Four Stars For Danger

by Burke, John

  “Sleep it off, like the nice copper said.” But he did not resist when she opened the door for him to get out. They went into the pub.

  Mr Owen’s lower lip dropped when he saw them. He came closer to inspect Mark, and said with some awe: “That’s a fair-sized one he’s been tying on, then, isn’t it?”

  “Have you a bed for the night, Mr Owen?”

  “Sorry. Full up we are.”

  “But he’s worn out. Any room would do.” Ellen recognised a wheedling feminine tone in her voice, not at all in keeping with her strict programme or principles. “If you could just fit him in somewhere”

  “Full,” said Mr Owen regretfully. “Keep coming, they do.”

  “Oh, well. I’ve booked a room for myself at Mrs Jones’s. Perhaps he could have that, and she wouldn’t mind me sleeping on a couch or something.”

  “Diawl, that would never do. Very strict is Mrs Jones. Doesn’t mind a man having his pint or two, but” – he grimaced at Mark – “not that much.” He put out a hand to steady Mark, who was once more showing signs of falling asleep on his feet. “Tell you what, though. Our Ivor can sleep in the attic. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Mark made a sound that might have been a protest; but really he was past caring.

  Ellen said sharply, to keep him conscious just a little while longer: “I’ll get some of your things from your car, if you’ll telephone the garage and authorise them to let me into it. Mr Owen, you know the number?”

  She drove back to the village and found Jenkins’ garage. Lights were on in the bay behind the forecourt. A small mobile crane was just swinging the wreck of the Cortina round so that two men in overalls could guide it in under cover.

  Jenkins was expecting her. He looked her up and down with as much disapproval as if she had been personally responsible for this battered ruin.

  There was a small case in the boot, and a roll of what she took to be dirty washing. She took the case and left the washing. On the back seat was a map, scored and dotted with cyphers which she was sure must be important. Probably they represented a large part of Mark’s work over recent weeks. She reached in for it. When it came out into the light she noticed the printed lettering along one margin. Although it was a map of part of Wales, it was of German origin.

  She drove back to the Pride of the Valley. Mr Owen took the case and the map.

  “He’s upstairs, miss. Flaked out. I’ll see he’s all right. You go and get yourself a good night’s sleep.”

  In the morning Ellen did not eat with Mrs Jones, but walked along to the pub for breakfast with Mark.

  His face was glum, his eyes were tinged with yellow, and he had little appetite. But he was wide awake now. And angry.

  “This has got me mad,” he announced as she sat down at the table. “Really good and mad. I don’t know if they thought I could be bullied into giving up. Just kicked off the trail into the ditch. They’ve made a big mistake. I’m going to sort this whole thing out.”

  “What is there to sort out?”

  “That house. That road. And that truck.”

  “Start at the beginning,” Ellen suggested. “What persuaded you to come back here in the first place?”

  He treated her to a rueful grin. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “I asked first.”

  The echo of their earlier meeting outside Bryncroeso Hall was irresistible. They both laughed.

  Mark said: “I read about that corpse being washed up. It didn’t make any great impression until I read about the boat that turned up next day. David Parr’s boat.”

  “Was it next day?”

  “The papers said...”

  “It could have come back that same night. The implication is that the boat drifted after Dr Mansell fell overboard, and finished up in Caitlin’s Cove. But it’s a lonely spot: the fact that it wasn’t found till the following day doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been there all along. Might even have got back before the body was washed up.”

  “What are you trying to prove?”

  “I don’t know that I can prove anything. It’s just speculation.”

  “I see what brought you back,” said Mark. “The same thing as me. Curiosity. A hunch. The same hunch.”

  “That boat,” Ellen dared, “could have been sailed back. If...”

  “If. Quite so. We must be telepathic: we think along the same lines.”

  “If you’re responsible for fiddling with my mind and dragging me back into all this...”

  “Let’s say it’s mutual.”

  In spite of his jaundiced appearance Mark was livening up. He looked at Ellen with disconcerting affection. It was even more disconcerting to realise that she, too, felt they had known each other for a long time.

  “The truck,” she said severely. “Shall we get back to that?”

  He sipped his cup of coffee and hissed with pain. “My alimentary canal – that whisky scorched it. I’d be no good as one of your hirelings. No taste-buds left. All I know is that everything’s too hot as it goes down.”

  “The truck.”

  “All right, all right. It’s all this harrying of waiters and reception clerks that makes you such a bully, I suppose. The truck,” he went on hastily, seeing Ellen’s threatening expression, “comes from somewhere over the border. Maybe from Shropshire, or further over in the Midlands. I spotted it going into Bryncroeso Hall when I came back and started nosing around. Tried to follow it, but lost it on one of those stretches above the slate quarries. It’s very exposed up there. I couldn’t risk crowding it too close. I’d have been too obvious. It gave me the slip somewhere in the valley.”

  “Did they know you were on their tail?”

  “I couldn’t be sure. They certainly cottoned on to it last night.”

  “What was there about the truck – anything special?”

  “The weight.”

  “You mean,” said Ellen excitedly, “I was right after all about...”

  “Ssh!” Mark glanced warningly round the room. Another couple sat at a table in the window, paying no attention. Somebody in the bar was singing, accompanied by the swish of a floor polisher. Ellen obediently lowered her voice.

  “Gold,” she said. “They’re bringing gold out.”

  “No. At least, it doesn’t look like it. Because,” said Mark, “watching the truck on the roads, and having a peek through the gates at the gravel drive, I discovered something rather interesting.”

  He waited, tantalising her.

  “Go on,” she urged.

  “It’s not a matter of bringing stuff out but of taking it in. The truck goes in heavy – very heavy – and comes out light.”

  Ellen felt oddly depressed as she faced up to the rational explanation. Wasn’t it so much easier to accept it, write the whole mystery off as no mystery at all, and get on with her job? She said: “Maybe Morgan Jones is simply Morgan Jones. Decorator and heating engineer and all that. He chooses odd time? to work – but they’re a weird lot round here, anyway, according to David Parr.”

  Mark stared. “What’s this about David Parr?” '

  “The truck came up to the house while I was having dinner there last night.”

  “While you were doing what?”

  Ellen sketched in the events of the previous two days. He listened spellbound.

  “And David did say,” she concluded, “that Morgan Jones was still working on the central heating.”

  “Did he, now?”

  “It’s plausible enough. It may even be true.”

  “Plausible, yes. But true? I doubt it.” Mark’s appetite was improving. He spread butter and a thick layer of marmalade on a slice of toast, and champed heartily into it. “Early last evening I caught them in their transformation scene. Drawn up in a lane, fitting a cover over the truck. Before that it had been just a drab, rather military-looking vehicle. But lo and behold, we become Morgan Jones for the last part of the journey.”

  “In case anyone asks questions?”r />
  “There are plenty of Morgan Joneses hereabouts. Not a local contractor, of course: but then, Parr has a reputation for cussedness. Trust him to get someone from another part of the country to do his work for him! Plausible, as you say.”

  “But why the camouflage?”

  “He has to leave somewhere as one character and arrive somewhere else as another. Why? That’s what I want to find out. That’s why I followed the truck up to the Hall last night and waited for it to come out. This time I wasn’t going to be shaken off.”

  “But this time they spotted you.”

  “Looks like it. I was a mug to stop for that man in the road. That’ll be a lesson to me.”

  “What do you suppose Dr Mansell knew?”

  “What is there to know? None of it adds up.”

  “Not when most of the figures are missing,” Ellen agreed. “And I suppose it’s none of our business to go searching for them.”

  “It is now,” said Mark. “It’s my business now. I don’t get clobbered, breathalysed, framed on a drunken driving charge, have my car bashed up, and just sit back and say sorry – I was trespassing.” He swallowed the cool remains of his coffee with no more than a faint whine of discomfort. “Let’s go.” Then he said apologetically: “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. You’ve got other things to do.”

  “I can manage this first.”

  “If you’ll just run me down to the garage, I’ll see what the damage is. Sort it out. Maybe hire another car. If you could just do that for me.”

  Ellen said: “Let’s go.”

  They saw what the damage was. It could have been worse; but if it had been much worse, Mark would not have survived. The steering wheel had not been rammed back into him, and the engine had not crushed into his lap. But the whole bonnet was a mess of metal, and the front wheels were twisted, and something had smacked down hard on the plugs.

  If Mark had looked like a man with a bad hangover before, he was now the picture of gloom. Ellen felt like cuddling him and saying, “There, there.” Alarmed by this sentimentality, she pursed her lips and looked reproachful. This made him more dejected than ever.

  Mr Jenkins brooded over the corpse like a minister concocting a final peroration on the pride that goeth before a fall and on the wages of sin. He said:

  “Notifying your insurance company you’ll be?”

  “Of course,” said Mark. “But don’t wait till that’s tidied up. Go ahead with the repairs anyway.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “Safer it is to know just where we both stand, like.”

  Mark said stiffly: “You want a deposit?”

  “Well, it’s not very nice to have to ask, like, but...”

  “How much?”

  Jenkins raised his eyes in the general direction of the Recording Angel. “Say you give me fifty pounds on account, now. Then we both know where we are.”

  “Do we?”

  Jenkins sighed. Repent, said his black eyebrows.

  Mark took out his bank card and poised his pen over a cheque book. Then he said: “While we’re at it, I’ll include a deposit for hire of another car. What’ll that be?”

  Mark waved the bank card at him.

  “It’s not that, sir,” said Jenkins.

  “Then what is it?”

  “There’s only the one hire car I got, see, an’ I like to have it on hand most of the time. Not out for more than a week at one go, you get me? Because there’s locals who may be in a spot of emergency, like, an’ we have to look after our locals, isn’t it?”

  “If I give you a reasonable advance...”

  “Anyway it’s out at the moment, and there’s no telling when I can expect it back.”

  The two men stared at each other. Finally Mark wrote out a cheque for fifty pounds, wrote his address on the back, and waited for a receipt.

  He sat in dour silence as Ellen drove away from the garage.

  “A bit of a nuisance,” she ventured at last.

  “Nuisance? You know what he was telling me, of course. Drunk and incapable. Not to be trusted with his hire car.”

  Ellen had deduced just this, but did not fan the blaze by openly agreeing with him. Taking a side turning at random, she realised that they were getting nowhere, and said: “Oughtn’t we to go to the police?”

  “I’ve been. Last night. Remember?”

  “But since we’ve compared notes, we’ve got more for them to work on.”

  “Such as?”

  “We’re going to the police,” said Ellen resolutely. “You’re going to tell them about the truck, and I’m going to tell them about the truck – from where I saw it, in the Hall.”

  “I don’t think...”

  “Every sensible person,” said Ellen with patriotic fervour, “goes to the police when in trouble.”

  Mark sagged down in his seat.

  There was a constable sitting at the desk this time. The duty sergeant, he informed them, was out on an assignment. One could almost feel the timeless mountains tremble.

  Ellen told him what had happened to her, last night. Mark told his version of what had happened to him. The constable took no notes, but nodded. His face was too ruddy and too honest – too ruddy honest, thought Ellen disagreeably – for him to be able to hide his scepticism.

  “Yes, sir. I did hear something about last night, yes. I’ll pass the message on to the sergeant – the one you saw when you was here. But I expect he’d like to know what it is you’re suggesting. I mean, what’s it got to do with drunken driving?”

  “That was a frame-up.” Even as Ellen came out with it she heard how corny it sounded.

  “There’s a charge you’re making against someone?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “No, miss. But leave it to me, and I’ll tell Sergeant Matthews when he comes on duty.”

  They left.

  “Every sensible person,” said Mark, “goes to the police when in trouble.”

  “It was worth a try. It didn’t do any harm.”

  “Or any noticeable good.”

  Driving badly because she was angry, she headed over a ridge of hills and down a swerving, narrow pass. They began to climb again and she speeded on without knowing where they would come out.

  “And now what?” she asked after a while.

  “Samples of my polluted blood and urine are on their way to a sober analyst. I think it takes a week or ten days before the police get the result. Then they send me a summons, and graciously allow me time to prepare a defence before the court sits.”

  “You’ll fight it?”

  “I can imagine my solicitor’s face when I tell him the truth. He’s bound to urge me to plead guilty and get it over with. If you engage a barrister, the case is likely to get reported in local papers, and the bench invariably turn hostile: ‘Must be more in this than meets the eye’...that sort of reaction.”

  They emerged abruptly and unexpectedly above a gleaming expanse of lake. The road curled around a hotel, its bedroom windows looking over a coppice and along the entire length of the water.

  The bar was open but there was nobody in it. When they went into the deserted lounge they found a bell and rang for service. A surprised-looking young woman came in and confirmed that she could fetch coffee and beer; but her expression implied that it was early in the day to ask for either.

  “My car’s insured by the company,” said Mark out of nowhere. “What they’ll say when they hear about this...”

  “Do they have to be told?”

  “I have to get around. There’s the job to be done. And,” he said stubbornly, “there’s this little business of Parr and his goings-on to be sorted out. I suppose I can hire a car a bit further afield. But that’s only a stop-gap. If I lose my licence for a year when the case comes up, that’ll fix everything. In my job, being without a car for a year is being without a job.” Milky coffee was set before Ellen. She stirred it abstractedly. Mark inspected his flat beer and drank without relish. This establishment would not feature in El
len’s book one way or another: there was absolutely nothing to be said about it.

  “And in the meantime,” she said, “until you can hire a car?”

  “I can spend a day or so writing up my notes. Then find a garage which my fame hasn’t reached.”

  “If...if it would help, just for a few days...I mean, if I could give you a lift. Until you know exactly where you stand.”

  He put his tankard down. “You’re offering to be my chauffeuse?”

  She hadn’t known quite what it was she’d had in mind, but now she acknowledged that this was it. “If it’ll help. I mean, you can go on making your notes while I go on making mine.”

  “And as a sideline we can both make notes about Mr Parr?”

  “Commander Parr,” she automatically corrected him.

  “You really are wonderful.” He was smiling but very serious.

  “I’m crazy,” she said. “But let’s see how it goes.”

  “We share expenses,” he said. “Fifty-fifty and no arguments. Right?”

  “But not meals. I’ve still got this job to do.”

  “Not even breakfast?”

  “If you mean...”

  “No,” said Mark, “that’s not what I mean. I wouldn’t dare.” He was still smiling and still serious. “Not until we both have the same appetite.”

  Chapter Six

  Next day Ellen, checking in at a hotel on her scheduled route, found an urgent message waiting for her. She was to ring the office if she arrived before five-thirty. If not she must ring Mr Alec Wood at home after seven o’clock.

  It was almost seven. She went to her room, washed and changed, and put the call in at seven-fifteen.

  Alec said: “Ellen? Where the hell have you been? I’ve left messages for you all along the route.”

  “I’ve branched off once or twice.” It was the understatement of the season.

  “Been having a dirty weekend? Or a dirty midweek?”

  “I understood,” said Ellen frostily, “that my brief was to find little-known places, show my initiative, root out the truffles wherever they maybe...”

  “Yes, yes. All right, love. I’ve caught up with you, so everything’s fine.”