The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19) Page 6

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “In the meantime, I suggest you station a man at the bedside of the last of my fellow survivors. He may have something interesting to say. And whatever happens, don’t let him go.”

  “I know my duty,” the fat man said snappishly. He waddled to the door and gave an order, and one of the guarding gendarmes lumbered in and was directed to the relevant bedside where he was provided with a chair. There had been something of an altercation at the door, and I suspected that the man in immediate charge was being upbraided for not having thought of a listening watch earlier. Unconscious people do ramble, and much can come out.

  It took another twenty minutes for the hospital routines of self discharge to be gone through, papers signed and so on, and then I was on my way through the early morning in a police car to HQ. With the gold medallion, as it now seemed to be; a nun had brought it from a safe stowage somewhere, for which I was grateful. I wouldn’t have wanted the cops to nab it.

  *

  “You say you are Commander Shaw.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of 6D2.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is suspicious,” the fat police chief said, looking self-important.

  “You’ve heard of 6D2?”

  “Of course, yes. But how do you assure me of the truth of what you have said? How do I know of your identity?”

  I could see his point; my clothing was, to say the least, rudimentary, and I was unshaven. My story could sound extremely thin; there was virtually nothing I could tell the fat man that would convince him. I had repeated what I’d said to the gendarme in the hospital – I hadn’t the remotest idea where I’d been held captive or by whom. The one point of reference was the Zonguldak and the police chief had in fact confirmed by telephone that the ship had arrived in Cherbourg from Shoreham, but that didn’t appear to convince him that I was genuine. There was just the one thing and I’d laboured it whenever I could get a word in: give me access to a security line and let me call Marcus Bright in Barfleur, but he kept hedging on this. He wanted to sort me out first, waving his arms in the air at my suggestions that the best way of sorting me out was that phone call to someone who would vouch for me. He answered pettishly that he would like to know who would vouch for Marcus Bright …

  It was impasse again.

  After we’d been at it for around half an hour a telephone burred on the prefect’s desk. He snatched up the handset and barked into it. Then he listened, and swore. Putting the instrument down, he glared across at me.

  “The other is dead. Your friend.”

  “Not my friend,” I said between my teeth. “But I’m very sorry he’s died – presumably without talking?”

  “I did not say that.”

  I nodded; he hadn’t. He would want to keep me guessing, but I knew from his reaction that the villain hadn’t uttered. I repeated that I was sorry, that a valuable lead had been lost.

  “It is not my fault. Tell me again about the crash, and all that led up to it.”

  I was losing patience fast, though so far I’d managed to keep my surface cool: annoy the French and they can be very obstructive. Anyway, I went through the thing again, up to the point of the car leaving the road which was all I could recall. The prefect hummed and ha’ed and rubbed at his jaw, sunk in rolls of double chins. He had to be prodded. I said, “We’re wasting time, m’sieur. I’ve told you … in that house there’s a child and it’s not happy. The woman I spoke of – she struck me as a sadist. I think we need to cut the cackle. Another point: if I’m held here for much longer, you’re going to have 6D2 Paris on your neck. Our Paris boss has lines out to your President.”

  He looked uncomfortable but still obstinate. And it was at that moment that his telephone burred again, this time the security line. He answered, and his attitude changed. He almost sat to attention; if he’d had a uniform cap on, he’d have saluted. Instead of that, he cringed. He didn’t say much: just a succession of Mais oui, m’sieurs. When he did speak further it was to me, after he’d been cut off from the other end.

  “Paris,” he said.

  I lifted an eyebrow. “6D2?”

  “Yes,” he said. I guessed what had happened: Marcus Bright had lost patience waiting for my call, and had rung the Paris HQ. I said to the prefect it was time to allow me to call our man in Barfleur and, addressing me politely as m’sieur, he agreed that it was.

  So I called Marcus and he told me I should get back to London pronto. There had been developments back in Britain. After that call from Paris the prefect of police had become very co-operative. I asked to be helicoptered north. It was still early morning and I had a lot to do.

  *

  “They got Freyard,” Marcus Bright told me over a much needed whisky in the airport bar, where, no time wasted now, he had met me. “Police picked him up in London – ”

  “Has he talked?”

  “A little, apparently, but Max didn’t go into details. He won’t be saying any more … he was armed, and there was a shoot-out in Kensington, in Church Street. Freyard died soon after being taken to hospital.”

  I nodded. The score had evened up a little: Alphonse Freyard, who had killed Mandy Askew, was nicely dead. But, like the hospitalised villain back in Clermont-Ferrand, unfortunately a little prematurely. I would find out more when I got back to London: Marcus Bright had already made arrangements for my onward flight from Cherbourg airport, a plane on charter to 6D2. He had brought some decent clothing, along with an electric shaver – field men tended now and again to need refitting clotheswise, and Marcus, like our other agents, maintained a fair stock of varying sizes. I changed in a cubicle in the gents; and, not really needing that bandage on my wrist, I let it go when it began to loosen. So I looked civilised again when I embarked for London.

  I’d shown Marcus the object I’d picked up in the cellar after it had been dropped by the bear-like, hairy man. It wasn’t a coin; but it was undoubtedly gold. Neither Marcus nor I had seen anything quite like it before. The obverse, or what we took to be the obverse, showed a woman’s head, but not that of a queen or president. A summery girl, with long, flowing hair, head back to show a slender throat. Around the edge was an inscription in Latin, a somewhat erotic one. It could have been some kind of a love token, Marcus said, and I agreed. The reverse showed a woodland scene, and a river running through, a small, stone-built cottage on the bank, between the trees. It was really rather beautiful. Max would be interested, though the relevance of the medallion in the context of current events might be tenous: the bear-like man had probably nicked it, or maybe just found it lying around somewhere.

  *

  Once again I went through the whole story, this time to Max in person. He wanted the lot before he would say anything about Alphonse Freyard. When I told him about the child’s cry on those two or three occasions, I saw him tense up and narrow his eyes.

  “Did you see the child, Shaw?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Male or female?”

  “I’ve no idea. A child’s cry is fairly sexless.”

  “When young. Can you estimate an age?”

  “No,” I said again. “I’d just say … not a teenager. Not an infant either.”

  Max nodded. “That’s an estimate of a sort, isn’t it? Say, between three and twelve?”

  I shrugged. “Probably, yes. It’s important? Is there something I don’t know, Max?”

  “Yes,” he said, And that was when he told me about Alphonse Freyard’s last words, uttered when under police guard in a side ward of the hospital he’d been taken to with three police bullets in him – chest, stomach, neck. It had emerged as a kind of death-bed confession, or maybe just penitence for what he’d been involved in, though even that was uncertain. He may just have been, as you might say, in the know and not personally involved; it was important not to jump to any conclusions, Max said. What Freyard had revealed was that a child, an American boy, was about to be kidnapped. This child was six years of age. The name ha
d not been stated. Freyard had died too soon, but he had made some garbled references to the current series of arms reduction talks going on between the western nations and the Soviet Union.

  “So?” I asked. “What’s the connection?”

  Max shrugged. “I don’t know what to think at this moment, I have an open mind.” He grinned. “It’s hard to have anything else, isn’t it, in the absence of any positive leads – just Freyard’s words.” He paused, big hands playing with a round ebony ruler. “But now I’m thinking about that crying child of yours.” He brought the ruler down sharply on his blotting-pad. “True, there are plenty of crying children around the world. But the coincidence is rather large for me to stomach, even though Freyard apparently referred only to the prospect of a kidnap. He could have been out-of-date, couldn’t he?”

  I nodded.

  Max lit one of his expensive, handmade cigarettes that he was supplied with from a tobacconist’s in the Burlington Arcade. He didn’t offer me one: he didn’t like others to smoke in his office suite. Not many could afford the aroma he liked to have around him. “We’ll need to find that house again, Shaw. I’ve a gut feeling that Freyard’s remarks about the arms talks, juxtaposed with the kidnap, add up to something that could be very big. I’m keeping the lid on it for now. It’s to be done nice and quietly. You know the routine.”

  I did. 6D2 could operate where governments could not be seen to act. That was our raison d’être, largely. We had carte blanche but we could never go whining to officialdom if things went wrong. We would be politely disowned, with shrugs and spread hands and bland expressions. Further, it was not hard to assess the concern that would take the Western governments by the throat if any hindrance to the arms negotiations should develop. Myself I couldn’t see what it would be; but any threat to the success of the current talks would be a tragedy for the whole world. Kulachev, a new broom in the Kremlin though following on in the recent tradition of Mikhail Gorbachev, was the world’s last hope of sanity, a voice crying strongly in the nuclear wilderness, calling for the world to live at peace and without fear of total obliteration. Much had been achieved by Gorbachev, more had already been achieved by Kulachev and the American President, but the future was on a knife-edge and the balance could well be tipped by those in Russia or elsewhere who didn’t, for their own reasons, want the talks to succeed.

  Max said abruptly, “Neskuke.”

  “What about him?”

  “Neskuke’s still the mystery. We don’t know whether he was involved or not, whether there was coincidence around. He could have been trying to bring in information, either about the kidnap or something else. Or he could have been a red herring. He bears more investigation in any case.” Max opened a drawer in his desk and brought out a sheet of paper. “The sister. A Mrs Sillitoe, living in North Yorkshire. The only relative left. Go and see her, Shaw. Find out what you can but don’t let her know her brother’s dead. That’s still under wraps.”

  “Right,” I said, and then Max gave me a surprise: Felicity Mandrake was back from the USA, her job having folded. I said that in that case I wanted to take her north with me. Max said she was officially on stand-by leave until required. “That means now,” I said.

  *

  Max, as ever, worked fast. When I reached my flat, Felicity was there ahead of me, having used the keys I always left with her. We kissed: it had been a longish while and the kiss made up for some of it. I asked her about America. She said her cover had been blown and the CIA had withdrawn her with a pierhead jump, a pace or so ahead of real trouble, by which she meant her own death. You don’t fool around with the drug peddlers: you know when the time has come to get out from under, or someone else does on your behalf if you’re as seductive as Felicity Mandrake. I sent up a silent vote of thanks to God and the CIA. Then, getting down to business, I filled the girl in on current affairs. She was a good listener who always took things in fast. When I’d finished she said, “That poor little kid – if he’s the one you heard … if there’s some kind of threat behind it, which there has to be … well, it can’t be long before the villains come across with a set of demands, right?”

  “Probably,” I agreed, “but that depends on many things.”

  “Such as?”

  “The reasons behind it,” I said with a touch of irritation. We left it at that. I told Miss Mandrake we were getting on the move, pronto. To a village in North Yorkshire: West Witton, in Wensleydale.

  *

  We went north by Intercity, Kings Cross to York, which was faster than a progress up the M1 which as it happened was half jammed, according to the road reports on the radio, with chicanes and contraflows, more so than usual. In York I picked up a self-drive hire car that I’d telephoned for ahead and we took the A59 to Green Hammerton and then the A1 as far as Leeming where I turned off for Bedale and Leyburn on the A684, roads I knew well. Wensleydale was fresh and inviting; there was a strongish wind that blew big white clouds across the fells. Shadows from those clouds dappled the dry-stone walls and the sheep that strayed across the roads. After Leyburn the summit of Great Whernside rose behind Melmerby. It was a welcome sight; just a few hours of London was more than enough for me and there could be no better contrast than this.

  We drove into West Witton, a long, narrow village astride the main road, past the little Post Office and the Wensleydale Heifer where I’d drunk many a pint of good Yorkshire bitter. Neskuke’s sister lived a little beyond the village, a biggish house that had once been a farmhouse by the look of it: the outbuildings were still there if a little decrepit. Barns, cowsheds, a harness room, what looked as though it had once been a dairy.

  Mrs Sillitoe, as she turned out to be, was in the dairy, under a rusted milk churn, wearing green wellingtons that were thrust out incongruously from the milk churn. The wellingtons were motionless and Robert Alexander Neskuke’s sister was dead. The bullet had gone right through from the back and she had probably knocked the milk churn over as she fell.

  Six

  “Killed before she could talk,” I said.

  “Meaning someone knew you were coming up?”

  I shrugged, standing now in what had been the farmyard. “Doubtful. I’d say it was just a precaution.”

  “So it looks as though Neskuke really was involved.”

  “In some way as yet unknown, yes.”

  “Was she the only relative?”

  I nodded. This was another impasse, of which life currently seemed to be full. Find a lead, and have it cut off before it led anywhere. Felicity mentioned the local cop. I doubted if there would be one in West Witton, the county police were everywhere thin on the ground these days. Maybe a patrol car could be summoned from Leyburn but first I wanted to take a look around untrammelled by police procedures. Secrecy was still all, and if I could find anything that looked significant it would be better kept out of police hands until I’d contacted HQ in Focal House. I didn’t pay too much attention to the farmyard: the ground was hard and I couldn’t see any footprints. The door of the dairy would have to be left to the fingerprints section from Leyburn or wherever. All I could do was not muck up the prints if there were any.

  The back door of the house was open and we went in. A long passage led to the kitchen quarters, comprising the kitchen itself with a scullery and big walk-in larder, as cool as any refrigerator. There was a whole Stilton cheese and a whole Wensleydale, the latter freshly cut into. In the scullery were the plates and cutlery from a last meal – lunch that day, not yet washed up. On finding the body I’d checked my watch: the time was seven thirty. Death somewhere between then and, say, one-thirty? Not a lot for the police to go on.

  Beyond was a door that, when I opened it and flicked on a light set just inside, led down to a cellar, a coal cellar it seemed to be. I went down and checked for an intruder without expecting to find one; I didn’t find one. Another door led to a wine cellar, also empty. With Felicity I went up a flight of stairs to a green baize door. This opened into a big, square hall
on two levels. We had emerged just inside the front door, rather an impressive affair. I led the way up some stairs, well carpeted once though now worn thin, to the upper hall. A mahogany tallboy stood behind a round oak table; various doors opened off.

  I chose one at random.

  It was, I assessed, the drawing-room. Like the hall carpet, the furnishing was good but had seen better days. There was shabbiness and a lot of wear. Not much money around. I knew from Max that Mrs Sillitoe was a widow, her husband having been a naval captain, probably existing on an inadequate pension, maybe tried his hand at farming, I fancied, without much success. The land is a different kind of expertise from the world’s wide waters. There was a worn sofa, four big armchairs equally worn, the linen covers threadbare and a little soiled, but not, I believed, from domestic pets. Anyway, there had been no sign of an animal, either farm or domestic. There was a mahogany bureau with a pull-out flap and a display cabinet on top, filled with china. Felicity said, “Chinese.”

  “Yes.”

  “Probably worth a fortune.”

  “Might be, might not. If it was,” I added, looking around at the general shabbiness, “she could have sold it.”

  “Sentiment,” Felicity said. “Stuff brought back by Captain Sillitoe?”

  I nodded abstractedly. I had moved away to look at some oil paintings hanging from a picture rail: the ceiling was very high, with a crystal chandelier in the centre of the room, and the ceiling itself was moulded but darkly stained with use, years ago, of oil lamps and never redecorated since.

  But it was the paintings that interested me. One of them, a portrait, looked of much more recent vintage then all the others. The gilt of the frame was comparatively fresh. It was of a young girl … a summery girl, with long, flowing hair, head back to show a slender throat.

  Felicity had come across now to join me. I brought out the gold medallion I’d picked up in that French cellar and told Felicity to look, and then look at the portrait.