“I wanna phone at the gas-station over there to let ’em know we’re on the way.”
Hoffa sat waiting in the car looking across to the lights of the McLouth Steel Corporation’s huge complex. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes past midnight and the little squares said it was already the 30th of July.
When the Italian got back in the car he didn’t speak or look at Hoffa, and ten minutes later he pulled into a deserted lay-by. Hoffa was sitting with his eyes closed but he wasn’t asleep and the pressure of the silencer against his chest made him stir. He looked down, then, disbelieving, he looked at the Italian. “For Christ’s sake what …” And those were the last words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke.
Half an hour later the car drove through the open gates of a scrapyard. Two men helped the Italian stuff Hoffa’s body into the fifty-gallon oildrum. The big jib-crane swung down and its metal claws gripped the oildrum, biting into the metal swages, lifting it over the pyramids of rusting metal to the scrap-crusher. When the oildrum was released ten minutes later, from the press that could pulp a truck to a neat bale of metal in ten minutes, it was a quite small cube. That would normally have been the end of the matter but the men who had given the order wanted absolute finality and a truck took the bale to a smelting plant in River Rouge. There the Italian stood on the platform shielding his eyes from the white heat and watched the bale of metal drop into the molten metal of the furnace.
9
Maclaren left his car at what had once been the grand entrance to the estate and the big house, which was now no more than two gaunt stone pillars with an eroded coat of arms carved on a shield at eye-level. The big house had been bulldozed flat by the developers’ men a week before the local authority appeal to make it a listed building was to be heard by the Ministry. The ensuing public outrage had been pointless apart from ensuring that the Lodge House and the Dower House could not be demolished. There had been no intention to demolish them. They could be done up and sold for a good price. Meanwhile the Dower House had been let. A young American diplomat had taken it on a twelve-month lease.
There were lights on downstairs in the house and one bedroom window showed a pale pink glow through the net curtains. Maclaren turned his back to the house to light a cigarette and held it cupped in his palm when he turned back to keep watch.
He had watched the house for two weeks, alternating the shifts with Sturgiss. The red Mustang was there. It was there almost every night except at the weekends when the girl’s husband was at home. She worked in Woolworth’s and her husband was a joiner on the night-shift at one of the big furniture factories in High Wycombe. But Maclaren guessed that she was earning more money in her sessions with the young American than she earned at Woolworth’s. She was in her early twenties and it was her gossip with one of the girls at the store that had caused Maclaren and Sturgiss to be sent down. Her gossip had been with the girl on the sweet-counter who happened to be the girl-friend of a police-constable at Marlow police station. According to the girl her extra-marital boy friend not only looked like James Bond but had told her that he was a real-life spy.
When Maclaren and Sturgiss first went down to Marlow and the house near the moorings at Temple, they had taken for granted that it was a waste of time. Just the usual bullshit that was meant to impress a girl enough to get her into bed. But when they saw the little dish aerial lashed to the tallest chimney they changed their minds. It wasn’t big or particularly noticeable, but it was a piece of powerful high-technology that Cheltenham had confirmed as being suitable for both long-range transmission and receiving. What was also significant was that the aerial lead went down inside the chimney so that it couldn’t be tapped from outside the house.
The American was in his late twenties, and he did have a vague resemblance to Bond in the days when Sean Connery first played the part. Except for shopping and eating he seldom went out, but whenever he went into the town he called for mail at the main Post Office. Maclaren had asked for a mail check but Century House hadn’t responded either way. Neither would they agree to a break-in without more indication that it was necessary. Maclaren despised the old-maidish reaction. In the kind of work he normally carried out for SIS the only reason you needed for a break-in was that you wanted to do it.
Except for the rustling of disturbed wood-pigeons in the copse of willows and chestnuts, and a distant quack from a restless mallard, there was complete silence. From far away Maclaren could just make out the faint sounds of the traffic on Marlow Bridge. But as often happens just before midnight a slight breeze got up, stirring the branches of the trees and flapping the shrouds of pleasure boats moored on the river bank on the far side of the house. As he looked up at the full moon the faint trails of cloud across its face were barely moving and the sky was almost clear.
It was just before one o’clock when he heard the sound of the car. It was coming up the lane from the road and he turned to look towards the gate. He was just in time to see the headlights fade into darkness. It was a small pick-up van, not a car, and it was still coming on, in the dark. He saw its
