The two senior policemen then spoke together for some time, and it was frustrating for me listening to only half of the conversation. Mostly they spoke about the videotape that the superintendent had removed from Mr. Patel’s recorder. The superintendent and I had watched it on the small black-and-white screen in the storeroom behind the shop. Just seeing the grainy image of the man as he had come through the shop door made the hairs on the back of my neck stand upright. He had advanced a couple of paces in and stood there, looking around. Then he had walked down the length of the store, putting his head through the plastic curtain into the storeroom behind. He then retraced his steps and went out the door, closing it behind him. Unfortunately the angle of the CCTV camera didn’t show what he did next. And none of the images showed his gun, which he must have been holding in his anorak’s pocket.
I shivered. How close had I come to hiding in the back room? Very close.
“Chief Inspector Tomlinson would like another word,” the superintendent said to me finally, handing over the phone.
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you think of any reason why someone would want you killed?”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “And, if they did, why wait until now? Why not do it at Aintree at the same time as killing Herb? Something must have changed since then.”
“What?” he said. “Have you been trying to find out whose initials are on those sheets?”
“No, I haven’t. But I did go into a MoneyHome agent and ask about the pay slips, but that was last Friday.”
“Leave the investigating to the professionals, Mr. Foxton,” said the chief inspector somewhat formally.
I think I was being told off.
“But if I hadn’t,” I said in my defense, “then you wouldn’t know that it was other Americans who were gambling using Mr. Kovak’s credit cards.”
“We still don’t know that for certain,” he said.
Maybe not, I thought, but I was sure I was right.
“So how are you going to catch this guy?” I asked him. “And before he succeeds in killing me?”
“Superintendent Yering will issue an immediate alert to all stations, including the airports and ports, with the man’s image from the tape. And we will be approaching the TV stations to run the video clip in their news broadcasts.”
It didn’t sound sufficiently proactive to me.
“Haven’t you got some mug shots or something for me to look at?” I asked. “I have to tell you I don’t feel very safe with this guy still out there on the loose.”
“You had better ask Superintendent Yering,” he said.
So I did but he wasn’t very forthcoming.
“We have literally tens of thousands of mug shots,” he said. “It would take you weeks to look through them all, and our man may not even be there. We need something else to point us in the right direction first, then it might be worthwhile. Perhaps we’ll get a fingerprint from your doorbell. Be patient, Mr. Foxton. The video image is good, and it should bear dividends when it’s shown on the news.”
If I lived that long, I thought.
“Can’t you provide me with some police protection?” I asked. “In a safe house or something?”
“MI5 or the CIA might have safe houses, but we don’t,” he said with a smile. “You’ve been watching too much TV.”
“But someone is trying to kill me,” I said in frustration. “Surely it’s your job to prevent that. I need some protection.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We simply don’t have the manpower.”
They had the manpower, I thought, to have a dozen officers crawl along the road on their hands and knees looking for a bullet but not enough to prevent a future murder. It was crazy.
“So what am I to do?” I asked him. “Just sit here and wait to be killed?”
“Perhaps it wouldn’t be sensible to stay here,” he conceded. “Have you anywhere else to go to?”
My home and my office were now off-limits. Where else?
“I’m going to go back to the hospital to see my girlfriend,” I said.
Some of the Armed Response Team agreed to wait in my house while I belatedly had a shower and changed my clothes. I then threw some things into a suitcase, including my computer, and set off for the hospital in the back of one of their police vans.
“It’s the least we can do,” they said.
At one point I insisted that the police driver go right around the big roundabout at Swiss Cottage to make sure we were not being followed.
We weren’t, of course. What sort of killer would follow a van full of heavily armed police? But what sort of killer would gun a man down with sixty thousand witnesses close to hand? Or try to kill someone on their own front doorstep?
I couldn’t help but think of Jill Dando, the British TV personality, gunned down in exactly that way in a Fulham street.
And her killer has never been identified.
Claudia was still resting when I made it back to her room at the hospital. She was neither aware nor surprised that I had been away for nearly four hours and not the one and a half I’d promised.
I had made it, unmolested and alive, from the police van outside the hospital main door to her room, but not without a nervous glance at every person I met on the way. I nearly had heart failure when, just as the lift doors were closing, a man jumped through the gap who slightly resembled my would-be killer.
If I went on like this I’d be a nervous wreck in no time.
I closed the door to Claudia’s room, but of course there was no lock on the inside.
It made me feel very uneasy.
I thought it unlikely that the gunman would give up just because he’d lost me once. I imagined he was a professional assassin, and, like most professionals, he would take pride in completing his job.
Bugger the police, I thought. I felt so vulnerable. I believed absolutely that I needed some protection or else I’d wind up dead. Maybe I might be killed even if I had a bodyguard, but at least it would make me feel a little safer. However, Mrs. Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, had been shot dead by one of her bodyguards, so armed protection wasn’t always the best policy.
What should I do?
I couldn’t hide forever. But what was the alternative? Perhaps I should buy a bulletproof vest.
My main objective had to be to find out who was trying to have me killed and stop them, or at least remove the need, as they saw it, for my life to be terminated.
Easy.
But why, exactly, would anyone want me dead? It seemed a very extreme solution to a problem.
I must know something, or have something, that someone didn’t want me to tell or show to somebody else. Hence I needed to be killed to prevent it.
So what was it that I had, or knew?
The police already had the credit card statements and the MoneyHome payment slips so surely it couldn’t be them. Was there something else I had inherited from Herb that was so incriminating that murder was the only answer?
Claudia groaned a little and woke up.
“Hello, my darling,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“Bloody awful,” she said. “And really thirsty.”
I poured some water from the jug on her bedside cabinet into a plastic glass and held it out to her.
“Just go easy,” I said. “The nurse said to drink just small sips.”
She drank several large ones and then handed back the glass.
“I feel so sore and bloated,” she said.
“Dr. Tomic said you might. It’ll pass in a day or so.”
She didn’t seem much reassured.
“Can you help me sit up a bit?” she asked. “I’m so uncomfortable in this bloody bed.”
I did as she asked, but it didn’t really improve matters. Nothing would, I realized, for as long as she was in pain.
“Let’s get you some painkillers,” I said, and pushed the nurse call bell.
They gave her an injection of morphine that deadened the pain but also sent Claudia back to sleep. It was probably the best thing for her.