Queen's Pawn

by Victor Canning

  He saw the little over-frown of concentration as she half-peeled the protective cover from the plaster strip.

  He said, knowing that she would know that he was not telling the truth, but that it was conventional and would be what she would expect of a man like him. ‘I got it on the side of the loft dragging the case up.’

  She nodded, and bent, beginning to fix the plaster on his cheek, her long fingers, firm, expert in the woman’s work. As she did so, he put his hands forward and up under the hem of her dress and held her thighs, his hands sliding over the top of her stockings on to the warm, bare flesh. He felt a slow, involuntary tremble of her body, a slender birch taking the first pulse of a rising breeze. She said nothing, her breath against his ear, her fingers smoothing the plaster home.

  Standing away from him she said throatily, ‘That all right?’

  ‘Yes, fine. Thank you.’

  She looked down at his knees and made a mouth, twisting the dark red bow. ‘What about your knee?’

  His right knee was heavily bruised from Gilpin’s kick. ‘I must have knocked that, too. I bruise easily.’

  He stood up and began to finish towelling himself as he would had she been his wife and seen him naked a thousand times. She watched him for a moment and then went back into the bedroom.

  When he came out of his bedroom, dressed, she was sitting, drink at her side, reading an Evening Standard.

  He said, ‘ Do you think we could have some home cooking tonight? I’d rather not go out with this.’ He touched the plaster.

  ‘There’s steak—and a cauliflower.’

  ‘Fine. What did old Fu Manchu provide in the way of wine?’

  He bent and opened the sideboard door and over his shoulder said, ‘By the way, you can tell him that it all went off all right.’

  ‘He’s in Malta until Monday.’

  ‘When he comes back.’

  He began to whistle gently as he looked over the bottles of wine.

  She lay in bed, Raikes sleeping at her side.

  From the moment that she had gone into the bathroom with the plaster, seeing him naked, feeling his hands on her thighs, she had known that she was helpless. What he wanted, she had wanted, despite herself. (You say to yourself that you won’t—and then you do. What bloody sense was there in that?) If it had just been him, naked, the sex and their two bodies and nothing beyond that, then she would have felt neither helpless nor afraid. (She knew damned well that he was setting out to use her … and she didn’t want to be used. With her body, yes … but not this other thing which was coming. And yet … did it matter so much? Being Sarling’s creature wasn’t all that good. Being his would at least give her a different kind of hope.) She turned over on her back, wondering why she was struggling with herself.

  They’d spent the evening comfortably, pleasantly, and not once by accident or design had he touched her; the memory of his hands on her thighs lasting, and he knowing that it would last. Two hours ago he had come to her, through the bathroom into the dark bedroom, she hearing him from the moment his door had clicked open.

  He’d moved in beside her, no words spoken and his hands had touched her again, sliding under the silk of her nightdress, lingering, the slow movement of browsing animals drifting over the smooth pastures of her body.

  His mouth had been warm, generous, full of wanting and giving and there was no power in her which could hold back the response of her own lips and tongue … only a faint, receding cry of warning somewhere miles behind her. He’d taken her, hard, thrusting into her, thrusting his will into her, claiming her, possessing her and she had met it all with an instinctive, matching brutality, tearing at the muscular sweep of his back, rising to meet him, spreading herself for him, feeling herself ridden, swept away, not caring, dying into darkness, spent and not spent because from that darkness he had brought her back again and spurred her on to another death, and another, until body, mind and all time were spent and she lay empty. Then, knowing she had no power to be anything but what he wanted, he had filled her with himself, his passion of possession, and the knowledge that whatever he would ask she would do, whatever he wanted her to be she would be … Knowing it, she had drifted into sleep only to wake now to feel the warmth of him still alongside her, one arm and hand limp across the nakedness of her breasts, fingers cupped even in sleep with a mild, possessive firmness over her flesh, the dry heat of his palm moving into her hard nipple, into her, claiming a union that she needed and welcomed.

  The hand on her breast moved down, found the placid, gentle roundness of her stomach, fingers spread and drifted lower and she knew that he was now awake and knew that she, too, was awake. He turned, pulling her gently to him, the possessive hand and arm moving, the hand taking her right knee, sliding her leg across him. The need he had for her matched her movements of the need she had for him, and then magically, unheralded, he was in her, proud now, but gentle, and it was nothing like the other had been. She felt herself blossom to a warm, wet-petalled flowering, like nothing before and, drifting away into the long hungry spasm of abandon, she felt him come with her, following her, loving her.…

  He had been going down to Devon the next day, Sunday, but he stayed with her. He slept with her again that night and there was tenderness and hardness in him and she gave herself to both, wanting both, and knew that she was in love with him, knew that it could lead nowhere but was content to crest with it from moment to moment. Limp and lazy with their fill of passion, she waited for him to speak, but he said nothing, turning to her, cradling her to him and slept.

  Chapter Five

  In the train he had with him the morning papers. There had been nothing in the Sunday papers of the raid on the depot. But all the morning papers had, tucked away somewhere as an unimportant item of news, a report on the break in at an Army depot in Kent, nothing of importance stolen. Raikes had the impression that the authorities had decided to play down the incident. He settled with The Times and forgot the depot, putting everything that was London behind him. Everything that was Belle Vickers he had already put behind him the moment the flat door had closed on her.

  As he was taking his first drink before dinner, the telephone rang. It was Belle. Sarling was back and she had seen him, reporting that the depot affair had been successful. Sarling had said that he would not want to see Raikes for a week or two, but that she, Belle, was to stay on at the flat. Once she had given the message, he sensed that she wanted to go on talking, wanted to keep this tenuous thread with him unbroken for as long as possible. Relying on her understanding, he said that he had people in for drinks and couldn’t stay on the phone any longer. He went back to his drink. Whatever part he had to play with her in London, he didn’t want even an echo of it to follow him down here. But as he began to push her out of his mind he had a memory of her face as he had made love to her the morning of their second night. Her eyes had been shut, the lips a little parted, hardly breathing, the life in her as fragile and muted as that of a sleeping child, a stranger’s face below him, wiped, clear of all lines, all strains, bathed with fresh innocence. For about five seconds he had been oddly moved, stripped of possessiveness, sensing the slow urge to protect and shield whatever it was that spoke to him from the face below his. Remembering it now, he thought he must look at Mary’s face the next time. Maybe this was some transcendental, dew that bathed them all as they dropped away into warm, unthinking bliss. Transcendental dew, for Christ’s sake—that was a new line for him. All he wanted from her was that she should commit herself, be on his side against Sarling—and he knew that when he went back to London he would get it. She would be falling over herself to help.

  The next morning, after telephoning Mary, he went up to Alverton Manor to talk with the outgoing owner. Before going in, he sat in the car, halfway up the drive, looking at the grey-stone, gabled and mullioned-windowed house. Every window, every ledge, every chimney and roof space he knew, had climbed them, fallen from some, knew the holes in the masonry where the daws neste
d, and the exact crotch in the climbing virginia creeper where the fly-catchers raised two broods each year. He knew the outside and the inside as he knew himself, the one his skin and the other his guts. The present bastard had added a low, glass-roofed, modern loggia affair at one end. The first thing he would do when he took possession would be to pull it down because it stood on the site of his mother’s small herb garden. The herb garden should come back, just as it had been, for Mary. He spent an hour going round making an inventory of the furniture he would like to keep, accepting nothing but the furniture which had belonged to his father and had gone at auction. In his present house he had some of the rest, and what he still lacked, a dealer in Exeter was tracing and buying for him.

  Driving over to Mary’s house in the afternoon, he had, packed in his overnight case, the small canister he had taken from the Z/93 crate. He was taking her out to dinner, then on to a dance at one of their friends’ houses and staying the night with her. He made a long detour, knowing exactly where he wanted to go, time on his hands.

  He drove up Dunkery Beacon from the south side on the Porlock road. Right on top of the moor was a small side road that led from the summit down to a deep valley which had been high-dammed to form a reservoir. He pulled off the road just before the turning. It was an overcast day and the cloud was low, an even, wind-drifted veil of thin mist that left furze and heather and wortleberry growth dewed with leaden water drops. The world existed for fifty yards, and then vanished.

  Sitting in the car, he took the canister out of his case and examined it. It fitted the hand, not as a grenade would, but as though its shape had been based on a fat, eight inch roll of clay, held and squeezed gently by fingers and thumb to give a natural, moulded grip. The only markings on it, in raised bakelite, read Z/93. Series GF1. The body of the canister had been moulded into raised rhomboids, much as the body of a grenade was moulded for fragmentation on explosion. The base was slightly concave. At the top, set flush with the flat surface, was a thin strip of light metal, a narrow tongue, the tip of which was held down in a small bridge. A steel pin ran through the top of the side supports to hold the tongue down. Holding the tongue in place with a finger, Raikes tried to pull the pin out. He couldn’t move it. Then he saw that one end of the pin was flattened out into a small disc shape, the edges knurled. He turned the disc and the pin revolved and moved out a fraction. He screwed it back into place and got out of the car.

  He went down the side road fifty yards to a small sheep track that wound across the hillside. The wind was blowing into his back. After a while he stopped and listened. From somewhere ahead of him and up to the right there came the rough, bronchial fluke-cough of a sheep. He left the path and moved up towards the sound, going slowly through the knee-high heather. The ground dipped to a hollow ahead of him. Cropping on the windward side of a large granite rock were a couple of ewes and three well grown lambs. One of the ewes looked up, saw him, moved nervously for a moment and then went back to her feed. Raikes wetted his finger, held it to check the wind, edged a couple of yards up the hill to bring it on his back, and then holding the metal tongue firmly down began to unscrew the pin. The sheep were forty yards from him and now and again they were lost in a swirl of mist. He freed the pin and tossed the canister underhand twenty yards, hearing the click of the hinged tongue as it sprang free. The container landed on a patch of grass, rolled and came to stop against the stems of a bracken patch. Stepping backwards slowly, he began to count to himself. The sheep fed on undisturbed. At ten there was a soft phut and the canister jerked a foot into the air and must have fragmented for he could see no more of it. In fact he could see nothing. There was no obvious escape of gas.

  He looked at the sheep. They were still cropping. If there had been anything in the canister, he thought, it must have gone downwind to them by now. Then it happened. Just for a moment the nearest old ewe looked up and then she went down, legs collapsing under her. As though it were some act, some circus trick, done at a signal, timing and co-ordination beautifully, precisely drilled into them, the other sheep went down. Not sideways, or staggering or protesting, but dropping, surrendering their weight to the pull of gravity. They went down and they stayed down. As he watched, he saw a stonechat come flirting across them four feet from the ground rising to land on the granite rock outthrust. Abruptly from mid-flight, from an eye-catching flicker of red, black and white-flecked wing and throat, airborne, wind-coquetting, the earth claimed it and it dropped like a stone.

  Raikes turned and walked back to the car.

  Mary came into his room that night as she always did, even when her parents were at home, and she stayed with him until the first light began to come up. As she lay beneath him, full of his morning love before leaving, he looked at her face. It was Mary’s face. The face he knew, the face of the girl who was going to fill Alverton with children. Of transcendental dew there was no trace. Sensing he was looking at her, she opened her eyes and then winked at him.

  She said, ‘Love me?’

  He nodded.

  She reached up, kissed him, and said, ‘Not one of your first-class performances. You were drinking too much last night.’

  Driving back he made a detour to Dunkery, parked the car and went down to the place of the sheep. There would be no danger now. Whatever had been in the canister must have long been dissipated by the wind.

  There was no mist this morning, only bright sunshine on the bronze bracken.

  In the shadow of the granite rock lay one of the old ewes, dead. The bird lay there, too, dead. But with the dead ewe, trotting away as he approached, was one of the lambs, crying and then half turning back, but not for milk for it was long past that need from her. Of the other ewe and lambs there was no sign, and no sign of their removal. Although he searched around for them but could not find them, he was sure that they were all right. Nobody had been up here since yesterday. The nearest point a tractor could make was the road a hundred yards away and there would have been signs of the removal of the other bodies. In the heather and bracken close to where the canister had exploded, he found a few bakelite fragments but he left them there untouched.

  He drove back, wondering why the ewe had died and the bird, but not the others. He got back home in time to pick up the phone which was ringing. It was Mary.

  She said, ‘ How much did you drink last night?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you’ve gone off without your case. I’ll bring it over. I’m coming that way later.’

  He phoned Berners from Devon and two days later met him at the R.A.C. and told him about the canister.

  ‘What the hell does Sarling think he’s going to use them for?’

  ‘God knows. I should think they were part of some riot-control stock, kept handy in that depot for quick distribution to the police or army in Kent and Sussex.’

  Raikes said, ‘I shouldn’t want to see a crowd of people go down the way those sheep did. Some of them would never get up again. What the hell was it?’

  ‘You’d have to ask the boys at Porton or Fort Detrick, Maryland, about that. Sounds like a G-agent or nerve gas. Most of them in an enclosed space will kill.’ Berners caressed his bald crescent. ‘ It’s a great civilization and neither you nor I are any credit to it. I’ll try and find out what the stuff is.’

  ‘We’ve got to do something about Sarling before he lands us in some wild scheme using the stuff.’

  ‘The only thing we need for that is the help of Miss Vickers. She can get us all the information we want.’

  ‘And she’s going to.’ Raikes stood up. ‘ I’ll speak to her when I get back and phone you tomorrow.’

  He took Belle out to dinner that night and half-way through the meal he began to talk to her about the canister, telling her what had happened in Devon. It was better to talk to her about it here, surrounded by people so that she couldn’t get emotional or make any vigorous protest. He put it to her as though it were a business proposition, an unexceptionable discussion of al
ternative methods.

  ‘He’s going to get us all involved with the use of that stuff. That could mean that a lot of people are going to die. God knows what crazy idea he’s nursing. You don’t think I can stand by and let that happen? Could you? A lot of people being snuffed out just because of Sarling? The only thing to do is to get rid of him. He’s got to go and you’ve got to help us, Belle. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘You don’t really know he’s going to have you use it.’

  ‘Of course I do. He didn’t get me to steal it just as a boy scout test. Sarling never wastes time on things like that. Belle I know it’s a hell of a thing to ask you—but you can’t escape it. You’re either going to have the death of Sarling or the deaths of other people to deal with. One or the other. And what’s Sarling matter to you or to me when we can save other people and also free ourselves? Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so. When you put it like that.’

  ‘That’s the way it is. Anyway, you don’t have to do anything positive about Sarling. All we want is information. Just think of it that way. A few facts. You give them to us and then you forget all about it …’

  She looked down at her wine glass, fingering it, twisting it slowly round. ‘The whole thing frightens me.’

  ‘If you help us nothing can go wrong. Berners and I will see to that. Belle, I need you in this. I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone … Are you going to help?’

  It was a long time before she looked up at him. There were a hundred things she wanted to say but she knew that none of them would do her any good, none of them would stop him having his way. All she had to do was to stand up and walk away, away from him and from Sarling and let events take their course. But she knew there was no power in her to do it. He needed her. She wanted to be with him. She raised her head and nodded.