The Golden Horns

by John Burke

  “Well,” Martin shrugged, “if you will play such eccentric old things, you’ve only yourselves to blame.”

  He was glad to get away from young Clifford—glad when they reached Liverpool Street the following day, and glad as the taxi whirled him away from the station.

  He let himself into his flat and pushed his two heavy cases into a corner of the small entrance hall. First things first: a drink and a cigarette, and a sprawl in his favourite chair.

  He was just lowering himself gratefully into its cushioned depths when the doorbell buzzed softly.

  Martin sighed. For a moment he considered ignoring it; but a doorbell, like a telephone bell, was a challenge he could never brush aside. He went to the door and opened it.

  There was nobody there. Ahead of him was the stairwell, to his right the lift doors.

  He emerged from the flat to glance along towards the lifts...and was slashed savagely across the back of the head by something hard—something that drove a surge of pain into his head, exploded a blaze of light before his eyes, and then thrust him down into a reeling, tumultuous darkness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Berkley Square was flooded with sunlight. The bodywork of cars parked against the kerb were hot to the touch, and office windows around the square stood gaspingly open.

  Martin Slade glanced up at the first floor windows of the building he was approaching, as though hoping they might reveal something about the identity of the occupant of the rooms behind.

  But they remained impassive and non-committal.

  He went in and prodded the button for the lift. First floor, they had told him on the telephone. It was not far to walk, but this was not the sort of day when anyone walked more than he had to.

  The lift purred up; the doors opened; across a richly carpeted passage another door faced him.

  He went in.

  The brunette behind the desk just inside the door looked up and smiled. Then she blinked at Martin, and smiled even more.

  Fifteen years ago he would have been wild with delight at knowing he could make women look at him like that. Now it didn’t matter—not as much as it had done, anyway.

  “Yes, sir?” Zoe Peters said in a breathless voice that sounded as though it might rush up an octave if not kept strictly under control.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Logan. Martin Slade.”

  “Mr. Slade,” she repeated. “Yes. Oh, absolutely, Mr. Slade.”

  A moment later he was being shown into a spacious, well-appointed room overlooking the Square. A man rose from behind the desk to meet him.

  Martin, who had had doubts on his way here, was suddenly sure that he had done right in coming. He knew that he had come to the right man

  David Logan said: “Sit down. Mr. Slade.”

  Martin had met men like this during the war—not many, for there were not many of this calibre. When you met them, you knew them right away. Apparently dispassionate, saturnine men whose rare smiles were sardonic and disillusioned, they were capable of endurance to a degree beyond that of most mortals.

  Martin had seen such a man smoke his last cigarette, tell a joke, break into an unexpectedly charming grin, and then go out towards death with steely determination in his eyes and all the tense magnificence of a fearless tiger.

  He said: “I’d like you to help me. Mr. Slade, but I’m not sure if the job is up your street.”

  “Just give me a few details, and we’ll see. I get a lot of varying traffic up my street, you know!”

  “Actually,” said Martin slowly, trying to work out what he must say and how best to start, “I think it concerns a murder.”

  “You think it concerns a murder?” One satanic eyebrow lifted querulously.

  “The Clifford murder,” said Martin. “You’ve read about it this morning?”

  David Logan nodded. “But if you know anything about that—anything at all—you ought to be telling the police. I’m not the man for you. It’s your duty—”

  “I know all that,” interrupted Martin. “But I can’t talk to the police. There are reasons.”

  “Then why come to me? If you want to pass on information anonymously to the police, I can arrange that for you, but frankly I’ve got more important things to do.”

  “Nothing like that,” said Martin. “I want you to work for me. I’ll tell you the whole story, and then—”

  “Just a moment.”

  Logan leaned forward and flicked a switch. The breathless voice of Zoe Peters crackled with a hollow note in the speaker.

  “Yes, Mr. Logan?”

  “Is Miss Dane in?”

  “She’s just brought those slides in for Mr. Marston. They’re going over them together.”

  “Ask her to come in, will you?”

  David Logan sat back in his chair the shape of his head making a lean, devilish silhouette against the brightness outside the window.

  There was a brief silence. It was broken by the slight click of the door

  Martin looked round; and got up.

  “This is my secretary, Miss Dane,” Logan was saying. “Carol, this is Mr. Slade, who promises some startling revelations about the Clifford murder. Have you got a note pad for the salient points?”

  Carol Dane shook hands with Martin, flipped open a small pad, and slid gracefully into a chair in the corner of the room. One slim, nylon-sleek leg was crossed over the other. Her honey-blonde head bowed over the pad, and then lifted as she glanced inquiringly at Martin.

  David Logan said: “Well, Mr. Slade? Let’s have it from the beginning. The whole thing. Then tell me what you want me to do…and I’ll tell you if I’m prepared to do it.”

  Martin told him. He started with the call from Henning Holtesen, and reached the incident of the blow he had received on the head. Then he paused for a moment, sorting out details in his mind.

  “You’ve no idea who attacked you?” Logan prompted.

  “None at all. When I came round, I felt so sick that it took me quite a time to get myself straightened out. Then I checked up on the flat. Nothing had been stolen, but the whole place had been turned upside down. No….” He frowned, anxious to be exact. “That’s not quite true. My cases—the cases I’d just brought back from Denmark—had been literally torn apart. Everything had been taken out, and the hinges were wrenched off. It looked as though it had been done in a fit of fury. But someone might have been looking for a false side to the case or something of that sort.”

  “And the rest of the flat? That had been treated in the same way?”

  Martin shook his head. “Not quite the same. It had been turned out but rather hastily—as though that were a last resort.”

  “You mean that whatever the intruder was looking for must have been, according to his reckoning, in the cases you had just brought back with you? Searching the rest of the flat was just a last despairing effort.”

  “Something on those lines,” Martin agreed.

  Logan’s lips were pursed.

  “And when the search proved fruitless—”

  “He moved on to Sean Clifford.”

  “The connection being your friend Birgitte,” said Logan. “Mrs. Holtesen asks you to smuggle something out of Denmark for her. You refuse. She picks up this young impressionable Clifford chap and, a few days after his return from Copenhagen, he’s murdered. By whom?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” said Martin.

  “It’s what the police would like to know,” observed Logan grimly. He stared penetratingly at Martin. “Have you any ideas at all on the subject?”

  “I might have some ideas,” said Martin, “if I had any idea of what it was I was supposed to smuggle. Maybe this business has nothing whatever to do with that—but I shall be surprised if that’s the case.”

  “It would be quite a coincidence. Hm.” Logan pushed a cigarette box across the desk, and leaned forward with a lighter. Smoke swirled about his head, blurring its sun-sharp outline, “Yes, it’s a great pity you didn’t find ou
t what the package was that you would have transported.”

  “If I’d found out, maybe I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. Maybe, having used Clifford, they killed him the moment he had done the job for them.”

  “They?” queried Logan.

  “Birgitte and Eiler are in this together. I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “But why should they, or their agents over here, knock you out and go through your cases? They would know you hadn’t got the…well, whatever it was. No, there must be someone else in this affair—someone who was either waiting here for you to arrive, or who flew over from Copenhagen in order to get to London before you. Someone else. Any ideas?”

  Martin had no ideas. He was groping in a fog. None of this added up to anything.

  Logan went on: “Your host, perhaps—Henning Holtesen? Could he be involved?”

  “I don’t see how.” said Martin. “I suppose he can’t be ruled out, but I wouldn’t have said he was a criminal type. Certainly not a murderer.”

  “There are no certainties when it comes to murderers,” Logan swiftly assured him. “But if Holtesen is not mixed up in this, what else is there? Somebody quite unknown—and we can’t cook up any theories on those lines. Or else there was a quarrel between your girl friend and her brother Eiler, and one of them is double-crossing the other. Or maybe their liaison with their people at this end—assuming they’ve got people over here—broke down. Or they were both double-crossed.” Logan sighed. “There are far too many imponderables.”

  “Far too many,” Martin agreed. “But there must be a solution somewhere—and you’re the man to find it.”

  David Logan emitted a thin jet of smoke between his lips. He said: “I still don’t know why you won’t see the police. I’m not touching any work for you until I know that. Perhaps you’ll explain.”

  Martin was aware of Carol Dane studying him intently. He knew that they were both sizing him up—and that the woman’s assessment would be as shrewd and thorough in its own way as Logan’s would be.

  He explained.

  He told them, tersely and without heroics, about his work during the war.

  Son of a Danish mother and an Englishman who had worked in Copenhagen for years before the war, he spoke fluent Danish, and knew the country inside out. Dropped by parachute, he worked on behalf of British Special Operations Executive in organising sabotage of industries that worked for the Germans. Railway lines were blown up, factories wrecked, and propaganda distributed through illegal presses. It was a nerve-racking life, and yet a ceaselessly stimulating one.

  When the war ended, everything became suddenly flat. Life was intolerably dull.

  Martin Slade went back to Denmark. He organised complicated currency deals, and smuggled everything from gold to cigarettes across the troubled frontiers of postwar Europe.

  “Everything,” he said bluntly, “except drugs. I never went in for that dirty traffic.”

  Excitement was what he needed. He could not relax. He found excitement in this illicit trading, founding his small organisation on Copenhagen, in its key position dominating Scandinavia and the Baltic.

  And he found excitement in Birgitte Nielsen. It was an excitement that flamed high and then died suddenly—died away into petty quarrels and savage bitterness

  At last self-disgust and weariness drove him back to England permanently. Music, his first love, reasserted its sway. The madness of war and the postwar turmoil faded, and he put his own madness behind him.

  “But there are still a lot of police forces in Europe who would like to grab me,” he said, while Logan nodded understandingly. “I could still be dragged in by our own police. Once put them on the trail, and they’ll ferret out too many things. It would be too unhealthy for me.”

  Logan stubbed his cigarette out.

  “You’re quite right. They’d be bound to ask why you had been approached by Birgitte in the first place. And then they’d start asking more questions. You might make a deal with them—an exchange of your information, such as it is, for the promise of immunity—but even so, it’s a risky business. They’d keep a sharp eye on you from then on. Might even pick you up on some technicality, long afterwards.”

  “That’s why,” said Martin decisively, “I want you to take this case up independently.”

  There was a long pause. Logan tilted back again in his chair, teetering lazily to and fro.

  “What makes you so interested in it?” he demanded. “What makes you willing to spend money—perhaps a lot of money—on something that doesn’t really concern you.”

  Martin had been afraid of this question. He knew the answer would sound absurd. It sounded absurd to himself. But it was the only answer; the only true answer.

  He said: “It’s all due to the torment m a girl’s eyes. Don’t think I’m crazy. It’s just the way it is. I’m haunted by Inge Nielsen’s face. I wish I weren’t—I wish I could forget it. But I won’t have any peace until that ghost is exorcised.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When, after some further discussion, Martin Slade had left, Logan turned to Carol Dane.

  “Think he’s on the level?”

  “Yes,” said Carol unhesitatingly.

  “So do I. But this is a pretty little problem he’s dropped in our laps.”

  She smiled. “Where do we start?”

  Logan reached for the telephone. “With Scotland Yard, I think.”

  Zoe Peters at the reception desk took five minutes to coax her way through to the appropriate department in Scotland Yard…only to find that Inspector Brisbane was out.

  “On the Clifford case,” murmured Carol in the background

  “I expect so,” said Logan. He left a message for Brisbane to ring him, and then sat back in absolute silence for half an hour.

  Absolute silence—save for the tapping of a cigarette against his thumbnail, and the intermittent flare of the lighter on his desk.

  At last he let his chair sag forward, and said: “No. No good. We’ve got to have more to go on.”

  The telephone shrilled abruptly.

  “Hello. Logan here. Yes. Ah, Brisbane....”

  The detective’s voice became as soothing as syrup. Yes, he quite understood that the hard-worked Brisbane must have been having a hell of a time. No, he didn’t expect to have favours done for him all the time. No, he wouldn’t dream of worrying his old friend unnecessarily….

  But he was curious about the Clifford murder.

  Carol, coming in with a sheaf of documents, perched on the edge of Logan’s desk and exchanged grimaces with him as the voice from the other end of the line crackled busily away.

  “All right, old chap,” said Logan eventually. “I know you’re curious, too. And if I learn anything about the murder, I’ll tell you. What? No, no angles at all. Why should I have?” He winked at Carol. “But how was this young fellow murdered? There don’t seem to be any real details in the morning papers.”

  He listened, and the friendly mockery went out of his face. There was a grim crease in his forehead that Carol had seen before—a harsh line that meant trouble for somebody.

  At last he said: “Anything stolen? Any—er—cases or boxes opened, or anything?”

  The telephone spat angry questions at him.

  “Never mind how I guessed,” said Logan. “I can’t tell you. Professional etiquette. All right, all right. Don’t bite my head off. It’s just that…well, anything you can tell me may help me to return the compliment at a later date. You know me by now.”

  Again he listened, and finally said: “Thanks. Thanks a lot. That’s what I wanted to know.”

  Carol sat waiting.

  “Well?” she demanded impatiently.

  “Clifford’s travelling cases had been ransacked. His musical instruments had been taken out of their cases—and he had quite a collection of rare freaks, apparently.”

  “No indication of what the murderer was looking for?”

  “None. If there was anything there, it�
��s gone now.”

  Carol sighed. “How did he die?” she asked.

  The stony look in Logan’s eyes was not pleasant to see.

  He said: “Clifford lived down in Kent. Stayed in town when he had a late concert, of course, but he could usually get back home. No parents. The house belonged to a deaf aunt. He seemed to like a solitary sort of existence. His aunt didn’t hear a thing when her nephew was killed. He was stunned and then dragged out into the wood behind the house…and spreadeagled.”

  “Spreadeagled?” echoed Carol.

  “An ancient tradition,” said Logan grimly. “The victim is slit down the middle from his chin downwards—and his ribs are pulled out and bent to each side.”

  Carol gagged. With trembling fingers she accepted the cigarette Logan jabbed towards her.

  “But who could have done that?” she whispered.

  “The Danes.”

  “Not in our branch of the family,” she said shakily.

  Logan smiled a wintry smile. “It’s an old Danish custom that used to be the terror of our East coast. It’s been out of fashion for hundreds of years. Only a fanatic would do such a thing If we get involved in this case, it looks as though we shall be dealing with a dangerous madman.”

  “There must he easier ways of earning a living. We could take on a few nice divorce cases, or—”

  “We’re taking this one on,” said Logan.

  “Where do we start?” asked Carol for the second time that day.

  “From Copenhagen. The spreadeagle could be a blind—it seems so monstrously melodramatic that it might be a put-up business—but somehow I don’t think so. Anyway, I’m convinced the trail begins in Copenhagen. I’ll ring Slade, and then Harry can see about getting some plane seats.”

  He slid open a drawer in his desk and drew out his Luger. His hand weighed it speculatively. “If we’re dealing with barbarians,” he said, “we’ve got to be prepared to match their methods with some real twentieth-century toughness.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The sea was a ribbon of brightness between Denmark and Sweden as the plane dipped, banked, and came sweeping smoothly down upon Kastrup airport. The sun seemed to have filled everyone with a sort of careless exuberance: Customs formalities were cut to a minimum, and when Carol Dane went through, things came almost to a standstill. The examiner who scribbled a chalk mark on her case was so dazed that he did not even ask the next four people the usual routine questions.