Pay Any Price

by Ted Allbeury

  “They send you from the hospital?”

  “No. I’m nothing to do with the hospital.”

  “The police?”

  “No. It says on my card what I am. I’m an intelligence officer.”

  “What’s she … I don’t understand.”

  “Can I come in and explain?”

  Randall shrugged helplessly and stood aside as Boyd walked inside and closed the door.

  “You want a snifter?”

  “No thanks. Just a chat.”

  “You just chat away, pal. I’ll be listening.”

  “Would you like me to make you coffee?”

  Randall half-grinned. “You wanna sober me up. Is that it?”

  “I’ve read the report you gave to Special Branch, Mr. Randall. They seem to be keeping her in hospital a long time. I’m a bit worried about it.”

  “Join the club, old man. I’m out of my bloody mind with worry, but there’s nothing I can do. Not a relative, they say.”

  “Has she got any relatives at all?”

  “Nary a one. Nary a one.”

  “Did you know that she’s being held on a Section 72?”

  “What’s a Section 72?”

  “It means that she can be held indefinitely in a mental institution and that she has ceased to be a voluntary patient. There’s no appeal against such an order and only the Home Secretary can vary it.”

  “Why are they doing this to her?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  “How can I help?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to talk to you. Talk about her. Every detail you can remember.”

  “Why are you interested, Boyd?”

  “I want to talk to Debbie myself. I think she could help me with something I’m investigating. You’re the next best thing.”

  “Let me take a bath and get sobered up and then I’ll be able to talk.”

  He talked with Randall for almost three hours. Not gaining much information that would help his investigation, but he saw photographs of the girl and learned a lot about her. Irrelevant detail so far as his enquiry was concerned, but details that made him feel that he actually knew the girl.

  As he sat in the taxi on the way back to Hampstead he thought about Randall. He was a strangely sad man, still with enough show-business panache to try and find some silver lining to his cloud, but so clearly failing. And so patently defenceless and unhappy. Randall seemed to have had a mutually satisfying but odd relationship with Debbie Shaw. He spoke about her as if the relationship was quite normal but it obviously wasn’t. They had several roles for each other. The man was lover, brother and father, and the girl was mother, lover and friend. Neither of them seemed to have demanded much from the other and yet they seemed totally dependent on each other. Their lives had gone on day by day in a routine that suited them both. Both of them secure in their lives of business and pleasure. Not looking for anything more than that it would go on for ever. And then suddenly, shockingly, it had all ended. The girl’s mental disturbance would have been blow enough, but Randall was now the victim as well. A victim of bureaucracy that gave him no status, no part even, in the girl’s life. They were related by neither marriage nor blood and bureaucracy was impervious to claims of affection, love or dependence.

  Boyd found it unusually depressing. He never allowed himself to be emotionally involved with anyone connected with his work no matter whether he was for them or against them, but there was something strangely familiar about Randall and his girl. He knew what it was, but he kept it lodged firmly at the back of his mind. Steve Randall and Debbie Shaw reminded him too much of Katie and Jimmy Boyd.

  The phone at his bedside rang at three o’clock in the morning, two days after Schultz had gone back. It was Schultz calling from an El Paso number.

  “Is that you, Jimmy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry if I seemed rough on you the other day. I guess I was being selfish. I thought about it on the plane coming back. Anyway it was wrong thinking on my part. I’ve done some fishing around for you down here in Texas. I gotta talk in parables, you understand?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The doctor I recommended to you is right where you are now. You heard of a place called Northumberland?”

  “Yes.”

  “A town called Craster. The residence is Percy House. And the other doctor on our recommended list is there too. You might think they’re Canadians if you didn’t know any better. OK?”

  “Yes. Message received and understood. And much appreciated. Are they here for long?”

  “Indefinitely. But I’d guess they’re being well looked after.”

  “I owe you, Otto.”

  “You sure do.”

  And the line went dead. Boyd got out of bed quietly and padded bare-footed into the sitting-room. He sat on the couch, his head in his hands. Not in despair, but to exclude all distractions from his mind. He had arrived, he knew, at the point where he should not only report back to Cartwright, but get his opinion on what the next move should be. But if he did that Cartwright would have no choice but to refer upwards because of Carter’s move against the girl. And then, almost certainly, the investigation would be called off. Carter’s business nearly always took precedence over routine operations. And whatever games Carter was playing he’d put a stop to this investigation. In the past agents had argued their cases with skill or anger according to temperament but Boyd could only remember two cases where Carter had failed to win the day.

  If this investigation was called off George Walker was never going to live a normal life and he’d never even know why. And Debbie Shaw, a pretty girl, would never come out of that mental research unit. Even if she did she was always going to be vulnerable. Always under tensions that she didn’t understand that would send her poor brain back to its nightmares. They had been ruthlessly abused, the two of them. And they were totally innocent. Picked almost at random, and methodically turned into zombies. No rewards, no praise, no pensions, no medals, they could be abandoned when they were no longer of use. Abandoned with a slow fuse burning to the bomb inside their brains.

  So telling Cartwright was out. At this stage anyway. He didn’t know enough about what the two had been used for and how to convince Cartwright to stand up against Carter. That meant that he had no real choice. He had to find out what had been done. Symons and Petersen were probably the only ones who knew.

  He dressed and shaved slowly and worked out the first stage of what he had to do.

  The armoury officer placed the two guns side by side on the table. One was a Walther and the other a Smith and Wesson snub-nosed Magnum.

  “They’ve both been stripped and re-calibrated, sir.”

  Boyd nodded, pursing his lips as he looked down at the two guns. They were both double-actioned and he was used to both models. He would have preferred the Smith and Wesson just because revolvers were more reliable than pistols. But there were too many protuberances that could snag on a pocket or a sleeve. He pointed and said, “I’ll take the PPK.”

  “Right, sir. How many rounds do you want?”

  “How do they pack them now?”

  “Same as before, Mr. Boyd. Packs of fifty and a hundred.”

  “I’ll take four fifties and a spare magazine.”

  The armourer raised his eyebrows but said nothing as he turned away to the metal shelves. Two hundred rounds was a bit above the odds. Boyd sent him back for a pair of handcuffs.

  From Facilities he drew a miniature transceiver with an electric speaker, and from Finance he drew an Amex card and a Barclaycard and £300 in cash. He walked in the drizzle from Century House to the bridge and hailed a taxi. He felt depressed and guilty leaving London and not seeing or phoning Katie. But there would be too much to explain and he needed to keep all the pieces of the jigsaw constantly in his mind or they would slip away again as they had done so often on this operation. Most operations went in sequence. A led to B, and B to C. But this operation was
disjointed. Almost nothing that he uncovered seemed to connect to anything he already knew. It was almost as if two, or even three, different operations had got mixed up somewhere. Every ladder seemed to lead to a snake’s head and back to square one.

  He bought two drip-dry shirts, some underwear, and half a dozen pairs of socks and stuffed them in the canvas holdall with the gun and the other hardware. At St. Pancras station he booked a sleeper and had a meal at the station hotel. Twice he got as far as putting a coin in the phone-box meter to phone Katie, and twice he reluctantly removed it and walked back to the lounge. An hour later the train rumbled out on its way to Newcastle.

  It was six o’clock when the train pulled into the station at Newcastle Central and Boyd walked to the station hotel, bathed and shaved and breakfasted. At eight o’clock he walked to the roundabout and crossed the road to the police station. He showed his card, but the duty Special Branch man was not expected until mid-day.

  The CID checked with several estate agents for the ownership of Percy House. The house was in the name of a family trust and was let on long lease to two Canadians. Their references said that they were both doctors from Kingston University, Ontario, on a two-year sabbatical. They were both writing books. One was Anthony Smith and the other was Peter Pardoe, and the lease was joint and several. There had been no complaints about damage from the quarterly inspection and the payments had been prompt and in advance.

  The estate agency which had been responsible for the letting sent round the sales details of the house, a set of plans that had been done in 1920, and a couple of up-to-date photographs of the front of the house. When he saw the size of the house and grounds Boyd was sure that there would be servants. CID phoned the local constable who confirmed that a married couple lived in a converted outbuilding about fifty yards from the house. Their name was Chatton and they had worked at the house for ten years. He sent out to the bookshop for a six inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map covering Craster, and the three adjoining sheets.

  He waited until noon but the Special Branch man hadn’t shown up and Boyd walked down to Neville Street and hired a Rover 3500. At the supermarket at Gosforth he bought several packs of long-life milk, coffee, cheese, bread, butter, and half a dozen tins of pressed meat. A tin-opener and a knife, a razor, blades, shaving foam and a Camping Gaz heater completed his purchases.

  An hour later he stopped to check the map, and a mile further on he was at the level-crossing at Littlemill and ten minutes later he slowed down as he approached the entrance to the driveway of Percy House. There was no name-sign, and he could see only the tiled roof and the chimneys. He turned right, on to a rough farm track and stopped the car. He could see the back of the house clearly, and the outbuildings, but there was no evidence of anyone in the house.

  He reversed the car back down the road and headed south-west for Alnwick. He found what he wanted in the market square. A chemists and opticians that sold microscopes and binoculars. They hadn’t got what he wanted but they could get it in two hours from their main shop in Newcastle.

  Boyd had a leisurely coffee and then went to the main estate agents and asked about a cottage or a house on a short let. There were two. A large house at Wooler, and a cottage just a couple of miles south of Seahouses. They were honest enough to point out that it was isolated and the only access was a cinder track from the road. It had been the cowman’s cottage when it was part of the farm. It was £10 a week for a minimum let of a month. He paid cash and they gave him the keys and instructions for finding the cottage. By the time he had finished at the estate agents the binoculars were waiting for him, and he paid by Barclaycard in the name of G. H. Merrick, one of SIS’s favourite pseudonyms.

  There were clumps of weeds, wild-parsley, thistles and couchgrass growing in the cinder track as the car crunched its way noisily towards the cottage. He sat in the car looking at the cottage before he got out. There was nothing picturesque or pretty about it. It was built of local stone with small windows and a grey slate roof. The windows were grey with dust and there was ivy growing over the blue-painted wooden front door.

  He got out and walked round the cottage. There was a small orchard of very old apple trees, and a vegetable plot with Brussels sprouts that had gone to seed the season before and now stood three feet high in a dense jungle of rotting leaves. There were two milk bottles outside the back door and a pile of rotting windfalls by a wooden water butt standing on four cinder blocks. But the big old-fashioned key turned smoothly in the door and it opened easily into the quarry-tiled kitchen and parlour. There was a Rayburn stove and a small electric double ring alongside the sink. The walls were at least eighteen inches thick.

  21

  Boyd switched off the lights, parked the car close to the hawthorn hedge and walked up the farm track, ducking under the wire strands into the field that led to the grounds of Percy House. He walked slowly, stumbling from time to time in the dark on the tussocky grass, until he came to the low stone wall that marked the edge of the farmland.

  He could see the house now. There were lights in the downstairs rooms and he made his way across the well-kept lawns to a magnolia, and then on again to a group of three tall cupressus that marked the edge of the lawn. The gravel driveway was about ten feet wide and there was no cover until he got to the shadows of the house itself. He stood watching the house and he could hear faintly the sound of a piano.

  It seemed an interminable walk across the gravel and despite his efforts the noise of his feet on the loose stones sounded outrageous in the stillness of the night. There were rose bushes in the border along the walls that snagged at his clothes, and it took ten minutes before he could look cautiously into the room. It was a big room lit by two large crystal chandeliers, sparsely but elegantly furnished. The polished oak floor gave it the appearance of an artist’s studio.

  He was looking across the top of a grand piano, its lid propped open. And a man was playing, easily and confidently, moving from one tune to another. From “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to “Try a Little Tenderness.” He was alone in the room, intent on his playing and as he changed key into “Manhattan” Boyd saw that he was singing the words to himself. Smiling as he sang. For a brief moment the man looked towards the window, directly at where Boyd was standing.

  Boyd guessed that the man was in his middle forties; his black hair smoothed back, the first signs of baldness at the temples. His face was so smooth and shiny that he could have been wearing make-up, and his dark eye-lashes were like a girl’s, long and sweeping as he looked down at the keyboard. He played a few bars of “Moon River” and then he stopped, stood up, closed the piano lid and walked across the room, switching out the lights as he left.

  When Boyd moved on along the back wall he came to another lit window. A small window with drawn gingham curtains. Through the gap in the curtains he saw that it was a big old-fashioned kitchen. The pianist and another man were sitting at a table and an elderly woman was serving them food, smiling at something one of them had said. The other man was tall, wearing a sweater and jeans. The fair hair, blue eyes and square shoulders gave him a Scandinavian air. He was looking up, talking to the woman.

  Boyd moved back to the narrow grass border that edged the drive and followed it round the house. At the far corner an open archway led into a cobbled yard and in the darkness he could see the silhouette of the outbuildings where the two servants lived. He was about to move on when he heard the back door open. As he pressed back into the shadow of the archway the woman went past, humming to herself, a shopping basket in her hand. When the light went on in the servants’ quarters Boyd moved on. There were no windows on the ground floor on that side of the house and when he came to the front of the house he saw that he would be too exposed to check it carefully. He moved on quickly to the long window on the far side of the big main door and saw that there was a large hall, and in the faint light from an open door he saw the broad stairs that led to the first floor. From the size of the house he guessed that th
ere would be five or six bedrooms. Slowly and silently he made his way back to the car.

  Back at the cottage he tried to work out a plan as he sipped his coffee. Despite the warm night it was unpleasantly cold inside the cottage and he walked outside, the mug of coffee in his hand. He could use the old ploy of checking meters or maybe pretend to be doing an inspection for the estate agency who managed the property. Both would give him a chance to look the place over. But it was wasting time and what did he expect to find? There was probably nothing there. They didn’t need anything to hypnotize the girl and the soldier. There was obviously no guard on the place, not even a dog. And suddenly he felt quite calm. He was being stupid. He didn’t know enough to decide how to tackle them. There was urgency, but even a week would make little difference. He put the empty mug on top of the water butt and listened to the night sounds. There were faint rustlings in the long grass under the apple trees and from somewhere near wood-pigeons cooed softly. And from far away he heard the long low roar of a train on the main-line to London.

  It was still dark when he woke. He’d dreamed that Katie was running towards him on a sandy beach, her hair streaming, her arms outstretched and he hadn’t been able to move, and as she ran towards him she seemed to get farther and farther away. It wasn’t frightening, just strange, and he switched on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. He had only slept for three hours and as he lay back on the pillows he knew that his thinking last night had been wrong. He couldn’t wait around, he had to go straight in. Something could happen to Walker or the girl, or the two men could disappear. His eyes closed, and it was eight o’clock before he woke.

  He spent the morning in Alnwick buying food and various things he might need. He phoned the SB man at Newcastle to get him duplicate keys for the main door and the bedrooms of Percy House. He would collect them from the police station at Alnwick. He went to The White Swan at lunchtime and froze when he saw the pianist with a pretty girl at the bar. Despite realizing that the man would have no idea who he was, he left and went back to the market square and ate at the small café. He picked up the keys at the police station, signed for them, and went back to his car.