Field of Fire Read online

  Kerr said he’d like to go across to the field and inspect it. Fegan went into one of the sheds and drove out a new Range Rover. He might not be growing gold dust, thought Kerr, but with a Rover 3500 and a Range Rover he obviously had found a reasonable substitute.

  The hundred-acre field was virtually flat, very well drained, and with grass recently close-cropped by sheep. With the nearest tree about three hundred yards away, any small plane had a near perfect approach. They left the Range Rover by the gate and walked over and running across the centre they found tyre impressions, not deep or clear because the drainage had kept the soil firm despite all the recent rain.

  “Have you driven across here recently, or would any of your blokes have done so?” asked Kerr.

  “Do what? Go driving around the fields in winter-time when there’s no call? Start treating the soil like that . . .”

  Kerr listened with less than half an ear to a lecture on soil consistency and the conversation of same. He studied the tracks. Guessing, they seemed the wrong width and design for any car and at the halfway stage there was a third track which could obviously have been made by a tail wheel. Who could read the tracks accurately — a man from Fortrow airport?

  After leaving the farm, he drove along a lane bordered by deep ditches away from the direction of Tawsey Head. Half a mile on, sited round cross-roads, was the small village of Reckton that consisted of a church, a pub, a general store, and a handful of squat, weathered cottages built in ragstone and looking as if they’d stood there for centuries. The owner of the general store had seen no strangers around: the landlord, about to close the pub, said he’d seen no one but offered Kerr a drink. Two pints of bitter later, Kerr went on to question the cottagers and again drew blank. He returned to the car, sat down, and lit a cigarette. It seemed reasonable to assume that a plane had landed in Wiltdown Field because it was difficult to imagine Fegan was either lying or largely mistaken. But surely if it had unloaded illegal immigrants someone would have seen something?

  He drove along several lanes, questioning people in the isolated farmhouse, and spent a considerable time in a village almost on the outskirts of Fortrow, but he learned nothing until he was on his way back into town and saw the red post office van and flagged it down. The driver, tubby and cheerful, said that he’d been on early-morning delivery because his mate was away sick and he’d seen a car on the Reckton road some time after half-six and there’d been several coloured passengers although the driver had been white. He’d particularly noticed them because out in the country it was unusual to see several coloured persons together, especially so early in the morning. He thought the car had been a Ford Cortina, but had no idea what was the registration number.

  Kerr thanked the postman and continued into Fortrow, becoming snarled up in a traffic jam along New Dock Road.

  He reported to Fusil, whose response was typical. “You’ve been gone a long time. Been skiving hard, I suppose?”

  “I’ve not had time . . .”

  “One of your troubles is, you’ve never the time for anything but food and women.”

  “You seem to forget I’m married now, sir,” said Kerr indignantly.

  Fusil smiled again.

  *

  Rowan was basically a very unhappy man, made no less unhappy by the knowledge that his own jealousy was to blame. Jealousy made him all too ready to believe his wife, Heather, was having an affair with at least one of the men who gave her modelling jobs. Their daughter, Tracey, was becoming emotionally disturbed by the constant rows and he often found it difficult to concentrate on his work because his mind would keep conjuring up pictures of Heather making violent love to others. His bitter distress had soured him and he was only too aware that he now had few friends and that at work his fellow detectives tended to avoid him whenever possible.

  He ordered another half-pint of beer. The barman drew it and then briefly waved aside the proffered money. Rowan lit a cigarette and watched the darts match. One of the players was only recently out of prison after doing three years for robbery with violence: he looked a jolly, kind man. Rowan finished the beer and left, walked briskly along two roads and came to a call-box that was empty. He went inside and in less than a minute the phone rang. “Rowan here.”

  “’Evenin’, Mister Rowan.” Teach always telephoned from one call-box to another.

  “I want info on any new faces.”

  There was a pause. “Are you on about the Chokey Parsons job?”

  Rowan said: “I’m offering ten.”

  “Make it ten thousand, Mister Rowan, and it won’t alter nothing.”

  “Come on, let’s have the news. You must know something.”

  “I don’t know nothing and you won’t find no one else what does.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll add another five, seeing this is a big job.”

  “Would you grass for fifteen quid, knowing what they did to Chokey? Mister Rowan, you’re wasting your time.” The connexion was cut.

  Rowan took several coins from his pocket, sorted them out, put them on the coin-box and dialled the station. He was put through to Fusil, still at work.

  “Rowan here, sir. The only thing I’ve learned all evening is that the snouts are so scared they’re telling nothing.”

  “All right. But keep trying.”

  Rowan left the call-box and looked at his watch. He longed to hurry home to see Heather and find the words that would finally break down their hostility and restore the love they had once known, yet he was scared to return in case she was out so that all the anger and the bitterness whirled round and round in his mind, ready to explode when she did finally come home.

  Back at the station, Fusil closed his eyes and felt the waves of tiredness swirl through his mind. Josephine would tear strips off him for staying so late, but what she didn’t seem able to understand was that with his character he couldn’t keep away from the work when the pressure was really on.

  He yawned heavily, tipped back the seat and rested his feet on the desk. There could now virtually be no doubt there was an assassination plot in being, engineered by a mob who were barbarically ruthless. If they were as clever and as efficient as they were ruthless, it was going to be extremely difficult to prevent their making the attempt successful.

  There was no need to spell out to him the result of a successful assassination. The borough police would get such a roasting they’d no longer be able to fight their enforced amalgamation with the county police. As for him — who’d want to know the D.I. who’d been in charge of such total failure?

  For the umpteenth time, he mentally reviewed the evidence; for the umpteenth time he came to the inevitable conclusion that so far they’d no leads. Even Parsons’ C.R.O. file had proved useless. He jerked the chair forward after sliding his feet off the desk and stood up. He was finally prepared to give in for the day and go home to bed.

  Chapter Eleven

  On Sunday the clouds rolled back and the sun shone, though without much warmth. But the sunshine brought little cheer to the C.I.D. The pathologist’s report on Parsons told them nothing fresh, the woods yielded no clues, the C.R.O. file remained virtually useless, and not a single informer could be persuaded to talk.

  In his office Fusil, dressed in a pair of old flannels and a blazer, faced Kywood. Typically, despite the fact it was a Sunday, Kywood was dressed formally.

  “I’m not convinced,” said Kywood.

  “No?” replied Fusil, feeling he’d been all through this conversation before.

  “Parsons may have been murdered for a reason totally unconnected with any assassination plot.”

  “Then it’s pure coincidence that he was the man who was making enquiries amongst the Toms for someone who works at the town hall?”

  “Coincidences happen.”

  “Maybe. But this isn’t one.”

  Kywood spoke impatiently. “You just don’t know that. You’re basing your conclusions on assumptions that could very easily be wrong.”


  “But are surely more likely to be right.”

  Kywood rubbed his square chin. He couldn’t begin to understand a D.I. who made a point of arguing so bluntly with his superior officer. When he’d been a D.I., he’d never been so foolish. “Look, what proof have you?”

  Fusil quickly side-stepped the question. “Suppose I’m wrong, there’s no harm done. But if I’m right and no extra security precautions are taken and there’s a successful assassination attempt . . .”

  “If we call in extra men above the numbers already agreed the supplementary bill from county will give the finance committee apoplexy.”

  “Money. Always money.”

  “You know what your trouble is, Bob? You’ve never been ready to learn that police work isn’t isolated from the rest of the town. You’ve refused ever to try to appreciate the interplay between local politics and a local police force. All you’ve ever done is moan because such a relationship exists — well, it does. It’s a fact of life.”

  It wouldn’t be so much of a fact of life, thought Fusil, if Kywood had more backbone and fought harder when dealing with local political committee.

  Kywood suddenly became jovial, the understanding superior officer jollying along a slightly mutton-headed D.I. “You know, Bob, you can be a difficult cuss! You remind me of old Andrews who was in the county force when I was pounding a beat. I can remember . . .”

  Fusil doodled on the foolscap sheet of paper. Somewhere, men were planning an assassination . . . And all Kywood could do was reminisce about some old fool of a sergeant.

  *

  When Josef Dzur reached the house in south-east London, a cold wind had sprung up to strip all warmth out of the late sunshine. Napier met him at the door and took him through to the sitting-room, where Joyce was standing by a tray of drinks. Dzur said he’d have a whisky, straight, and then studied Napier with open curiosity. Napier, skin fresh and smooth after a long facial massage, moved gracefully round to pick up a silver cigarette-box, which he offered.

  Dzur sat down. He was middle-aged, square-faced, grey-haired and beginning to bald, and he had the blinking, vaguely arrogant look of a minor intellectual. His eyes, a very pale blue, were his most immediately noticeable feature: no matter how much he smiled to show gold-capped teeth, they remained coldly watchful.

  Napier settled on the settee and carefully adjusted the knees of his trousers. “I’ve got a job that’s worth twenty grand to you,” he said, coming straight to the point.

  Dzur could not hide his astonishment at the amount. He was a specialist, but specialists brought in from the outside seldom came that expensive. “What is the job?” he asked. He spoke English easily, but with an accent that could suddenly thicken to make it difficult to understand him and occasionally he got words wrong.

  “There’s a man to be killed.”

  “Who?”

  “Jiri Pakac.”

  “Jesus!” said Dzur, so surprised that he jerked and some of the whisky slopped out of his glass. His mind flicked back to Presov and the ‘liberation’ of that town by Bulgarian troops. He’d always been an enthusiastic communist, but he’d come to support Dubcek and his liberal policies and had loudly and publicly urged rejection of the Warsaw July letter from the U.S.S.R., Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. The troops had made straight for his house. He’d been away, trying to find out if the rumours of invasion were correct. His wife had been raped and shot, his son taken away to an unknown fate, and his house had been looted. On his return, he’d only escaped because the troops had been too drunk to aim accurately. He’d fled. He’d reached England via Austria and had tried to make contact with other Czech exiles, but all the old hands had refused to have anything to do with him because he was, and always would be, an avowed communist.

  Shattered emotionally, bitter to the point of sheer fatalism, he’d drifted into crime. Soon, he’d carried a gun and used it to good effect. He became known as an expert shooter, even before he was one. But he had the invaluable assets of cold hatred for all people and a contempt of life which left his trigger finger steady at the greatest moment of tension. He became the expert reputation had long since named him. “Jirik Pakac,” he repeated, in tones of awe as if he’d never supposed he’d be offered so much happiness.

  “It’ll be difficult,” said Napier.

  Dzur said nothing. He found Napier even more dislikable than he’d expected, but he’d have done a deal with Satan for the chance to kill Dr. Jiri Pakac.

  “Are you interested in the job?” asked Napier, not so self-possessed as usual because he sensed that he was dealing with a man whose potential for evil was possibly as great as his own.

  “Of course,” replied Dzur simply. He drank quickly, almost finished the whisky. “Shoot him?”

  “Unless you think some form of bomb would be more efficient?”

  “No. Then we use a rifle.”

  “Or a shotgun?”

  “A shotgun for this work?” Dzur spoke scornfully.

  “Suppose we could get close enough and all the shot was heavily treated with curare — there’d be no chance of his surviving, would there?”

  Dzur’s expression changed very slightly. He realised that he’d still been underestimating Napier.

  “A very small hole in each pellet wouldn’t upset the flight too much through uneven weight distribution, would it?”

  “We can test. I would not think so.”

  “Fill the holes with curare and the pellets are bound to kill even if they miss a vital spot. I reckon we want a heavy shot — something like AAA or SSG?”

  “SSG,” replied Dzur immediately. “The striking energy of SSG is more important than the extra number of pellets. But how to get as close as ten or fifteen yards — which is what will be necessary even with SSG?”

  “There are bound to be ways,” said Napier evasively.

  “Ways to move close, perhaps, but not to get away afterwards, I think?”

  “We can’t work that out until we’ve the details of the procession.”

  “I tell you now. A rifle is the weapon. I can shoot him at a distance. That way, no one knows for a long time where the shot came from.”

  “The Special Branch will make certain every possible vantage point is under guard. A shotgun used close to would catch them all napping because if they’re expecting anything, they’ll be expecting a rifle. Anyway, I’d like to plan for both methods.”

  Dzur shrugged his shoulders. “A rifle is the way,” he said stubbornly.

  “If that’s the case, you’ll use a rifle when it comes to it. One more thing — I want you to have an understudy.”

  “Why?”

  “You could fall ill on the day.”

  “I am never ill.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “You concern yourself widely,” said Dzur, not expressing himself exactly.

  “That’s my job,” replied Napier.

  Dzur curled his right finger as if pressing a trigger. There was a faraway look on his face.

  Chapter Twelve

  Monday saw a return of low cloud and drizzle. People who’d been talking of spring despondently returned to the subject of a never-ending winter. Crime flourished, as if there were little else to do: between six in the morning and eight reports came in of three burglaries, two weekend robberies from stores, five stolen cars, a girl who’d escaped from a remand home, a very nasty hit-and-run, blood on the pavement near the old docks with no body to account for it, a missing consignment of silver bars to a ship in Harcourt Dock, and evidence of an attempted raid on the National Westminster Bank in Ascrey Cross.

  Fusil divided the crime reports in two piles and pushed one to the side of his desk: the uniform branch would have to deal with them because C.I.D. just hadn’t the time. Even without any outstanding crimes in hand, minor ones seldom received the attention they should through ever increasing pressure of work. He called Braddon in and handed across the second pile of reports, told him to investigate
the cases, and cut short an attempt to complain at the volume of work.

  Fusil yawned. He felt tired, washed-out, and in need of the holiday Josephine kept telling him he must have. The telephone rang. The town council P.R.O., who had responsibility for the detailed planning of the state visits, reported that on arrival at work he’d found his desk unlocked although he could be absolutely certain he’d left it locked on Friday evening. In the desk was the revised and final itinerary for the two state visits.

  Fusil stared across the room. Here was proof positive that the villains had found a victim and had blackmailed him into working for them: with the help of skeleton keys supplied by them, he’d broken into the P.R.O.’s desk over the week-end and found the itineraries which he’d probably photographed. By now, the details must be with the villains. No one — not even Kywood — could reasonably continue to doubt the existence of an assassination plot. He told the P.R.O. someone would be over immediately, rang off, and telephoned Kywood.

  Before Fusil could report, Kywood began. “A very good morning to you, Bob. Bit nippy weather, though, especially after all that sun. Wouldn’t say no to one of those package holidays in the sun, would you? Make a nice break. But who’d look after the crime then, eh?”

  There was a certain warped Pyrrhic pleasure in destroying such false cheerfulness. “I’ve just had a report in from the council’s P.R.O. His desk was broken into over the week-end.”

  “But is that so important?”

  “He had the completed itineraries in it.”

  “He what? shouted Kywood. “What the hell were they doing there? Why weren’t they in the safe? Why didn’t you go over security with him?”

  “I did. He obviously chose not to listen.”

  Kywood swore. “Have you investigated the break-in?”

  “Not yet. I’ve only just been told about it. You’ll have to get on to Dalby, won’t you?”

  “I’m goddamn well aware of what I have to do,” snapped Kywood. “You’d better find out which of the employees it was and make him talk.”