The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  By dinnertime, the Seddon party had grown: Brock's wife, a lean blonde with a Texan accent, together with another husband-and-wife from the London office and the elderly defence correspondent of a national newspaper. Three very good-looking girls who obviously didn't belong to the hotel helped pass around drinks in the dinning-room annex.

  Maxim ate almost alone in the dining-room itself and dawdled over the meal as long as he could, although it was nasty even by the standards of famous old coaching inns. Then he went back to the bar and sipped a pint of beer until the party broke up in a burst of laughter and cigar smoke just before midnight.

  "Ah, my faithful watchdog!" Tyler was a little drunk. "It's all right, Harry, you can go to bed now."

  But: "A last Drambuie, Professor?" Brock suggested, so they all had a final liqueur at the bar. The landlord, doing the barman's job to save overtime by now, was happy to stay open as long as Seddon Arms wanted to drink. Maxim was beginning to guess at the scale of 'hospitality' which the arms business could afford.

  They got to bed at about half past. Another snag about old coaching inns is that the old coaching lines they once served have become main-line lorry routes. But it wasn't a lorry that shook Maxim awake, just the double bang of a gun.

  He was on his feet, revolver in hand, before he had worked out what gun and where. Probably a double-barrelled shotgun, and close. As close as the next room?

  He lunged at Tyler's door. It was locked. He yelled: "Professor!" and got no answer but heard something move and there was a small mat of light at his feet, coming from the ill-fitting door. There was a heavy conical fire-extinguisher hanging on the opposite wall. He tore it free and smashed it into the door-handle in one sweep.

  Tyler peered at him, bright-eyed and unsleepy, from the rumpled big bed. "Harry, what is going on here? What are you-"

  But Maxim had slipped into old ingrained habits: looking for an armed man you either moved very slowly or very fast, and he was already moving fast. He threw a chair at the curtains and hit nothing, barged open the bathroom door, opened the wardrobe-If she had been chosen for looking decorative, Seddon Arms had proved themselves good choosers, assuming they hadn't seen her stark naked, as Maxim now did. Well, not really stark, since somebody had been drawing interesting patterns on her in lipstick. She looked at Maxim with a small, cold smile.

  He said: "Do you want to come out, or shall I close the door?" It sounded silly, but it was the only polite remark he could think of. She walked regally past him and shut herself in the bathroom.

  He glanced back at Tyler, who was clutching the sheets up to his chin, but knew he was in the wrong place. There was no smell of gunfire.

  In the doorway, he bounced off Brock, also wearing just pyjamas. Behind was the young aide, who had shyly waited long enough to get on a dressing-gown.

  "Nothing wrong in there," Maxim said, pushing past.

  "I guess outside, then…"

  Maxim grabbed his shoes and combat jacket from his room and met the landlord at the top of the stairs, twittering like a lost starling chick. Maxim shoved him back down. "Get that back door open."

  "But there's somebody outside, he's just waiting to-"

  "Or I'll throw a chair through the bloody window. Now move!"

  The landlord had spent years catering for Army celebrations and arms company parties, but Maxim was actually holding a gun. He unlocked the door with shaking hands.

  The night was far darker and quieter than a London night and in his pyjamas Maxim felt both vulnerable and ridiculous. But I know more than he does. Whoever it is out there isn't as good as I am. You believed that or you looked for a job selling encyclopaedias. He began to circle the building anti-clockwise, wanting to come up on whoever from the right. For a right-handed man it is more difficult to swing a long gun to the right than to the left.

  Unless he's standing facing the hotel, of course, which puts you on his left. Or he may be left-handed anyway. Maxim shivered.

  A lorry rumbled past, shaking the ground, and he moved ten yards before the noise had faded. There was a stone wall about the height of a desk just ahead, he recalled. But there's a bush that breaks the sharp line of it. Get behind that…

  Somebody moved on the porch. Maxim carefully brought the gun up, cupping it in both hands. The figure stepped back, just a black silhouette against the near-blackness of the sky, but carrying something long…

  Maxim took a slow breath. "Drop the gun or I shoot."

  The figure turned, not fast, but not dropping the long thing. "Are you the police?"

  "I said drop it!"

  Suddenly Maxim got tired of playing a TV detective. He lifted the revolver, remembering to shut his eyes against the flash, and squeezed off a shot towards the sky.

  There was a moment of silence, then the night tore apart in light and thunder. The bush above Maxim shattered, sprinkling him with twigs, and for a moment he had to try and think if he were hit or not. But it had been another double bang, certainly a shotgun and almost certainly empty now, so then he was over the wall and rolling up with the pistol pointed…

  Maxim said, very calmly: "Put the gun down."

  Farthing put it down. It was a double-barrelled shotgun, all right.

  Maxim walked quietly up and put his pistol against Farthing's forehead. For a long moment they stood there, and perhaps it was Farthing's trembling that made the gun shake in Maxim's hand.

  "Don't ever shoot at a soldier," Maxim said softly. "It gives him funny ideas about wanting to shoot back."

  "Oh, I didn't mean to… I thought you were from MoD."

  "Where else do soldiers come from? Spread yourself against the wall. Just like on the telly."

  Farthing leant against the wall while Maxim searched him. There were three unfired 12-bore cartridges in one pocket.

  "You've done it now, haven't you?" Maxim said.

  Farthing straightened up painfully. "I said I didn't mean to shoot you. I was just trying to get arrested."

  "Last time it was something like football hooliganism. This time it has to be attempted murder. There's a big difference. You committed it while out on bail so you won't get bailed for this one. And you won't get any suspended sentence, either. In about twenty minutes you will be in a cell in Warminster and you will stay in cells for just about all you could call your life. You've probably had your last drink and by the time you get out you won't even remember what women are for. Oh, you may get buggered in jail, if you look clean enough, but Charles Farthing, that was your life."

  "I didn't mean to shoot you," Farthing whimpered. "I didn't try to shoot you."

  "Don't tell me. I'm not the jury. I'm only giving evidence."

  A light glowed from the first floor, a window creaked up and a voice – standing well back, it sounded – called: "Are you all right? I've rung the police."

  "Fine," Maxim answered. "Everything's under control." Except the temperature. It must be only just above freezing and he was in pyjamas and the combat jacket. His breath steamed in the dim light, but he had to stay. In maybe five minutes Farthing would become public property; for those minutes he wanted him private.

  Farthing said: "I just wanted to… to get into court again."

  "It's funny you should say that. When I felt the shot going through my hair, I thought: 'This bloke just wants to get into court, he isn't trying to hurt me or anything,' "

  "It was an accident. I didn't want to harm anybody."

  "Tell them why you didn't bother to take the shot out of the cartridges." Maxim clunked the three shells in his hand.

  Farthing was quiet for a while. Then: "I was going to. I meant to, but it didn't seem to matter that much…"

  "You've no idea how much it matters to me."

  "Can you… I mean, if I was just firing that gun to get arrested, and… I mean, if I told you what I was going to say, and you know I wasn't really trying to hurt you."

  "I'll listen until the cops get here."

  Farthing sat on the low ston
e wall of the porch. "After Warrington dropped me, I went abroad. To Canada. It wasn't a very certain job, they just wanted somebody to advise them on export markets. Elizabeth didn't come with me, and that was about the end of the marriage. After I'd been there nine months, something like that, I got hepatitis, you know, liver trouble. They thought it might have been cirrhosis – well, I had been drinking a lot. And I was in the same ward as this Bob Bruckshaw."

  He took out a packet of cigarettes and then asked: "Is it all right if…"

  "Ask your doctor."

  Farthing lit a cigarette. "But this chap Bob, he really did have it. The way he was swelling up, I mean… it was splitting his pyjamas. He'd come from Yorkshire, too, so we were talking. He wasn't very bright by then, but… he said about this Professor Tyler. He'd been with him in the war, he said, and he knew something about him that he said had spoiled his whole life. That was why he'd left England. He gave me this letter."

  "What letter?"

  "The one he gave me. He said it wasn't fair that Tyler had gone on and become a professor and written famous books and all that. He wanted me to get this letter to somebody back in England."

  "And did you".

  "Yes. When I came out of hospital I'd lost my job, so I came back to England. I found out where this man was and I posted it to him."

  "What happened to the man in hospital?-Bruckshaw."

  "Bob died just two days after he gave me the letter."

  "Did he tell you what was in it?" Maxim's voice was beginning to shiver as much as the rest of himself.

  "No. He said he was too ashamed. He'd have to explain it to God soon enough. He became a Catholic in hospital, at the end."

  "Did you read the letter?"

  "No I didn't."

  Far down the empty road, the police car sounded its pointless hee-haw.

  "Who was the letter to?"

  "D'you mean you don't know?" Farthing's voice came alive. "After you people had him framed and he killed himself and then what happened to the letter? You tell me!"

  "I don't know who the hell you're talking about."

  "Your Mr Jackaman at the Mine of Dung."

  "Never heard of him."

  The outburst bad drained Farthing's aggression. He began to cry silently, his wet face glinting in the thin light from the windows above. Up there, the murmur of voices blended in the growing hum of the police car.

  "And so," Maxim said, "you are going to stand up in court and say that somebody now dead knew something you don't know about Professor Tyler and it's in a letter to another man who's dead and you don't know where the letter is? Have I got that right?"

  "I promised Bob," Farthing said sulkily. "And I said I'd make sure Mr Jackaman had got the letter… and I didn't. I didn't make sure. He couldn't write back because I hadn't given him an address, but I could have rung him up. I promised Bob."

  "Get yourself together." The headlights glowed very close down the road.

  "What are you going to tell the police?" Farthing asked.

  "What are you going to say when you get into court?"

  After a moment, Farthing muttered: "Nothing."

  "All right. You fired in the air. And I'll do what I can to look into this letter and Jackaman – do you believe me?"

  Farthing grunted.

  "And do you also believe that if you speak up in court I will one way or another make the rest of your life very unpleasant indeed for you?"

  "Yes." He sounded convinced of that, at any rate.

  "Good." Maxim sat down on the opposite wall, still holding the pistol and still watching Farthing instead of the sudden blaze of light from the police car as it dashed onto the gravel drive.

  "Oh God," Farthing began, muttering the old soldier's bitter and blasphemous prayer; "if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul."

  "Shut up." It was still going to be a long night, but at least Maxim could now put some clothes on. In all his life, he had never been so cold.

  7

  It was a very long night indeed – or a very short one, depending on which way you looked at it. Maxim flatly refused to leave Tyler and go back to Warminster with the police, or to hand over his revolver for some vague forensic reason. George had to be rung up. Tyler had to be moved to a new room because of the broken lock, and the landlord had to be assured that somebody would pay for it. Brock quickly offered to. Statements had to be taken, and the police – who were now far from certain that the world was a better and brighter place for having a Major Harry Maxim in it – had to be persuaded not to take one from Tyler, since his version of 'on hearing what sounded to me like gunshots' wouldn't really be better than anybody else's rendering.

  Behind the scenes, the lady with the lipstick decor vanished like (and probably with) the morning mist, never even getting a mention. At last, Maxim flopped back into bed, setting his alarm clock for eight-thirty.

  George and Agnes woke him at eight.

  "We fort as ow yer might like brekfuss in bed for a chiange," Agnes said, putting down a loaded tray on Maxim's feet. She started to pour coffee for all three.

  Maxim tore his eyelids open; it was at such times that he wished he still smoked. Only a cigarette could bridge that interstellar gap between unfinished sleep and the feeling that you might live. It was a small consolation that George looked even worse than Maxim felt.

  "What got you up at this time, George?"

  "Following up the gunfight at the Warminster corral. And it isn't this time: I haven't been back to bed since you rang me. Oh God. What have they done with friend Farthing?"

  "He's in the Warminster nick and I suppose he goes to court today. They were talking about creating a disturbance and illegal possession, but it might go further than that."

  "Coppers," Agnes said brightly, "are a bit like wine connoisseurs, once they start talking about a charge. Shouldn't we have a drop of Section 17 in the '68 Act? Certainly, old boy, and then a sip of Section One, Prevention of Crime 1953. Dash it, why didn't I think of that, me dear feller? Black?" She gave Maxim his coffee and as he sat up to take it, saw the holstered gun under his pillow. "I say, I say, Harry, what do your girl friends think? Or do you fire it off at the magic moment?" She leant back against the foot of the bed and it rocked with her laughter.

  George grumped: "It's lucky he had it with him last night, anyway."

  "Lucky?" Maxim looked at him, then passed his cup back to Agnes. "More sugar, please."

  "What's he going to say when he gets into court?" George asked.

  "Nothing."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I think I persuaded him."

  Agnes had gone thoughtful. "Firing off guns at three in the morning when he's already on bail for some other rumpus-making… he's going to get a remand in custody for medical reports. Will a week in jail change his mind?"

  "I don't think so."

  She looked at him dubiously.

  "All right," George said. "So now what's this about a letter?"

  Maxim told them. Agnes buttered and marmaladed toast and passed slices around. There weren't enough plates, and George had to make sudden pecking movements to stop crumbs and drips of marmalade falling on his tie.

  He listened quietly and then looked at Agnes. "Do you believe in this letter?"

  She thought, then nodded rather tentatively. "I think so. It's an odd thing to make up – and it does account for something in Jackaman. Also I tend to believe a man who's trying so hard to go to jail."

  "He could be just spreading alarm and despondency for Greyfriars."

  "I'm hired to see reds under beds and I can't see any under his. But I could get one of our mob to chat him up. We could be a lawyer from Civil Liberties or something like that."

  "You will do nothing of that sort whatsobloodyever. Oh blast. So now there is, or may be, a letter saying that over thirty years ago Tyler and a party of the second part did something Unspeakably Un British together. Or Unspeakably British, even. In wartime, in the Army… Who is, or was, b
rother Bruckshaw?"

  Neither of them knew. Maxim asked: "Who was Jackaman?"

  There was a sudden stillness. Then Agnes said: "Come on, duckie. If you expect Harry to act like he's twenty-one, you'll have to give him the key to the door."

  Slowly and reluctantly, George said: "In a way, Jackaman's why you're at Number 10. Yes, he killed himself. The inquest heard a lot about the problems of overwork at Defence. It was in the papers but you were probably still out in the Gulf. Last November. He was a deputy under secretary and he wasn't going any higher. A good committee man, just rather stiff and old-fashioned. Then when it got around that Tyler was going to chair the policy review, he came rushing out of his hutch spitting fire and lettuce and saying Tyler was Unsound."

  "And you can't say worse than that in Whitehall," Agnes put in.

  "None of this in public, of course. But it was embarrassing enough all the same. So Box 500 decided to help out, without directives from anyone, and put the dogs on him, sniffing around trying to find some dirt to roll in. And they came back with the idea of him having an illegal bank account in France. They put this to him, with what degree of tact we can only imagine, and he went home and shot himself. With a Purdey 12-bore."

  "Full-length barrel?" Maxim asked before he could stop himself.

  "Yes. Itcan be done, particularly if you've got the dogs yapping close behind you."

  "Not this bitch," Agnes said. "I knew nothing about it."

  "You would not be here if you had. Anyway, that's why the Headmaster wanted a… a new opening batsman against any more fast balls. Is there any coffee left?"

  "What about the French bank account?" Maxim asked.

  "We don't know if there was one. The Headmaster was so angry that a good man had been hounded to death – without anybody even finding out if he knew anything useful – that he ordered the whole operation closed, dead and buried."

  "In Pandora's box," Agnes said softly.

  Maxim said: "Farthing believed the whole thing was a frame-up, to keep Jackaman quiet, one way or another."