“So you say you tracked her down. What did you do then, if you didn’t go to the police?”
Anna drew a very deep breath. “How much do you love me?”
“I love you more than life itself.”
“Is that the absolute truth?”
“Of course it is.”
“Then you’d better stop the car.”
Druce obligingly pulled into the side of the deserted road. “Tell me.”
Another deep breath. “I shot her.”
Druce stared at her with his mouth open.
“And when her boss came home,” Anna said, “he had designs on taking me to bed and I shot him too.”
Part Three
The Pursuit
“Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation.”
William Shakespeare
The Police
“Well,” Josef Goebbels said, “I suppose you are to be congratulated.”
Heinrich Himmler blinked at him from behind his glasses; he had no idea what his boss was talking about.
“It is not entirely satisfactory, of course,” Goebbels went on. “But according to this . . .” he tapped the German edition of the Globe which lay on his desk, “he is very badly hurt and perhaps crippled for life.”
Himmler attempted to look at the paper, upside down, without letting on that he didn’t know what it had to say.
“Still, that is a step in the right direction,” Goebbels said. “And perhaps a Townsend, lying in bed, crippled and in pain, waiting helplessly for us to strike again, is even better than a Townsend dead. What I particularly admire, Heinrich, is the way you have handled this, so close to your chest, so cunningly. I take it this woman is absolutely trustworthy?”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”
“But still, I think, when she returns from England, it might be best for her to be eliminated. Is she handsome?”
“Ah . . . yes, she is handsome, Josef.”
“Well, then perhaps I will interview her myself when she returns. Before I hand her back to you for a final solution. But as I say, I like the way you have handled this. I can tell you that I am putting your name forward as my recommendation for commander of the new Blackshirts.”
“Thank you, Josef. Thank you.”
“You will understand that people like Hess and Goering and Roehm will have their own recommendations. But I doubt they will have anyone with credentials to equal yours.”
“Thank you,” Himmler said again, and stood up. “May I borrow that paper? I would like to see how they treated the incident.”
*
Druce felt physically sick. “You have shot and killed two people?” he asked, not at all sure it was actually him speaking.
“I executed the two people responsible for Papa’s shooting,” Anna said.
“My God! Oh, my God! And one was a general?”
“That’s right. He is, was, Papa’s enemy.”
“But . . . my darling girl, you will be arrested and charged. My God, you’ll be hanged!”
He just couldn’t contemplate such a prospect.
“I will only be arrested and charged, and then hanged, if you betray me.”
He stared at her. “You cannot get away with murder.”
“I keep telling you that it was not murder; it was an execution.”
“That’s not how the police will think of it. What are we going to do? You can’t possibly hope to get away with it. Everyone knows you went to London yesterday.”
“But no one knows when I left.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went to London yesterday morning and had an interview with the editor of the Globe. I wanted him to do something for me. Whether he will or not, I don’t know. Have you seen a copy of the paper this morning?”
“I have been far too distraught to look at newspapers.”
“Well, we’ll have to get hold of a copy. Anyway, after lunch I went to see this General Shrimpton. He used to employ Papa and I thought he might help. He said he would, but only if I spent the night with him.”
“My God!”
“I agreed to.” She stared at him. “I didn’t think I had a choice. He sent me to a flat and the door was opened by the pretend Salvationist woman. So I shot her.”
Druce groaned and held his head in his hands.
“Then I waited for this Shrimpton to turn up and shot him as well.”
Druce tried to visualise this girl, to whom he had given his heart, calmly pointing a revolver at someone and pulling the trigger. “And you don’t suppose all London knows of it by now?”
“By now, very probably. But they don’t know of my part in it. Listen. Shrimpton gave me the address of the flat. What he was doing was nothing he could be proud of so it is almost certain that he did not tell anyone about it. He did not even telephone the woman, because she was as surprised to see me as I was to see her. So, no one save Shrimpton knows I went to that flat.”
“You’d have been seen on the street. No one is going to see you and not remember you.”
“There was no one in the street when I got to the address. No one saw me go in.”
“But the noise of the shot . . .”
“I closed the door before I fired, and I fired through my handbag. The hole is there. Both holes. I shot Shrimpton through the bag as well. There was no indication that anyone else in the building heard either shot. Certainly no one came to investigate.”
“All right.” Druce was intrigued, despite his distress. “Where did you spend the night?”
“Right there.”
“You spent the night in a flat with two dead bodies?”
“There was food and a bed, and I had nowhere else to go.”
He was speechless for a moment. “But when you finally left, surely someone saw you then? Or at the railway station?”
“Yes. But as soon as I had shot Shrimpton, I went out. He had money in his wallet. Some of the shops were still open, and I was able to buy this dress and the wig and a new hat.”
“And the saleswoman won’t remember you?”
“I don’t see why she should. Before leaving the flat I put on one of the woman’s bandannas and used one of her hats as well. Besides, who’s going to ask? That would require not only working out what I did but which shop I went to.”
Druce scratched his head. “So you left the flat this morning, in disguise, and caught the train to Roade.”
“Well, I couldn’t go into Northampton wearing a disguise.”
He nodded. “What are you going to pretend to have done between leaving Shrimpton’s office and this morning?”
“I returned here and spent the night with you.” She gazed at him.
“That is what you would wish me to say in court.”
“If we both make up our minds that that is what happened, it will never come to court.”
“My darling . . .” he held her hands, “it just will not work. You would claim to have caught the train at what time?”
She shrugged. “I left Shrimpton just after four. I would then have gone straight to King’s Cross and caught the next train. We can look up the times.”
“But you can’t prove you caught that train.”
“No one can prove I didn’t.”
“Your ticket?”
“I handed it in just now. The collector never looked at me twice.”
“So you’re going to pretend you returned last night. But you didn’t pick up the trap.”
“Because I was in a hurry to get back to you. And make love. We can go along and collect Hannibal and the trap this morning”
“Unfortunately, when you didn’t come back last night, I went to the station to find out what had happened. I spoke to the stationmaster. He’ll remember that.”
“Oh. That was sweet of you. What time did you go?”
“After the last train. Must have been about ten. So there is no way you could have come back last night. Jennings would have remembered y
ou, not only because he knows you but because you would have collected the trap.”
“Then the best thing we can do is not attempt to offer an explanation. As I said, we’ll just collect it today.”
“He’ll wonder what was going on.”
“Of course. He’ll assume we’re having an affair, which we are, and that my appearance or non-appearance was an aspect of that.”
“And when the police ask him about it?”
“Why should they?”
“For God’s sake, Anna, when they find the bodies . . .” He looked at his watch. “They’ll have done that by now, and when they start checking they’ll discover that you were one of the last people to see Shrimpton alive. Whether or not they suspect you had anything to do with his death at this stage, they’ll certainly want to interview you.”
“So? I saw Shrimpton, he refused to help me, I caught a train and came home. There is absolutely no reason for them to connect me with his death.”
“Save that you have a motive.”
“The only people in the world still alive who can possibly know I had a motive are Papa, Martina and you. That woman was Shrimpton’s tame assassin, and no one save she and him knew she tried to kill Papa.”
They gazed at each other while Druce attempted to think straight. Of course she was right. There was no way anyone in the world could look into those angelic features and associate them with death. Save that he would always know. So which was she really? A beautiful, tragic girl whose life had been forced into the most vicious paths by the accidents of her birth and parentage? Or a devil from hell masquerading as the most lovely woman he had ever seen?
“So all you require from me is that I perjure myself,” he said slowly.
“And that you love me.”
He knew it was a time for bargaining, for laying down certain lines of conduct in exchange for his support. But he was afraid of losing her. Besides, he now knew her well enough to understand that those she did not regard as friends she considered enemies.
“I presume you still have your gun,” he said.
“Of course.”
“You don’t think it might be a good idea to get rid of it? Ballistics and all that.”
“If the police ever get as far as comparing the bullets they take out of Shrimpton with my gun,” she said, “I’m done, anyway.”
“You mean, we’re done. I would like you to get rid of the gun, Anna. Everything you have said is plausible but that gun is a certain link between you and those dead bodies.”
She kissed him. “I hoped you’d say we and not me. All right, I’ll get rid of the gun. Let’s go home.”
*
Martina, predictably, was delighted with what Anna had to tell her. “Oh, I wish I could have been with you.”
“It was a job for one person.”
“Yes. I can see that. What do we do now?”
“We sit absolutely tight,” Anna said, “and take care of Papa.”
Druce clapped his hands to his forehead. “My God!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’d forgotten. You were supposed to be coming with me to meet my parents this evening.”
“Oh, splendid. I am looking forward to that.”
“You mean you want to go through with it? Now?”
“Why not?”
He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. “Then I’ll pick you up. Now I really must get back to the office.”
“Of course. Will you give me five minutes to change my clothes, then perhaps you could drop Martina, Howard and me in town.”
“To do what?”
“Firstly to get the trap. Then we can go to the hospital and see Papa.”
Druce swallowed. “Are you going to tell him what happened?”
Anna shook her head. “Not till he’s safely home.”
*
“Why, Miss Townsend,” the stationmaster said. “That Mr Druce was here last night, looking for you.”
“I know,” Anna said. “It was so stupid of me. I had so much on my mind that when I got back I forgot all about the trap and took a taxi home.”
He scratched his head. “You came back through here last night?”
“Of course I did,” Anna said. “How else was I to get home?”
“It’s just that I don’t remember you.”
Anna took a fairly safe shot in the dark. “I was on the six o’clock. There was such a crowd. I remember you.”
“There was a crowd. You’ll find Hannibal in good nick.”
“Thank you, Mr Jennings,” she said.
“Do you think that’ll work?” Martina asked, as they drove out of the yard.
“I would say so. Jennings is a simple soul.”
“What about Druce? Do you trust him?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “For two reasons. One, he loves me. Two, by simply doing what I asked he’s committing himself to us. He’d go to prison as an accessory if he ever changed his mind.”
“He’s a lawyer,” Martina said darkly. “Lawyers are devious.”
Before going to the hospital, they bought a copy of the Globe. As the bodies of Shrimpton and his housekeeper would not have been found until this morning, there was no report of the double assassination in the paper as yet. And as Anna had suspected would be the case, the follow-up story on the shooting of Berkeley contained no suggestion that he might be more seriously hurt than was suspected; it simply concentrated on the possible link between this attempt on his life and the Karlovys.
“The bastard,” she muttered. “I should’ve shot him as well.”
“But if that woman had nothing to do with the Nazis,” Martina said, “does that mean they have given up?”
“No,” Anna said.
They found Peter Watt with Berkeley, who was already looking much stronger although he still could only move his head and arms. They had encountered Cheam in the corridor, and he had warned them that Berkeley did not know the truth of his situation. So they were as bright and cheerful as before.
Watt was less so. “I’m sorry to say, Miss Anna, that the woman has just disappeared. She must have changed her clothing and appearance within minutes of shooting the colonel. We haven’t even found the bicycle. She must have had an accomplice close by, because we would certainly have had a sighting of a woman bicycling by herself. She must have been picked up in a motor car and driven away.”
“But you’ll keep looking,” Anna suggested.
“Of course. And we’ve put a watch on all the seaports, although our people don’t really have a worthwhile description to go on. But I have a feeling she’s already out of the country. The only positive evidence we have is the two bullets. Our experts say they came from a German-made automatic pistol, called a Luger.” He paused, hopefully.
“Which increases the possibility that she is somehow connected with the Karlovys.”
“That’s the point, Miss Anna.”
“I think it might be a good idea to have a talk with Helen Karlovy.”
Watt nodded. “I shall do that right away.”
Anna realised that Watt’s conclusions had added another dimension to the situation: if the woman had had an accomplice waiting to pick her up, then there was a third person who would know the Townsends had a motive for revenge; it was hardly likely to have been Shrimpton himself.
On the other hand, that third person, as an accomplice to an attempted murder, would not dare come forward however much he might try to settle things on his own. In which case, she thought with grim satisfaction, even if she had buried her revolver in the garden, she still had the guns belonging to both Martina and Alexandros, not to mention Papa’s heavy Browning. She was quite willing for number three to try.
Cheam was waiting for them in the lobby.
“I’ve been giving the matter some thought,” he said. “And I have concluded that it would be best dealt with at the farm and in your presence. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “When?”
“
I think we will be able to move him next week.”
“Will he not begin to suspect after a week?” Martina asked.
“I think we should be able to keep him happy until then. You do understand that this is going to be a considerable shock? For a man who has lived such an active life where survival has so often depended on his strength, his speed, suddenly to have to face the fact that he has none of those assets left, well . . . I am sure you know him better than I.”
“We understand,” Anna said. “But I think he will cope.”
“I hope to God you’re right.”
“What makes you so sure he will be able to cope?” Martina asked, as they drove the trap back out to the farm. “I am scared stiff.”
“He will cope,” Anna said, “because I intend to tell him exactly what has happened; what I have done.”
“Are you sure that is wise?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “It will reassure him that there is someone at hand who will take care of his future.”
Martina swallowed. She also was realising that she was in the presence of someone she did not really know.
*
Druce called for Anna at six. He was in a highly nervous state, as he had been all day.
“How do you feel?” he asked Anna.
“I feel fine,” she said. She had dressed demurely in a short but very plain frock, and tucked her hair virtually out of sight beneath a cloche, while to add to the general suggestion of somewhat dowdy chic she wore white stockings and low-heeled button-strap shoes. “Do I look all right?”
“You look superb.” He cast an anxious glance at her handbag. “Do you, I mean, have you . . .”
“My revolver has been discarded,” she said. “I am leaving it up to you to protect me.” She gave a wicked smile. “Even from your parents.”
“Well . . .” He kissed Martina and they drove out of the yard. “I have had to put them in the picture.”
“How big a picture?”
“Well, I told them that you are Colonel Townsend’s daughter.”
“Does that mean they know I was kidnapped as a girl?”
“I’m afraid it does.”
Be Not Afraid Page 18