by Desmond Cory
It seemed an odd way of putting it, but certainly some of the basic equations … “Well, yes. I do. On occasion.”
“Well, now. At last we are getting somewhere.” Olly stood up purposefully. “Would you mind if I used your telephone?”
“By all means. It’s right beside you.”
“I mean … for a private call?”
“Oh, I see. Why not? … There’s one in the … Let me think. Ah yes. In the hallway. And while you’re doing that I’ll just run through a few random calculations, if that’s all right with you.”
… Not exactly random. Dobie had but a few moments earlier been struck with a sudden idea and was all agog to put it into practice. It was perhaps a little odd that it hadn’t occurred to him to consult the computer before on the matter, but then his mind had been rather thoroughly engaged in other directions of late. He slid accordingly into his computer jock’s chair and, after a brief period (though almost immeasurably long by computorial standards) of human ponderation, engaged the gears and got the old crate rolling down the runway. Here we go again, Dobie thought, watching the figures whizz by on the monitor screen in a blur of electronic motion. Coming up to lift-off …
FINDCAPELLA
Nothing easier, the computer decided with an audible snort of contempt.
Capella gallinaga, the common Snipe, a shore bird of the sandpiper family, approx 11 inches long inc lengthy (3 inch) bill …
Dobie wasn’t interested in the following ornithological details. He grunted to himself and tapped the RETURN key. The computer had at least cleared that little matter up. While the Snipe’s version of last night’s events was of course a total travesty of the facts, he’d noticed with no little surprise that the facts themselves were, on the whole, accurate; someone had done a fair amount of research into Kate’s past career, as into his own, and if the primary source of that research had been the Special Branch CRO file that he himself had blundered into … well, that might go far to explain why the Snipe had whizzed off through the reeds in so startlingly misguided a direction. It didn’t, of course, explain the role in all this of the van den Buggers, but Dobie was beginning to suspect that he himself had been slightly misguided in supposing them to have anything to do with it. In which case that Dutch accent of Polly Smirk’s was purely coincidental.
She, at that moment in time, was once more back on the blower and gripping the receiver rather more tightly than usual, since she was also in a state of mild excitement. Idle to pretend, of course, that much had been achieved that morning but there are times, as every newshound knows, when the scent may appear to have grown a little cold and when Dobie was around the pack seemed invariably to be casting round in all directions at once, howling mournfully and scaring out of its burrow the occasional irritated field mouse. “All he’s done the whole bloody morning,” Olly said, misting the plastic with the breath of her indignation, “is go poncing round the place chatting up that Melanie. You remember Dotty Watson? … Yes. Her. On the job in Cardiff now, by the look of it. Can’t say the years have treated her kindly, either, but that’s by the way. I’m on to him, mind. He’s leading me on a false trail, the cunning bastard. It’s obvious.”
“Maybe from where you’re standing. But—”
“Where I’m standing is in his house, believe it or not. And what Lord Jim’s doing right now, he’s sitting down upstairs playing chopsticks on a bloody computer. Cool as a cucumber. I mean, he knows I’m on to him, he’s seen the Snipe and all and yet he acts like he couldn’t care less. Make yourself at home, he says. Sure you can use the blower, he says. Be my guest, he says. Pour yourself a double while you’re about it. I’m here to tell you he’s getting right up my nostrils.”
“Perhaps,” Columbella suggested, “he feels he’d rather have you inside the tent—”
“Inside the tent, phooey. I’m going to have to get real close to him if I’m to get anywhere, you know what I mean?”
“Only too well. You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Otherwise the guy’s just … unimpregnable.”
“Remember you’re not,” Columbella advised. “That’s if it really comes to … My God, Olly, his being a murderer and all, I really don’t think you should—”
“You got to take risks in this business. And besides, I’m beginning to think we may have made a teeny-weeny little mistake about that.”
“A mistake?”
“Well … Sort of. Oh, he’s a contract man all right, that’s been established, but maybe he isn’t, you know … bad all through. My present theory is that we ought to put it all down to that damned woman. She’s the one who’s been leading him astray. In fact I’m convinced of it.”
“Olly,” Columbella said, in the tones of a vicar’s wife counting up the missing teaspoons after a garden party, “you are getting out of line. I hate to say this, but you’ve got to be losing your onions. You’ve been saying all along that—”
“Look, she’s the one who did it after all. And anyway you know what bloody Manderson’s like. He always goes for a story with a twist.”
“And what’s your Peter Crumb got to say about it?”
“Oh. Him. He suggested it.”
“I always told you he was a wimp.”
“That’s okay. We got a new deal now and I’ve upped the payola. Manderson—”
“Olly, why are you talking all posh?”
“Am I?”
“You sound sort of different, anyway.”
“Well, that’s the way I’ve been talking to him. I mean, he’s not like Crumbo now, is he? He’s cultured and all that. I tell you, he’s … he’s so … he’s …”
“Not like you, Olly, to be at a loss for words.”
“How would infuriating do?”
“Well, he’s only a man, after all.”
“Yes,” Olly said tightly. “Though in one sense that’s still got to be established.”
“Oh oh,” Columbella said.
12
If Olly Bohun had had in many ways a disappointing day so far, the same might also be said of Dim Smith. With knobs on. “Honest-lee,” he observed to Crumb. “Those utter chumps at Central Office might as well be sitting on the bog. There are times when one could weep out of sheer frustration, one reelly could.” In this he was grossly maligning the unstinting efforts of a notably hard-working body of computer terminals, all of which had girded their microchips to take energetic action in the case of SC4211/5/94, by which designation the Primrose Murder Case (Underworld-Shaking Drug Gang Kill) had become more conveniently known. “Oh, I dunno,” Crumb said, fishing fax flimsies out of a wire tray and then putting them back again. “Lots of stuff here if one had time to go through it. All helps to put us in the picture, you might say.”
“It’s hardly an Oscar-winning production when all’s said and done,” Dim Smith wailed. “We’ll be bombing in bloody Bognor Regis if we go on like this. Something has got to turn up before too long or we’re in deep shit.”
Crumb could see, of course, what Dim Smith was getting at. Somewhere in the UK a tall dark-haired guy was walking around with a bandage the size of a Rugby ball wrapped round his hand and as yet Central hadn’t come up with a single sighting. “He could be out of the country by now, sir, if he really got scared. Nothing from the airports, I grant you, but likely as not he’s got another passport. In fact a full set of them, for all we can tell, all stamped with entry visas to Cuba.”
“You’re letting your imagination run away with you, Crumblet. I’ve had occasion to make that comment before. Not much good his switching passports if he’s got a bloody great bandage—”
“Ah, but he might not have.”
“Yes.” Dim Smith did his pensive bit. “Taken it off, you reckon? Yes, it’s a possibility, I must agree.”
“A bit more than that, sir, assuming he’s got the average amount of common. We don’t know how bad his hand is, of course … Come to that, we don’t know if it was ever bad at all. That wife of his coul
d have slapped a bandage on him easy as winking, she’s a doctor of sorts, after all.”
“Oh, she’s a doctor all right. And so was he. But why should she do a thing like that?”
“To get everybody looking for something that isn’t there, now he’s on the run.”
Dim Smith shook his curly locks. “Over-imaginative, ducky. Like I said. Ingenious, though.”
“There’s nothing on the medical records that have come through to Central. Nothing at all.”
“Don’t know how far back they’ve run the trace, though, do we? He could have had his little accident, whatever it was, before he got to the UK. Chances are he did.”
“That’s the other thing. He’s not only done his disappearing act now, he seems to have done the same thing when he got here. We got no record of his movements at all until he got to Cardiff. No residences, no car hire, no credit card purchases. Nothing.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Those nerds at Central are being completely useless. I’m seriously considering putting in for a transfer to Home Office and that should give you some idea of my utter desperation. After all, it isn’t just him. It’s her as well. They’ve both of them done some kind of Indian rope trick and I’m bored to tears with these corny old lady-vanishes capers, I can tell you that. Oh, it’s all so hopelessly vieux jeu, it makes me feel sick sick sick.”
… Nothing like as sick as Kate was feeling, though.
Literally so, in fact. Whatever noxious substance was currently being swished around her bloodstream had to have induced a serious attack of what her arduous medical training enabled her to identify as collywobbles of the galloping variety, affecting the general region of the bandydoodlum and all stations north of Golders Green. Her anatomical auto-examination was hindered, however, by the fact that she appeared to be surrounded by a grey and nauseous-smelling mist, reducing her range of clear vision to six inches or thereabouts. Weird …
Nor had she any idea at all as to what hour of the day it was. She didn’t seem to be wearing her wristwatch. Turning her head on the pillow, she found she could just make out the shape of what looked like a wristwatch, presumably her wristwatch, lying on the night table eighteen inches or so in front of her nose; she couldn’t reach out for it, however, because her wrists had both been lashed securely with what, again, looked like leather thongs to the posts conveniently placed to either side of the bedhead. That probably didn’t matter much because, judging by the way things kept looming up at her through the fog and then disappearing into the middle distance, she was at present incapable of focusing on so small an object as the dial of a wristwatch anyway. Curious, though, how you almost always wonder what time it is when emerging from an anaesthetic coma; she’d noticed that phenomenon many times. In other people, of course. But this, she thought woozily, isn’t another people; this is me. What what what what what …?
Inconvenient in other respects, too. The leather thingummies. Other and undoubtedly similar thingummies were restricting the movement of her feet, preventing her from kicking out or from raising them. Not that she wanted to kick out at anything or anybody; at least, not right now. She chiefly wanted to lie quite still, as this seemed to be the best way to avoid being violently sick. She didn’t feel actively uncomfortable in her present position; the bed upon which for some reason she was lying seemed to be commodiously mattressed and, though it had been stripped of sheets and blankets, she didn’t feel cold. She was shivering, yes, but that wasn’t the reason. But what what what … Where was she? And what was she doing wherever she was? … Lying on a bed, yes, but why? To what end? To whose end? And had she been had she had she had she …
Drugged. Of course. That was why the mist. And why the nausea. Yes. But how? An injection? … Yes. A car. A face. A sharp biting sting in her arm. Ow. More than one, maybe. Yes, she thought she remembered others. She’d come to her senses before, if these were her senses, but not so completely … if you called this completely. Swimming about in a fog of cotton wool. But remembering things now. Some things. A long thin nose, an Arab sort of face. And later another face. A woman’s? … Yes. And a woman’s voice. Unless of course she’d been listening to herself. Yelling out and … what? … singing something? … Yes. She’d been singing something. People often do that, though. She’d noticed that, too.
She’d been she must have been … the guy in the car …
Kidnapped. Yes.
Impossible. Why would anyone …?
But here she was.
And she’d been given a real swinging snifter of coke, if her reactions were anything to go by. A heroin headache was what she had to be nursing. It would get worse and then it would get better. In fact it was getting worse right now. Her vision was clearing pretty quickly, but she wasn’t feeling comfortable any more. Her nose and her mouth were itching and her hands, conversely, seemed to be going cold and numb. Nor were the stations north of Golders Green in very good shape. She felt like the girl in that poem she’d had to read at school … her to learn by heart …
They cuffed and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her …
She’d had to recite it, the whole damned thing, that time at Speech Day and she’d felt just awful, sick with nerves, almost as sick as she was feeling now. She’d had a thing about goblins ever since. And right now one of the goblins was staring down at her through the slowly-clearing cocaine-induced miasma, unless maybe it was one of the girls in the poem, Laura or was it the other one? …
A dark-haired girl with dark smudges under big dark eyes. The dark-haired girl spoke in a low-pitched dark-smudged voice. “… What choo on about? Belt up why doncha?”
Kate hadn’t realised that she’d been speaking the verses out loud. “Hoo yoo?” Kate said.
“Ahhhh shaddap.”
Having thus established a basis for further civilised discourse the girl drifted off into the still prevalent smoky murk. A hallucination? … Possibly. Possibly not. Aware of her increasing discomfort, Kate wriggled a little, finding it possible in this way to lift her knees a very little and in so doing to disclose various other interesting-looking dark smudges running down the insides of her thighs. An optical illusion? … Injection bruises? … Her skirt appeared to have ridden up considerably. Or maybe been pulled up by someone. Surely she couldn’t have been …?
Surely not? …
Hell, a girl would have to remember a thing like that …
But there again (again), what was she doing lying on this bed and all tied up? And obviously stoned way up to the eyeballs? She was really a bit too far along in life to be going in for this sort of thing. Lowering her knees again, she stared past them and past the foot of the bed at what lay beyond. Nothing much. A wall, a door, and over to the left a curtained window. Heavy blue velvet curtains. Impossible to tell if there were daylight behind them or not … so there wasn’t much point in just staring at them; she didn’t much care for blue velvet anyway. It certainly wasn’t a very big room. More like a cell, really. An overhead electric light, the bulb itself obscured from view by a yellow-brown lampshade with tassel things dangling from it. The light given off was hence quite dim, which was just as well. Bright lights wouldn’t have suited Kate in her present parlous condition. She wriggled again, with slightly more determination. This was just bloody ridiculous. A girl should know if she’d been raped or not, shouldn’t she? Even if … And she certainly had a vague recollection of a dark bent-nosed face peering down at her from a very close range indeed, probably exuding evil for all it was worth, but that had been in the car, hadn’t it? … The car, yes …
That was it. The man at the station. Two men. She’d been, she’d been … She’d just bought a newspaper …
Suddenly she remembered it all, right down to the moment when the hypodermic needle had gone in. This return to something like full c
onsciousness brought with it no corresponding sense of relief. Quite the contrary. She’d indeed been kidnapped. That was what. Which probably meant that she had to be in an even worse jam than the one that she’d been in before, because kidnappers don’t usually have very amicable intentions towards their victims, or towards anyone else, for that matter. Unless, of course, Kevin was behind it. He might well be. But there wasn’t any real reason to suppose that Kevin’s intentions would be especially amicable, either. Indeed, there were reasons to suppose the opposite.
The important thing now was to keep her cool. She had a vague idea she’d tried screaming for help before and it hadn’t done any good, but if they’d put her somewhere where her screams might be heard they’d obviously have gagged her as well as tied her up, and as they hadn’t gagged her as well as … Yes. Elementary logic. Dobie’s thing. God, she hadn’t been able to get in touch with him that morning, Dobie would be doing his nut …
From one point of view, that didn’t much matter, because Dobie doing his nut was practically indistinguishable from Dobie not doing his nut and anyway this was hardly the time to start worrying about bloody Dobie, he was probably all right and she definitely wasn’t and the important thing now was to keep her cool and not, e.g., start screaming blue murder when the door opened …
The door opened.
Kate pressed her lips tightly together and didn’t scream. It wasn’t the Arab guy after all and it wasn’t the other geezer; it was someone she’d never seen before and hence presumably not the one who had raped her. If anyone had. She would dearly have liked to be further informed on this point. “Has anyone raped me lately?” Kate therefore inquired. The new geezer didn’t seem at all put out by this line of questioning and only mildly perplexed. “I dunno. I’d a thought you would.”
“Well, of course in the ordinary way—”
“Listen, lady,” the new geezer said, sitting down on the edge of the bed beside her. As there wasn’t anywhere else for him to sit, Kate couldn’t very reasonably make objection, though there wasn’t anywhere much further away from him that she could wriggle to. “That’s the least of your present worries, I should tell you that.”