After Midnight

by Robert Ryan

  Another detonation, low and dull, and now I could feel a wind coming through the trees, and like charcoal under a bellows the fire swelled and flared, radiating heat and light. The remaining aluminium became a white sun in the woods. Lindy got to her feet.

  ‘Get on the bike,’ I said, as I walked, over and yanked it up. ‘But you can’t threaten to shoot me and hold on tight at the same time.’

  She grimaced and I knew that arm must be hurting like a bastard. ‘Truce?’

  A curtain of fire descended across the pathway ahead. This was no time for negotiations. ‘Truce,’ I answered. She nodded and shoved the Colt into her jacket pocket. ‘Now get on. And put the helmet on.’

  It took a minute before we were both ready and the curtain of fire before us was even fiercer. I licked my lips and they were as dry as the forest floor. I kicked the bike and she stuttered and I found myself saying: ‘Not now, baby. Not now.’ I kicked again; she turned and gave me a half-hearted huff.

  ‘Fuel?’ shouted Lindy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You opened the fuel valve?’

  Instinct had made me flick it off when we had halted. I reached down and turned it on, kicked and the CrossCountry burbled into life.

  ‘Thanks. You know bikes?’

  ‘Used to ride them on Grandad’s farm.’

  I put her in first and rode for the fire, head down, feeling Lindy do the same across my back.

  As we neared I felt my cheeks start to crisp. If the conflagration was deeper than a foot or two, this was going to end here, with no answers, no valediction, just two charred corpses.

  Lindy screamed as we went in, the fire spitting at us with jets of resin-fuelled fire. I closed my eyes. Despite the gloves, my hands felt like they’d been put in an oven. ‘Shiiiitttt!’ I shouted at the top of my voice as an arc of flame shot across my face.

  Then the bike misfired.

  I twisted the grip once more, praying a vapour lock or oxygen starvation wasn’t going to kill the engine and us with it, but it picked up and we were through, into a stand of tall thin pine trees, the shimmering orange wall behind us.

  I took us past them, to where the cool air felt like balm on my skin, and stopped. The crash site looked as if hell had come to earth. The wind was taking the fire slightly to the south, away from us now. It was possible the gap between the deciduous trees and the pines might act as a fire break. I heard the Rangers’ chopper again. They’d know whether to let it burn or not.

  ‘You OK?’ I looked at the arm with its inch of protruding metal. It didn’t seem to have got any worse, but her hand was clenched in a tight fist, the knuckles white.

  ‘Yeah.’ She sat up and looked at me. ‘Jesus.’

  I pulled up my goggles and felt the sting of raw, blistered skin. I looked in the mirror. There were two crescents across my cheek, flecked with burned rubber, my top lip had swollen and my eyes were crimson from the toxic smoke from the plane. Now I felt cold, and I regretted leaving the jumper behind.

  ‘I think we both need a doctor,’ she said.

  ‘You were going to shoot me a minute ago,’ I complained.

  ‘That was before you saved my life.’

  In a movement that made me wince, she reached up and pulled out the metal from her arm, gasping as she did so. I saw her eyes roll in pain, and thought she was about to faint, but she sucked air in through her teeth and then smiled. She flung the jagged triangle into the undergrowth, and flexed the bicep several times. ‘Ow.’

  ‘Lindy,’ I asked slowly, ‘who is waiting for us at the meadow?’

  She blinked her reddened eyes and said: ‘Just an old friend.’

  Thirty-Three

  I KNEW WHERE THEY would be waiting for me. The glimpses I saw as the track twisted through the greenery told me that the field that was our destination sloped up to a thick wall of pines and, just where grass met tree, there was an old rifugio, a mountain shelter, still relatively intact. They’d be in there. As I climbed the bike up the hillside, I took deep breaths to try to ease my scorched lungs. I looked back at the plume of smoke still spiralling from the crash site. The helicopter was a mere speck to the south, on the far side, probably calling in a water dump.

  I reached the edge of the field, which was covered in a thick mat of coarse knee-high grass and nettles, dotted with late wildflowers. I stopped the bike at the bottom of the meadow, killed the engine, and we dismounted. The hut was around 400 yards away up the slope, and approaching it gave me precious little cover. I held out my hand to Lindy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The gun,’ I pointed to her jacket pocket.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You told me this wasn’t meant to happen. Furio wasn’t meant to die. Well, he did. I don’t want to join him.’

  ‘That was an accident.’

  No, it wasn’t. Engines don’t spontaneously combust. Not those old Pratt & Whitneys. The oil pressure fluctuating suggested something else, maybe torn-up rags in the oil tank, an old trick. It meant they would have had to take care of Diego, the nightwatchman, but that was easily done, either by money or force. I put as much iron in my voice as I could manage. ‘I am not walking out there without the gun. Now shoot me or give it to me.’

  I looked into her eyes. They were glazing. She was going into shock. I’d have to worry about that later. She didn’t stop me when I stepped forward and removed the gun from the jacket. I checked the action and said, ‘Wait here.’

  I started tramping into the clearing, kicking up clouds of seeds from the thistles and dandelions, all the time feeling eyes, and maybe even telescopic sights, on me. Part of me wanted to sit down and weep for poor Furio, but I knew that had to wait, too. He’d understand. I had to use the anger at his death to keep me going. I was huffing and sweating again by the time I was a third of the way up the hill. That’s when I stood and shouted.

  ‘This is it. No further. Show yourself.’ I waited. My voice sounded tiny in the mountains. There was no reply, just the ticking of my heart. I was sure I was right though, so I said his name. ‘Come on, Lang. I haven’t got all day.’

  He stepped out from the dilapidated hut, looking incongruous in that remote setting. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, a tailored black coat with velvet collar over the top. In his hand was a walking stick, probably from Swaine Adeney Brigg or some other fancy purveyor of country accoutrements to the Duke of Edinburgh. On either side of him were two of my robbers, Monkeyman and Gutbucket.

  ‘Hello, Kirby.’

  The minders flanking him had weapons, modern small submachine guns. I was within range of them, I reckoned, if they knew what they were about. ‘What the bloody hell have you done, Lang? What have you done?’ I pointed behind me to where the remains of the Beech lay. ‘A man is dead.’

  ‘That wasn’t my doing.’

  ‘No? I would bet every last cent that somehow, in some way, this one lands at your door.’

  ‘Look, I can’t stand here shouting, Kirby. The old throat isn’t up to it. Come closer.’

  ‘And get cut in half by those two?’

  ‘They won’t do that.’

  The movement to my left caused me to spin and I fired two shots at the shadow in the trees. I didn’t think I’d hit him, but you never knew your luck. I swivelled back. ‘Tell him to stay away.’ It had to be Blondie, the third of the trio that had jumped me that night. ‘I’m staying put. You’ll just have to go hoarse, Lang. Tell me what you’re doing here. Then I’ll answer any questions you have.’

  He signalled to his bodyguards to remain where they were and advanced, with some effort, fifty yards through the rough grass. He was red in the face by the time he stopped, but decorum prevented him taking off his coat or loosening his tie.

  We stood facing each other. A list of questions longer than my battered brain could cope with presented themselves. Not least where he had hidden the Land Rover or similar vehicle he must have used to get up the mountain. Finally, I said, ‘You used that poor girl to get a
t me.’

  He pursed his lips, and shook his head. ‘No. She knew what she was doing.’

  I indicated over my shoulder. ‘Which is. why she is slowly slipping into a coma thinking about her dead boyfriend.’

  Together, we looked across the trees to the thinning smoke which marked the funeral pyre. The fire was dying. It seemed as if the entire forest wasn’t going to burn after all. ‘That wasn’t me, Kirby.’

  ‘What was you, then?’

  He threw me something that flashed in the last rays of the sun. I caught it cleanly and examined it. A cartridge case, with a big square dent made by a firing pin in it. ‘It’s from a Sten gun,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ He scratched his cheek, composing his thoughts. ‘A few months ago a body was discovered here. In the hut. Not much left of it. One leg was broken, though, the fracture was very clear. The man had also been shot, several times. Followed by what we assumed was a final bullet through the head. But before that last shot, the victim picked up a cartridge case and gripped it hard. There were no other cases around, so they must have cleaned up after themselves but missed that one, the one in his hand.’

  The shadows reached us, the sudden chill making me shiver, but I didn’t move. ‘To prove it wasn’t the Germans?’ I suggested, holding the case between my thumb and forefinger. ‘Different firing pin on an MP38 or 40.’ They were the most common machine pistols used by the other side, the kind of weapon that Rosario had liked. ‘That was why he gripped it. Post-mortem evidence.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the bullet in the head?’

  ‘We found that still in the skull. Not a Sten. A pistol, perhaps. We wanted to check.’

  ‘Hold on—tell me why I didn’t read about this body.’

  ‘Because the hikers who found the body reported it to the Carabinieri, who told the SISDe, who slapped whatever is the Italian equivalent of a D-notice on it.’

  ‘So Zopatti is one of yours?’

  He laughed and his tone was almost horrified. ‘Hardly. Let’s just say we had certain personal interests which coincided. He’d hit his rubber wall. Like me, he wanted to stir things up, see what bobbed to the surface.’

  I heard a noise behind me and turned, but it was only Lindy, coming out into the open and moving into the last patch of shrinking sunlight. It would be dark soon. We had to get away and down the mountain before nightfall.

  ‘So you stole my gun to check the ballistics, to see if it was me who killed this chap.’ Then when it turned out not to be, he had given the gun to Lindy to make sure she could get me along to this showdown at the appropriate time. Except the plan had unravelled, as all plans have a tendency to do. ‘You thought I’d helped murder him?’

  ‘Yes. It crossed my mind. We needed to flush out whoever had done it, one way or another. I have to admit, you were a candidate.’

  I had a cold hate building inside, but letting it rip through me wasn’t going to do much good. ‘It was Jimmy Morris,’ I said. ‘The dead man was Jimmy Morris.’

  ‘So you were there?’

  ‘No. But no ordinary flyer would think of incriminating his assassins. And no mere dead pilot would bring you out here, Lang—get you to leave your comfy Whitehall desk. It had to be someone you liked.’ I took another step forward. ‘I’ve heard the affection in your voice when you talked about Jimmy—’

  ‘Stop it.’

  It didn’t brook an argument. ‘It means he survived the plane crash. Or …’ I let that tail off.

  ‘He jumped,’ he said with a mixture of sadness and irritation. ‘The bloody fool jumped. Broke his leg. Crawled to the hut. Waited for help. Someone found him and killed him.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps someone who didn’t want to be replaced as BLO.’

  My laughter sounded hard and heartless, but it wasn’t meant to be. ‘You have to be joking. You think I would kill a man just because you were sending someone to stop Domodossola? That was his brief, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To stop the secession by all means necessary?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Including assassination.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘We weren’t specific. By whatever means Jimmy thought appropriate. If Fausto or any of the others kicked up rough, so be it. We just thought it was an idiot idea. We were right.’

  ‘You were wrong. You had to let them make their own mistakes. You made enough in your time. All of us did.’

  I was feeling cold now and my face was hurting. Again I had to fight the urge to sink into the grass and curl up. ‘So the idea was that I would come blundering in, trying to uncover what had happened to EH-148 …’

  ‘Which really is still missing. We didn’t lie about that. Finding it would have been a bonus.’

  ‘Did you put it to Lindy like that? A bonus? It’s more than that for her.’

  ‘We all have our priorities.’

  ‘So I was meant to act like a beater, flushing out anyone who had a guilty secret about the fate of Jimmy Morris.’ He gave me his thin smile. Christ, I thought, talk about Machiavellian. But that was Lang: once a conniving, underhand spy …

  ‘I rather thought that even if you had nothing to do with it, someone would be worried about you finding the plane, because we’d discover our supernumerary was missing, and his parachute and the canisters perhaps, and we would know that EH-148 made the drop anyway.’

  It was my turn to snap. ‘They shouldn’t have. They shouldn’t have done it. They should have just gone home.’ I wondered if he knew that there was only one ground flare. Bill Carr would have argued—correctly—that it wasn’t enough for a man to make a jump. Jimmy Morris must have ignored him. ‘He shouldn’t have gone out.’

  ‘Jimmy could be a very persuasive man. Who can be sure? He may have simply jumped without the pilot’s permission. He wasn’t the sort of chap who liked to abort a mission. We’ll never know.’

  ‘No. But you had to come searching anyway.’

  ‘I did. Call me sentimental.’

  I could think of better things to call him. I heard an animal yelp, far away, its plaintive voice hanging in the thickening air. A wild dog, a wolf perhaps. I looked up at the sky. It was darkening, but there were to be no stars tonight. A layer of cloud was sliding in. A storm on its way.

  ‘So someone tried to stop me flying, by planting dead bodies on my plane, complaining to the military, and Zopatti made sure I did get up in the air.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. He’s looking for some stolen art, of course, rather than the murderer of an Englishman. But we agreed that the two missions might well intersect at some point. And that you might be of some use to both of us.’

  I pointed towards the Beech wreckage once more. ‘That smoke also marks the spot where three trucks were burned out sometime in 1944. I think they were taken from the convoy and driven up here. They must have contained Zopatti’s missing art. There are bodies in them.’

  Behind him, I could see bats darting and swerving as they vacuumed the insects from the dusky sky. ‘I will tell him.’

  ‘I’m not your man, Lang. I didn’t kill Jimmy. I never even knew he got out of the plane.’

  He thought for a few moments before he nodded. ‘No. I don’t believe you did.’ He seemed to shrink a little, his shoulders slouched, and I realised he must have seen sixty pass a while back. Coming up for retirement. I also knew he was doing this off the clock, a personal vendetta to tie up one of his precious loose ends.

  ‘It was a long time ago, Lang. That was yesterday. We’re well into a new day, a bright new world, all ballistic missiles and atom bombs. Twenty years. Who’ll be interested in our war in five or ten years? Nobody. Our time is past. Let’s go home.’

  I heard the blades of the helicopter slicing the air. It would do well to go home, too. Darkness, storms, mountains and choppers don’t mix. I felt a drop of icy rain on my face.

  ‘I can’t leave yet, Kirby. If you didn’t kill him, who
did? Who else wanted Domodossola so badly?’

  I opened my mouth to speak when his chest began to dance, chunks of fabric and sprays of blood flying from it as his knees buckled and he went down.

  His bodyguards began to fire and I did what came naturally—I threw myself down and began to crawl.

  I pumped my elbows and knees as fast as I could back downhill, aware of the zing overhead of bullets coming from the chopper, but not certain they were meant for me.

  ‘Lindy! Get to the bike.’

  The grass around me hummed and thwacked. Those definitely had my initials on them. I risked a glance up and the bubble-fronted Bell was spinning around for another run. ‘Lindy!’

  ‘I’m here.’ She was already climbing onto the CrossCountry.

  ‘Start it!’ I yelled.

  As she kicked and the bike caught, I stood and sprinted as best I could, the thick vegetation tugging at my feet, the hiss of rounds driving me on. I reached the treeline and jumped on behind her. ‘Go.’

  I half-expected her to stall it, but she found first and accelerated away into the trees, turning us to run parallel with the edge of the meadow. I looked up. The canopy was not as dense as I had hoped; they’d be able to see us. We needed thicker tree cover.

  ‘Go down the hill!’ I shouted.

  ‘There are men,’ she retorted. ‘Moving up towards us.’ A series of zips through the air confirmed it. The Bell must have dropped someone down there to sweep up anyone who got out of the field alive.

  The clattering from the helicopter was louder now, and the branches above our heads began to rustle as the rotor-wash caught them. My ears hurt from the thrumming air. I looked up, and for a second the machine seemed to fill the sky.

  A rattle of machine-gun fire came through the leaves and I heard the sound of metal being punctured and felt the bike almost buckle. Lindy noticed a thin, needle-strewn path off to the left and took it. She squealed as branches whipped into our faces and bodies.

  ‘Want to swap?’ I shouted.

  ‘No. I’m OK!’

  ‘Good girl!’

  ‘Don’t be patronising!’