The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries

by E. X. Ferrars

  The hours passed slowly.

  With the morning a shaft of sunlight crept across their beds, striped by the slats of the Venetian blind. It wakened Melanie, who opened her eyes, blinked them at the brightness, glanced at her watch, mumbled something about its still being too early to order breakfast and shut them again.

  Leo gave a groan.

  “What’s the trouble?” she asked.

  “My head,” he said. “Oh God, my head!”

  “Bad?”

  “Absolute hell.”

  “It’s this heat,” she said. “I’m afraid it doesn’t suit you. Next year we’ll have to stick to Torquay. Want the codeine?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind...”

  She swung her feet down to the floor. Leo heard her padding about the room, heard her run water in the bathroom as she filled a glass, heard her come to his bedside. He raised his head, took the two tablets she held out to him, gulped some water, then buried his face in the pillow again. Melanie went back to bed and almost immediately dropped asleep. It was nearly nine o’clock before she woke once more and ordered breakfast.

  When it came, brought by the small, dark, smiling waiter, Leo drank a cup of coffee but refused to eat anything. When Melanie suggested that going to Kyrenia and having a swim might help, he demanded that for God’s sake she should leave him alone.

  “But you go,” he said. “Take the car. Take your lunch. Have a swim yourself. Go to see the old man. Just leave me alone.”

  “But it’s not so much fun, all by oneself,” she said.

  “It won’t be much fun for you either, hanging around here.”

  “Well, if you’re sure...”

  “Of course I’m sure. You can’t help.”

  She did not take much persuading.

  It was half past ten when she took the car and drove off to Kyrenia. Leo did not hurry after she had gone, but presently got up, dressed, went out and strolled about the town for a little while, so that the maid could do the room, then returned to it, lay down again and spent a quiet morning reading. At half past twelve he went to the bar and had a drink. He did not linger over it, but he had a chat with the barman about the composition of a brandy sour, which seemed to be the favourite drink in the place, and thought that the man would remember that he had been there. At a quarter to one Leo went to the dining room and again made a point of chatting to the waiter. At a quarter past one he went to his room, took the red cotton hat and the big black sunglasses from the top shelf of the cupboard, put a pair of gloves in his pocket, made a bundle of his swimming trunks and a towel and put the gun in the middle of it. Then he went down in the lift, out to the street, turned to the right, turned again to the right, so that he was out of sight of the hotel, put on the red hat and the sunglasses and hailed a taxi.

  He told the driver that he wanted to go to Kyrenia and they set off along the road outside the old town, came to the roundabout, took the turning to Kyrenia, passed through the gap in the oil-drum barricade and drove on along the road across the plain.

  The driver, a stout, hunched figure of a man, had a sullen sort of talkativeness. He told Leo that he was a Turk and went on to tell him what a miserable thing it was to be a Turk in Cyprus, with the Greeks getting all the best jobs and just waiting for a chance to murder you. His complaints, in halting, mumbling English, went on for most of the drive. Leo did not listen. Now that the time had come, now that so soon there would be no turning back, he did not feel conscious fear, but only a chilly kind of rigidity. He paid off the taxi at the harbour in Kyrenia, sat down at a table there under a bright umbrella and ordered a beer, drank it quickly, then walked along the road to Uncle Ben’s house. There was a bench near the house, which he had noticed on his first visit. Sitting down on it, he lit a cigarette. The time was a few minutes after two o’clock.

  It was a quarter past two when Mrs. Nicolaou left the house. She was a dark-skinned, dumpy woman in a tight, printed cotton dress. She had a fluffed out mass of black hair and walked with little mincing steps. She did not even glance at Leo. As soon as she was out of sight, he got up, slipped on his gloves, turned in at the gate of Uncle Ben’s house, walked round the house to the terrace at the back, saw Uncle Ben lying there in his cane chair, half-asleep, held the gun to his temple and shot him.

  Leo had forgotten about the noise. The sight of death did not frighten him, for he had seen enough of it to be hardened during the war. But as he heard the angry bark of the gun in his hand, he felt his first real fear. But the echo died and silence followed. Somewhere not far away a hen cackled loudly, but that was the only sign of disturbance. Leo tugged at one of the old man’s limp hands, folded it round the gun, then dropped the gun on the ground beside his chair, with the hand dangling above it, as if the gun had just fallen from the fingers. Then he walked quietly away round the house, out into the street and strolled back to the harbour.

  He had no difficulty in finding another taxi to take him back to Nicosia. It was as he got into it that he began to shake. Collapsing on the seat, closing his eyes, he trembled from head to foot. Tensing his muscles, he tried to fight it. But that only made it worse. Yet something must be done, or the driver might notice it. Deliberately Leo tried to relax, and to calm himself, started to go over in his head everything that he had done, to tell himself how well it had gone.

  First, if anyone had seen him sitting on the bench or entering the house, it would be the red hat and the outsize sunglasses that he would remember. There was no risk that he would be recognised.

  Second, no one could ever trace that gun to him. No one in the world knew that he had ever possessed it. It had probably lain in that loft since at least the war, its very existence forgotten. So how could anything ever be proved against him?

  Third, luckily for Leo, Uncle Ben had made a parade of his loneliness and depression. Certainly not only to Leo and Melanie, but to Mrs. Nicolaou too, and his other acquaintances. What more likely, then, that one day he would kill himself? How had he got hold of the gun? Well, hadn’t there been a time when guns had been common in Cyprus? Weren’t they still, if it came to that? You had only to look about you.

  Fourth, by the time that Melanie had had her lunch after her swim, slept for a little in the shade of the bamboos, driven to the house, arriving, say, at about three o’clock, found the body and rushed out in terror to the nearest of those red telephone booths to call Leo, he would be safely back in his room in the hotel, ready to answer the call. The red hat and the sunglasses would have been disposed of in some litter-bin, or just dropped in the gutter, as soon as he had paid off the taxi. He would be terribly shocked and upset at what Melanie told him, would tell her to get hold of the first policeman she could find, and that he himself would come to her as quickly as he was able. And he would make quite sure that the people in the hotel knew that he had received that call....

  Boldness. Simplicity. What could go wrong?

  The trembling gradually ceased. He opened his eyes to look at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes to three. That left plenty of time.

  But something suddenly bewildered him. The taxi should have been climbing the steep, twisting road through the hills. Instead it was speeding along a flat, straight road with the sea on the right of it, calm, glittering, serene. There were mountains on the left, but nowhere near the road.

  Leo shot forward to the edge of the seat and grabbed the driver’s shoulder.

  “Here, where are we? Where are you taking me?” he shouted.

  “To Nicosia,” the man answered. “You want to go to Nicosia, no?”

  “But this isn’t the way!”

  “It is the way.”

  “It isn’t. I’ve never come this way. You’re playing some trick on me.”

  “No trick. This is the only way I can take you. I am a Greek. On the other road there is a Turkish village. I am not allowed to drive through it.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not allowed?”

  “What I say. Haven’t you seen the s
entries and the oil drums? The Turks say, if we let you come into our villages, you will kill us. It is not true, but it is what they say. A Greek cannot go to Nicosia by the other road unless he goes in a United Nations convoy. They go twice a day, nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, with jeeps before and behind. But this is a nice drive. No need to worry.”

  At that moment Leo saw a road-sign ahead of them. It said, “Nicosia, 44.” Forty-four miles! Forty-four...! It might easily take an hour. And Melanie would find Uncle Ben, would telephone the hotel, would be told there was no answer...

  And he had thought that it did not matter if you could not tell the difference between a Greek and a Turk!

  “Oh, God, God!” Leo cried pounding his knees with his fists, panic making his voice almost a scream. “This can’t happen! You can’t do this to me!”

  “No need to worry,” the driver repeated placidly. “It costs you no more than going the short way.”

  FLY, SAID THE SPY

  They had promised that they would warn him if it ever became necessary. They had promised that he had nothing to fear, that they would arrange his getaway. They had promised to look after him to start a new life. But he had never quite trusted them to do these things. If there was any real trouble, he had thought that he would be thrown to the wolves. That was why, on an impulse, on a visit to a friend’s laboratory, he had acquired a small packet of cyanide. Sooner the cyanide, he had thought, than years in prison. Sooner swift death than the shame of having his wife discover what the man whom she had loved so devotedly for the last eight years had really been all that time.

  So when the warning came and with it precise instructions as to what he was to do next day, the first thing that happened was that his mind was thrown into a state of confusion in which sheer disbelief that this could happen to him when everything had gone so smoothly and comfortably for so long, was blended with blinding fear. This was the time for the cyanide. That very evening. A letter to his wife, telling her the truth about himself, which he would leave beside his typewriter in his small study at home, and then the darkness. But when it came to the point, could he face it? Would it not be best to do as they said and rely on them to take care of their own?

  He had been working for them for ten years. They had approached him almost as soon as he, a nuclear physicist, had taken up his new work at the very secret Institute of Physical Science at Bladfield in Berkshire, and because of a bitter and defeated mood that he had been in at the time, mostly because a job that he had coveted had gone to another man, one whom it happened he had despised and never considered seriously as a rival, and also because of trouble over a woman which had almost broken him, he had found something attractive in the thought of taking revenge on a world that did not value him as it ought. Perhaps at the beginning there had been a spark of idealism in what he had done, an attempt to achieve faith of some kind in something or other, but that had not lasted long. He had never felt much need for a faith, religious or political. His pleasure in what he was paid had lasted longer and what was expected of him had never been too demanding. In fact, the ease with which he had managed to do it had given him a sardonic sort of amusement. It had added to the zest of life. Until, that was to say, he had found that he wanted to marry Rosemary.

  When that had happened he had told them that he wanted to end what he had been doing, only to find that this was not going to be allowed. He realized that he ought to have expected that. He was in their power and they were not going to let him go. He was too useful to them. They had repeated their promises that, should danger arise, they would take care of him, and had even sent a bottle of champagne to him on the day of his wedding. But the pressure on him had been firm, the threat unmistakeable. So he had gone on as before, distressed at first at having to keep the whole truth about himself from Rosemary, almost confiding in her sometimes and stopping himself only just in time, but gradually becoming accustomed to the situation and in the end finding it surprisingly easy, almost natural, to deceive her.

  She was an incurious woman. Just as she accepted his scientific work as so far beyond her grasp that she need not struggle to understand it, she seemed to feel no need for any deep emotional intimacy. She was reserved herself, quiet, not very sociable. She had been working as a technical officer in the Institute when he first met her, and had kept on her job after their marriage, but like him had very little desire to take part in the active social life of the place. They lived in an attractive old cottage about five miles from it, each had a car and in their work seldom encountered one another. But with their joint salaries they could live very comfortably. He had been afraid at first that those extra payments he received on the quiet might be hard to explain, but she accepted his story without question that they were royalty payments for some commercial work that he had done in the past, and she had a remarkable gift for making them go a long way. Though they lived quietly, in a modest way they lived luxuriously. They drank wine every evening. She seemed never to be driven to making small economies in her excellent cooking. Her clothes were elegant. He was able to go to a good tailor. They took expensive holidays.

  Yet now all this was to be given up. And for what? If he did what they told him and escaped the net which he understood was closing about him, what was ahead of him? Could he bear to think of it? Was it not the time for the cyanide?

  He went home earlier than usual. He had thought that perhaps he ought to clear out his desk before he left the Institute in case there was anything incriminating in it that he had forgotten. But what did that matter now? Tomorrow he would either be safely on his way to a remote destination, a long way beyond the reach of retribution, or dead. So if some oddments of evidence against him were found in his desk it would be of no importance whatever. If there were a chance that some extra precautions might lessen the blow for Rosemary when she found him gone, he might have taken the trouble to go through his desk. But in fact it would not help her and if his secretary noticed him doing anything so unusual as tidying his drawers it might worry her, and she might carry her worries to someone who would be a danger to him. For all he knew, she was the person who had alerted the people whom he now had to think of as his enemies, though as marriage had gradually mellowed him, he had come to think of them as friends. He had not been told who had betrayed him. Whoever it was, however, it seemed best not to do anything unusual today.

  When he reached home he found Rosemary’s car in the garage already. That meant that she also had come home earlier than usual. When he went into the house he could hear her in the kitchen and smell something very savoury coming from it. His heart began to beat uncomfortably. It was so important now for him to act as he always did, to be perfectly normal, yet this felt a more difficult thing to do than anything that he had ever done in his life. He would have to go into the kitchen and kiss her and ask her what delicious thing it was that she was cooking, when what he wanted to do was to take her in his arms and crush her to him and bury his face in her hair and burst into tears. He had never been as near tears as he was now since his childhood.

  But he managed to control himself, kissed her on the nape of her neck and asked, “What is it that smells so good?”

  “Pheasant,” she answered. “I went into Reading at lunchtime to have my hair done and happened to see one and thought we might as well give ourselves a bit of a treat.”

  He noticed then that her dark hair had the glossy sheen that it had when she had just been to the hairdresser and that she was wearing one of her dresses that he liked best. He also saw through the door that led straight from the kitchen into their small dining room that the table was laid with their good silver and glass and that there were flowers in the middle of it, which no doubt, like the pheasant, had come from Reading. For a moment he thought unhappily that they must be expecting visitors, which would not suit him at all, but the table was laid for only two.

  “Are we celebrating something?” he asked, surprised at how lightly he managed to ask the ques
tion.

  “No, it was just a feeling I had that it would be nice to do things properly for once,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we do it just for ourselves?”

  “Why indeed?” It gave him an excuse to hold her as he wanted to and kiss her over and over again. But each kiss felt as if it might be the last one for the rest of his life and he let go of her suddenly because he was afraid that she might feel his trembling.

  “Is there time for a drink without spoiling anything?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  They drank sherry in the sitting room. They did not talk much, but they never did, there was nothing odd in that. Yet it seemed to him that there was something unusual about Rosemary that evening. Her face, which he thought beautiful in its calm, pallid way, was never expressive, but tonight it struck him that it had a kind of glow, the look of some only half-hidden excitement, which he had seldom seen on it before. A curious uneasiness came over him. Was it possible, he wondered, that she had somehow learnt what had happened to him that day and that she was trying to make tonight a kind of farewell for the two of them, to leave a memory that must last them over the bleak years to come? But how could she have discovered anything, and if she had, why did she not simply speak to him about it? No, that was not the explanation of her unfamiliar mood.

  A desire more intense that he had ever known before to tell her the whole truth about himself possessed him. Only shame kept him silent. He had lived with it in his heart for so long that as a rule he hardly noticed it except when, as had happened a few times, he had come near to confessing it. He could not imagine what look he would see on her face when she knew what he was and he could not bring himself to try to think about it. The fear of it stopped him now. Somehow he would get through the evening, help her to make it the kind of evening it seemed she wanted, and then...