Sky High

by Michael Gilbert

  He came out again into the hall and walked upstairs. His search must start in the attics. If Gattie had planted the explosive anywhere else, why should he go up to the attics at all?

  And it was not as if he was looking for something you could hide away just anywhere. The explosive to destroy a solid house like this would be a bulky packet – quite as big as a large suitcase.

  The door to the attic stairs presented a problem. It was shut. There was no way round that. They had no ladder long enough to reach the top storey windows.

  Tim tried to consider the matter logically. It was, on the whole, unlikely that this particular door had been chosen, for the simple reason that there was no certainty that any of them would use it that night. In the end he opened it. Nothing untoward happened. He wedged it open.

  There were four rooms on the top storey. Two box rooms, Anna’s bedroom, and the room with the cold water tank in it. All the doors were ajar.

  Tim started with the tank room, which had nothing in it at all (except the tank). The window was tightly shut and had obviously not been moved for years. Next he tried Anna’s room. There were a few obvious places – a hanging cupboard, a curtained recess, under the bed. None of them yielded any secrets. The window was a dormer and opened on to a steep pitch of tiled roof. Nothing could have been put or hung out of it.

  One of the box rooms was used for storing apples. The whole floor space was covered with newspaper, on which the fruit lay in neat rows. Tim acquitted it at a glance.

  He had kept till the last the front box room. It was the bigger of the two. Like Anna’s it had a dormer window, and it was full of stuff.

  It was the box room that finished him.

  He was soaked with sweat; sweat that had dried on him and then sprung up again. His movements were slow and heavy as if he moved in a nightmare. Round his head, killing thought, ran an iron bracelet of tiredness. And he had to think, as never before in his life. Could he lift? Dare he probe? An endless Tantalus-torment of fatigue and dust and fear.

  He lost all sense of time. He had no idea if it took him five minutes or fifty, but in the end he had done it. He walked downstairs. After the attic, the bedrooms were an anti-climax. He searched them thoroughly, but without precaution. They contained nothing that they should not.

  As he reached the hall the drawing-room door opened and Sue looked in.

  ‘Whatever have you been doing?’ she said. ‘Do you know you’ve been more than an hour? Rupert was getting worried. He said you’d fainted.’

  She looked at him thoughtfully, and added, ‘You look as if you could do with a wash and brush up.’

  ‘I don’t faint easy,’ said Tim with a grin. ‘To the best of my knowledge and belief the house is clear. I refuse to believe that Gattie had time to take up the floorboards and replace them without leaving a trace. Short of that, I’ve looked everywhere in the house which could contain even a modest packet of explosive.’

  ‘Perhaps he dumped it in the garden whilst he went into the house to explore.’

  That’s an idea,’ said Tim. ‘But I’m not doing any searching to-night. Now for the call box. Hullo—’

  There were footsteps in the front porch, the rattle of a key in the lock, and the front door opened and Liz came in.

  Close behind her was the General.

  Liz took one look at her son, another at Sue, and a third at Rupert.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said Tim.

  Then you’d better tell it quickly,’ said Liz. Her voice was hard and high. ‘We’re up against a time limit. I telephoned Bob and asked him to come round at nine o’clock. It’s nearly five to nine now.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tim. ‘Only I’m going to sit down, if you don’t mind.’ He led the way into the drawing-room.

  It did not take long. The General said nothing. Liz, who had been listening like a person who hears bad but expected news, said, ‘You’re certain, now, that he hasn’t fixed his booby trap?’

  ‘Pretty certain. I don’t think there’s any place bigger than nine inches square in this house that I haven’t looked into. He can’t have put it anywhere very elaborate. He wasn’t here all that long.’

  Liz looked at her watch.

  ‘Rupert,’ she said, ‘will you go out into the kitchen and start getting yourself something to eat. Do you know how to fry an egg?’

  ‘Rather.’

  ‘You’ll find everything you want in the larder. That’s the boy. And as for you, Sue—’

  ‘All right,’ said Sue. ‘If you’re indicating tactfully that I’d be better out of the way, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve less than no desire to see Bob, and I feel as if I’d crawled backwards through the corporation rubbish dump. A big hot bath is what I want.’

  There’s a clean towel in the airing cupboard,’ said Liz.

  Something stirred, very faintly, at the back of Tim’s mind, but no thought was born. He was sitting back – lying almost – in the chair and as long as no one asked him to move he thought he might get by.

  The General said something quietly to Liz, who thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think they’re all in the cupboard in the cloakroom, just inside the front door.’

  The General went out, and when he came back Tim saw that he was carrying one of his father’s sporting rifles, a light twenty-bore with a dark, carved, stock and old-fashioned ejector that had been made half a century earlier but was still a very lovely gun.

  The clock on the mantelshelf struck, and, as at a signal, huge headlamps swung out of the road and into the drive. The big car came quietly to a halt. The engine was cut. A click as the car door opened, and a ‘tock’ as it shut.

  The General put the gun carefully down behind his chair.

  ‘I’ll let him in,’ he said.

  He went out and they heard the front door open and shut; feet in the passage; and Bob Cleeve appeared with the General just behind him.

  ‘Come in, you bloody murderer,’ said Liz, ‘and shut the door.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  QUARTET – WITH STRINGS

  Dumas: ‘Dark needs no candles now, for dark is light.’

  The three of them looked at Bob, and Bob looked back at them.

  What does he say now, thought Tim, struggling against the waves of fatigue. What does anybody say, in such a situation? There was indecency in it; like a man being forced to undress in front of his friends.

  The General shifted very slightly in his seat, so that the tips of his fingers rested on the steel of the shotgun.

  Bob stood in the middle of the room, his feet planted square, his face a little redder than normal, his light blue eyes abstracted.

  Time plays odd tricks,’ went on Liz. ‘I find it almost easier to forgive you what you did in Cologne in 1920 – though it cost me my husband – than what you’ve done to-night. Gattie’s upstairs now.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘First you talk him into carrying on your stupid burglaries – because you’d got too fat or too dignified to do them yourself – then you send him to be killed. He was a nice person, too. A better person than you.’

  ‘Not fat,’ said Bob. ‘I’d never allow myself to get fat. I’m as fit now as I was twenty years ago. Rupert was the trouble. If he felt lonely at night, he used to come along to make certain I was still there. Couldn’t risk him finding me gone.’

  He sat down carefully in the wing-backed chair beside the fire.

  ‘By the way’—he levered himself up and looked round—’no microphones?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  He settled back again comfortably.

  ‘How long have you known?’ he said. ‘And, incidentally, who does know?’

  ‘Just the three of us,’ said Liz.

  Bob looked away. A small, cold, tremor touched the General. Exactly so had he seen the African buffalo look away. Just before it charged. He edged the gun forward into his hand.

  ‘Well now,�
� said Bob. ‘When did you guess?’

  ‘When you told me,’ said Liz. ‘No sooner and no later. That evening at Clamboys. Do you remember? When you said that you never saw a problem in the abstract. All your difficulties were people – you actually mentioned Rupert.’

  ‘A bit obscure.’

  ‘It didn’t register at once,’ said Liz. ‘But perhaps you remember, a week earlier sitting in this very room with Hubert and me. Telling us the story of Feder, the country house burglar. How he came to his downfall through being seen by a boy. It’s plain now. You were rationalising your own fears. You were deadly afraid it might happen to you, so you invented it happening to someone else. Pure voodoo.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Liz. ‘I asked Tom Pearce, of course. Nothing like that happened to Feder at all. He was caught, all right; but nothing like that. They got at him from the receiving end. Through one of his safe deposits.’

  ‘Did they now,’ said Cleeve, amiably.

  Watch him, thought the General, he’s fluffing. This isn’t really going home at all. He’s acting. Dangerous man. Don’t relax.

  ‘It’s when a thing is absolutely obvious’—went on Liz—’patent and above board and plain from beginning to end – that you don’t see it. To start with, how could you possibly be so disgustingly rich, unless you were a crook? Your family never had any money, did they?’

  ‘Not a cent.’

  ‘And all the jobs you’ve ever done. Army and police and Home Office. They never paid you enough to get fat on.’

  ‘They paid the most inadequate salaries.’

  ‘And yet, there you were living like a—like a nabob, with an enormous house and servants and horses and cars and God knows what. And of course, when one comes to think about it, you had a top Q job at Cologne in 1920. That must have been the foundation of your family fortunes—’

  ‘I’d pulled off a few modest coups before then, but I admit that was the beginning of the big stuff.’

  ‘Motor-cars and tyres and petrol and Red Cross medical stuff—’

  ‘And food,’ said Cleeve, with savage good humour. ‘We’d any amount of food, and the Germans were starving, remember?’

  ‘And I suppose Bill had just about got wise to you.’

  ‘Believe it or not,’ said Bob, ‘and you probably won’t, because I can’t possibly prove it, but that was nine tenths genuine accident. A very fortunate accident for me, I admit, but an accident just the same.’

  Liz gave him a long, cold, look. The trouble is,’ she said, ‘that you’re so corrupt that nothing you say has got very much meaning in it. It might be true. It might not. Was the blowing up of MacMorris an accident too?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. It was a most carefully planned job. Practically the perfect crime. We couldn’t be expected to guess that the little creature was going to lose his nerve at the last moment and start writing letters to himself, and roping Tim in. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d have gone up and no questions asked. I’d planted one or two ideas in the official mind that he might be the country house burglar they were so interested in. Burglars handle explosives. MacMorris blew himself up. Therefore MacMorris was the burglar. Post hoc, propter hoc.’

  ‘Very neat,’ said Liz. ‘Where did Gattie put the explosives?’

  ‘Under the bed,’ said Cleeve, a shade too quickly.

  But that’s a lie, thought Tim, coming suddenly to the surface. The bed would have disintegrated if the explosive had actually been under it or even near it. He’s telling the truth about some things and lies about others. Why should he bother to lie about that?

  ‘Since you’re being so obliging—’ said Liz.

  ‘So damned suspiciously obliging,’ said the General,

  ‘—perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me, just as a matter of interest, why you should have tied a rope across the General’s gate-post and then run into it yourself.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Cleeve sadly, ‘that that bit was all Gattie. He did it off his own bat. I think your activities had begun to alarm him, and he decided that it would be better for all concerned if you were laid by for a bit. I’m sure he didn’t actually mean to kill you.’

  ‘You overwhelm me,’ said Liz. ‘And I suppose you’re telling us all this, because you know we can’t prove it.’

  ‘There’s not a shred of proof in it from beginning to end. It’s all the purest surmise. Intelligent assessment of probabilities. Or moonshine and wishful thinking, according to which side you see it from.’

  ‘There’s a little more to it than that,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t know how far the police took you into their confidence, but they’ve been watching Brasseys and the Captain for over a year—’

  ‘Brasseys? Oh, you mean that eating place in Sloane Square, kept by the character with side whiskers. I have been there once or twice. Got to eat somewhere when you go up to town.’

  ‘Six times in the past twelve months.’

  ‘You surprise me. Me and who else?’

  ‘Oh, about five thousand other people,’ agree Liz. ‘It’s just a tiny scrap of corroboration. Also there’s a strong possibility that the police will be gathering in the Captain and his boyfriends any day now, and he may decide to purchase his own comfort by a little discreet gossiping.’

  ‘I don’t think he knows very much about me, really,’ said Cleeve. ‘And the worst I know of him is his post-war claret.’

  ‘All right. Then there’s the wife of Sergeant-Major Bottler.’

  ‘Now there you have got me. I don’t remember the Sergeant-Major at all.’

  ‘No?’ said Liz. ‘He remembers you, though. And he took the trouble to ring up the General yesterday and tell him so.’

  They both looked at the General, who shifted very slightly in his chair and said, ‘That’s right.’ He had not taken his eyes off Cleeve for a fraction of a second since Cleeve had come into the room.

  In the sudden silence they could hear, from upstairs, the faint wail and gurgle of the water tank as it filled again after Sue had finished running her bath.

  The noise started off a curious train of thought in Tim’s mind. It sprang from a triple coincidence of sight and sound and smell. On two different occasions he had stood, in the near darkness, outside an open door. On both occasions he had smelled the smell of a man in mortal fear. On both occasions, also – and this was the first time that it had occurred to him – he had listened to the gurgling and whistling of a water tank. What made a water tank gurgle and whistle?

  ‘I’m still not quite clear,’ said Cleeve politely, ‘what it is that the Sergeant-Major, or his wife, remembers.’

  ‘It’s just one of those mad coincidences,’ said Liz. ‘The file that you stole, the one with all the records of the Cologne explosion, its number was M.B. 56. And the day you went there to look at it – calling yourself, with some lack of originality, Major Robinson – was Madge Bottler’s fifty-sixth birthday. Therefore the Sergeant-Major happened to remember it. I’m rather looking forward to hearing that tried out on the jury. I think they might like it.’

  ‘My dear old Liz,’ said Bob, ‘if you haven’t got any more than you’ve been giving me, you won’t get near a jury. You might get into court, but it’ll be a civil court. Action for defamation. However—’

  Watch him, thought the General. Much too pleased with himself. And why does he keep looking down at his watch. If I’m not mistaken that’s twice I’ve caught him doing it.

  ‘—if that really is all for the moment I must be getting along home. Rupert will be wondering what has happened to me.’

  ‘Rupert—’ began Liz. But quite suddenly there didn’t seem to be anything useful to say about Rupert.

  So he doesn’t know Rupert’s here, thought the General. Wonder what he’d say if he knew he was in the kitchen cooking himself eggs and bacon. Would it make any difference to him – supposing he has planned to do something. Better be ready for anything.

  ‘That�
�s quite all right, General,’ said Cleeve. ‘I can see the gun. But I’m quite sure you’re not going to be so unkind as to use it on me.’

  ‘Shoot you if you get difficult,’ said the General. ‘Not unless.’

  ‘Then I hope you don’t classify going home as “getting difficult”,’ said Cleeve, ‘because that’s what I propose to do – by all your leaves.’

  He was on his feet now. Neither Liz nor the General moved.

  Tim seemed fathoms deep, in abstraction. Why did water-tanks and cisterns always make such a peculiar noise when they were refilling, particularly at the moment when they were nearly full?

  ‘You realise,’ said Liz sharply, ‘that there is someone who can give evidence against you. Rupert must have solved the secret of your famous priest hole; and incidentally helped himself to one of the implements you keep there – along with the explosive, and the swag, and other things you wouldn’t care to leave lying about the house. You didn’t by any chance lose a pick-lock? It must have been some time ago. Rupert is quite expert with it now.’

  That hit him. There’s his head coming round. He’s going to charge.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Cleeve at last. ‘But if you think that you or anyone else can make Rupert say anything he doesn’t want to, I should advise you to think again. I’m fond of him, and I think he’s fond of me. You’ll find us a difficult combination. And now, if there’s nothing further to be said—’

  He was half-way to the door when they all heard it. The front door of the house opened and slammed shut; heavy and hurried footsteps in the passage, then the drawing-room door was thrown open, and the bulk of Jim Hedges filled the doorway.

  In that same moment Bob Cleeve turned on his heel, ran to the French windows, thrust against them, and was gone.