Game Over by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online Page A

rapid notes as she listened. When she replaced the receiver, she said, ‘Boss, that was the mobile dump. The call you got from Bates was made from a mobile. It was a pay as you go, and the location was King Street, Hammersmith.’
    ‘So he was following me,’ Slider said. ‘Who’s it registered to?’
    Swilley made a face. ‘Paid for by cash. That’s the trouble with those things.’
    ‘Still, we’ve got the number, and we can trace the signal, can’t we?’ Fathom said.
    ‘If he turns it on. It’s off at the moment,’ said Swilley.
    ‘But SOCA will do the same thing, won’t they?’ Atherton said. ‘The mobile trace unit will report to them. How do we get them to give us the information without SOCA knowing?’
    Swilley looked at Slider. ‘There’s this guy at the unit – Mick Hutton – he’s a sort of friend of mine.’ She almost blushed. An ex-lover, everyone thought. ‘From way back,’ she added as though she’d heard the thought.
    ‘Would he do it for you without telling anyone?’
    ‘Yeah, he’d do that for me, if I asked him.’
    Slider thought for a moment. Maybe nothing would come of it anyway, but he’d feel better about trusting the Bates inquiry to his own people than waiting for a lofty SO department to get itself moving. If his own firm did nail Bates and there were questions about how they found him – so be it. He’d face that when and if it happened.
    ‘Do it,’ he said.
    A couple of phone calls located Candida Scott-Chatton at her office, the headquarters of the Countryside Protection Trust in Queen’s Gate Place – handily round the corner from her house, Swilley thought. She spoke to the woman’s secretary, who said her name was Shawna Weedon, and who told her that Scott-Chatton knew about Stonax’s death. ‘It’s on all the newscasts. It’s terrible. He was such a nice man. He used to come in a lot and he was always so friendly and polite. I really liked him.’
    ‘I’ll come round straight away and talk to her,’ Swilley said.
    The office was on the ground floor of one of those splendid white-stuccoed Kensington houses, so the inside spaces were lofty and grand, with plenty of what was known to viewers of house makeover programmes as ‘original feachers’. There were two rooms, and the rear one was labelled Reception and Enquiries. It had the massive marble fireplace with an oil painting over it of a man with a funny hat and a red coat holding a horse, and was furnished with dark blue carpet, a visitor’s sofa, and a coffee table on which were spread various appropriate magazines, such as Country Life , The Lady , Horse and Hound , and the Trust’s own glossy quarterly, cutely entitled Countryside Matters .
    It also contained the desk of the secretary. Shawna Weedon greeted Swilley with a sort of self-conscious fluttering, and at once buzzed the intercom to her boss, invited Swilley to take a seat, and then got on ostentatiously with typing something on to the computer. Swilley stood, to make the point that her time was valuable, but she was not kept waiting more than a couple of minutes before the communicating door to the front room was opened and Candida Scott-Chatton invited her in with a, ‘Do come through, won’t you?’ as though it were a social visit.
    The front room was even more splendid and spacious than the waiting-room, with a more elaborate fireplace, a lot more paintings on the walls, antique furniture, and a blue and white Chinese carpet over the same dark-blue wall-to-wall as the other room. There was a highly polished antique partners’ desk on which the computer looked the only out-of-place thing in the room, and there were huge flower arrangements in probably priceless vases, on a side table, on the hearth in front of the fireplace, and on a torchère stand in a corner. It was, Swilley thought with loathing, like something out of a National Trust stately home. She liked everything modern and minimalist; and besides, she had an