“Not before you’re heard what I’ve come to say.” Johnny took his cigarette from between his thin lips and very slowly blew a spiral of smoke ceilingwards. “I’ve come a long way to say it. Relax, Danny, and listen to what’s on my mind.”
He jerked his head round and stood listening. Danny watched him, then he crossed to the door to the scullery which stood ajar and he pushed it wider. He came back into the room, shaking his head. “Sounded like it was someone,” Johnny said.
“Place is full of noises. It was nothing. But, listen Johnny, the kid’ll be back any minute. She doesn’t know about me. She may have a suspicion I wasn’t on the level during the war and afterwards. But she thinks I’ve levelled out for good. I want her to keep thinking that way.”
Johnny glanced round and let his expression tell the other what he thought of what he saw.
“Don’t kid yourself, Danny. You wouldn’t want to pass up this opportunity, when I’ve drawn the maps for you. Look, I’ll take care of everything. Sure, I don’t aim to take you away from this. You want it should be this way. All I aim is you should be more comfortable here. You haven’t lost your old touch. Why, the mere thought of it sometimes must make your fingers itch. Don’t you see, you and me in the perfect set-up. This place as our H.Q. Miles from anywhere. In a few months we’d make enough to live on for the rest of our fives. I’d clear off. Back to the States, South America, wherever. Danny, we can’t miss.”
“Nothing doing, Johnny,” Danny said quietly. “I’m finished with the racket.”
“Don’t give me that, I bet you could set up operations at the drop of a hat. I bet you got some caper up your sleeve all the time, all you want is someone like me to spark it.” He was half-kidding him, he felt convinced that what the other had said he meant, and that he’d have to work on him quite a while. “Why, I bet you even got a plant ready to go to work for you, some place.” He gave a look around as if suggesting that Danny had a hiding-place on the premises. “You never give up a love like that.” It was then that he could have sworn he saw the muscles in Danny’s hand tighten, and he wondered if for all that he’d only been kidding, he’d hit the spot. Maybe Danny had got ideas, maybe he had got a press stashed away against a time when he could get to work again.
Danny was shaking his head slowly. “Even if it wasn’t for the kid,” he said, “I’m staying out.”
Johnny flicked his cigarette-stub into the empty grate. His mouth was a hard, tight fine. He had a hunch that Danny was lying to him. He felt it in the air that he had a caper set up for himself.
“Your final word, Danny?” His lips hardly moved.
Danny came over to him. He stood there, nondescript and older-looking now than Rome, and Johnny knew that there was still magic yet in those fingers. “No hard feelings,” Danny said, and he sounded as if his heart was in his words. “But you go your way and leave me to stay put. I don’t never want any part of it again. Never. So on your way, Johnny, and good luck go with you.”
“Before I go maybe you should hear my final word.” He drew in his breath between his teeth. To Danny it sounded like a snake when about to strike. “So you think I’m going to pass it up just on account of you not wanting to play ball? It ain’t natural. So how do you leave me? So I’ll tell you. So I got to resort to a little persuasion, to put my side of it to you. If you see what I mean.”
He pulled out the packet of cigarettes, tapped out one and with an affable grin offered the packet to Danny, who shook his head. Johnny took a cigarette for himself and with studied casualness pushed the packet back into his pocket. He caught the other’s glance fasten on his lighter. The look in Danny’s eyes didn’t tell him very much, as he lit his cigarette and took a long drag at it.
“You got Lucilla to think of, like you said,” Johnny said. “But I sympathize with you. She’s sweet, real sweet. You wouldn’t want her to see you wind up in the cooler. Just on account of some sneaking rat went and tipped off the gendarmes about her old man.” The other made a movement, and Johnny grinned, spreading his hands. “You see how it is with me Danny? I’m really serious.”
The other had moved closer, the greyness of his face showing pale now beneath the sun-tan, and he was about to say something, when light footsteps sounded from the scullery and the door opened, Lucilla stood on the threshold, her dark gaze on her father.
“So there you are,” she said.
“Hello,” Danny said, and once again Johnny had to hand it to him for the way he forced his tone to hide the feelings that his words must have aroused in him. “I’m sorry you had to go looking for me, I wasn’t a mile away.”
“I gave you a yell, but there was no reply,” she said. “Anyway, you’ve already introduced yourselves.” She looked at Johnny as if she was hoping they’d hit it off together. “He’s an American,” she said. “We met in Southend, but perhaps you’ve discovered all about that.” She laughed. “He’s very nice, and he wants to stay here for a night or two. You can give him a room, can’t you?”
She glanced at Danny, then back to Johnny again, her eyes bright with affection.
“Sure,” Johnny said, “your pop and I soon got acquainted. I told him how I’d taken a fancy to this neck of the woods, isn’t that right?” He turned to Danny, whose hands were hanging at his sides, the fingers clenching and unclenching again. “Your pop’s real kind, too, he says sure I can rest my weary head for a couple of nights.”
“That’s fine,” Lucilla said, she seemed to be brimming over with happiness as she moved to her father and took his arm. Danny and Johnny stared at each other silently, the former thinking what to say as the girl chatted on, and in answer to the mocking glint in Johnny’s gaze, masked by a cloud of cigarette-smoke.
Although she stood close to him, Danny didn’t realize that Lucilla’s legs were trembling, that her blood was running cold, that she was seeing her father and Johnny through a mist of horrified shock.
Neither of them guessed that she had been outside the door all the time, that she’d heard every word that her father and Johnny had said.
Chapter Twenty-One
HE STRETCHED HIMSELF out on the bed. It wasn’t all that soft, but he’d slept on worse. Slept on better, too. And by hell, he would sleep on better beds yet before he was through.
The sounds of the inn-yard came up to him through the open window, a rooster crowed, a hen clucked, a dog barked in the distance. From somewhere came the croak of some wild bird. He lay there relaxed, that thin smile creeping across his face, that smile of complacency, as he told himself it was all sewn up.
He turned the pages of the paper-backed book he was reading, about guns. It was an American book he’d picked up in Nice a while back. He was interested in guns. He read in a chapter which was devoted to handguns how a .22 pistol loaded with high-speed hollow-point ammunition was no toy, but that unless a man was hit in a specially vulnerable spot, such as between the eyes, a .22 bullet wouldn’t stop him. Not fast enough for safety. A man could have received a mortal wound but could still shoot back. The lightest cartridge that can be depended on to stop a man was the .38 special.
He read on about the comparisons between revolvers and automatic-pistols. The Colt .45 Army semi-automatic pistol, he read, was a powerful gun, generally rated the best military semi-automatic pistol. However, even it was no more reliable than the ammunition it fired, if it misfires, the gun stops. Both hands, and time, would be needed to clear the jammed gun. If on the other hand, a revolver misfires it could go on shooting. The cylinder rolls a fresh cartridge into place regardless of whether the previous cartridge fired or not.
Revolvers, the book said, of .38 calibre or larger are easier to shoot than semi-automatic pistols of similar power. They possessed better trigger pulls. Furthermore unless the pistol was not only loaded but cocked, which was highly dangerous and asking for trouble, it was slower with the first shot than a double-action revolver. He nodded his head to himself and reflected that the larger calibre semi-automatic pist
ol is okay only in skilled hands, and most who know how to shoot it prefer a revolver, which was why he preferred a revolver.
He went on to read how both Colt, and Smith and Wesson made a wide variety of revolvers. The target-revolver, the K 38 Smith and Wesson, for example, with its modern short action and broad hammer spur. But this gun had a six-inch barrel, it was a little large to keep in a bedside drawer.
Both Colt, and Smith and Wesson, he knew, made guns with shorter barrels. He remembered the standard police revolver he’d once had, before he’d come East, a four-inch barrel with fixed sights, chambered for a .38 special cartridge. A gun with a longer barrel wouldn’t be so easily and quickly drawn from a holster. The fixed sights were all right, too. Then he’d once owned a Smith and Wesson combat model, which had a Baughman front sight, rounded so it wouldn’t catch in the holster, an open-front holster made by J. H. Martin of Calhoun City, Mississippi, and known as the Berns-Martin. It held the gun with a spring-clasp. In drawing the gun you didn’t have to lift it out of the holster, you simply pushed it forward and down.
He lit himself another cigarette and dragged at it for a while, thinking of the man in the boat-train railway-compartment. The funny, surprised look when he’d shot him clean between the eyes. Just like it said you should stop a man in the book. He began reading some more. Shooting for keeps, he read, requires far less precision. But it does require practice. You may have to shoot in the dark, you may have to shoot fast. You point the gun at waist level and shoot. Shooting from waist height, means you must depend on pointing the gun as you might point your finger.
He read that you should grip a revolver as if you liked it. Your grasp should be high on the gun and firm. The grip of his Colt Detective Special was made small, so the gun was compact. He couldn’t find room for his little finger, so he curled it under the butt. Shooting the .38 special cartridge made it jump a bit and it had a loud bark, owing to the short barrel. Neither the jump nor the bark ever hurt anyone.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood up. He smoothed his silk shirt and crossed to the dressing-table. Expertly he strapped the Detective Special in the holster under his left arm-pit. He wasn’t left-handed.
He put on his jacket and glanced at his watch. It was pushing seven o’clock. He went downstairs. He thought he’d never had it so good.
Lucilla found him lounging back on a chair in the kitchen, relaxed, a cigarette drooping from his lips and a half-empty whisky glass in his hand. He pulled her down to him and kissed her, and she made her kisses as warm and lingering.
After the big act she had put up she had continued to keep mostly out of his way. She had said nothing of what she had overheard to her father on the few occasions she had seen him alone.
She had given the impression to them both that she took it for granted Johnny was staying, and had busied herself getting one of the bedrooms ready. Johnny had gone out to the car for his suitcase and later, when he had unpacked and gone downstairs, she had taken the opportunity to creep back to take a look at his room. Her heart racing she had glimpsed through the drawers in the dressing-table. But the few belongings he had brought along had told her nothing.
At the same time she had been alert, listening, observing Johnny and her father, watching for any sign that hinted that there was going to be another scene between them, like the one she had overheard a few hours earlier. But there was no sign, Johnny behaved with his usual relaxed charm, and there was little to indicate what her father was thinking. He was a little quieter perhaps, but that was the only difference.
She wondered anxiously if he was in fact seriously considering Johnny’s proposition. Perhaps, she thought, he had given her father time to think it over. Maybe that was what her father was doing. A few more hours of Johnny around, another threatening scene when she was out of the way, and her father might give in; accept Johnny’s blackmailing terms.
She heard her father’s voice in the bar-parlour. He was gossiping with one of the customers. She wondered what he was really thinking, what agonies of anxiety and apprehension now filled his mind. She had known about the glinting machine hidden under the sacking underneath the old church for a long time. She had spotted her father going to the place one night and without realizing the significance of his surreptitious errand she had followed him. Intrigued, but scared that what she had done might arouse his anger, she had not made her presence known. After he had left, she had taken a look around.
She couldn’t guess what the machinery was in aid of. But the mere fact that her father had secreted it in this isolated place, where the chance of it being discovered was negligible, and that he had not confided in her about it, was sufficient. She had always sensed that there was something in his past that was sinister and which he was trying to live down, to forget. She had felt sure that this strange hide-out she had stumbled on held some dark secret from the old days. Something to do with his travels abroad, after the war. Something which was crooked.
As Johnny’s hands caressed her, and she held him in the sort of embrace she knew he was expecting of her she felt the sinister bulge under his arm. She felt him tense and shift his position, so that her arms no longer held him in the same way. He didn’t say anything. Nor did she.
The shock of learning that he was a criminal, a murderer, that he’d killed the man on the train, had faded a little. She was no longer hearing his voice, cold, inhuman so that she’d barely recognized it. She would have sworn it was a stranger if she hadn’t known it was her father and Johnny there. The suffocating feeling that it was all a terrible nightmare had left her.
Whatever her father may have done, she had told herself always, it was past and done with. She had helped him begin afresh. She’d imagined that it wasn’t easy for him to break with the mode of life he’d led, that he still hankered after his old ways. Even to the extent of making the old crypt in the ruined church into some sort of secret workshop. One day, she had promised herself, she would tackle him about it. And if it was something sinister, to do with his shadowy past, she would make him promise to destroy the lot. Dump it all into the river.
And now this man who was Johnny Destiny, though he called himself by another name, had to come on the scene. He had to fool her into leading him back to her father. She understood now. He had used her to that end, everything he’d told her, his interest in her background, where she lived, had all been part of the crafty plot he’d weaved to fasten on her father again.
It was not so much her own feelings, as the danger she had brought upon herself and her father by bringing this man to The Wildfowler. This ruthless murderer from the past who had come to threaten, to blackmail her father into working with him again. She recalled somebody at the Kursaal saying something they’d read in the papers about the death of a man on a train at Victoria.
Johnny Destiny had killed him and left his body with battered head to appear as if it was himself. “I saw him coming and got mine in first. I bashed him around with his own Luger so his own mother wouldn’t have known him.” Destiny had killed a man and planted on the victim his own identity. His motive, to destroy any trail he may have left; to ensure he could continue his life of crime, safe in the knowledge that the world thought him dead.
And drag her father into the abyss with him.
“Drink up, Johnny,” she said, holding out her hand for his glass.
“Sure, hon.”
He kept his eyes on her as he knocked back the remainder of the drink. They followed her when she went across the room. She went and got him a large whisky. She gave herself a gin. She drowned the gin in tonic water.
When she had come back he had the drink in his hand; she raised her own glass.
“Here’s to us, Johnny,” she said.
“Just you and me, hon,” he said.
She leaned back in a chair and crossed her legs, smiling at him. His eyes focussed on her legs, and then moved upward until he was looking into her face. He crooked a finger at her.
“Come and si
t close to me, hon,” he said. “I been missing you.”
“You sound like you really mean it, Johnny, darling,” she swept a dark curl of hair over the flimsy collar of her loosely-fitting shirt and the movement exposed a creamy shoulder. “Wonder if your miss is as great as mine?”
He took another gulp from his glass and studied her again.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“I’m stifled.” She laughed at him, her eyes very bright. “It’s so warm in here.” She threw a glance at the window. “It’s lovely outside.”
“So let’s go see.” Johnny got to his feet. He crossed to her and let his hand stroke her hair and come to rest on her bare shoulder. “You going to take me for a walk?”
She took his hand and squeezing it teasingly pressed it against her cheek.
“I’ve got a favourite spot not far from here,” she said. “Out by the creek.”
Johnny lifted her up gently until she was standing beside him.
“That I have to see, hon,” he said.
They went out through the back way, she led him across a patch of spiky grass up on to the river wall, following the creek towards the river. The evening was warm, the ripple of the tide a faint whisper seeping across the mud-flats. A distant white haze was beginning to drape the river and marsh, it would become a curtain of muslin in the moonlight.
Behind them a pair of eyes, speculative in the greyish face with the hair thinning over the bony forehead, watched them until they were out of sight. But if they had been oblivious that their departure from The Wildfowler had not been entirely unobserved, neither had for a moment suspected that they had come into the range of vision of someone else who had caught them and held them sufficiently long enough in the lens of a pair of powerful field-glasses.
Johnny glanced at the dark, sultry-looking girl beside him, as if he sensed her anticipation. She led him down off the wall on to a grassy plateau that fringed the high-water mark. This was formed by the wall curving sharply into the marshland and then out again into the creek. The patch of grassland inside stretched to the edge of the tideline where reeds and sedge-grass flourished.
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