Cut to the Chase

by Ray Scott

  ‘That can’t be you, Bob…Ah, I’m with you…Dave said something about a famous Scottish rebel…OK?’

  ‘A Scottish reb…!’ Wallace repeated somewhat testily before realisation dawned. William Wallace of course. There was a short silence and then Kelsey said.

  ‘He wants to know exactly where you are moored.’

  Wallace hesitated; then told him.

  ‘OK, I’ll pass it on.’

  As Wallace left the telephone box he saw Adele come out of the shop, she was obviously going to lunch. He could see Murray Craddock himself inside the shop so he slid around behind the phone booth. She paused and exchanged words with a passer by outside the shop, they conversed for some minutes. Wallace could clearly see her nodding in agreement at something that was said from where he was on the opposite side of the street. He recognised her fellow conversationalist as the newsagent, whose shop was three or four units down the street from her shop. They parted company and she began walking on down the street.

  Wallace stayed outside the shop and wondered what to do next, he was curious about Murray Craddock/Morris. Wallace had nearly walked into a trap, and though Craddock had been partly instrumental in springing it, it seemed to Wallace that he had been unaware of what was going on. Someone had told him that Wallace was a visiting incognito communist rabble rouser and clearly that someone was Kalim. So how had Kalim locked onto Murray Craddock as a means of apprehending Wallace? How had Kalim known he was going to contact Craddock?

  Wallace crossed the street and re-entered the Post Office, taking down one of the local telephone directories. He looked up A. Morris, he was listed as such and it gave the home address that had nearly been Wallace’s undoing the previous night. Then he looked up Adele Briscoe, it gave an address somewhere in Stourbridge. There was a separate entry for the High Street shop.

  The boat was still secure when Wallace arrived back. He scrambled aboard after having a good look around. As he was about to go below he thought he saw some rose bay willow herbs move at the top of the bank. He paused and had another look but they remained still. He wondered whether to investigate but to do so would have necessitated crossing the canal and losing sight of them for some length of time. If he tried to move the boat across he would likewise lose sight of them. He must have watched the clump of flowers for some time but there was no further movement. It must have been a slight current if wind. He realised he was becoming paranoid and then went below. He was feeling peckish and wanted some food.

  After some thought, and checking his cash balance, he decided to eat out and paid a visit to a small café a half mile or so down the road. He kept a good look out as he did so, there were several cars parked along the way and he peered around suspiciously. He had a reasonable meal and then decided to make his way back to the boat.

  He left the pavement near the canal bridge and made his way down the tow path to where the boat was moored. It looked much the same as when he had left it. He sat down and examined the banks closely, especially the clump of rose bay willow herb. Nothing moved.

  He had a good look around and then boarded the craft. There was nobody around, he opened the hatch and went below.

  Wallace gave a yelp of terror as he saw a shadowy figure rise as he entered the narrow cabin and followed that up with a squeak of fear, falling back and cracking his head against the door jamb. Before the panic had time to develop further he realised it was McKay.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Wallace snarled furiously. ‘Do you have to jump out of the woodwork like that? Where the fuck did you spring from, and where the blazes have you been?’

  ‘Never mind that, I’ve been around for the last couple of days,’ snapped McKay, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Being chased all over the bloody countryside!’ Wallace snapped back.

  McKay clearly became aware that this question and answer mode could go on for some time if they weren’t careful so he adopted a more conciliatory tone.

  ‘All right…all right…I’ve been here since last night,’ said McKay. ‘I wanted to warn you that Kalim and his men were around.’

  ‘Oh Great – Tell me something I don’t bloody well know,’ Wallace stormed furiously and laced with sarcasm. ‘I was playing hide and seek with those bastards the other night, hopping over garden fences and being attacked by every goddam dog in the county!’

  ‘You were what…?’

  ‘You may well say…‘what’…’Wallace snorted. ‘If I hadn’t obeyed your instructions to the letter and become involved with this damned Craddock caper I wouldn’t be in the mess I am now.’

  ‘Craddock?’ McKay looked startled. ‘How did Craddock affect matters?’

  ‘Hells teeth!’ Wallace ground out furiously. ‘How the hell should I know? I called at his house by arrangement…OK…OK…I know I stuffed up and he recognised me as being from Down Under, but I went there for a meal and a chat…tea and bloody muffins I thought…well the meal was OK and then afterwards he seemed to go right off. Kept looking at me, he just looked… I don’t know!’ Wallace spread out his and shrugged. ‘He just looked puzzled, that’s all.’

  ‘Puzzled? What about?’

  ‘Some people had been in touch with him, I gathered that much from his Commie bookseller girl-friend. They had told him I was a visiting Comrade who was on the run, or travelling incognito, or just plain paranoid…and the local comrades were coming to pick me up and help me to hide…something like that so far as I could make out. When they arrived it was Kalim and his bloody gorillas, I only got out by the skin of my teeth through a landing window. I must have fallen into every blasted cucumber frame in Stourbridge and clambered over God knows how many garden fences, and that’s not forgetting every blasted dog that tried to take a piece out of me!’

  McKay adopted a supplicant pose, pressed his palms together and pressed the ends of his fingers against his chin, his brow was furrowed.

  ‘How the blazes did they get onto you up here?’

  Wallace shrugged and didn’t answer; he knew the question was directed more to the world generally than to him in particular. Then Wallace had another thought.

  ‘How the hell did they get onto me at that Broad Street Basin?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Broad Street Canal Basin in Birmingham.’

  He shook his head in perplexity.

  ‘Did you tell anyone where you were, when you were moored at Broad Street?’

  ‘No, only you,’ Wallace said. ‘If you remember, I phoned you that morning from Knowle.’

  McKay tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip.

  ‘Do they know where you are now, where this barge is?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wallace answered dispiritedly. ‘I had a good look around before I came in and there was no sign of anything or anyone. But you were watching me and I was looking around hard enough for anyone tracking me.’

  McKay looked suitably modest.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to be noticed,’ he said. ‘I do know how to keep my head down.’

  ‘Maybe you can keep it down,’ Wallace retorted acidly. ‘But you can’t stop it waving from side to side. Was it you skulking behind that clump of rose bay willow herb?’

  ‘Rose bay willow herb?’

  ‘That clump of plants at the top of the bank by the road bridge, purplish flowers.’

  He had the grace to look abashed.

  ‘You saw me?’

  ‘Not exactly, but I saw the flowers waving around.’

  He muttered something under his breath and Wallace felt that he had scored.

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Nothing. You still lie low,’ said McKay. ‘Incidentally, do you have the film of Craddock?’

  ‘Yes, it’s here,’ Wallace went to the drawer, took out the camera equipment and handed it to him. He slipped them into a zip up pocket on his trouser leg.

  ‘We are still looking into the leasing of that apartment, we may need more samples of your handwriting and some DNA, but
the signature on that lease looks nothing like yours, and it’s signed Henry Wallis…spelt W-A-L-L-I-S.’

  ‘Henry Wallis? Well, however it’s spelt, I never ever sign plain Harry Wallace and certainly not Henry,’ Wallace replied. ‘I always sign J. H. Wallace. Somebody has made an assumption, that Harry was derived from Henry.’

  ‘Yes, I had noticed that already,’ said McKay. ‘They knew you were coming to London, but they were short on detail. But there was an address on that lease, a Melbourne address in Toorak Road, South Yarra.’

  Wallace gaped at him.

  ‘But that’s where I used to live, until a few months back. How the hell did they find that out?’

  ‘Give me time, I’ll have to nut that out. I might even get Bramble onto it.’

  ‘What about Craddock?’

  ‘If he has contacts with Kalim, forget him. That’s something I never considered. The fact that he does certainly interests me. But maybe he doesn’t, you say they introduced themselves to him as Reds?’

  ‘That was certainly my impression,’ Wallace replied.

  ‘Well they got onto him somehow, either by his affiliations or when they were tracking you.’

  ‘Why are they tracking me? Why did they frame me? What have I done? Where do I fit in?’

  ‘They wanted a scapegoat,’ said McKay. ‘They had Ravindran on their hit list and they needed a hit man and a fall guy. Well they got their hit man from somewhere. Then they needed a fall guy, a patsy who would incriminate someone else, or more to the point, another nation, one they want to discredit and who better for this than Australia. After the Jakarta exercise they found both, a fall guy and a scapegoat nation. Apart from becoming involved with collecting a message drop which connected you with ASIO, they knew you were coming to London where Ravindran was living. Couldn’t have been better?’

  ‘They were taking a chance, what if I failed to come here after all?’

  ‘Maybe they had other patsies, maybe not. But your itinerary was ideal. It just fitted in and simplified their plan.’

  ‘So I just lie low for the present?’

  ‘Just do that. We’ll try and investigate Kalim further. They must have a base around here somewhere; we know they have one up north. If we can find out where it is it may give us a lead.’

  ‘How will you find Kalim?’ Wallace asked. ‘You’ll never find his base unless he leads you to it.’

  ‘We’re working on it…’ McKay broke off as the boat yawed suddenly, and they heard the thump of feet. ‘Christ, what’s that?’

  ‘Bloody Hell! I think he’s found us, we’ve got to get out!’

  ‘Get out…how?’

  McKay leapt onto the bunk.

  ‘Remember the fire escape? Come on!’

  He unlocked and pushed the hatch open and pulled himself out of the cabin. Wallace jumped onto the bunk but the boat yawed again violently with the bodies piling aboard and he lost his balance. He clutched desperately at the bulkhead as he over-balanced and then fell across the table as McKay’s legs vanished through the fire hatch.

  ‘Oh God!’ Wallace cried in sheer terror as he heard the sound of heavy footsteps outside and then the door burst open. Kalim came in at the double followed by Juan, as Wallace fell to the deck he briefly caught sight of McKay’s face as he replaced the fire escape hatch. He prayed that he would be able to get away.

  Wallace tried to rise but received a blow across the face that knocked him down to the deck once more. Kalim, his face an angry red, gave him another but was pulled off by Juan and Tara who had followed them in.

  ‘Come on, we haven’t time for that,’ snapped Juan. ‘Get him out of here and into the car.’

  Wallace was hauled roughly to his feet and then Kalim hit him again, Wallace went limp and collapsed onto the deck. Then he was hustled out and frogmarched up the canal bank, he barely had time to register that he was a prisoner as he was thrust into the back seat of a car. The others gathered around it, opened the other doors and piled in and the car moved off.

  ‘You won’t get away so easily this time, Wallace,’ snapped Kalim. ‘I have a gun, so don’t try anything stupid.’ Then he gave Wallace another backhander as an afterthought and Wallace nearly passed out. There was a chance another one was coming so he slumped back into the seat as the car took off. He was right, he received another blow and this time did pass out momentarily.

  Chapter 21

  'Leave off you bloody fool!’ Wallace heard Juan snarl angrily. ‘I must think.’

  Wallace was only partly conscious; he had a momentary sight of a knife blade being flashed before him as the inside of the vehicle swirled around. The vision of the knife nearly made him die from sheer fright. He closed his eyes for a spell, they seemed to be unaware he was conscious.

  ‘But if he talks our cover is gone,’ Wallace heard Tara say. ‘Only he knows we killed Ravindran…!’

  ‘Put that damned knife away before we make any more mistakes,’ Wallace heard Juan shout furiously. ‘I’d like to know how he managed to survive and get out of that apartment before the police arrived. We put enough of that stuff in him to kill a horse.’

  ‘I say we kill him now,’ Tara sounded aggrieved.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kalim’s voice entered the verbal fray and his sarcasm was bitter and to the point. ‘We travel all the way through Stourbridge with a corpse in the back and blood all over the seat. Maybe you’d like to sit in the back seat with him like that all the way…eh?’

  Up to that point Wallace was in agreement with Kalim.

  ‘…whatever you may think…’ Kalim raged on ‘…the police in England are not bloody stupid, if they see a dead man in the back seat of a car and three men covered in blood they may possibly think it worthy of investigation. Just shut your mouth until you’ve something useful to say!’

  ‘I did!’ Tara still persisted. ‘It was my idea to wait here and catch him on his boat.’

  ‘Well I would have thought of it myself if you hadn’t stuck your oar in,’ snarled Kalim. ‘Now shut up!’

  ‘And watch the bloody road; they drive on the left in this country,’ grated Juan, as Tara appeared to stray over to the right.

  Kalim reminded Wallace of a branch manager he had once worked for while he was employed in the insurance industry. His modus operandi was that if he didn’t think of an idea but somebody else did, and it worked, then he worked on the assumption that it was so obvious that he would have thought of it, given time. He gave nobody any credit on the basis that he would have thought of it eventually. He and Kalim must have studied the same management textbook.

  Confronted with Kalim’s angry rhetoric they lapsed into sulky silence, while Wallace tried to stop fainting from sheer fright. He was somewhat intrigued with Tara’s comment, that Wallace was the only one who knew they had killed Ravindran. Were they aware that McKay was in the reckoning or not? Did they believe that Wallace was alone and that the canal venture was his own escape plan? On the other hand, how had they located him? How did they know where he was?

  ‘What are we going to do then?’ Tara still seemed determined to have his say.

  ‘Just keep bloody going!’ snarled Juan. ‘And keep your eyes on the road, I’ve told you once to keep left. We’ll decide what to do when we get there. Don’t worry about our friend for now, he’s sleeping nicely.’

  ‘The hell he is!’ their friend thought. Their friend had decided that sleep or feigning unconsciousness was the best solution while he nutted it out. He had no wish to be in the same world as Kalim and his henchmen while his mind worked overtime. To be awake could mean being involved in desultory conversation with Kalim, while he told Wallace what a clever fellow he was and how stupid Wallace was. Alternatively it would be a series of threats and Wallace was scared enough as it was.

  The car was being flung around violently giving birth to a wild hope that they would be picked up for speeding, but as usual there was never a policeman around when you needed one. Wallace reflected bitterly that if En
gland was anything like Australia the police were probably wasting time booking motorists for speeding on freeways.

  One piece of information was that Tara was clearly not Indonesian; if he had been he wouldn’t have had to be reminded to drive on the left hand side of the road, while Juan appeared to be either Spanish or Portuguese.

  The car eventually drew up at an old house that seemed to be in the inner fringes of a small town, Wallace couldn’t see too much as he was examining it through half closed eyes, but wherever it was it wasn’t Stourbridge. He was still lying back on the back seat trying to look as if he wasn’t conscious, but whether he was convincing them he wasn’t sure.

  The car pulled up around the side of the house and Wallace was manhandled out. Any hopes he had of being observed by passers by were dashed when he found that the drive had curved around the side of the house which was surrounded with high foliage. He decided to come round after his head came into contact with a door post, reminiscent of the stay at the Knightsbridge apartment. Wallace wondered if this house was registered in his name as well.

  ‘Where do we put him?’ Tara asked.

  ‘In the attic,’ snapped Juan, and added with a note of sarcasm. ‘That’s upstairs on the top floor.’

  ‘How long should he stay there?’ asked Kalim. Wallace still wasn’t sure who was in charge of this operation, Juan or Kalim.

  ‘Until we decide how to dispose of him,’ snapped Juan. ‘But for now he stays locked up.’

  Wallace nearly genuinely passed out from sheer fright there and then, he avoided that condition when his head hit and dislodged a picture from the wall; the resultant pain ensured he stayed awake. He was hustled upstairs and landed on the floor of an attic with a crash; he heard the door slam and was left alone with his thoughts.

  Two hours must have elapsed before a key grated in the lock and he was manhandled out by Tara and Fino, both of whom were previously encountered in the Knightsbridge apartment. He made feeble attempts to struggle and was promptly slammed against the wall.

  ‘Careful Fino, we don’t want any bruises,’ cautioned Tara.