The Templar Archive by James Becker Read Free Book Online Page A

dumped it in some back street after we’d got away from him, and probably left the key in the ignition.”
    Robin nodded and smiled. “If he did, you were really lucky that the woodentops found it before some local tea leaf got his hands on it. Unattended cars with the keys in the ignition have a really short life around here. Porsches especially, I would have thought.”
    “I know. But the Italian did leave me a kind of present.”
    Robin looked quizzically at him, but didn’t respond, and Mallory looked around cautiously before he said anything else, again ensuring that his words could not be overheard by any of the other patrons of the café or the man behind the counter.
    “Tucked away neatly under the driver’s seat,” he said, “was one of the Beretta pistols that all those Italians seemed to be carrying, along with three spare magazines, all fully loaded. That was probably the weapon he used to kill the three men in your flat. He probably left the pistol in the car in the hope that the police would find it and that would provide a definite link between me and the murdered men. A link I’d find very difficult to disprove.”
    “But why didn’t they find it? Don’t the police search stolen cars that they recover?”
    Mallory shook his head. “That’s a slightly gray area. Strictly speaking, in order to search the vehicle they need either permission from the owner or a search warrant. With stolen and recovered vehicles they sometimes get around that by claiming to be looking for clues to the identity ofthe person who nicked it. And if, during that search, they find some marijuana or crack cocaine or anything else that’s interesting from a legal—or rather an illegal—point of view, they’ll happily charge the owner of the vehicle with whatever offense they think they can make stick.
    “If the plods had found the pistol, then I would certainly be sitting in a cell right now, and quite probably so would you. The only favor that Italian did me was to tuck the weapon well out of sight so that it was invisible to anyone looking into the car, or even driving it, but making sure that anything more than the most casual inspection of the vehicle would find it. And obviously nobody did carry out a check.”
    “I’m amazed that Wilson didn’t order the car to be searched.”
    Mallory smiled again. “That’s the thing, you see. Traffic officers are the lowest of the low. Even other police officers call them ‘black rats.’ The detectives are at the other end of the scale, and officers who specialize in murder investigations are another few levels above that, right at the top of the tree. Most detectives won’t sully their reputations by actually talking to traffic officers, and the reverse is also true. There really can be that much of a lack of communication between the different sections. And there’s another factor as well that would have muddied the waters.”
    “What?”
    “The Porsche isn’t actually registered in my name,” Mallory pointed out. “Just like you, I have an accountant, and when I told him that I was going to buy a fairlyexpensive car he explained that there were a couple of helpful tax breaks I could use if I bought it in the name of my company, rather than personally. So that’s what I did. If by any chance Wilson had decided to take a look at the list of vehicles held by the Exeter nick, my name wouldn’t have appeared anywhere, only the name of a small and obscure IT outfit down in Cornwall. So I’m pretty certain that he would have had no idea my Porsche was sitting in the police pound while he was trying to persuade me to confess to a bunch of crimes that I genuinely hadn’t committed. Because if he had, I’m absolutely convinced that men with latex gloves and wearing white overalls would have been scrambling all over it, just in case they managed to find something to put me in the frame.”
    “What have you done with the pistol? Not left it in the car, I