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

by John Creasey

  Kenyon followed him into the hiding place he indicated, a small clearing in the trees and shrubs of the grounds of White House. Hardly had he done so, when the sound of a car turning into the drive came to them. And at the same time there was another sound, which Kenyon noticed but Knight missed….

  Then he had a surprise.

  An Austin Cambridge passed them, and driving it was Colonel Martin Wyett!

  So that part of Knight’s story was true.

  They waited for another five minutes, and the other sound Kenyon had heard was a little louder; Knight seemed not to notice it.

  A second car came, with two men. Kenyon knew neither of them, but he saw that they were dressed in silver grey and that their faces were swarthy, as Ahmet Ali’s had been.

  ‘That’ll be the lot,’ muttered Knight. ‘If Serle uses the dining-room, we’ll be able to hear them.’

  Kenyon wondered whether Knight really thought he was being taken in. It seemed so. He noticed, with a feeling of repugnance, a tenseness about the other man, an absorption similar to that which had possessed the members of the New Age Party. Knight was jumpy. It did not need very much insight to realise that he was suffering from intense excitement, or the effect of a strong stimulant.

  ‘This way,’ he whispered suddenly, and led Kenyon towards the house.

  There was only a short patch of open space, and they made it apparently without being seen. But Kenyon’s right hand was in his pocket as they went.

  The French windows opened on to a shrubbery and small lawn. They inched cautiously towards them, pressed hard against the wall, hardly breathing they waited, and presently they heard Colonel Wyett’s voice.

  ‘It’s time you stopped this fooling, Serle. I’ve warned you that unless…’

  ‘Stop that, Wyett!’ Serle barked, cutting him short. ‘You’ve already known the delights of trying to interfere. Do as you’re told and you’ll be all right. Do you understand?’

  Wyett grunted something. Kenyon whistled to himself. That a fiery, self-opinionated man like Colonel Martin Wyett could be quelled so easily, staggered him. It was added evidence that Serle could do what he liked with any addict—including Knight?

  Instinctively, the big man glanced at Knight’s hands. The tell-tale marks were there!

  Serle’s voice came again, quieter than before.

  ‘You’ve been worried about your niece,’ he said, and the listener’s heart warmed towards the Colonel. ‘You needn’t. Mary Randall doesn’t know enough…’

  ‘What about Mick?’ asked Wyett, in a subdued voice.

  ‘I’ll look after him,’ said Serle.

  And then the comparative quiet of that August morning was pierced by a high-pitched cry of horror and pain. It came from one of the rooms above the spot where Kenyon was standing, and the big man tensed as Wyett gasped: ‘What was that? God, what was that?’

  Knight’s face was ashen.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Serle said suavely. ‘Forget it…’

  But it came again, a high-pitched, wailing cry, like the scream of a soul in torment. Kenyon’s forehead was wet. Nothing could make him stay in hiding while that was happening. He moved.

  ‘Don’t!’ warned Knight, in an agonised whisper.

  For a third time the cry came, and even as it quivered through the air, Kenyon sprang forward and smashed the window with the butt of his automatic.

  Wyett swung round, while the two dark-faced men moved from the centre of the room and waited, lounging against the walls, right hands in pockets. Arnold Serle stood by the table, his red face split into a grin that had something animal about it. The silence was absolute.

  Kenyon put his arm through the hole in the glass, opened the window, and entered the room. There was no expression on his face, but the gun in his right hand was unwavering.

  Very suddenly across the silence that cry came again. It shivered through the air, and there was something inhuman in it. It sent the hair creeping at the back of Kenyon’s neck—and it seemed to make Serle’s grin wider.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ gasped Wyett.

  ‘Who is it?’ demanded Kenyon.

  ‘A mutual friend,’ said Serle, glancing towards the dark-skinned men.

  Kenyon’s gaze did not waver.

  ‘You’ll quieten her,’ he commanded, ‘and bring her down here.’

  ‘My dear Kenyon,’ protested Serle, ‘you seem to overestimate your position. My friends’—he waved towards the silent watchers—’are armed and ready to shoot. The gun in your hand doesn’t afford you much protection.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  From somewhere above came the sound of a high-pitched moaning, worse even than the screams, and there was murder in Kenyon’s eyes. ‘My gun will last me just long enough to put a bullet into you…’

  ‘At considerable self-sacrifice,’ murmured the fat man, but he looked uneasy.

  ‘I’ll chance that,’ said Kenyon. ‘Send for her.’

  The words came out with a restrained fury which chilled Serle’s air of victory. He hesitated, then pressed a bell-push built into the table. A door slammed somewhere outside, above that awful, ceaseless whimpering. A man entered, one who might have been a footman in any ordinary household.

  ‘Look after Miss Scanling,’ said Serle, ‘and bring her down here.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  The servant turned away. Serle looked at Kenyon, still uneasily, for the gun was very steady in the big man’s hand.

  ‘We always try to accommodate our guests,’ said Serle. ‘But what made you come, Kenyon? A most unexpected visit…’

  ‘You know why I came,’ snapped Kenyon.

  ‘But on your wedding day?’

  ‘There’s time enough to handle you,’ Kenyon told him, ‘and the other business. I’m not tied by any rules, now. I can shoot you…’

  ‘Hanging is so unpleasant,’ murmured Serle.

  ‘Have you ever been shot in the stomach?’

  ‘No,’ said Serle, suavely. ‘But we mustn’t waste time, my dear James. I insist on calling you James—it will be my last opportunity.’

  ‘How true,’ said Kenyon.

  ‘Not—er—quite in the way you think,’ said the fat man. ‘I—er—persuaded you to come down here…’

  ‘Persuaded?’ For a split second Kenyon’s left hand moved towards Knight, before a mask of nonchalance hid his feelings.

  ‘I don’t trust you, Kenyon,’ Serle went on. ‘You’ll have to die. You will see Miss Scanling first, and then…’

  ‘The first move to shoot,’ said Kenyon, ‘and the first sound of a shot will make me touch my trigger.’

  The door opened. The same footman half-carried, half-pushed the slim figure of Scanling’s daughter into the room. Kenyon saw her face, and knew that she had been pretty, but at that moment her face was drawn with lines of suffering, the agony of physical torture. She was breathing very heavily, and seemed only half-conscious.

  ‘Put her in a chair,’ ordered Serle.

  The man obeyed. Irene Scanling sat in an armchair, looking straight in front of her. Occasionally her face was twisted in a spasm of pain—or it might have been the memory of pain.

  There was something very cold inside Kenyon. He realised that when he had heard her screaming she had been craving for the drug.

  ‘She’ll be all right, now,’ said Serle, soothingly. ‘I had to make you break cover, Kenyon, and I thought that way…’

  Colonel Wyett broke the silence that followed. All the time the Colonel had been leaning on the table and breathing heavily. His face was a pasty white.

  ‘This is ghastly,’ he muttered, ‘ghastly. You can’t do it, Serle—this poor girl.’

  ‘I did it to you,’ muttered Serle, and his gaze, Kenyon noticed, was continually directed towards the garden. ‘And I’ll do it again if you’re not—Ah!’ he broke off suddenly, and there was a smile of genuine relief on his face. He ignored Wyett. ‘You’ll be glad to know, Kenyon, that several of my—er
—friends are in the garden behind you. The slightest false move on your part…’

  Kenyon was suddenly conscious of an increased tension in the air. Serle was waiting for something. His two gunmen were waiting.

  ‘Don’t!’ screamed Knight, suddenly, ‘Don’t! I can’t let you!’

  And then, very plainly, there came the sound that Kenyon had heard earlier in the morning. None of the others noticed it, or if they did, they made no comment. Knight’s trancelike eyes were staring out of the window and Kenyon guessed what was coming.

  Outside, a man raised his gun and trained it on Kenyon’s back.

  Serle’s face was twisted in that wolfish grin.

  Wyett groaned and buried his face in his hands.

  Kenyon said:

  ‘Aeroplanes are wonderful things, aren’t they, Serle?’

  And then there came the ominous rattling sound of a machine-gun. In the grounds of White House two men screamed and fell forward on their faces. The man who had trained his gun on Kenyon was one of them. High above every other sound there was the roar of the plane as it swept down. Suddenly the room was darkened by the great shadow, as the machine swept low across the rays of the sun.

  The silence in the room was deathly, weirdly exaggerated by the roaring of the plane outside.

  ‘You…’ began Serle, white-faced.

  ‘Me,’ murmured Kenyon, his face wet with sweat. ‘I don’t really mind what you do, but I’m warning you that if you decide to kill me, White House will be in a sorry state within five minutes. If, on the other hand, I go out into the garden and wave, my friends will come down.’

  ‘Your friends,’ muttered Serle.

  ‘You didn’t really think I’d come alone, did you?’ asked Kenyon, cheerfully. He slipped his left hand into his pocket and pulled out cigarettes, for he felt badly in need of one. ‘An aeroplane can be fitted with a gun, and also with a bomb—or bombs. Useful things, bombs. Make a pretty picture, but such a nasty mess. And, of course,’ he added, lighting a match dexterously and streaming grey smoke towards Arnold Serie, ‘it seems a shame to destroy such a charming house as this, but…’ He broke off, shrugging.

  Wyett was staring at him, as though unable to believe his ears. Ronald Knight was muttering under his breath. The two gunmen, hands still in pockets, were rigid, and afraid. Irene Scanling seemed to have fallen into a troubled sleep, moaning as she turned her head from side to side.

  ‘You’d go up with the rest of us,’ Serle blustered.

  ‘It’s so comforting to think one dies in good company,’ said Kenyon, gently, ‘and even more to think of dying for a good cause. I feel quite a hero, Arnold.’

  The noise of the aeroplane engine grew louder again. As its roar filled the room and its shadow swept across like a shroud, one of the dark-faced gunmen moved from the wall.

  ‘I can’t stand this!’ His face was glistening with sweat. ‘It is more than…’

  ‘I should say,’ said Kenyon, glancing at his watch, ‘that the pretty picture is due for showing in about three minutes. I ought to be on the lawn by then.’

  There was a glint in Serle’s eyes.

  ‘What guarantee have we that the plane will come down?’

  ‘Only my natural honesty,’ said Kenyon.

  ‘For the love of Allah!’ pleaded the gunman.

  ‘Funny how religion is nearly always one’s last thought,’ murmured Kenyon. ‘I think we’d better be moving. You first, Arnold.’

  Serle hesitated, then motioned to the two gunmen.

  ‘Go outside,’ he ordered.

  The men couldn’t get out of the room quickly enough. Serle followed them, with Knight close on his heels. Colonel Martin Wyett waited until Kenyon had picked up the girl.

  ‘Gad!’ Wyett muttered, ‘but that was plucky, Kenyon. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Let’s hope we never have to risk it again,’ said Kenyon.

  He reached the lawn, laid Irene Scanling on the first shaded spot, then waved upwards. The aeroplane, piloted by Tommy Besset—that small, exquisite man—carrying Curtis and Righteous Dane as passengers, circled overhead for a moment and then planed downwards. It was fitted with the latest vertical controls and needed less than fifty yards for landing.

  It pulled up within ten yards of the group on the lawn and Besset climbed down, perkily. Curtis, grinning like a cat, was at the machine-gun. Righteous Dane was singing, in a tuneless voice:

  ‘And when I die-ee, don’t bury me at awlll,

  Just bury my bo-oones, in alcohawll!’

  And then, clear across the silence as he stopped, there came the crack of a pistol shot! For a moment there was a stunned uncertainty. Serle went white. Knight groaned.

  Dane suddenly coughed, and threw up his arms. There was a peculiar grin on his face as he crumpled to the ground.

  ‘Looks as if I sang the—right—epitaph…’ he whispered.

  Kenyon, his eyes blazing, emptied his gun towards the trees from which the shot had come. Curtis, with a bellow, hurled himself across the lawn, grabbed the girl and hurtled back to the plane. Besset jumped into the cockpit and slewed the gun round.

  A little fusillade of rifle and revolver shots came from the house and the grounds surrounding it. Kenyon’s party had the shelter of the plane and the machine-gun. Little short of a howitzer could damage them, but the fight was on.

  He had no time to wonder who was in the house. He had no time to dwell on the fact that Arnold Serle was crouching, white-faced, beneath the shelter of the machine, with his two gunmen next to him. He only knew that there were others inside the White House—and that they meant to kill.

  They were the men behind Serle’s activities, the leaders of this drug plague, otherwise they would not have risked hitting Serle. Was the end of the hunt in sight?

  Kenyon reloaded his automatic from ammunition which had been brought in the plane. Besset was sweeping the trees with a hail of bullets. Occasional stabs of flame spat out from the windows of the White House.

  And then Kenyon went very still.

  He saw the figure of a man rush forward to the edge of the trees, a man who was heedless of the bullets. The man hurled something, quickly, a little round ball which came towards the aeroplane. Then the man coughed and fell forward, with half a dozen bullets in his vitals, but the thing came on.

  ‘A Mills bomb,’ muttered Kenyon, and his voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘A Mills bomb…!’

  18

  Gun-fire at Godalming

  There was no time to move. Only Righteous Dane, on the ground, with blood oozing from the wound in his chest, seemed to notice nothing. The others stared, in awful fascination, for the split-second that divided them from eternity. They heard one of Serle’s gunmen scream but did not see him run. He moved, blindly, towards the tail of the plane.

  The bomb dropped two feet from the tail. It hit the ground a few inches from the Arab. There was a roar, a scream, and a cloud of earth shot upwards and outwards. Smoke belched and flame flared up. The Arab was hidden, but something was flung through the air. It touched Kenyon’s hand; and his hand was spattered with blood.

  Kenyon hardly noticed it.

  The tension of that split-second was gone. The damage was slight; Curtis’s cheek was scored, Wyett’s right hand was cut, and blood was running from a wound in Serle’s chin. But the only thing that was serious was the damage to the plane. It was out of action; petrol was dripping from a hole in the tank.

  ‘Now we’re for it,’ murmured Besset.

  ‘Just—pickle—my—bones…’

  It was Righteous Dane, gasping the words as he sprawled, the dark stain spreading over his chest.

  ‘The Arrans,’ Kenyon remembered suddenly. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Should be here soon,’ Besset told him.

  They crouched round the plane. A hundred yards away they could see the figures of the attackers, hiding amongst the trees. Two of them started to race towards the plane, bombs in hand
s. Curtis brought one man down, just as he had drawn the pin; the man went up in a terrific explosion. Kenyon’s shot took the other through the head.

  Bullets pitted into the side of the plane, into the ground. Serle made a dash for the cover of a patch of shrubs, twenty yards away. Curtis levelled the gun.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Kenyon. The glint in his eyes told Curtis that he had an idea—a mad one, probably. But at that moment they needed that touch of madness that can save an almost lost battle. ‘How much petrol below that hole?’

  ‘Ten—fifteen gallons,’ said Besset.

  ‘It’s enough,’ muttered Kenyon. ‘Get at the controls, Tommy. Take the gun, Bob.’

  The others obeyed. Irene Scanling was in one cockpit; only Kenyon, Wyett and Knight were outside the plane. Kenyon muttered to the Colonel. Wyett shivered, but he did not lack courage. He drew away from the shelter of the wing, and climbed into a cockpit.

  ‘Now you,’ Kenyon told Knight.

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ muttered Agent Seventeen.

  As he spoke a bullet hit Wyett’s leg. The Colonel gasped as he tumbled into the plane.

  ‘Get in!’ snapped Kenyon. ‘Get in!’

  Knight left the shelter and climbed up. A bullet took him in the small of his back. He cried out as he flopped down, dragged in by Wyett.

  ‘I’m coming behind you,’ Kenyon told Besset.

  As he went up, the engine of the plane roared. There was a brief stoppage in the firing from the trees. Kenyon reached cover, unhurt. His eyes gleamed.

  ‘Across the lawn,’ he shouted above the noise of the engine, ‘and stop at the porch. You can make it—the drive’s wide enough.’

  Besset’s eyes glistened as he released the lever. The machine began to move. It jockeyed along the grass, barely missing the trees but reaching the drive safely. Bullets still pecked into it, but Curtis was spraying the ground with the machine-gun. The rat-tat-tat shivered through the air. Men were screaming and shouting in the trees. Kenyon saw a man’s face in a window of the house, and saw the barrel of a rifle poking through. He pulled the trigger of his automatic and the face dropped back; the rifle clattered down to the porch.