No Ordinary Killing

by No Ordinary Killing (retail) (e

  “Shawcroft’s involvement suggests something of that order. Quite how they were going to do it, I don’t know and to what specific end, I’m not sure. But I’m positive they were going to leak it. Lady Verity was privy to information that came and went from Government House, after all. It’s not unrealistic for her to have come across it, or to have heard something else which led her to taking it to a newspaper. She struck me as a principled sort of woman. Maybe she was blowing the whistle for moral reasons. I like to think it was more than cocking a snook at her husband. Although as for Cox, God only knows. Hate to say, but I think he saw it as an opportunity to make a few quid – ‘sell’ rather than ‘give’. Journalism by cheque book.”

  Brookman, a man who seemed generally unruffled, appeared anxious to Finch now.

  “This is dangerous stuff. Incendiary stuff!” he said, his tone turning purposeful. “And certainly too much for one man … one woman to sit on, by God.”

  He urged Pienaar on faster.

  “Look, who else knows?” he added. “Has either of you told anyone … speculated with anyone?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Good.”

  Brookman patted his jacket. He’d remembered something.

  “Listen, my revolver. You still have it?”

  Finch delved in his pocket and produced the inspector’s Webley. Brookman took it.

  It happened so quickly that Finch had no time to register. The gun’s stock hit him hard and true across the side of the neck, delivered with an expert, whipped blow.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  It was dark and wet. Somewhere up high, off to the side was a chink of light. Finch could not see clearly, his vision blurred. Through the congested blood and mucus he could smell the sea, the salt air, the seaweed and, with it, damp rock.

  Lying on his side on the hard wet stone, granules of sand and shingle were embedded sharp in his cheek. There was the trickle and dripping of water. He could sense splashes and ripples around him. The acoustics, the reverberation, suggested height and breadth.

  Finch tried to move but there was a stab of pain up the left side of his neck from shoulder to ear. It made him feel nauseous.

  He felt the suffocating wad of cloth forced into his mouth – not tied at the back but rammed in roughly. Then he realised – his hands had been bound tightly behind him, as had his ankles. The gag was stifling, his inhalation laboured. He began to panic, forcing his breath into small, involuntary gulps.

  He tried to focus on the light. He heard the squawk of a seagull, then a boom as a breaker pounded outside. He tried not to splutter and to keep his breathing calm, measured – to concentrate on his surroundings.

  He was in a cave, a sea cave.

  There was more squawking, more gulls and then another boom. Though this time it was distant, different, out to sea. He heard a high-pitched whistle …

  Magersfontein.

  … And then …

  CRASH!

  … felt the almighty crack as something – a shell, yes, a shell – exploded, so loud, so concussive on its impact that stones rained down, jolted free from the nooks and crannies up above.

  It was not safe, in any sense.

  He detected a faint groaning. Another person. Female. He called as best he could. The word was muffled.

  “Annie?!”

  He thought he heard a ‘yes’. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he could make it out now – her shape, the long dress. Like him, she was lying on her side, bound.

  He wriggled his chin, working his jaw round in circles. He pushed hard with his tongue. There was leeway in the gag but not much – the cloth, a kerchief, had been rammed in deep, right to the back of his throat. He managed to dislodge it a little.

  “Are you hurt?” he tried this time.

  A muted cry came back.

  “Okay,” he thought it went. “I’m okay.”

  BOOM!

  The rumble was louder, like a vicious thunderstorm, the accompanying whistle more demonic. And then …

  CRASH!

  … Another almighty explosion, more seismic than the first. He ducked his head in vain to deflect the falling debris which showered down hard. Small stones danced on his skull.

  Cape Point. They must be at Cape Point.

  At Christmas dinner the naval officer had told him about it. The warships testing their guns, shooting at tugs or at land targets, perfecting the art of a shore bombardment.

  This cave. No one ever comes here. No one would ever hear them, probably ever discover them.

  He tried to shift himself, to roll over to Annie. She was 10ft away.

  But then came a flicker of orange from the side. The sound of leather soles on rock, the crunch and splash of pool and shingle as men strode towards them. A lantern was swinging.

  With a thud, it was deposited on the ground next to Finch’s face – so close the light blinded him. The heat hurt his eyeballs. He caught a brief and distorted glimpse of himself in the nickel plating. It was not someone he recognised.

  He was jerked from behind, by the elbows, up into a kneeling position. He winced as he was forced to bend his damaged leg.

  His gag was yanked out roughly. He choked and coughed. He mustered what little moisture he could to spit out the aftertaste and could hear Annie doing the same. They both gasped, swallowing in the air.

  Before them stood three men – Brookman and two others he did not recognise. One – older, fatter and bespectacled – wore a tweed suit and had a walrus moustache; a watch chain hung on his waistcoat. His bowler hat seemed too small for his head. The other man was younger, leaner, better tailored.

  The first one introduced himself.

  “Agent Soames,” he offered, flashing some kind of badge in a leather wallet, as if the circumstances were entirely cordial.

  “Rutherford,” nodded the second.

  And then, there he was, a fourth man, stepping out of the shadows, loitering at the back.

  … Payne.

  Annie shrieked, thrown into a panic, as yet unaware of the detective’s duplicity, complicity.

  “It’s him, it’s him! … Inspector, it’s HIM!”

  “Now, now, Miss,” Brookman soothed. “Let’s not make this any more difficult than it has to be.”

  And now Finch understood – Brookman’s ‘regret’, his ‘sorrow’ about Annie getting caught up in this. And ‘Dood’ … Was that last bit really necessary? In Afrikaans, Finch knew this much, ‘dood’ meant ‘death’. That was with whom they had their appointment. Their final judgement.

  Payne remained impassive, disinterested. It was the first time Finch had been able to get a good look at him. And now the penny dropped. The mud … Magersfontein … It was him, the wounded lieutenant who, in his delirium, had whispered ‘Moriarty’.

  But how … why?… What on earth?

  “Seems my colleague Mr Payne owes you a debt of gratitude, Captain Finch,” pronounced Soames, like a grandee at a prize-giving. “It was thanks to you that he got through the lines that day. The late Major Cox had been uncharacteristically smart in anticipating his own tormentor’s arrival. Knew we wouldn’t stay bottled up in Kimberley for long. There are ways and means of getting out.”

  Kimberley?

  “Cox was unbelievably fortuitous in having you deliver Payne to him broken and incapacitated,” he added. “Putting him under lock and key. What Cox hadn’t gambled upon was our man’s resourcefulness; that he would escape his guard and continue pursuit.”

  Rutherford, chuckled.

  “Though retrieving the documents proved more difficult than we’d expected,” Soames continued. “Our fault for trusting that fool Rideau.”

  It was Brookman’s turn.

  “Rideau had convinced us that Cox’s papers were in his possession, or at least available to us via an associate … this Moriarty … and that he could procure them for us for a fee.”

  Said Rutherford: “In which case, Captain, we are grateful – and with no sma
ll amount of irony – that it should have been you, too, who delivered the goods to us … And absolutely for free.”

  Soames turned to Brookman. For all the horror of their predicament, he really did sound like he was on stage at a village fête.

  “And it is thanks to the professionalism of our friends in the Cape Police here,” he beamed, extending his palm to indicate the detective, “that we have also managed to restrict access to this vital information. The situation has thus been contained.”

  Nodding his appreciation, Brookman reached inside his jacket and pulled out the manilla envelope. Like the scroll of an honorary doctorate, he presented it to Rutherford.

  “Inspector,” nodded the agent in thanks.

  What happened next occurred so swiftly and without suggestion that Finch could barely comprehend it, his head echoing with the disbelieving scream of Annie.

  In the blink of an eye Payne stepped forward, nonchalantly raised his pistol and with such devastating violence and volume – the percussive echo ringing in their ears – shot Brookman through the chest.

  He crumpled to the floor, life extinguished.

  “Most unfortunate,” muttered Soames. “But a case of what you might call covering our tracks.”

  Finch could hear Annie sobbing now. He couldn’t see her face properly. It was shrouded in a veil of untamed dark hair. But he felt her presence, her tired, scared, confused presence. He yearned to hold her.

  Annie, I am truly sorry.

  And for a moment he understood Ans Du Plessis’s need for all those Bibles.

  “Cowards!” she was yelling now, the fight not over. “Pathetic cowards!”

  “Nurse Jones,” admonished Soames. “Might I ask you to keep control of your emotions. This is no time for hysterics.”

  If Brookman could be eliminated in the pursuit of Cox’s documents, there was little hope, Finch knew, that they would spared.

  “They got Rideau, too, Annie,” said Finch. “Last night.”

  Brookman lay there in front of them. On his back, he looked as serene as if he’d just taken pause after a heavy Sunday picnic on a glorious sunny riverbank, his black eyes twinkling up in silent post-prandial contemplation.

  You miserable two-faced bastard, Brookman.

  “Not one of the Chosen People, after all,” mused Rutherford. “Unlike yourself. As you’ve probably guessed, you weren’t selected at random. The Inspector proved an expert fisherman. You were a juicy bait for us to dangle.”

  ‘Were’ a juicy bait. He already existed in the past tense.

  “You even gave up Lady Verity’s letters,” Soames added. “Fortunately we’ve managed to nip that scandal in the bud.”

  “I don’t get it,” snarled Finch. “Why run round chasing after documents … after Moriarty … offing people left, right and centre when you had Cox right there. He could have led you anywhere you wanted.”

  “Because that idiot Rideau went and killed him,” Rutherford snapped.

  “Rideau?”

  “Cox’s error was that he’d entrusted some of what he knew to Rideau, including that the document had been passed on to someone … or as we now know something … called Moriarty. Rideau, pathetic little addict, thought he could extract some reward out of the situation – blackmailing Cox for pharmaceuticals in return for not spilling the beans about it … or the Lady Verity affair for that matter … then trying to extort cash left right and centre from those in the hunt, on the basis that he was the gatekeeper to the information.”

  “Got to hand it to Cox,” conceded Soames. “He threw everyone off the scent with that Moriarty trick.”

  It was starting to fall into place for Finch. It was Rideau who had got wind of Cox revealing the documents to the press. Cox had genuinely been planning to expose the story about gas warfare and in an entirely proper manner, but then Rideau popped up, queering the pitch, offering Shawcroft money for the same information, once it came his way – ‘Your man … a big price.’

  Presumably Rideau was doing so to save his own neck, to procure the documents then deliver them to the secret service as he’d promised … though, again, for a fee.

  Cox, you were acting honourably all along.

  “Cox had been harassed by Rideau in the months before the war,” said Rutherford. “But this time, when Cox arrived back on leave and Rideau immediately got up to his old antics, Cox had had enough. He called his bluff by procuring some laudanum for Rideau, as requested, but then withholding it. He’d hoped to bring Rideau to heel but instead it provoked him into a rage.”

  The row outside the chemist’s shop.

  “That night Rideau took advantage of Cox’s inebriation at the Officers’ Club,” explained Soames. “Saw that Kilfoyle had put him in a cab, drunk, then hopped in himself. Started rooting around in Cox’s pockets for the laudanum bottle, but couldn’t find it. Then, in a fit of pique, he killed him by stuffing his own handkerchief down his throat.”

  Rutherford gave another derisive snort.

  “The bloody bottle was right there in Cox’s coat all along. He’d missed it. At the Somerset Road Cemetery our friend Payne sneaks on board, too. Had been following behind and was alarmed to see that Rideau had not only got into the cab but had killed Cox to boot.”

  “Thought he’d teach Rideau a lesson,” said Soames. “Pulled out the kerchief, whipped out the laudanum and poured the whole damn bottle down the dead Cox’s throat, right in front of his very eyes … before replacing the kerchief again. Showed Rideau who was boss … we still needed him at this point as our lead to Moriarty, of course. Payne then threw the coat with the bottle in the pocket out of the cab just for good measure, just to spite Rideau.”

  “Of course Rideau was then forced to jump out and root around in the dirt for it like a pig,” described Rutherford. “Poor bloody cabbie meanwhile is so bloody drunk himself, he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on under the canvas.”

  Finch spluttered, too inaudibly for his inquisitors.

  “You what?” asked Rutherford. “Spit it out, man.”

  “Cox’s coat. How did it end up with Shawcroft?’”

  “Aha. Didn’t crack that did you? Originally, unbeknown to everyone else, Cox wasn’t meant to go straight home. Had a clandestine two o’clock rendezvous with Shawcroft at the cemetery gates. Our intrepid reporter had become particularly exercised, what with this Rideau suddenly turning up and trying to put in advance order for the Moriarty merchandise, so to speak. Needed to find out from Cox what was going on.”

  Said Soames: “Unfortunately Cox got so sauced that when Kilfoyle put him in the cab and wrote down the address to the guest house, the cab went sailing on past. Shawcroft didn’t like the look of what was going on, so stepped back into the shadows. Cox’s coat came flying out and landed in the mud nearby. He grabbed it.”

  BOOM!

  Another shell. A devastating roar. And …

  CRASH!

  There was more debris showering. None of them, not even Payne, could escape flinching. This time there was little interval between the sound of the guns and the shell’s arrival – like the diminishing pause between thunder and lightning. The shells were exploding closer.

  Soames examined his pocket watch and harrumphed.

  “We haven’t much time.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “This is not a pleasant business. But sometimes such things are necessary to preserve the security of Queen and Country. You find the trial of poison gas revolting? We all do. But the Germans are already working on it themselves. They’ve conducted wholesale massacres of natives up in South West Africa. We are merely keeping up. Freedom, and the means to protect it, comes at a cost, usually, regrettably, human.”

  “You find something honourable in slaughtering innocent people?” Finch protested.

  “Come, come, Captain. There were ten million Indians killed in the Mutiny; 30,000 Sudanese perished in a single afternoon at Omdurman. Today, in Tasmania, they shoot Aborigines for sport.
Why only when victims are white and Christian do you do-gooders get so high and mighty?”

  It was true, no one would had given a damn about the native villagers had it not been for the Suttons.

  BOOM!

  The naval guns rumbled again, louder still. This time, even from within, they could hear the shell shriek through the air.

  CRASH!

  The explosion was so close, so loud, so jarring, it nearly threw those standing off their feet. The blast rocked the cave, the stones rained down harder, painfully harder. The flame in the lamp almost flickered out.

  Soames wanted it wrapped up.

  “We’ll not delay,” he assured. “You will be recorded as having died in battle. We’ll see to that. But first …”

  He nodded to Rutherford, who took the envelope, ripped it open and slid out the sheaf within.

  His face turned to thunder.

  “What the—?”

  He flung the contents straight into Finch’s face – 27 blank white pieces of foolscap paper.

  “Very funny,” he growled. “We can make this as painful as you wish. Now where are they?”

  He nodded to Payne, who stepped forward and slapped Finch hard, open-handed across the cheek.

  Finch, blood pouring from his mouth, grinned maniacally. If they were going to kill him, to kill poor Annie, he would make it as unpleasant for them as possible.

  “This morning, on my instruction, the papers were delivered by a station bellboy to the Central Post Office,” he crowed. “They are now on their way via steam packet to Southampton where they will proceed to an address in London. More precisely, they will be delivered to an attorney colleague who has strict instructions only to open the envelope on the untimely death of myself, Captain Ingo Finch …”

  Payne went to strike Annie.

  “… or Nurse Annie Jones of the New South Wales Army Nursing Service Reserve.”

  Payne stopped.

  The two agents looked at each other. Finch sensed confusion … doubt.

  “Then we’ll have to take our chances,” said Soames.

  Rutherford nodded at Payne.

  “Ladies first.”

  At which Payne went to stand behind Annie and placed the barrel of his revolver to the nape of her neck.