The Hoof Read online

  The Hoof

  Philip McCutchan

  © Philip McCutchan, 1983

  Philip McCutchan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1983 by Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

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  1

  Frankie Locci had died on Christmas Eve but wasn’t found until New Year’s Day. A gruesome discovery had been made by some scavenging dogs. Locci was thirty-eight and a few weeks when he died. From humble beginnings he had risen high: leaving school with a CSE in English obtained by cheating, he had become a kitchen porter in the West Hounslow General Infirmary. From early days he had taken a leading part in union affairs, had never missed a meeting, and had ended up as he had all along intended: general secretary of the National Union of Hospital Employees.

  And dead — not intended.

  Death had not come from natural causes. Locci had been murdered. On his way home on Christmas Eve he had been waylaid by a Volvo car containing four men. (This did not emerge until much later, after certain birds had sung.) On New Year’s Day, amid a powdering of snow, five small boys and a girl had become interested in the antics of a couple of lean-looking dogs. They had approached closer; then, terrified but full of importance, the boys and the girl had rushed to the police station. The find had been made in Osterley Park, south of the M4: a plastic bag inside a brown paper parcel, bloody, containing a left forearm. Despite freezing weather it was a trifle high; but the police view was that it hadn’t been in its present situation all that long. Until the dogs had got at it it had been in a litter bin, and apart from the parcel and, beneath it, some Christmassy paper, the bin had been empty.

  Later that day, and over the next two succeeding days, other brown paper parcels came to light. The right forearm, two legs from the knee-joints down in separate parcels, the upper arms severed at the shoulder, and the private parts. All these came from widely dispersed areas: a gentlemen’s public lavatory in Stockbridge on the A30, ditto in Axminster, a car-park litter bin in Okehampton. The trail could lead west. Or north. The other three parcels were found in the Leicester Forest East service station on the M1, beneath a bush in the grounds of the Old Deanery restaurant in Ripon, and finally outside the regimental museum of the Green Howards in Richmond, North Yorkshire. This was a deliberate insult: Locci had been the antithesis of militarism except in the Communist cause.

  Neither the head nor the torso were ever found, but Locci’s wife, when the body was more or less put together for inspection, identified Frankie from a tattoo on one of the arms, I LOVE MARIA, which was Mrs Locci, plus a hammer and sickle. Mrs Locci had reported Frankie missing on Christmas Day, very early in the morning. She had been distraught; the National Union of Hospital Employees had been less so. Red Frankie was a loss but no man was indispensable. His deputy was ready to step into his shoes pending formal election if Locci didn’t show up again at National Health House, the union’s headquarters, which happened to be in Hounslow. Nevertheless, once he was known to have been murdered, there was plenty of propaganda to be made out of it. Everybody knew of the existence of a rightist backlash against union power. NUHE would pour out its propaganda, disregarding for political purposes the possibility that Locci had had personal enemies.

  Which he had.

  *

  “He was a nasty little bastard,” the Assistant Commissioner, Crime, remarked to his deputy on the morning of New Year’s Day. There was no file on Locci, who had always kept within the law, but plenty was known about him from other sources, the sources that supplied information concerning certain prominent persons’ political affiliations. For one of those in service for the sick Locci had been worse than a rampant germ. Stoppages, go slows, walk-outs, cutting off of power didn’t help the medical staff, but Locci had known well enough who ran hospitals and it wasn’t the medical staff, not any more, oh no. In his shop steward days Locci had been lethal. In his then restricted sphere he had been all powerful and it hadn’t been only the medical staff who had detested him. The leadership of NUPE and COHSE disliked him as much if not more. He had been a poison, infecting his mates who, without him, would have been as loyal to the Health Service as they’d always been before his advent. They were scared of him. He threatened and intimidated and when anyone complained about him to higher authority he was always able to engineer their dismissal. He had disrupted a first-class body of men and women. The ACC knew all this. Following his train of thought he remarked, “It could have been anybody, it doesn’t have to be political in the sense the union’s making out. A patient, a relative of a patient, or someone he’d got up against outside his work.”

  “Or right inside it. Someone at National Health House who loathed his guts!”

  The ACC grinned. “Murder’s an extreme form of expressing dislike, but as a theory it’s not impossible I suppose! Most of the NHH lot are in fact far from being as extreme as Red Frankie was. They’d have seen the way —” He broke off as a telephone burred on his desk. He answered it. “Hesseltine here.” He listened, eyebrows going up. He stared across the room, through a big window that looked away towards St James’s Park where snow was thinly falling. London was bleak today, and growing bleaker, with a low sky like cold metal. “Thank you,” he said, and cut the call. He looked at his deputy. He said, “Another one, Charles.”

  “Killing?”

  “Yes. And believed to be another union leader. Jack Mortimer — Amalgamated Union of Power Workers, a moderate. He was attending a conference in Cardiff. South Wales Police had a report from a farm worker. The body was found on a track west of Barry, run over repeatedly by a tractor it’s believed. From what was left, positive identification was impossible but has been tentatively made from the contents of a wallet.”

  “When was this, sir?”

  “Early hours of this morning. The wife doesn’t know yet — confirmation of identity will have to come from her. The wallet could have been planted, though I don’t see why.” The ACC ran a hand over his jaw. His eyes were hard. “Two union leaders … coincidence, or not? Maybe someone’ll claim responsibility, like the IRA. We won’t be waiting for that, though.” He was about to go on when another telephone call came in. This time it was the Foreign Office: Hedge, speaking for the Head of Security.

  *

  When Hedge cut the call he took up another telephone, an internal line. “Chief Superintendent Shard,” he said. “I want him here immediately.”

  It was Shard’s DS, Harry Kenwood, who had answered. “Not here, sir. Detective Inspector Bolton’s around —”

  “Damn. I don’t want Detective Inspector Bolton, I want Mr Shard. Where is Mr Shard?”

  “Seddon’s Way —”

  “Get him. Get him at once.” Savagely Hedge slammed the receiver down, his cheeks, plump and pink, wobbling angrily. It was all frustration these days. No-one could exercise authority any more, not even an Under-Secretary of State could be certain of his orders being obeyed. Everything was shocking. Slackness was rampant: Shard should be where he was wanted. Hedge got to his feet and waddled across to a window. He looked down on Parliament Square and wondered where it would all end. The buildings below him, looming darkly through falling snow, snow that was getting heavier — they’d seen much history, many changes. So, come to that, had Hedge himself: now everythi
ng was anarchy. The appalling riots that had shaken Britain back in 1981 to the extent that the police had virtually lost all control in the inner cities — nothing had been quite the same since, there was no certainty of law and order any more; the confidence had gone. Hedge bared his teeth in a snarl. Damn the unions — they were so largely in his view responsible for the downgrading of authority; and now the very deaths of their leaders looked like causing him personal trouble and anxiety. The call that had come from his man in the Paris embassy had been upsetting and foretold a clear Foreign Office involvement.

  In Seddon’s Way off the Charing Cross Road, Simon Shard received his summons and asked if the reason for it was known.

  “No,” Harry Kenwood said; down the line, Shard sensed a grin. Hedge, whose name was not in fact Hedge, the appellation being descriptive of his function as the protection screen between the Head of Security and lesser persons in the Foreign Office hierarchy, was a subject for cautious ribaldry to his staff. He wasn’t a joke, quite; he was too powerful and often too vindictive for that. “He’s in what you might call a tense mood.”

  “Seen him, have you, Harry?”

  “Heard him, sir.”

  “Ah. Any gen at all?” It was Safe to ask that; he was on a security line, untappable.

  Kenwood said, “There was a call from Paris.”

  “I see. I’ll be along, Harry.” Shard sat back at full arms’ stretch from his desk, frowning across the small office, the commercial philatelist’s office that he used as cover, calling upon a lifetime’s interest in stamps. Paris. It might mean anything, of course. There might even be no connection at all, but Harry Kenwood was always a perceptive man. Shard locked his desk drawers and his safe, patted the shoulder holster beneath his double-breasted jacket, and left the office. He clattered down ricketty stairs, uncarpeted. From Seddon’s Way he turned into the Charing Cross Road and hailed a passing taxi, was put down anonymously near the Cenotaph. He hunched into his anorak, pulling the hood over his head. The crowds looked thoroughly depressed. London … summer or winter, which was worse? Shard often wished he’d joined something like the West Yorkshire force rather than the Met. On the other hand, his present secondment from the Yard did mean he didn’t spend all his service in London and that was something. Over the years, he had come to detest London with its crowds, its fumes, its dirt and its vice. To say nothing of its expense: the taxi, the fare reclaimable from his expense account of course, had put him two pounds fifty out of pocket. Hedge travelled in a chauffeur-driven Princess and managed not to like it; mentally, Hedge belonged to the Daimler days, would have appreciated a footman riding on the step.

  Shard crossed the road to the north side of Whitehall, heading for the massive dignity of the Foreign Office. He entered splendour — it was still that, and in the 1980s the fact gave it an air of sadness rather than anything else. The times were not spacious enough — to some extent, Shard went along with Hedge’s nostalgia. The building had known any amount of greatness in its past. In these days of expenditure cuts, it was understaffed menialwise, and it showed. Shard went down to his own section in the basement for a word with Harry Kenwood, then up to Hedge’s room. Hedge was still looking out of the window, glooming at the snow. He turned when Shard entered and moved importantly towards his desk.

  “Ah, you’ve come. About time. Sit down.”

  Both men sat. Hedge cleared his throat and said, “Collis rang, from Paris. From the Embassy, don’t you know —”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like what he reported. It could link, you see.”

  Hedge was being typical: he throve on mystery, it added to his stature and it put his audience, or victim, on the spot, the spot of having to admit a degree of ignorance. Shard sighed and asked almost automatically, “What did he report, Hedge, and what could it link with?”

  Hedge said portentously, “It could link with Locci’s disappearance — Locci’s murder.”

  “Murder? I knew there’d been a disappearance —”

  “Yes. A body’s been identified, after being put together.” Hedge filled Shard in about the dispersed discoveries, then added that another body had also been found: Jack Mortimer. Shard nodded non-committally. The details were gruesome but so had any number of murders been in his experience. Like any other senior detective, he was inured. Hedge said impatiently, “Well, Shard?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Is that your only reaction, my dear fellow?”

  “No. Let’s take the facts: two union leaders are murdered, one of them militant the other not. Are there any leads?”

  “I’m told not.”

  “I see. Why us? You seem to be suggesting it’s our pigeon —”

  “I wouldn’t have done,” Hedge snapped, “if Collis hadn’t rung from Paris.”

  Shard said again, “I see. So what did Collis have to say?”

  Hedge put on a clandestine air. It was incredible how furtive he could look when he wanted to. He said in a lowered voice, “The Hoof. The Hoof’s back. He’s known, somewhat too late, to have flown out from Charles de Gaulle.”

  Shard gave a whistle, a sound Hedge detested; it had a common connotation. The Hoof. The Hoof had been sent down at the Bailey on a lifer five or so years earlier — Shard had actually been in court at the time — and had escaped after three years spent at Leeds, the Moor and the Scrubs. Like a fox, he’d gone right to ground. If he was emerging now, he was taking a big risk.

  “You’ll remember what his crimes were,” Hedge said with an air of I-told-you-so.

  “I remember, all right.” The Hoof had been a kind of Yorkshire Ripper but his victims had not been young women. They had been shop stewards. Thirteen of them before he’d been apprehended. The Hoof had borne a grudge against the unions; since his sentence the grudge would have grown a lot bigger. The Hoof had been, probably still was, a rightist of the most extreme kind, the thug kind. He’d left the NF standing, showing them up as kindly amateurs, old ladies’ pets. He had worked in steel, down at Port Talbot in South Wales, in its heyday when steel was a viable British product, making money by export. The Hoof’s views had shown too obviously, and the union had got him shot out — not surprisingly in Shard’s view. In addition there was a family history to add to his grudge: his father had got up against the union in his own trade, and the union had seen to it that he lost his job and became unemployable. As a result, he had committed suicide. The Hoof had brooded and had used his wits. He’d lain low for almost a year and his first killing hadn’t been at Port Talbot. Not even in steel. It had been a shop steward of the Tobacco Workers’ Union. Port Talbot had in fact been the thirteenth. The Hoof had hated all shop stewards and any of them would do, until he’d got the one he wanted in particular.

  “So now he’s going up market,” Shard said, following his thoughts.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Right to the top. The general secretaries — isn’t that what you’re suggesting, Hedge? When did the Hoof fly out, and where to?”

  “Gatwick. Last night.” Hedge scowled. “The wretched French authorities slipped up.”

  “In that case he couldn’t have been the killer. You said Locci was killed before —”

  “Yes, yes. No, I don’t suggest the Hoof did that, but I’ve a strong feeling he’s behind it. We have to find the Hoof, Shard.”

  Shard nodded thoughtfully. “What’s the full story from Paris, Hedge?”

  Hedge was still angry, much upset by inefficiency. Disregarding the question he said, “If only we could have picked him up at Gatwick! Really, it’s too bad.”

  “Isn’t all this a Yard job?”

  A shudder seemed to pass through Hedge’s pudgy form; he detested Assistant Commissioner Hesseltine, basically disliked the whole police force. But on occasions, and this was one, he had to work with them. He said, “To some extent, yes. The Home Office will be involved too. As a matter of fact I’ve sent for Hesseltine — the man should have been here by now. But basicall
y it’s our job. Your job. You may ask why —”

  “I do, Hedge.”

  Hedge, disliking interruptions, glared. He said irritably, “You asked about the Paris call. I was going to tell you. Kindly listen.” He cleared his throat importantly. “You’re probably not aware — I wasn’t myself until the call came from Paris — that for some while now a man calling himself by some stupid French name has been under distant surveillance on the Continent. He’s been contacting all sorts of trouble-making groups, you know the sort of thing, uneasy men, thugs, killers, all of them having links not only with crime but much more importantly with neo-Nazism. Extreme rightists in France, Belgium, West Germany, Scandinavia, Spain. It’s a very dangerous situation potentially. Anti-unionists of all kinds are involved, apparently, and this man has been the co-ordinator. He has very powerful alliances and there’s no shortage of cash back-up.” Hedge paused. “This man is in fact our friend the Hoof. That’s been established recently by the finger-print people at Interpol.”

  “How recently?”

  “Very recently, a matter of days ago. In the light of what we now know, it seems only too probable that the Hoof is planning to wreck the power of the trade unions. We all know that in many ways the unions have become virtually the governing power in the country — even Mrs Thatcher is not able to put them wholly back where they belong. The result could be chaos. The Hoof’s known, now, to have been infiltrating his own extremist nominees into the continental unions — glib-tongued men who’ll see to it when the time comes that there’ll be no cooperation with the British unions over blacking of ships and goods and what-have-you — when there’s a dispute, don’t you know. Break down the co-operation and you’re half-way to emasculating the British unions.” Hedge sniffed. “Of course, I consider that a good —”

  “So this is where we come in?”

  “Yes, certainly. Extra-territorial threats — definitely up to us. When the call came in I reported at once to the Head of Security. He informed the Under-Secretary —”