Blood Never Dies (29 page)

They hadn’t seen each other in quite a while, but despite the new slap-top, Slider recognized him at once when they met outside Leicester Square station, and it only took one look into his pleasant, nondescript face and honest brown eyes to remember the liking they had had for each other back in Central days.

They walked together, talking about old times, families and careers, through streets that smelled sweet and sour – sour with garbage and sweet with Chinese five-spice – over pavements that were pocked with chewing gum, but these days, thank heaven, free of dog-doo. ‘Remember how you used to have to skip about like a flea to avoid it?’ Lillicrap said when Slider mentioned this.

‘I used to think Soho must be hosting the World Incontinent Dogs Conference,’ Slider said. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Little place I’ve discovered. Bit of a haven in this gastro-tourist-trap, especially in August.’ They turned into Frith Street, past Ronnie Scott’s, where they had spent many pleasant hours after coming off duty in the old days, and a few doors down Lillicrap stopped.

‘Here it is. Doesn’t look like much – that’s why the tourists stay away. I’ve booked us a table. Not too early to eat is it?’

It was called the Bon Bourgeois, and featured a window and door both net-curtained and impenetrable and a rather shabby fascia board above. Slider could see how tourists would pass right by unless they’d been recommended to it. Inside, the door led on to a short passage with stairs straight ahead, and another door to the right led into the restaurant, which was comfortably lit, low-ceilinged and cosy, with square tables covered in fine white tablecloths, plain wooden chairs, and nothing on the walls but the light sconces. This was a restaurant where the clients looked at each other and not the décor.

A young waiter in black with the traditional long white apron came at once to greet them and seemed to know Lillicrap, for he began leading them to a table without anything being said. As they sat, a female version, smiling, gave them menus and enquired about drinks.

The food was regional French, and the smells wandering about the room were certainly agreeable, and were worming their insidious way into Slider’s saliva glands. ‘Let’s get the order in, then we can talk,’ Lillicrap said. ‘I’m going to have the onion soup – not very summery, but it’s a favourite of mine. And then the roast lamb.’

The roast lamb was billed as
pre salé avec persil et salicorne
, but there was no way John Ernest Lillicrap was going to show himself up trying to order anything in French. Slider chose the
millefeuilles de saumon fumé
, which sounded intriguing, and then staked his evening on the
boeuf bourguignon
, a dish that could be wonderful or terrible, but which Lillicrap said was wonderful here.

‘So, Bill,’ said Lillicrap when they were finally left alone, ‘what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’

‘It’s a bit of a complicated case, seems to be spreading in all directions, but it keeps coming back to the clubs. And cocaine. So I wanted to get your reaction and pick your brains. Maybe I’d better tell you about it from the beginning.’

‘I’ve got all evening,’ he said comfortably. ‘And I like a good story.’

‘There’s not much good about it,’ Slider said. ‘But here goes.’

The exposition lasted them right through the starters – which were excellent – and Lillicrap had to order a second bottle of Beaujolais with the main course. Slider’s
boeuf bourguignon
proved a triumph – made properly with fat bacon and sweet garlic and lots of tomato paste, long-cooked until the beef was as soft as butter and the sauce was velvety and dark as love.

‘Secret ingredient,’ Lillicrap said. ‘They grate a bit of dark chocolate into it.’

It was so good it took Slider some self-discipline to get back to the sordid story. He finished at last, and there was a silence as Lillicrap digested it and Slider digested beef stewed in burgundy wine.

‘It does sound as if you’re on to something,’ he said. ‘It has all the hallmarks of a nasty little operation – except not so little.’

‘Jesse Guthrie – has he come on to your radar?’

‘Not that I recall – but there’s more than one ring working in London, Bill. I know of the Hot Box but it wasn’t one of the places we were watching. You can only do so much at a time. You follow one line and shut it down. But there’s always others working alongside all the time, and as soon as you create a vacuum something else fills it up.’

‘Tell me about the clubs,’ Slider said.

‘Oh, the clubs!’ Lillicrap drained his glass, reached for the bottle and poured for them both. He looked a little worn. ‘Of course the clubs are one of the main markets – clubs and pop concerts and some of the pubs – wherever the young and stupid hang out, begging to be parted from their money. We know that’s where the final sales are taking place – and most of the consumption too. But there’s fifty clubs in Soho alone; take the radius out another mile and there’s a hundred more. And then there’s the older set, the thirty-somethings, bankers, MPs, media types, various high-flyers, who have their own exclusive clubs, plus private and semi-private parties – a whole different ring. We know where the stuff is being sold to the punters, all right, and sometimes we know who’s selling, but that’s not the level we were interested in. What we wanted was the level above, who could lead us to the distributors. It’s no good tugging ’em too low down – the trail just blows away like breadcrumbs.’

Interesting he had used that analogy, Slider thought. Hansel and Gretel again.

‘Your Jesse Guthrie sounds like one of the intermediate level. The middle men. He’ll pick up his stuff from his distributor, probably a kilo at a time. That makes a package about the size of a bag of sugar, so it’s easy to conceal – stick it in a plastic carrier or in your backpack, all looks as natural as can be. Then he’ll divide it up into wraps of a gram apiece – he may cut it further at that point, depends on his distributor and his market – and pass it on to the bottom-feeders, ten, twenty, fifty wraps each, whatever they can shift. Your Tommy Flynn was probably one of those. And they sell it to the punters at fifty quid a time and upwards. So his little bag of sugar’s worth anything between fifty and a hundred thousand pounds. Let’s be conservative and call it fifty. Your distributor’s only got to have ten middlemen taking two packages a week, and there’s an income of a million a week, fifty million a year. Plus extra for big events, high days and holidays. If they’re working that from more than one base, you’re starting to talk serious money.’

‘Worth killing a few people for,’ Slider said, ‘if they look like getting in your way.’

‘And they do,’ Lillicrap said. ‘Bodies everywhere, and most of ’em never get into the papers. To tell you the truth,’ he added, leaning forward a little more, ‘I wish to God they’d legalize the bloody stuff. All this time and effort trying to stop people snorting their disposable cash – who cares if their heads cave in and their hearts explode? That’s their business. And it’s not the nose-bleeders who give us the trouble, it’s the criminals who import and distribute the bloody stuff. Make it legit, there goes their profit, they’re out of business overnight. But you can’t say that in public, or the media will string you up. And I didn’t just say it to you, either.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Your Guthrie overdosing on pure – you think that was murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘So do I. What we call summary justice. He must have done something wrong. A quiet execution.’ He shrugged. ‘He’s not important. If you want to break a set-up, you need to find out two things – where the charlie comes from, and where the money goes to – because it’s got to be cleaned up somehow to be enjoyed. And those are the two things they’ll go to any lengths to conceal.’ He looked at Slider levelly. ‘But you don’t want to go there.’

‘Why?’

‘Because A, it’s dangerous, and B, you might get in the way of an SO operation that’s on the same tracks. And that’s also dangerous – to you, at any rate. Don’t tread on toes, Bill.’

‘I have to,’ Slider said. ‘You know what’ll happen if I turn this over to the drugs squad – they’ll say Corley’s murder’s not important in the grand scheme of things. He’ll get forgotten. And I don’t want him to be forgotten. I like him.’

Lillicrap gave a faint smile. ‘You’re a daft bugger, Bill Slider. You always were – thinking you can fight for right and justice.’

‘Why not?’ Slider said, though he knew the answer to that.

‘Because there’s only partial right and comparative justice, and there are a lot of vested interests who don’t even want that if they have to rock the boat for it. I won’t say you’re a legend in your own lifetime, but there are places around the Yard – and the corridors of power – where I could mention I was a friend of yours and expect a few chilly looks.’

Slider smiled. ‘Feel free to deny me.’

‘Oh, I would, mate, don’t worry, and I wouldn’t wait for cockcrow. I didn’t make superintendent by making myself unpopular. And I’ve got Linda to think of, to say nothing of the kids. Universities don’t come cheap these days. You might start thinking along those lines yourself, you know. How much would this Corley have risked for you?’

Knight-errantry
, Slider thought. And his mother had called him gallant. ‘That isn’t the point,’ he said.

T
he office of Regal Forsdyke in Leadenhall Street was in one of the old buildings, tall and severely handsome in glazed red brick to halfway up, with high windows and a massive and forbidding wooden door under a classical broken pediment. It put Atherton in mind of his council primary school. Inside the heavy door was the same smell of industrial polish and the same pitted dark green lino on the floor. A legend on the wall showed the building was divided into a warren of chambers, occupied by various small concerns. The office he wanted was on the second floor. As the lift was somewhere up above, and he could hear it rattling and wheezing like an emphysemic chest, he took the stairs.

The door to the office, like all the others he passed, was of heavy dark wood with a frosted-glass panel in the top half, on which
REGAL FORSDYKE
was painted in neat black capitals, without any other information. He listened a moment and could hear nothing from within, so without knocking he turned the brass doorknob and pushed. For some reason he had become convinced since arriving in the building that the door would be locked, so he almost fell inside and had to make a rapid adjustment of balance to save his dignity.

Inside was an office that could have come straight out of the 1950s, or BBC Broadcasting House, which was much the same thing. Moss green carpet, dark wooden furniture, including hatstand, cream walls, industrial olive filing cabinets, and a middle-aged, grey-haired, comfortably-figured woman in a twinset sitting behind a desk. The only difference was that instead of a typewriter she had the ubiquitous keyboard and monitor in front of her. It was a small office, and wouldn’t have held much more than it did without some very un-fifties-like hugger-muggering. The window on to the street, roman-blinded, was in the wall to Atherton’s right, and in the wall to his left was another door, standing half open. The room beyond evidently had no window and as the light was off it was dark inside, but Atherton could just see the back of a desk with a handsome leather chair behind it. There seemed to be nothing on the desk but an old-fashioned leather-bound blotter.

The woman had looked up at Atherton’s entrance, and now said, ‘Can I help you?’ in the sort of voice that wished to do anything but. Her hair was short and done in an old-fashioned style that suggested rollers and a hair-drying hood, and her glasses had a pearl chain disappearing round the back of her neck. Atherton felt uncomfortably as though he had fallen through a wormhole into Enidblytonland.

Still, he had a job to do. He smiled his most innocent and engaging smile and said, ‘I do hope so. I’d like to see Mr Regal, please.’

She didn’t smile in response. It was hard to see her eyes behind the glass of her spectacles, but Atherton got the impression he was being given a very thorough and professional once-over. ‘I’m afraid Mr Regal is not here. It is not his day for the office.’

Her accent went with the 1950s BBC motif as well. He wondered if she was a retired civil servant augmenting her pension, and toyed with the notion that she had been in MI6. She’d have made a chilling M.

‘Perhaps Mr Forsdyke, then?’ Atherton said.

‘There is no Mr Forsdyke. Mr Regal bought him out fifteen years ago. May I ask what it is concerning? Perhaps I can help you.’

Atherton let himself appear to consider. ‘You’re very kind, but I really think I had better speak to Mr Regal in person.’

She gave him another long, considering look, and then reached into a drawer and brought out a large desk-diary. ‘Perhaps I can make you an appointment. May I ask your name and company?’ she said, opening it and leafing through. Atherton raised himself a little on the balls of his feet, but she tilted it towards her in such a way that he could not get a good look at the pages. Still, in the instant before she did that, he got the impression there was nothing, or next to nothing written there.

‘Detective Sergeant Atherton, Shepherd’s Bush Police,’ he said, watching her face for reaction.

There was nothing, so much of nothing that it was suspicious in itself. Not a twitch. Not a flicker. She looked up and said smoothly, ‘Mr Regal will be in the office on Monday and I can squeeze you in in the afternoon, if that would suit. But if it’s urgent, if you would care to tell me what it’s about, perhaps he could meet you somewhere else before then.’

To stir or not to stir? Only instinct to go on. ‘It’s concerning the death of Robin Williams,’ he said. ‘But I won’t put you to any trouble. I can just as easily contact Mr Regal at home myself.’

He thought she would argue about that, but after another look that felt as long as the Pleistocene era and about as warm, she said, ‘As you please.’ And she poised her hands over the keyboard in a form of dismissal.