had left the Nineties Club, Conrad Draper arrived in his flashy limousine and made his way to Silver's office.

Chapter Ten

The Tauern Express leaves Victoria every afternoon at three o'clock, passing through Cologne, Munich and Salzburg, to reach its destination at Klagenfurt. Paul Jacobs climbed aboard twenty minutes before it pulled out, having no idea that Conrad Draper was already sitting in a first class compartment in the next coach.

Snigger had known nothing about this latest move and was unable to warn Paul to be on his guard. He had seen Conrad come into the club late on the previous evening, after Jacobs had left without an order, but had no idea that Ray Silver had passed on the tip that Paul was catching the Munich Express.

Jacobs was travelling under a newly forged passport in the name of Reginald Foster, a post-graduate student from Birmingham University. He did not intend coming back to England in this name for some time. Reginald Foster would go into cold storage in Germany for a few months until he was needed for a return trip. Paul had other plans for making his way back this time.

He settled his luggage on the rack of a second class compartment. He had a rucksack and a small case, in keeping with his role of an elderly but still impoverished research student. Dropping into his reserved seat – he had stretched his student character enough to have a couchette for the night – he pulled out a magazine and relaxed.

He had made all the elaborate preparations for the trip some weeks before. A false passport in the name of Franz Shulman had been mailed out to a hotel in Munich – it would be too embarrassing to be searched by the Customs and have it found on his person. These passports were made for him by an accomplished pen-man in Paddington. They cost him a great deal of money, but he considered that it was good value.

Dead on three o'clock, the long train pulled out on the first stage of its journey to Austria. Both men gazed out from their respective compartments at the wintry London suburbs and then the fields of Kent as the boat-train raced along. Conrad alternatively dozed over his lunchtime whiskies and glanced at the bawdy magazines that he had brought from a Soho shop. Apart from a basal glow of satisfaction about the sweet revenge that was on the way, he had no definite plotting to disturb his lazy mind.

Paul Jacobs' brain, a few yards away, was ticking over at high speed, thinking of details of this trip and the next one, which was a run to Marseilles. In addition, as his eyes roamed over the bleak fields of the Weald, he fretted over Silver's attack of cold feet. This might mean that he would have to reduce his buying or work up new contacts in London if he wanted to keep his profits stable.

As he mulled over his business, Jacobs was oblivious of the man in the next carriage who was determined to kill him.

Gigal had been wrong in thinking that Conrad only wanted to find Paul so that his thugs could give him a beating up. The warped mind of the ex-wrestler had been permanently bruised by the insult he had suffered – when Paul had liquidated Draper's new mistress, he had triggered off the man's latent madness.

Silver's tip-off in the club on the previous night, when Draper had learned of Paul's intention to catch the Saturday train to Munich, had been too great a temptation for him to miss.

He sat in his plush first class compartment, the Webley making a slight bulge in his jacket pocket, without making any effort to make sure that Golding really was on the train. His megalomania assured him that no one would dare interfere with the plans of the great Conrad. He was endowed with blind faith in his own invincibility. Draper would have gone all the way to Bavaria without bothering to confirm that the other man was aboard somewhere, but as it happened, he caught a glimpse of Golding as they were transferring to the cross-channel ferry.

Draper smiled smugly to himself and tapped the automatic in his pocket. He had one great advantage over Golding: he recognised the drug runner at sight from seeing him a few times with Rita, whereas Golding had no reason to know him from Adam.

The bookie had not the slightest idea of how he was going to deal with his enemy when they got to Munich – again his delusions of utter superiority carried him way above such trivial worries. The idea of failure never crossed his mind – the facts that he was alone in a foreign land, without a word of the language and not even a place to stay, only sank in as the train carried him across Europe.

Early the next morning, the big cities of southern Germany rolled past the windows: Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Ulm. By the time Augsburg was reached, the last big town before Munich itself, Conrad was forced to think of some plan of action, even if it was only to keep Golding in sight when they reached their destination.

His unimaginative but cunning mind got to work. The more he sat thinking about it, the more difficult his position appeared to be. Though still no thought of failure entered his mind, he began to realise that some careful strategy was needed if he was not to be left standing on the platform whilst Golding vanished in a taxi.

So when the great diesel engine dragged them to a stop at the Hauptbahnhof Munchen, Conrad was already on the step waiting to hop off at the front end. He wanted to intercept Golding before he vanished into the town.

Grasping his suitcase, he stepped off and stood in the centre of the platform, with the crowds streaming past him. He kept a sharp lookout for his fellow countryman and soon spotted him coming up the platform, his rucksack bowing him slightly.

Conrad began a rather overdone pantomime intended to express the utter bewilderment of an Englishman in a foreign land. He called out in a loud voice to a passing porter.

‘Hello, porter! Porter! Oh, for God's sake, doesn't anybody speak English here!'

Several heads, including the porter's, were turned towards him, all quite willing to show their knowledge of that language. Conrad ignored them and stepped across to intercept Golding.

‘Sorry to pounce on you, but could you help me?'

Paul Jacobs stopped dead. He had been daydreaming a little, the familiar sounds and sights of his native country having aroused many memories. He stared at the large man standing squarely in his path. A warning bell began ringing faintly in his mind.

‘Er, yes … sure, if I can.'

Where the hell had he seen this chap before? He knew his face but he couldn't place him.

Conrad dropped his case onto the concrete and dragged a small German guidebook from his pocket.

‘I knew you were English – heard you talking in the dining car last night, that's why I had the nerve to stop you … look, I can't speak a bloody word of this lingo and I've got to find somewhere to stay … can you help me?'.

Paul, cautious and wary now, beat his brains to try to remember where he had seen the man before. Was it at some Customs desk or Immigration office? Was he a narcotics man, or a policeman of some sort? He didn't look it. And that voice …

‘A hotel, you mean – you want me to recommend one?' he stalled, still desperately trying to size Draper up. It was transparently obvious that this encounter was a fake. The whole scene was pure ham. The man was surely too bad a performer to be a detective.

Draper eagerly answered. ‘Yes, yes, if you would; I've got to meet a friend on Tuesday – he speaks German – but until he shows up, I'm scuppered!'

‘What sort of place did you want?' asked Paul.

Draper eyed the other man warily. Unless he was careful, he would get an address thrust at him and he would lose Golding after all.

‘Oh, I don't know. Where do you stay? That should be about my mark,' he ended illogically.

Paul had an answer ready. ‘I stay with friends, I'm afraid. But I can recommend a few places, depends on what you want to pay.'

Draper cursed under his breath. For the first time his self-assurance began to wilt. If Golding got away from him now, he might as well get on the train and go home again. He became desperate and his voice shed some of its painfully acquired West End veneer and slid back to Whitechapel.

‘Look, chum, couldn't you do me a favour … come with me in a taxi and drop me off at some hotel? I couldn't even ask for a room in this flaming language.'

There was a sudden clash of cymbals in Paul Jacobs' head. This was the voice on the tape!

Without understanding how the owner came to be standing alongside him, seven hundred miles from London, he accepted the fact and his defence mechanism snapped into action. He must find out more about the man's motives in following him and in this ridiculous farce of pretending not to know him.

‘Right, come along this way, we'll get a cab.' He beckoned Conrad and strode in front of him, his mind working furiously. He led the bookie off the platform and out into the wide area in front of the station, where he called a car.

A sleek Mercedes drew up and the driver peered questioningly from the window. Jacobs spoke to him in faultless German. Normally he used language with a painfully acquired foreign accent in keeping with his supposed identity, but in the pressure of events his tongue slipped back into his native speech.

‘Take us to Schwabing, go along Leopoldstrasse,' he said. ‘I'll tell you exactly where when we get there.'

The cab crawled out into the permanent traffic jam that clogged the Bavarian capital. The two men lounged in the back and exchanged entirely fictitious names and addresses, the bookie professing to be Albert Smith of Croydon, on his way to meet a friend for a winter sporting holiday. Apart from the fact that the snows had not yet come to the Garmisch area, the bookie's racetrack suit, his one small case and lack of skis, cameras, boots, or any of the paraphernalia of winter sports made a complete nonsense of his story.

Just to keep things even, Paul trotted out his Reginald Foster routine about the University. He enquired about Conrad's idea of a hotel.

‘Will a pension suit you – you know, a boarding house? I know a place that's very reasonable – clean and cheap.'

Conrad nodded eagerly. He would quite cheerfully have slept in a doss house if it meant keeping Golding in sight.

Paul stared out of the taxi windows at the attractive city. His mind was working at top speed. What the devil was this big moron doing here? Was this more than an attempt at blackmail? Why keep up this stupid pretence of not revealing who he was? Even Jacobs' astute mind failed to guess the real reason for the ex-wrestler's clumsy efforts to follow him halfway across Europe.