Chapter sixteen. Fighting back part 2.
Getting to work.
Philip continued to buy time over the next few days, by maintaining the pretence of severing his links with his partners and clients. Meanwhile Andy pulled strings with his former police contacts and renewed his acquaintance with Superintendent Bill Torrens. Andy knew that his old friend was personally incorruptible, but bitterly frustrated at the way big gangsters could move around with total impunity.
He learned where Rotkoff was living, and found out a lot about the occupants of the big house in Barns Green.
Knowing that Rotkoff had bent coppers on his payroll, Andy was very careful about whom he approached. A long, beery afternoon in a pub in Aston got him a promise from the very top level of the CID that a blind eye would be turned if Andy's team could pull off something the protocol-driven police could not.
Bruno was also spending some time in the West Midlands and finding copious quantities of beer useful to oil the wheels. He paid a visit to colleagues in the Warwickshire County Planning department, and clandestinely came away with the ground plans of Rotkoff's' house in Mearse Lane.
A day or two later a firm of tree surgeons pollarded the row of elms along the edge of the next-door garden, ascending each tree in turn to remove the topmost branches. A month later the occupants of the housed returned from their ranch in Colorado to be confronted by a mystery.
Ivy and Ginny were at work too, collecting and collating a file of press cuttings, court transcripts and totally illicit copies of police files.
Soon Philip and Andy had access to a very accurate outline of Rotkoff's affairs, together with photographs of Rotkoff's house and grounds, and snapshots of Mrs Rotkoff, the former beauty queen Sonja Kanievsky, the children, their two bodyguards, the dog-handler and the two guard dogs.
Now some serious planning could begin.
By common consent, Bruno had assumed the leadership.
"Let's set out some objectives. Philip, what do you want us to achieve?"
Philip knew that his squeamishness could imperil the others, but he could not countenance serious brutality.
"I know it is childish, but at first I just wanted him to leave me alone, but the more I think about it the more I want him stopped before he harms anyone else. But I don't want deaths on my conscience."
"Ok then, no unavoidable deaths or needless cruelty. I understand. Oddly enough, I have been thinking of an elaborate practical joke that would destroy his business and permanently undermine his credibility.
We would make him 'disappear' for a day or so, and give the police the chance they have been looking for to take his business to pieces.
Events over the next week moved to plan. Andy and Bruno went to a closed-down USAF airfield in Lincolnshire to attend a Sunday car auction. They came back with a pre-war Pickford's furniture pantechnicon with a big Bedford engine.
They parked it discreetly at the back of the Mardi Gras roadhouse, and Bruno, with lots of help from Ginny and Ivy, repainted it inside and out. They left it in the care of Bruno's ex-Army friends to give the smell of new paint time to dissipate.
At the New Walk office, the telephone rang and rang as Laura and Joan had to try to placate angry and embittered customers. Letters arrived from Don's and Denise's solicitors contesting the forced buy-out and the valuation. Laura threw herself into the role-play.
She went and visited Denise at her home, but got no further then the doorstep. She tried to calm down a furious Denise, and went away in a flood of tears.
She made an attempt to talk to Donald, at his flat, and met a less brusque, but still implacable response. Laura went to see Ivy to appeal to her to try to mediate, and Ivy was sad but unable to help.
A visit to the Edgar Backus bookshop gained her tea and sympathy, and she ended up crying on Jamie's chest.
Ever alert, Laura noticed the maroon Morris Oxford following her bus to Oadby and parked outside Denise's house.
She also identified a seedy-looking elderly man in grey gabardine raincoat and greasy trilby hat who loitered on a bench in New Walk and followed her on foot whenever she turned left out to the office to walk up to the Uni, or right when she popped out to drop some letters into the postbox or do some shopping in the marketplace.
After a couple of days in which she contrived to avoid catching his eye or making him aware that he had been spotted, she decided to follow him.
Watching him prepare to depart one evening, she put on Joan's duster coat, a pair of her spectacles and a headscarf, and followed him into the centre of town. As she got to Wellington Street she saw him get into a black Ford V-8 Pilot and drive away.
Since Bruno was acting as clearing house for information, Laura reported both number plates to him along with descriptions of three men. Smugly, they were beginning to feel like people out of spy thrillers like Casablanca or The Third Man. The situation, they felt, was well in hand.
***
As Donald Bray arrived at work one morning, the receptionist cheerfully informed him that a new customer, one Dr James Gray, had asked for an appointment with him for advice on a commercial lease. From force of habit,
Donald looked up Gray in Kelly's Directory and found that he was in practise as a GP in Countesthorpe, a nearby village. The hour of the appointment arrived and the receptionist showed in a heavily built man in his forties, with a boxer's shoulders and a broken nose. His thinning sandy-coloured hair and high colour seemed somehow familiar although he had never seen the man before.
