by Colin Forbes
Bit by bit she told Jack, the barman, about herself. 'I'm recovering from an illness – convalescent leave they call it, the insurance company I work for. And when I was a kid I used to come down to Taunton to visit relatives…'
Her psychology was shrewd: country folk liked to know who they were talking to. Gradually she extracted from Jack information about the occupants of the bungalow estate. The one day she avoided was Wednesday: she had seen Barrymore and Robson lunching at their usual table. They were still keeping up the ritual meetings, but Kearns was not there with them. She checked his absence on two Wednesdays before avoiding that day.
'Thinkin' of buyin' one of those bungalows when it comes on the market?' Jack commented to her one day. 'You'll be lucky. A funny set-up that lot, you mark my words.'
Tunny in what way?' she asked.
'Ever 'card of a bungalow estate put up fifteen years ago and not one of the original owners has moved? Six bungalows there are. Six men. You'd think at least one would have moved on. New job, somethin' like that. Not a bit of it. They're all still there. And keeps themselves to themselves.'
'You mean you've never met one of them?'
'Now I didn't say that, did I, miss? One of them came in here soon after they'd all moved in. Chap called Foster. Didn't take to 'im. Drank gin and tonics while he chatted. La-di-dah type.'
'What did he chat about? It sounds like a mystery. I love mysteries,' Paula glowed.
'Said he was an investment counsellor, whatever that might be. Works in Bristol. His wife has some big job overseas. Never seen 'er. Said his friend, Saunders, also had his wife abroad. Some job with the UN in New York. Funny sort of married life. Wouldn't suit me – visiting the missus once or twice a year.'
'You mean the wives never come here?'
'That's about the long and short of it. Then there's the crank. Professor Guy Seton-Charles. Bachelor. Something to do with Bristol University. In summer they mows their lawns at the weekends. That's about all you see of 'em. Stuffy lot, if you ask me.'
Paula swallowed a piece of her chicken and mushroom pie, the day's speciality chalked up on a blackboard. She sipped at her glass of white wine. Jack was polishing yet another glass until it came up gleaming like silver crystal.
'I heard there was a Mr Simon Mode living in one of the bungalows,' she said casually.
'Maybe. I wouldn't know. They're there and yet they're not there.' People were beginning to fill up the tables. He turned to another customer. 'What can I get you, sir?'
That was the night they had the most almighty row back at The Anchor.
They were all assembled for dinner at their usual table. Paula sat between Newman and Marler. Butler and Nield faced them, and Nield, inadvertently, lit the fuse.
'Saw you today, Paula. I was tracking Robson when he tried to call on Kearns. Got no joy. I thought Kearns must be out. Robson pressed the gate bell several times, no one came out, so he pushed off. I had wondered whether Kearns was ill.'
'I think he is,' Paula replied. ' I saw Robson call, then drive off. A few minutes later Dr Underwood – we met him in the bar if you remember – called. Kearns came out and let him in.'
'What did you mean, Pete?' Marler asked. 'You said you saw Paula. Driving along the road?'
'No. Parked in her hired Renault inside a gateway overlooking that bungalow colony – and Kearns' place.'
Marler turned to Paula. 'What the devil were you doing there?'
'Observing that bungalow estate. You can look down on it. It's odd – one woman seems to clean the lot. Furtively.'
'How do you mean?' Nield enquired.
'She always slips in by the back doors. She has a key to each of them. I've used night glasses to watch her after dark…'
'After dark?' Marler's tone expressed incredulity 'How long have you been keeping up this vigil?'
'For about two weeks.'
'You do realize it's only a matter of time before you're spotted,' Marler persisted in a cold voice. 'It's madness.'
'I have already realized that.' She said the words deliberately, disliking his tone. 'I saw the solution today. There's a riding stable near Dunster which hires out horses. In future I'll ride – which means I can get on the moor, check the area from different angles.'
'You bloody well won't…'
'Partridge used a horse,' she snapped. 'For the same reason, I suspect. He could see more from a horse.'
'And look where it got him.' Marler leaned his long white face – his Grecian suntan had long since faded -close to hers. 'It got him a knife in the back. You should be armed. You shouldn't be doing it at all.'
'No one's going to stop me,' she said icily, staring hard at Marler. 'If you feel that way, get me a weapon…'
It was Newman who calmed the atmosphere. He knew Paula was seething at the unspoken suggestion that she couldn't take care of herself. He remembered times when Tweed had put her in the front line to toughen her up. Standing up, he said he was driving into Minehead to call Tweed, to ask him to send a Browning automatic with spare magazines by motorbike courier. While he was away the rest of the meal was eaten in silence.
The following morning after breakfast Newman tapped on Paula's door. Inside he handed her a Browning and spare mags.
'So, I've come of age,' she said and smiled drily.
'How are you going to carry it on a horse – so it's easy to get at in an emergency?'
She produced a makeshift but neat holster made of blue denim and took hold of the Browning where she had laid it on a table. Releasing the magazine inside the butt, she checked to make sure there wasn't a bullet up the spout, pushed the mag back inside the gun and slipped it inside the holster. Two straps of the same material were attached to it.
She was wearing tight denims thrust inside riding boots and a padded windcheater. All purchased the previous day. Then she strapped the holster to her right upper leg close to her crotch. Parading round the room, she made a gesture with her slim hand.
'I'm on a horse. You meet me. Would you notice it?'
'No. It blends in perfectly. How on earth did you make that holster?'
'By staying up half the night. I cut material from the bottom of my jeans – tucked inside my boots you can't see where I took it from. Then a lot of careful sewing.' She came close to him, kissed him on the cheek. 'I expected you to flare up like Marler last night. Thanks for your vote of confidence.'
Newman shrugged, grinned. 'You are one of the team. Marler's got a short fuse. What did that cleaning woman you saw down at the estate look like?'
'Middle-aged. Medium height. About a hundred and twenty pounds. Grey hair tied back in a bun. I've got several photographs of her. I was carrying my camera with the telephoto lens. Should we send the film to Tweed?'
'Let me have it. Maybe in a few days one of us will have to go up to London. You'd finished the film?'
She handed him the spool. 'Yes. And I've a fresh one in the camera. The one you're holding has pictures of all the men living there. Plus pictures of the bungalows. Including Seton-Charles' place with that weird complex of TV aerials attached to his chimney.'
She hid the Browning with its holster and the mags at the bottom of the wardrobe, then picked up neat rows of shoes and spread them over the gun. Straightening up, she looked at Newman.
'After that row at dinner last night I feel like a walk along the coast. I didn't get much sleep and I'm feeling restless.'
'Let's go…'
It was dark but the gale had slackened to a strong breeze as they strolled along the track westward. Paula glanced at the cottage where Mrs Larcombe had lived, then looked away. Newman was careful not to refer to it.
'What are the others doing?' she asked as they picked their way across the pebbles.
'We're keeping up the watch on the commandos. Kearns appears to have recovered, but he's limping a bit. Maybe he twisted his ankle. Butler followed one of the men who live in those bungalows to the Somerset and Cornwall Bank in Bristol. Watched him draw abo
ut a thousand pounds in fifties. He's reported it to Tweed who has now started a discreet check on where that money comes from.'
'Anything new on the commandos?'
'Not really, blast it. Robson still rides to see his patients at all hours. He has one old duck who delights in using her bedside phone and calling him out late at night. Lives in a creepy old mansion near Dulverton. Barrymore is still making calls from that public box in Minehead. Kearns has no help in his house – looks after the place himself, does his own cooking. Army type, I suppose…'
He stopped speaking as Paula grasped his arm. They were some distance west of Porlock Weir, walking close to towering cliffs. 'I heard something funny, a sinister noise,' Paula whispered.
Then Newman heard it. A crumbling sound, the noise of grinding rocks. He looked above them, grabbed Paula's hand, shouted at her to run. They headed for the sea. Behind them the sound increased, grew to a rumbling roar. At the water's edge Newman turned and Paula swung round with him. She gazed, appalled.
By the light of the rising moon they saw a gigantic slab of cliff sliding down from the summit, a slab which broke into smaller pieces as it rolled towards the beach. Enormous boulders bounded downwards towards where they stood, their backs to the sea. The boulders lost momentum, came to rest two dozen yards away. A sudden silence descended. Paula shivered, huddled closer to Newman.
'It's OK,' he said. That's it.'
'My God, if we hadn't run we'd have been under that.'
She pointed towards a dark mass of rocks piled up the height of a two-storey house. They were making their way back, keeping to the edge of the sea, when Paula pointed again.
'Who can that be?'
In the distance, close to the track, a man on horseback was riding away from them. Hunched forward, close to the horse's head, it was impossible to make out his shape, guess his height. He reached the track and the horse broke into a gallop. When they arrived back at The Anchor there was no sign of any horseman and they hurried inside to report the landslip.
The violent incident took place next day.
48
Grey mist was curling over the high crests as Paula rode her horse over the high ground behind the bungalow estate. It lay about two hundred yards below her and from this angle she was able to observe features she had not seen before.
Behind the end of the cul-de-sac a path led down into a dip invisible from the road. An old barn-like structure huddled in the dip, a building with half-doors. Both upper halves were open and two horses' heads peered out. This was her first realization that someone living on the estate rode the moors.
She saw movement, the opening of a back door in Seton-Charles' bungalow. Lifting her glasses looped round her neck, she focused. It was the grey-haired cleaning woman, carrying a mop and a plastic bucket. Paula remained perfectly still: people rarely looked upwards.
The woman opened a gate in the back garden fence, walked into the next garden. She put down mop and bucket, fiddled with a bunch of keys, inserted one in the rear door of the bungalow and disappeared inside with her cleaning equipment.
Paula dropped her glasses, rode on, slowly circling the estate. As usual, no sign of cars. They had probably all driven off to their jobs. The cars she had seen earlier, arriving back in the evenings, were Jags and Fords. No Mercedes or Rolls-Royces, but the cars they drove still cost money. There seemed to be no shortage of that commodity.
She had watched them at weekends cutting their lawns with power mowers, big machines which did the job quickly. It was late November and she gave a little shiver: the cold clamminess of the approaching mist rolling down the slopes was making itself felt.
She kept moving slowly, like a rider out for a gentle morning bit of exercise. For the moment she was sheltered from the estate by a gorse-covered ridge. She guided her mount up the side and perched on a small rocky hilltop which gave a bird's-eye view. The two horsemen seemed to appear out of nowhere.
One moment she was alone on the hilltop, the next moment they rode out from behind a concealed ridge and confronted her. They stopped about two dozen feet away, staring at her. She noticed several things as she casually dropped her right hand over the holster.
They were experienced riders: neither had his feet inside the stirrups. Probably because they had mounted their horses in a hurry. She recognized their mounts as the horses which had peered over the half-doors. One man was tall, lean-faced and with jet-black hair. His cheekbones were prominent, almost Slavic. The other was short and heavily-built with an ugly round face and a mean mouth.
Both were in their forties, she estimated. Both wore windcheaters and slacks thrust into riding boots. The Slavic-faced man raised a hand, unzipped the front of his windcheater, left it open. The ugly man began guiding his horse, took up a position on her right side. She responded by turning her own horse.
'I like to face strangers,' she informed them and smiled.
'Why are you spying on us?' Slav-Face demanded.
'It's normal to introduce yourself in this part of the world,' she replied. 'I'm Paula…'
'And I'm Norton. Now, I'll ask you again – why are you spying on us?'
His right hand slipped inside his windcheater, emerged holding a gun. A 9mm Walther automatic as far as Paula could tell. She froze. The weapon was aimed point-blank between her breasts. Paula glanced to her left. A ridge higher than the hilltop masked the road. No help from that direction – even if Nield came driving along.
'This is moorland open to the public,' she snapped, 'You think you own Exmoor?'
'Gutsy, eh?' Norton commented. 'Now answer the question.'
'I ride all over the place. I don't know what you're talking about. And it's illegal to threaten someone with a weapon in this country.'
'She says it's illegal, Morle,' Norton said to his companion, still staring at Paula. 'She says she doesn't know what I'm talking about.'
His voice was cultured; high falutin' some would have called it. Almost a caricature of Marler's drawling way of speaking, but with an underlying sneer. Norton and Morle. Paula recalled the names she'd recorded while Butler examined the electoral register. These were two of them: she had all five names in her head.
'So if she doesn't know what I'm talking about,' Norton continued, 'how come she's been sitting in a parked car up the road day after day, watching the bungalows through field glasses?' He still held the gun levelled at her. 'I think maybe we will continue this discussion inside my bungalow, have a real cosy chat.'
Paula had been frightened when the two men first appeared. Now she remembered Newman putting her through her paces at a quiet spot on the North Downs. And he'd gone through the Special Air Services course before writing an article on the SAS. Faced with a gunman there's always something you can do – say – to distract him, if you're armed. .. And now, unsure of survival, she had gone as cold as ice.
'So you've confused me with someone else,' she said. 'Parked in a car, my foot. A horse is my form of transport here. You can tell the difference between a horse and a car? This is not very encouraging – when Foster asked me if I could take on the job of helping clean the bungalows.'
'He did what?' Norton's forehead crinkled with puzzlement. He turned to Morle. 'Do you know anything about this? He must be clean out of his…'
As he spoke the gun sagged, the muzzle aimed at the ground. It took seconds for Paula to haul the Browning from the holster, to grasp the butt in both hands, to aim it. Norton saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He began to lift his own gun. Paula fired twice. Norton slumped, was falling from his horse, when Morle ripped down his zipper, shoved his hand inside, began to haul out a gun. Paula had swivelled the Browning, her knees clamped to her horse to hold it steady. Twice more she fired.
Morle grabbed at his saddle with one hand, slowly toppled. A loud explosion echoed. Paula thought she was hit. Then she saw Norton had pulled the trigger in a reflex action as he hit the ground. The bullet winged across the moor.
The men's two h
orses galloped off in panicky freedom. Paula's mount threatened to rise up on its hindlegs. She pressed a firm hand on its neck, made soothing noises, dismounted, trailed the reins and approached Norton, still gripping her Browning. He lay unconscious, his fingers had dropped the gun. She bent down, felt his neck pulse. It beat steadily. Blood oozed from his right shoulder.
Standing up, she ran across to examine Morle. He also was unconscious. A red stain spread across his slacks close to his left hip. Again she checked the pulse. Again she felt its regular beat. Thank God, she thought and stood up, deciding what to do.
Two minutes later she was riding fast along the track which led to Exford, a four-mile trek. She left the horse at the riding stables she had hired it from. Nothing more to pay. Walking along the road, she entered the field where she had parked her Renault, got behind the wheel.
She drove across country, turned on to the A396 and arrived via Minehead at Porlock Weir half an hour later. To her infinite relief Newman and Marler had just returned to The Anchor.
Tweed drank three cups of coffee while he listened to Paula's story in his Park Crescent office. She spoke tersely, with not a wasted word. On his desk lay the sheet of handwritten names she had given him – the occupants of the six bungalows. He already knew them from the earlier report Butler had given him on the phone. He squeezed her hand as she concluded her account, stood up and went back behind his desk.
'So Newman and Marler cleaned up the mess,' he said.
'They were marvellous. I wondered if they'd say I'd made a mistake stopping at the first public phone box on my way back to Porlock Weir. That was when I phoned the police, refused to give a name and told them there'd been a shooting incident near the bungalow estate close to Simonsbath. That they'd better send an ambulance. I felt I couldn't just leave them there. Marler said he'd have done just that…'