The End Game

by Michael Gilbert

  “Roust him out,” said Trombo. “Take a couple of lamps. This is the only exit.”

  Birnie Samuels appeared from behind one of the vans. He was a stout and cheerful Jew. He was carrying a short-handled pitchfork. He said, “This might be useful. We’ll soon dig him out for you.”

  He and McVee disappeared up the steps, and they listened to the thumping and bumping as they searched. A few minutes later Samuels reappeared. He said, “No sign of Morgan. It’s a stinking muck heap, and there’s a dead man in one corner.”

  “Dead?”

  “Big, fat fellow. Been dead some time by the look of him. If anyone else wants to search, they’re welcome.”

  No one seemed anxious to volunteer.

  “You’re sure he’s not hiding? He’s a slippery customer.”

  “He didn’t slip past Monkey and me,” said Birnie. “We turned over every lump of shit and corruption in the place. He must have got out before we came.”

  One of the tramps, a wizened man with a high-pitched voice, squeaked out, “Ask Percy. They used to doss together like a pair of poofs.”

  “I don’t know that I’m all that interested in Morgan,” said Trombo. “It’s Mr Moule we’ve come looking for. Put him up where we can all see him.”

  Moule had collapsed into a squatting position on the floor. Ginger Williams grabbed him by the coat collar and dumped him on top of a packing case. A nail which was sticking out of the wood went into his leg, and he gave a little squeal and was silent again. His eyes were glazed with terror.

  “I seem to remember,” said Trombo comfortably, “that you and me have had words before.”

  Moule shivered.

  “That being so, you know that I’m a man of my word. If I tell you that I’m going to tie you up in one of those straw bales and set fire to it, you know I’ll do it.”

  Moule shivered again. Then he said, in his oddly pedantic voice, “There is no need for threats. I will tell you anything you wish to know.”

  “I was sure you would. It’s a little matter of some papers—copies of papers, I think they were—that you stole from a friend of mine and hid somewhere. Well?”

  “I will show you if you wish. They are not far from here.”

  “That’s friendly,” said Trombo.

  “It will mean breaking down a door.”

  “No problem.”

  Moule pointed across the courtyard to the front door of the office block, which was covered by a padlocked metal grill.

  “Turn that van, so we can get some light on the job,” shouted Ginger Williams. “Mace, you and Scotty attend to the door.”

  Two blows with a sledgehammer dealt with the padlock. The door was a tougher proposition. It took a full minute to demolish it.

  Williams said, “We don’t want everyone coming inside.” There were a dozen men in the courtyard, most of them sheltering from the rain in the vans and another lot crowded into the open space under the loft. “Birnie, McVee, Mace and Scotty. Bring those torches with you. The rest—stay out here.”

  If Trombo noticed that Williams seemed to be taking over the operation, he gave no sign of annoyance, but followed the men in.

  “Where now?” said Williams.

  They were in the entrance hall, with the two doors on either side and the small partitioned cubicle at the end.

  “The door on the left. The second one,” said Moule.

  Williams said, “Birnie, stay outside and keep in touch with the rest of the crowd. Put one of them outside the front door and tell the others to get the vans turned and facing outwards. If we have to scarper, we don’t want to waste any time.”

  Birnie Samuels nodded his understanding.

  “All right,” said Williams. “Let’s get on with it.”

  The rest of them had already moved into the big office room. Three powerful torches lit up the lockers which flanked the fireplace.

  Moule went down on his knees in front of the left-hand set, fumbled for a moment and drew away the strip of wood which formed its base. He put in his hand, felt around and drew it out again.

  “Well?” said Trombo.

  “Could you give me one of the torches? Thank you.”

  He held the torch at ground level and knelt to peer in.

  “Well?” said Trombo again.

  Moule said, “They were here. Someone must have found them. They’re gone.”

  “So we see,” said Trombo.

  “I swear I put them there.” The panic note in his voice was pitiful. “No one could have got them. The place was locked up. See for yourself.” Moule was still on his knees. The words tumbled out of his mouth, disjointed and almost inaudible.

  Williams took the torch out of his shaking hand and shone it down on to the floor in front of the fireplace.

  “Someone’s been here, no question,” he said. “Look at those marks in the dust.”

  Trombo peered over his shoulder.

  “So it would seem.”

  “And not long ago.” Williams jerked Moule to his feet. “If you were the only one who knew, you must’ve told someone.” He gave Moule a shake. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “It would seem to be the only possibility,” said Trombo. His voice had thickened. There was a treacly note in it which was more menacing than threats. “Put him on the desk.”

  Handling Moule as though he were a child, Williams placed him on the desk, gripping his match-stick arms above the elbows. All the torches were focused on the scarecrow figure.

  “Now,” said Trombo gently. “The truth, please.”

  Moule opened and shut his mouth, but no sound came out.

  Trombo clenched his right hand and hit Moule a savage clout on the left side of his face, a blow hard enough to jerk his head round on his shoulders.

  “Think again. You don’t want me to get rough.”

  “I didn’t.” There was a pause. Moule’s voice was low, but quite distinct. “I didn’t.”

  This time the blow came from Trombo’s left fist, jerking Moule’s head straight again. Then, without pause, from the right and the left and the right. The force of the final blow knocked Moule off the desk, which crashed over with him on to the floor.

  “Hold it,” said Williams. He lifted the desk and peered down at the figure sprawled there. “I think you’ve done him.”

  The crash of the desk going down had brought Birnie Samuels into the room. For a moment no one had eyes for anything but the bundle of rags on the floor. No one saw the shadow which slid down the hallway outside the open door of the room and vanished up the stairs.

  During all this time David had been in the old telephone cubicle at the end of the passage, having dived in there at the last moment for safety as the front door went down. The hatchway had given him a view of what was happening in the office, and he had stood there, impotent to help but unable to move as long as Samuels was outside the door.

  He had now only one idea in his head. To get away as fast and as far as he could. He had little doubt that Moule was dead. In his weakened state any one of those blows could have finished him.

  He had left the window of the upstairs room open when he came down. He peered out. The rain had thickened again, and a freshening east wind was driving it up river. The night was as black as the far side of hell. He was glad he had reconnoitred the spot by daylight. He could hardly have risked a blind drop.

  He lowered himself out of the window, hung on by both hands for a moment, used his knees to push himself slightly away from the wall and let go, flexing his knees and rolling as he landed.

  “A perfect parachute drop, without a parachute,” he said. He was winded, but undamaged. He scrambled to his feet and trotted off down the cinder track which led to the fence.

  He located the swinging plank without difficulty and pressed it outwards. Halfway up it seemed to stick.

  As he crouched down and put his shoulder to it, a bright light came on in the road outside, and a motor horn blew three short, three long and three
short blasts.

  Cursing under his breath, David went into retreat, trying to think as he stumbled back down the path. He had not gone far when he stopped. Trombo, as always when an emergency arose, had taken charge. He was speaking through a loud-hailer.

  “We know he’s somewhere in here,” said the booming voice. “And he can’t get out. The gates are guarded, and there are cars outside. There’s nowhere he can climb the fence without being spotted. What we’re going to do is beat this whole area and drive the Welsh rabbit on to the guns.”

  A rumble of laughter.

  “We’ll have three men on the cross tracks at the west end. You, you and you. The rest of you spread out, starting at the east end. Keep in touch and move as slowly as you like. The trucks can keep in front of us, one on each track, with headlights full on. Any questions? Right. Then, let’s get moving.”

  David thought about it, and the more he thought about it the less he liked it. He had explored the area by daylight and he knew that the high fences of small meshed wire were impossible to climb without tackle. And even if he could get over, a car in the road outside with headlights on would pick him up at once. Alternatives? He could try to hide, in or under one of the piles of rusty machinery, but forty men, with torches, would be sure to find him sooner or later.

  The voice boomed out again. “I’ll give you something to play for, lads. There’s two hundred for the man who first spots the rabbit. And five hundred for the man who lays the first hand on him.”

  It had become a game for them. A game played on a board half a mile square, full of rusty machinery and deep pools of stagnant water and crossed by rutted tracks. A scientific game. Not quite chess, perhaps. Fox and geese, with himself as the poor, bedraggled fox.

  While he was thinking this out, he had been moving, keeping parallel to the main cross path, but edging slowly towards the western fence. He could see the lights behind him now. The firefly flicker of the torches and the tigers’ eyes of the headlights.

  He stopped. He had come to the first of the cross tracks, and a man was standing there. David recognised the stunted figure he had seen before in the Rayhome office. It was McVee.

  It would be easy enough to creep past him, in the rain and darkness, but what good would that do? He would be pinned against an unclimbable fence, in the headlights of the advancing trucks. Probably the only result would be to put seven hundred pounds into McVee’s pocket.

  It was when he was thinking about this that the plan came to him. It was a plan born of desperation. It depended on split-second timing and was based on greed and surprise. It contained a dozen imponderables. All that could be said for it was that it was better than no plan at all.

  Just beyond the point where McVee stood was one of the largest of the abandoned pools, fifty yards across and brimful of water. McVee had his back to David and was standing on the far side of the track staring down into it.

  If David was going to do what he had in mind, he had to wait until the advancing truck was on the point of swinging round the bend twenty yards away.

  Not a second too soon. Not a split second too late.

  One eye on the truck, one eye on McVee.

  Wait for it.

  Count five.

  McVee had shifted his position, half turning to look at the truck, whose headlights could be seen.

  Just beginning its swing round the corner. Now.

  David took three quick steps forward and kicked McVee in the middle of the back. He shot forward, teetered for a moment on the slippery edge and then fell with a splash into the water.

  The van was round the bend now and coming towards him, accelerating and breaking sharply as it came up.

  David was standing in the middle of the track, waving his hands in the air. “I saw him,” he shrieked. “I saw him. I was first. Then he went into the water, and I couldn’t get him. He’ll try to swim for it, and I can’t swim.”

  The driver was already out on the path.

  “I can,” he said briefly.

  McVee was floundering in the water, splashing feebly, three yards from the edge. The driver jumped straight into the pool. But no more quickly than David jumped into the cab of the van.,

  It was an old Bedford Woodman, of the sort he had driven as a boy on his father’s farm. He slammed it into gear and was moving before the man in the water had had time to turn his head.

  “No stopping now,” he said. The van had both accelerator and hand throttle. “Made for the job.” By the time he rounded the last bend and sighted the gate, he was moving fast.

  “Slow it a little, boy. No need to risk a broken leg.”

  Through the bars of the gate, which was a massive, padlocked affair, he could see the radiator of a car and a man standing in front of it.

  He twisted the hand throttle, feeling it take over from the accelerator, opened the door and put one foot on the step. Then he aimed the truck at the middle of the gate, opened the throttle wide and dropped to the ground. The truck leaped forward and hit the gate squarely. There was a scream of metal on metal as truck, gate and car went over together in a thrashing heap, and David was across the road and over the fence beyond.

  He had landed in long, wet grass, and he crouched there for a minute getting his breath and his senses back. He could hear sounds from the other side of the fence. Someone alternately retching and cursing. He guessed it was the second man, behind the car, hit by some fragment of the general convulsion. The man who had been standing in front was almost certainly finished. A second car was coming up fast. It was time to move.

  He started to crawl. It was not good ground for crawling, the long, sodden grass being full of thistles and dwarf thorn. But David persevered. The thing that mattered now was keeping out of sight. If he was spotted and had to run, he’d be done.

  He was a long way from being out of the woods. The streets round the dock area would be patrolled by Trombo’s mercenary army, and he was now such a conspicuous figure—muddy, bedraggled and tattered—that he would be identified at sight. He wondered if they could pick up his trail. A lot depended on whether the second man had seen him go over the fence. Anyway, it was a possibility that would be explored as soon as Trombo had the pursuit reorganised. He did not underrate that bald Napoleon.

  A second fence.

  David examined it. He was becoming an expert on fences. This one was diamond mesh, but the meshes were larger and offered a toehold. He scaled it cautiously. The wires at the top had been twisted upwards and formed an uncomfortable obstacle. He left further fragments of his trousers in it. A plain trail for the hounds, but it might not be picked up in the dark.

  The bank on the other side was steep and slippery. He turned over on his back and slid, feet foremost, clutching at tussocks to slow his progress. It was quite a long drop. As his feet grounded on what felt like rough stones, he realised two things simultaneously. He was on a railway line, and a train was coming.

  He flattened himself on the flint beside the track. An electric train rattled past a couple of feet above his heElectric train? Live rails. Dangerous at any time. Murderous when wet.

  Try to think.

  Were the live rails on the outside of the ordinary rails, or were they together on the inside, and, if so, how far apart?

  David decided that it would be stupid to electrocute himself and that he must wait for the next train. Its lights would show him what he wanted to know.

  He waited for ten minutes. It was a bad ten minutes. Twice he thought he heard voices in the field above his head, and twice he decided that it was his imagination. His head was full of strange sounds, buzzing and clacking and, behind them, in a swelling diapason, the glorious hymn which he had heard rolling round Cardiff Arms Park.

  “Feed them till they want no more.”

  Yes, indeed.

  Here came the train. By its lights the position was made clear. There were two live rails, between the tracks and less than three feet apart.

  “You’ll have to step like a
bloody ballet dancer,” said David. “An entrechat or pas de deux.”

  He advanced towards the live rail, lifted one foot over, felt himself sway, said, “Don’t be bloody silly, now. A child could do it.” Lifted the other foot over. Repeated the process. Cleared the second live rail. Took two quick steps forward, tripped over the outside rail and fell flat on his face against the far bank.

  Compared with what had gone before, this seemed a minor matter.

  “Nearly out now,” he said. And no sooner said it than he realised that there was a difference between sliding down a steep, muddy, twelve-foot embankment and climbing up one.

  There were moments in the time that followed when he nearly decided to give up and spend the night beside the railway. For every six inches he went up he seemed to slip back five. His nose was never more than an inch from the slimy surface. Handholds came away as he grabbed at them. He discovered one unexpected advantage from having no caps to his boots. His bare, protruding toes could seek out and dig into the smallest crevices, and it was this, in the end, which enabled him to lever himself on to the top of that nightmare bank and climb the fence beyond it.

  He found himself on a rough track which parallelled the railway running past the ends of a number of small back gardens. He guessed that there must be side roads or alleys leading from it into the High Street, which cut across at this point. The important decision now was whether to turn right or left. He tried to visualise the map that Len Mullion had showed him. He thought that he would go left and take the next opening that offered. If he was wrong he would have to go back and try again in the other direction. His wristwatch, after he had scraped the mud from its glass, showed the time to be ten minutes after midnight.

  The High Street, fronted by rows of locked shops, was silent and empty, the rain slanting down under the yellow neon lights and bouncing back off the black surface of the road. As David peered out, like some troglodyte intruder, from the mouth of his alleyway, a car turned the corner and cruised towards him.

  He drew back and waited, counting slowly.