Echo of Barbara

by John Burke

  Across the table his mother put down the tea-pot on its stand with a loud rattle. Her hand was shaking. He knew that she was silently imploring him to be quiet.

  But he could not keep quiet for ever.

  There was a faint, ghostly, musical vibration; then the telephone began to ring.

  Sam half rose from the table, held himself propped up for a moment as though weakness made it impossible for him to move, then walked stiffly towards the telephone.

  Roger and his mother stayed where they were. They did not make a sound.

  ‘Speaking,’ said Sam.

  There was a long pause. Mrs. Westwood leaned across the table. Her mouth worked. Roger put up one hand as though to ward her off. If she had any warnings, any entreaties, he did not want to listen to them.

  Sam said: ‘I see. Two o’clock . . . No good taking that tone of voice with me, Legat. I’ll do what I think best.’

  Again there was silence.

  Then: ‘All right. I heard you. Yes.’

  The bell rang faintly again. Sam came back into the room. He did not look at the other two.

  Mrs. Westwood was the first to crack. She stammered: ‘Well? What . . . what do they say?’

  ‘More or less what I expected.’

  ‘Yes, but —’

  ‘How do they want the ransom,’ demanded Roger harshly, ‘and when?’

  Sam raised his eyes unseeingly. Finally he said: ‘I’m to go this afternoon to the Red Lion at Grenbridge. They’ll pick me up there. Evidently they don’t want to venture as far down as this, into an exposed area where they can’t keep a good watch on things. I’ll be watched in Grenbridge, and if there are any policemen or anyone else around, the whole thing will be called off for today — and there’ll be trouble for Barbara. That’s the way they put it.’

  ‘And when they’ve met you?’

  ‘I’m to take them to where I hid the diamonds. If I don’t — and if they don’t get back with the diamonds — the one who’s guarding Barbara will . . . deal with her.’

  Now, Roger knew, he ought to tell his father the truth. But perhaps if he waited, if he stalled, his father would do something to make it unnecessary.

  Sam said: ‘I’m going to get her back. And it’s got to be done without handing anything over in exchange.’

  Roger felt a tremor of joy. He might have known that something like this would rouse his father to action. The somnolent weeks were ended. There was nothing to worry about. The old Sam Westwood was taking charge, and there would be no question of paying ransom and no need to confess the truth about Paula Hastings; and in due course, when it was all over, they could get back to the question of the diamonds.

  He said: ‘Dad, you can count on me.’

  ‘I prefer to count on Adam Collier.’

  ‘But he’s a —’

  ‘He’s the only man I can trust in this business. Or if he isn’t, I might as well give up.’

  He went out of the room, leaving the door open. His wife and son sat in silence, hearing the tinkle as the receiver was lifted, and the faint purr of dialling.

  Roger muttered: ‘But he can’t —’

  ‘I told you,’ said Mrs. Westwood, ‘that your father would decide.’ She began to clear the table, removing plates of food that had hardly been touched. ‘As for me —’

  ‘Hush!’

  ‘. . . demand from them,’ Sam was saying, ‘that I go to the Red Lion in Grenbridge. Two o’clock. They’re going to meet me there . . .’ His voice had sunk into its usual whisper. Roger stood as close to the open door as he dared, but only fragments drifted back to him. ‘. . . don’t know you. No, don’t even risk coming down here now, just in case . . . If you could start off in time to be there for lunch. Get yourself settled and . . .’

  Mrs. Westwood clattered dishes in the sink, once, to provide a convincing background, to prove that they were not listening. Then she laughed mirthlessly to herself and leaned against the drainboard.

  ‘If you don’t fancy it,’ said Sam with sudden energy, ‘don’t take it on. But tell me. I’ve got to know right now.’ There was a pause.

  ‘Yes. Thanks. I knew . . . Now, let’s get it straight . . .’

  The voice rustled down again into a whisper.

  *

  Adam looked at his watch. Twenty minutes from now he would leave. That would give him plenty of time. He could hardly spend too long prowling up and down in front of the Red Lion, and he did not want to spend too much time in the bar before lunch: he wanted his head to be quite clear.

  Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he saw a savage, anguished face. At once he made the attempt to relax. He had to appear at his ease. It would not help to go stamping into the hotel in Grenbridge with a murderous gleam in his eye.

  Consciously he let the tension leave his arms and shoulders. With the skill of long practice he smiled, as though thinking about something vaguely pleasant but of no great moment. Only someone who knew him well would have been uneasy.

  Downstairs the telephone rang. He heard the landlord’s uneven shuffle along the passage.

  ‘Mr. Collier — call for you.’

  Adam hurried downstairs. Sam might have thought up some new angle. There would be some last-minute instructions.

  He said: ‘Hello, Collier here.’

  ‘Hello, Adam. Fred here. A fine fool you’ve made me look, I must say . . .’

  The information which followed was incredible. For a minute it made no sense. Then it began to sound plausible. Plausible enough for Adam to interrupt: ‘Look, Fred, if this is true I’m damned sorry.’ There was a terse rejoinder to this. They talked for another minute, and then the conversation came to an end.

  Dazed, Adam reached out and depressed the cradle. He waited, raised his hand again, and dialled Sam Westwood’s number.

  Sam answered.

  Adam said: ‘Sam, I’ve got something to tell you. Barbara’s safe.’

  ‘How the hell can she be safe? What are you talking about?’

  ‘She’s in London. She was never kidnapped at all, by the sound of it.’

  Sam’s anger, when it came, was pitiful in its gasping intensity. ‘I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing — if you think you can pull off something clever and persuade me . . . when I had that call from Legat, and another one today —’

  ‘Listen, Sam. Listen. You’re going to be mad with me. All right, I can take that. You’re going to be mad because I got in touch with someone in London and drew the police into this —’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I told you it was the best thing to do, and I’ve been proved right.’ Adam shook the receiver as though he were shaking Sam Westwood by the shoulders. ‘You spent too long combating the police to realize just how good they are. I know them — I’ve worked with them, and I know what they can do.’

  ‘If you’ve endangered Barbie’s life —’

  ‘Less than you might have endangered it,’ snapped Adam, ‘if you’d had your way and gone ahead, and then the plan hadn’t come off. I’m telling you, Sam, that there isn’t any danger. Barbara has been found. I swear it.’

  ‘Where? How is she?’

  Adam hesitated. But what had convinced him must be said now in order to convince Sam. He said:

  ‘All that she seemed prepared to say was that she had walked out on you and she wanted to stay out. She was indignant with the police for tracking her down, and she says that any talk of kidnapping is a lot of rubbish. She made herself pretty nasty to some of my old friends, I gather.’

  ‘Just as Roger said.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Roger,’ said Sam, ‘told me it was just another of her moods. You were there when he said it.’

  ‘Yes, I was there. I didn’t know —’

  ‘If you want to know,’ came the bitter whisper, ‘the truth is that she walked out before . . . before I came out of prison. Said she wouldn’t come back. It was Roger who talked her into coming back then. And I thou
ght . . . I thought she had settled in — that it was going to be all right. She was a bit strange at times, but —’

  ‘She was very upset when she dropped in to see me,’ Adam unhappily remembered. ‘She wouldn’t talk about it. Then when she disappeared I thought she must have been afraid — especially when I heard about those men who’d been to see you.’

  ‘Instead of which, she had simply decided to walk out again. Because I wouldn’t hand over the Mannerlaw diamonds to my precious family. And yet — I was going to tell her. She went before I had a chance of finishing what we were talking about.’ Alarm quickened beneath his despondency. ‘This doesn’t add up. Why should Legat and those two think they could get away with an attempt to extort the thing from me? How did they know it would fit in — that it would be just the right time to talk about a kidnapping, so that I’d believe it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Adam grimly. ‘None of it seems very nice to me. Maybe, somehow, they saw her leaving —’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sam, ‘they gave her a lift.’

  His despair was chilling. Adam felt that even the certainty of a kidnapping would have seemed better to him, in some terrible way, than this.

  He said: ‘Anyway, she’s all right. She’s free.’

  ‘And she wants to stay . . . free.’

  ‘I want you to leave this to me, Sam,’ said Adam. ‘I’m going to drive up to London — right away. Let me talk to her.’

  ‘If she doesn’t want to come back,’ said Sam, ‘she doesn’t have to.’

  ‘I don’t believe she knows what she’s doing. She was upset, Sam: I’m telling you that. I saw her, and I know that something was wrong. If it was something to do with you, better let me approach her first. Let’s try to clear it all up. It wouldn’t do any good for you to go.’

  For a second he thought Sam was going to answer that he had had no intention of going. But then the disturbing split, the fear of the other possibility, widened again. Sam said: ‘But the Red Lion — suppose you’re wrong, and it isn’t Barbara the police have found, and I don’t go for that telephone call . . .’

  ‘Who else could it be but Barbara?’

  ‘If they’re wrong, and Legat really has got her, and I don’t turn up . . .’

  Adam wanted to tell him not to be a fool. The police could not be wrong about this. Fred could not have passed on false information. But the mere possibility, the one chance in a thousand, was one chance too many where Barbara was concerned. He almost wavered.

  Sam said: ‘I’m going to go to the Red Lion anyway. You go to London — I’ll be grateful to you, and you’re right about me not going to see her — but I’ve got to meet them at Grenbridge. Just in case.’

  The telephone mouthpiece was hot and moist. Adam heard his own breath faintly resounding. He said: ‘Don’t be crazy. That’s what they’re after. It’s you they want to get their hands on. They’ll drive you off somewhere and beat the truth out of you.’

  ‘Not if I refuse to go with them. I’m going to meet them, because I daren’t not meet them. But before I move from the Red Lion I shall want proof that they’ve got Barbie. And if, as you say, they can’t provide it —’

  ‘All right,’ said Adam. ‘All right. Do it that way. Tell them you want proof. Stall them. We know they can’t provide it. And it won’t look suspicious: it’s a reasonable thing for you to ask. Then, by the time you’re back home I’ll be on my way back, maybe. With Barbara, just to make sure they don’t really get their hands on her.’

  ‘Don’t bring her,’ said the dead voice in the receiver, ‘if she doesn’t want to come.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ said Adam with meaningless confidence. ‘It’s all going to be all right.’

  He ought to have been happy as he drove up to London. The relief he had felt when Fred telephoned ought to have flowered into something richer. Barbara was all right, and he was on his way to see her: that was reason for happiness.

  But he felt depressed. He did not know what he would have to face. Something, somewhere, was wrong. Whatever he might have said to Sam, he knew in his bones that something was wrong.

  It had been like this before — this instinctive disquietude, the prickling of dread. During the war and in those complicated months after the war, he had experienced it often. There had been days and nights of tension, carrying out a plan that seemed fool-proof and yet, one sensed, would go wrong. There had been the tracking-down of men who were just out of reach and who, one knew, would always remain just there. Traps failed; plans did not work out; brilliant improvisations misfired. In the war’s aftermath of intrigue, instinct was often as sound a guide as any; and in his work since then, it had rarely failed him. Now it told him that there was no neat, happy ending just ahead.

  There was certainly going to be trouble from his superiors. This was a peculiar way of carrying out his instructions. Admitting to his quarry who he was, and then helping the criminal to get his daughter back — this would hardly appeal to the Company.

  But it was not this that cast a dark shadow over his mind. Sooner or later, he knew, he would have to face up to the consequences; sooner or later he would have to decide what he was doing about the job with which he had been entrusted. But now, as he wove through the outskirts of London, through interminable streets as sullen as his thoughts, the job itself had faded into the background. Only one thing counted.

  He parked in the courtyard of the hideous red office block, and hurried in, bursting unceremoniously into Fred’s office.

  Fred raised his owlish face and blinked with ominous mildness. The scar on his cheek was white, as it always was when he was irritated.

  He said: ‘Having a good holiday, Adam? Getting matey with the local crooks, picking up a girl friend —’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Do you suppose we’ve had her deposited in the strongroom to await your arrival?’

  ‘Fred —’

  ‘She’s at home. She didn’t want to stay there, but I exercised my discretion and persuaded our — ah — friends to help. We talked her into it. I shall probably have to retire next week.’

  ‘You won’t regret this, Fred,’ said Adam.

  ‘Won’t I? I regret it already. I don’t know if there’s anything in it at all — and yet I’ve been hinting that if she doesn’t stay indoors instead of going to work, she may be kidnapped. Our friends are beginning to wonder why we don’t lodge an official complaint. Or a warning. Or something. They won’t co-operate much further, I’m warning you.’

  ‘They won’t have to. What’s her address?’

  It was a tall, clean house in a street off the Old Brompton Road. There were little cards with smeared ink beside the front door, each with its adjoining bell-push. Adam tried to make out the names. He was surprised to find the name of Barbara Westwood there — challengingly real, as though she disdained to change her name and hide away.

  Oddly, the card and the ink were faded as though the name had been there for months.

  A policeman said: ‘Were you looking for somebody, sir?’

  Adam straightened up. There had been no sign of this policeman as he came along, and no sound of approaching footsteps. But evidently a watch was being kept. Fred had certainly been pulling some strings.

  ‘I want to see Miss Westwood,’ he said.

  ‘Is she expecting you, sir?’

  The man was oddly like a deferential but very firm butler, incongruously dressed in police uniform.

  Adam said: ‘I doubt it. I’ve come from her father. But she knows me. I think she’ll see me.’

  ‘Your name, sir?’

  ‘Adam Collier.’

  ‘Ah, yes. It was mentioned that you might be along sooner or later. You won’t mind if I come up with you, sir?’

  They were taking care of her. His heart warmed to Fred, to the police, and to this constable in particular. Regulations or no regulations, something had been set in motion, and red tape had been quietly snipped. Perhaps none of it was necessar
y — the Legat threats had all been bluff, and once the bluff failed that would be the last that was heard of it — but it was heartening to see what had been done.

  ‘You come right along,’ he said.

  The policeman pressed one of the other buttons. A faded middle-aged woman opened the door, said, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ and stood back to let them in.

  They went up to the second floor. The policeman tapped on a door.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s all right, Miss Westwood, you can open up. I’ve brought somebody to see you.’

  There was the quiet snap of the catch being removed from the lock. Then the door opened.

  Adam stepped forward. He said: ‘Barbara . . .’

  Then he stared. Because it wasn’t. The hair, sleekly drawn back, was almost the same. The grey eyes were, for a moment, disconcertingly familiar; but they looked back at him without recognition.

  ‘Yes?’ she said coldly. ‘I’m Barbara. Barbara Westwood. But who are you? I don’t think I know you.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  She sat beside this large, aggressive-looking man and let herself be driven to the house she had sworn she would never visit. London receded and they approached her father’s house.

  Not that she was anxious to set his mind at rest. That was not why she had allowed herself to be persuaded to make this journey. The incredible story that this Adam Collier had told her had moved her in one way only: it moved her to angry curiosity.

  Occasionally he glanced at her, appraising her and relating her to something or someone in his own mind. There was nothing even remotely companionable in his gaze.

  Barbara said: ‘Do you have to drive so fast?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  At any other time she might have appreciated the sleek sports car, the rush of the wind and the thrust of the seat as they swung around corners. Today there was no pleasure. She simply wanted to reach Easterdyke and find out what had been happening.

  She asked: ‘And Roger — and Mother — played along with this, all the way?’

  ‘I’ve already told you that.’

  ‘It’s all so . . . so cheap. Just like them. No pride, no character — nothing but the lust for money.’