Nothing But the Night

by John Blackburn

  ‘Clever girl. It would indeed.’ Kirk waved his cigar at her in salute. ‘All the Van Traylen guardians are without issue, to use a revolting term, and most of them are very rich indeed. Helen Van Traylen was worth over twelve million dollars at the time of her death, Anderson inherited fifty-one per cent of Eagle Textiles and Naureen Stokes had ten bestsellers to her credit and had sold the film rights in two of them for over a hundred thousand pounds each. Even the poorest amongst them must be horribly wealthy. What would you say Eric Yeats was worth, Mark?’

  ‘I don’t know Yeats well enough for him to confide in me, but he is bound to be well off. He was not only one of the quickest surgeons in the country before he retired, but one of the most versatile. He once told me that he would tackle anything from a lobotomy to a kidney transfer.’

  ‘Their wills, Charles.’ Tania broke in excitedly. ‘How did the people who died leave their money?’

  ‘A good point, my dear.’ Kirk straightened from the fire and pulled at his cigar. ‘With the exception of the little boy and Miss Kingsmill, who only had her salary, every penny they possessed went to the Fellowship. Where a lot of money is at stake there is always a motive for murder, and if these deaths go on the Van Traylen Fellowship will be one of the richest bodies in the country.’

  ‘I see. Yes, I see what you’re driving at, Charles.’ Marcus’s laugh was savage and bitter and he felt the cut on his forehead start to throb again. ‘In the centre of the Fellowship sits the great fat spider; Fu Manchu disguised as Lord Fawnlee perhaps. He intends to liquidate all his fellow guardians and then make off with the loot. I suppose the little boy who drowned and Miss Kingsmill had some­how stumbled on his evil plans and had to be silenced.

  ‘Or perhaps it is not just one spider, but a worldwide organization: the Mafia or a group of sinister Chinese with their headquarters at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.’ Marcus paced the room in his irritation. ‘Please stop this absurd theorizing, Charles. The business is upsetting enough without that. We know Anna Harb was a lunatic who killed Haynes and attacked her daughter in a fit of mania. That cannot fit in with any plot to destroy the Fellowship itself.’

  ‘I never said it did, Mark.’ Kirk was looking at him with an expression of deep concern. ‘I merely consider that five deaths, six, if we include Haynes’s, are too many to be written off as coincidence.’

  ‘They must be coincidental.’ Marcus poured himself out another drink, and as he did so he clearly saw the red stone glinting on Haynes’s forehead. There had been so much death in his life, but this was one he was responsible for. As he lifted his glass, images of the past swam in the amber liquid. The charred bodies in the Warsaw Ghetto, shaven heads piled like mushrooms at Belsen, faces craning up from hospital beds and mouths pleading for life. ‘Help me, Doctor. Please don’t let me die. Please Doctor. I am not ready to die.’ Finally the face which he tried so hard to forget but never succeeded in doing—Rachel, his first wife, burning in his arms, while the rain pattered over the Vietnam jungle and he had cursed God because they had no antibiotic to combat the little commonplace bug which was eating her up.

  ‘You must have sent a hundred men to their deaths in cold blood, Charles, but now, because you’re bored, you have become obsessed with this Van Traylen business.’ There was a sharp crack, a stab of pain and he looked quite incuriously at the broken glass and the blood drib­bling down his fingers.

  ‘Stop it, darling.’ Tania’s arms were around him. ‘You think you were the cause of Haynes’s death, but there is nothing to feel guilty about. All you did was to help a friend.’ She started to tie a handkerchief around his palm. ‘Haynes contacted the woman and brought her to the hospital and he had only himself to blame for what happened.’

  ‘Of course, Tania.’ Marcus turned to Kirk. ‘Please forgive me, Charles. What I said was quite inexcusable.’

  ‘Not at all, Mark.’ The general shrugged. ‘You are right of course. I had to be cold-blooded in my job or I would have gone insane very quickly. You are probably correct in saying that this may all be coincidence too. Five deaths are not many when one considers how many persons con­nected with the Kennedy assassination have died and the official view remains that Lee Oswald was acting alone.

  ‘Now, I’d better be getting on my way.’ He picked up his case and started to move towards the door, when it opened and Jane McDoggart, the Levins’ grim Scottish housekeeper, came into the room. She disliked Kirk and her frown made it clear that he would have been an un­welcome guest for dinner.

  ‘More news of the case, Sir Marcus,’ she said, laying an evening paper on the table. ‘I told you that that puir, wee girl was not out of danger, just as I told you that hanging was too good for monsters like that Harb woman. I’m right as usual, it appears.’ She smiled smugly as they craned over the newspaper. Banner headlines ‘THE HUNTRESS’ covered a full third of the front page and there was a picture of Anna Harb taken shortly after her release ten years ago. Beneath it was a brief report that a woman answering Harb’s description had been seen on the ferry boat which made the crossing between the Scottish mainland and the Island of Bala.

  Chapter Seven

  The room was windowless, completely air-conditioned and as antiseptic as an operating theatre. Fluorescent lights glowed bleakly from the ceiling, the walls were coated with anti-condensation paint and an electric sign prohibited smoking in vivid red letters. In the centre of the floor was a long steel table before which five girls were bent over machines which resembled oversized typewriters. The monotony of their work had given the girls slightly dazed expressions, and the machines made a hypnotic ‘snick—snick—snicking’ noise as they spewed out the sixty-four-row punch cards which were to be fed into the computer. At the base of each machine was a vacuum tube to remove the dust and the chads.

  ‘We are now about to digest the material you have pre­pared for us.’ Major Norbert Reilly gave Kirk and Tania a glittering smile as his assistant picked up the first batch of cards and carried them across to a metal box on another table. Until recently, Reilly had been in charge of the department’s code and cypher files but at last his Ph.D. in electrical engineering had brought him up in the world. The powers that be had decided that automation should enter the intelligence services, and he had not only gained control of a computer which had cost the taxpayer more than a hundred thousand pounds but appeared to regard it as his own personal property.

  ‘You mean that that thing is the computer, Norbert?’ Kirk raised his eyebrows at the drab little box. This was the first time he had visited the major’s sanctum and he had expected batteries of flashing lights and trembling dials.

  ‘You are disappointed General? You hoped for something much bigger and more impressive?’ Reilly chuckled against the snicking of the card punches and tapped his forehead. ‘It’s not the size, but what goes on inside that counts these days. Compare a modern guided-missile destroyer with a Second World War battleship, for example. Four thousand tons against fifty thousand, but the little chap is the far more deadly weapon.

  ‘Microminiaturization is the plan for today and every cubic inch of that case contains more hardware, as we call it, than half a dozen conventional radio receivers, Lady Levin. At this moment thousands of integrated circuits are considering the general’s problem at the speed of light and it is only the human factors that slow us down.’ He looked sadly at Alsop, his assistant, and the card-punch operators. The material was piling up fast and Alsop was feeding the cards into a slot in the computer as nonchalantly as if he were posting letters.

  ‘But will it give us an answer, Norbert?’ Kirk repressed a scowl. Microminiaturization indeed! Hardware! Reilly knew that he detested technical jargon and had probably used the terms to annoy him. The fellow had been a good enough subordinate in the old days, but since the installa­tion of this precious box of tricks he had grown decidedly too big for his boots. The constant repetition of ‘we’ and ‘our’ might be mocking references to the machine, but there was
a hint of the grandiose about them too.

  ‘That is up to you, General. It depends on the data you have given us. You wish to know whether some dark force is at work against the members of the Van Traylen Fellow­ship and whether the deaths of the past year and the attack on the child were part of that force’s activities.

  ‘We are considering the facts you have supplied, but we are a cold dispassionate brain, not a seer. The apparatus is programmed to solve problems which are essentially mathematical and allow no margin for error. The circuits are controlled by gates which reject everything that is in­accurate or inappropriate to the subject. If your data is full enough and exact enough you will be given an answer and a suggested course of action, but not otherwise.’ He leered at Tania as if she had come to admire his etchings and then frowned as Kirk opened his cigar case.

  ‘No, please do not light a cigar, General Kirk. That notice means what it says, because some of our circuits are so sensitive that any change of temperature or atmospheric conditions may affect them. As you of course know, the mean particle dimension of tobacco smoke is 0.6 microns.’

  ‘Don’t talk down to me, Norbert, or I’ll have you back in “Codes and Cyphers” before you can say Michael Faraday.’ Kirk growled as he replaced the offending cigar. ‘So, it all depends on the fullness and accuracy of the information I gave you and which Alsop is now feeding into the computer.’ He looked at the piles of typescript which the girls were transferring on to the cards and considered the miserable task he and his assistants had been engaged on during the past three days. They had sorted out every fact they could discover about the Fellowship and its members, living and dead, child and guardian alike. They had written reports on each of the deaths and given an account of every person who might have benefited from them. Finally they had put down all they could discover about Anna Harb and her associates. The police had found her account books in the caravan she lived in at the fair­ground and they made interesting reading. The fortune-telling business had obviously been very profitable indeed, and over twenty thousand pounds worth of blue chip securities were lodged in her bank, together with the deeds of six tenement houses in the East End of London. Apparently clairvoyance can deal with the past as well as the future, and what Madame Harb learned from her clients was often used for blackmail and the recruitment of teenage prostitutes.

  Yes, he and his assistants had worked hard, but Kirk knew that the data was woefully inadequate and often based on hearsay. But there was nothing he could do about it now. The information was being considered by half a million transistors and all he could do was to hope that they would make something of it.

  ‘Exactly, General.’ Reilly was obviously quite unabashed by his rebuff and he nodded towards the girl at the far end of the table. She had transcribed all her material now and was leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed.

  ‘And as most of the information has now been dealt with, perhaps you would like to try and think if there is any fact, however small, you might have omitted to give us.

  ‘You too, dear lady.’ Reilly had two gold bridges in his front teeth and they glinted in the cold fluorescent lighting. ‘Anything that your good husband might have mentioned about Mr Haynes or the child or the Harb woman?’

  ‘No, Major Reilly. General Kirk has already talked to my husband.’ Tania had accompanied Kirk partly out of intense curiosity and partly to keep her mind occupied because she was very worried indeed. She and Marcus had been married for four years, but she had never known him to be so emotionally upset. The failure of the antibody was his own excuse, but behind that was the guilt which was eating into his mind like dry rot in timber. Guilt because Haynes was dead, guilt because he had broken his profes­sional oath and, above all, guilt that he might have been partly the cause of making a mentally sick child even more disturbed. For the last three nights they had slept apart and throughout each of them she had heard him pacing the floor.

  All the same, Marcus was probably right to sneer at Kirk’s idea of a conspiracy against the whole Van Traylen Fellowship. Who would want to destroy a group of kindly old people and the children they cared for? Tania con­sidered some of the theories they had discussed and rejected out of hand. Potential heirs, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, or old retainers who feared they were about to be disinherited in favour of the Fellowship and hired pro­fessional killers who had acted too late. Parents who had resented having their children taken from them and joined on a bent crusade against their new guardians. Even the old trick of committing several murders to conceal the motive for one. Not one of these notions made any sense at all. Haynes had been murdered by a solitary maniac and the other violent deaths must be pure coincidence.

  ‘No, I can’t think of anything else, Norbert.’ Kirk shook his head. ‘I’m afraid it really may take a seer, instead of your machine, to answer my question.’

  ‘The Sphinx or the Oracle of Delphi.’ Reilly spent twenty minutes under the sun-lamp every day and his smile gleamed against the tan. ‘We are not that, I’m afraid, General. All we can do is consider, reject and supply an answer if sufficient valid data remains.’ To Kirk’s dis­gust, the major launched into a highly technical lecture on a computer’s principles and five minutes had passed before he came to a stop. During that time, not a sound or a flicker of light hinted that the machine had been switched on. But, unlike Kirk, Tania could appreciate the mass of pulsing energy behind its drab exterior, with the circuits sorting and rejecting and storing at an unimaginable speed and then waiting patiently for Alsop and the operators to provide them with more information to consider. The scene made her think of a priest and a group of worshippers serving some primitive idol which would only speak when sufficient prayers had been offered up to it.

  ‘Ah, that’s it then, ladies.’ Reilly saw that the last girl had finished and they got up and filed out of the room while Alsop fed her bundle of cards into the slot. There were two sharp metallic clicks to prove the apparatus was indeed alive and a strip of tape appeared from its base. Alsop rolled it up and followed the girls through the door.

  ‘We’ve finished, General. Our deliberations are at an end; we have sorted the sheep from the goats and you may smoke if you wish.’ Reilly pointed to the sign which had gone out.

  ‘Alsop shouldn’t be long, but as most of the problems we are asked to solve contain confidential information, the machine is programmed to work in code and the decoding device is kept in another part of the building.’ He crossed smoothly over to a filing cabinet labelled ‘Most Secret’ and produced a tray of bottles and glasses.

  ‘While we’re waiting for Alsop, might we partake of some refreshment together. Dry or sweet sherry, Lady Levin? I know your preference, General.’

  ‘Thank you, Norbert.’ Kirk stared at the metal case as he took the glass from him. It looked so ordinary and harm­less, and he was certain that though it was all Reilly claimed there would be no answer to his question, because most of the facts were inconclusive. All he had was a hunch and a suspicion that some immensely sinister force was at work against the Van Traylen Fellowship, and electronic devices did not follow any human hunch. All the same, at the back of his mind he knew he was right, and he could see the picture changing like magic lantern slides: a car lying crumpled at the foot of a Scottish cliff, a woman’s face shattered by the blast of a shotgun, a tall man who feared death walking to the edge of a balcony, a child’s body drifting out to sea and another child screaming in the grip of a maniac. Finally there came a picture nearer the present: old people travelling up to Bala to keep their founder’s anniversary with the children in their care. Kirk was old himself and very fond of children. Somehow their protec­tion seemed to be his personal charge and he prayed that the machine could help him to carry it out.

  ‘It seems that there may be some information for you after all, General.’ Reilly was looking at a telephone beside him. ‘If the computer had recorded a complete blank Alsop would have rung through to me by now. Yes, w
e let you down as to appearances, I’m afraid, because you expected flashing lamps and whirring tapes and all the paraphernalia of a fruit machine, but it does appear possible that the residual material may have added up to some sort of conclusion after all. I must say that surprises me because most of the data was pretty vague.

  ‘There you are, Alsop. Have we come up with anything comprehensible?’

  ‘Not to me, Major.’ The man ignored Reilly’s out­stretched hand and carried a sheet of buff-coloured paper over to Kirk whom he clearly considered to be his real boss.

  ‘I don’t understand this, General. Maybe it means nothing, because you gave us over thirty thousand words to consider and the machine has come up with less than fifty.’

  He handed Kirk the paper and looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Alsop.’ The five lines of writing were in thick black type and Kirk did not need to put on his glasses. His face was completely blank as he started to read and then two deep furrows appeared at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Good God,’ he said and his maimed hand trembled slightly. ‘Your little contraption has confirmed my worst fears, Norbert. This is what the Oracle has replied, Tania.’ He handed her the terse unemotional message which read:

  VAN TRAYLEN PROJECT, PROGRESS TO DATE—SUCCESSES 4, FAILURES 1—IN VIEW EXCELLENT RECORD, OPERATION TO BE SPEEDED UP CONSIDERABLY—WITHOUT FURTHER DATA IMPOSSIBLE TO PROGRAMME EXACTLY—SUGGEST AS FOLLOWS: MEMBERS TO BE TREATED 5—METHODS, FIRE AND OR WATER—DISPOSAL AREA, ISLAND OF BALA.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ Kirk said, pulling himself stiffly out of the chair. ‘This is exactly what I dreaded to be told. There is something, individual or collective, working against the Van Traylen people, and in a few days’ time they will all be assembled on Bala. When that happens, five of them are to be murdered at one fell swoop.’