Mistress Murder (3 page)

His eye passed from a couple of attractive chorus girls to the man next to them. He recognised him as Conrad Draper, a big-time bookie who had benefited from many hundreds of pounds of Snigger's money in past years.

Like Gigal himself, Conrad was a product of the East End. He had catapulted to affluence and dubious fame about three years ago. Before that, he had been a wrestler and a strong-arm man for several unsavoury gentlemen of the turf. By means of some smart takeover bids, together with a deal of physical intimidation, he had rapidly ousted many of the smaller bookmakers and built up a monopoly of betting shops in Soho and the back streets of the West End. He had a finger in the protection rackets of the area and he was doing his best to become the A1 Capone of Central London.

Snigger watched him out of the comer of his eye as he sat idly twisting a whisky glass in his fingers. He had a large unlit cigar in his mouth. It fascinated the barman to see him take it out occasionally, lay it carefully on the edge of the ashtray, and take out a cigarette to smoke. After a few draws, he would crush it out and put the cigar back between his fleshy lips. He was a good six foot two in height and had the shoulders of a wrestler, as well as the experience. He was handsome in a heavy sort of way, but his features were already thickening and he had a slightly bent nose as a legacy of his days in the ring. Since he had got near the top of the Soho mobsters, he affected an American drawl and style of dress. He wore a flashy blue drape suit with narrow lapels and was liberally decked out with tiepins and signet rings. In the cloakroom hung an expensive camel-hair coat and a wide-brimmed Chicago-style hat.

Paul came back from his business with the club owner and disturbed Snigger's browsing by asking for more drinks. Rita and he sat talking while they finished them then went off to the dance floor.

After a few more smoochy dances, the couple came back to the bar. Rita had drunk quite a lot in the course of the evening and was getting sentimentally tipsy. She lolled against Paul a little too obviously and began stroking his sleeve. He frowned and gently pushed her upright.

‘Come on – time for bed … you're getting high.'

It was a quirk of his dual personality that in spite of his organised adultery, his immoral drug dealings and his crooked friend, he still had a wide streak of prudery which rebelled against seeing her drunk in public.

Rita giggled and tried to kiss him. He scowled, drew away, then his face cleared. The first glimmerings of a plan for her elimination came to him at that instant. He stood up, slid an arm around her bare shoulders and aimed her towards the door.

‘You've had enough for tonight, gorgeous,' he murmured gently. He piloted her to the cloakroom and got their things from the girl. He slipped the mink around her, reflecting that it had cost him the whole proceeds of a trip to Marseilles the year before. He steered her up the stairs and the pugilistic doorman called a cab.

While they waited, she buried her face in his chest. ‘I want to kiss you, darling,' she pouted tipsily.

He smiled grimly above her head into the neon jungle of Soho. ‘You can kiss me all you like, once we get home,' he promised.

He added silently, ‘And you can kiss him tomorrow, Rita, as arranged … make the most of it!'

Chapter Two

Paul Jacobs had plenty of time for reflection and planning on the following day.

He made his usual cover-up visit to a silver vault in St. Martin's Lane in the morning and made purchases worth a few hundred pounds. For the short time that he was in the vaults, he partly reverted to his Paul Jacobs identity, having left his fancy hat and coat in the flat. He paid by cheque drawn on a legitimate account in Cardiff and arranged for the silver to be insured and delivered to his antique business in Cardiff's dockland.

Having finished this genuine excuse for spending the better part of a week in London, he went back to Newman Street. He packed a case, took some documents and money from a wall safe and kissed Rita goodbye.

She had learned to show no curiosity about either his business affairs or his erratic comings and goings. Clinging to his arm, she went with him to the lift.

‘See you on Saturday, sweet,' he said, as he stepped inside. ‘We'll have a special night, eh? Be good till then!'

He smiled grimly as he went down to the foyer. He knew the sort of goodness she would be indulging in with her new boyfriend the moment he was gone.

At the top of the shaft she stood looking down, her mind filled with her own private thoughts.

‘Going to Glasgow, be damned! I wonder which passport he's using this time.'

As she went back into the bedroom and picked up the telephone, Paul was walking to a nearby lock-up garage to take out his Jaguar.

After an hour's difficult driving to get clear of Greater London, he got the grey Mark X onto the motorway and put his foot down for Dover. The big car slid quietly along in the outer lane with the needle steadily hovering on the ninety mark. The traffic was light on this dull November day and he could let his thoughts wander around his immediate problems.

He blessed the foresight which had prompted him some six months before to hook up the tape recorder to his telephone. At the time, he had no reason to suspect Rita of any double dealing, but the idea had come to him and his razor-edged sense of self-preservation had made him act on .it. For five and a half of those months, the spools had picked up nothing suspicious. He supposed that unless the affair between Rita and Mr X had been a whirlwind romance, the first stages had gone somewhere outside the flat – especially as the conversations on the tape had started abruptly on a most intimate level.

He could still hear them now, as if the recorder were inside his head.

‘Darling – how are you feeling this morning?' – meaningful sniggers – ‘Look, you shouldn't ring me here.'

‘Why not? You told me he's not back for a week.'

‘Well, he usually only comes about once a fortnight – but you never know.'

‘Oh, to hell with him!' More nauseating giggles and innuendos about the previous night.

‘But we mustn't get careless, honey … and I'm coming round tomorrow – only until Saturday, we mustn't risk leaving it till later, he's due any time after that.'

There followed several feet of tape that caused Paul no jealousy, but intense annoyance to think that the woman had been using his bed, clothes, and telephone to carry on with another man.

Then the important business began.

‘Look, honey, I rang you for something special,' said the unidentifiable voice. ‘If it comes off, it won't matter a damn about him finding out about us – he'll have too much else to worry about.'

‘What are you on about, for God's sake?'

‘This sugar daddy of yours – Golding. Know who he is?'

The rough East End voice with a thin veneer of Americanised club drawl held an expectant note of triumph.

‘No, why should I?' answered the girl. ‘He always brushes me off when I get nosy – so now I don't. I suppose he's some well-heeled business man from out of town, with a wife and kids – he naturally wants to keep me well out of his private life.'

‘So you don't know.'

The man's voice kept the suspense up and Rita became ratty.

‘Look, lover, cut the mystery will you? What are you trying to say?'

‘Sweetie, have you any idea what his business is?' The sham cultured overlay in the man's voice cracked under the strain of his excitement.

‘No, I bloody well haven't – he can sell ladies' underwear for all I care, as long as he keeps me in nylons and mink.'

‘Gorgeous, your boyfriend is a big-time dope peddler!'

The unknown voice, exasperatingly unknown to Golding, reached an exultant peak.

Rita was incredulous, but the voice went on to explain that one of his boys had recognised him in the Nineties Club the week before. This boy had once been pushing drugs himself and had dealt with Golding as a supplier. Paul cursed – this was a loophole that could not be sealed. He had to deal with so many people that it was impossible to avoid every risk.

Reaching Dover, he passed through the Customs and Immigration to reach the ramp leading down to the Ostend ferry.

This time he was travelling on a forged passport made out in the name of Peter Meadows, an industrial agent from North London. The officials at the barriers had no particular interest in him and soon he was idling over a late lunch and a bottle of wine.

The grey dunes of the Belgian coast came into sight whilst he was still sitting in the dining room. As he stared out at them over the sea, his thoughts strayed back to the other phone calls from Mr X.

One of them was a long and amorous post-mortem on the time that Rita had spent with the man at his place. He suddenly realised that the man might have stayed at the flat in Newman Street for all he knew, and he decided to bug the next place with a microphone until he realised that it would be impossible to keep it going for a fortnight at a time. He shrugged off plans for as far ahead as that and concentrated on the problems heaped on him by the sudden appearance of this man who had it in his power to wreck his trade and threaten his safety. The dangerous implications of it were clear enough.

‘When he comes back next time, do your best to find out everything you can about his real identity – get it?'

The voice increased its brash Yankee intonation. ‘We've got him tabbed for the drug racket – we can put the squeeze on him any time for that, but if we can dig up his legit hideout and his real business, we'll have him cold.'

Rita broke in with a string of objections about how tight-lipped Golding was about everything.

‘Look, sweetheart, we're sitting on a goldmine, see? You do what you're told – haven't you got any idea where he goes when he leaves you?'

‘I once found a luggage office ticket in his pocket for Euston station – so I suppose he goes up North. He gave me a yarn about going to Manchester once, but I didn't believe him.'

‘Well, have a good hunt around the flat – he may have left something besides that ticket.'

‘I tell you it's hopeless,' retaliated Rita. ‘If I start that, he'll soon smell a rat. I don't trust him; he's as hard as hell under the surface.'

The end of the call took on a harder note from the man.

‘Look, quit bellyaching! We're on the edge of the sweetest bit of blackmail you could think of. Golding will pay a lot to keep my mouth shut. He must be making a fortune out of that racket. And what if he does take a poke at you – it's worth it, isn't it? As soon as we've got all we want to know, you can tell him to stuff his flat.'

Paul pondered over this until the boat reached Ostend and he was called down to the car deck.

He drove off onto the quay, passed through the barriers where the officials were far more interested in his car than the driver, and then out into the streets of Ostend. He took to the right-hand side of the road without a second thought. His German origins and the frequent trips to the Continent made him equally at home on either side.

He drove out onto the auto-route to Brussels and settled the big grey car down to a steady eighty miles an hour. Now he had time to mull over the last phone call on the tape. Again, there was a big gap in the plot, but it seemed that since the last call, Rita had mentioned the wall safe to her boyfriend. He had sent some crony of his over to Newman Street to crack it open. The man must have been an expert, as Paul had examined the lock minutely without finding any trace of interference.

The taped voices echoed again in Jacobs' mind as the Jaguar hammered slightly on the bad joints in the concrete surface.

‘Are you sure there's nothing at all anywhere to give us a lead on where he really has his pad?' demanded the man's voice, sounding like the dialogue from a third-rate gangster film. ‘Those five passports in the safe make it a dead cert that he gets all his stuff from the Continent, but there was damn-all to give a lead on his real name over here.'

‘I tell you there's nothing more – he's never said a word about it and I've been through his clothes a dozen times –not even a tailor's label on any of them. He knows the score too well to be caught like that.'

She paused and hurried on.

‘I hope to God he doesn't catch on yet that I'm in this – I hate to think what he'd do.'

Paul Jacobs smiled grimly as the exit for Ghent flashed by the window. ‘You'll never know, sweetheart,' he whispered.

A few miles further on the dull day closed in towards dusk and he switched on his side lights. Odd bits of the obnoxiously carnal phone calls came back to him as he neared the Belgian capital. He thrust them aside and his orderly chess player's mind arranged a summary of the position.

Firstly, some unknown man had cut Rita out from behind his back. That was a nuisance, but not a dangerous one. She suited him very well in a physical sense, but she was replaceable. Women – apart from his wife, who belonged to his other world of sacred respectability – were like the car he was driving. They were beautiful and a novelty when new, but should be changed before they got old. They could be changed as easily as a car – and as often – if one was willing to pay the price. Secondly, this man knew of his narcotic smuggling racket and was preparing to blackmail him over it.

Thirdly, the unknown Mr X did not know his true identity – that he was Paul Jacobs, antique silver dealer of Cardiff. But he was working on it and had to be stopped.

It was dark when he reached the outskirts of Brussels. Driving through the confusing maze of roads with the ease of familiarity, he arrived at the Boulevard Adolphe Maximus and checked in at his hotel.

A porter drove his car around to the garages at the rear, while he went up for a bath and a rest before dinner. He lay on his bed before dressing, staring up at the ornamental plaster of the high ceiling.