Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  But it had not been a pleasant wait. The sky, the colour of dirty pewter, pressed down on the roofless shell of the house, enclosing Dougal with the charred beams, broken bricks and decayed vegetation. Previously, he had been able to keep at bay with activity the tension of the day. He and Amanda had spent most of it in the coach house and the stables, first examining, with the help of two large torches from the Sally-Anne, the rubbish that had accumulated there over the last seventy years, and then devising a reception for Lee.

  Up here in the house, however, there had been nothing to do except chain-smoke with a third of his attention and watch the road. And worry. His mind was discordant with fears, like somebody playing an untuned piano very badly and very loudly. He now understood the phrase ‘gritting one’s teeth’, except his teeth seemed to grit themselves of their own accord; his jaws ached.

  Curiously enough, the tension was only partly linked to the image of Lee. Amanda was tied up in it too – not the fear of her dying, but the feeling that this sharing of complicity in murder, robbery and deception had prized them apart rather than pushed them together. They were business partners; some unspoken decision had made them put the firm before themselves. Gumper’s death had started the process which changed them from lovers to associates. It was another reason to kill Lee, of course, although the probability that he would otherwise destroy them was motive enough. But his death, Dougal hoped, would also bring this episode, this aberration, to an end. He and Amanda would be able to go back to where they were before, richer, of course, and wiser in a sense, too. At this moment, watching the Lancia blur behind a hedgerow, he would have happily exchanged the largest fortune in the world, and divine omniscience as well, for the chance of stepping back. If he had not gone to Gumper’s room, if he had done something else, like go back to Amanda, he would be an entirely different person now. And so would she.

  Dougal shouted to Amanda, who was waiting between the house and the stable block, and began to clamber down to the ground. The forefront of his mind was occupied with the difficulties of the descent – the rusted nail that caught his jacket, tearing a triangular hole, the way the brickwork scraped his right hand (he had removed the glove to smoke and forgotten to put it on again) and the jar that went through him as he hit the ground. The back of his mind was heavy with the possibility of failure.

  He ran out of the front doorway, turned to his right and sprinted towards the stables. As he moved, the field glasses, slung round his neck, bounced awkwardly against his body. Veering right, left and left again, he was in the stable yard. Amanda was waiting by the double door of the coach house. She waved him on as he appeared, and then vanished into its interior.

  One leaf was open: the other was bolted. Dougal hurtled through the gap and whispered, ‘Good luck,’ to the scrambling noise which was Amanda over on the left. He himself went right, into a small and musty harness room, now empty of harness, and pulled the door to. A crack remained, through which he could see the door of the coach house and the pool of light which the open leaf admitted. He rummaged feverishly in his pockets, suddenly convinced that his weapons must have fallen out at some point. No, they were there; he glanced down at them: the heavy monkey wrench in his right hand and the kitchen knife in his left.

  Lee would take at least a minute to get to the stables – probably longer. Dougal eased the door open. He could just make out the outlines of the Escort in the corner of the coach house, immediately on his right. In the other corner, furthest away from the door, was Amanda, crouching up among the beams which still supported the tiled roof.

  ‘Get back, you fool,’ she whispered, and Dougal obediently withdrew. She was right, of course, but he hoped that those were not going to be the last words she spoke to him.

  The seconds stretched themselves indefinitely. The windows of the harness room were shuttered, and Dougal couldn’t see the face of his watch. His mouth was dry. Suddenly, he remembered to remove the field glasses. He set them, with infinite care, on the windowsill. It was out of his hands, he told himself. It was all up to a coil of nylon rope from the Sally-Anne, a heavy, circular stone with a hole in it, which had once been used for grinding knives, and the rusted blade of a scythe.

  As his ears strained to hear the first sound of the engine on the drive, his mind inexplicably emptied itself of fear. Dougal found that he was cataloguing their preparations; the details calmed him. The trap was set; the other leaf of the coach house door was bolted down; other doors in the stable block were bolted or locked; except for the patch just inside the door, the coach house was in varying shades of darkness; the hinges of the harness room door were oiled; the knife was . . .

  He could hear the snarl of the car outside. An image out of a nightmare sprung briefly into his mind – of some snouted monster, snuffling remorselessly towards its prey. The engine slowed: Lee must have reached the open space at the front of the house, where the drive described a circle and went back the way it had come, sending a narrow offshoot between the house and the outer wall of the coach house which led to the stable yard. The engine revved again – a lower note, which must mean that Lee had chosen first gear for the rutted track round to the stables. The sound was magnified by the canyon between the buildings; the snarling was angrier and more vicious.

  Dougal poised himself by the harness room door. One quick flick of his wrist and it would fly open. The car negotiated the 180-degree turn into the yard with painful slowness. The engine died abruptly, as if someone had knifed it. The silence stretched into an eternity of menace. The beast was preparing to spring.

  The sound of a car door slamming shut was sudden and shocking. Dougal shifted his grip on the cold steel of the monkey wrench; it was slightly clammy with his sweat.

  Then came another noise: the other door of the Lancia closed with a soft click, as if the person doing it wanted to be polite to the car.

  Lee had not come alone.

  Dougal took an instinctive, fear-propelled step backwards. His thoughts accelerated into manic overdrive, as if someone had pumped a vast dose of amphetamines into his bloodstream.

  It was no longer two to one: Lee had evened the odds. And there was no way that Dougal could alter the programme they had prepared for him. It all depended on Amanda. He swore at himself for his wishful thinking – for believing, because he wanted to, that Lee would come alone, trusting in their naiveté.

  Lee was a professional: of course he had brought someone to cover his back. For a second, Dougal fought an urge to run, anywhere, anywhere out of this world. But he couldn’t. The exit was barred by Lee and his companion.

  There were footsteps outside – town shoes on the cobbled yard. The light which filtered through the doorway darkened by a fraction. He saw Lee first, followed by the stooping figure of Tanner.

  Lee hesitated, trying to accustom his eyes to the gloom.

  ‘There’s their car.’ He spoke quietly, but Dougal, only five yards away, had the brief illusion that Lee was talking to him. ‘Distributor cap. And anything else.’

  So Lee wanted to cut off their retreat. Which meant, of course, that he had never had any intention of keeping faith either. The two men moved slowly into the coach house, Tanner on Lee’s left, the side furthest from Dougal.

  And closest to Amanda.

  There was a sound like someone trying to whistle – a rush of displaced air. From the shadowed rafters in the far corner something swooped down on the men in the doorway, its shape blurred by the speed it was travelling at.

  For a frozen instant, Dougal saw the faces of Lee and Tanner, pasty in the half-light, jerk upwards to the left, their mouths yawning like men waking after a long sleep.

  Dougal’s infernal engine was on the move. His fear was swamped by pride.

  It was, in fact, a lethal pendulum. One end of the rope was knotted round a beam halfway between Amanda’s perch and the spot just inside the entrance. On the other end of its carefully calculated length was the grindstone, which had taken the combined effort
s of Dougal and Amanda to lift; the rope passed through its center, where a square hole had been chiselled to hold the crank handle which must once have powered it. To the grindstone was lashed the blade of the scythe. It had been poised beside Amanda, restrained by a loop of rope. All she had needed to do had been to loose the rope and simultaneously thrust the stone as forcefully as she could, to increase the momentum of the missile.

  Its trajectory came to an abrupt halt as the point of the blade took Tanner in the chest, between his collarbone and his heart. Dougal watched, aghast; he had never really expected his invention to work. Tanner was lifted backwards off his feet by the blow, showing his yellow teeth in a rictus of astonishment.

  The pendulum, impeded by this dragging weight, came to the end of its arc and swung back. Tanner drooped from the blade of the scythe, his disproportionately long limbs dangling like those of a puppet whose master had suddenly abandoned the strings. His overcoat hung open, flapping gently in the breeze from the door. Tanner’s feet trailed behind him; their friction halted the return swing of the pendulum.

  Before the blade of the scythe had reached Tanner, Dougal had left the shelter of the harness room door. While his mind was responding to Tanner’s meeting with the pendulum with a welter of brightly coloured images, his body was rushing blindly towards the two figures in the doorway.

  Lee’s attention was on Tanner; he did not notice Dougal’s approach until it was too late. He had just begun to turn, his arm in the automatic act of rising to ward off a blow, when the monkey wrench thudded down on his uncovered head. He fell to his knees, swaying there for a soundless second. Then his body crumpled forwards on to the stone flags of the floor. There was the gleam of blood on his scalp.

  Dougal felt a superstitious shiver running through him. Why was killing so easy?

  Amanda made a sound without words. He swung round as she dropped from the rafters and stumbled towards him. They clung to one another, a few yards away from the bodies. There was no feeling of release, Dougal noticed. Perhaps that would come later. He felt slightly sick.

  ‘We’ll have to get them down to the boat,’ said Amanda, drawing back a little.

  Dougal looked at her as if she was talking in a foreign language. Then the sense caught up with the words. He nodded. ‘Later. It’ll be safer in the dark. Transport’s going to be difficult. Dragging them all the way down to the mooring would be sheer murder—’

  He stared at Amanda, aghast at the way in which the words had rolled unheeded from his mouth. But she laughed, and he joined her. The absurd was comforting.

  She broke off. ‘There’s an old wheelbarrow at the other end of the stables, isn’t there? How about that?’

  ‘Let’s try it. If the wheel still turns, it would be usable. We could do it in two journeys.’

  Dougal slipped back into the harness room and picked up the larger of the two torches. Amanda followed him – a second door led through to the rest of the stables. They walked past empty loose-boxes on a floor grey with generations of bird droppings. At the end was the wheelbarrow, flanked by a stone garden roller and a huge, pictureless frame of grimy gilt. Behind, the unplastered wall glinted with damp.

  Dougal passed the torch to Amanda and pulled out the wheelbarrow. The frame was still sound, though there was rust on every available surface and a couple of holes in the bottom of the barrow. The wheel was shod with iron.

  When he pushed it over the uneven surface of the floor, the axle of the barrow screeched against its supports and began to turn.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ he said.

  ‘There may be blood,’ Amanda suggested hesitantly. ‘It could drip anywhere out of those holes. It’ll be hard to see in the torchlight.’

  ‘We’ll just have to spend the night here on the Sally-Anne. It’ll be easier to do the final tidying up by daylight.’

  Amanda agreed with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘It’ll work out, love,’ Dougal said. ‘Let’s go out to dinner tonight. Somewhere warm. And dry.’

  He wheeled the barrow back through the stables, Amanda guiding him with the torch. In the coach house, he glanced involuntarily at the figures by the door, grotesquely deep-frozen by death. The touch of nausea returned and he looked away.

  Suddenly he stopped, just as Amanda came out of the harness room. He noticed her eyes widening with shock in the same instant as he remembered: Lee had fallen flat on his face, his arms outstretched.

  But the arms of the body on the ground had moved.

  As he looked round, Lee changed his position, his bulky limbs moving with swift, fluid precision, as if he had rehearsed the movement many times. His right hand emerged from the pocket of his blue, quilted anorak, holding a black automatic pistol. Simultaneously, he levered his head and shoulders from the ground with his left elbow and slapped his left hand against his right wrist. The muzzle of the gun pointed unwaveringly at Dougal, Lee’s eye bulbous with concentration behind the V-shaped rear sight. With both his elbows supporting him, the man was immobile again – but now his stillness effortlessly dominated the coach house.

  Lee broke the silence with a sound which made Dougal bite his lip to the sudden, shocking taste of blood.

  Lee tittered.

  20

  The titter moved gradually down the vocal register, changing its character until it became a flow of obscenities. The words were terrifying not for themselves, but for the manner in which they were spoken. Lee’s face was twitching. His hand squeezed the butt of the pistol. Dougal recognized the make of the gun, now – the knowledge was another legacy from his father, who had a small library on the subject of firearms – a 9-mm. Walther PPK. He couldn’t remember how many bullets the magazine held – probably eight. More than enough, in any case.

  Lee’s voice was as low-pitched and monotonous as usual, but his words seemed to have the cutting edge of madness. Dougal’s fear petrified his body, but his mind, fuelled with panic, ran swiftly: Lee had been humiliated and had gone temporarily berserk as a result; so far it had only affected his vocabulary . . .

  Suddenly the flow stopped. There was no diminution beforehand – it was as if a switch had been flicked which cut off the current of words as quickly and completely as an electric light. When Lee spoke again, he sounded hoarse.

  ‘Put your hands on your heads. Slowly. Turn around. Hands on that wall to the left of the door you came through. Feet apart. Lean against it.’

  It was difficult to tell which came first: the thought that one of them was about to die, the smack of the shot, or the shower of brick and mortar fragments which spurted from the wall between Dougal and Amanda.

  ‘Too close. Move a yard away from her, Massey.’

  Dougal obeyed. His insides churned; he hoped desperately he would not lose physical control of himself. He retained a shred of detachment which allowed him to recognize, but gain no comfort from, the absurdity of worrying about breaking that taboo now. Stiff upper lippery was as obsolete as the Empire which had inspired it. He would have cried if it would have done any good. Oh God, he prayed with soundless despair, if you get us out of this, I swear . . . hoping beyond reason and belief that some deity would be listening.

  His devotions were curtailed by the sound of painful breathing and scrabbling behind him. Lee must be getting to his feet. There was a scrape of metal on stone and a clatter, as the monkey wrench, which Dougal had dropped after hitting Lee, was kicked out of the way. Footsteps came towards them; the sound had a slow, conscious precision which reminded Dougal of a drunk proving he could still walk in a straight line.

  ‘I’m going to search you. Stand very still. Frisking stiffs is just as easy.’

  Dougal felt the pressure of the pistol in the small of his back. Lee’s hand methodically emptied the contents of his pockets on to the ground. He found the knife and threw it across the coach house. His fingers wandered over Dougal’s clothes in search of concealed objects. Always, Lee’s other hand held the gun rigid.

  He subjected
Amanda to the same process, which made Dougal feel angry and more impotent than he could ever remember feeling. At least Lee wouldn’t find the keys of the safe deposit box. Not yet, anyway. They were safe on the Sally-Anne – or rather in the water, attached to a length of transparent nylon fishing line, the other end of which was looped unobtrusively round a cleat at the bows.

  ‘Okay, what have you done with them? The diamonds?’ Lee’s voice sounded muzzy and venomous.

  ‘They’re down on the boat.’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say. It must sound plausible enough. He was gambling on the possibility that Lee would need their help to get the diamonds in his present state – that he would defer killing them, and prolong the chance that a miracle might arrive, until he knew that they could be of no further service to him. It was unlikely, surely, that he would send one of them to get the diamonds while he held the other hostage; Lee was on unfamiliar ground, and could not be sure that the one he sent would not fetch outside help. Nor, for that matter, he realized, could Lee be sure that the one he sent wouldn’t consider the diamonds well worth the life of the one who stayed. Amateur status might have this small advantage: a professional criminal would automatically assume the worst motives in others. Not that Lee’s cynicism was likely to help them in the long run. Nevertheless, Dougal wanted to stay with Amanda.

  Lee’s footsteps retreated slowly. Dougal’s hypotheses vanished, together with the tenuous reassurance they carried. Was Lee going to shoot them now after all? Lee couldn’t be entirely sane.

  That unnerving titter.

  At last Lee began to talk.

  ‘You’re going to help me down to that bloody boat.’ The words came slowly, as if each one had to be forced through a screen of treacle. ‘One on each side. And a bullet for each of you, if either of you starts playing heroes.’

  ‘Right,’ said Dougal. He had to say it again, because the first time it came out without any sound attached. Someone had to say something. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Amanda, but she seemed to be staring down at the ground, not at him.