by Gavin Lyall
He stood up a bit quickly as I came up to his desk. 'Afternoon, Major.'
I said quietly, 'For Chrissake sit down, Pip.'
He slumped. 'Just instinct, I suppose."
'I wasn'tthat bad.'
'You were still a major.' He picked up a packet of Gauloises; and took one, then offered me. I shook my head. He nodded sadly. 'I don't like them myself, but they help me cut it down. I see you got your name in the papers at last. Have they caught you yet?'
'No. Just ring the newsroom and you'll have a scoop on yout hands.'
He smiled gently. 'Let 'em do their own dirty work; they tell me how to do mine often enough.' He had a tall forehead that hid a remarkable private filing system, curly black hair, and the pale skin of a man whose office never sees the sun. 'What can I do for you, Major?'
'Fenwick.' You don't tell a man like Pip what you want to see, you tell him what you want to know. He'll think of sources you couldn't dream of.
He shook his head slowly. 'We've been trying to get something on him all day. He's not in Who's Who or. the Directory of Directors; we've got no packets on him. Seems to be just a Lloyd's man. We don't keep any of their registers or stuff. You really don't know any more yourself?'
'Nope. I only knew him a few hours.'
'The Standard's got everything we know.' He pushed across a fresh final edition. 'Anything else?'
'Mockby. Paul Mockby.'
He frowned thoughtfully. 'I think… Does he come into it?'
'He seems to be the bright light of Fenwick's syndicate, that's all. And while you're at it, I'd like some general stuff on Lloyd's – how it works and so on.'
'No can do. The packets are out.' He jerked his head to a young man sitting at a table about ten yards off, puffing at an oversized pipe and rumpling, alternately, his hair and a mass of newspaper clippings.
Pip said, 'He's working up some background on how an underwriter works. You ought to buy him a drink – he spent half last night waiting outside your pad for you to come home. I'll see what we've got on Mockby.'
I skimmed the Evening Standard while he was gone. The story was still front page – perhaps because the Arras police had announced finding a Walther PP down a drain; there's got to be a new fact to hang a new rehash of old knowledge on, and the police know that as well as anybody. But they hadn't tied the gun to me, yet. Or else the Standard hadn't risked libel by saying so. The only new thing about me was that I'd once been a major in the Intelligence Corps. No picture. I didn't think they'd find one before the story ran dry, anyway.
Pip was leaning over my shoulder with the Directory of Directors open at Mockby's page. 'I've got a bit of personal stuff on him, too.' He sat down to sort through a handful of clippings while I went through the Directory entry.
It seemed Mockby was a director of about twenty companies, none of which f d heard of, bar a small merchant bank and a shipping line. But there was perhaps something of a pattern to the rest of them. Most of the names – where the names told you anything – suggested electronics, chemicals and drugs, or man-made fibres. Laboratory companies. Find a new cure for cancer or nylon and farm out your patents and then hold on to the rocket stick while your share values go through the ceiling.
Still, what did that tell me? – that Mockby was what the Irish call a 'chancer'. He liked to be where the action was, and I could have told the Directory that myself.
Pip said, 'He played polo against Prince Philip once.'
'Riding what? – a tank?'
He grinned and compared two cuttings. 'Yes, he's thickened up a bit. We all do. Divorced in 1962. It looks as if his first one was the polo piece – the Hon Arabella. There isn't much about the new one. About fifteen years younger, that's all'
'Roll on the revolution and the government'll give us all one fifteen years younger.'
He leaned back in his chair and sucked at a tooth. 'I'll swap my new one for a crate of beer, Major.'
'It's a deal.'
After a while he said, 'What happened to Mrs Card? I read a par; I didn't clip it.'
I shut the Directory with a snap. 'I didn't make lieutenant-colonel. It lasted four years.'
' "Lieutenants might marry, captains may marry, majors should marry, colonels must marry," ' he quoted. 'It doesn't say anything about corporals.'
'Corporals are trash, dust, less than the mud on an officer's boots.'
'They survive.' He smiled lazily and tuned a violin on his tooth again. 'The stories I read, it was just one shot. That isn't right, is it?'
I nodded.
His chair came back to earth with a bang. 'What calibre? What range was that?'
'Nine-millimetre; about fifteen yards.'
He swung around to peer through the grimy window at the gloom gathering already in the well outside. 'At six o'clock? In that light? Apistol? Christ, but he was lucky. Or you taught us wrong.'
'I was right.'
'Amateur, then. Just one shot. It must have been luck.'
'Or Hopalong Cassidy.'
'Yes.' He brooded on it.
The young reporter came across trailing smoke like a wounded Messerschmitt; he had to puff at that pipe every two seconds to keep it going. He dropped half a dozen fawn envelopes on Pip's desk.
'I've got all I need. I think the pieces are back in the right packets.'
'I bet they're not," Pip said sourly. 'Are you out after the Card bloke again?'
'Yes.' He glanced gloomily at his watch. 'From six till the first edition closes. I bet he isn't even back in this country yet."
'And you wouldn't even know him if you saw him.'
'Oh, I dunno. I got a pretty good description out of the French papers.' He consulted a notebook. 'About forty, six foot, thin face, receding brown hair, wears a dark blue-grey sheepsldn jacket.'
My jacket was slung over the back of my chair, but he hadn't even glanced at me.
'Clever boy,' Pip commented.
'Well, I'd better write up the Lloyd's piece.' He puffed his way out through the door.
I asked, 'When's the first edition…?'
'Half past eleven.' Pip picked up the Standard and fanned irritably at the smoke cloud hanging around his desk. 'But the agencies'll probably keep men there until about three in the morning.'
'Thanks.'
'Pray for a nice local sex murder and an airliner crash. D'you still want to look at these?'
He passed over the Lloyd's packets.
I was on the street just before six and the pubs were open – but some reporters might have sharper eyes than the boy wonder, so I walked along to the Strand and finally to the Charing Cross Hotel. The bar there doesn't get crowded early, and anyway, my suitcase was parked in the station.
The sky was solid cloud, low enough to pick up a faint orange glow from the street lighting, and an east wind nibbled at the back of my neck all the way. Except there was no snow lying in London, it was the same weather it had been in Arras, just twenty-four hours ago…
I took on one double Scotch and soda fast, just to improve the mood, and started a second one slowly as an aid to thought.
Our forces: well, just me so far. It looked as if nobody from Fenwick's syndicate was going to hire me, or even help me. Mockby and Maggie knew what it had been about – or some of it – and they weren't telling. Enemy forces: at least two of them, with a nine-millimetre automatic – though maybe that was down a drain as well – and very willing to use it. Unless they'd panicked, of course, but what had we done to panic them? Just the sight of two men when they'd expected one? (But I'd thought of that and mentioned it to Fenwick; he'd said they wouldn't be surprised to see two…)Our intentions: that was a bit easier – just to find out what the hell it had all been about. Method: just stagger blindly on asking the obvious questions of the obvious people.
Our secret weapons: one Bertie Bear Colouring Book. And a hell of a secret weapon it is when you don't know which button to press.
I looked into the bottom of my glass and made sign languag
e for another.
Still, I must have advanced on some front today. If Mockby and Maggie knew something of what it was about, then it must touch on Fenwick's work – marine insurance. The newspaper clippings hadn't told me much, but they'd filled in some main features on the map. A full-time underwriter like Fenwick would have to put up no more than eight or ten thousand quid – in equities and giltedged shares – as a deposit with Lloyd's in order to become a member. Outside Names had to put up £15,000 and prove they actually had £50,000 plus. So Fenwick could have been the beggar at the Princess's christening. Did that mean anything?
I also knew that our Maggie had been in love with Fenwick. Question: had he reciprocated? Don't be filthy. Maybe I'd find out when I met Mrs Fenwick. Meantime, it was another advance – although I couldn't tell in what direction.
Before I left, I rang up and booked a room in a small tourist hotel up in Chalk Farm, not a quarter of a mile from my flat. It didn't have a proper bar and I'd heard the food wasn't much, so none of my resident reporters would be using it for a break.
The food was pretty foul, but I didn't want to risk eating out around my own neighbourhood. And I wasn't being entirely stupid in going there; I wanted to get hold of my car, and the safest time for that would be before seven in the morning. So I had to be close to start with. I went to bed about half past nine with my duty-free Scotch and Bertie Bear.
I read that damn book forwards, backwards, and upside down for the best part of three hours. It was the usual sort of gump, except more of it: straightforward pictures to colour, three-letter word puzzles, mazes to trace ('Bertie Bear wants to get the honey-pot. Can you draw the path for him?'), and pages where you link up the numbered dots and get a picture of you-know-who or his Best Chum, Dickie Donkey. Couple of right old security risks, if you ask me. I even drew in those pictures: they just might have turned into a map of where the Lutinesank with all her bullion. They didn't. And apart from my scribbling, there wasn't a mark on the book except the price. Unless it was in invisible ink.
Past midnight I threw the book across the room and tried to get to sleep. It took time and I wasn't helped by wondering if our Bertie wasn't just a bluff, a stand-in for another book or something that measured about fourteen inches by twelve and one inch thick. Getting Bertie instead might have been why Fenwick had thought the other side could turn rough.
It still hadn't been why they'd shot him.
Six
I'd asked to be woken at six but forgotten that by Internationa] Standard Hotel Time that was twenty to seven. I swore a bit, jammed on a few clothes, and decided I could shave when I came back for breakfast. I was outside my own flat just before seven.
It was just light – maybe too light for me, although that part of London doesn't get moving early. The sky had cleared to a pale cold blue and the windscreen of my blue Escort GT was solidly iced up. I got quickly into the driving seat and did my reconnaissance from there.
After a few minutes I was pretty sure nobody else was sitting and watching from a car, so it looked as if the day shift hadn't arrived. The only strange car I could spot – though that doesn't mean much in that area – was a maroon Jag XJ6. But it was iced up as badly as mine, and I didn't think reporters drove XJ6s. I was beginning to be tempted.
So far, I'd seen nothing moving except a lorry, one postoffice van, the newsboy who delivers to my flat, and an old boy in British Rail uniform. And yesterday's shirt was gritty on my back, and I could pick up another coat and stop being the man in blue-grey sheepskin, and… It would take less than five minutes, wouldn't it?
It's a new building with no real entrance hall and certainly nowhere to sit down there, so nobody could be waiting… I zipped through the glass doors and into a lift and up to the third floor. Again, no real corridor and nowhere to wait around. I was in through my door; dark, so I must have drawn the curtains before I left.
Then there was a creak and two dark figures stood up and one of them said,'Come on in, Card. We've got things to talk about.'
A torch flashed on, straight in my eyes, and after that there just wasn't anything I could do. Hands came out of the darkness and explored my clothes carefully, but didn't take anything.
A second voice said quietly, 'He's safe.'
The torch flicked away and pointed at a deep, low chair. 'Sit in that one, Card. Nice and relaxed.'
I sat; in that chair, there was no way of doing anything sudden. But just in case I needed any further persuading, the torch shone briefly on the gun the first man had in his other hand. A Walther P38. A very nice automatic, that; supposed to be the standard German Army pistol in the last war, though they still used plenty of Lugers, too. Almost certainly nine-millimetre.
The torch came back on to me. 'So now you know,' the first voice said calmly. He was still just a dark shape to me, even when I wasn't being dazzled, but the voice sounded like a big man; not too young, and not too yobbovitch, but not a Cholmondleigh of Chatterley, neither.
'What can I do for you gentlemen?' I asked.
The second voice chuckled; the first said, 'That's nice. Cooperative. You brought something back from France. It doesn't belong to you. We'll take it.'
'Is it yours?'
'That isn't the point. It isn't yours.'
'Keep your voice down,' I warned. 'These new blocks are built of cardboard.' Which actually wasn't true for my building; I just wanted to get him to do something I told him to. Psychological, you know.
And his voice became a hoarse whisper. 'Just tell me where it is.'
'What are we talking about? ' I whispered back.
'You know bloody well. Where is it?'
'You can search me.'
'Stop buggering about!' So he had some idea of the size of thing he was after.
'Sorry I haven't got any children's books to keep you happy.'
It was a chance. If he really was a Bertie Bear fan, then I couldn't play ignorant any longer. But if he wasn't…
He wasn't. The torch Cook three quick steps and something smashed on to my cheek. I couldn't even fall out of that chair, but it rocked with me.
'I said to stop buggering about. Now where is it?'
My eyeballs spun slowly to a stop. I touched my cheek, expecting to find it laid open; hell, I expected to find my head missing. Then I realised he'd used his hand, not the gun. It had still felt like Krupp steel.
The second voice whispered urgently. 'Keep it quiet!'
'The hell with that. Where is it?'
'I gave it back to the syndicate. Belongs to them.'
Clang. It was the other cheek this time, but his backhand was just as good as his forehand.
'For God's sake!' the second voice said. 'He's got it in a hotel or some bird's pad."
The torch took a pace back. 'You're not tough,' the first voice said quietly. 'You're cheap. For a hundred quid you'll carry a gun without a licence. And come the first shot you're on the next boat home to Mummy. You're just a mug.'
'I gave it to that big fat sod down at the office.'
'Mr Mockby? Mug.'
The torch moved in. I pressed back in my chair and kicked upwards. I must have got his thigh, though I wasn't aiming for quite that. He overbalanced and his hand swiped the back of the chair. His face fell on my knees. I banged both fists on the back of his neck, grabbed his hair and threw him aside, and tried to spill over the other side of the chair. Then the second one jumped me.
The chair spilled then, all right. One of my feet caught a small table and lamp. Add the two of us hitting the floor at the same time, and you had a crash like the delivery of a year's coals in hell. The noise froze him for a moment, and I got my feet back from under him and kicked him a few times more or less in the ribs. He made oofing noises and rolled away.
I grabbed the torch off the floor, got on my feet, and flicked it across the two of them. The big one was down on his knees and forehead like a Muslim at prayer, rubbing the back of his neck. The other was just getting up. The light stopped him; the
sound of the doorbell bloody well petrified him.
'Come in!' I yelled. Then I pulled back the window curtains and dumped the torch on the sofa.
A muffled voice called, 'It's locked!'
'Stay there! I'll be with you!' I got my first good look at the second voice: youngish, narrow-faced, long black hair, smart leather jacket.
I said, 'The rest we do with eye-witnesses. It's your decision.'
He just stayed crouched against the end of the sofa. I circled round the other man. He was big, all right, and about my own age or a bit more. He wore a rough tweed sports jacket with one pocket weighed down to the floor; I took the Walther out of it and began to feel more at home in my own home.
Then I backed off to the door and asked, 'Who is it?'
'It's Mr Norton. Is that Mr Card? '
'Yes.' The snoopy old bastard who lived one floor down.
'You're back, then?'
'Yes.'
'I heard a crash…'
'I'm sorry, Mr Norton. Knocked over a table in the dark. I'm not really awake.'
'It isn't good enough, Mr Card. At this time in the morning.'
'I know, Mr Norton. I'm sorry.'
'Some people are still trying to sleep.'
'I know. I'm sorry.'
Pause. Then, 'I may have to speak to Miss O'Brien about it.'
'I hope not, Mr Norton.'
'And those stories about you in the papers, and the reporters coming round…'
'You don't want to believe everything you read in the papers, Mr Norton. Anyway, I'm going away again in a minute.'
Pause. You could just about hear the clockwork running down.
'Well, it isn't good enough.'
'I'm sorry, Mr Norton.'
Pause. 'Well…' Tick… tick… tick. He shuffled away. I leaned back against the door. Even a punch-up is less exhausting than some things.
Back in the living-room, the young one was on his feet, looking a bit uncertain, and the big one in a chair, still rubbing his neck and breathing in grunts. I showed him the gun.
'It isn't loaded,' he growled.
Keeping it pointed, I worked the slide a couple of times -and damn me, it wasn't. I went quickly through into the bedroom and took the commando knife from the bedside table drawer. The drawer was already open, and when I looked around, they'd really worked the place over. Well, of course they would have done. Blast. I checked my cuff-links box and the drawer of personal papers and they were all right. At least I don't keep any guns in the flat, except the antiques, and they were still on the living-room wall. And in my business you don't keep files at home.