Blake's own house. Of course, they hadn't talked confidential in the hotel restaurant, but if they had music to drown them now, sure as hell they talked serious business, and he could not hear a bloody word. He was wet, he was cold, he was bloody miserable, and some time soon the bloody dogs would want putting out. He was an hour's drive from home, and at home there would be a darkened bedroom and the wife's back, cold.
There was the jewel moment. Harry Compton, wet and miserable, could have bloody well jumped and cheered. The CD, Oasis, had played out.
'… working hard at getting their different acts together. I think they'll be all right.'
'You know of Roberto Calvi?'
'Yes, of course.'
'They want the business?'
'Of course, and they want the commission.'
'If they want the business, the commission, then they should know of Roberto Calvi.
They should be told that Roberto Calvi deceived people, that he was strangled slowly.'
'Do we have to have more of the same? Kids'll think I'm on monkey glands.'
'Remind them to be careful. Please, something else…'
And something else was Elton bloody John. Harry Compton would hear nothing else for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. Within an hour, damn certain, rain or no rain, the bloody dogs would be put out into the garden. He dropped on his hands and knees from the window of the house, the nice bloody pad that went with soaping and rinsing and drying mafia money, across the flagstone path. Onto his stomach, and the crawl into the landscaper's shrub bed, and caught immediately by the thorny pyracantha. His wife had planted one of the bloody things beside her little greenhouse, and he might just, next Sunday, dig the damn thing out or plaster it with weedkiller. What he'd seen of Giles Blake, and of Mrs Giles Blake when she'd been clearing up the kitchen, luxury bloody fittings, they wouldn't do the garden because they paid for maintenance, and that was good because there was no way he could avoid smearing a trail across the earth and the mulch of the shrub bed. He went fast. He reckoned he had enough for a disclosure warrant from a judge, for a telephone- intercept order from the Home Office, maybe enough for a dawn knock and handcuffs. The name of Roberto Calvi was the diamond.
Rotten investments for bad people, bad people's money down the drain, strangled and left hanging from Blackfriars Bridge where the world and the world's dog could see what happened to a joker who lost bad people's money.
As he went over the wall, dropped down into the lane, Harry Compton heard the voice of the woman calling out the dogs. He loathed the sort of people who lived in that sort of house behind that sort of wall. He himself had earned a maximum of?27,380
(inclusive of overtime) the last year. The sort of people he loathed, through scams and greed and criminality, would have clawed in a minimum of?273,800 (part-time working) the last year. He had the big thrill, like best sex, when he did the dawn call on the bastards, when he had the handcuffs open. And it would be good, best, to have the Sicilian bastard in the interview room. He reached his car.
He peeled off his overalls, kicked out of his boots. One nagging thought – what was the role of the young woman, 'pressurized' by the DEA, gone as a child-minder to Sicily? Where did she fit? He cut it. The young woman was altitude politics. He fed in the world of mud-smeared overalls, filth-scraped boots.
He drove home.
Chapter Twelve
It doesn't matter what it says.' The detective superintendent swung his chair so that he faced the window.
Harry Compton held the audio-cassette in his hand, then made the gesture and dropped it on the desk, onto his unread report. 'I had a hell of a drenching. I crawled through the garden.'
'What do you want, a medal? We are not playing at Scouts.'
Harry Compton had come to work bubbling in a froth of personal satisfaction. Had left the kit, smeared in dried mud, outside the locked door of Stores section. Up to his desk in the open-plan area, first one in apart from Miss Frobisher, and she too must have realized that a jackpot had been won because he had the success gleam in his eye, and she had put the kettle on and made him a mug of her own particular coffee, which was not the muck out of the vending machine in the corridor. He had listened to the tape, twice. Gone through the last Oasis track, the clean conversation, the start of the first Elton John track. He had typed his report, transcribed the tape, underlined in red the references to Roberto Calvi and then sat on his hands while the office filled and waited for his detective superintendent to get to work.
'What I am trying to say, Roberto Calvi is not a name that trips off the tongues of every pair of business people sitting down for a little chat on how to make a good buck.'
'You don't cop on quick, do you?'
The detective superintendent was searching his drawer and coming up with his cigarette packet. About two days in every five, it was said, the detective superintendent tried to pack in his smoking, and the intention usually lasted about an hour or up to Ihe first of the morning's crises. But two days out of five he could be foul-tempered and sarcastic with it.
'I used to think, Harry, you were quite bright, a clever little sod. Right now I reckon you're dumb. Hear me, and I'll do it slowly. This is politics. We stumbled into something, we pushed it a bit, took it to the bosses, and they've claimed it as their own.
That is politics. The politics are between us, way above me, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, way above their London man. It's good politics for us to have a stick to belt the DEA with because that's the route to trading. We make a noise, a high-level noise, we promise to make their life difficult. And to shut us up we get something in return – could be equipment, could be priority on an investigation in their back yard, could be computer access or something from their phone-tap capability, anything – that is politics. Politics are on the high ground, you and I are in the gutter. Don't make bloody faces, Harry, don't bloody sulk. While you were doing the gardening down in Surrey last night, and hunting medals, the commander had the AC (SO) beating his ears for half an hour. Up above the clouds they see this as good politics and your suggestion would screw those politics, ditch the chance of trading lor something in return. We play
"civilized". Your suggestion, lift this Ruggerio man, would blow apart the DEA's insertion of that young woman – what's her bloody name?'
'Miss Charlotte Eunice Parsons. Sorry you'd forgotten.'
'Can't help being clever, can you? That young woman's insertion into a mafia family is now politics.'
Harry Compton flared. 'She was pressured.'
'She's between a rock and a hard place. She's for bartering for political advantage.
She's about as irrelevant as an individual as bloody Giles Blake and bloody Ruggerio.'
The cigarette smoke hung between them. The noise of the traffic below wafted through the window. He was flattened. Harry Compton reached forward and picked off the desk his report and his audio-cassette.