The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Read online

  “He took two stray bullets,” Harpur said. “Walter Rainsford Lonton had God on his side, most likely, but not luck.”

  “Somebody in one of the cars mistook him and panicked.”

  “Mistook him for what?”

  “There were two cars,” Lamb replied.

  “That we know. Four people.”

  “It was to be a simple but ample deal. One car brought packets of substance – a lot of packets. The other brought cash, a lot of cash. There should have been a swap. Yes, simple, but also, as you’d expect, very nervy, very excitable. These are people who live with two-timing and rough tricks.”

  Ritualistically and uselessly, Harpur would always ask Jack where his information came from. Ritualistically Jack, like any other purposeful whisperer, always ignored this. Sources stayed secret, or next time there would be no sources. There might be no Jack, either, if he ever disclosed too much, or anything, about those who disclosed to him. When Jack told you something you’d better believe it, and you’d better be content with that. “Who’ve you been in touch with, Jack?”

  “On the day, one of them in one of the cars, or perhaps more than one and in both cars, sees Lonton flitting between houses and assumes he’s some sort of look-out and is alerting hit squads standing by behind a couple of front doors to dash out at the crux moment and hijack everything – substance and cash. Anyway, somebody opens fire on Lonton . . .”

  “So not accidental, not just trapped in crossfire?” Harpur said.

  “They open fire deliberately on him, and would have on anyone else who appeared from the houses, if anyone had, which, as we know, nobody did, because Lonton was a total innocent. The noise of firing convinces some of the others they’re being attacked – that an attempted snatch of the substances or cash is under way – so, of course, they retaliate. But as far as I’ve discovered, neither car has injuries.”

  “I don’t know,” Harpur said.

  “Both cars finally pull away. Only Lonton is left.”

  “So who, Jack? In the cars.”

  “No names, or you’ll go and pick them up now and charges might not stick. I want them done as they are doing what they do. They’ll come back. They won’t let a botch muck up their trade, not trade of this scale.”

  “I—”

  “Look, Col, I only give tip-offs when I think people have acted with real vileness and disregard. I’m not a mouth for mouthing’s sake.”

  “Absolutely.” Harpur had listened often to Jack’s gospel of grassing. It was important for Lamb to feel all right about what he did. No money went to him for his help, but neither did Harpur ever ask too much about the rich art business Jack ran. That’s how the arrangement worked, and overall it worked well.

  “I consider it monstrous to knock over an amateur apostle on his divine rounds,” Jack said. “All right, an error, but people so jumpy shouldn’t be out with guns. So jumpy they can’t even hit one other.”

  “They hit Lonton.”

  “I wonder how many shots it took. Did you recover other bullets?

  “A quantity,” Harpur said.

  “A ton?”

  “We’re still searching.”

  “This kind of cruel, blast-off craziness – I see it as a symptom of something rotten nationally, Col. And it deteriorates.”

  “Mr Iles says that.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “He can get things right sometimes,” Harpur replied.

  “Yes, they’ll come back,” Jack said.

  “The buyers and sellers?”

  “That’s part of their brazenness, part of the general rottenness. This is commerce, Col. This is gorgeous livelihoods, Col. A bit of a shoot-out, a mistaken shoot-out, can’t be allowed to stop the free flow of merchandise – dirty merchandise, but merchandise. Yes, they’ll come back, not to that particular bit of ground, obviously. But I can point you the right way.”

  “How the hell do you know this, Jack?”

  “You, plus trusted pals – pals able to handle a Walther – will be waiting. Not a full-scale swarm operation, please. Now, please. Leaks can happen when too many are in the know. The business would be called off. And they’d guess how police came to find out about the new plans, the new site. How? Me. Too perilous, Col. You and your picked group can certainly manage them.”

  “How many?”

  “Probably four again, two in each car. You’ll outnumber. You’ll have surprise.”

  “I hope.”

  “A big BMW. A big Volvo. These are a switch from previously. They’re not going to risk the same transport, are they, especially as their previous cars might be damaged? But I’ve got registration numbers for you. Can you call on some good, discreet boys?” He put an encouraging, huge palm on Harpur’s shoulder: “But of course you can, Col.”

  “Francis Garland as a start. Yes, I’ll be all right.”

  “And as long as you scoop them all up—”

  “—it won’t matter if they work out who sold them,” Harpur said.

  “I don’t like ‘sold’.”

  “Sorry. Let’s amend: It won’t matter if they work out who scuppered them,” Harpur replied.

  “Because they won’t be around to do anything about it.”

  “You want the Walthers back afterwards?” Harpur asked.

  “Not if they’ve been used. Police can prove all sorts from a used gun. But you probably know that already.”

  As it would turn out, only one of the Walthers was eventually used, and, a little later than eventually, Harpur committed that to the river. He returned the rest to Jack at a subsequent short and joyful debriefing session at Number Three.

  Harpur had found he could recruit four helpers, including Garland, not five. The pool to draw on was small. He wanted good marksmen ready to believe they’d be passably safe, regardless: passably safe, regardless, from the crews they had to stalk; and passably safe, regardless, from superior ranks after running an uncleared shooting romp. Harpur considered that to convince four in the circumstances might be good going. Luckily, so luckily, one of them was Garland’s sergeant, Vic Callinicos, an esteemed marvel with handguns. In the swoop, when it came he fired ahead twice from out of the passenger window of a Citroën moving fast over uneven ground after shots aimed at them from the Volvo and the BMW. Their shots missed. Vic’s didn’t.

  Harpur’s interception platoon were in the Citroën and a Ford, both unmarked. They’d waited and watched in the dark, unnoticeable among a string of parked cars on the road bordering a public open sports field. This had been specified by Lamb at the block house as the new transaction site. A Vauxhall and a Peugeot already stood at one end of the field, probably immaterial. Harpur thought they could be love buggies: a soccer ground in the day, nooky at night. Jack had said to expect the target cars between ten thirty p.m. and eleven. At ten fifty, the Volvo, its registration spot-on, arrived and waited. It was at a distance, but near enough for them to hear that the driver kept its engine running. At two minutes to eleven the BMW came to a stop by the Volvo.

  In the Citroën, Harpur said, “We go now.” He drove, with Vic Callinicos alongside him. Harpur took the car up over the kerb and pavement and on to the grass. The Ford with Garland in charge followed. They had fix-on blue lamps and got them going at once. Garland also carried a loudspeaker in the Ford and began yelling: “Armed Police, Armed Police, get out with your hands up.” Despite this din and the cars’ engine roar, Harpur heard shots from the BMW and Volvo, and heard Vic Callinicos’s reply. He saw the driver of the BMW pitch forward against the windscreen and the man in the Volvo passenger seat lurch to his right. In a minute the Citroën had reached the BMW and Harpur braked and jumped out. He had a Walther in each jacket pocket and produced one of them now, and started howling the “Armed Police” advertisement himself. You could valve off some of the fear that way. He was on the driver’s side of the BMW, its window down. With his free hand, he was about to pull the door open when the man in the passenger seat leaned across
behind the body of the driver and blurted: “All right, all right. Here,” and threw a Browning pistol out through the window. When Harpur did open the door, the driver’s body tumbled on to the field and covered the Browning. Harpur got a grip on the front passenger’s arm and dragged him out. Harpur did not recognize either of them: a supply firm from away, most likely. The packages were very neatly laid out right the way across the back seat. As Jack had said, a lot.

  At the Volvo, too, resistance stalled, though the engine kept going. Vic could not only shoot, he could identify the right ones to shoot to neutralize an enemy. When Harpur went to that car, he found he did know these men, the alive and the dead: Karl Dane, arrested, and Joshua Tive-Amory, both local, both very small small-timers until now. So, perhaps Lamb’s and Iles’s joint theory of a fast-widening threat stood up. Garland handcuffed the two survivors to the BMW steering wheel while a money search of their clothes and the Volvo went on. Dane said: “Who the fuck sold us then, Mr Harpur?”

  “Sold you?” Harpur said.

  “You had us surrounded, didn’t you. Four fucking cars here to swamp us. Major planning. Who sold us?”

  “Just two, the Ford and the Citroën,” Harpur said. “All we needed for such a soft job. The other two cars are not ours. A bit of rudimentary guesswork told us you’d be back.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Dane said.

  “You’d better believe it,” Harpur replied. And he decided, then, that he ought to make sure the people in those original two parked cars were all right. Salvoes had flown tonight, who knew where? The Vauxhall moved off fast as Harpur approached. Somebody, or some pair, or even some trio, hetero perhaps, homo perhaps, mixed perhaps, didn’t wish to get sucked into this scene. He memorized the registration all the same, in case they’d do as witnesses.

  In the back seat of the second, the Peugeot, he now recognized Iles and his friend Honorée, efficiently getting themselves back into presentable shape. Iles lowered a window and said: “Perhaps I mentioned previously, Col, that Honorée wanted a change of location following the Lonton business. Well, I’m not sure this is better, after all, are you? I think we took a shot through the driver’s door and into the upholstery. One might have been sitting there, you know, Harpur.”

  “Probably you’re a back seat person in fields, sir.”

  “How about you give me the Walther, Harpur?” Iles replied. “It will look to the rest of them as if I’d been duly notified of this operation – and I should, should, and should, have been duly notified of this operation, holding the position, as you’ll recall, of Assistant Chief (Operations) – and so, having, we’ll imagine, been notified of it, decided to contribute in a personal, armed capacity. That would make the illicitness of this more or less all right, I feel. And the car hirer can then charge headquarters for the bullet trouble to his car.”

  “The illicitness of what, sir?” Harpur replied. “You mean you and Honorée having a—”

  “Let’s go and chat to the baddies and their captors, shall we, Col?” Iles left the car and he and Harpur walked towards the BMW and the Volvo. Iles paused, and Harpur paused with him. The ACC said: “Sly and eternal thicko, when I call it illicit, I mean, of course, you running a damn secret, unapproved, cordite campaign in which I might have got my balls shot off. But fortunately, now this has become an official police victory, with the Assistant Chief a participant. I think we can swing that. It’s why I wanted your Walther. Authenticity. But, all right, if you object, I’ll—”

  “I have a spare Walther, sir.”

  “There we are then,” Iles replied.

  Harpur gave him the pistol intended by Jack for the sixth man. Iles would do as the sixth man. “It has to be handed back later.”

  “Handed back to whom?” Iles said.

  “Will Honorée disappear while we’re over here, sir, with the task force, prisoners and deads? That the idea? She can sneak away to the road and a cab?”

  “Disappear? Of course she won’t disappear, Col. This is a fine and precious girl. This is plainly a girl I brought with me as cover. If you’re masquerading as an amour car for the purpose of ambush, you need to have a girl with you, don’t you, Harpur? She’s like a theatrical prop, isn’t she? It’s called verisimilitude. You’ll find that one in the dictionary, too.”

  “I hadn’t thought of cover as an explanation for her, sir.”

  “Don’t get despondent. I can think for both of us, Col. It’s a habit.”

  “I haven’t had time to congratulate you on the funeral, sir. You were very measured, if I may say.”

  “I think you may. I appreciated the setting. I loved that wall text.”

  “Which?”

  “The main one,” Iles replied.

  “ ‘Without shedding of blood is no remission,’ “ Harpur said.

  PROVENANCE

  Robert Barnard

  Leonid noticed the man when he was on his way to put a new label on a Manet picture on the third floor. The picture was due to be packed and taken away for exhibition in Lyons. The Hermitage, since the collapse of Communism, was readier to lend its treasures for special events such as the Lyons Manet show: sometimes they accepted loans in return, in lieu of payment, but mostly they insisted on payment, preferably in dollars. After all, they had more than enough pictures of their own.

  The man Leonid noticed was dressed in a T-shirt and sneakers and was walking up the Grand Staircase, looking neither to left or right. The gilded curlicues decorating the walls, the gods on cloud nine on the ceiling, the sturdy grey pillars with thickly encrusted gilt at their feet went unregarded by him. Leonid had never seen, or never noticed, him before, but as he gained the second floor he showed no hesitation in setting off in the direction of the Large Hermitage. The Grand Staircase could rarely have had so summary a dismissal. The man acted as if he knew the palace too well to notice it, but Leonid felt sure he did not. He knew where he was going because he was well prepared. Leonid shook his head and went about his business.

  A quarter of an hour later he descended from the French Impressionists and found himself among the Dutch paintings in the Large Hermitage. Perhaps curiosity about the man had something to do with his destination. Certainly he walked around without apparent goal until he spotted him in front of one of the Rembrandts which were the pride of the Hermitage collection, a jewel even among the palace’s three million items. Leonid stood back and watched. The man put his face close to the bilingual label under the picture, then moved on. It could have been a picture by a teenage art student for all he cared. The next picture he stopped at, by a lesser figure, was considered, evaluated, taken in. Then the man put his head down again close to the label. A second or two later he straightened, a satisfied expression on his face.

  He took out a little notebook, then wrote something in it, checking what he wrote against the label under the picture.

  When the man had moved out of sight, Leonid went over to the picture, though he knew the description by heart. It was “Spring Landscape” by Cuyp, and it had been acquired by the Hermitage from the Yusupov Collection in 1922.

  Leonid was more than intrigued. He was professionally interested. When a Spanish touring group swarmed into the gallery, surrounding a harsh-voiced woman holding a little banner aloft, he joined them as they went to one of the great Rembrandts. Leonid’s quarry had been standing in front of it, but now he moved smartly aside to one of the small pictures hung beside it. Leonid became part of the Spanish group and managed to get the place beside the man with the notebook. In that little book there was a list, ending with the landscape by Cuyp, but headed by two intriguing entries. Leonid saw:

  Renoir: Portrait of Mme. Bercy. Acquired from the Spaskov Collection, 1921.

  Picasso: Young Girl With Parasol. Acquired from the Berisov-Vernet Collection, 1924.

  So he had already done the twenty or thirty rooms on the top floor devoted to the French Impressionists and the moderns. Why had they provided him with so few entries for his notebook?r />
  A possible answer floated into Leonid’s mind, and his heart sank.

  He turned his attention to the Rembrandt now being described by the Spanish-speaking guide. It was a painting imprinted on his heart and brain down to the last casual brush-stroke. He tried to estimate the guide’s expertise by the number of words he recognised: Amsterdam, Franz Hals, Saskia, National Gallery. Leonid had no foreign language beyond a rather halting English. When the Spanish group moved on to the next preselected high spot the man he was interested in was gone. Leonid went down the central aisle of the Dutch galleries, looking in every alcove, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

  Leonid was troubled. Life had been so easy in the later years of Communist rule, when he had first come to work at the Hermitage. Then he had had a clearly defined specialist area (preservation) in which he worked. He was not thanked if he let his interest stray to any other area, where he would only be trespassing on someone else’s special preserve.

  Now it was all so different. True, his salary was now once again (Putin be praised!) paid regularly, but so much more was now expected of him. He was required to have an interest in the whole spectrum of the gallery’s possessions and activities-conservation, display, inter-gallery loans, the education programme, the shop and other commercial enterprises, PR . . . It was all very bewildering. They even had staff meetings, which ranged over these and myriad other topics. It was possible to make an awful fool of oneself at these meetings, and though Leonid was not aware that he had done that, he did feel he had not shone. How could he shine? He was the product of a different age. How could he talk confidently about the commercial exploitability of a Cuyp landscape or Gauguin’s South Sea Island girls?

  On his way back to his office on the ground floor he struck lucky. He was just passing the main cafeteria when he heard an American voice and, turning, he saw the object of his interest. He was standing at the coffee counter expostulating with the woman behind it.

  “Chocolate! CHOCOLATE! I always have chocolate with a cappuccino.”