This was where we parted.
‘Did that girl get a good look at you?’ he asked as I opened the door. They were the first words he’d spoken since the shootings.
‘No, we’ll be all right. It was too dark.’
He sighed. ‘I don’t like it, you know. Three murders, and now we’ve got a witness.’
Admittedly it didn’t sound too good when he put it like that, but at the time there was no reason to think that we weren’t in the clear.
‘Don’t worry. We’ve covered our tracks well enough.’
‘There’s going to be a lot of heat over this one, Dennis.’
‘We both knew that when we took the job. As long as we keep calm, and keep our mouths shut, we won’t feel any of it.’
I gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder, and told him I’d call him the next day.
The Rover’s keys were behind the front driver’s side wheel. I got in, started the engine and followed Danny out of the car park. He turned south and I turned north.
And that should have been that, but tonight was not my lucky night. I’d barely gone three miles and was just short of the turning that would take me back to London when I hit an improvised roadblock. There were two Pandas with flashing lights at the side of the road: officers in fluorescent safety jackets were milling about a BMW they’d already stopped. My heart gave an initial jump but I quickly recovered myself. No reason to worry. I was a man on my own, unarmed, driving a car that had never been within five miles of the Traveller’s Rest, and they wouldn’t even have the vaguest description of me yet. The clock on the dashboard said 9.22.
One of them saw my approach and stepped out into the road, flashing his torch and motioning for me to pull up behind the other car. I did as I was told and wound down the window as he approached the driver’s side. He was young, no more than twenty-three, and very fresh-faced. They say you can tell you’re getting old when the coppers look young. I could just about have been this kid’s dad. He looked really enthusiastic as well. That wouldn’t last. A second officer stood a few feet behind him, watching, but the other two were preoccupied with the driver of the other car. None of them appeared to be armed, which I thought was a bit foolish under the circumstances. I could have run this roadblock and they wouldn’t have had a chance.
‘Good evening, sir.’ He leaned down into the window and gave me and the car a gentle once-over.
It always pays to be polite. ‘Evening, officer. How can I help?’
‘There’s been an incident at a hotel called the Traveller’s Rest on the A10. About fifteen minutes ago. You haven’t come that way, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come from Clavering. I’m on my way to London.’
He nodded understandingly, and then looked at me again. You could tell that for some reason he wasn’t entirely convinced, although I don’t know why. I’m not the type who arouses suspicions. I genuinely look like a nice guy. There shouldn’t have been any alarm bells.
But there were. Maybe I’d just met the new Ellery Queen.
‘Have you got any identification, sir? Just for the record.’
I sighed. I didn’t want to have to do this because it could well cause me a lot of long-term problems, but I didn’t see that I had much choice.
For a split second I baulked.
Then I reached into my pocket and removed the warrant card.
He took it, inspected it carefully, looked back at me, then back at the warrant card, just to double check, probably wondering why his instincts were so wrong. When he looked back again, he had an embarrassed expression on his face.
‘Detective Sergeant Milne. I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t realize.’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Course you didn’t. You’re just doing your job. But if you don’t mind, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
‘Of course, sir, no problem.’ He stepped back from the car. ‘Have a nice evening.’
I said goodnight, and put the car in reverse. Poor sod. I remembered only too well what it was like to be out on nights like these, being paid a pittance to stand around for hours on end with the rain pissing down on your head. Knowing that the people you were meant to be looking for were probably miles away. Oh, the joys of being a uniformed copper.
I waved as I drove past, and he waved back. I wondered how long it would take him to lose the enthusiasm; how long before he, too, realized that by playing by the rules he was just banging his head against a brick wall.
I gave him two years.
2
I used to know a guy called Tom Darke. Tomboy, as he was known, was a buyer and seller of stolen goods. If you’d nicked something – whatever it was – Tomboy would give you a price for it, and you could be sure that somewhere down the line he’d have a customer who’d take it off him. He was also an informant, and a good one too if you measure such things by how many people his information convicted. The secret of his success lay in the fact that he was a likeable character who was good company. He used to say that he listened well rather than listened hard, and he never asked too many questions. Consequently, there wasn’t a lot that went on among the North London criminal fraternity that he didn’t know about, and such was his affability that even as the local lowlifes were going down like overweight skydivers no-one ever suspected old Tomboy of being involved.
I once asked him why he did it. Why, as the Aussies would say, did he dob in blokes who were meant to be
