The Shy Traffickers (Professor Dobie Book 4) Page 18

  I really don’t. I’m getting all confused. And of course it’s Dobie’s fault, as usual. The one thing I’ve been trying to do all along is keep him away from Kevin and out of this mess and now there he is, there again, right on the front page of the paper, what the hell’s he doing there? … Helping me escape? … And that had been stupid, too. How am I going to find Kevin now? … Okay, a big shambling guy with a bandaged hand, he was here last night, maybe right here on this platform … In the ordinary way it’d be easy enough or easy enough to try … the ticket clerks, the platform guards, the girls in the cafeteria, someone had to have seen him … but the police would be doing that, too, as a matter of course, and this is exactly the sort of place where they’ll be looking for me as well, or if they’re not it’s because Jacko simply can’t imagine my being that stupid and he’s right because I’m not and yet … here I am … doing one stupid thing after another …

  Like just standing here, for instance. They’ll pick me up in no time unless I keep moving. So I have to do something. Such as what? … It’s sad in a way, Kate thought. I’ve lived and worked in this town for ten years now, or thereabouts, but there’s no one here I can really call a friend, no one I can turn to in this kind of a jam. Except Dobie, of course. And maybe Jacko – ha! That’s the irony of it. The two people I daren’t now go anywhere near. Perhaps I ought to do what Kevin’s probably done. Buy a ticket Intercity to London, get off somewhere else along the line … or risk going all the way through, I know London and it’s a pretty big place to get lost in, at least until … And I’ve got enough money to do that. Just about. Enough money for something else, too …

  She stopped at another stall on her way to the exit stairs and bought a pair of very dark sunglasses. It was a bright sunny day already and lots of people were wearing sunglasses. She perched them as high up on her nose as she could get them and made her way to the ticket office. There was a queue, of course. And sure enough, a uniformed wolly over by the main exit door. Kate didn’t recognise him, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t recognise her, sunglasses and all. Joining the queue, she could turn her back on him. She did just that.

  … Checking, as she did so, the indicator board. The Paddington train would be due in twenty minutes. Not so bad. And a Birmingham train left eight minutes before that, but what would she do in …? And was it eight minutes? It was difficult to read the figures through the sunglasses, with the board at an acute angle to her line of sight. She was still peering at it when someone touched her elbow. “Dr Coyle?”

  Here it was, then. Twenty minutes? … They’d got on to her within twenty seconds. Well, it wasn’t really all that surprising. “No,” Kate said frigidly. All hoity-toity. “You’ve made a mistake.”

  “Bin on the lookout for you, see,” the man said.

  “Look, I think you’re—”

  “Kev couldn’t make it, all right? So he sent me along.”

  Barry accent, she thought. A local lad. Though he looked more like some kind of an Arab, the hook-nosed loose-lipped kind. Little stocky bloke in a shiny blue suit and with shiny brown eyes fixed on her in silent appeal and bulging slightly, like a King Charles spaniel’s. “You said … Kev? …”

  “Not too comfy a place for him, the railway station.” The eyes now shifting quickly from side to side. “Nor for you, neither. We’d best get out of yurr ’cos he wants to see you.”

  One thing for sure, he wasn’t a cop. “And I want to see him,” Kate said. “Where is he?”

  “Outside. In his wheels. Just there round the corner, look.” The touch on her elbow again, but soft, respectful. “Pig on the main door but you seen him already, he’ll be no bother. Come on. Show you where to go.”

  There was a side door leading into the tourist and advance bookings office and another door that led them down a passageway onto a side street. There was a car parked opposite the exit door and another dark-skinned type was standing beside it, smoking a cigarette. Kate stopped. Kevin? … Where was Kevin, then? … “Where’s …?”

  The hands at her elbows again, grasping them firmly from behind, this time neither softly nor respectfully. The other man flicking away his cigarette and advancing swiftly upon her as the hands gripped her more tightly, twisting her backwards. The other man taking something from his pocket, she couldn’t see what because of the sunglasses, but he was leaning forwards with the same movement to push up the loose sleeve of her jacket and she started twisting this way and that, fighting against the pressure on her arms that was forcing her further and further backwards, then she felt the sharp prick in her inner forearm and knew what it was and wondered why she hadn’t screamed but there wasn’t time to wonder about that for very long, she found herself saying instead, “What Dobie … What Dobie doing? …” but the words didn’t come out very clearly because her tongue had suddenly swollen up to fill her mouth completely and the sunglasses were getting darker and darker and heavier and heavier and fell off as she jerked her head forwards and smashed on the stone pavement but Kate didn’t hear the sharp crack of the splintering plastic and after that didn’t hear any sounds at all, though one of the men grunted softly when they heaved her into the back of the car and ran thick brown fingers consolingly over the spot where the needle had drawn a tiny red thread of glistening blood. “Took it like a lamb, din’t she.”

  “So she should. She’ll have dunnit to enough people herself, will she not now? her bein’ a quack.”

  “Ought to ’ave a dab of disinfeckant on it, reelly.”

  “Well, screw that for a lark. Let’s get movin’.”

  The other man nodded. Agreed on that point, they clambered into the front of the car and drove off. On the back seat, Kate went on sleeping peacefully. Her mouth was wide open but she didn’t snore.

  Some part of Kate’s admittedly woozy thinking that morning might have been put down to the fact that she hadn’t had any breakfast. Or, for that matter, anything to eat the night before. Normally, she was a great believer in the virtues of a hearty breakfast and had even succeeded in converting Dobie (previously prone to commence the day with a cup of instant coffee and a crumpled pack of Players No 3) to her way of thinking. Olly Bohun, who shared her opinion on these matters, was indeed getting stuck into her breakfast bangers at that precise moment when Kate, comatose, was being heaved onto the back seat of the car and Crumb, who was sitting opposite Olly at a formica-topped table in one of the eateries by the closed market, was observing the demolition job with considerable awe, the wonder growing in his mind how one small head could take in such enormous quantities of protein and carbohydrates without any apparent detriment to the figure underneath it. He had, of course, often reflected on this matter before.

  “Dunno how you do it,” he eventually remarked.

  “Wock?”

  “That’s your second helping, innit?”

  “Yus. Well,” Olly said, clearing the passageway with a voracious gulp, “I bin up all night. Or pretty near.”

  “Me, too.” The difference was that Crumb looked as though he had. Bleary-eyed and draggle-tailed. Far from radiating vim. “And I’ll tell you something. They’re a bloody useless lot, the crowd round here. Not a sign of you-know-who. Though she must be … I don’t reckon they’re even trying.”

  “Not to worry,” Olly said, engulfing more sausage and almost an entire rasher of bacon at a forkful. “I’ll find-the-lady all right. See if I don’t.”

  “May not be as easy as you think. You haven’t heard the latest.”

  “That’s what you’re here to tell me.”

  “Right. That Dobie character …”

  Olly looked up sharply. “Ush? …”

  “He was seen picking Coyle up right after the killing. Wolly on all-night duty at the service station with a good eye for make of car and a numberplate … Dobie’s car, no doubt about it. You can see what that means, can’t you? … All three of them. In it together.”

  “Makes sense,” Olly said. “In a way.”

 
“Set it up between them, they did. The Coyle guy fixes a hand-over, arranges the when-and-where … The woman’s there to shoot old Primrose through the head when he goes to the window … And Dobie has to be the, the …”

  His voice trailed away. “… Mastermind,” Olly said helpfully.

  “Yeah. Sort of. Though I got to admit that … when you look at him … it’s hard to credit.”

  “It’s his eyes are the giveaway. They’re sort of …”

  “Squiffy?”

  “Yeah. Like there’s nothing there behind them.”

  “There is nothing there behind them. Not that I can—”

  “But him a professor an’ all. I mean, he really is a professor, I checked him out. And,” Olly said, snapping her jaws shut over another delivery from the fast-emptying plastic plate in front of her, “I bin checking out on something else, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His wife. The one who got dead. I bin reading up on it, the Strange Attractor affair they called it in the trade … An’ you know what? … I don’t think he did it. I think he got that doctor woman to do that one, too. She’s the killer, see? … That Dobie, oh man, he’s something else, he’s just got the … power …”

  “What power?” Crumb, perplexed.

  “Unlimited power … over women …”

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re barmy.”

  “No I ain’t. I feel it myself. Like, you’re sitting there with him an’ you feel all of a sudden he’s only got to reach out and undo your—”

  “Never mind all that,” Crumb said hurriedly. “I’ll tell you something else that’s more to the point. Stainer’s here.”

  Olly’s reception of this item of news was gratifying. She even laid down her fork, if only for a moment. “No kidding?”

  “George Stainer, that’s who. Got in last night.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I saw him. Spoke to him. And he isn’t too pleased about Primrose, no, he isn’t pleased at all.”

  “Is there gonna be a … war?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Hey!” Olly, delighted, picked up her fork again. “Just like I said. Wow, that’s great. Business is booming.”

  “Yours is. Not mine. Kevin Coyle is still the one we’re after. He’s still the only one who knows where the shipment’s stacked and if he wants to do a deal he’ll have to deal with us. No one with any sense is going to go round doing deals while the boys are on a carve-up, that’s obvious.”

  “Okay.” Olly shrugged. “He’s down to you, then. And that Kate Coyle … she’s mine. This thing’s getting better and better …”

  … But also more complex and more complex. Getting in fact more and more like a typical Jackie Collins where you’d have a pretty hard job working out what all the characters were up to, or not up to, exactly, that was obvious, but where and who with and above all why, Olly having herself found that last part hard to explain when composing her own spirited narratives of a broadly similar nature. “… That being the case,” Crumb said, “how about my, er … retainer?”

  “Yeah, well, look, Pete … This is costing the Snipe already and I do mean costing …”

  “The other tabs aren’t taking a narrow view, you know. Crime’s on the up and up and the Special Branch intends to see that it’s kept that way so the tabloids don’t have to worry on that score. I mean, the police are concerned to improve their public image, right? … and we know we got to cooperate with the press, it’s just a matter of which organs of the press—”

  Ollie sighed and laid down her fork, this time with finality. “Don’t go through the old buck-and-wing again, Crumbo, we bin through that a hundred times already. I s’pose we can call it five this time an’ see how it breaks.”

  “Five? Look, if it weren’t for me you wouldn’t be in on this thing at all. I gave you the Primrose tip-off, for crying out loud.”

  “Yeah. But I found the Man.”

  “The man? What man? … Oh. Him. Well … You keep a close eye on him, Olly, and he just might lead you to the Woman. And she’s the one who did it. Which is something you might care to bear in mind.”

  “I’ll be close to him all right,” Ollie promised. “From now on he’s got a minder, right? … Me.”

  “Good,” Crumb said. “I reckon he needs one.”

  Maybe he did at that. He looked even worse than Crumb, if possible. Tousle-haired and otherwise distraught. He didn’t even seem to have recognised her. “Sorry doctor’s indisposed today,” Dobie yammered in a high-pitched incoherent falsetto, obviously trying to imitate Kate’s answering machine. “No clinic until further notice.” He hadn’t recognised her. In one way that wasn’t altogether surprising as Olly had adopted a much severer style of dress today, her Jodie Fosterest outfit in fact, a simple black tussore silk two-piece with frilly white blouse, a fetching if somewhat conservative ensemble normally worn to those Literary Luncheons to which she was now as a matter of course invited. She was hoping that it was as yet a little too early for Dobie to be thinking about luncheon or even about stocking the refrigerator with tender morsels but his appearance didn’t do much to reassure her in that respect. “I, er … I …”

  “Oh it’s you.”

  “Yes,” Olly said.

  “The young lady from the Hog. Oh dear. I’m afraid that what with one thing and another I haven’t been able—”

  “It’s all up, Mr Dobie.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all up.”

  “Oh. Is it?”

  “You better believe it. Have you seen the Snipe?”

  No. Dobie hadn’t. His glance whizzed wildly towards the neighbouring rooftops in search of small feathered creatures flitting in and out of the chimneypots and then returned to its former muddy opacity. “No. Look, I seem to be having a little difficulty … It must be that Dutch accent of yours. I thought you said—”

  “I don’t have a Dutch accent.” Indeed she didn’t. She even had the East Enders bit under wraps for Dobie’s benefit. And the periodical in question tucked under the strap of her shoulder-bag. “Here …” Whipping it out from under like a practised gun-slinger, a movement that caused Dobie to flinch back in alarm. “Take a look at this.”

  Dobie did so. His reaction was identical to Kate’s.

  “Oh my God,” Dobie said.

  “Looks like they’re on to you at last.”

  “Yes. I mean no. I mean … what is this? What’s this horrible-looking lout doing here next to Kate? I don’t—”

  “That’s you, Mr Dobie.”

  “Eh?” Dobie examined the portraiture more closely. “Ah. Yes. So it is. But this is all most … distressing. And I don’t quite see what it has to do with, with … with … Well, you’d better come in.”

  Once again, then, our intrepid heroine steps in through the ominous portal, her heart in her mouth (as the saying has it) at least for the time being. But he didn’t seem to have that unspeakably sinister scalpel thing with him today. He was, of course, a depraved and revolting monster but (Olly thought) really quite dishy if you liked that kind of thing. This time, though, he wasn’t conducting her into that waiting-room place but was instead leading her up a flight of dark and shadowy stairs … towards who knew what inner sanctum of ultimate horror? … No, well, it seemed to be a pretty ordinary kitchen, actually. In Kate’s absence Dobie had reverted to his earlier habits; there was a half-finished mug of coffee standing on the table and a stubbed-out cigarette in the ashtray beside it. He was obviously an unlikely candidate for a Good Housekeeping Man-of-the-Year award but then, you can’t hope to win them all. “… You won’t mind if I finish my coffee, I hope? Perhaps I can offer you some?”

  Some cool cat, huh? – Olly thought. His cover’s been blown to ribbons, his career as a syndicate hitman exposed and to look at him, you’d think he didn’t care a shit. In fact, to look at him you’d think he was stoned to the wide, hey
, perhaps he was. Caramba …

  “No, thanks. I just had breakfast.”

  “Oh? That’s a thought. I haven’t had breakfast. Not yet.”

  His gaze, she noticed, was resting now on her delicately dimpled knees where they emerged from her skirt, which seemed inadvertently to have risen two or three inches when she’d seated herself on a knobby kitchen chair. Olly tugged nervously at the hem and tried not to think about sausages. “In fact I got no quarrel at all with you, Mr Dobie.”

  “Quarrel?” He seemed to be quite surprised. “With me? … Of course not. Whyever should you?”

  Not only cool. Evasive, too. It was going to be difficult to pin him down, she could see that. Better to get straight to the point. “It’s really your confederate I wanted to talk to.”

  “My confederate? … I don’t have one. Unless you mean Gwyn Merrick. But his field is installation, not analysis. You see, at the university we’re not really—”

  “I didn’t mean Gwyn what-you-said. I meant Dr Coyle. Kate Coyle.”

  “Kate? Why didn’t you say so?” Dobie appeared to be greatly relieved. “I knew there had to be some mistake. Kate doesn’t know anything at all about computers. Nothing whatsoever. No, we’re not colleagues. We just … um, er …”