by Jon Cleary
He noticed the car had seemingly picked up speed of its own accord. “I think the storm’s easing up. We could be lucky.”
“How?” asked Malone.
“You want that plane to be able to get off, don’t you?” Then he screwed up his face, shook his head. He was tired; he would have to watch himself out at Sunday Harbor. He did not want to bitch things up for Malone by making the wrong remarks out there. He glanced at Birmingham. “I’m not gonna explain it to you now, but if your daughter is in this, she could have backed herself into a corner where she can’t get out.”
“Don’t be enigmatic, Captain. Don’t you trust me?”
“No,” said Jefferson flatly. “But what worries me more is will your daughter trust you when we get you to talk to her?”
Birmingham had no answer to that and he turned his head away, took off his hat and leaned his face against the cold glass of the car window. In the back seat his wife drew her hood about her face and began to weep quietly. Malone sat unmoving beside her, his hands thrust into his raincoat pockets, his eyes gazing unseeingly out at the rain hitting the window like silver splinters. He could feel a sickness growing in him, a fear that he might not be able to face whatever lay ahead of them out at the cottage. For he had convinced himself that Lisa was there, that in another hour or so they would have reached the end of the trail. But he had reached a stage where despair was beginning to weigh heavier than hope. He was, against his will, digging a grave, just in case …
By the time they reached Sunday Harbor the wind had dropped to no more than a gentle blow with occasional strong gusts, like last salvoes from Hurricane Myrtle. It was still raining, a steady downpour that was the final deluge from clouds that, high up in the darkness, had already begun to move away. Two local police cars and four cars from the Sheriff’s Department were parked at the end of the street to which Birmingham had directed Jefferson. They were without lights and Jefferson switched off his own lights as soon as he saw them.
A man in a slicker and rain-hat got out of one of the cars and came running through the rain. Malone opened the back door and the man got in, apologizing for bringing so much water with him.
“I’m Jack Narvo, the Deputy Sheriff of the county.” He was a tall thin man but it was impossible for Malone and the others, in the darkness of the car, to see his features clearly; he had a light, friendly voice and a trick of putting his head on one side as if expecting a question after each remark he made. “Which is Captain Jefferson?”
“I am.”
The long narrow head went on one side and there was a moment’s pause. “Okay, Captain. We have three more cars down at the other end of the street and two cars in the street behind this one, just in case your guess proves correct. One of my men has been down to the house, checked the car in the driveway beside it. It has Missouri plates.”
“We don’t know anyone from Missouri,” said Birmingham.
Jefferson introduced the Birminghams and Malone, and Narvo’s head ducked to one side as he acknowledged each of them. “We’re pretty sure there’s someone in the house, but we don’t know how many. The car’s been out tonight. The motor’s cold, but in this weather it could have cooled off pretty quick. But there are tracks in the gravel of the driveway that haven’t been washed out yet.”
“Your man seems pretty observant,” said Jefferson.
“We try to be.” The head went to one side again and the light voice just for a moment lost its friendliness; but it was impossible to tell whether he resented being complimented by a city cop or a black cop. “The Sheriff and the local police chief are away on an administration course - this is usually the quiet time of the year for us. This part of town is unincorporated, so it comes under my jurisdiction.”
Oh Christ, thought Malone, here we go again with the bloody jurisdictional protocol again.
“Well, you talk it over with Captain Lewton and the FBI when they get out here,” said Jefferson. “Kidnapping is a Federal offence, so I guess the FBI are running things now.”
“Who are you then?” Narvo’s head looked as if it would fall sideways off his neck.
“Just a friend of Inspector Malone’s,” said Jefferson. “He needs one, with all the goddam red tape that’s been tangling him ever since this business started. That looks like Captain Lewton arriving now. Let’s go and introduce him to your jurisdiction, Sheriff.”
He and Narvo, the latter stiff and awkward with anger and embarrassment, got out of the car, leaving Malone alone with the Birminghams. The husband reached back over the front seat and took his wife’s hand.
“She may not be in there after all, dear. This sort of thing isn’t Julie-”
“I know it isn’t. But - ” Then both of them looked at Malone.
“Look,” said Malone quietly, “I’ve been a cop for quite a long time. One thing that keeps repeating itself in my experience is the number of parents who don’t know their children. You don’t seem to have known your son too well. What makes you think you knew your daughter?”
“You sound as if you want her to be in there!” Mrs Birmingham pushed back the hood of her raincoat, sat forward to be closer to her husband.
“All I want is for my wife - and Mrs Forte - to be in there. At least that will mean I know where they are - up till now
I haven’t had any idea where they are or even if they’re still alive.” Again the Celtic shadow darkened his mind; he shook it off. “I don’t care who the kidnappers are - your daughter or Bill Buggerlugs - but if your daughter is in there, I’m hoping that you can talk her into letting my wife and Mrs Forte come out safely. What happens after that, I don’t care.”
The Birminghams looked at each other, then the husband said, “We’ll try, Inspector.”
Then Jefferson came back, opened the door of the car and leaned in out of the rain. “They’re busting into the house opposite yours, Mr Birmingham. They’re gonna set that up as the command post. Captain Lewton would like you down there. We can’t take the car down, but we should be able to get down there on foot without whoever is in your house seeing us.”
Five minutes later the four of them, their lower legs drenched and their shoes covered in mud, were in the large kitchen of the house across the street from the Birminghams’. On the way down Malone had tried to catch a glimpse of the cottage where Lisa might be held, but darkness, the heavy rain and the need to hurry had prevented him from seeing it.
“Oh, what a mess we’re making,” said Elizabeth Birmingham. “I hope Nell Royce will understand.”
“This is Dr Royce’s house,” said her husband. “I hope you did no damage when you were breaking in.”
It was a large house, built ranch style in fieldstone and timber, and the kitchen reminded Malone of illustrations he had seen in the American home magazines Lisa had started buying once they had become engaged. He wondered what sort of money the owners had that they could leave such a house closed up for six months of the year. This was not a holiday place but what he would have thought of as a luxury home. He was beginning to appreciate that his own values were way down the scale from those he had seen in the past few hours.
“We broke the lock on the back door there.” Lewton was brusque; he had no patience with a couple who seemed more concerned with their neighbours’ property than with who might be in their own house. “Sheriff Narvo has made a note of it and we’ll see the damage is repaired. We’ve also had the phone reconnected - we’ll let Dr Royce know about that too.”
“Who’s in charge?” asked Birmingham.
Lewton looked at Norman Cartwright. He and the FBI man had ridden out together from Manhattan and on the way he had explained to Cartwright the background to Commissioner Hungerford’s determination that the Police Department should wrap up this case. Though the case was now a Federal matter, Cartwright had not insisted on asserting his authority; he had explained, though without elaboration, that he did not like to see any man close to retirement being kicked out of his job. For the time b
eing they would be a partnership.
“Is it any concern of yours, Mr Birmingham?”
“Yes! If my daughter is across the street there, I don’t want you busting in, maybe harming her. Maybe even -killing her!”
His wife gasped and he put his arms around her. Lewton looked at them both, then he jerked his head and went out of the kitchen towards the front of the house. Several of the men followed him; Jefferson looked at Malone, then they too went towards the front of the house. The light was on in the kitchen, but the rest of the house was in darkness. Malone found himself in a wide hall dimly lit by a guarded flashlight held by a local patrolman who stood with his back to the heavy front door. Lewton and the other men were in the big living-room off to one side of the hall, only their voices telling Malone and Jefferson where they were.
“Inspector Malone,” said Lewton, “we have to make up our minds whether to rush that house across the street or just wait till they come out. Assuming, of course, that the people over there are the ones we want. If your wife and
Mrs Forte are across the street, do you want us to run the risk of rushing the place?”
Malone could only dimly see the other men, but he could read their minds. He didn’t blame them for what he read there; he had tried the same trick himself in the past. No cop ever wanted to take the whole blame for something that might go wrong.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “Back home I’ve been in two cases in the past twelve months where the set-up was something like this. Not a kidnapping, but blokes wanted for armed robbery. At the first place the bloke gave up without a struggle - he had a gun but he didn’t even fire a shot from it. The second bloke went berserk - he even killed the dog he had in the house with him. It was panic as much as anything else - but he wounded two of my mates before he finally blew his own brains out. Fifty-fifty, that’s my experience of what chances you’ve got when you rush a place. I want better odds than that for my wife.”
Lewton sensed that the men around him agreed with Malone. It relieved him of a decision he would not have cared to make alone. There would have been no future at all for a captain of detectives who gave an order that might have resulted in the death of the Mayor’s wife.
“Okay, we’ll play it safe. We’ll have Birmingham call his house, talk to his daughter if she’s there. If it’s not her in there and whoever it is refuses to come out, then we’ll sit it out till daylight.”
“Is the Mayor on his way?” Malone asked.
“Only if we know for certain that his wife is across the street.”
“What happens at daylight, if they refuse to come out?”
Lewton was glad of the darkness of the room. “Then I think it’ll be time for a collective decision.”
Lisa, struggling up out of the abyss of exhaustion, heard the phone ringing out in the living-room and in the other bedroom. It went on and on, with that monotonous insistence of the mechanical, and in just a few moments it was rubbing rawly against her nerves: Answer it, for God’s sake answer it! She looked across at Sylvia, who was also wide awake now.
“Someone must know we’re here! God, why don’t they answer it?”
“Listen! I think they’re arguing- “
Carole, pulling a wrap round her, had come out into the living-room, followed by Abel, who was still naked. The phone went on ringing, urgently and yet patiently, and in the corner of the room the television screen still showed its silent images. Carole reached for the phone, but Abel grabbed her hand.
“Don’t touch it, I tell you! It’s a trick- “
“What sort of trick? Who knows we’re here?”
“It could be your folks - “
That had been one of her few mistakes, to tell him that this cottage was her family’s; it would be the one clue he would have to her identity when she finally left him and disappeared again. The information had slipped out when he had asked her why she had chosen Sunday Harbor; even after four years she had not become fully professional at retaining her cover. She was proving every minute, as the phone was underlining now, that she was no more than an amateur in this whole game.
She drew her hand away from the phone, but he still kept his grip on her wrist. “You sure you didn’t tell someone tonight we were here?”
“No!” She could see suspicion and anger making him ugly; she sought desperately for a reason why the phone
should have rung: “Someone must have seen the car outside - “
“I’ll go put it in the garage.” He let go her wrist, massaged it gently with his fingers as the hardness slipped out of his face. “I’m sorry, baby. If some bastard is being curious we gotta get outa here before daylight.”
“Where shall we go?”
“Out to the boat - there’s nowhere else.”
Her parents’ boat, anchored at a mooring off the yacht club, had been another reason she had chosen Sunday Harbor. She knew how to handle it and it would have been easy to slip away in it during the time Abel would be away dumping both the car and the women. She would have been almost across to Bridgeport before he could have got back to Sunday Harbor.
The phone stopped ringing. Abel looked at it, then in the sudden silence lifted his head. “The storm - it’s going, baby! That’s only rain! We’re gonna be okay!”
He grabbed her, kissed her, then went quickly back into the front bedroom. Carole remained standing in the living-room, still afraid and now suddenly dispirited. A commercial had come on the television screen, but she stared at it without really seeing it. A woman walked into a bathroom, looked down into a toilet; in the water of the bowl was a motor cruiser, on its deck a handsome man in yachting cap and blazer; silently he offered the woman a package of toilet cleaner, then the cruiser slid away, presumably down the sewage pipes to a larger and less polluted pond. All at once Carole became aware of what she was seeing; suddenly angry with the imbecility of it all, she switched off the television set. The pinpoint of light died away on the darkened screen, the obliterated image of the announcer who was about to introduce the repeat of a special message by Mayor Michael Forte.
Abel came out, dressed now and pulling on a raincoat. “Get some clothes on, honey. Then you better get the dames dressed while I clean up around here.”
He went out through the kitchen, opened the back door. It was still dark, but he could tell at once that the rain was coming straight down now, not beating almost horizontally as it had been. He pulled up the collar of his raincoat, closed the back door and ran through the rain and round the corner of the house to the driveway. He was about to pull open the door of the car when the searchlight beam hit him. He staggered back against the wall of the house as if he had been hit a physical blow; he threw up his hands against the blinding glare and turned his face away. A cry of anger and shock escaped him, then he spun round and ran back into the house. He slammed the kitchen door shut, locked it and leaned against it, breathing heavily and trembling like a man who had just, unwittingly, put one foot over a precipice. Then he heard the phone in the living-room start to ring again.
In the kitchen of the house across the street Cartwright held the phone to his ear, then raised a warning hand to the others waiting around him. “This is the FBI. We have you surrounded. If you come out with your hands up, you won’t be hurt.”
Abel, on the other end of the line, snarled, “Screw you! You bastards get away or something’s gonna happen here you won’t like!”
Cartwright put his hand over the phone, looked at Lewton. “You better withdraw that squad car with the searchlight, Ken. This guy, whoever he is, sounds nasty.”
“Is my daughter there?” said Willard Birmingham. “Ask him if I can speak to her.”
Cartwright spoke into the phone again. “Is Julie Birmingham there?”
“Who?” Abel’s note of puzzlement was genuine. Who, for Christ’s sake, was Julie Birmingham? He had not bothered to look around the cottage since they had been here, but he had found nothing in his casual scrutiny of the rooms that Carole
might be anyone but who she said she was. Now he looked at her and all at once knew who she was.
He felt suddenly even more angry; but what was worse, he also felt empty. Christ, why hadn’t she trusted him all the way? What other lies had she told him? “You Julie Birmingham? That your real name?”
Carole (Julie: it was a name she had never really discarded in her mind) hesitated, then nodded. “Who is it? Is it my parents?”
Abel stared at her, beginning to hate her. Jesus, how had she conned him, got him into this ? He was still getting over the shock of the searchlight blazing at him out there in the driveway and he could feel the nervousness in his hands, the beginning of another headache. He spoke into the phone again. “Who wants to talk to her?”
Across the street Willard Birmingham took the phone in the kitchen while Lewton went through and picked up the extension in the hallway. The curtains in the living-room had been drawn and the lights turned on; advertising where the police were did not matter now, unless the kidnappers were stupid enough to start sniping at the house. If they did that, then Lewton hoped Commissioner Hungerford was out here by that time to make the next decision.
Willard Birmingham said, “I’d like to talk to my daughter - please … Julie?” For a moment he looked as if he were about to break down; his face went slack and grey and he looked with pain at his wife. She stood close to him, her ear pressed against the phone as he held it to his own ear. Birmingham recovered and went on, “Julie dear, what’s going on ? How did you get into this terrible mess ? Do you have the Mayor’s wife and Mrs Malone with you?”
Julie (Carole: the name no longer meant anything, it was useless to her from now on) did her best to keep her voice steady. “Daddy, I’m sorry about this - I didn’t want you and Mother involved - “