This lucid contribution to the argument was not encouraging, yet Tim himself seemed far from downhearted. He remained silent and thoughtful, however, over the next half-dozen miles.
‘We must just rely on rapid improvisation when the time comes.’ he said. ‘Quick wits will be the order of the day. Do you think you and I are cleverer than they are? Top crooks are clever, of course. Everyone knows that. Much cleverer than the police, certainly.’
‘Even than the top police?’ Averell almost contrived to be amused at the unmistakable sound of the bees buzzing yet again in Tim’s bonnet – or inside his head.
‘Oh, yes – them too. You should read the books they write when they retire.’
‘That’s rather a different activity.’
‘And it’s why the fuzz use some act of parliament or other to clamp down on the record of their own efforts. But you and I are fairly smart, you know. I’m going to scrape a First in Schools if I ever go back to that dump.’ (By this Tim presumably meant the University of Oxford.) ‘And at Cambridge you came right at the top of your Tripos, I don’t doubt.’ Tim grinned again at his uncle, well aware that he was talking cock-sure nonsense. ‘Hold hard!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Action stations, Major Averell!’ This seemed to be a whimsical reference to his uncle’s long-past military career – the thought of which Tim always contrived to find amusing. ‘They’re going off.’
This was the first incontestably true remark that Tim had offered for some time. There was a junction ahead, and the truck was bearing left on the line of arrows leading to it.
‘And we’re in luck,’ Tim said. ‘Not Slough or Reading or any such ghastly place. Open country, winding lanes, and gents’ secluded residences dotted around. Top crooks go in for your secluded residences – when it isn’t phoney farms or derelict air strips. Let’s hope they haven’t a date with a private plane or helicopter. Proper Charlies we’ll look if it’s that.’
‘There is a helicopter,’ Averell said, and pointed upwards. ‘I’m not sure it isn’t hovering, just as if it’s going to land.’
‘Courage!’ Tim commanded. ‘The air’s thick with such things round about here. We’re still not all that distance from Heathrow. Don’t say you’re wishing you were back there and bound for Paris, Uncle Gilbert.’
‘These scoundrels may be wishing they were just that.’
‘Brazil or Guatemala, more likely, in their case.’
There was now only an empty road between themselves and the truck, and the truck was in fact out of sight beyond a bend. During all this chat the scene around them had changed entirely – and much as Tim had predicted. The road meandered, and off it on either side mere country lanes meandered too. There was even the roof-top of what Tim declared to be veritably a secluded gent’s residence visible on their left.
‘Aha!’ Tim cried suddenly. The truck was in sight again, but only momentarily. It had swung abruptly off the road and vanished. ‘This is where we drive on like mad,’ Tim said. ‘With one or two loud toots if the corners at all justify them.’ Taken by this idea, he tooted now – rejoicing, his uncle supposed, in the possession of a guile unknown to the dull minds of the constabulary. They drove on in this way for something over half a mile, and then Tim drew the Bentley abruptly to a halt on a convenient grass verge. ‘So here we are. Button up that combat-jacket, Major. Foot-slogging now. And we turn into Red Indians later on.’ They scrambled from the car, and Tim locked its doors with a promptitude that would have done credit to a well-trained constable. ‘What we shall have to think up pretty quick,’ he said, ‘is something in the way of diversionary tactics. Avanti, Uncle Gilbert! The curtain rises.’
18
And red Indians they did become. It wasn’t a ploy that Averell could have imagined himself as much relishing had he been drawn into it by, say, a band of nephews and nieces much younger than Tim. He was without any impulse (such as uncles ought to have) to join in the imaginative games of children on call. Not many years before, had Tim, Kate and Gillian so summoned him, he would have produced some good-natured excuse, relapsed into his book, and assuaged a subsequent sense of guilt and insufficiency by tipping them all with unusual liberality at their next parting. But on the present occasion he was no sooner down on his belly than he was taking satisfaction in the thought that although an elderly, he was by no means an out-of-condition man. It was a reasonably flat belly, and the muscles controlling this unwonted mode of progress responded surprisingly well. And his eyesight was good. If that possibly fatal dry twig lay in his path he wasn’t going to fail to spot it in time.
‘Over to the right a bit,’ he heard himself direct Tim in a most approved whisper. ‘So that we’ll still be under cover of those bushes ahead.’
Tim crawled to the right at once, and his uncle fleetingly recorded to himself once more the curious fact that his nephew, who habitually bossed him around, in fact took an order from him the moment it was given. There was a kind of weight of responsibility in this. He mustn’t in a crisis – and wasn’t there certainly going to be a crisis? – say the wrong thing.
Rather as if covert behaviour were infectious, the house seemed to be crouching behind hedges and shrubberies too. At one point in their cautious approach it even disappeared entirely, leaving them disoriented in a small forest of rhododendrons. Averell disliked rhododendrons, particularly when prematurely heralding the spring with a tasteless exuberance of conflicting hues. And beneath rhododendrons, moreover, the going is always for some reason so particularly dusty as to be distasteful to even the most intrepid brave. Quite suddenly, however, this garish barrier gave out, and the house was uncomfortably close in front of them – seeming to glare at them, indeed, from a score of upper windows like malignant eyes. It wasn’t to be supposed that, in their present situation, Averell and his nephew would fall in love with the place at sight; but it seemed equally certain that no reasonable being could greatly care for it even under the most favourable circumstances. It was a hypertrophied not-quite-modern villa, all gables and bogus timbering and ill-proportioned fenestration, and it was neither on the one hand deservedly derelict and in disrepair nor on the other decently cared for in any evident way. Perhaps it was just right as a temporary hide-out for malefactors conducting business on a generous scale. In front of it lay what appeared to have been at one time a broad lawn, but this had been converted in a rough-and-ready fashion into a large gravelled and now ill-weeded sweep on which one felt that large cars could circle in an impressive fashion. But the weeds would not, of course, have afforded cover to a mouse – or at least not to a stray cat – and this made further direct progress impracticable.
‘We’ll try the back,’ Tim whispered. ‘It’s my bet the dump will break down into a tumble of useless outbuildings that nobody goes near any longer. Unless you feel it would be better simply to march up to the front door and ring the bell.’
Averell didn’t feel this at all, and they resumed their painful progress on a wide arc. When this was achieved Tim proved to have been right. The back of the house presented two abandoned wings straggling out in offices of diminishing consequence, and the fourth side of a large concreted area between them was closed by a large freestanding structure which seemed to hover in character between a warehouse and a barn.
‘The bloody van!’ Tim breathed. ‘With its trailer still. But where’s the crate? Gone!’
This was indeed the state of the case. The tip-up was parked before what must be the main back-entrance to the house, with its tarpaulin-covered load still piled up on it. But on the trailer there was nothing but its own tarpaulin, roughly folded and with a coil of rope beside it. It was – there could be no doubt of this – a spectacle of an indefinably sinister sort.
‘Freeze!’ Tim whispered.
This was an unnecessary injunction, since Averell was already very effectively frozen. Two men had emerged from the house and were climbing back
into the cab of the truck. The truck then moved slowly across the yard and halted before the door of the barn-like building opposite. Simultaneously this was opened from within and two more men appeared. All four proceeded to strip the truck of its tarpaulin, unload its contents, and carry them into the interior of the barn.
As this operation was certainly of an illicit character one might have expected it to be carried out in a hasty and wary fashion amid evidence of guilt and unease. Nothing of the sort was evident. The four men worked with that sense of the worth of their own labour, and the moderate pace congruous with its dignity, which constitute (it may be thought) the true secret of England’s greatness. It was Averell who felt guilty. Never before in his recollection – or never since the innocent pastimes of childhood – had he acted the part of a spy, or of any sort of vulgar peeper through chinks and crevices. And now he was doing so in immediate physical circumstances of particular indignity, since he and Tim had wormed their way within a small rectangular enclosure of crumbling brick which might at one time have served to accommodate a favourite pig, promoted to the status of domestic pet and as a consequence brought virtually within the curtilage of its proprietor’s dwelling.
And might not this situation, so demeaning to two persons of some standing in the learned and academic world (for wasn’t Tim, after all, going to take the same sort of distinguished degree as he himself had done?), be the result of some gross error or misconception about the whole affair? Trucks such as the one now under their surveillance were common enough; it was not unknown for them to trail subsidiary conveyances behind them; and it was impossible to be quite certain that the present outfit had emerged from what was indeed the back premises of that abandoned butcher’s shop. Some unfortunate coincidence might have bedevilled their whole design.
These implausible misgivings, although perhaps the issue of wishful thinking, received some support from the totally innocent appearance of what was going on. One of the men under observation was whistling as he worked; another had paused to light and enjoy a cigarette; the remaining two were exchanging uncultivated but good humoured badinage as they passed one another in the course of their task. What was being unloaded so far was a number of cardboard cartons of identical size and seemingly no more than moderate weight; they might contain, say, packets of breakfast cereal or rolls of lavatory paper or some equally innocuous variety of merchandise.
Averell was about to communicate these disturbing dubieties to his nephew when he was arrested by a change in the character of the freight being dealt with. The cardboard boxes had all been carried inside, and the men were now unloading what appeared to be a large number of small but heavy blue canvas sacks. These struck with Averell what was for some moments only a vaguely familiar note. Tim, however, clarified the situation at once.
That’s the hard cash,’ Tim whispered with satisfaction. ‘They cleared out the copper as well as the silver, if you ask me. Quite a wholesale job.’
Averell was constrained to agree at once. These were, of course, just the sort of bags that one observes being humped in and out of banks by the beefy and helmeted and leather-clad men who man the vehicles of security firms. So it was no longer possible to place even a remotely innocent construction upon the spectacle now being afforded. The barn-like building in front of them was nothing less than the repository of the ill-gotten gains of atrocious criminals.
The unfortunate Dave, however, was another matter. If he had indeed – as now seemed too likely – been conveyed to this remote hide-out in circumstances of horrible discomfort, if not remorselessly inflicted agony, he had been judged worthy of the enhanced security of the house itself. And there could be no doubt why he was here at all. If he were simply (as Tim had been) in the position of knowing too much it was certain that he would simply have been promptly taken care of (as Tim himself, if abortively, had been). The gang had arrived at a realization that Dave, alive, was probably worth much more than the total spoil to be obtained from a not particularly distinguished branch of a trading bank. The gang, in fact, had moved promptly into an alternative line of business.
Averell now saw that – lurking as he was in this disgusting pigsty – an enormous responsibility had devolved upon him. He knew that Tim, so commanding and so given to hair-raising action, would, at a pinch, do as he was told by a senior man. (Public-school boys are brought up that way.) He himself had only to refrain from making suggestions and offering advice (which would be ignored) and, as it were, save up for the moment when an order must be given, and the thing would be on his own shoulders and not on his nephew’s.
So what was the position?
It was much more hopeful than it might have been. Here was a cardinal fact. The story that Dave’s father was the richest man in England was probably a picturesque exaggeration. Nobody in the world knows who is the richest man in England, although probably quite a number of people idly speculate from time to time as to whether they themselves fill the bill. But if one merely postulated great wealth in Dave’s family it was almost a certainty that the family would pay up quietly whatever feasible ransom was demanded rather than risk the sort of battle of wits with the kidnappers that the police would probably favour. But would they? Averell, as if a little infected by his nephew’s views on the fuzz, reflected that they mightn’t be all that keen on setting the sort of trap that risks ending in failure and a panic killing. A quiet deal was perhaps something that they wouldn’t, at least, very vigorously clamp down on.
So the broad facts of the case were simple. Dave’s life was in no present danger. So far as the bank robbery went, he was no longer any sort of threat to the robbers, since he was their prisoner and would remain so until they had effectively covered up their tracks for good. And the ransom project was something to which they could then turn their attention at leisure. A period of silence after a kidnapping of this sort was even – Averell appeared to recall – a standard softening-up technique.
Of course the validity of this line of thought depended a good deal on Tim’s confident assumption that the men with the truck had remained unaware of being followed; or that, failing this, they believed themselves to have successfully shaken off pursuit before the end of their journey. Were the criminals to conclude that their headquarters had been discovered by adversaries still at large the entire situation would change at once.
At this point Averell’s reflections were interrupted by an episode of minor drama. The truck had now been almost entirely emptied, but for some moments two of the men appeared to be struggling with a single remaining object of a bulky and awkward sort. They edged it to the ground with difficulty, and then with greater difficulty heaved it up between them and staggered with it into the barn. It was the case in which there ought to have reposed that Jumbo-sized musical instrument, a double-bass.
‘What made the penny drop,’ Tim whispered.
‘The penny?’
‘Inside Dave’s thick skull. Even Dave knows that a big fiddle oughtn’t to weigh a ton, since it’s no more than a few slivers of wood wrapped round vacancy. Of course they used it to smuggle in their heaviest gear – and the stuff’s in it now. Probably they had other bits and pieces in other cases, for bassoons and trombones and what have you. Cunning notion, smuggling themselves in as a band... Look, they’re calling it a day.’
This was evidently so. The four men had emerged from the barn, and one of them was locking its door behind them. Then, leaving the truck where it stood, they walked across the yard and disappeared into the house.
‘Come behind this wall,’ Tim said, ‘and we can at least stand up. How are you feeling, Uncle Gilbert?’
‘Rather like the Empress of Blandings, I’d say.’ Averell, whose reply had been prompted by a distinct impression that a faint porcine odour lingering in the sty had actually transferred itself to his person, wondered whether this literary allusion remained intelligible to one of Tim’s generation. ‘O
r,’ he added, ‘like Sancho Panza tagging after Don Quixote. So where’s your next windmill, Tim?’
This was perhaps rather a testy joke, and inappropriate in the grim situation confronting them. Tim, however, took it in good part. Now behind the shelter of what might have once been a coal shed, he was helpfully dusting his uncle down with a flapping handkerchief.
‘The house itself, I’d suppose,’ he said. ‘That’s almost certainly where Dave is, so it’s from there that we have to rescue him. But let’s case that other building first. We’re unlikely to get into the part they’ve stacked up their loot in, I suppose. But there may be more accessible bits and pieces at the back. I’d like to have a look – do a bit of a recce, as you used to say in your army days. Do you mind? I’ve rather an idea about the place, as a matter of fact. There may be ammo in it. Red Indians always have to steal their ammo, being poor ignorant bastards without the know-how to manufacture it.’
‘Let’s have a look, by all means.’ Averell had felt something ominous about these remarks, having discovered by now that talking nonsense was often with Tim a prelude to outrageous action. But the ‘recce’ was at least preferable to an ill-advised march upon the house itself – which was certainly something that his nephew was perfectly capable of.
‘Then here goes, Uncle Gilbert. And I don’t think we need do any more crawling at the moment – do you? We just have to keep on the outer side of all these buildings to be safe enough. At least from bipeds, but of course one doesn’t know about dogs. Wouldn’t you expect these sort of people to go in for guard dogs? Alsatians and Airedales and Doberman Pinschers and Rottweilers. I don’t think I’ve met a Rottweiler. They’re said to be quite horrific.’
‘Stop being an idiot, Tim.’
‘Sorry.’ Tim was now walking confidently ahead. ‘But just keep your ears open for low growlings. You haven’t heard anything of the sort, so far?’
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