Free (2013) Collateral Damage by Colin Smith Page B

arrest did not altogether
surprise him. When he left he had noticed something he had not even considered they
would bother to use against her. Across the street from the entrance to the basement
flat, attached high up on a concrete lamp-post, was a small video cassette television
camera, with its stubby wide-angle lens trained on the door. No attempt had been
made to disguise it. For most people the very brazenness of its position would be
disguise enough; if it registered at all on the untrained eye it might be assumed
to be some esoteric part of the street-lighting equipment, perhaps a time-switch.
    For a moment he had debated going back and telling Ruth, but
easily decided against it. She would panic, demand to go with him. And that was
impossible. If they came, he mused as he walked away, she would
be surprised, to say the least, when they found the gun. He considered climbing
the lamp-post and destroying the camera but dismissed that idea too, on the grounds
that it might be fitted with an alarm that sounded at the local police station.
Moreover, there was always a chance that some policeman might happen by while he
was unarmed and halfway up a lamp-post. It would be a very humiliating way to be
captured and he was not unconscious of his position in the hierarchy of wanted men.
He guessed that the camera was probably fitted with an infra-red lens for night
filming and that somebody came along, disguised as a municipal workman perhaps,
and changed the cassette once a day, most likely shortly after dawn, which would
explain why he had not noticed this activity.
    At Heathrow the German encountered no problems in leaving the
country. This was despite the presence of those Special Branch officers regularly
assigned to airport duty whose hopeless task it is to scrutinize travellers' faces
and compare them to memorized mug-shots in the few seconds the immigration officer
takes to flip through their passports.
    Nevertheless, he took certain precautions. First, using a Swedish
alias, he booked himself on to a flight to Vienna. As an added precaution he even
checked a suitcase, containing a dozen or so paperback books and a few clothes,
on to this flight. He then walked over to Terminal One and, posing as a Dutchman
called Van Freyberg, bought a ticket on a British Airways flight to Amsterdam. The
Swedish alias he had used before and it was possible that it was on Scotland Yard's
computer. His Dutch identity - passport, driving licence, credit cards - was a new
one. From Schipol Airport he took a taxi into Amsterdam, spending most of the night
in a small hotel in the red-light district where motionless whores display themselves
in artfully spot-lit bay windows, like a tableau at Madame Tussauds. Before he went
to bed Koller spent twenty minute; and a few guilders trying to bring one of those
figures to life in her little room backstage.

 
    Ruth sat just as still as one of the window ladies at a plain
wooden desk in the police station's bleak interviewing room. There were two other
people in the room. One was a woman police constable, who stood with her back to
the wall near the barred window. The other, seated across the desk, was Detective
Chief Inspector John Fitchett of Special Branch, who glared at the young woman through
a smoke haze, a strand of tobacco hanging from his lower lip. Next to a crowded
ash-tray in the middle of the desk lay Koller's Browning and a spare magazine, still
inside the polythene bag they had been found in. Attached to the bag was a brown
cardboard police exhibit tag on which was written the designation 'A.l.'. The weapon
had been wiped clean, but Forensic had found prints from the German's right thumb
and forefinger on some of the bullets in the magazine. The West German police had
made his prints available to police forces all over Europe some time ago.
    'You're in a lot of trouble, young lady,' the Detective Chief
Inspector said, 'and the only way you can get out of it is to help us as much as
you