The Sweeney 02 Read online

  “Not true,” the banker said quietly.

  Regan let a silence grow as he studied the man. Casey-Moore was not looking at him, he was looking at the paper cup of tea in his hands.

  “I asked you a question. What was your purpose in going to the Aerial Hotel to meet those men, two of whom are under examination by the FBI?”

  The banker sipped the tea, as if to lubricate his vocal cords, then he shrugged. “I could have told you in six sentences. But you arrested me.”

  “I had no choice.”

  “I went to the airport as part of the normal business of the bank. I had received a request from Berliner Bundesbank, a German merchant bank of unimpeachable integrity, with reference to a process hold account that they had, which their client wished to transfer into sterling. It is the duty of the Bank of England to encourage any large-deposit transfers, especially, as in this case, deutsche marks for sterling.”

  “How large was the sum involved?”

  “Approximately fifty million sterling, or a hundred and twenty million dollars.”

  “What’s a ‘process hold’?”

  “It’s a quantity of capital that is picking up bank interest while its management makes a decision about investment. However, in order to get the benefit of the money, the Bank of England has to guarantee permission to reexport, the minute the management decides to transfer out of sterling back to deutsche marks. I was assured the process hold on this fifty million would last about a year. But, as I say, a management would never guarantee that. And however short term, fifty million in deutsche marks is not to be sniffed at.”

  “Jerome Bates Carlton. Why was he there?”

  “Berliner Bundesbank hinted that the process hold might eventually favor sterling investment in shares, and this should be followed up.”

  Regan was nodding. “Wouldn’t you first make inquiries about these Americans, and maybe find out that two of them had dubious backgrounds?”

  “How dubious?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You’ve arrested them and yet you don’t know?” Casey-Moore said gently. “My experience is that many prominent American businessmen have at some time or another run afoul of the law, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Internal Revenue Service. Anyhow, my meeting at the Aerial Hotel was purely by way of preliminaries. These men would then have had to establish their bona fides to the bank’s satisfaction.”

  Regan pursed his lips, thought about it, and decided. “Thank you, Mr. Casey-Moore. We won’t detain you or Mr. Jerome Bates Carlton any longer. The station sergeant will arrange transport, if you wish, to take you back to your car at the Aerial.”

  Casey-Moore started to speak. Regan signaled him to silence. “I wouldn’t say anything if I were you. I’ve no doubt there’ll be some form of inquiry. You will be given the opportunity to present your case. I guarantee you’ll get to say what you want, including, without doubt, the last word.”

  Casey-Moore stood up and headed for the door. Then he turned. “I take your point that when somebody in your job makes a mistake he’s pilloried. I’ll consider very carefully what action I should take. It may be that after I’ve thought about it, I’ll decide to forget the whole thing.”

  Regan’s eyes met Casey-Moore’s. “That would be appreciated,” he said quietly.

  Casey-Moore turned and walked out.

  Regan didn’t have even ten seconds to deliberate on the interview. The phone rang. The hollow echo on the line announced FBI New York before its switchboard operator chimed in. “Detective Inspector Regan? Mr. Broughton for you, sir.”

  Broughton’s voice came on the line. This time less of a drawl, more precise and positive. “Inspector Regan, I’ve spoken again to Chief Lucas. Here is what we would like you to do. Retain all the suspects’ papers and under no circumstances or legal maneuvers allow them out of your custody. The legal attaché at the London embassy will shortly send you our instructions about what we want done with the papers. We suggest you release all suspects, and inform the Americans that they are to remain in the country pending the preparation of warrants for their rearrest in connection with the Cologne investment—do you understand that? Tell them ‘Cologne investment.’ As soon as they hear you say that they’re going to hightail it back here to New York, but fast. You let ‘em leave the country. We’ll be waiting here to grab ‘em as soon as they step off the plane. Is that all clear, Inspector?”

  “Very clear.”

  “One last inquiry from Chief Lucas. Can you confirm the amount of correspondence, possibly in Arabic, headed the Tunis Hilton, sir?”

  “Four letters, all short, all less than a page.”

  “Interesting,” Mr. Broughton said. “Very interesting.” But he didn’t enlarge.

  When Covent Garden market moved to its new site on the river at Lambeth, a man called Nick Colouris, forty-five, Greek Cypriot, lost part of his income. What remained came from the full range of product: gambling, protection, girls, dope, porn, and the odd killing. His private zoo covered the area bordered east to west by Oxford Street, then down Charing Cross Road to Trafalgar Square. It did not take in the Post Office Tower, where he had a permanent table in the revolving restaurant, and where he entertained amateur girls on whom he was about to bestow professional status.

  So Covent Garden moved, and Colouris’s income went down. And the CID observed that Colouris was looking nervous and expanding too rapidly into other fields to compensate for the financial loss. Regan became involved. He had been on the Colouris case two weeks when he’d been instructed by DCI Haskins to take two hours off and follow up the FBI red-letter telex. Now he was back on Colouris.

  Regan sat in the front seat of a Maserati Mistrale convertible, top down, while old Bob Henson painstakingly waxed the red cellulose and coughed his way through his fifteenth cigarette since breakfast. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The Maserati Mistrale was in a multistory car park off Charing Cross Road. Both the Maser and the car park were owned by Colouris.

  “Bob, what was gelt like on the market toms, was it heavy?”

  “Your individual bunk-up, or turnover?” Bob was beginning to gasp with the exertion of polishing.

  “High-class toms, or everything you always wanted to know in one minute and a fiver?”

  Bob looked up and smiled. “A fiver ritzy for that bint.”

  “How much did Colouris make? How many girls?”

  “You sit in Mr. Colouris’s car and ask an employee for trade secrets? Not a snowball in hell, Mr. Regan. I wouldn’t be here with you bending my ear if I thought I knew anything I could tell you. Mr. Colouris is a good guv’nor. He’s seen me right.”

  Regan laughed. “Yeah. There’s a great future in car waxing, if you’re prepared to travel to Saudi Arabia.”

  “I said he’s a good guv’nor.”

  “I was a good guv’nor to you as well,” Regan said gently. “I’ve given you more in my days for informing on your Cypriot pals than toe rag Colouris pays you now to shine this dodgy motor. Does he know that I was a good guv’nor for that kind of trade?”

  He could see old Bob’s eyes uncertain, a hint of worry as he worked out Regan’s threat.

  “I’m not asking for the complete spiel. I just want to know what a bunk-up cost in the Garden. And I want to know how many scrubbers were plating there, and which style clientele. Rough idea. What was the business worth to Colouris? Ten Gs a year?”

  “Porters were clientele. Well, ninety percent.”

  “You’re kidding?” Regan was surprised. The fruit and veg porters used to check on at midnight. So as often as they could afford it they came to work via a local whore’s bed?

  “Fifty bob in the hay.”

  “Cut price,” Regan observed.

  “Right. But he had thirty girls on the game.”

  “Thirty!” Regan was amazed. “So what was the gross national product? What did Colouris grab?”

  “You get an answer, but that’s your last que
stion, Mr. Regan. I’ve heard talk as he made fifty Gs a year out of the market.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Regan said softly. Not a copper in London would have guessed at the size of that business.

  “Bye-bye, Mr. Regan,” Bob announced.

  “One last word.”

  “No questions.” Old Bob was looking worried again.

  “Not a question.” Regan got out of the car. “Colouris has lost the porters, okay? They’ve gone south of the river, and that’s Tony Edwards over there, and Colouris, apart from being a dirty little bubble, is also the holder of the Duke of Edinburgh’s award for outright cowardice. Now he thinks he’s going to make up his losses by moving in on some little family fencing firms in W. One. He is not. If he tries, we hit him with Sherman tanks. I’m warning you, don’t get in the line of fire. If I were you I’d ship your creaking carcass to your country seat, retire, and smoke yourself to death...”

  Bob was shrugging and polishing and pretending to ignore Regan.

  A garage hand came up. “Is your name Inspector Regan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bloke on the phone says he’s Scotland Yard. He wants you there immediately. What d’you think we run here, a fucking message service?”

  Regan ignored him. He turned on old Bob. “If your brother hits another fucking sub post office, we’ll have you in and nail your toes to the floor for the lot. Get it?”

  Bob’s face dropped. Everybody in the world knew his brother robbed sub post offices on the average of one a month —if he ever spent that long out of jail.

  Regan took a cab back to Scotland Yard. He paid the cab and cowered his way through the cold hard rain to the revolving door of the concrete and glass monolith of New Scotland Yard. He showed his police ID to the security sergeant at the desk, took the lift to the third floor, and went down the east corridor to his office.

  Haskins sat behind Regan’s desk, reading Regan’s correspondence and files. He didn’t give a damn that Regan had walked in and caught him.

  “Maynon would like to see you,” Haskins said quietly.

  “When?”

  “Half an hour ago, to be precise. He just put his head in, said he’d be missing ten minutes. But if you turned up you were to hightail it to his office and wait.”

  “Thanks,” Regan said flatly, and started to reverse out of the room.

  “Just a second, Regan. Maynon wants you to take all the casework files of jobs you’re working on—presumably Colouris, the Aerial Hotel thing, and that job you grabbed off DI Perkins six months ago, the stolen boats caper—all the paper work to Maynon’s office.” Haskins got up suddenly and walked out.

  Regan stood there. The threat of it had happened a hundred times, the actuality never. He was going to be suspended —and obviously for some period. Like for the duration of a lengthy inquiry. Why else take all his casework away? He began to gather up the files. So Mr. Casey-Moore had reflected, reconsidered, and decided to activate the legal processes. And at the first sniff of that the Commander of the Flying Squad would tell Maynon to shift his butt and get Regan off the streets fast and on official suspension. It was now four days since the Keystone Cops cock-up at the Aerial Hotel. Regan realized he had been kidding himself that he would get away with it. Now what would happen? An internal inquiry that would take a bloody month to set up, maybe more.

  Regan, angry, banged the files and stacked them into a pile two feet high, got his arms around it, and strode out of the office.

  Down at the end of the corridor, he elbowed the Detective Chief Superintendent’s office open, marched in, and dropped the files on the orderly surface of Maynon’s desk. He heard the door close softly behind him and turned. Maynon, stone-faced, gestured him to a seat and then went behind his desk. “What have you heard about the Aerial Hotel gentlemen in the last two days?”

  “Heard?” Regan queried. He didn’t understand the question.

  “Broughton in New York. Talked to him?”

  “No.”

  “I understand you parroted to those heavy visitors the line Broughton gave you. We would shortly arrest them for their involvement in the ‘Cologne investment’?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know they rushed back to the airport and took flight?” Maynon’s eyes were quizzically on him.

  “Carter and Hilliard put them on the plane.”

  “And the FBI arrested them at Kennedy.”

  Regan’s spirits began to lift. This wasn’t the usual dialogue between a chief superintendent and a DI he was about to suspend.

  “The FBI are now aware of the reasons for your unsubtlety at the Aerial. They think you made the only decision possible—and a difficult one.” Maynon shrugged to provide the impression that he was reporting a compliment rather than approving it. “The trial preliminaries will start soon. They tell me the team, Galliano, Cohen, and company, are sorting out a formidable legal lineup. Evidence, like which documents you found in which suitcases, is going to be critical, apparently.”

  Regan said nothing.

  “You’ve visited New York, yes?”

  Regan nodded.

  “What did you think of it?”

  Regan thought about it. “Mixed,” he decided.

  “FBI would like you there. To make affidavits for them. And to be the postman to deliver the documents.”

  “I thought we had wirephotoed some of the documents to them.” “No, we didn’t, for the legal reason that telegraphing evidence in a de jure case is technical publishing. They haven’t seen the documents. When can you go?”

  Regan looked at his nails. “I bet you’ve already booked me on a flight, sir.”

  “British Airways, BA one-twenty, noon tomorrow.”

  “How long will I be there?”

  “Two or three weeks.”

  “Expenses?”

  “No more or less than anybody else—plus FBI hospitality. So cut the shit.”

  “Two or three weeks means a reassign on the Colouris case.”

  “Yes, you lose that. Think we hand that to DI Walker.”

  “I don’t want to lose the Colouris case,” Regan said, just to make things difficult, on the principle of never let your superiors think you can be pushed around.

  “You’ve lost the case, Regan. You’re going to New York,” Maynon said quietly.

  Regan got up.

  “The FBI requested that you pay particular attention to the security of the documents in transit. They’re in my safe. The documents you took from the Aerial, plus the Ricky Rossi passport. You collect them at oh-nine-hundred hours tomorrow. You’re to take them hand luggage the whole way.”

  “Is that everything sir?” Regan asked, his voice flat and official.

  “That’s it. File two-day reports by telex.” Maynon’s voice was equally formal.

  Regan paused at the door. “One thing, sir. Nobody’s explained what it means, the ‘Cologne investment.’ Can you tell me, sir?”

  “No idea,” Maynon said, which meant he might or might not know, but wasn’t about to say. “Ask the FBI. If they like you, maybe they’ll tell you.”

  Around Christmas ‘68, overwork, saturation drinking, and a regular three hours’ kip a night finally got to Detective Inspector Regan’s health. In six hours he went from influenza to pneumonia to an oxygen tent. Two weeks later he was still in the hospital. The speed with which he succumbed terrified his wife Kate. Her father called in a heavyweight consultant who talked to Regan and came back to her with long explanations, which she didn’t understand, and a lot of talk about stress. And she pondered over that diagnosis and its related problems, like the accelerating breakdown of their marriage, and she decided to take the opportunity of this illness to try and get a fresh start for both of them.

  So one evening Kate turned up at the hospital with a check for 450 pounds signed by her dad. She hadn’t made many friends among Regan’s colleagues, but there was one guy on the squad who vaguely amused her while he was a DI, and then, when he resigned, be
came quite a close friend. Parry Jenkins was Welsh, and so was a lot of Kate’s background. Jenkins resigned from the squad because “I’m bored stupid not seeing the kids and being so bloody poor all the time.” Three months after leaving the squad and the police force, Jenkins got alien registration, went to New York, and found a fairish job with a security outfit there.