He had just made it – the swirling water took him round the nose on the side farthest from the searching beams of the launches.
His lungs bursting with effort, Paul stopped swimming and lifted his head out of the icy water to take stock of his position.
It was the last voluntary thing he was ever to do.
In the last second of his life, with the calmness of inevitable death on him, he stared along the side of the barge into a steel funnel which meant oblivion for him.
There were two barges, side by side, and he was between them.
Their steel flanks met where the taper of the bows ended but, with the choppy water and the speed of the tug, they were moving apart and crashing together rhythmically as they bore down on him.
Paul Jacobs was carried on the bow wave into the gap. Like a giant nutcracker, with eighty tons on either jaw, the sides of the two barges slammed together, again and again as his body was washed along between them.
What came out at the other end was recovered the next day. It caused a wrinkle of disgust to appear even on the face of the hardened pathologist who examined it at Deptford Mortuary.
The loose ends of the case were stretched over half of Europe.
‘More bleeding work than a dozen straight murders,’ growled Benbow, a few days later. ‘And not even the satisfaction of a pinch at the end of it.’
A contended Bray looked up from an avalanche of statements on his table.
‘I don’t know, we’ve got a few characters in the can … Silver, Irish, Gigal … the skipper of that ship. And that poor flaming radio operator has got a load off his mind.’
Benbow masticated a green pencil as he thought of the complications with the Federal German Republic. Their ship had been arrested, moored in the river and the captain charged with being an accessory to murder. He stoutly denied everything but, even if the Germans succeeded in getting him back for trial at home, he was unlikely to be seen on the high seas for a few years.
Benbow stared out of the window at his blank wall opposite and absently champed on some splinters.
‘Amazing bloke, that Jacobs or Golding or what the hell you like to call him,’ he reflected. ‘He’d have got off under our damn noses again if that Busch fellow hadn’t spotted him. I wonder how his wife will get on. I feel sorry for her.’
Bray stared at the water polo team.
‘Parry said on the phone that she thought it was for the best … but I don’t know. It was a hell of a way to go, between those barges.’
Benbow picked timber from his tongue. ‘Thank God that most of the villains around here haven’t got his brains. If they were all like Golding, I’d give up the force tomorrow and go and raise chickens.’
Bray muttered inaudibly to his blotter, ‘And the eggs wouldn’t have the little lion – they’d have the Red Star!’
The Sixties Mysteries
by
Bernard Knight
The Lately Deceased
The Thread of Evidence
Mistress Murder
Russian Roulette
Policeman’s Progress
Tiger at Bay
The Expert
For more information about Bernard Knight
and other Accent Press titles
please visit
www.accentpress.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Robert Hale Ltd 1966
This edition published by Accent Press 2015
ISBN 9781910939963
Copyright © Bernard Knight 1966, 2015
The right of Bernard Knight to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN
Mistress Murder Page 19