“Kevin.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Stop fannying about.”
Naylor coughed, came close to blushing. He could hear Divine laughing at the far end of the CID room. “What I missed, Fossey was in trouble four years back. Before Sergeant Millington interviewed him. Motor accident. Someone ran into the back of him at a roundabout. Came out that Fossey was driving without insurance. He was told to report next day, but no charge was made. All blown over.”
“And now,” said Resnick, seeing the smile beginning at the back of Naylor’s eyes, “you’re going to get to the interesting part.”
“It was DI Harrison, sir. That Fossey saw.”
“Four years ago,” said Resnick. “I wonder if that was when he met Andrew John Savage? Insurance broker of this parish.”
This morning Jack Skelton looked as though he was held together by fortitude and shaving soap. His early glance seemed to say to Resnick, all right, Charlie, I know what you’re thinking, understood, but keep your distance. Resnick sat down between Norman Mann and Bill Prentiss from the Serious Crimes Squad. Tom Parker was there, exchanging pleasantries about DIY with Lennie Lawrence. Graham Millington kept opening his note book and closing it again, for all the world as if he were about to give evidence.
“Gentlemen,” Skelton said. His voice was pitched an octave lower and Resnick thought he’d aged ten years overnight. “I think you all know Bill Prentiss. Bill’s here because of some wider interest in our two rear-entry merchants. Bill?”
Prentiss was a Devonian who’d been promoted away from his home patch and kept inside his head a calendar on which he ticked off the years he could retire back there. Little place overlooking the sea near Lynmouth: on a clear day you could see the refineries at the other side of the Bristol Channel.
“We’ve got a lot of unsolved burglaries,” Prentiss said, “similar MO to your lads and stretching back, oh, six, seven years or more. Midlands, mainly, but moving up to the north-west. Nothing north of Manchester.”
“I’d always suspected that,” laughed Tom Parker. “Bloody sight more than south of Watford,” said Lennie Lawrence.
“Never got very close to them,” Prentiss went on, “never sure if that was down to their luck or whether they had themselves a good source.”
“You’re not suggesting,” interrupted Skelton, “that somehow this pair have got people across half the country peddling them information?”
Prentiss shook his head, lit a cigarette. “What seems to be the pattern, they move into an area, make connections, milk them for a year or two-not too greedy, never enough to let us get a good line on them-and then try somewhere else.”
“Last couple of years,” said Resnick, “we’ve been the lucky ones.”
“Bit like fleas,” said Prentiss, “they come and go.”
“Seasonal,” said Tom Parker.
“And we’ve got enough to tie them in with Fossey and Savage?” Skelton asked.
“Enough to bring them in and lean on them, sir,” said Millington. “I think once one of them goes, the others’ll cave in pretty sharpish.”
“What I’m still not happy about,” said Tom Parker, “is trying to fit Jeff Harrison into this.”
Resnick passed on to the meeting Naylor’s findings, Patel’s suspicions, the conclusions he had drawn himself as a result of the meeting between them.
“What I don’t see,” Lennie Lawrence leaning forward, uncrossing his legs, “is what Jeff reckoned he was getting out of this, always supposing Charlie’s right.”
They turned and looked at Resnick. “It sounds a cliché, but I think he’s disillusioned. Thinks any further promotion is blocked; considers he’s been shunted aside, whatever reason, good or bad. He’s been looking for a way out.”
“So he hooks up with this outfit for a few envelopes stuffed with flyers, that what you’re saying?” Lennie Lawrence shook his head in disbelief.
“I don’t think it’s that at all,” Resnick replied. “I doubt that he’s had any contact with Grice or Grabianski. I hope he’s never taken money from them. No, I think Fossey’s what interested him. Whatever else Fossey is, he’s a good talker. Eye very much on the main chance. If he saw the way things were going in the security business three years back, the spread of private police out into the general public, he could have got Jeff Harrison excited enough to want to keep him sweet.”
“What was he hoping to get from Fossey?” Tom Parker asked.
“Contacts. Names. Enough up-to-date information so that when he went in to talk to people he had it all at his fingertips. All his years in the force plus a good knowledge of state-of-the-art surveillance techniques.”
“In exchange for which,” said Prentiss, “this Fossey wanted the occasional favor.”
“A blind eye.”
“An investigation that stalled before it got out of the drive.”
“Like the Roy burglary.”
“Exactly.”
“Jeff would do what he could, not much skin off his nose, all the time waiting for the right moment to jump ship.”
Skelton was on his feet and walking, stiff-backed. “There’s an awful lot of conjecture here, gentlemen.”
“We’re not thinking of touching Harrison yet anyway, I presume,” said Tom Parker.
Resnick shook his head. “Not until we’ve lifted Fossey and Savage.”
Graham Millington allowed himself a short laugh. “See what happens when we shake their tree.”
“And Grice and Grabianski? If they find out we’ve moved in on their informants, they’ll be gone.”
“Grice we’ll take the moment he leaves his flat,” said Resnick.
“The other one? Grabianski.”
“Ah,” said Norman Mann, speaking for the first time, “your DI and myself, we’ve got plans for Mr. Grabianski.”
The unmarked car slowed to a halt fifty yards back from the Fossey house, the opposite side of the street. Millington leaned his elbows on the front seats and opened radio contact.
“In position?”
“Ready to go.”
“The back covered?”
“Three uniforms.”
Millington checked his watch, twenty minutes shy of seven o’clock. No indication that Fossey ever left the house before eight. The morning paper was still half in the letter-box, half out. Two pints of milk on the step. One of the advantages of living out here, Millington thought; we get ours in cartons and never till eleven.
Millington lifted the handset to check with Divine, on watch outside Savage’s house. “You’re sure Savage is inside?”
Divine used his elbow to shift condensation from the car window. “Far as we know.”
“How far’s that?”
“His car’s here.”
“Lights on in the house?”
“Nothing.”
“Jesus,” said Millington. “What we don’t need-one without the other.” He looked again at his watch. “Unless he tries to leave, give it a couple of minutes.”
“Right, sir,” said Divine and signed off.
Savage had a maisonette down at the fashionable end of the canal; young executives with over-powered motors and small boats moored in the marina. Divine guessed the narrow brick buildings would have been described as individually designed, architecturally enlightened. Not enough room inside to hoist a sail. Mind you, they wouldn’t hurt when you were trying to pull a bird. Waltz her straight out of happy hour in the Baltimore Exchange and on to the waterbed.
“What d’you think?” Lynn Kellogg asked, seated alongside him.
“Don’t know if I could get used to all that squishing.”
“Eh?”
“Waterbeds.”
“Savage, you think he’s in there?”
Divine cleared away a little more condensation; sixty seconds and they’d find out.
Graham Millington tapped Naylor briskly on the shoulder, nodding in the direction of the house.
“Sir?”
“Go.”
Naylor swung the car across to the other side of the road and brought it to a standstill at the end of the open path leading up towards the front door. As soon as the handbrake was set, he and Millington were smartly out and on their way. Less than five yards on and the door opened and Fossey’s wife was standing there, dressing gown over baggy silk pajamas, struggling to free the paper from the letter-box. She recognized Millington at the second glance and ran back inside, shouting her husband’s name.