The Danger

by Dick Francis

  “No.” I stowed the power packs in the boat beside a large amorphous canvas bag. “Our friend Eagler promised. Also . . .” I hesitated, “I’ve thought of another safeguard.”

  “Tricky, aren’t we?” Tony said, when I told him. “But yes, we can’t afford a balls-up. Want a nut bar? Good as dinner.”

  I ate a nut bar and we sat quietly and waited, and a good while after one o’clock I telephoned to Eagler and told him when and where to bring—and conceal—his men.

  “Tell them to be silent,” I said. “Not just quiet. Silent. No talking. No noisy feet. Absolutely silent.”

  “All right.”

  “Wait for us, for Tony and me. We will come to meet you. We may be a long time after you get there, we’re not sure. But please wait. Wait in silence.”

  “That’s all you’re telling me?” he said doubtfully.

  “We’ll tell you the rest when we meet you. But it’s essential to get the timing right . . . so will you wait?”

  “Yes,” he said, making up his mind.

  “Good. We’ll see you, then.”

  I put the receiver down and Tony nodded with satisfaction.

  “All right, then,” he said. “How are your nerves?”

  “Lousy. How are yours?”

  “To be honest,” he said, “when I’m doing this sort of thing I feel twice as alive as usual.”

  I drove us gently back to Itchenor and parked in a row of cars round the corner from the kidnappers’ house. There was only one street lamp, weak and away on a corner, which pleased Tony particularly, as he wanted time for us to develop night vision. He produced a tube of makeup and blacked his face and hands, and I tuned into the bugs again for a final checkup.

  There was no noise from either of them.

  I looked at my watch. Two-fifteen. Eagler’s men were due to be in position by two-thirty. With luck the kidnappers would be asleep.

  “Black your face,” Tony said, giving me the tube. “Don’t forget your eyelids. If you hear anyone walking along the street, squat in a corner and close your eyes. It’s almost impossible to see anyone in the shadows who’s doing that. Standing up and moving with your eyes open and gleaming, that’s playing silly buggers.”

  “All right.”

  “And be patient. Silence takes time.”

  “Yes.”

  He grinned suddenly, the white teeth satanic in the darkened face. “What’s the good of years of training if you never put them to effing use?”

  We got out of the car into the quiet deserted street, and from the large shapeless canvas bag in the trunk Tony extracted his intricate and lovingly tended harness. I held the supple black material for him while he slid his arms through the armholes and fastened the front from waist to neck with a zip. It changed his shape from lithe normality to imitation hunchback, the power packs on his shoulders lumpy and grotesque.

  The harness itself was a mass of pockets, both patched on and hanging, each containing something essential for Tony’s purpose. Everything was in pockets because things which were merely clipped on, as in a climber’s harness, clinked and jingled and also threw off gleams of light. Everything Tony used was matt black and if possible covered in slightly tacky binding, for a good grip. I’d been utterly fascinated the first time he’d shown me his kit, and had also felt privileged, as he kept its very existence private from most of the partners, for fear they would ban its use.

  “O.K.?” he said.

  I nodded. He seemed to have no trouble breathing, but my own lungs appeared to have stopped. He had gone in, though, with his bare hands in many a land where to be discovered was death, and I daresay a caper in an English seaside village seemed a picnic beside those.

  He pressed an invisible knob somewhere up by his neck, and there was a small muffled whine as the power came on, steadying to a faint hiss inaudible at two paces.

  “Fine, then,” he said. “Bring the bag.”

  I took the canvas bag out of the trunk and quietly shut and locked the car. Then without any fuss we walked in our black clothes as far as the corner, where Tony seemed to melt suddenly into shadow and disappear. I counted ten as agreed, slid to my knees, and with caution and thumping heart took my first dim view of the target.

  “Always kneel,” Tony had said. “Lookouts look at head height, not near the ground.”

  The house’s paved garden, weed-grown, was in front of me, but dimly perceived, even with night-accustomed eyes. “Move to the house wall, on the righthand side,” Tony had said. “Bend double, head down. When you get there, stand up, face the wall, stay in any deep shadow you can find.”

  “Right.”

  I followed his instructions, and no one shouted, no one set up a clamor in the house.

  Above me on the wall I could see, looking up, a dark irregular shadow where no one would expect a man to be. No one except people like Tony, who was climbing the bare walls with sucker clamps fastened on by a battery-powered vacuum pump. Tony who could go up a tower block, for whom two stories were a doddle.

  I seemed all the same to wait for several centuries, my heart thudding in my chest. No one walked along the road; no insomniacs, no people humoring importunate dogs. Sussex-by-the-Sea was fast asleep and dreaming, with only policemen, Liberty Market and perhaps kidnappers wide awake.

  Something hit me gently in the face. I put my hand up to catch it and fastened my fingers round the dangling length of black nylon rope.

  “Tie the bag on, give the rope two tugs, I’ll pull it up,” Tony had said.

  I obeyed his instructions, and the canvas holdall disappeared into the darkness above.

  I waited, heart racing worse than ever. Then suddenly the bag was down with me again, but heavy, not empty. I took it into my arms and gave two more tugs on the rope. The rope itself dropped down into the shadows round my feet, and I began to pull it in awkwardly, my arms full of bag.

  I didn’t hear Tony come down. His skill was truly amazing. One second he wasn’t there, the next moment he was, stowing the last of the released clamps into voluminous pockets. He felt for the rope I was trying to wind in and had it collected into the holdall in a flash. Then he touched me on the arm, and we both left the scrubby garden, me hunched double over my burden and Tony already sliding out of his harness. Once in the road and out of any possible sight of the house I stood upright and grasped the bag by both handles, carrying it in one hand as one normally would.

  “Here,” Tony said quietly. “Rub this over your face.” He gave me something moist and cold, a sort of sponge, with which I wiped away a good deal of the blacking, and I could see that he too was doing the same.

  We reached the car on silent feet.

  “Don’t slam the doors,” Tony said, dumping his harness onto the front passenger seat. “We’ll close them properly later.”

  “O.K.”

  I took the bag with me into the rear seats and removed its precious contents: one very small boy, knees bent to his chest, lying on his back, with coils of black nylon rope falling over his legs. He was more than normally asleep but not totally unconscious: unwakably drowsy. Uncombed blond-brown curls outlined his head, and across his mouth there was a wide band of medicated sticky tape. I wrapped him in the rug I always kept in the car, and laid him along the back seat.

  “Here,” Tony said, passing me a bottle and a tiny cloth over from the front seats, “this’ll clean the adhesive off.”

  “Did they do this?” I said.

  “No, I did. Couldn’t risk the kid waking up and bawling.” He started the car and drove off in one fluid movement, and I pulled the plaster off gently and cleaned the stickiness away.

  “He was asleep,” Tony said, “but I gave him a whiff of ether. Not enough to put him right out. How does he look?”

  “Dopey.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He drove quietly to where I’d told Eagler to take his men, which was to another of the eleven houses on his list; to the one which had had the electronic antiburglar dev
ice, a good half mile away.

  Tony stopped the car short of the place, then got out and walked off, and presently returned with Eagler himself, alone. When I saw them coming I got out of the car myself, and for a moment in the dim light Eagler looked bitterly disappointed.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s here, in the car.”

  Eagler bent to look as I opened a rear door gently, and then, relieved, straightened up. “We’re taking him straight to his mother,” I said. “She can get her own doctor. One the boy knows.”

  “But . . .”

  “No buts,” I said. “What he absolutely doesn’t want is a police station full of bright lights, loud voices, and assorted officials. Fair’s fair, we got the boy, you get the kidnappers. You also get the media coverage, if you don’t mind. We want our two selves and Liberty Market left out of it completely. We’re useful only as long as we’re unknown, both to the general public and especially to all prospective kidnappers.”

  “All right, laddie,” he said, listening and capitulating paternally. “I’ll stick to the bargain. Where do we go?”

  Tony gave him directions.

  “I left a canister of tear-gas there,” he said cheerfully. “I took it as a precaution, but I didn’t need it myself. It had a timer on it.” He looked at his watch. “I set it to go off seven minutes from now. There’s enough in it to fill the house, more or less, so if you wait another five to ten minutes you should have a nice easy task. The air will be O.K. to breathe about then, but their eyes will be steaming . . . that is, if they haven’t already come out.”

  Eagler listened enigmatically, neither objecting nor commending.

  “The kid was on the top floor,” Tony said. “He was wearing one of those harness things they put in prams. He was tied to the bed with it. I cut it off him, it’s still there. Also there’s some floor boards up. Mind your P.C.s don’t fall down the hole. God knows where they’d get to.” He fished into the car and brought five cassette tapes out of the glove compartment. “These make good listening. You play them to our friends when you have them in the nick. No one’s going to confess where they came from. Bugging other people’s conversations ain’t gentlemanly. Andrew and I never saw these recordings before.”

  Eagler took the tapes, looking faintly bemused.

  “That’s about all then,” Tony said. “Happy hunting.”

  He slid into the car behind the steering wheel, and before I followed him, I said to Eagler, “The kidnappers’ leader is due to join them tomorrow or the day after. I don’t suppose he’ll come, now, but he might telephone . . . if the news doesn’t break too soon.”

  Eagler bent down as I maneuvered myself into the rear seat. “Thanks, laddie,” he said.

  “And to you,” I answered. “You’re the best.”

  Tony started the car and waved to Eagler as he closed the rear door, and without more fuss we were away and on the road, taking a direction opposite to the kidnappers’ house, set fair for safety.

  “Wow,” Tony said, relaxing five miles on. “Not a bad bit of liberating, though I say it myself.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, “and if you go round any more corners at that speed Dominic will fall off the seat.”

  Tony glanced back to where I was awkwardly jammed sideways to let Dominic lie stretched out, and decided to stop the car for rearrangements, which included removing more thoroughly the black from our faces and stowing Tony’s gear tidily in the trunk. When we set off again I had Dominic on my lap with his head cradled against my shoulder, and he was half grasping the cuddly teddy which I’d taken from his suitcase.

  His eyes opened and fell shut occasionally, but even when it was clear the ether had worn off, he didn’t wake. I wondered for a while if he’d been given sleeping pills like Alessia, but later concluded it was only the middle-of-the-night effect on the extremely young, because towards the end of the journey I suddenly found his eyes wide open, staring up at my face.

  “Hello, Dominic,” I said.

  Tony looked over briefly. “He’s awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  I interpreted the “good” to be satisfaction that the patient had survived the anesthetic. Dominic’s eyes slid slowly in Tony’s direction and then came back to watch mine.

  “We’re taking you to your mother,” I said.

  “Try mummy,” Tony said dryly.

  “We’re taking you to your mummy,” I said.

  Dominic’s eyes watched my face, unblinking.

  “We’re taking you home,” I said. “Here’s your teddy. You’ll soon be back with your mummy.”

  Dominic showed no reaction. The big eyes went on watching.

  “You’re safe,” I said. “No one will hurt you. We’re taking you home to your mummy.”

  Dominic watched.

  “Talkative kid,” Tony said.

  “Frightened out of his wits.”

  “Yeah, poor little bugger.”

  Dominic was still wearing the red swimming trunks in which he’d been stolen away. The kidnappers had added a blue jersey, considerably too large, but no socks or shoes. He had been cold to the touch when I’d taken him out of the holdall, but his little body had warmed in the rug to the point where I could feel his heat coming through.

  “We’re taking you home,” I said again.

  He made no reply but after about five minutes sat upright on my lap and looked out of the car window. Then his eyes came round again to look at mine, and he slowly relaxed back into his former position in my arms.

  “Nearly there,” Tony said. “What’ll we do? It’s only four. She’ll pass effing out if we give her a shock at this time of night.”

  “She might be awake,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Worrying about the kid. I suppose she might. Here we are, just down this road.”

  He turned in through the Nerrity gates, the wheels crunching on the gravel: stopped right beside the front door, and got out and rang the bell.

  A light went on upstairs and after a considerable wait the front door opened four inches on a chain.

  “Who is it?” John Nerrity’s voice said. “What on earth do you want at this hour?”

  Tony stepped closer into the light coming through the crack.

  “Tony Vine . . .”

  “Go away.” Nerrity was angry. “I’ve told you . . .”

  “We brought your kid back,” Tony said flatly. “Do you want him?”

  “What?”

  “Dominic,” Tony said with mock patience. “Your son.”

  “I . . .” He floundered.

  “Tell Mrs. Nerrity,” Tony said.

  I imagined he must have seen her behind her husband, because very shortly the front door opened wide and Miranda stood there in a nightgown, looking gaunt. For a moment she hovered as if terrified, not daring to believe it, and I climbed out of the car with Dominic hanging on tight.

  “Here he is,” I said. “Safe and sound.”

  She stretched out her arms and Dominic slid from my embrace to hers, the rug dropping away. He wrapped his little arms round her neck and clung with his legs like a limpet, and it was as if two incomplete bodies had fused into one whole.

  Neither of them spoke a word. It was Nerrity who did all the talking.

  “You’d better come in, then,” he said.

  Tony gave me a sardonic look and we stepped through into the hall.

  “Where did you find him?” Nerrity demanded. “I haven’t paid the ransom . . .”

  “The police found him,” Tony said. “In Sussex.”

  “Oh.”

  “In conjunction with Liberty Market,” I added smoothly.

  “Oh.” He was nonplussed, not knowing how to be grateful or how to apologize or how to say he might have been wrong in giving us the sack. Neither of us helped him. Tony said to Miranda, “Your car’s still at the hotel, but we brought all your gear . . . your clothes, chair, and so on . . . back with us.”

  She looked at
him vaguely, her whole consciousness attuned to the limpet.

  “Tell Superintendent Rightsworth the boy’s back,” I said to Nerrity.

  “Oh . . . Yes.”

  Dominic, seen by electric light, was a nice-looking child with a well-shaped head on a slender stalk of a neck. He had seemed light in my arms but Miranda leaned away from his weight as he sat on her hip, the two of them still entwined as if with glue.

  “Good luck,” I said to her. “He’s a great kid.”

  She looked at me speechlessly, like her son.

  Tony and I unloaded their seaside stuff into the hall and said we would telephone in the morning to check if everything was all right; but later, when Nerrity had finally come up with a strangled thank-you and shut his door on us, Tony said, “What do you think we’d better do now?”

  “Stay here,” I said decisively. “Roughly on guard. There’s still Terry and Peter unaccounted for, and maybe others. We’d look right idiots if they walked straight in and took the whole family hostage.”

  Tony nodded. “Never think the enemy have ceased hostilities, even though they’ve effing surrendered. Vigilance is the best defense against attack.” He grinned. “I’ll make a soldier of you yet.”

  14

  For one day there was peace and quiet. Tony and I went to the office for a few hours and wrote a joint report, which we hoped would be acceptable to the assembled partners on the following morning. Apart from being misleading about the order in which Dominic’s escape and the entry of the gladiators had occurred, we stuck fairly closely to the truth: as always it was in the wording itself that the less orthodox activities were glossed over.

  “We deduced that the child was being held in the upper story,” he wrote, without saying how the deduction had been made. “After the child had been freed, Superintendent Eagler was of the opinion that he (the child) should be reunited with his parents as soon as possible, and consequently we performed the service.”

  On the telephone Eagler had allayed our slightly anxious inquiries.