‘No, not that. Not if you mean they’ve killed him.’ Averell heard himself speak with more conviction than he’d have supposed he could summon up in such a crisis. ‘If they’d killed Dave they wouldn’t have left his car on the spot for almost immediate discovery, while at the same time burdening themselves with his body. They’d have driven away the one in the other. So there must be a different explanation.’
‘So there must.’ Tim was now in command of himself again in a way that his uncle could only wonder at. Averell himself had seen – had just seen – death in war; Tim had never been tried that way. To Averell Dave was the acquaintance of a day, but he was Tim’s oldest friend. If Tim could take this horror and remain instantly clearheaded Tim was a man, a grown man, one could rely on. ‘And I’ll tell you something,’ Tim said. ‘That fat woman and her clumsy threat. It was a stupid kind of temporizing. Behind it lay some sort of indecision. Dave was a potential threat. Just like me, he had only to remember something, to let something click in his head, and he’d become an actual one. But they’d come to see him as something else as well.’
‘Do you know, I believe I may have an idea what it might be?’ It was the learned Adrian who had said this, and still with the air of a detached spectator. He might have been a scholar who had just glimpsed some hope of resolving a minor but much debated textual crux in Sophocles or Aeschylus. ‘Haven’t I heard that Dave comes of rather wealthy people?’
‘He does, indeed,’ Tim said. ‘I’ve been telling my uncle so. Enormously wealthy, as a matter of fact.’
‘Then that’s it. Those deplorable people have carried him off – and with a nasty scalp wound, as likely as not. But not for subsequent slaughter.’
‘I believe you’re right,’ Averell said. Adrian too, he felt, had to be wondered at.
‘They’d have two motives,’ Adrian continued mildly. ‘The bank robbery would appear to have been on a large scale, and they must require time to tidy up on it. To get the stuff away, I mean, and probably themselves away too. So – knowing he now knew – they’d want to hold on to him until that was effected. But alive, fortunately. And there’s the second motive. Alive, Dave might be worth as much again. But it isn’t so easy to collect ransom-money on dead bodies. Or not in the western world. There are, I believe, primitive societies in which a different view is taken. Even, indeed, in the Greece of the heroic age. To your uncle and yourself, Tim, I need scarcely cite instances in Homer.’
‘No, you needn’t,’ Tim said grimly. ‘What’s important is to waste no time. And to keep this thing absolutely quiet for the moment.’
‘To keep it quiet?’ As Averell uttered these words he felt the return of a now familiar dismay.
‘Yes, of course. When somebody has been kidnapped in the hope of monetary gain the one fatal thing is to hasten off to the police. Task forces go scurrying around, there are headlines in the papers, and it’s even odds the criminals panic and chuck their victim into the sea or down a well. So we’re on our own still.’ Tim paused for a moment in which – momentously – Averell found nothing to say. This bee in his nephew’s bonnet he had come to know there was no ready coping with. ‘And listen!’ Tim went on. ‘There’s one vital thing they don’t know we know. They know what Dave remembered, and that it took him back yesterday evening to case their joint in that empty shop beside the public library. But they don’t know that Adrian happened to witness that most extraordinary and mysterious occasion when Dave actually lent them a hand in loading up their van. My guess is that Dave just happened to be passing by and put on a turn in the way of gratuitous obligingness – the silly ass! And perhaps that gives us a tiny edge on them. So in we get.’
‘But, Tim!’ Averell did now manage to exclaim. ‘We can’t possibly–’
‘Listen, Adrian.’ Tim had ignored his uncle’s expostulation. ‘We’ll run you back to Uffington Street and drop you there. You must cope with those two girls, but without giving them a clue about where my uncle and I are off to. We can’t possibly have them mucking in on this thing as it’s now developing. Lucky the bastards left the key in this bloody great car.’ Tim was already at the wheel. ‘Jump in,’ he said.
They dropped Adrian off as proposed. He had provided vital information, and now for good measure a rational hypothesis covering the state of the case. But Tim clearly had no opinion of him as a likely man in a rough house. Uncle Gilbert, on the other hand, had been recruited at once. Uncle Gilbert (whom a punch on the nose had virtually worsted in the garden at Boxes) felt a very reasonable doubt about himself as a swingeing Friar Tuck. But Robin Hood had flattered him, at least by implication, and he went along. At least there were to be no Maid Marians involved, and that was something.
Tim seemed to know the location of Adrian’s public library, and he parked circumspectly in a road behind it.
‘When we find that shop,’ he said, ‘the best thing will probably be simply to walk in.’
‘It may be locked up.’ This was the only rejoinder Averell could think of to what seemed to him a staggering proposal.
‘Then we bang on the door, and see what happens. If nothing does, we can bash our way through a window. It won’t be the sort of shop with effective shutters of any kind. And if we just confront them in a perfectly confident way, the chances are they’ll bolt in panic, leaving Dave behind them. It will be beyond their imagination that we haven’t got the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police himself outside. You’ll see.’
Averell judged it very improbable that he’d see – or hear or feel either, were this hair-raising psychological conjecture to be acted upon.
‘But of course we’ll be cautious,’ Tim added, a little unexpectedly. ‘We’ll take a prowl round first, and particularly take a look at the back. There may be a way in-and out – at the back as well. Perhaps one of us ought to go in at the back, and one at the front.’
At this point Averell, had he been his nephew’s contemporary, might have said something like ‘Don’t make me laugh’ or ‘You must be kidding’. As it was, he held his peace. And he wondered whether it wasn’t unfortunate that Tim hadn’t brought his shotgun, or that he himself hadn’t thought to possess himself of that knobkerrie from the elephant’s leg at Uffington Street.
They took the cautious prowl, starting by walking past the empty shop on the other side of the road. It was a dirty and neglected little property, which could just be distinguished as having once held itself out as the place of business of a family butcher. This was a little ominous in itself, but there was no other sinister appearance to be seen. They crossed the road to the public library, where Tim insisted on pausing to study some fading dust jackets displayed in a window. As a move to allay the suspicions of a possible observer this was unimpressive. It had, indeed, the appearance of being a joke – and a joke of an untimely sort, considering Dave’s possible situation at the moment. Averell had to tell himself, not for the first time, that his nephew wasn’t in the least mad; that the young in general weren’t mad, but merely variously inscrutable. Then they moved on, rounding a couple of corners in order to gain and identify the hypothetical back entrance to the failed butcher’s establishment. This, in fact, brought them almost back to their parked car, and they were just short of it when the situation developed in a dramatic manner.
More or less under their noses a large decayed door swung inwards, and from a covered yard beyond it a vehicle propelled itself rapidly into the road and turned away from them. It was a tip-up truck. Two men could just be glimpsed in its cab. It was piled high with a load covered with a tarpaulin. In tow was a trailer, entirely occupied by a large crate, covered in part by a tarpaulin too. It disappeared in the direction of the main road.
‘Quick!’ Tim yelled, and made a dash for the Bentley. Averell followed – as he appeared perpetually destined to do. They bundled in; the engine sprang to life; Averell was bumped in the small of his back as the car acceler
ated at a tempo astonishing in so ancient and so lumbering-seeming a conveyance. It was quite as alarming, Averell thought, as being suddenly hurtled in the direction of the moon.
17
‘It’s our only chance,’ Tim said as he slipped into top gear. ‘Just not to let them out of our sight. Once they give us the slip we’re done for. Not a hope.’
‘They’re bound to see we’re following them. And they know this car already. At least we must suppose they do, after last night.’
‘Well, yes – that’s so. Provided they get a clear view of us. But it’s quite possible they won’t. With that affair in tow behind them, their rear vision must be about nil. The truck hasn’t got one of those periscope things you use when hauling a caravan.’ Tim slowed sharply, and then rapidly accelerated again. ‘It’s London that’s going to be tricky. If we’re held up by traffic lights and their route happens to branch off not far in front of them, we’ve pretty well had it. But once out in the country – if they’re making that way – we needn’t ever lose sight of them. And it won’t much matter whether they tumble to us or not. We can hang on and be in at the kill, even if it’s at Land’s End or John o’ Groat’s.’
Averell was silent – partly because one ought not to talk to the driver, and partly because he had judged Tim’s figure of speech to be infelicitous. Of course if Dave were really where they both thought he was, his position, although it must be acutely uncomfortable, was far from being beyond hope of rescue. There need be no kill to be in at. His captors, if foiled in their ransom plot and virtually cornered, were unlikely to add gratuitous murder to their existing misdeeds. They’d simply try to bolt. Unless, of course, a live Dave knew far too much about them. And this – Averell realized with dismay – was about as big an ‘unless’ as one could conceive.
The truck wasn’t hurrying, and its driver betrayed not the slightest sign of thinking to evade pursuit. With Holland Park behind it, it moved sedately down the length of Goldhawk Road, with its trailer swaying gently from side to side – and occasionally bumping rather drastically up and down – in the rear. It seemed improbable that any turn of speed could be extracted from it in however great an emergency. So in a sense it was an easy quarry.
‘Remember how this road bears left?’ Tim asked. ‘If they go on to the end, and turn right for Chiswick High Road, it’s my bet they’ll be making for our old friend the M4. And I’m just wondering whether to take a chance – either here in town or out on the motorway.’
‘A chance?’
‘Well, yes. I wish they had Dave in a cage and not in that crate – if he is in that crate. The rub’s there, wouldn’t you say, Uncle Gilbert? If he were in a cage – like that king in Tamburlaine – he could gibber at us, and we’d know. But of course it might perturb the passersby.’
‘Certainly it might.’ Tim, his uncle supposed, was entertaining himself with this bizarre fantasy by way of what he would have expressed as keeping his cool. Averell himself found the notion of a young man pinioned in a crate so extremely horrible as to be an unsuitable subject for anything of the kind. But he saw the underlying cogency of Tim’s line of thought.
‘It would be easiest on the motorway,’ Tim went on – swinging, as predicted, into Chiswick High Road. ‘Just draw level with the thing, force it on to the soft shoulder, and then give it and ourselves a good immobilizing bash. There would be a crowd in a jiffy, including your friends the fuzz. But suppose that crate holds nothing but their swag – or even just a collection of miscellaneous musical instruments? If swag, we’d be heroes in the eyes of the bloody bank, of course. But it mightn’t much improve Dave’s chances if in fact they’re holding him elsewhere.’
The lucidity of all this was apparent, and Averell acquiesced in it. What disconcerted him now, oddly enough, was the gentle pace, almost the unflawed decorum, of this morning drive through the western outskirts of London. The occasional casual turning on of a television set a little before some desired programme was a habit that had familiarized him with the habitual climax of that sort of entertainment in which cops catch robbers. Salvos are exchanged, sirens ululate, cars squeal, skid, turn themselves incontinently into roundabouts. This was not like that, and so a naive expectation of drama was frustrated in him.
‘That confounded thing might be a hearse,’ he said testily – and was immediately appalled by the unfortunate implication of this remark.
‘In which case,’ Tim said grimly, ‘it’s our job to track it to the crematorium. But we’ll hope it’s not as bad as that. Yes! There’s the flyover ahead. So it’s as I thought. We’ll be going west.’
Averell almost managed to find this echo of his own phrase équivoque (an expression his friend Georges would have admitted) tolerably funny, and he was further relaxed by the fact that their pace presently picked up considerably. If he wasn’t exactly looking forward to a confrontation with the two toughs (as they must be) in the truck, he wasn’t inclined to shirk it either. And if it were to be done at all (he told himself, vaguely recalling Macbeth) then ’twere well it were done quickly. He was almost disposed to urge his nephew to step on it and have his bash. On the motorway, which they had now gained, there was a great deal of traffic moving out of London, and the frenzied weaving in and out promoted by such situations would render at least the preliminary manoeuvring the more colourable.
But Tim was in no hurry, and his uncle had soon to conclude that he had abandoned the notion of a contrived collision. It was indeed true that if Dave wasn’t in the crate, and these men were arrested on the discovery of stacks of banknotes, the move might eventually prove counter-productive so far as Dave’s safety was concerned. And if Dave was in the crate even a small miscalculation (such as Tim’s own car-driving assailant had committed) might not be at all healthy for him. Which all went to show that Tim was possessed of more native caution than some of his suggestions might lead one to expect.
‘There’s a panda car behind us,’ Tim said suddenly.
‘A what, Tim?’ The expression was unfamiliar to the expatriate Averell.
‘A police patrol car. It’s been there for quite some time. Could it be of any use to us? I think not. We could wave it down and report. But the end-position mightn’t be improved much by their bringing those chaps in. Not if Dave isn’t there.’
‘I’m not sure that I agree.’
‘Can it be trailing us, do you think?’ Tim had ignored his uncle’s remark. ‘Don’t I look like somebody who drives a Bentley? At least I own a driving-licence, although I haven’t got it on me. What about you, Uncle Gilbert? Could you prove yourself to be somebody respectable?’
All that Gilbert Averell could prove himself to be (it was an astonishing fact) was the Prince de Silistrie. That passport was still in his pocket, and so was a considerable sum in francs, along with a little small change in English currency. The sudden minor alarm occasioned by this reflection was merely ludicrous. It disturbed Averell, nevertheless.
They were in the middle lane, and now the police car in the fast lane drew level and slowed beside them. It contained two policemen, who studied Tim and his uncle with some curiosity. This seemed quite gratuitous behaviour, and as such was discomposing. The panda car, however, then moved on, switched with due notice to the middle lane, and similarly paused abreast of the truck, which was in the slow one. The truck seemed to interest them even more. Perhaps they were judging it to be injudiciously loaded, or perhaps there was something irregular in the way the trailer was hitched to it. But again there was anticlimax. The police returned to the fast lane and rapidly diminished ahead of them.
‘Good riddance,’ Tim said comfortably. Then he glanced into his driving mirror and added, ‘Well, I’m blessed!’
‘What is it this time, Tim?’
‘Another one. Two more, in fact. There they go.’
And there, certainly, they had gone. Two further police cars had swept
past them at speed.
‘Going to a football match, I expect,’ Tim said. ‘Or to look after some minor royals at Windsor. There it is. See Windsor’s domes and pompous turrets rise. Pope doesn’t mean “domes”, Uncle Gilbert. He just means “halls”, or something like that. Latin domus, you see.’
‘No doubt.’ Averell took this burst of pedantry (Oxford pedantry) on his nephew’s part to indicate rising spirits. Averell’s own spirits were not quite managing that. It was with a certain wistfulness that he had seen all those policemen vanish into distance.
‘And “pompous”,’ he said with an effort, ‘means “characterized by stately show”.’
‘Alpha, Uncle.’ Tim gave Averell a quick sideways grin before fixing his eyes on the road again. He was trying to keep three or four vehicles between the Bentley and the truck. ‘But to business once more. When they quit the motorway and we’re clear of all this traffic, they may possibly become aware of us, although I think it unlikely. Just in case, let’s plan to seem to lose them without really doing so. Any ideas about that?’
‘Well, yes – if their destination’s right.’ Averell had been thinking about this. ‘They may just be making for another empty shop, or a yard or warehouse in an urban street. Slough, for example. If they did a sudden pull up like that, it wouldn’t be much good just driving on and pretending not to notice. But if their next hide-out is a secluded place in the country – which seems probable enough – it might be managed that way. If they made a quick turn down a private drive, for instance, where the road was twisting and turning a bit, it might be possible to go haring past as if we thought they were still ahead of us.’
‘In that case, so far so good, Uncle Gilbert. Aren’t you a dab hand at this? But it wouldn’t give them more than what might be called a breathing-space to rely on. Just comfortable time, come to think of it, for them to arrange a little reception committee if we did turn up.’
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