‘No, I’ve got it clear in my mind.’
‘I wish I had.’
‘Just a little patience, that’s all it requires.’
‘They’ve gone and brainwashed you too, damned if they haven’t, and they — ’
‘Shut up, Bill, and listen. Vicki and Sharal played out their act at the ‘Golden Pagoda’, and set about snaring Truncard. But our people were on to her since heroin went missing in Marseilles. Vicki was crooking her own Government. When they were told they agreed to let her trip over her own feet in our territory. Reasonable?’
‘I suppose so. But — ’
‘No, let me tell you my way, Bill. Jeremy was a friend of Wilma, so that made it easy for getting to him in a roundabout way and using Porter and the professor, both of whom were contacted by our people and told to go along with mayhem and blackmail and what else — ’
‘Why?’
‘So our people could follow through, find out really what can happen in our own backyard.’
‘Now that does make sense. I’m beginning to feel happier.’
Hazard lit a fresh cigarette.
Drury went on. ‘So the conners were being conned, Bill. Remember what I said about Oriental diamond cut diamond. I don’t think that second diamond, the one that did the real cutting, was Oriental. It was polished and ground not a great many yards from where we’re standing. But Wilma’s advert was rather like lighting a slow fuse. Vicki went after Jeremy, who didn’t want Wilma hurt, but didn’t want her involved in undercover stuff. He’d had enough of it himself, working with his own boss, Sir Thomas Albirt, and getting nowhere with the boss’s daughter — ’
‘But I thought he was making out there.’
‘Not according to the boys higher up Whitehall, or lower down if you prefer. They know all, see all, and only tell what they think is necessary. Of course when Vicki took after Jeremy, Paget went with Bateman to have a chance of losing him with no questions asked and picking up Vicki, who had all the time kept up the deception of working with our people as represented by Paget, and our people had helped by making things easy for her to do her stuff, like telling you and me to keep our noses clean. It was a clever game Sharal and Vicki were playing of matching both ends against each other and trying to tie up the middle at the same time.’
‘Oriental minds,’ Hazard said disgustedly.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Drury. ‘Our people were doing some pretty close pattern work themselves.’
‘Why Russian Roulette? Tell me that.’
‘A catch phrase. Wilma seized on it, and it was good for stalling the action any time. But Truncard, poor chap, had a bad time at Euston and in the club trying not to show Wilma he knew her. That was when he really felt like chucking his hand in. Especially when she followed him to Euston and tried to talk to him on the platform and he appeared not to know her. She broke into tears. That did it. That’s why he went absent when he saw her advert.’
‘This is new.’
‘Not to our people, Bill. They know all, chummy. And they can only know this much by having had someone tail Wilma. They didn’t leave much to chance.’
‘My God!’ Hazard looked over his shoulder quickly.
‘I think we’re alone here,’ Drury told him, amused. ‘Of course they could have had a second tail on Jeremy Truncard, too. Amazing what you can do when it doesn’t all have to go down in triplicate afterwards. I wish we could have such facilities.’
‘Don’t say you aren’t side-tracked this time,’ Hazard put in.
Drury tamped down the warm ash in his pipe-bowl. ‘Anyway, to get back to what I started out to tell you. As soon as Vicki left with Jeremy from Twin Trees he was a bit of putty in her slim hands so long as he reached Wilma. Don’t tell me that isn’t love.’
‘I won’t. But there was all that stuff about a baby.’
‘Wilma playing bitchy, no more. She resented being dependent on a male.’
‘More stuff you got from those know-alls?’
‘Well, they’ve given it all a great deal of thought.’
‘I’m doing that right now, and somehow you aren’t making it as easy as I’d hoped.’
Drury’s pipe was out. He tapped the warm ash down between his feet, and was quiet for some seconds, so that Hazard shot him a sharp look of inquiry.
‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘it seems Wilma and Jeremy have a problem to work out. They’ve been pecking at it since they were kids. Now — ’
‘Now all England thinks Wilma can’t recover and is likely to die at any minute, and he’s in some unnamed hospital.’
‘So’s she. Wilma’s been moved. She will have a remarkable recovery where reporters can’t get at her. Peregrine Porter will quietly fix a name change by deed poll. She’s told Jeremy there’s no baby, that she was just making sure no other woman would have him — ’
‘And this is love?’
‘It takes all shapes and comes in all sizes.’
‘But when did she tell him?’
‘That’s the most important question you’ve asked, really, Bill. The answer wraps it all up. After our people had got her to go along with them there was a wait. Sharal turned up, just as Claude and Cedric told us, and went to collect the heroin from the painted gnome and fix a plastic time bomb. He has been nabbed with the five kilos and will be charged with Singh’s murder and later deported. None of this will come out. But, of course, when he apparently vanished with the heroin she had cached in the gnome, Vicki took off. No one knows where the hell she is, so Wilma’s been moved.’
‘Don’t tell me our clever people haven’t kept another tail on her.’
‘They had Paget, remember? It was Vicki who rang the number Paget had given her and reported what had happened at Twin Trees. Our people did what was necessary without even telling us, so they were following the Biblical advice not to let the right hand know what — ’
‘Not on a Sunday night, please,’ Hazard begged.
‘I get your point, Bill,’ Drury smiled, tapping the parapet with his cooling pipe. ‘But you must see there was a sudden gap with Paget removed that way. Vicki moved right into it. Either she knows something has come unstuck, or she must think Sharal has run out on her with the five kilos prize money handed over, presumably, by someone who Warrender said looked like a Chinaman.’
‘And our people didn’t say a word about that?’
‘Not a syllable. But they did say a small charge was set in the gnome, to smash it, and Wilma agreed to set it off herself, so that she had ample time to duck, and of course she had told Jeremy Truncard she loved him, and he had confessed he wasn’t really engaged to Gladys, and the professor was acting like an automaton, so she didn’t have to ask him awkward questions. She knew that the cue was when she said Russian Roulette. Jeremy would start running, the professor after him. You know who bloody nearly spoiled everything, Bill?’
‘Us.’
Suddenly Bill Hazard began to laugh, loudly, the sound tearing out of his throat in great jovial gusts. He took out his handkerchief and started wiping his eyes. But he wasn’t crying.
‘They should have told us earlier, chief. Serves them right for the shock they gave us. I suppose that ambulance being ready was all part of the act?’
‘It was most efficiently handled.’
‘Claude and Cedric could have talked.’
‘They didn’t know. It was all set up before Sharal arrived and got tough with them. You know, I even think those Intelligence boys spend longer on the job than we do.’
‘You’re beginning to sound — ’
Bill Hazard half-turned as he started to speak derisively because his mind was suddenly at ease. The next moment he flung himself at Drury, hurling the other back away from the parapet and falling with him and rolling. They were still moving on the hard pavement when the car screeched over the kerb, but the front wheels went into a spin.
Instead of the front wheels being pulled back, the driver lost control of the steering and the
car went smack into the granite wall at about fifty miles an hour. There was a crunch of collapsing sheet metal, the sound of glass splintering, and the air was suddenly poisoned with petrol fumes.
The two Yard men picked themselves up. They reached what was left of the car together and Hazard switched off the ignition. Hazard was staring at the yellow face of the Chinese driver whose neck had been broken.
As if that had not been sufficient to terminate an expendable life, a long sliver of glass from the rear-view mirror had been driven through one eye. Only the end showed, like a glinting jewel.
There was the sound of a soft drip, drip.
Drury stared at the thin line of blood running across the dust of the shadowy pavement. In the poor light it looked as though the car itself was bleeding.
‘Why?’ he asked.
The short question was not specially addressed to the shaken inspector, who was mopping his face again.
Chapter 13
‘Oh, no,’ Drury said as he was about to hang up his coat and hat. The note by the telephone was too much like a growing habit.
He read the number. So far as he knew he had never seen it before, and he certainly knew no one who had given him that number in the past. But there was no mistaking the urgency. His wife had timed the message twenty minutes before, and had underlined the words ‘ring back immediately you come in’.
He heard a stair creak. His wife was peeking over the landing.
‘Everything all right, Frank?’ she said in a low voice, so as not to wake their son.
‘Yes. Go back to bed, love.’
‘Only that man who rang — well, he sounded as though something might have happened.’
‘It has. The case is closed. Now go back to bed and stop worrying.’
‘Don’t be long, Frank. You’ve still some sleep to catch up.’
She retreated and Drury began dialling. A few seconds later he heard the familiar voice of Sir Benedict himself.
‘I’m phoning to say how sorry I am for what happened on the Embankment a short while back, Superintendent, and to congratulate you on escaping. I expect you’re wondering why.’
‘It had crossed my mind, sir.’
‘Well, look at the foreign news page in The Times in the morning, and remember that these people take setbacks personally. They can’t afford to lose face. By the way the car was Vicki Seeburg’s, with altered number-plates. So I rather fear they caught up with her.’
‘Oh.’
It was all Drury could say with safety.
The man at the other end of the line said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to know that the Minister is very grateful to you, Superintendent. He has told the Commissioner so personally. Give my apologies to your wife for disturbing her so late, but I had hoped to find you already home. Good night — and again thank you.’
‘Good night, Sir Benedict.’
Drury hung up his coat and hat and went into the kitchen where he poured some milk into a saucepan, put it on the stove, and began searching for a tin that would provide him with a few spoonfuls of a vitaminised compound that promised a good night’s sleep. But he couldn’t find it, and he forgot the milk, which boiled over, and the stench of the burning milk on the stove’s saucepan ring soon pervaded the whole house, and brought his wife downstairs. Her pyjama jacket was unbuttoned, and her hair was tousled, and when she saw the direction in which he was looking she grew very flushed.
‘I wondered what you wanted.’
It was the truth, but a poor choice of words, and she realized that too late. For he suddenly grinned and reached for her, and she started back, saying, ‘Now it’s much too late for that sort of nonsense, Frank, and you’re too tired.’
‘You want to bet?’ he asked her.
But of course he knew she wasn’t a betting woman. Which made it a certainty for him.
The report on the foreign page of The Times that interested Frank Drury was on a Skoplje dateline and dated the previous Saturday.
It read:
‘An unconfirmed report from a normally reliable source in Tirana announces that a violent explosion occurred yesterday at a Government armaments factory believed to be working on contracts for the Chinese People’s Republic. There are unconfirmed rumours of many casualties among key personnel and great material damage. The loss may be vital to the programme recently announced by the Defence Ministry in Tirana. There has been no official announcement by the Albanian radio.’
Drury put down the newspaper and felt for his pipe and filled it slowly. Some minutes passed before he lit it. He was not a man normally stirred to any great personal depths, but this time he was surprised by his own sense of unease.
He could see again the figure behind the crumpled steering-wheel, the glittering piece of glass where an eye had glinted with hate for him, Frank Drury.
He heard again the drip, drip and felt slightly nauseated.
His wife had seen the bruises on his left thigh and asked him what had happened. He had told her he had fallen over, which was near enough to the truth for a woman to whom he had never lied since their wedding day.
She had merely said, ‘Well, your feet should be big enough to stand on.’
She usually liked, woman fashion, having the last words, and those he had been glad to let her have. But she hadn’t forgotten. She had produced a bottle of liniment before he left for the Yard.
At the front door she had had the last words again.
‘Feel rested?’ And when he had grinned without saying anything she had added, ‘I don’t think you should. But try falling the other way next time.’
He struck a match and lit his pipe. He smoked for maybe ten minutes, thinking about the paperwork the case would still demand. His thoughts were back on the Embankment when Bill Hazard came in. He carried an afternoon edition, which he dropped on the desk in front of Drury. He had ringed a piece in the third column of the opened page he had folded back.
‘That was a good tip you had, chief.’
Drury picked up the paper and looked at the marked passage which was headed ‘Body Found in New Forest’. The paragraphs below the heading ran:
‘Early this morning a New Forest ranger came upon the body of a young woman lying among bushes in the New Forest a few miles from Lyndhurst. She had been strangled and it is believed the body had been removed from a car.
‘A thin silk cord was found by Hampshire police almost embedded in the creamy flesh of the good-looking victim’s neck. A handbag recovered from the bushes contained papers identifying the woman as a Mrs V. Singh. It is understood the police are seeking a man who can help in their inquiries. An arrest is expected shortly. Mrs Singh came to this country some years ago from Bombay. It is not known whether she has relatives in London, where she lived.’
Drury took a pair of scissors from a drawer. He cut out both pieces, wrote the date on them, and dropped them in the drawer with the scissors. The newspapers were tossed in the waste-basket, which was empty except for an open packet that had held cigarettes of the brand Bill Hazard usually smoked.
‘I don’t suppose either of us will have much difficulty in writing the next piece about the New Forest crime, Bill.’
‘Depends how they want to play it,’ Hazard said. He had been forced to change his ideas so many times in the past week that he preferred to remain non-committal.
‘They want it over, done with, and swept under the plush sort of carpet they favour in Whitehall, Bill. Tomorrow morning should see the finishing touch, about in time to stop awkward questions as to why we weren’t being called in on a murder case.’
Drury wasn’t mistaken.
Hazard was first in the next morning, and he had another column ringed for the Yard superintendent’s attention. It was on the back page and headed ‘Murder Case Closed’.
The report read:
‘Hampshire police late last night confirmed that they are satisfied that the man who strangled the woman whose body was found yesterday morning in the New Forest not
far from Lyndhurst has been identified.
‘He was the driver of a car which crashed on the Thames Embankment on Sunday night, narrowly missing two pedestrians.
‘He was dead when his body was recovered from the wreckage. Fingerprints have established that the dead woman, Mrs V. Singh, had been a passenger in the wrecked car. There was no other occupant of the car at the time of the crash.
‘It is understood that the dead man was not the murdered woman’s husband.
‘Hampshire police now consider this inquiry closed.’
Hazard lit a cigarette and blew smoke down the length of his tie. He walked round Drury’s desk like a stalking hunter closing in on unsuspecting game.
‘You hadn’t seen it?’
‘The paper boy didn’t turn up this morning.’
‘Then you won’t have seen page one. Better take a look,’ he suggested.
Drury was just in time to see the near-grin Hazard was struggling to lose. He turned the paper over to find another ringed report, in the last column under a bold headline proclaiming ‘Wilma Haven’s Amazing Recovery’. The lead-in paragraphs were in black type.
The superintendent read:
‘A special bulletin from the hospital where doctors have been working day and night to save the life of Wilma Haven, following the disastrous events at her home Broomwood last week, announces that their patient has suddenly and quite unexpectedly responded to their hours-long fight to save her.
‘ ‘A miracle,’ was how one doctor, who was visibly impressed, described the dramatic change. ‘There now seems every chance of a complete recovery. But it will take a long time.’
‘Miss Haven’s legal adviser, Mr Peregrine Porter of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, told reporters that plans are already being made for Miss Haven to convalesce abroad.
‘ ‘I feel sure she will wish to forget the recent past,’ he said. ‘She has suffered considerable shock.’
‘This was confirmed by the hospital doctors.
‘It is understood she may receive fresh psychiatric treatment by Professor Warrender who, it will be recalled, was present at the time of the incident which the police are still inquiring into. The professor would make no comment other than to say, ‘If my services are required I am sure they will be available.’
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