‘I told you. A week or two.’
‘And if I do not say a word …?’
‘If you and your wife do not say a word, if you can pretend that they have gone – oh, to their grandmother, for example – then they will be returned to you at the first possible opportunity. But do not be impatient. It may be difficult.’
‘Why difficult?’ I stormed.
‘Because, Mr Taine, your children and Losch and ourselves will all, I hope, be out of the country tonight. We shall leave by private means, and I shall restore your children by private means. If you inform the police, you might make it quite impossible for me to return them at all. I cannot, you see, simply put them on a Channel boat under the eyes of the world. I must be sure that no one but you is looking out for them or expecting them.’
I begged him to let me speak to the children, but he would not. He apologized for this cruelty – he frankly described it as cruelty – explaining that the children had seen in what direction and where they had been driven.
‘In fairness to them,’ he said, ‘I cannot allow you to have the least idea where you are. If you knew, the temptation to appeal to the police would be irresistible. And now we must hurry, if you are to get back in time to warn your wife. You will persuade her not to be foolish as best you can. Everything else I have arranged for you.’
My mind was in a blank prison of helplessness. How I could get my boys back, how I could face Cecily – those two questions were swirling through my head like a fever dream. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was simply exclaiming to myself.
Yet then, in that room, it wouldn’t have helped me if I could have thought with the clarity of a chess-player. There was nothing I could force Yegor Ivanovitch to do except to kill me. That, it is true, would have badly upset his plans. Cecily, finding herself in the evening without children or husband, would have instantly got in touch with Roland, and the next day the police would be in action all over the country. But would the police succeed in finding this hideout? And, if they did, would they find it in time? Ivanovitch talked of leaving that very night.
‘I shall take you back in the van as you came,’ he said. ‘I need hardly tell you that the registration number which you have seen is false. I shall then leave you with your car, not far from your own home. One of your tyres will be flat, and you will have to change the wheel. That will prevent you following us. And please do not have any fear for your brave boys. We are all fathers. And it is the first duty of a Russian citizen to care for the next generation.’
I submitted to the indignity of being trussed up again. Good Lord, they could have insulted me as they pleased – painted my nose blue or made me sign any confession they wished! I was in such a state that I would have welcomed it. To be humiliated was a sort of expiation for my folly. Never again will I despise those chaps who heap unnecessary dirt upon themselves at state trials.
All went as Ivanovitch had said it would. The drive was longer, and over a rougher road than that by which we had come. At last the van stopped. I was untied and pushed out. Simultaneously the man who had been driving my car to the rendezvous jumped in. The van roared away. My car was standing on the green verge of a country lane, pointing in the opposite direction to that in which the van had disappeared. It had a flat tyre, and the jack was already in position.
It was 3 p.m. I had less than half an hour to get home before Cecily set out to fetch the children from school. My captors had run it fine. If Cecily showed anxiety when she found the children gone, there was little we could do thereafter to hush up their disappearance.
I changed that wheel in record time, and drove straight up the lane to higher ground. In two minutes I was on the top of the downs, and saw below me a long village street which I recognized as Piddletrenthide. In ten more minutes I was at my door.
What happened between Cecily and myself is nobody’s business but ours, and neither of us want to recall it. Had she been, from the start, eager and willing that I should work for Roland, we might perhaps have broken down in tears together over our joint folly. As it was, I was overwhelmed by guilt. There was I, well, alive, unhurt, without the children.
The telephone had been mended. I tore it out of her hands when she insisted on calling the police. I drove it home to her that Yegor Ivanovitch could never take the risk of returning our boys if the police were on the lookout for them; any man seen with them, here or abroad, would be instantly arrested and his contacts and antecedents traced.
I tried to explain to her that, after all, Ivanovitch wouldn’t want to be bothered with them more than necessary; that when he had destroyed all the evidence of those cursed ticks in Tangier, he wouldn’t mind what story I told, and would have no need to hold any hostage for my good behaviour.
I came alive in my eagerness to persuade myself that what I said was true. It is odd that one can show more emotion in convincing oneself than another person. Up to then I had spoken with a dreary, artificial calmness, and called it self-control.
‘Why should he ever return them?’ she cried at me. ‘What about the Greek children?’
‘But what could I do?’ I implored her.
‘You came home without them.’
I moved away to pour myself a drink, to pick up the paper, to do I know not what in order to separate myself from my beloved. Meanwhile she prowled back and forth across the room, dead white, her eyes cold with torture and anger. When I said something – some worthless idiocy to try to restore an unrestorable normality – she shouted at me to leave her alone to think.
‘Losch – was he at this house?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t believe he was.’
‘Why wasn’t he? Oh, pull yourself together and think!’
That last word seemed to be forced from her by a superhuman effort of throat and tongue, as if it were a muscular compulsion upon both of us.
‘Because he couldn’t just vanish,’ I answered. ‘Because he’s a respected citizen of Bournemouth. Ivanovitch must have left him free to clean up his affairs, whether he liked it or not.’
‘Why doesn’t Losch go to the police? Does he expect any mercy when he gets to Russia?’
‘He might,’ I answered. ‘More than here, at any rate. And Ivanovitch has a way with him.’
‘Oh, you!’ she cried. ‘You can’t think badly of anyone who offers you a drink. But Losch?’
‘How can I know what he hopes? They may have offered him a laboratory beyond the Urals where he can’t get into trouble. Something of that sort would be their game.’
‘Would he be watched?’
‘How can I know?’ I repeated hopelessly. ‘Perhaps. But Ivanovitch can’t have men for everything. They may just fetch him when they are ready.’
‘Get him first,’ she said. ‘You and Pink.’
I couldn’t even judge her proposal on its merits. We were so limitlessly apart that nothing either of us said had meaning. I was determined not to compromise the children. I insisted that it was too great a risk.
‘There isn’t any risk that is too great,’ she answered frantically.
I didn’t agree, but her tone stung me at last into constructive thinking. It might well be that Yegor Ivanovitch had left one untidy end in all his quickly improvised planning; after all, it was only a little over twelve hours since Pink had made his disastrous appearance at my car.
Cecily perceived my change of mood – though I do not remember saying a word – and her eyes were fixed on me more kindly.
‘Don’t stay with me,’ she said, ‘and don’t listen to me! But just remember Losch! When you are with Pink, you’ll – oh, you’ll see more clearly. I can’t advise you.’
I wanted her to go away for the weekend – partly so that she wouldn’t be alone in the house, and partly so that I could communicate with her safely. She wouldn’t hear of it. She couldn’t bear the thought of the children coming home – unlikely though it was – and finding the door locked. She understood that she might be condemning hersel
f to remain without news of any of us beyond, perhaps, a very guarded telephone call. Such patient courage is beyond me.
I changed out of my London suit, and took with me kit for a couple of nights. I looked longingly at my old army revolver, but I had no ammo for it, and I’d had enough of empty pistols. Then I drove down to the office and told my clerk that I was taking the children away for the weekend and might not be back till Tuesday.
I found a message on my desk that Dorchester police had telephoned. I called them back, in an intolerable mood of wild hope that they were going to report some suspicious circumstance which might lead straight to my boys, and of dread lest they had found out just enough to force my hand, and no more.
The reason for the call was plain routine. The inspector wanted to know if the person who had talked to a constable in Bournemouth at 2 a.m. had really been me.
‘I didn’t know you collected moths,’ he remarked invitingly.
He was the same inspector who had been just too late to run me in the previous autumn. Ever since he had regarded me as a first-class subject for nods and winks and knowing conversation.
I couldn’t pull myself together, and made some stammering reply to the effect that I’d caught butterflies ever since I was a boy. He thought, I am sure, that I was embarrassed at being detected in so infantile a hobby.
‘What was it all about?’ I asked him.
‘Someone broke into a Dr Losch’s house. Nothing missing, though he did a power of damage in getting out. You ought to know of Losch if you collect moths.’
I nearly said I didn’t, and then had a flash of inspiration.
‘I did just meet him once,’ I replied. ‘He struck me as a nervous sort of chap.’
‘What made you think so?’ he asked at once.
‘Oh, just an impression.’
‘Well, you summed him up all right. He was burning something in his chimney early this morning, and now he has told Bournemouth police that he is so upset he has to go away for a week or two.’
‘You seem to know a lot about the case,’ I said.
‘Oh, as soon as your name came up, I thought I might as well find out all I could, you see.’
‘No,’ I assured him, ‘I wasn’t pinching his spoons for the prime minister or anything. By the way, who was that officious ass who wanted to have me run in?’
‘Just a journalist of some sort who has had rooms across the road from Losch for the last fortnight.’
I wanted to suggest to the inspector that Bournemouth police should check the antecedents of the journalist; but such a lead could only mean that I knew something and that I had not been on the scene by the merest accident. I was in no mood to be questioned. I had to tell the police all or nothing. And if I told them all – you might make it impossible for me to return them Ivanovitch had said.
I got to West Bay about six, and ran my car into a hotel garage where it wouldn’t be seen by every casual passer-by. I was sure I had not been followed, but it was well to assume that I might at any time be in Ivanovitch’s neighbourhood. I didn’t know where in all Dorset he was, and had not the least clue.
The wind had been freshening all day. The headlands of Devon were a long black line in the west with black clouds above them; but the sun was out, and the even, white-capped seas racing across Lyme Bay looked more exhilarating than dangerous. Olwen was not in the little harbour nor in sight. I waited for half an hour, and then I saw a speck of white, part solid and part a moving fountain of spray, coming up from the west.
I watched Pink round the breakwater with beautiful ease, and heard him exchange hails with some official on the quayside. He claimed to be making a passage from the Exe to Portland and coming in for shelter. You couldn’t have disbelieved him. He was clean-shaven and fresh and merry with the sea. His white sweater and shorts, when he peeled off his oilskins, were properly expensive and weather-beaten, and, I thought, in convenient contrast to the dark clothes known to have been worn by Dr Losch’s burglar. He was the very picture of a simple, healthy naval officer on a holiday. It might be considered a little odd that Olwen and her owner belonged to no yacht club, but their respectability couldn’t be questioned.
It was the top of the tide, and he took Olwen up through the lock-gates into the lagoon at the mouth of the Brit. I hailed him with a surprised Good-Lord-who’d-have-thought-to-see-you. He played up splendidly and shouted something about not having met since Alexandria. Then he paddled the pram over and fetched me, and I went down into that desolatingly neat cabin.
‘You’re back from London soon,’ he said.
I couldn’t bring myself to give him more than an unrevealing, brutal outline of the facts. It wasn’t that I had any resentment against Pink. He was in trouble enough himself. My story, when I came to tell it, seemed such a shameful admission of inefficiency and defeat.
Pink was gentle as a mother. I didn’t expect him to have that characteristic. Yet I shouldn’t have been surprised, for I well remember one of my company commanders who was an angel to his men but couldn’t be trusted to obey an order without embroidering upon it some fancy of his own which could involve a whole division. Pink wouldn’t let me blame myself at all. That, I suppose, was what Cecily hoped or foresaw, knowing that she herself could only throw me into worse distress.
‘Any idea at all where they took you?’ he asked, after he had made me repeat and expand my wretched report.
‘No. We went up and down a considerable hill, and we never seemed to pass through a town. That looks like the north of the country.’
‘You can make your mind easy on one score,’ he said, ‘they won’t leave tonight. For one thing, we’re in for a real blow, and for another your cloak-and-sickle man can’t have had time to lay on the private transport he mentioned. After all, I know a bit about it – sea or air, whichever you like. And I tell you we’ve got at least twenty-four hours to play with. Look here, we’ll get back into the harbour while the tide serves. We might want to go to sea in a hurry.’
He took Olwen through the lock gates, and anchored in the outer pool. Except for a little coaster tied up to the quay, we had the port to ourselves.
‘Had anything to eat since breakfast?’ he asked. ‘No, I thought not. Well, we’ll put that right first.’
He produced a cold pie and salad and a bottle of wine. Olwen unexpectedly possessed a refrigerator.
‘When you know you’re going to be alone, and fitting out to be alone,’ said Pink, ‘you can find room for a lot more comforts than usual.’
As soon as I felt a more useful member of society, he asked:
‘What does your missus expect us to do with Losch?’
‘God knows. Exchange him, perhaps.’
‘Bad bargain from their point of view,’ Pink said. ‘The moment you had your boys back, you’d go straight to the police.’
‘I don’t think she had any definite plan,’ I said. ‘She just spotted a hole in their arrangements.’
‘We might as well see if he can be got,’ Pink suggested cheerfully, ‘and open up the game a bit.’
I didn’t much care for opening up the game without having the faintest notion how to win it, but I was too grateful to think hardly of Pink. He hadn’t said a word of his own troubles and of the fate that awaited him when Yegor Ivanovitch supplied the Portuguese police with a name for their set of finger-prints.
‘If we could get Losch down in this cabin, we could probably make him talk,’ Pink went on. ‘I don’t know, old man, where you’d draw a line.’
‘Nowhere – so long as you’ve got a heavy weight to sink what’s left of him.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ he said. ‘Now here’s another line of country. If I were copped, the police would want Losch to identify me. Now, if I gave myself up, would that delay the whole party?’
I couldn’t see that it would. The identification parade could not take more than an hour or two. I was thinking so deeply and selfishly that for a moment the magnanimity of Pink’s offer
went clean over my head.
‘Good Lord, Pink!’ I exclaimed. ‘If I thought it would do any good, I’d probably have handed you over already!’
‘That’s the spirit!’ he said again.
He made himself comfortable on the settee, and poured out some brandy. It was the first drink I had tasted without the feeling that I had no right to enjoy it.
‘How many men has this Ivanovitch got?’ he asked.
‘Well, everything he has done could be done with four and himself.’
‘Four’s a lot. He could spare a man to keep an eye on Losch, or he may be right there in the window himself on top of his typewriter. If he is, shall we just bust in and tear him apart?’
It was a pleasant thought, but my mind was running on ways and means of getting Losch away from all windows and possible watchers. Identification parade – I kept returning to some idea vaguely glimpsed in those words. At last I had it.
‘I wonder if we would be caught if we telephoned Losch to come down to the police station and identify his burglar.’
‘Why the devil should we be?’ Pink exclaimed heartily. ‘And we must take a chance somewhere.’
His enthusiasm put me off. Suppose Losch telephoned the police station to have the request confirmed? Suppose Ivanovitch or one of his men accompanied him? Suppose we were arrested while trying to kidnap him?
‘Yes,’ said Pink, and suppose Ivanovitch doesn’t see why he should return Jerry and George, anyway, and brings ’em up to be bloody commissars!’
That clinched it. I doubted whether the plan could succeed, but, if it did succeed, we might have Losch to ourselves for a day or all eternity. Assuming he had settled up his affairs and paid off his servants, no one would ask after him. The police would take it that he had done as he said he would, and gone off for a holiday to restore his nerves. Ivanovitch would think he had bolted.
‘I hope he doesn’t know much about English police methods,’ I said.
‘Don’t care if he does,’ Pink answered. ‘But I tell you – because I’ve listened to ’em and I know – that a German in his position is going to have nightmares about the British Secret Service. Losch will think there’s no limit to what they might do. God, he ought to see Roland calling a conference to decide whether it’s safe to pass a traffic light!’
A Time to Kill Page 6