Dr. Morelle stepped inside. The atmosphere struck chill and damp on their faces. The gloom was suddenly illuminated by a flickering halo of light from Dr. Morelle’s cigarette-lighter. He went forward, Miss Frayle practically treading on his heels. “Steps go down under the church, probably to the crypt,” he said. He spoke quietly, yet his voice had a strange echoing sound.
Silently Miss Frayle followed him slowly down the worn steps. The movement of the tiny flame cast grotesque dancing shadows on the white chipped walls. The air became chillier and stale, with the damp smell of moss in their nostrils. The steps turned sharply and opened out into a small space. A faint gleam of daylight seeped through to the flagstoned walls. Miss Frayle noticed that it came through a hole in the ceiling, this proved to be the end of a crude ventilator-shaft, and when she stood beneath it she could see a small grid covering the opening at ground level.
“I should estimate this to be directly under the church,” Dr. Morelle was saying, glancing up. His voice was low yet in the confined space it sounded boomingly in Miss Frayle’s ear. He held the flame of his lighter up close to the opening. “It has been excavated recently.”
“By the man I saw?” Miss Frayle spoke in a tiny whisper.
Dr. Morelle was remembering the trampled-down path through the grass and weeds to the vestry-door. He shrugged non-committally. “This was once probably a private vault,” he said. “It isn’t large enough for anything else. An old tomb there.” He indicated a long coffin-shaped slab of stone and was rewarded by a shudder from Miss Frayle.
“I think we ought to go,” she said, nervously.
But Dr. Morelle had moved to the coffin-like stone and was applying the flame of his lighter to a small oil-lamp he had seen. He broke off and said: “This lamp is still warm.” Miss Frayle gave a start as he held up the lamp, now lit.
In its light there was a table against one wall, and nearby stood something covered by layers of sacking. Dr. Morelle gave it his attention for a few moments. Miss Frayle gazed at him over her horn-rims. His gaunt features seemed carved from ivory in the flickering light, his eyes dark, sombre and narrowed beneath his black, craggy eyebrows. A wisp of smoke curled from his cigarette as he moved in and pulled the sacking away to reveal something that glinted dully.
“Machinery?” Miss Frayle said wide-eyed. Dr. Morelle was staring down reflectively. Miss Frayle drew in her breath. “It looks like a printing-press.”
“Precisely, Miss Frayle,” Dr. Morelle said.
Chapter Nineteen
EVEN THOUGH THE afternoon sun was warm, the terrain appeared to him bleak, uninviting. He thought it was a good place to bury yourself; and he supposed it couldn’t be better for what was hatching out in the darkness of his mind.
“This is Pebcreek,” the girl beside him said. “This is the village.”
All that took his attention was the police-station, which brought a faint grin to his face. He made with the chat about the scene and drove along the street. It was not like driving the Merc. The car he’d hired was an old model, a popular make. He didn’t want a flashy heap anyway. Not this time. Something ordinary that wouldn’t attract too much notice in this backwater of a place.
“Follow the road, along by the river.”
He nodded and put his foot down when they cleared the village. The road was too snaky, the surface too poor for any speed. He sat silent at the wheel as the car rattled along, the smile on his face covering the thoughts behind his pale eyes. He was looking forward to the end of the trip. He’d come a long way. He thought it was going to be worth it.
He wasn’t so sure of the sort of welcome that awaited him, but so what? He figured he held all the cards. So if the guy had changed, if he had settled down to scratch a living from a seedy waterside pub? There were still links with the past.
The car dropped down from a shallow hill towards a hump-backed bridge and he eased his foot off the accelerator. He could see a creek twisting in from the river, but as they descended the water was hidden from them by a high river wall. Ahead, where the wall levelled out with the road he saw a brick and boarded building of low, rambling shape. His glance shifted momentarily beyond and took in the jetty, a moored boat, a car nearby, a cottage opposite, across the road. It was pretty much the way he expected and it suited him okay. He glanced at the girl beside him.
“This is it,” she said. “This is all there is of Dormouse Creek.”
“You like it, don’t you?” He took his hand off the wheel to fondle her hair above the nape of her neck. “I guess it kind of grows on you.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I never thought Dad would settled down here, but he has. Gossips with the locals in the bar, or wanders the marsh with his gun. The living’s not much but he’s never been so happy.”
He nodded, his gaze narrowed a little, taking the scene in. “It’s got something. Sort of draws you, land and water all mixed up like this.” He was looking at the inn, with its sign sticking out, weather-beaten and faded. He couldn’t see how anyone could stick it when they’d known the gilt and plush, easy living.
The girl’s dark, lustrous eyes were shining with anticipation. “It’s a nice surprise for him,” she said.
“A very nice surprise,” he said to her.
He turned the car off the road and, following her directions, drove through a gate between a shed and a lean-to outbuilding that formed one end of the house. He stopped the car in the yard and got out.
He could see the back of the place. It was brickwork so far as the ground-floor window-sills; the rest of it was built of wood. Long, black overlapping boards. At some time in the distant past, the house had been given an extension. One part of the roof was higher than the other. The older portion was roofed with tiles, the addition was slate. The tiles were breaking away and so was part of the gutter. It drooped down at the end waiting for the next high wind. The drain-pipes were rusty at the joints, they emptied into two round water-butts, one close to the backdoor, the other at the far corner of the house. There weren’t many windows at the back, just three on the ground floor and two up. The glass looked smeared, as if recent rains had the salt of the marshes in them and had left it on the windows.
He followed the girl to a narrow wooden porch. He had a glimpse of flower-beds and shrubs and beyond, fruit-trees. She rattled the latch of the back door and eventually the catch was released. They went into a low, dark scullery. A low, grubby sink with a pump over it beneath the small window. A massive copper jutting out from the wall opposite. Round the walls shelves of old bottles, some with candle-ends in them. An old dresser lined one wall with a load of junk on it. Oil-lamps, cans, a reel of string and paper cluttered its top and shelves. There was nothing else in the scullery. Nothing, he thought, but spiders and flies. It wasn’t so much that it was dirty, it was just the sort of place that would never look clean. It stank of poverty.
The kitchen looked better. The windows were larger and one of them was open. The wallpaper had faded, but it was still a light colour. There wasn’t much furniture. But it had been kept dusted and polished. There was a table in the centre with a swinging oil-lamp above.
A heavy silence hung on the musty, dampish atmosphere.
“He’s certainly not expecting you,” he said.
She was frowning. She crossed to the open window, looking out. She turned to him again. She came back across the room to the door, to call out into the passage. There was no reply. “I think I know where he is,” she said. “Stick around, I’ll get him.”
“Where’ll he be?”
“Not far,” her tone was suddenly evasive.
“Shall I come with you?”
She shook her head and started to move down the passage towards the scullery, but he caught her by the shoulders.
“Give me something to think over, hon, while I’m waiting.” He took her in his arms and kissed her lingeringly. Breathless, she drew away, turned and went out. He grinned after her thinly. He took a packet of cigarettes out of
his pocket, tapped a cigarette from it and his gold Cartier lighter flamed into life. He began to pad along the passage to the stairs. From there he could look into the bar. Over the doorway was a stuffed wild-fowl in a glass case. The floor of the room was just rough boards. Oil-lamps in wall-brackets and the plain varnished paper was smoke-stained. A dart board opposite the outside door, the wall all around it pitted with dart-marks. A couple of sporting-prints on the other wall. Some hard-backed chairs, and wooden benches with deal tables in front of them. The bar itself was little more than a trap in the wall which divided the room from the passage. Just opposite this past the stairs, was a recess with a stand fitted to the wall on which were bottles and glasses, and shelves behind equipped with earthenware and pewter mugs.
Dragging at his cigarette he went down the passage as far as the bar and just beyond it saw the curtained archway leading down a couple of steps into the cellar. He could see the beer-kegs and crates of bottles, but there wasn’t a big stock. The other side of the cellar entrance was a wall showcase, its shelves sparsely furnished with tobacco and packets of cigarettes. A door opposite with a lifting glass shutter opened into a small room furnished with tables, a long sofa and black-hide chairs. He could just make out the inscription on the outside door: BAR PARLOUR.
Two other rooms on the ground floor; but they were no more than half-furnished and had the appearance of never having been lived in.
He paused listening for voices that meant the girl’s and her father’s return. He slipped quietly upstairs. The landing was long and gloomy, paint and paper dark, dull with age. Four bedrooms and a smaller room with a stained, enamel bath in it. There were no taps. A huge enamel jug stood in a china bowl on the washstand, and like the bedrooms, the sloping floor was covered with cheap linoleum and thin mats.
One of the larger bedroom’s was obviously the man’s; it was untidy, the bed still unmade, an air of shiftlessness about it, as if its occupant had no intention of staying any length of time. He went out of the room and down the stairs. The whole place had a dingy, poverty-stricken atmosphere which gave him the creeps.
It was very quiet in the kitchen. The stillness was disturbed now and then by the distant call of a marshland bird seeping into the room. He glanced at his watch. It said a couple of minutes past three o’clock. He noticed that the clock on the wall had gone haywire, it was ticking away like crazy, but the time it gave was five minutes past twelve. He glanced at his watch again. He supposed it explained why the dump was so quiet. So still. It was shut up till opening-time again in the evening. Not that it looked as if it did a roaring trade even when it was open, at that. But the girl had explained how it didn’t bother her old man that he wasn’t rushed off his feet with customers.
The sudden movement behind his back brought him pivoting round on his heel, his right hand instinctively starting to reach up to the left side of his jacket. Then he relaxed, he lowered his hand again slowly and his face creased in a smile at the man who stood there.
He had come in through the door that led to the scullery and outside, the way the girl had gone. His face was sunburnt, but there was the same old greyish tinge beneath the tan. His hair was thin and brushed back from a bony forehead. He looked as if he hadn’t changed a bit, the other man thought. He was wearing a nondescript suit with an open-necked shirt, above the collar of which his Adam’s apple worked convulsively, his eyes were protruding out of their sockets, as if he was staring at a ghost.
“Hello, there,” Johnny Destiny said, making it sound casual, though his voice rasped a little, and without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.
And he moved easily forward and held out his hand to Danny Boy.
Chapter Twenty
DANNY BOY RECOVERED himself quickly. After that first shock Johnny could see the way he pulled himself together sufficiently to say: “You staying long?”
Johnny’s grin broadened. This was how he’d figured it would go. This was how he’d hoped the other would take it. This was the way it had to go. He felt expansive now as his pale glance flickered over the familiar figure before him. He knew now he’d played it right with the daughter. The way he had figured it that she’d had only a hazy idea of her fathers’ racket; if she’d been suspicious at all that it hadn’t been quite on the level, he was sure she didn’t know just how far off-track he had been. Like she could know he’d deserted from the British forces in Italy. She could know that. But she wouldn’t know a thing about the Transatlantic caper. He felt sure of that. She wouldn’t know he was wanted by the gendarmes. He hadn’t given the show away and disillusioned her about her old man. Apart from it not getting him any place, it would have antagonized Danny. No point in kicking off on the wrong foot, even if he had to get tough later. And maybe he wouldn’t have to get so tough. But that was up to Danny.
He let his gaze wander around the kitchen.
“Depends,” he said lightly. “You got it nice here. I like these parts. I could use a vacation.” He could read Danny’s mind from the expression on his face. He knew Danny must have read it in the newspapers about him having been done in on the boat train. He smiled to himself at that. Then he tried to figure it out how Danny had taken it. But anyway his arrival like this must have given him one hell of a shock. He really must have thought he was seeing a ghost.
Again he had to hand it to Danny the way he had reacted.
Danny gave a short laugh.
“Not much in the way of entertainment here,” he said. “It’s the world’s end. Not like — like Rome, for instance.”
“I can take Rome, or leave it alone,” Johnny said. “Like I told Lucilla, I go for the simple things.”
The other’s eyes slitted. Johnny had been expecting Lucilla to show with her father, and was beginning to wonder where she’d got to, now he realized that she hadn’t found him and brought Danny along to meet him. She was still looking for her father.
“She brought you?” Danny looked baffled.
“She was going to introduce us,” Johnny said, without smiling. He knew at once that this was the tricky part. Dragging his kid into it, Danny might take a poor view of that.
“I never guessed you knew each other.” Danny turned away, he began whistling under his breath and Johnny’s face unfroze. He watched the other cracking the knuckles of his spatulate fingers, and it made him feel that it was just like old times. It was going to be even more like old times before the world had taken many more whirls. “When the papers said you were dead,” Danny said, and turned back to him, “it came as a bit of a shock.”
“I can imagine,” Johnny said smoothly. “It was just a little gimmick to ensure I’d left no trail behind.” His lips curled back wolfishly. “This other character, I forget who he was, and it doesn’t matter a damn, he had the same gag in mind. He’d spotted me on the boat coming over. He must have remembered me from way back somewhere, though I never remembered him. When he tried to do for me, just like that,” Johnny’s tone sounded quite aggrieved, “I saw him coming, and got mine in first. He’d given me an idea, so I did to him what I figured he aimed to do to me.” He lit a fresh cigarette and it drooped from the corner of his mouth. “I bashed him around with his own Luger so his own mother wouldn’t have known him. The rest was simple. It paid off, too. Well, I thought, I’d be a fool to pass up an opportunity like that.”
Danny nodded slowly. “You always were pretty quick on the up-take,” he said. “Like that time in Brussels, remember? So when I read you’d cashed in your chips, I didn’t break my heart over it.”
“Take it easy,” Johnny said. “I didn’t do dirt on you in Brussels, you know that. It was the Lizard mob who double-crossed both of us. I saw you picked up, but how would I have helped by butting in?”
Danny shrugged as if it couldn’t matter less. “You didn’t tell Lucilla who you were, or anything?”
“No,” Johnny said, “I gave her the label I’m travelling under these days. Same as I didn’t query the name you’re using.” He saw t
he other’s tension slacken, and again he congratulated himself for playing it the way he had.
“So you found out where she was?” Danny said.
“I remembered you talking about her once or twice; then that photo you had of her. It just stuck in the back of my mind, you know, the way things do.” Danny didn’t say anything, the kitchen was very silent except for the ticking clock on the wall, and Johnny could hear his own voice as if he was listening to someone else talking.
“Then I happened to pick up an item of news over the grapevine in Vichy, that you were well under wraps somewhere in this part of the world, and that the kid was working the carney at the place you call Southend. So I thought, why shouldn’t I look you up? And here little Johnny is, dropped in for a cosy chin about old times.”
“You found Lucilla at the Kursaal, and she fell for your smooth gab?”
“You know how it is with me and the dames.” The other spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “She’s a sweet kid, let me tell you that. Real sweet. You should be real proud of her.”
Danny glanced round as if he was expecting the girl to put in an appearance. Johnny explained how she’d gone in search of him. Danny said something about they must have managed to miss each other, though he hadn’t been so far away. The pub hadn’t long closed for the afternoon, customers wouldn’t be dropping in until evening, though they didn’t usually look in at the Wildfowler until late evening this time of the year.
If he hadn’t sensed it, Johnny could hear it in his voice that behind the façade he had thrown up, Danny was definitely shaken by his reappearance in his life.
“Danny,” Johnny said softly, without taking his cigarette out of his mouth. “She don’t need to know a thing. Not the way I figure it.”
“I don’t want to hear the way you figure it,” Danny said, and Johnny saw that suddenly his hands were trembling. “All I want is you should leave me out of it.”
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