John Creasey Box Set 1: First Came a Murder, Death Round the Corner, The Mark of the Crescent (Department Z)

by John Creasey

  ‘Did Tim and Toby have to play?’ enquired Mary of her father. ‘We needed a particularly strong team, Daddy.’

  Slowly Kenyon regained his normal colour. He was meeting the Randalls for the first time; to have had that meeting spoiled by the Arrans’ individualistic sense of humour was more than he would allow.

  ‘The Arrans?’ Sir Michael entered into the joke without knowing what it was: ‘Ah, yes, we were two short at the last minute. Yes.’ He smiled, absently.

  ‘I’ll have some more ham,’ said Timothy Arran, plaintively. He spoke with a deliberate and affected drawl, which matched the immaculacy of his clothes and the perfection of his features.

  ‘Beef,’ said Toby, whose conversation consisted of a series of stops and starts. ‘When are you going to learn to bowl a length, Jim?’

  ‘He saved you from fielding this afternoon,’ retorted Mick Randall with spirit.

  ‘The lad,’ drawled Toby, transferring his glance from Kenyon to Randall, ‘is growing up. That catch made a man of him.’

  The diplomat turned a deaf ear to his son’s retort.

  ‘How did Serle do this morning?’ he asked Kenyon.

  ‘Batted very well.’

  ‘Forty-three,’ supplied Mary, promptly. ‘He had a fight with Jim,’ she went on, ‘and the honours were about even.’

  For the next half-hour the subject was cricket, and to all but the enthusiast the vagaries of their discussion would be mystery. Kenyon forgot the Arrans, not noticing their constant efforts to catch his eye, and was surprised when Colonel Wyett started to deliver his annual ‘may the best side win’ oration. The Colonel was too serious-minded to be amusing, but he was funny at times; usually those at which he was least aware of it.

  After lunch, Randall’s Eleven passed Wyett’s score with three wickets down, and Kenyon electrified the somnolent spectators with some fierce hitting. Rarely for him, he wanted the limelight that day. Arnold Serle, a slow bowler of some merit, tricked him with a leg break, and the big man passed the fat one on his way to the pavilion. Serle was smiling, as usual.

  ‘We’ve been at each other all day,’ he said pleasantly.

  ‘About fifty-fifty,’ Kenyon murmured back.

  But as he walked to the pavilion he was wondering whether there was anything behind those straightforward words. They had been at each other all day….

  Did Serle know that he, Kenyon, had been sent an invitation to play for Randall’s Eleven for no other purpose than to meet the fat and red-faced cricketer? Was Arnold Serle aware of the interest he had aroused in that room at Whitehall, headquarters of the department conveniently labelled Z?

  Kenyon believed that he was. Kenyon also believed that Serle knew him as an agent of the Department.

  That slight, rather enigmatic smile curved Kenyon’s lips as he waved his hand in acknowledgement of the applause. The Arrans were on either side of Mary Randall, who looked cooler, calmer and more lovely than ever. The Arrans were staring at him without expression as they automatically clapped. Kenyon clattered up the wooden steps of the pavilion. Mary Randall, meeting his eye, leaned forward and winked at him.

  The shade of the pavilion was pleasantly cool. Kenyon dropped on to a seat and unbuckled his pads. The only other occupant was a large-boned man sitting and looking out of the window, towards the field. The man said nothing, and did not turn round. Kenyon shrugged his shoulders; lack of sociability in others mildly irritated him.

  As he threw his pads down he saw a bag opposite him, gaping open and revealing the odds and ends which comprise the cricketer’s wardrobe. The initials ‘A.S.’ stencilled on the leather brought his mind back to the day’s major problem—Arnold Serle.

  Kenyon took a shower, and as he rubbed himself down, he was still thinking of Serle. He had had a summons from Craigie two days before, and had cancelled a round of social engagements in order to call at the office of that remarkable man who was known, by reputation, throughout the world.

  Gordon Craigie, Chief of the British Counter Espionage, was at once the best-known and the least-known man in England. The Men Who Mattered rarely did anything without consulting him. His influence on foreign policy was considerable, but he could walk through the streets of London without being recognised, and it was on record that his photograph had never been taken; certainly it had never been published.

  Kenyon had worked for Craigie for five years. Most of his work had been done abroad, and he saw his Chief very rarely. His father, however, had been a friend of Craigie for years, and as such Kenyon had known him from his childhood.

  These things and others flashed through Kenyon’s mind as he leisurely re-dressed. He had seen Craigie on the morning of his summons.

  ‘I want you to go down to Greylands, Jim. A Colonel Martin Wyett owns the place, and there’s an annual cricket match between an eleven of his and an eleven of Randall’s.’

  ‘The French Embassy man?’

  ‘The British Embassy man in Paris,’ corrected Craigie with a grin. ‘The man you’re to watch is Serle.’

  ‘Arnold Serle?’

  ‘Arnold Serle.’ Craigie’s voice had hardened. ‘There have been rumours about the Rensham business. If the rumours are right, Serle knows something about that.’

  Kenyon had protested that a man who played cricket for England and travelled the world on cricket tours, from India to Canada, was hardly the man to be connected with the Rensham case—or the drug scandal which a year before had shaken the indifference of the English aristocracy to its marrow. Lord Hugo Rensham had been murdered; before his death he had gasped out that he could tell the whole story of the dope racket. But the whole story was still untold, and dope was more widespread than ever before.

  ‘I know that there’s a nasty taste about associating cricket with crime,’ Craigie had added, his grey eyes twinkling, ‘but it’ll have to be done, Jim. There will be four other men down there. Two of them are watching the Randalls.’

  At that time the Randalls had meant nothing to Kenyon, so he had asked why.

  ‘Sir Michael Randall was a good friend of Rensham, before Rensham took to drugs. It has been rumoured that Randall swore to discover what Rensham meant before he died. Therefore, if Serle had anything to do with Rensham’s death, he’s interested in Randall. So Randall is being watched.’

  Kenyon had never properly accustomed himself to the care with which Craigie covered every possible line of inquiry. The Chief left nothing to chance, which accounted in no small measure for the success of Department Z.

  Kenyon had left the Department, and on reaching his Gresham Street flat had found an invitation from Sam Driver to play for Randall’s Eleven. Craigie arranged everything.

  The big man slipped on his blazer, lit a cigarette, and moved towards the lawn in front of the pavilion. He saw Mary Randall, still with the Arrans, and wondered whether the Arrans were Department men. There were disadvantages about the secrecy with which Craigie covered his agents. Four other men were among this crowd, and Kenyon knew none of them.

  And then he felt a little pin-prick of anxiety. If Randall was in any kind of danger what of his daughter? Kenyon told himself that he must be careful. This was the first time the possibility had occurred to him, which meant that he was not thinking as he should be.

  The Major’s voice, rather high-pitched, carried to Kenyon’s ears. Someone chuckled a few yards away. Toby Arran was rat-tatting a remark which made Mary Randall laugh. The scene was picturesque, for the setting of Greylands cricket field was beautiful, with the hills beyond and the woodlands in the distance and, partly hidden by trees, the old Manor House, stately and austere. The atmosphere had just that combination of activity and laziness which accompanies cricket. Many of the spectators seemed asleep, but the slightest incident on the field re-caught their attention.

  Kenyon passed the window of the pavilion where the uncommunicative player had been sitting. He was still there, Kenyon noticed.

  Mick Randall tried to hook a bad length
ball for a six, failed to get on it properly, and skied it towards square leg, who took a good, running catch. Randall’s grimace could be seen as he turned pavilionwards, and there was the usual rumble of applause. Something struck Kenyon as being out of place. He hardly knew what it was, but something spoiled the perfection of that country house setting, and the cricket.

  The cricket; Kenyon frowned suddenly. The man in the pavilion window had neither clapped nor spoken. The big man looked round, regarding the other more carefully.

  Then intuitively, he knew what was the matter. He hurried back to the window. On the stranger’s face, pleasant if not handsome, there was an unmoving smile, which had in it some element of surprise. As Kenyon hurried past him he did not alter his position by so much as a hair’s breadth; nor did the set expression of his eyes alter.

  A moment later Kenyon felt the man’s wrist; the flesh he touched was cold, with a clammy, inhuman chill. For an hour or more, Death had been staring with its sightless eyes across the green field, towards those memorably described as flannelled fools.

  Something very cold touched Kenyon’s mind.

  ‘Craigie was right,’ he said aloud.

  *See other ‘Department Z’ books by John Creasey.

  2

  Mary Randall Asks a Question

  Toby Arran saw the big man’s shadow, guessed who it was and formed his lips to make a comment provocative enough to be amusing, when he saw Kenyon’s expression. He stood up, making a casual excuse to Mary Randall.

  Quickly Kenyon pointed out the man in the pavilion window.

  ‘Who is that?’ he asked.

  ‘Dickie Roberts, one of the Yeovil crowd. There’s nothing the matter with him, is there?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Kenyon, without raising his voice. ‘Who’s the best man to take charge? The Colonel’s too peppery, the parson’s too slow.’

  ‘Randall’s our man,’ said Arran. He took the news of Roberts’ death with surprising coolness.

  ‘You fetch him,’ said Kenyon, and added slowly, ‘Do you think it will rain?’

  Arran’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘Unless the wind changes from South to West,’ he said.

  ‘Number Fourteen,’ said Kenyon.

  ‘Number Six,’ said Toby Arran. ‘Tim’s Five. Numbers Eight and Seventeen are down here somewhere.’

  Kenyon nodded. Arran hurried away, towards Randall, the man most capable of handling a tragic incident with the least commotion. Kenyon took his stand by the pavilion door.

  Mick Randall hurried up, ready to rid himself of his pads.

  ‘I ought to be kicked for that shot.’ He sensed the seriousness of the big man’s mood. ‘What’s on, Jim?’

  ‘A spot of bother,’ said Kenyon quietly. ‘Take your pads off out here, and look after your sister.’

  There was something compelling enough in Kenyon’s manner to enjoin restraint. Mick nodded and turned away. Kenyon saw him speak to Mary, who turned and looked towards the pavilion.

  The next ten minutes passed less calmly. The schoolgirl revealed a morbid excitement, the angular woman would have fallen but for the supporting arm of her spouse, the Rev. Denbigh Morse. The Colonel muttered something about a doctor, and hurried off for a whisky and soda. Someone mentioned ‘police’. Timothy Arran, meanwhile, had slipped into the Manor and was already telephoning to Craigie, in London. Toby was on another line, calling the local doctor and the local police; agents of Department Z took no chances.

  Sam Driver, who knew Roberts better than most of the others, hurried on to the field with the news. The players gathered in a little circle round him, and then began to troop towards the pavilion. Kenyon watched Arnold Serle.

  The fat man was the first to arrive. For once his smile was missing, and he was mopping his red face with a yellow silk handkerchief.

  ‘Great Scott!’ he muttered. ‘What a ghastly thing—ghastly. Dickie Roberts. Useful man with a bat—quite dead, you say?’

  ‘Afraid so,’ said Kenyon.

  ‘Terrible!’ Serle rooted in his pockets for cigarettes, then accepted one from Kenyon. ‘Ah! Nothing like a cigarette to soothe you down, Kenyon. But—er—can’t we go in?’

  ‘Afraid not,’ said Kenyon. There was little in the bearing of the fat man to suggest anything but shocked surprise. Arnold Serle’s face was very red, his skin a little coarse, threaded by an occasional blue vein strayed about his nose. His lips were thick, and his teeth excellent. There was nothing distinctive about his features, but Kenyon noticed that his eyes were clear, brown, and very shrewd.

  He might have been taken for the sports-loving warrior whose mind never travelled further than the cricket field, but for the penetrating shrewdness of those eyes. He did his best to counteract it; he blinked a lot, and looked bewilderedly at the ground. Kenyon smiled to himself; Mr. Arnold Serle was indulging in that olden-day pastime of leading him up the garden path.

  ‘You see,’ said Kenyon, earnestly, ‘you can never be sure in an affair like this that he didn’t take poison, or something of that kind.’

  ‘Suicide?‘ rapped Serle in astonishment. ‘Not Dickie Roberts!’

  ‘Can’t be sure,’ said Kenyon, with an attitude of owlish wisdom. ‘Anyhow, I told Sir Michael Randall, and he said——’

  Kenyon was saved from an imaginary version of Sir Michael’s reaction as half a dozen members of Wyett’s Eleven arrived, realised that they could not get to their clothes, and moved away, in pairs. A little crowd gathered about twenty yards from the pavilion window, including the parson’s wife and the schoolgirl, and Kenyon saw, with a little disgust, that they were staring eagerly at the dead man who was still sitting at the window, his eyes open, that queer little smile on his lips.

  Serle went off. The Arrans came over with a tall, blond youth named Knight. Knight looked as weary as his shoulders were broad, and his blue eyes held a gleam that belied his rather vacuous face.

  ‘Seventeen,’ said Toby Arran, succinctly.

  Knight’s eyes flickered. Kenyon grinned. No one less like a member of the Intelligence Department could have been imagined.

  ‘I tried to get Craigie,’ said Timothy Arran—the four men were in a little group by themselves—’but he’s out of the office. The local police are coming.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Knight.

  Kenyon shrugged.

  ‘It looks like poison. It might have been a natural seizure, or it might have been suicide.’

  ‘I’ll wander off,’ Knight said with a faint grin. ‘Mr. Serle might wonder why we’re gathered together.’

  ‘You’re after Serle?’ Kenyon’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘That’s so,’ said Knight, ‘and he’s talking to Denbigh Morse, and looking our way. Chin-chin.’

  Knight joined an acquaintance. Kenyon saw Mary Randall walking with Mick and an older woman. She beckoned to him. He moved away from the Arrans, under a running fire of remarks at once ribald and regrettable.

  Mary Randall did not say that it was terrible, but there was an expression in her eyes which Kenyon did not understand. She made no conventional reference to the affair, but, after introducing him to the older woman—the Colonel’s sister Angela—she took the opportunity of speaking to Kenyon, aside.

  ‘You found him, didn’t you?’

  Kenyon was uncomfortably aware of the scrutiny of her grey eyes.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And—and there was no wound of any kind?’

  ‘Wound?’ Kenyon did not have to ape surprise. ‘I don’t quite understand you.’

  There was anxiety in the girl’s expression, perhaps a hint of fear. Kenyon was suddenly on the alert. Something had been happening down here, which Mary Randall knew but which the Department did not.

  ‘Don’t you?’ she asked quietly.

  Kenyon congratulated himself that he looked convincingly puzzled.

  ‘Aren’t we talking in riddles?’ he demanded. ‘I can answer your first question. There was no kind of wound at all,
and it rather looks as if Roberts had a heart attack, or…’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ Mary Randall’s eyes continued to search his.

  Kenyon saw the Colonel bearing down on them.

  ‘What else is there to believe?’ he asked. ‘Ah, Colonel, I’m awfully sorry to have been the discoverer of…’

  ‘Bad news, eh, danged bad news.’ Wyett’s voice was thick and his breath smelt faintly of whisky. Odd, thought Kenyon, that Colonel Wyett should have been so disturbed about the mysterious affair. ‘I can’t understand it, Kenyon. Can you?’

  ‘Until we know the cause of death,’ Kenyon said, ‘I don’t think it’s much use trying. Was Roberts’s heart sound, d’you know?’

  ‘Sound as a bell!’ The Colonel hesitated, his hand straying out, as if to reach for a decanter which wasn’t there. ‘Well… I didn’t know him very well, lately. Might have been a heart attack, eh?’

  ‘It seems the obvious thing.’

  ‘Yes—I suppose so. Heart attack. Haa-rumph.’

  He turned to go, but Kenyon stopped him.

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting, are you, that there might have been something else?’

  ‘Nothing else—couldn’t be!’ proclaimed Wyett, overemphatically. His eyes were glassy, as if some thought or knowledge had driven him to drink more than was good for him. Jim Kenyon placed the Colonel on his list of suspects. Wyett knew—or thought he knew—something. ‘Well, I mustn’t let the guests think I’m deserting ‘em, ha! See you later, Kenyon. Mary. G’bye.’

  He stumped off towards a larger group of players and spectators, who, gradually recovering from the shock, were beginning to realise the inconvenience which the death of Dickie Roberts was causing them. Kenyon wondered why the local police had not arrived.

  ‘What do you really think?’ asked Mary Randall. They were alone again. Kenyon regarded her thoughtfully. More strongly than ever, she attracted him. It was strange that she should look so disproportionately worried.