Sky High

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘I see,’ said Tim. ‘Applying it to my man—?’

  ‘Easy. Ordinary landing light with a two-way switch, one switch by the stairs, one at the other end of the passage by your bedroom. You turn the landing light on at the stairs when you come up to bed. That’s movement number one. Last thing at night, when you’ve finished washing, and so on, you turn the light off, at the bedroom end. A five second delay fuse. Enough to let him get into the bedroom and shut the door, but not long enough for him to get into bed.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tim. ‘Yes. That fits well enough with what was observed. How long would it take to rig up?’

  Mr. Smith looked doubtful.

  ‘I could do it in ten minutes,’ he said.

  ‘And leave no signs?’

  ‘They wouldn’t be very easy to spot. There’d be nothing at all in the bedroom. One extra wire from each switch on the landing. The actual timing and setting devices would be screwed into the explosive. They’d disintegrate.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tim. ‘Yes. Thank you very much. I need hardly say—’

  ‘Oh, discretion itself,’ said Mr. Smith with a blink.

  Tim stepped out into High Holborn, into a slant of cold rain.

  Darkness had fallen and the lamps were lit. The tide, which sets eastward here as Londoners scurry home to their firesides, was already slackening.

  Brasseys lies behind Sloane Square. It is a name which Londoners have associated for sixty years with good food. Three generations of diners-out have passed through the swing door, between the twin bow windows, one with its ten different sizes of champagne bottle, the other with the giant scarlet lobster in plaster-of-Paris.

  You go straight into a cramped ante-room and bar, with stairs leading off it on both sides. At the back is a long partition of screens. Behind the screens the dining-room. You can still see, if you look carefully, that it was once a gymnasium. There is the big double skylight in the roof, with the long, brass rods and the cog wheels by which it was opened, and there are hooks in the high roof from which ropes once hung. The inner room is now a comfortable mixture of Regency sporting prints, red plush, brass rails and balloon glass. If it is not quite as full as it used to be in its hey-day, it is still popular.

  The scene was just warming up when Tim arrived. The family parties, who had been eating early to get to a theatre, were finishing, yielding place to more leisured and serious diners. In one corner three naval sub-lieutenants were examining the wine list with suspicion. A clergyman and his wife were saying that on the whole they thought they would just start with clear soup. A very fat man was superintending the addition of hot garlic sauce to a plate of scampi.

  Three people came in at the same time as Tim. One was an untidy but intellectual-looking young man who was walking with the extreme care of one who is drunk, but unhappily not quite drunk enough to have reached unawareness; with him a blonde. Behind them a moon-faced man, the back of whose neck recalled to Tim someone he was certain he knew. Irritating. Couldn’t place it. School? Army? Palestine? Tim dismissed the problem. There was work to do. He picked up the long, hand-written menu and studied it carefully for clues.

  A frail old waiter who looked like a windblown leaf, if it is possible to imagine a windblown leaf in a tail coat, drifted up behind his elbow and awaited his pleasure.

  ‘Is there anything you can particularly recommend?’ said Tim.

  ‘The whitebait’s nice,’ said the waiter.

  ‘Whitebait, then. And steak,’

  ‘The steak’s not so good tonight.’

  He looked like an honest man.

  ‘Duck?’

  ‘Very good, indeed, sir. Orange salad, spinach, straw potatoes.’

  Tim said he thought that would do. The waiter produced a black shagreen-covered wine list which was a little smaller than a family bible.

  ‘A pint of beer,’ said Tim.

  ‘A pint of beer,’ said the waiter and drifted off.

  It took the usual unconscionable time to serve, but it wasn’t a bad dinner. When he had eaten it all up, and had rekindled a spark of hope in the waiter’s breast by ordering a small kummel, Tim felt fortified for the next move.

  The dining-room was quite full now, full of the aroma of garlic, of methylated spirits, of newly ground coffee, faintly hazed with the incense of cigar smoke and good humour. It was a moment for the laying down of lines and the drawing up of blueprints for the future. It was the moment when your ankle would touch someone else’s under the table and out of that light contact unimaginable things would be born.

  The untidy young man had progressed several stages beyond self-consciousness and was trying to balance one soda water syphon on top of another. The moon-faced man caught Tim’s eye and looked away. Now where had he met him?

  Tim shook his head angrily, and beckoned to a superior waiter who was propping up a pillar beside the service door. The superior waiter ignored him as long as he could, and then advanced at a speed which implied that he was not used to being beckoned to by men who drank pints of beer.

  Tim waited patiently until the man had come to anchor behind his left elbow.

  ‘I wonder if I could have a word with the Captain,’ he said.

  ‘The Captain, sir.’

  It was difficult to detect whether or not there was a question mark at the end of it.

  ‘I’m told he can get me a special line in whisky. Is that right?’

  ‘Oh, whisky,’ said the superior waiter, as if that made sense of it all.

  He sailed off. Tim thought that he was moving a little faster. The wind was behind him this time.

  A short interval ensued in which he heard a stout party say to the innocent girl who shared his table, ‘always save your chemist’s bills, my dear. You’re an actress. You can put them in for expenses against your surtax. Save two hundred pounds a year by that. Two hundred pounds. That’s not to be sneezed at, you know.’

  The girl confirmed that she would not sneeze if anyone offered her two hundred pounds, and the superior waiter reappeared.

  ‘Would you come with me, sir?’ he said.

  Tim followed the man out into the ante-room. The jostling crowd was no longer there. It was either eating its dinner or had gone on. The room was quiet and deserted. They turned left, up the shallow stairs, through a door and along a short passage.

  The waiter knocked, bent his head to listen, opened the door and stood aside for Tim to go in. The gesture was as clear as words. His part of the job was done. Tim was now on his own.

  The man who was sitting behind the big, cluttered, desk was vaguely familiar. It was a picture in the fashionable weeklies. Sporting event? The turf? Greyhound racing, perhaps. He had sandy hair, dropping into old-fashioned sideboards in front of his ears; a yellowish leathery face, the lower folds of which rested on a high Edwardian collar.

  He did not get up but looked vaguely towards an empty chair. Tim sat down.

  ‘I understand you wanted to see me.’

  ‘You’re the Captain?’

  ‘My friends call me that.’

  Hardly a snub. Just a remark.

  ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance,’ said Tim, getting as much geniality into it as he could. It was not easy. There was something formidable about the old man and something chilling.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I didn’t really intend to burst in on you like this. But a friend of mine told me that you could put me on to something quite special in the way of whisky.’

  ‘A friend of yours? He knows me?’

  ‘Toby Carshalton,’ said Tim readily. ‘16th Hussars.’

  ‘Carshalton?’ said the Captain impassively. ‘I don’t remember the name. But I have many friends in the Army. Tell me, Mr—?’

  ‘Artside.’

  ‘Mr. Artside. When he recommended my whisky, did he particularly mention Scotch or Irish?’

  It was as clear to Tim as anything could be that this was some sort of pay-off line. If he got the answer to this one he was
in for a dividend. The trouble was that he lacked any sort of inspiration. Silently he cursed MacMorris for giving him only half the story.

  Before the silence could become awkward he said, ‘I don’t know that he mentioned that especially. If you know Toby you’ll know what a vague sort of chap he is at times—’

  At this moment he happened to look up and his blood chilled.

  He was looking into the eyes of a wolf.

  Just a flash. Then it was the dear old Captain again. But he could no more mistake it than the Styrian peasant could have mistaken it when, at dusk, in the lonely depths of the forest, he looked more closely at the friendly old man who was guiding him and saw the sprouting hair, the lengthening white teeth, the yellow fire in the shallow eyes.

  Tim had no more to say and his mouth was dry. The Captain continued to look at him, thoughtfully now. It was an awkward silence to break.

  At that moment the door opened and a man came in without knocking.

  Tim found it difficult, afterwards, to remember what he looked like. He was a youngish man, with a suggestion of the Latin in his hard brown face and black hair. He was well dressed, and carried himself with the confidence of a man who expects to be deferred to wherever he goes. Tim got the impression that he, and not the Captain, was the real owner of the room.

  He glanced at Tim for a moment, and then walked over to the fireplace and helped himself to a cigarette out of the box on the mantelshelf.

  ‘I did think,’ said the Captain, in a voice which conveyed a warning, ‘that we might have a customer here. I was led to think it.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘A customer for our whisky.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But it didn’t work out that way.’

  ‘A pity,’ said the newcomer, with an insincere smile. ‘In that case—’

  Tim accepted his dismissal. He rose to his feet and said, ‘Well, if there’s nothing doing I’ll be getting along. Sorry to have bothered you.’

  Neither man said anything to that. He was conscious of two pairs of eyes watching him as he closed the door.

  When he reached his table he was surprised to find that his coffee was still hot. He felt that he had been away a lot longer.

  He drank it slowly, in time with his slow thoughts. When you are clearing out the sty, he thought, there is no mistaking the moment when the prongs of your pitchfork, driving through the piled trash and straw and rubbish, touch on the concrete of the floor itself. He had run up against the hard competence of professional crime and his arms were still tingling with the shock.

  Yet it seemed to have nothing, less than nothing, to do with the amateur goings-on at Brimberley. They were different equations, without a common factor.

  He signalled for his bill and two men began to move. Both were big men and neither of them had been serving him before.

  He realised that he had made a mistake.

  He should have paid his bill and got out whilst the going was good.

  It was all done very smoothly.

  One of the men stationed himself in the alleyway in the line between Tim’s table and the door. The other came straight for him. He had the bill on a salver in his big right hand. He looked like an army gym instructor, one of those menacing men who used to tie you in knots and bounce you genially on the mat.

  Only this time he was going to be bounced on the pavement, face downwards, and not genially. To teach him to keep his silly little nose out of things that did not concern him.

  As the man approached, Tim got to his feet and got clear of the table. The man came on, until he was right up to him, leaned forward courteously, and stamped on Tim’s toe.

  As Tim’s head jerked forward, he raised the salver so that the edge of it caught Tim on the bridge of the nose.

  A scene, thought Tim, through the sharp pain. A scene. That’s all they want. They’ll say I started it. Then they’re covered.

  Tour bill, sir,’ said the gymnast. ‘And I hope you won’t forget to add a nice big tip.’

  Tim kicked him, as hard as he could in the small space available, on the shin. He might have been kicking a wall.

  The man put down the salver without hurry and his big hands came up and felt for the lapels of Tim’s coat.

  It was at this moment that the untidy young man, two tables away, knocked over one of the lighted methylated spirit stoves. It rolled on to the floor and burst with a little pop.

  The blonde screamed.

  The untidy young man looked unspeakably horrified at what he had done. He then picked up an open bottle of brandy, and poured it helpfully over the wavering nest of fire on the carpet.

  A sheet of flame rose from the floor and for an instant everything stood still.

  Then, as Tim tore himself out of the hands of his startled opponent, pandemonium broke loose.

  There was one chance. The front door was blocked by the second man. He dived for the service door.

  The gymnast came after him, fast. The service door was a swing door, but even so Tim doubted if he could negotiate it in time. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the gymnast go into an involuntary dive. He had become entangled with the untidy young man, who was behaving like a demented fire brigade.

  With the crash of that fall still ringing in his ears, Tim burst through the service door.

  That a waiter should have been coming through it in the other direction carrying a tray of madras curry was bad luck, on the waiter. The incident hardly checked Tim who, as opponents on the rugger field had discovered, was slow off the mark but devilish difficult to stop once he got fairly under way.

  Tim hurdled the body of the waiter, skidded through the first wave of curry, took the short passage in five steps and erupted, through a second swing door, into the kitchen. Three men in white caps and aprons jerked their heads up together, as if they had been strung on the same wire.

  ‘Fire!’ shouted Tim. ‘Police. Fire.’

  The men continued to stare. Through the doors they could hear a growing hubbub.

  ‘Way out?’ shouted Tim.

  One of the men gestured feebly.

  Tim wrenched the door open and found himself in an alley. At the end of it was an archway, with an iron gate across it. The gate solidly and completely filled the archway, and it was padlocked.

  There was a row of dustbins against the wall.

  Tim got up on to one, felt for the top of the wall, and scrabbled up.

  The top was dirty, and slippery with rain. Tim balanced for a moment. Ahead of him was a pit of darkness.

  At that moment angry voices broke out from the room he had just left.

  He turned on to his stomach, lowered himself to the full length of his arms, and hung for a moment. He hoped there was nothing spiky below. Then he dropped.

  His landing place proved soft and yielding. As he got to his feet he decided that it was a bale of partly scraped sheepskins. The smell was powerful and unmistakeable. There was a heap of these bales. He slithered off them and felt his way forward.

  He had time to notice that it was still raining.

  It was an open yard, at the back of some sort of factory or workshop. The building was barred and inaccessible, but he could see a wooden gate, and the street lamps beyond.

  The gate was high, but there might be room to squeeze over the top. He went back to the wall and fetched, one after the other, a dozen bales of skins, which he piled, two deep, into a sloping ramp behind the gate.

  From the top he saw that he could manage it. Apart from the steady drip of the rain all seemed quiet.

  He hoisted himself over the door with a squeeze. There was one hitch, followed by a sharp tearing sound, and then he was dropping down into the street.

  Before he had time even to get to his feet, two unwinking lights had him captive.

  A long car slid up and a voice said, ‘Can we be of any assistance?’

  There was no choice. The rear door opened and Tim climbed in. Someone flicked on an interior lig
ht and he saw that it was the moon-faced man he had noticed in the restaurant. There was another man with him in the back and another in the front beside the driver. They were none of them in uniform, but Tim had no difficulty in guessing who they were.

  ‘Been killing someone?’ asked the moon-faced man. His voice was unexpectedly authoritative.

  Tim glanced at his hands. What with the soot and the sheepskins they were quite something.

  ‘It’s Artside, isn’t it?’

  Tim looked at him. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘It’s been on the tip of my tongue all the evening.’

  ‘Has it not! I was afraid, once or twice, that you were going to shout it across the room.’

  ‘Beasley?’

  ‘Getting warm.’

  ‘Bazeley. Jaffa. 1947. Right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Detective Inspector Bazeley. ‘But I’m damned if I’m going to shake hands until you’ve had a wash.’

  An hour later Tim was feeling a lot better. He had had a bath, and his clothes had been dried and brushed.

  ‘Now perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it’s all about,’ he said.

  ‘You take the words out of our mouths,’ said Inspector Bazeley, with a glance at his assistant, Detective Pontifex.

  Tim considered.

  ‘I’ll strike a bargain,’ he said. ‘If I tell you what I was doing there, will you tell me what you were up to?’

  Bazeley considered.

  ‘You can check up my references, if you like,’ said Tim. ‘I’m quite respectable. Tom Pearce, our Chief Constable, will give me a chit—’

  ‘I’ll take you at your face value,’ said Bazeley. ‘You used to be quite reliable in Palestine. You shoot first.’

  ‘From my end,’ said Tim, ‘there isn’t a great deal to tell. I got a tip through a man – a Major MacMorris—’

  It was evident that the name meant nothing to them.

  ‘It led to the idea that if I sought out a character at Brasseys, called the Captain, and started to talk to him about whisky, then things would happen. I did. They did.’

  ‘They certainly did.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tim. ‘Now your turn.’

  Inspector Bazeley said, ‘This really is absolutely not for publication. I’d get the sack if anyone knew – however. It’s fencing. Big time fencing.’