the Savage Day - Simon Vaughn 02 (v5)

by Jack Higgins

  She glanced at me, white-faced. 'How much?'

  'A subject for discussion.' I poured myself another drink. 'On the other hand, maybe you don't have the funds.'

  'We have the funds,' she said.

  I tossed back the whiskey, most of which, like the previous one, had actually gone down the leg of my left gumboot, and tried to sound slightly tight when I laughed.

  'I just bet you have.' I poured another drink, spilling a little. 'Maybe we'll ask for gold this time. Something solid to hang on to in this changing world of ours.'

  Binnie's hand went inside his coat where the Browning once more safely nestled and Norah Murphy said fiercely, 'What in the hell are you getting at?'

  'Oh, come off it, angel,' I said. 'I know the Small Man was behind that bullion raid on the Glasgow mail boat. Word gets around. How much did he get away with? Half a million, or were they exaggerating?'

  They both sat there staring at me and I got to my feet. 'Anyway, you go and see your uncle when we get in and I'll have a word with Meyer. We'll sort something out, you'll see. Can I go to bed now?'

  She sat there staring at me and I moved towards the aft cabin, chuckling away to myself. When I reached the door I said, 'You know it really is very funny, whichever way you look at it. I'd love to see Frank Barry's face when he checks those sub-machine-guns and the Lahtis and finds the firing pins are missing.'

  Her hands tightened on the edge of the table and there was a look of incredulity on her face. 'What are you talking about?' she whispered.

  'Oh, didn't I tell you?' I said. 'Meyer's got them. One of those little tricks of the trade we find useful, life being such a cruel hard business on occasion, especially in our game.'

  There was a look of unholy joy on Binnie's face and he slammed a hand down hard across the table. 'By Christ, Major Vaughan, but you're the man for me. For God's sake take the oath and join us and we'll have the entire thing under wraps in six months.'

  'Sorry, old lad,' I said. 'I don't take sides, not any more. Ask the good doctor, she'll tell you.'

  And then Norah Murphy did the most incredible thing. She started to laugh helplessly, which was so unexpected that I closed the cabin door and actually poured myself a whiskey which I drank. Then I lay down on one of the bunks and, as is usual with the wicked and depraved of this world, was plunged at once into a deep and refreshing sleep.

  7

  When that man is dead and gone

  We came into Stramore just after noon. It was still raining, but the mist had cleared and according to the forecast brighter weather was on the way. Stramore was little more than a village really, the sort of place which had lived off the fish for years and was now doing better out of weekend yachtsmen.

  Except for the side window missing in the wheelhouse and the odd chip where a bullet had splintered the woodwork, we showed little sign of the skirmish with Barry and his men. We anchored off the main jetty and used the dinghy to go ashore.

  I arranged to meet Norah Murphy and Binnie in the local pub after I'd reported to the harbourmaster, which was only an excuse for I had something much more important to do.

  I found a telephone-box up a back street and dialled the number Meyer had given me. It was somehow surprising to hear the receiver picked up at the other end almost instantly, to hear the familiar voice, Al Bowlly belting out Everything I have is yours in the background.

  'Randall Cottage. Mr Berger here.'

  'Mr Berger?' I said. 'You asked me to contact you the moment I got in about that consignment I was handling for you.'

  'Ah, yes,' he said. 'Everything all right?'

  'I'm afraid not. Another carrier insisted on taking over the goods en route.'

  His voice didn't even flicker. 'That is unfortunate. I think I'll have to contact my principal about this. Can you come to see me?'

  'Any time you say.'

  'All right. Give me a couple of hours. I'll expect you around three-thirty.'

  The receiver clicked into place, cutting Al Bowlly dead and I left the phone-box and moved back towards the waterfront. I wondered if he would have the Brigadier there by the time I arrived. It should prove an interesting meeting, or so I told myself as I turned the corner and walked towards the pub where I'd arranged to meet Norah and Binnie.

  They were sitting in the snug by a roaring fire, a plate of meat sandwiches between them, pickles in a jar and two glasses of cold lager.

  'And what am I supposed to do? Live off my fat?' I demanded as I sat down.

  Norah reached for a small handbell and rang it and a pleasant-looking, middle-aged woman appeared a moment later with another plate of sandwiches.

  'Was it the lager, sir, like the others?' she asked.

  'That's it,' I said.

  She brought it and disappeared. Norah Murphy said, 'Satisfied?'

  'For the moment.'

  'And what did your friend Meyer have to say?' I tried to look puzzled and she frowned in exasperation. 'Oh, be your age, Vaughan. It stood out a mile why you wanted to be alone. Did you think I was born yesterday?'

  'Never that,' I said and held up my hands. 'All right, I surrender.'

  'So when are you seeing him?' I told her and she frowned. 'Why the delay?'

  'I don't know. He's got things to do. It's only a couple of hours, after all, and we can reach him quickly enough. The place he's taken is no more than ten miles from here. What about your end of things?'

  'Oh, that's all taken care of. I've been doing some telephoning too.' She glanced at her watch. 'In fact, I'll have to get moving. I'm being picked up outside the schoolhouse in fifteen minutes by the local brigade commander. It was his people who were waiting for us on the beach last night. He wasn't too pleased.'

  'I can imagine. Will you be seeing your uncle?'

  'I'm not sure. I don't know where he is at the moment, though I think they'll have arranged for me to speak to him on the phone.'

  I emptied my glass and Binnie picked it up without a word, went behind the bar and got me another.

  Norah Murphy put a cigarette in her mouth. As I gave her a light, the match flaring in my cupped hands, I said, 'I'm surprised at you, smoking those things and you a doctor.'

  She seemed puzzled, a slight frown on her face, then glanced at the cigarette and laughed, that distinctive harsh laugh of hers. 'Oh, what the hell, Vaughan, we'll all be dead soon enough.'

  In a sense, I had a moment of genuine insight there, saw deeper than I had seen before certainly, but we were on dangerous ground and I had to go carefully.

  I said, 'What will you do when it's all over?'

  'Over?' She stared at me blankly. 'What in the hell are you talking about?'

  'But you're going to win, aren't you, you and your friends? You must believe that or there wouldn't be any point to any of it. I simply wondered what you would do when it was all over and everything was back to normal.'

  She sat there staring at me, caught in some timeless moment like a fly in amber, unable to answer me for the simple and inescapable reason that there was only one answer.

  I nodded slowly. 'You remind me of that uncle of mine.' Binnie put the pint of lager down on the table. 'What was it they called him again, Binnie? The Schoolmaster of Stradballa?'

  'That's it, Major.'

  I turned to Norah Murphy and said gently, but with considerable cruelty for all that, 'He never wanted it to end, either. It was his whole life, you see. Trenchcoats and Thompson guns, action by night, a wonderful, violent game. He enjoyed it, Norah, if that's the right word. It was the only way he wanted to live his life - just like you.'

  She was white-faced, trembling, a kind of agony in her eyes, and she turned it all on me. 'I fight for a cause, Major. I'll die for it if necessary and proud to, like thousands before me.' She placed both hands flat on the table and leaned towards me. 'What did you ever believe in, Major Simon bloody Vaughan? What did you kill for?'

  'You mean what was my excuse, don't you?' I nodded. 'Oh, yes, Doctor, we all need one of
those.'

  She sat back in the chair, still trembling and I said softly, 'You'll be late for the pick-up. Better get going.'

  She took a deep breath as if to pull herself together and stood up. 'I want Binnie to go with you.'

  'Don't you trust me?'

  'Not particularly, and I'd like the address and telephone number of this place where your friend Meyer is staying. I'll phone you at four o'clock. Whatever happens, don't leave till you hear from me.' She turned to Binnie. 'I'm counting on you to see that he does as he's told, Binnie.'

  He looked more troubled than I'd ever seen him, torn between the two of us, I suspect, for it had become more than obvious that the events of the previous night had considerably enlarged his respect for me. On the other hand, he loved Norah Murphy in his own pure way. She had been put into his charge by the Small Man, he would die, if necessary, to protect her. It was as simple, or as complicated, as that.

  A great deal of this Norah Murphy saw and her mouth tightened. I wrote Meyer's address and phone number on a scrap of paper and gave it to her.

  'Ask for Mr Berger,' I said. 'If anything goes adrift, we'll meet back at the boat.'

  She said nothing. Simply glanced at the piece of paper briefly, dropped it into the fire and walked out.

  Binnie said, 'When I was a kid on my Da's farm in Kerry I had the best-looking red setter you ever saw.'

  I tried some more lager. 'Is that so?'

  'There was a little flatcoat retriever bitch on the next place and whenever he went over there, she used to take lumps out of him. You've never seen the like.' There was a heavy pause and he went on, 'When he was run over by the milk lorry one morning, she lay in a corner, that little bitch, for a week or more. Would neither drink nor eat. Now wasn't that the strange thing?'

  'Not at all,' I said. 'It's really quite simple. She was a woman. Now get the hell out of here with your homespun philosophy and hire us a car at the local garage. I'll wait here for you.'

  'Leave it to me, Major,' he said, his face expressionless, and went out.

  The door closed with a soft whuff, wind lifted a paper off the bar, the fire flared up.

  What was my reason for killing? That's what she had said. I tried to think of Kota Baru, of the burned-out mission, the stink of roasting flesh. It had seemed enough at the time - more than enough, but there was nothing real to it any more. It was an echo from an ancient dream, something that had never happened.

  And then it was quiet. So quiet that I could hear the clock ticking on the mantelpiece, and for no logical reason whatsoever my stomach tightened, dead men's fingers seemed to crawl across my skin and I suddenly knew exactly what Meyer meant by having a bad feeling.

  There had been no car available at the town's only garage, but Binnie had managed to borrow an old Ford pick-up truck from them, probably by invoking the name of the Organization although I didn't enquire too closely into that.

  He did the driving and I sat back and smoked a cigarette and stared morosely into the driving rain. It was a pleasant enough ride. Green fields, high hedges, rolling farmland, with here and there grey stone walls that had once been the boundaries of the great estates or still were.

  He had picked up an ordnance survey map of the area and I found Randall Cottage again. The track leading to it was perhaps a quarter of a mile long and the place was entirely surrounded by trees. The right kind of hidey hole for an old fox like Meyer.

  I gave Binnie the sign when we were close and he started to slow. A car was parked on the grass verge at the side of the road a hundred yards from the turning, a large green Vauxhall estate with no one inside.

  God knows why, that instinct again for bad news, I suppose, the product of having lived entirely the wrong sort of life, but something was wrong, I'd never been more certain of anything. I clapped a hand on Binnie's shoulder and told him to pull up.

  I got out of the car, walked back to the Vauxhall and peered inside. The doors were locked and everything seemed normal enough. Rooks called in the elm trees beyond the wall that enclosed the plantation and Randall Cottage.

  I walked back to the van through the rain and Binnie got out to meet me. 'What's up?'

  'That car,' I said. 'It worries me. It could be that it's simply broken down and the driver's walking on to the next village for help. Pigs could also fly.'

  'On the other hand,' he said slowly, 'if someone wanted to walk up to the cottage quiet like ...'

  'That's right.'

  'So what do we do about it?'

  I gave the matter some thought and then I told him.

  * * *

  The track to the cottage wasn't doing the van's springs much good and I stayed in bottom gear, sliding from one pothole to the next in the heavy rain. It was a gloomy sort of place, that wood, choked with undergrowth, pine trees un-thinned over the years cutting out all light.

  The track took a sharp right turn that brought me out into a clearing suddenly and there was Randall Cottage, a colonial style wooden bungalow with a wide verandah running along the front.

  It was unexpectedly large but quite dilapidated, and the paved section at the foot of the verandah steps was badly overgrown with grass and weeds of every description.

  As I got out of the van, thunder rumbled overhead, a strange, menacing sound and the sky went very dark, so that standing there in the clearing amongst the trees, it seemed as if the day was drawing to a close and darkness was about to fall.

  I went up the steps and knocked on the front door which stood slightly ajar. 'Heh, Meyer, are you there?' I called cheerfully.

  There was no reply, but when I pushed the door wide, Al Bowlly sounded faintly and rather eerily from somewhere at the rear of the house.

  The song he was singing was When that man is dead and gone, a number he's reputed to have dedicated to Adolf Hitler. It was the last thing he ever recorded, because a couple of weeks later he was killed by a bomb during the London Blitz.

  None of which was calculated to make me feel any happier as I moved in and advanced along a dark, musty corridor, following the sound of the music.

  The door at the far end stood wide and I paused on the threshold. There were french windows on the far side, curtains partially drawn so that the room was half in darkness. Meyer sat in a chair beside a table on which the cassette tape-recorder was playing.

  'Heh, Meyer,' I said. 'What in the hell are you up to?'

  And then I moved close enough to see that he was tied to the chair. I tilted his chin and his eyes stared up at me blankly, fixed in death. His cheeks were badly blistered, probably from repeated application of a cigarette-lighter flame. There was froth on his lips. He'd had a bad heart for some time now. It seemed pretty obvious what had happened.

  Poor old Meyer. To escape the Gestapo by the skin of his teeth so young and all these years later to end in roughly the same way. And yet I was not particularly angry, not filled with any killing rage, for anger stems from frustration and I knew, with complete certainty, that Meyer would not go unavenged for long.

  The door slammed behind me as I had expected and when I turned, Tim Pat Keogh was standing there, flanked by two hard-looking men in reefer coats who both held revolvers in their hands.

  'Surprise, surprise,' Tim Pat said and he laughed. 'This just isn't your day, Major.'

  'Did you have to do that to him?' I asked.

  'A tough old bastard, I'll give him that, but then I wanted him to tell me where those firing pins were and he was stubborn as Kelly's mule.'

  One of his friends came forward and ran his hands over me so inexpertly that I could have taken him and the gun in his hand in any number of ways, but there was no need.

  He moved back, slipping his gun in his pocket, and the three of them faced me. 'Where's Binnie, then, Major?' Tim Pat demanded. 'Did you lose him on the way?'

  The french windows swung in with a splintering crash, the curtains were torn aside and Binnie stood there, crouching, the Browning ready in his left hand.

 
There was a sudden silence, the one curtain remaining fluttered in the wind, rain pattered into the room. Thunder rumbled on the horizon of things.

  Binnie said coldly, 'Here I am, you bastard.'

  Tim Pat's breath went out of him in a dying fall. 'Well, would you look at that now?'

  One of the other two men was still holding his gun. Binnie extended the Browning suddenly, the revolver dropped to the floor, the hands went up.

  'What about Mr Meyer?'

  'Look for yourself.' I pulled Meyer's head back.

  A glance was enough. The boy's eyes became empty, devoid of all feeling for a moment, the same look as on that first night in Belfast, and then something moved there, some cold spark, and the look on his face was terrible to see.

  'You did this?' he said in a strange dead voice. 'In the name of Ireland?'

  'For God's sake, Binnie,' Tim Pat protested. 'The ould bugger wouldn't open his mouth. Now what in the hell could I do?'

  Binnie's glance flickered once again to Meyer, the man with his hands raised dropped to one knee and grabbed for his revolver. In the same moment, Tim Pat and the other man went for their guns.

  One of the finest shots in the world once put five .38 specials into a playing card at fifteen feet in half a second. He would have met his match in Binnie Gallagher. His first bullet caught the man who had dropped to one knee between the eyes, he put two into the head of the other one that could not have had more than two fingers' span between them.

  Tim Pat fired once through the pocket of his raincoat, then a bullet shattered his right arm. He bounced back against the wall, staggered forward, mouth agape, and blundered out through the french windows.

  Binnie let him reach the bottom of the steps, start across the lawn, then shot him three times in the back so quickly that to anyone other than an expert it must have sounded like one shot.

  Al Bowlly was into Moonlight on the Highway now. I switched off the cassette recorder, than I walked past Binnie and went down the steps. Tim Pat lay on his face. I turned him over and felt in his pocket for the gun. It was a Smith and Wesson automatic and when I pulled it out, a piece of cloth came with it.