A Fine Night for Dying. Jack Higgins

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      ‘Paul, you’re looking fine. It’s wonderful to see you again.’

      She came round the desk, a small heavy-hipped woman of thirty or so, but attractive enough in her own way. Chavasse took her hands and kissed her on the cheek.

      ‘I never did get around to giving you that evening out at the Saddle Room. It’s been on my conscience.’

      ‘Oh, I’m sure it has.’ There was a look of scepticism on her face. ‘You got my message?’

      ‘My flight was delayed, but the messenger was waiting when I got to the flat. I didn’t even have time to unpack. I’ve been to St Bede’s and had a look at the corpus delicti or whatever they call it. Most unpleasant. He’d been in the sea rather a long time. Bleached a whiter shade of pale, by the way, which seemed extraordinary considering what you told me about him.’

      ‘Spare me the details.’ She flicked the intercom. ‘Paul Chavasse is here, Mr Mallory.’

      ‘Send him in.’

      The voice was remote and dry and might have been from another world – a world that Chavasse had almost forgotten during his two months’ convalescence. A tiny flicker of excitement moved coldly in his stomach as he opened the door and went in.

      Mallory hadn’t changed in the slightest. The same grey flannel suit from the same very eminent tailor, the same tie from the right school, not an iron-grey hair out of place, the same frosty, remote glance over the top of the spectacles. He couldn’t even manage a smile.

      ‘Hello, Paul, nice to see you,’ he said, as if he didn’t mean a word of it. ‘How’s the leg?’

      ‘Fine now, sir.’

      ‘No permanent effects?’

      ‘It aches a little in damp weather but they tell me that will wear off after a while.’

      ‘You’re lucky you’ve still got two legs to walk around on. Magnum bullets can be nasty things. How was Alderney?’

      Chavasse’s English mother lived in retirement on that most delightful of all the Channel Islands and he had spent his convalescence in her capable hands. It occurred to him, with a sense of wonder, that on the previous day at this time he had been picnicking on the white sands of Telegraph Bay; cold chicken and salad and a bottle of Liebfraumilch frosted from the fridge and wrapped in a damp towel, strictly against the rules, but the only way to drink it.

      He sighed. ‘Nice, sir. Very nice.’

      Mallory got straight down to business. ‘You’ve seen the body at St Bede’s?’

      Chavasse nodded. ‘Any idea who he was?’

      Mallory reached for a file and opened it. ‘A West Indian from Jamaica named Harvey Preston.’

      ‘And how did you manage to find that out?’

      ‘His fingerprints were on record.’

      Chavasse shrugged. ‘His fingers were swollen like bananas when I saw him.’

      ‘Oh, the lab boys have a technique for dealing with that sort of problem. They take a section of skin and shrink it to normal size using chemicals. They arrive at a reasonable facsimile.’

      ‘Somebody went to a lot of trouble over the body of an unknown man washed up after six weeks. Why?’

      ‘In the first place, it didn’t happen in quite that way. He was brought up off the bottom in the trawl net of a fishing boat out of Brixham, with about seventy pounds of chain wrapped around him.’

      ‘Murdered, presumably?’

      ‘Death by drowning.’

      ‘A nasty way to go.’

      Mallory passed a photo across. ‘That’s him, taken at his trial at the Bailey in 1967.’

      ‘What was he up for?’

      ‘Robbing a gambling club in Birmingham. The Crown lost, by the way. He was acquitted for lack of evidence. Witnesses failed to come forward, and so on. The usual story.’

      ‘He must have had a lot of pull.’

      Mallory helped himself to one of his Turkish cigarettes and leaned back in his seat. ‘Harvey Preston arrived in England in 1938 when he was twenty and joined the Royal Army Service Corps during the Munich crisis. His mother and father followed a few months later, with his younger sister, and Preston fixed them up with a small house in Brixton. He was stationed at Aldershot with a transport regiment as a truck driver. His mother gave birth to another son, whom they named Darcy, on the third day of the war in September, 1939. A week later Harvey’s regiment was posted to France. During the big retreat when the Panzers broke through in 1940, his unit was badly knocked about and he was shot twice in the right leg. He made it out through Dunkirk and back to England, but was so badly lamed by his wounds that he was discharged with a pension.’

      ‘What did he do then?’

      ‘At first he drove an ambulance, but then he underwent the kind of personal tragedy so common during the Blitz. The house in Brixton took a direct hit during a raid and the only survivor was his young brother. From then on, things seem to have taken a different turn.’

      ‘What did he do?’

      ‘Take your pick. Black market, prostitution. After the war he ran a number of illegal gaming clubs and became something of a power in the underworld. Moved into organized crime about nineteen-fifty-nine. The police were certain he was behind a very efficient hijacking organization, but could never prove anything. There were several payroll robberies as well and he was very definitely involved in drug trafficking.’

      ‘Quite a character. What happened after his acquittal? Was he deported?’

      Mallory shook his head. ‘He’d been here too long for that. But the Yard really turned the heat on. He lost his gaming licence for a start, which put him out of the casino business. It seems they breathed down his neck so hard that he hardly dared stir from his house. It was the money from the Birmingham casino robbery they were after. Even if he couldn’t be tried again, they could stop him spending it.’

      ‘Was he married?’

      ‘No, lived on his own. A different girl a night by all accounts, right up to the end.’

      ‘What about the brother, the one who survived the bombing?’

      ‘Young Darcy?’ Mallory actually grinned. ‘Funny thing happened there. Harvey kept the boy with him. Sent him to St Paul’s as a day-boy. Must have been an extraordinary life for him. Mixing with the sons of the upper crust during the day and the worst villains in London by night. He decided to go in for the law, of all things, passed his bar finals three years ago. Cleared off to Jamaica after Harvey’s trial.’

      ‘And what did Harvey do?’

      ‘Left the country on a plane to Rome two months ago. They just about took him to pieces at the airport, but there wasn’t a thing on him. They had to let him go.’

      ‘Where СКАЧАТЬ