The Hireling's Tale Read online

  ‘Get the authoritative word from Ballistics,’ said Crowe. ‘But yes, that’s what it was. In the right hands - which it was - a gun like that would be accurate at very long range.’

  ‘Quarter of a mile?’

  ‘Quarter of a mile would be nothing to a gun like that.’

  Which left Shapiro more confused than ever. So now he was supposed to believe that Wicksy saw something in the twenty minutes after Donovan left Cornmarket that not only meant he had to be killed, but that whoever needed him dead had immediate access to a hired assassin, possibly from South America, who was accurate with a sniper rifle at a range of quarter of a mile or more. He thought he’d go back to believing in the Golem before he’d believe that.

  Then Donovan came in, knocking as an afterthought, and though he didn’t know it he had the answer. ‘I just had the funniest phonecall.’

  Shapiro sniffed. ‘And you think that makes you someone special?’

  Donovan gave his saturnine grin before continuing. ‘Keith Baker. You know, the vet? He stopped me this morning, he had a dead sheep, apparently it had been shot - by kids, he reckoned. Except when he opened it up and recovered the bullets, they didn’t come from any kid’s gun, or any farmer’s gun either.’

  Shapiro felt the creeping unease of déjà vu. ‘Let me guess. It was a sniper rifle? Fired from anything up to quarter of a mile away?’

  Donovan had long suspected Shapiro of having extrasensory perception. It was the only explanation for some of the leaps of intuition he’d made over the years. But even that didn’t explain this. ‘Have you bugged my phone?’ he asked suspiciously.

  Shapiro shook his head. ‘I’ve just heard from Crowe. Wicksy was shot with the same gun.’ He sucked in a deep breath. ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’

  Donovan was good at his job, but as a philosopher he wasn’t in Shapiro’s class. ‘That the sheep saw the same thing Wicksy did?’

  But Shapiro was too worried to be amused. He shook his head. ‘Wicksy didn’t see anything. The man who killed him didn’t know him, had nothing to gain from his death. But he sure as hell means to shoot someone, and he wants to be sure of a clean kill. It’s going to be a long shot, so he needs to get the gun sighted in - is that what you call it? - adjust the sights so that he hits what he’s aiming at even at long range.

  ‘Donovan, the bastard was practising. First on the sheep; and when he was happy with that, just to make sure, he practised over the same distance with a human being.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘The conference,’ said Liz. ‘Where’s that list of delegates?’

  He wasn’t sure whether he was getting old or she was getting sneaky, but increasingly these days Shapiro found himself having to work to keep up with her. He found the list but still hadn’t worked out why she wanted it. ‘You think the two things are connected? You think that whoever killed the girl … Or rather, you think the man who killed the girl is the target? Or maybe … He gave up. ‘What do you think?’

  Liz looked taken aback. Nothing so sophisticated: it had only occurred to her that, with so many foreigners in town over the weekend, anything smacking of international intrigue might involve one of them. ‘Dr Crowe mentioned South America. I wondered if any of Mr Kendall’s delegates came from there.’

  Two Brazilians representing a company in Sao Paulo had shared one room, a third representing the government occupied another. ‘He’s still there,’ said Shapiro. ‘Eduardo da Costa. I met him: small man, sharp dresser.’

  ‘It’s hardly a reason to assassinate him.’

  ‘Maybe he’s the assassin.’

  Liz thought about it, then shook her head. ‘That hotel’s at the centre of a murder inquiry: it’s the last place a mechanic would stay. And da Costa’s been here for five days, which is four days too long. Whatever the mechanic’s here for, he’ll do it today. He arrived overnight, he sighted his gun in first thing this morning, he’ll do the job today and be gone by the time we hear about it. No one in The Barbican Hotel is a mechanic; but one of them may be the target.’

  Also on the list were a Uruguayan from Montevideo and a Mexican with a Scottish name. Most of them checked out after breakfast on Monday, long before Wicksy or even the sheep got shot. It was hard to see why anyone who wished them ill would be sighting in his gun twenty-four hours after they left town. Which suggested the target was one of the eleven delegates left at The Barbican. Two of them were from South America: da Costa and Selkirk.

  ‘Don’t get hung up on the South American angle,’ advised Shapiro. ‘A professional mechanic will work for anyone who can afford him, the politics are irrelevant. Even if it is the same man, he won’t confine himself to people from one part of the world.’

  It was never more than a shot in the dark. Liz was just looking desperately for somewhere to start: somewhere to begin chipping at the monolith. Someone they didn’t know was going to kill someone else they didn’t know for some reason beyond their ken. It was like looking at a black glass pyramid, there was no way of getting hold of it and no way of getting inside. Somehow they had to chip a hole in the façade to see what was happening behind it, and all they had was the list.

  Everything had happened so quickly there’d been no time to register the astonishment that events common enough in Colombia, in New York and Moscow and Naples, and not totally unheard of in London, had found their way to Castlemere. Dull, grey, work-a-day Castlemere. When she had a moment the fact that they were up against a hired killer would leave her breathless, even more amazed than appalled. But right now she needed to concentrate on the practicalities, and nothing was more practical, more concrete, than two corpses in the morgue. ‘All right. But the target’s on this list somewhere. And so, probably, is whoever killed the girl.’

  Shapiro couldn’t argue with that. ‘The same man?’

  She considered. ‘No. It doesn’t work. Nobody hires a top-class assassin to avenge a hooker. Even if they did, it wouldn’t happen here. Whoever killed the girl is long gone. If someone was after him, he’d have followed.’

  Shapiro closed one eye in a pensive squint. ‘So if the mechanic’s here the target’s still here; so whoever he is he didn’t kill the girl.’

  ‘That’s how I see it. The target is probably one of the eleven men still in the hotel. The man who killed the girl is probably one of the thirty-seven who’ve already left.’

  Shapiro nodded. ‘Get over to the hotel, get those eleven together and tell them what we suspect: that a hired killer is after one of them. That should loosen somebody’s tongue. I’ll see Kendall, have him flesh out the list with a bit of background information. Once we identify the target we can do something about protecting him.’

  ‘What do you want me to do about Maddie Cotterick?’ asked Donovan gruffly. He’d been sitting on the windowsill, contributing nothing until now.

  ‘I’m not sure what you can do. You could leave messages with some friends, so if it’s a coincidence and she’s safe enough she can let us know. Unless she turns up dead, she probably just went off on holiday without telling anyone.’

  ‘She didn’t pack for a holiday,’ objected Donovan. ‘She grabbed things in a hurry and got out. She was scared.’

  ‘If she’d heard about the girl on the boat she had good reason to be scared,’ said Liz. ‘If I was a tom, I’d think this was a good time to be out of town too.’

  It was fair comment, but somehow Donovan didn’t think they were taking Maddie Cotterick’s disappearance as seriously as they might. As seriously as they would have if she’d been, say, the local librarian, she hadn’t turned up for work one day and her house looked as if she’d left in a hurry. Perhaps it was natural, even inevitable. If he challenged them they’d say, reasonably enough, that people with regular jobs keep regular hours and acting out of character is less likely to be significant in those without much character in the first place. Yesterday he’d have agreed with them. But now he’d been in her house, he’d got some kind of a handle on Ma
ddie Cotterick, and he thought she was entitled to more from them than she was getting.

  He went back to his office and started leafing through her address book. One of the few advantages of converting a private house into a police station was that everyone above bog-standard constable got their own office. Donovan’s had originally been a maid’s bedroom. Shapiro’s, as befitted his status, had been the butler’s.

  ‘Did you sense a certain chill in the air just then?’ asked Shapiro after he’d gone.

  Liz nodded. ‘He thinks we’d be doing more if the victims had been People Like Us.’

  ‘Maybe he’s right. We’ve got two bodies, a prostitute and a wino, but what we’re actually talking about is who the next victim might be. Because if somebody’s brought in a professional mechanic, a man who’s such a perfectionist that he practises on real people, his target is someone important.’

  ‘More to the point,’ said Liz, ‘his target is still alive. If we find him quickly enough we may be able to keep him that way. Wicksy and the girl on the boat are a lower priority not because they’re less important but because things can’t get any worse for them. We have to protect the living before we can spare time for the dead.’

  ‘But you don’t think the two cases are connected.’

  She’d already said so, and given her reasons. If he was asking again it was because he was unconvinced. She thought some more but didn’t change her mind. ‘I can’t see how. There’s a mechanic in town, and he killed Wicksy for target practice. That’s seriously scary. He’s going to kill someone else - but it won’t be the man who pushed a prostitute off a roof. Who’d have paid him - her friends? He earns big, big money. Whoever the girl was, if she mattered to someone with that deep a pocket she wouldn’t have been on the game.’

  ‘So we’ve got two killers to find, and one of them we have to find before he kills someone else. All we know about him is that he’s an expert with a sniper rifle.’ Shapiro shook his head, defeated. ‘Our only chance is finding the target. Go talk to the people at The Barbican.’

  Liz was halfway to the door when her step slowed and she turned back, her expression troubled. ‘Damn it, Frank, have we got this wrong? It would almost make more sense if he’s not one of the delegates at all. If he was, the mechanic should have been here earlier. It’s only a fluke that any of them are still in town. What if it’s a local man he’s after?’

  Shapiro scowled at her. ‘You’re supposed to be narrowing the field. Now you tell me it could be anyone in a population of about sixty thousand.’

  Liz twitched him a little smile. ‘Not just anyone. Someone wealthy and well-connected. Whoever wants him dead certainly is, but he wouldn’t have to spend this kind of money stepping on some little person who annoyed him. If he’s hired a real pro it’s because the target’s going to be hard to reach. He may have permanent protection, or he may know he’s in danger. That’s why it has to be a long-range hit.’

  Shapiro thought, She’s getting good at this. ‘So on a list of council-tax payers he should be in the top band.’

  ‘Along with an awful lot of others,’ Liz admitted ruefully. ‘We can’t protect them all. We can’t even warn them all: ten per cent would have heart attacks, forty per cent would grab the nearest gun - to the immediate danger of themselves, their families, their neighbours and their milkmen - and the rest would end up in hospital with perforated ulcers. If we do nothing, someone’s going to die. If we do too much, half a dozen people could.’

  That was when the phonecall came in. Shapiro took it; Liz went to leave but he waved her back to her seat. ‘Mr Kendall - Mr Kendall, calm down. Tell me what’s happened.’

  Donovan went with him. Shapiro explained while he drove. It would have been normal practice for the sergeant to drive while the superintendent sat in state beside him, but motorcyclists don’t make good chauffeurs. They lean into the corners, and forget that they need more space on the road than the width of their knees.

  ‘Well, now we know what our assassin’s here for,’ he said. ‘He’s here for Philip Kendall. How the sales director of a custom engineering company comes to make the sort of enemies who send round a professional hit man is something else.’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell you?’

  ‘He said he didn’t know. He sounded panicky enough for it to be the truth.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Philip Kendall took a leisurely breakfast, as he always did, with his wife and the Financial Times. Before leaving for work he took his geriatric Labrador for a stroll round the garden of his house at Cambridge Road. Once they used to walk as far as the Chevening Moss Road; but Rosie was getting old seven times faster than her master, a gentle inspection of the shrubbery suited her better now.

  They were returning to the house, Kendall was actually climbing the steps to the back door, when a brick in the wall beside him exploded. There was no noise except a sort of clipped pfutt as a shower of masonry fragments erupted from the hole. They stung his hand; it was almost more that than the sound that drew his attention.

  When he looked at the hole in the wall, his first absurd thought was, You’d almost think a bullet did that. His second was, A bullet did do that! He left his third thought out on the step with the surprised dog while he raced inside, locking everything that would lock, curtaining everything that would curtain, grabbing for the phone.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘He says so. He doesn’t think there was a second shot. Of course, by then he was under the sofa.’

  Shapiro’s car wasn’t the only one heading for the scene. Access to the back gardens in the smart part of Cambridge Road was by a green lane running behind the houses. An Armed Response Unit was on its way to intercept anyone leaving that way, though in all likelihood it was already too late. The moment Kendall disappeared into his house a professional assassin would evacuate the area. He wouldn’t get another chance in the immediate future, and any delay increased the risk that he wouldn’t be able to return. A man got to be a top-class mechanic partly by being good with a gun but mainly by being good at risk assessment. A hit man who doesn’t know when to leave and come back later is going to figure in a lot of photographs with numbers on them.

  But a top-class mechanic would always come back. He would always complete the job. Nothing, including threats to his freedom or his life, would make him abandon a job. It was part of the credo. You decide whether the money’s worth the risk before you take it. Because in this line, commitment has to be absolute.

  Another police car was heading for the motorway interchange. But with no description the chances of spotting something suspicious were right around zero. People like this man didn’t get careless and leave their telescopic sight on the car’s parcel shelf beside the nodding Alsatian. They wore suits and had a briefcase on the back seat, and if stopped their credentials were faultless. If the papers in the briefcase were about critical path analysis, they could talk critical path analysis with the best.

  All of which was bad news for the man on whom a professional hit had been ordered. If he ran he’d be followed; if he hid he’d be found; if the attempt was unsuccessful it would be repeated, as often as necessary. The assassin couldn’t be found by assiduous detective work among the target’s circle of acquaintance. Even the person who hired him may never have met him, and might be in no position to stop him even if - by dint of detective brilliance or great good fortune - CID managed to track him down. A mechanic on your case was a little like having Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: it mightn’t show right away, but ultimately the results would be devastating.

  ‘Bespoke Engineering,’ ruminated Donovan. ‘These guys make bits of machinery for individual customers?’

  ‘As I understand it.’

  ‘Remember the Iraqi gun fiasco?’

  Shapiro did. A British company was commissioned to manufacture some piping to an Iraqi design. The end use was uncertain: something for the oil industry was a good guess, and one expert positively identified the f
inished product as part of a condenser. Only it turned out to be part of an artillery piece designed to hurl shells at Israel. Export was blocked, but it took a court case to exonerate the manufacturers.

  ‘You think Kendall’s sold his firm’s services to - what? An unfriendly government? A terrorist organization?’

  Donovan shrugged. ‘Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he’s found out and they want to shut him up.’

  It made sense. It belonged to a different world, but it did make sense. The sort of organization or individual who could commission that sort of job could afford the most expensive hit available.

  ‘Then perhaps the best way to protect Kendall is to find out what he’s sold to whom and make it public,’ said Shapiro. ‘If it’s no longer a secret his clients might as well call off the dogs. It’ll be hard enough to explain placing an illegal order; if it turns out they were willing to assassinate the salesman as well, they may find it pretty hard to do business in future.’

  ‘Will Kendall talk? A deal like that, confidentiality will be built in.’

  ‘The way he sounded on the phone, he’ll tell us everything he knows, everything he suspects and everything his wife’s mother saw in the tea leaves. He’s a frightened man, Sergeant, and frightened men rethink their priorities. Besides, whatever confidentiality he signed up to, it didn’t include this. They lied to him; now they’re trying to kill him. He’ll talk faster than you can write it down.’

  Understandably, Philip Kendall didn’t meet them at his front gate. The area car was there and PC Stark checked the occupants of Shapiro’s Jaguar before admitting them. WPC Wilson answered the door.

  ‘They’re in the morning-room, sir.’ It was at the side of the house; only a sniper perched in the cherry tree outside would have been able to shoot through its one window.

  But Kendall was still nervous. Half an hour ago someone tried to kill him. If he’d been six inches to the right as he came up those steps it wouldn’t have mattered how many policemen had been distributed around the house and grounds.