A Conflict of Interests (7 page)

As it happened, they failed to get an answer from two apartments, and of the remaining seven residents they interviewed, not one had seen Karen Whitfield the last time she was known to have been in residence at Abercorn House. All of them, however, could recall having noticed at least one of her visitors in the past, although none were able to put a name to the faces they attempted to describe. The one positive lead was the fact that no less than four residents had observed the same overweight, blond-haired man on different occasions, a description that bore a passing resemblance to Oliver Leese.

Their inquiries completed, Coghill and Mace left Abercorn House shortly after two o'clock and began the journey back to Wimbledon. Approaching Marble Arch, they received a radio message from Control, instructing them to proceed to 17 Brompton Mews off Cadogan Square where Oliver Leese had been found dead.

Brompton Mews was a narrow cobbled street between Cadogan Square and Pavilion Road. An ambulance, two patrol cars, a Rover 2000 and a Ford Capri were parked in the vicinity of number 17, where two obvious plainclothesmen were talking to a police constable who looked as though he wasn't old enough yet to put a razor over his face. Inside the flat, a police surgeon, a forensic expert, a photographer and two more plainclothesmen from S District were gathered around Leese, who lay face down on the bloodstained carpet in the living room. The officer in charge was Detective Superintendent Rowntree, a burly Yorkshireman who greeted Coghill with a perfunctory handshake and gave him an equally laconic rundown.

"Your request for information started the ball rolling. Desk sergeant at Lucan Place decided to put one of his probationary constables onto it and sends him around here. The constable rings the bell, doesn't get any response and goes calling on the neighbors. The lady next door tells him Leese was expected to return yesterday from a business trip on the Continent, so he goes back, looks through the window and sees a body lying on the floor. Being a bright lad, he whips out his truncheon, busts a windowpane and climbs into the flat. The killer found it a lot easier; he just rang the bell and was invited inside."

"There were no signs of a forcible entry?" Coghill said.

"Not a bloody one." Rowntree wrinkled his nose in disgust. "This fucking room still pongs to high heaven," he said.

"Excreta?" Coghill said and sniffed.

"Yeah. Leese shat himself when he realized his visitor was about to shoot him." Rowntree took Coghill by the arm and steered him into the kitchen. "Two bullets in the head from a small-caliber revolver," he continued. "Same as Karen Whitfield."

"There's another connection; they knew one another."

"Aw, for Christ sake, Inspector, that's a glimpse of the blinding obvious. Why else would you have circulated his description?" He smiled derisively, then said, "Apart from that, I happen to know she phoned him, because there's a message from her on the answering machine."

"Karen Whitfield was a call girl," Coghill said evenly. "Leese put her act on film whenever she was entertaining an influential client. Then, later on, they would lean on their victim."

"Can you prove that?" Rowntree growled.

"Karen might have lived in Wimbledon, but she also had an apartment at Abercorn House over in Maida Vale. The master bedroom is wired for sound, there's a large two-way mirror above the dressing table and I found a movie camera in the adjoining room. The rest is supposition."

Rowntree delved into his pockets, took out a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum, unwrapped a stick and popped it into his mouth. "I'd still like to hear it," he said.

Coghill nodded, kept it brief and to the point. The killer had wanted a particular film and had burned Karen Whitfield with the glowing ember of a cigarette until she had told him where it was.

"You're saying Leese had it?"

"And maybe a few more besides. Of course, it doesn't necessarily follow he kept them here in the flat."

"I think he did." Rowntree moved his jaws like a cow contentedly chewing the cud. "There's a combination safe behind the oil painting in the living room. We've sent for a locksmith, but I've a hunch we'll find it's been cleaned out. Judging by the untidy heap of papers on Leese's bed, it looks as though the killer emptied his briefcase and took them away in that."

Somebody with a personal axe to grind would have taken only the one cassette; a professional hit man might have seen the other video tapes as a way of making a little extra on the side.

"Leese had a visitor yesterday," Rowntree went on. "A woman across the street saw him leave the flat — about five foot nine, medium build, brown hair, round face. I bet you've had any number of sightings to match that description."

"Give me a minute and you'll have the latest head count."

Coghill returned to the living room. Leese was still lying on the floor, head facing toward the grate. The police surgeon had finished his preliminary examination and the forensic expert was busy taking his fingerprints before running a comparative check with the Criminal Record Office to see if the deceased had any form. Lifting the phone, he dialed 218-5999, one of the two emergency numbers the GPO had installed at Wimbledon Police Station, and got Detective Sergeant Ingleson on the line.

A ticket collector, the newsagent in the entrance hall and a cabdriver waiting in the rank outside Wimbledon Park had all observed Karen Whitfield leave the station with a man dressed in a casual but expensive-looking gray suit. None of these witnesses, however, could agree on his physical characteristics, which had made life difficult for the officer who'd attempted to make up a composite Identikit likeness. Smiling wryly, Coghill put the phone down and returned to the kitchenette.

"Well?" Rowntree stopped chewing and gazed at him expectantly. "Am I right?"

"Only partially," Coghill told him. "We've got one round-faced man, but his hair is mousy, graying or fairly blond. He could also be either five-seven or five-eleven and his weight seems to fluctuate between ten and twelve stone."

"Shit." Rowntree scowled. "Wouldn't you just know it."

"One of the witnesses thought he had a Canadian accent."

"Big deal."

"It's a start."

"Well, don't get too excited; the odds are it won't do you any good." Rowntree removed the chewing gum from his mouth and dropped it into the wastebasket. "Who's your guvnor?" he asked abruptly.

"Bert Kingman." Coghill thought he knew what the superintendent was getting at and added, "He's holidaying in Majorca, but he'll be back soon enough."

"Bert will be wasting his time if he hops a plane. Take a tip from me and warn him off."

"Why?"

"Because your area commander is going to talk to my area commander and when they've finished jawing, they'll decide to hand both murders over to the Regional Crime Squad. Naturally, those sods will pick our brains and we'll end up doing most of the legwork, but there'll be no glory in it for you and me."

It was a long speech for the Yorkshireman. Coghill suspected it was also a highly accurate prognosis.

The loose minute Caroline Brooke had written first thing that morning had acquired a pristine folder, a file number and one typewritten sheet of foolscap by the time it was returned to her desk toward midafternoon. Patterson's name, initials and known aliases appeared on the front cover in block capitals, and her superior had evidently thought the contents sufficiently hypersensitive for the file to be classified top secret.

The former CIA man, she learned, was forty-six years old. Born in Moorefield, West Virginia, on March 21, 1936, and the youngest of seven children, Patterson had left high school without any educational qualifications at the age of sixteen to work in a coal mine. One year later, he'd enlisted in the United States Army, who'd sent him first to Fort Benning, Georgia, then to Stuttgart in West Germany. Other tours overseas had followed on his way up the promotion ladder from private first class to master sergeant — Japan, Okinawa and an eighteen-month spell in Korea with the 24th Infantry Division.

Until 1964, Patterson had never heard a shot fired in anger, but from then on, it had been a vastly different story. To join the Green Berets, he'd reverted to sergeant, but had got his former rank back six months after becoming an adviser to the 16th ARVN Regiment operating in the Thua Thien province of South Vietnam. The Mekong Delta, the Ho Chi Minh trail, Laos, Cambodia, wherever the action was, Patterson had been there, winning himself a chestful of medals and a battlefield commission in the process. Along the way, a talent spotter for the CIA had decided he was the sort of operative their counterinsurgency department needed. A lack of formal education had been more than offset by experience gained in the field and the fact that he had a natural ear for languages and was fluent in German and French, the latter tongue acquired from a part-Vietnamese mistress he kept in Saigon. Mustered out of the army with an honorable discharge in June 1969, Patterson had exchanged his jungle fatigues for a gray flannel suit and a desk at Langley.

The brief was noticeably reticent about his career with the CIA, but it appeared that Patterson had had some sort of roving commission in the Middle East. Eighteen months after he'd left the agency, the FBI had issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with drug trafficking and the suspected homicide of two law enforcement officers in Galveston, Texas, sometime between May 24 and 28, 1975. The CIA was also anxious to question him about three thousand M16 rifles and one million rounds of 5.56mm ammunition which had allegedly been shipped to Chile.

Without going into too many details, the head of K Desk had indicated there were several good reasons why DI5 should do everything in their power to apprehend Patterson on behalf of these two agencies. To this end, the director general himself had said he was prepared to sacrifice Raschid al Jalud if or when the necessity arose. In the meantime, however, Caroline Brooke was to take whatever action was thought necessary to shield the Libyan diplomat from any police inquiries connected with the Whitfield case.

Caroline Brooke placed the file on one side, opened her copy of the
Daily Telegraph
at page 3 and studied the photograph taken of Coghill as he arrived at Wimbledon Police Station for the press briefing. A tallish man with an angular face that suggested a strong character, she thought, and good-looking too. She would need to keep an eye on him if Raschid al Jalud was to be safeguarded, and there was only one way to do that. Lifting the phone, she called the DI5 contact at New Scotland Yard.

Eight miles away at Linsdale Gardens over the river in Kennington, Patterson finished unpacking everything he intended to leave behind and got to work on the floorboards in the bathroom. The blade of a penknife served to raise the linoleum around the pedestal washbasin; then, using a nail extractor, he loosened and removed a plank two foot long by six inches wide. That done, he carefully laid the .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver in the cavity between the joists, together with all the video cassettes, except the one featuring Raschid al Jalud. The floorboard and linoleum replaced, he collected a suitcase of clothes from the bedroom and drove out to Heathrow, where he left the Mini he'd purchased that morning with the Ace Airways garage. Half an hour later, he boarded the 4:00 P.M. Air France flight to Paris.

6.

The offices of Quainton, Phipps and Slingsby were located in Putney High Street above a florist's shop and a ladies' hairdressing salon. A brass plate on the wall to the right of the narrow passageway between the two shops informed Coghill that the partners were also Public Notaries and Commissioners for Oaths. There was no sign of either Phipps or Slingsby, but he and Mace did come across an earnest-looking man in his mid-forties who claimed he was the managing clerk and asked if he could be of any assistance. Coghill said he hoped so, told him they were police officers and briefly explained why they wanted to see Mr. Quainton. The clerk buzzed the solicitor on the intercom, repeated the message, got a monosyllabic grunt from Quainton and then showed them into his office.

The room was at the back of the building, overlooking the courtyard behind the ladies' hairdressing salon. It also afforded a depressing view of row upon row of terraced houses, which Coghill thought must be the reason why Quainton had arranged the furniture so that he had his back to the window. There were four trays on the desk in front of him, In, Out and two Pending, all of them overflowing with bulky files done up with narrow red tape. The ashtray to his right was brimming with cigar stubs and a pall of blue-gray smoke eddied below the ceiling. Not surprisingly, the white paintwork on the window frame was now a brownish-yellow.

"Well now, Inspector," Quainton said, "what can I do for you?" His offhand manner and limp handshake suggested he was not pleased to see them again.

"It concerns your client, Mr. Trevor Whitfield."

"He's not my client."

"You were present when we questioned him this morning," Coghill pointed out.

"But not in an official capacity. I represented the late Mrs. Whitfield."

"When she purchased the boutiques in Fulham and Wimbledon and the house in St. Mark's Hill."

"You have a good memory, Inspector," Quainton said acidly.

"Did you know she was a prostitute?"

Quainton blinked several times, then said, "A prostitute?" in a voice that didn't sound convincingly incredulous.

"She had a wider variety of contraceptives in her flat at Abercorn House than most chemists have on their shelves." Mace looked up from his notes with a cheerful smile. "We also found three canes, a whip and various items associated with bondage."

"Prostitution wasn't the only thing she was into. We've reason to believe Mrs. Whitfield blackmailed a number of her clients." Coghill eyed the solicitor thoughtfully. "I have a feeling that's where most of the income to Karen Boutiques Limited came from."

"You're overlooking the fact that her accounts were regularly audited by Richard Atkinson and Company. They're a very reputable firm."