by Desmond Cory
She must have reached the roof now, he thought, leaning for a moment against the wall and peering anxiously up towards the sky. She had that much advantage. On the other hand, she couldn’t get away from there; all he had to do was wait there until reinforcements arrived. Or could she get away? Was there some other way out? There might very well be. He’d have to go on up.
He took another quick step upwards and suddenly caught sight of her again, or rather of the fullness of her skirt moving in the wind. She was standing with her back to the wall on the near side of the roof, shielded partly by the parapet and partly by one of the palms that he had noticed before. She was absolutely motionless; it was only the slight lifting of her skirt that had given her away.
“Annette,” said Johnny.
There was the slightest of movements in response to this, a slow adjustment of the position of the right shoulder. But there was no reply.
“I can hit you there, dear. You’d better give this game up – I’ve been playing it too long.”
There was another long pause. Then she said, outwardly quite calm, “… Go ahead, then. To hell with you.”
Johnny moved slightly away from the wall and crouched down behind the steps, waiting for the shot. It didn’t come. Instead she said, “What happened to Gann?”
“He’s dead. And Malinsky.”
“I suppose you had the police in. I didn’t know you’d got so far.”
“Not at all,” said Johnny easily. “I did it all on my ownsome. What happened to Crashaw?”
“The policeman? I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I think I missed him. I’m not much good with this thing.”
There was another pause, then she said more quickly, “All right. Let’s get it over.”
Johnny said, “They don’t hang ’em now, baby. You’d do much better to come on out. In a light like this I can’t take any chances with you.”
She fired, and then twice more in quick succession; the bullets passed clear over his head and, far below, he felt the thudding as they kicked into the gravel. She was using a heavy revolver for a woman. He rested his shoulder against the step and pressed the trigger; the big earthenware pot against which she was leaning cracked abruptly, and from her quick intake of breath he guessed that the fragments had struck her. He fired again, slightly farther to the right and lower, and this time she moved, a good ten paces in three clean jumps. He saw her shadowy outline jumping for the parapet, for shelter behind the next pot of palms; then her breath was expelled so harshly that, in the silence, it had almost the effect of a scream. Beneath him, the steps suddenly quivered and he knew that the police were coming up; then, even as he was settling himself for a third shot, he heard the sudden slither of her shoes on stone and saw the palm fronds suddenly jump from side to side. For a second after that he distinctly saw her shoulder and hand desperately clutching at the pot, then her whole body coming away and falling outwards from the parapet, falling without a sound; the pot teetered for a moment on the edge and then slowly and inevitably followed her. In the silence that followed he heard the thump as she hit the ground and the unbelievable crash as the huge earthenware pot smashed itself to pieces beside her. And mixed with the splitting of a solid hundredweight of soil and pottery was a fantastic rattling, the sound of a thousand tins tied to the tail of a Cerberus. Johnny swung himself across the banister and looked downwards; in the light that streamed out from the windows beneath him he could see the tiny hermetically-sealed tins, dozens of them, some still rolling across the gravel, some mingled with the earth that had burst from the pot, some resting against Annette’s body sprawled out on its face to the right.
He stared dazedly back at the rows of earthenware pots standing like sentinels along the parapet, each with its fluffy plume of ferns or miniature palms on top, each rooted in its shallow socket, each containing the Lord knew how much drugs tucked snugly away under a covering of good, soft, British soil.
… From a few steps beneath him he heard Crashaw’s voice, soft but urgent. “Johnny? You all right?”
He said, “I’m fine. That was Annette going over.”
Crashaw said non-committally, “So I see. She didn’t hit you or anything?”
Johnny stepped upwards on to the calm security of the roof and said, “No, nowhere near. And you?”
“I’m all right. She hit Smith, though, in the shoulder: I don’t think it’s at all serious. We’ve got the husband downstairs all right, anyway. But she had a gun in her handbag and managed to get it out. … Lucky you were on the spot, or she might have got away.”
Johnny slid his Mauser back into its holster and pulled thoughtfully at his tie. The pain that had been in his arm seemed to have moved up and to be now affecting his neck muscles and shoulder-blade; with a feeling of mild surprise, he saw that the roof was tilting to and fro, rocking like a ship in mid-Atlantic. With a definite sensation that this was no way for a well-behaved roof to behave, he held up an arm to ward it off as it heaved itself upright in front of him. Far away, very far away in the distance he heard a heavy thud, filtering in the vaguest possible way through into his consciousness; and that was all.
EPILOGUE
“WELL,” said Crashaw. It hasn’t healed too badly.”
Johnny looked down at his left arm, a pale greenish-white in the watery sunlight, and at the jagged red scar where the broken bone had cut through the skin. He slid his shirt-sleeve back and buttoned it carefully.
“They did a sweet job,” he said. “No one could’ve done it better.”
“Very neat,” agreed Crashaw, leaning back in his armchair and wondering what on earth to say next. “Very neat. Er, how do you feel… all right?”
Johnny said, “Sure. But sort of empty, if you know what I mean.”
“Empty?”
“Yeah. You know how we felt at the end of the war, when the excitement was over? A kind of ‘is-this-all?’ feeling… I don’t know.” He got up and walked over to the fireplace to light a spill. Crashaw saw his face in profile for the first time since he had entered the room, satanically thin after three months in hospital and crowned with a mass of cherubically tousled hair; he noticed the angularity of the cheekbones and the difficulty that Johnny was experiencing in keeping his hands still.
“I can’t make it out,” said Johnny perplexedly, returning to his chair. “Here I am sittin’ here all ready for somethin’ fresh, an’ all Holliday does is tell me to go an’ twiddle my thumbs some place else. Honest, pal, if I don’t get a little activity soon I’ll fall on the floor an’ start bitin’ holes in the Axminster.”
Crashaw focused his eyes dreamily on a small white patch on the ceiling. He said, “I think a good scream would do you a lot of good.”
Johnny said, “Suppose you scream for me. I haven’t the energy.”
“No. I mean it,” said Crashaw. “Listen, Johnny. I’m going to give you a spot of avuncular advice.
“You boys are all alike; I’ve met your type before. You’re so damned used to risking your valuable little necks that when you’re not doing it life seems absolutely boring and generally worthless. Is that how you’re feeling these days?”
Johnny said, “I think that’s an exceptionally fine description of an ‘is that-all?’ feeling.”
“Yes,” said Crashaw quickly. “You’re lucky; you’ve got a sense of humour. That and your music’s all that saves you from being a nervous wreck.” He blew his nose violently without moving his eyes from the ceiling.
“It’s your training that causes all the trouble. You’ve worked up an astonishing nervous control – oh, yes; I’ve seen you. You sit on a chair for half-an-hour without twitching a muscle, and you do it without thinking about it. You’ve trained yourself so damned well it comes naturally; you move about in oil and you take anything that comes without batting an eyelid. You’re about the best-trained operative I’ve ever met.”
Johnny said, “If I…”
“Shut up,” said Crashaw irritably. “I’m doing th
e talking now. I’m not trying to flatter you; God knows you’re conceited enough already; I’m telling you.” He glared at Johnny intimidatingly.
“All right. So you’re good and you know it. Nevertheless, you’re still human; or let’s assume you are, just for the purpose of argument. And there are limits. That’s why when you spend days wondering what’s going to hit you next, being shot up, beaten up, held up, broken up, and utterly shemozzled, you begin to feel the least bit tired of it all, deep down underneath. And yet you still want to keep on with that sort of life, you want excitement like some kind of drug as an escape from the real business of living. You honestly believe you can’t live without excitement, and that the only thing worth doing with life is risking it.
“Well… am I right so far?”
Johnny leaned forwards to knock cigarette-ash into the tray. He said, “Go on.”
“Let’s look at it in another way. Now, all these emotions and muscular responses that you’ve learnt to completely suppress – if we must be psychological – well, you can’t just bottle them up. Not for long, anyway. They find an outlet somehow, and that outlet’s bound to become almost an obsession.
“I knew an R.A.F. boy whose parents were killed in an air raid, early in the war. From that moment on his only purpose in life was a sort of personal revenge; everything else seemed to stop for him. The result was that he went on crashing ’plane after ’plane in training and ended up with a nervous breakdown. That’s what happens if you find an outlet in pure hatred.”
Johnny sat very still, but something was moving very slowly behind his eyes.
“As I said, you’re lucky. You find an escape in music as well; and, as I said, you’ve got a sense of humour; you take things lightly. In this racket I’ve found that the winner is simply the one whose nerves last the longest; the fellow who worries about past mistakes has had it from the start. To put it mildly, you’ve been more successful than that R.A.F. laddie.”
“But now,” Crashaw clasped his hands together with the air of a master logician concluding a thesis, “now you’ve got to knock off, Johnny. You’ve lasted about as long as three average agents would, and if you take a real holiday now, you’ll be able to go on for as long again… six years, isn’t it? But when I say knock off, I mean knock off. Don’t go to a hotel and lie on your back in bed wondering what’s going to happen next; try and behave like a normal citizen. You know; don’t be afraid to sit in front of a lighted window at night; go through a door without throwing it open in front of you, Things nice ordinary people do without having to think about it; or things that your crowd don’t do without having to think about it.
“Normality, old chap, that’s the watchword – and if you’re thinking that once you’ve gone back to normal you won’t be able to do this work again, forget it; you’ll be better than ever. This is just getting your second wind.”
Johnny said, “Sure. Have you got yours yet, by the way?”
Crashaw said, “Damn it. I’ve finished.”
“Free play to the emotions, huh?” said Johnny thoughtfully. He got up, went down on hands and knees and bit furiously at the carpet. “You know,” he said, “I feel better already.”
Crashaw said, “Two months, Johnny. At least.” Johnny sat up. His face was flushed and really did look healthier. He scrambled to his feet and walked over to the fireplace again.
“That bit,” he said, suddenly sober, “that bit about excitement bein’… like a drug. You really believe that?”
Crashaw said, “Do you?”
“Well, you could be right,” said Johnny slowly. “I’d never thought of it just that way. It’d be a laugh if we stopped Annette Trevor from druggin’ half the population an’ then findin’ she’d done us in.” He surveyed his right hand thoughtfully. “Nervous breakdown,” he said. “I wonder.”
Crashaw said nothing to that. Johnny threw his cigarette-stub into the fire and said, “I smoke too much, don’t I? Look, I’ll cut it down. How about forty a day?”
Crashaw said sadly, “Two months. At least.”
Johnny said, “I think I’ll just un-suppress my emotions enough to brain you with the poker – or is that an impossibility?”
“It’d be a good sign.”
“But you’ve got a sense of humour an’ you find an outlet in psycho-analysis. That, of course, saves you from somethin’-or-other.” Johnny breathed deeply and said, “All right. I’ll try it. Two months.”
Crashaw leaned forward eagerly. He said, “Really? No kidding?”
“Yes, I’ll try it. This drug business… might be somethin’ in it. Damn it! I think you’re right.”
Crashaw said, “Great! Absolutely great. I’ll tell Holliday you’ve changed your mind and that you want, er, three months’ leave… be on the safe side.”
Johnny said, “Fine.” And then, helplessly, “Oh, God. How do I start? Where do you think I could go?”
“Well; now,” said Crashaw. “As it happens I’ve got a suggestion to make. I brought someone along with me – she said she’d like you to go for a holiday at some place in Dorset she knows. She’s waiting outside; if she hasn’t got fed up, that is.”
Johnny said, “Davida?”
“Yes.”
“You think I ought to go?”
Crashaw sighed. He said, “I’m aware of the propensity of you people for shunning female society. You’re always afraid you’ll talk in your sleep or discover she’s a German spy or some such fatuity. Well, you are now normal, my son. I personally have no doubt what a normal young man would do about Davida.”
Johnny said, “Um.”
“All right. You’re hard to get. You run away so that they can chase you with greater abandon. I suppose that’s the excuse.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” said Johnny vehemently. “Just let me think, will you?”
“You don’t have to think, man. Just walk out of the front door and get into the car. Smith’s been packing your things.”
Johnny said, “He has, has he?” He thought that, as repartee, that remark was below standard. “Well – if that’s the case, I’ll go and get it from him. Out the front door, you said —”
“— down the steps —”
“— and into the car. Yes. Well… I’ll be seein’ you, Inspector. Four months, I think you said?”
“Three months,” said Crashaw firmly. “At the most.”
“Yeah. I’ll see you then. So long.”
“Swell,” said Crashaw absent-mindedly. He shook hands and watched Johnny leave the room; then walked slowly over to the window. He took out his pipe and filled it slowly; as he watched, Johnny went down the path, swinging a brown suitcase in his hand.
“That’s the case all right,” said Crashaw happily. “The silly young fool. And the other one’s all wound up. Swell.”
The car suddenly bumbled into life and rolled forward out of the Inspector’s range of vision. He turned and stumped over to his desk.
“What’s the matter with me?” he thought. “Swell! No kidding! Huh! I’d better apply to join the F.B.I.” He picked up the telephone and said quickly.
“Douglas? Right. Get through to Holliday and tell him Fedora’s going to be all right. That boy’ll be better than ever by the spring. Yes. Then bring me the files on the Ottersby stuff; those drugs they found in Essex. I’m travelling over there this afternoon; you, Smith, and Spencer are coming with me as usual. … What? Yes. Almost certainly IIIB again, just another crowd. Should be easier this time without that feller Fedora buttin’ in.”
He replaced the receiver and lit his pipe thoughtfully. “I think,” he said to himself, eyeing the glowing mixture in the bowl with affection, “something must be cooking.” He chuckled horribly and reached for the morning paper.
THE END
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