The Game

by Gerald Hammond

  She smiled again, but brilliantly this time, and touched her hair. After the door had closed two vertical lines appeared between her eyebrows and the smile became uncertain. It was as if a mist had come over the sun.

  Keith looked at the guano which was spattered over his car. ‘She was right,’ he said.

  ‘She usually is,’ Wallace said. ‘Especially about the shitty side of life.’

  Chapter Six

  Keith dropped Wallace at the shop and took Molly back to Briesland House for lunch. Molly spooned carefully-sieved guck into the baby while Keith made a snack. The baby fell comfortably asleep. Keith and Molly sat down together.

  ‘I’ve got to go up to Perth tomorrow for Wal’s client,’ Keith said. ‘You want to come? The snag is that I don’t know how long it’ll take. I may have to stay over, or even go on somewhere else. You could leave Thingy with Janet, or bring her along.’

  ‘Deborah. Not Thingy.’

  ‘Deborah, then.’

  Molly considered, nibbling away at her corn-on-the-cob, butter running down her chin. When she had first met Keith, he had been itinerant in his life and in his spirit, a wandering lover with more mistresses than she cared to think about. He was still a happy sensualist, loving her but revering the whole feminine gender. Since their marriage his comparative fidelity had assuaged her deep concern. As far as she could tell his lapses had been unplanned, no more than sudden failures to resist temptation and of no long-term importance. Molly could suffer them if she could keep Keith’s heart. One reason for her success as Keith’s wife was that she had avoided showing jealousy. The other was that she rarely sent him away on his own, and never with his passion unsatisfied.

  ‘This client,’ she said. ‘It’s Personal Service, isn’t it? I’ve heard Wallace mention them.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Keith said. He waited for the storm to break. He was accustomed to getting away with more than most husbands would have dreamed of, but not even Molly would tolerate a business relationship with a house of ill-fame.

  Molly nodded, satisfied. If Wallace had brought Keith into it then it must be perfectly respectable. ‘I looked them up in the phone book. They’re big. They’ve got lots of businesses. Did you know that they do our laundry? They’ve got several antique shops and a finance house. They could be very useful to you. If you’re doing business for them you’d better take plenty of clean shirts and things. I won’t come. It wouldn’t be fair on Thingy.’

  ‘Deborah,’ Keith said. ‘I’ll need the car. Shall I take you in to the shops this afternoon?’

  ‘I’ll drive myself, if you’re staying here.’

  Keith nodded. ‘I’ve got to search some samples for clues.’

  ‘And later,’ Molly said, ‘shall we make a special effort to get an early night?’

  *

  Next morning, while Keith was loading his suitcase into the car and adding a shotgun (not that he was expecting anything more untoward than an impromptu shooting invitation), Mrs Heller was taking a phone call from Mr Green of the Granton and Green agency.

  ‘You wanted to think it over,’ he said. ‘Have you thought?’

  ‘I’ve thought,’ she said, thinking hard.

  There was a pause on the line. ‘Well?’

  Mrs Heller felt her way carefully. This kind of negotiation could have a substructure of logic, almost of mathematics. ‘You know my figure,’ she said.

  ‘You know mine.’ The Glasgow-Irish voice was hesitant, she thought.

  So he was more anxious to do business, and less sure that he held all the cards. It could be, she thought, that some new factor had made his need for the money paramount. More probably he could see his chance of a deal slipping away. Why, she wondered, would that be? ‘I have my own investigators at work,’ she said. ‘I expect to know your client’s name any time now. Meantime, if those boys of yours pull any more illegal stunts I’ll make a complaint to the fuzz.’

  ‘That could be unwise.’

  ‘It could be unwise to let them get out of hand.’ She was still fishing for the lever she needed. ‘You’re responsible. They’re your agents.’

  There was a silence on the line. Then Mr Green sighed. ‘You send your boy over with five grand and I’ll give you the name of my ex-client.’

  ‘Ex?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got to tell you this, got to go on record to protect myself Anything they do from here on is on their own responsibility. They’re useful operatives, mind, but rough. I’ve had to hold them in check, and only use them for special jobs in tough neighbourhoods. But now they’ve made their own deal with . . . my client. They’re working for him direct and I’m out.’

  ‘That should pull the price down,’ she said.

  ‘No way! You need that information more than ever. Get it and you can do your own deal with the client. Otherwise, those boys can play rough, especially if there’s big money in it for them.’

  ‘Is there big money in it for them?’

  ‘There should be. If there isn’t, they’re being done. I was offered a ten-grand bonus if I could get proof of what happened. My advice is to send your boy Calder over with the five. And tell him to be careful.’

  ‘I might do that,’ she said. ‘And again I might not. Do they know that I’m using Mr Calder?’

  Green laughed mirthlessly. Even his laugh had accent. ‘They told me. While they were watching your place, but before they got in to plant the bugs, they saw him visiting. They might have thought he was just another client, but Cyril had seen Calder giving evidence in a firearms case. Then suddenly Calder’s shop was shut for four weekdays.’

  She broke the connection and pressed down the switch on her intercom. ‘I want to speak to Mr Calder now,’ she said. ‘If you can’t get him, put him through the moment he phones. And tell Wally James.’

  *

  By the time his phone started ringing Keith was on his way. There were road-works on Soutra, so he was heading across country to pick up the A7. As he drove, he hummed in tune – more or less – with the car’s radio. It was playing Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, not the easiest of hums.

  Keith was not surprised to see the large, grey Citroen beside the road with its bonnet up. It had passed him a few minutes before at a pace that had made him wonder how long any car could stand up to that sort of punishment. The driver was out in the road waving him down, a large man with a friendly smile.

  Keith pulled in behind the Citroen and wound down his window. ‘You want help?’ he asked.

  ‘Help is just exactly what we want,’ the man said. The friendly smile had vanished. He put an arm through the car window and plucked out the ignition key. Keith’s engine died. The radio was cut off.

  Keith knew better than to duck out of a car towards a hostile man, especially one who was, he now saw, possessed of a wicked-looking cosh. Fumbling with haste, Keith wound up the window. The door was locked. His key-ring, with spare car key, was deep in his pocket, but miraculously he found it and it came clear. He stabbed at the key-slot.

  The driver of the Citroen – Keith thought of the big man as the driver – dropped Keith’s key into his pocket. There was a flicker of his former smile on his face. With a brisk blow he drove in the window of Keith’s door so that Keith was showered with little squares of safety-glass. ‘Come on out, Sunshine, he said. ‘The next one’s for you.’

  The radio came on. The engine span but failed to catch. The big man lifted his cosh, began to swing.

  There was another man on the other side of the car, but he seemed smaller and less ready. Keith started to scramble to the other side of the car. The smaller man was standing too close. Keith flung the door open and the man had to dodge back.

  Keith would have rolled out of the car and come up fighting – and he had been a sturdy fighter not long since – but for one mischance. As he swung over the central tunnel, the gear-lever went up his right trouser-leg.

  The cosh whipped past his right ear.

  Keith threw himself out of
the car. His trouser-cuff twisted, locking his ankle to the gear-lever. His face and hands came down on the tarmac. He sprawled head-down, waiting for a cosh to fall. Two pairs of feet appeared beside his face.

  When it came, it was not to the back of the head but a paralysing blow between the shoulder-blades that drove the breath out of him and sent agonised messages out along his nervous system.

  Four strong hands grabbed him and dragged him away from the car. His trouser-cuff had started to tear, and it ripped almost to his knee. Before he could put up even a token struggle, his arms were twisted up his back and he was being frog-marched through a gap in the roadside hedge. He twisted his head around. There was not a soul in sight. The world seemed deserted. Everyone might have gone to the moon.

  Beyond the hedge was a grassy shelf and then an embankment down to a small water-meadow beside a burn that was running low. Tall trees threw wavering shadows across grass and weeds.

  ‘This’ll do grand,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Get the cuffs on him and we’ll ask a few questions.’

  Keith knew that once they had him in handcuffs he was done for. They could beat out of him any information that they wanted. Afterwards, if it suited their book, they might kill him. Such things happened in a world whose fringes he had once known. And with the thought there came back to him a precept that he had known in those days and had almost forgotten. Don’t fight against the pull, use it.

  As one of the men took a hand away to feel for the handcuffs, Keith dragged that arm down. He could not reach the man’s genitals, but he grasped the waist-band of the man’s trousers and, using the pull on his arm as a springboard, jerked viciously up. At the same time he back-heeled at the other man’s shin, and connected heavily. Score so far, one squawk and a grunt of pain.

  As both men heaved up on his arms, Keith launched himself up and forward in a somersault. The jerk on his arms, when it came, instead of twisting the bones out of their sockets was along the length of his arms. It wrenched his muscles but it snatched his arms out of those two deadly incapacitating grips. The jerk swung Keith half round and he landed badly and heavily, on his side and half-way down the bank. He rolled to the bottom and stumbled somehow to his feet. He felt battered and winded, but this was no time to lick wounds.

  The two men were coming after him. Keith was already disabused of his first suspicion that he was being mugged. Now, seeing the hooked nose of the smaller man, he realised that these must be Bardolph and Warrender. The larger man, Bardolph, was limping down the bank with a long stride. Warrender was more circumspect. If they had come at him together Keith’s problem might have been beyond solution. As it was . . . he flicked over the probabilities in his mind, and liked them not one whit. With another part of his mind he tried to calculate how much it would matter if they overpowered him and he spilled the beans. He decided that it would matter like hell.

  There was still nobody to be seen.

  The larger man arrived with a rush, swinging his cosh round-arm. Keith ducked under and grabbed for it before it could strike again back-handed. At the same time he lashed his boot at where he judged his back-heel had landed. The thong round the man’s wrist broke and the cosh came free, but they fumbled it between them and it flew into a patch of nettles. A young rabbit bolted out, crossed the burn and disappeared. Keith envied him his speed.

  Keith took a punch in the ribs and returned one, harder, to the big man’s lower belly.

  He had bought himself just enough time to turn on Warrender, who was moving in with the handcuffs swinging like a second cosh. Keith wanted to run, or to lie down and give up, but he forced life back into his creaking shell. He feinted a kick to the groin, and as the hands came down he put his weight into a punch. It landed too high, but it put the man down for a moment.

  The bigger man was coming in again, swinging a low punch. At the top of the bank a car went by unseen, almost unheard, but Keith saw the drag of its wind in the lower branches. He blocked the punch with his elbow and struck for the jaw. Too high again, but he felt teeth break and maybe the nose. Bardolph stepped back, stumbled and fell. Keith got in one kick, but the smaller man was already getting to his feet. This could go on for ever.

  The bigger man got to his knees. Keith saw his own car key lying in the grass. He snatched it up and ran for the car. If he took to the driver’s seat he might get away in time or he might not, and they had a fast enough car and more than enough anger to hound him off the road. He glanced behind. They were coming already, and from the manner of their coming he knew that they were no longer pursuing an aim. They were just plain fighting.

  Through the hedge and onto the road. There was nobody in sight. He dashed to his car, fumbling with the key in his left hand while he dug in his pocket with the other. He was wearing his invariable short shooting-coat and, as usual, there was a handful of cartridges loose in the pocket. The boot-lid clunked up. Keith was not a believer in gunbags, except when the law insisted, believing that their dank interiors fostered rust. His favourite double gun lay open on a nest of old coats that sometimes doubled as a backseat dog-bed. He slid the cartridges in before lifting the gun, closing it in the same motion. The radio played on. God, were they still in the short second movement?

  The two men burst through the hedge and stopped dead in the face of the gun. There was a frozen moment while three sets of lungs heaved, three hearts pounded.

  The bigger man, Bardolph, still had his wits about him despite the blood on his face. ‘You’ve not had time to load,’ he said indistinctly.

  ‘You want to bet your life on it?’ Keith asked.

  The answer seemed to be affirmative. The man took a pace forward.

  The gun was a McNaughton of top quality, far too good to use as a club. Keith could have blown Bardolph apart, or at least taken his foot off Shunning anything so drastic and irreversible he lowered the gun and aimed short, counting on the dual effects of surprise and of richochetting pellets.

  His aim was closer than he intended. At that short range the shot, still in its shot-cup, took a semi-circular bite out of the tip of the big man’s sole and hit the road under his toe. Some of its energy was lost in the tarmac, the rest lifted his foot into the air as if he had stepped on a mine.

  Keith let the other man see right down the barrels. ‘That was meant to take his foot off,’ he said quickly. ‘The next shot kills.’

  Warrender looked at him dumbly. His face, which had started by reminding Keith of a Semitic bloodhound, was developing a black eye of outstanding quality. Bardolph, blood dripping from his chin, was balanced precariously on one foot and staring at the other, wondering whether this new agony was a passing pain or betokened serious injury.

  Keith fumbled, cross-handed, for another cartridge, then pressed the top-lever with his thumb. The barrels dropped, and the selective ejector flicked the spent cartridge out. From habit, he caught and pocketted it. He had the fresh cartridge in the chamber and the barrels closed before either man could move. He snapped the safety-catch forward as noisily as he could.

  There was still nobody in sight.

  ‘Back through the hedge,’ Keith said. They hesitated. He wondered what the hell he’d do if they refused. ‘Go, or I’ve no option but to kill you.’

  ‘Can’t walk,’ Bardolph said thickly.

  ‘Then hop. If you fall down I’ll kill you both and stuff your bodies in the culvert.’

  They turned. Keith thought that they believed him because they were capable of such ruthlessness themselves. Tenderly, the smaller man helped the other to limp through the hedge and back down the bank. Keith steered them to the base of a sturdy tree which forked about seven feet above the ground. ‘Sit down with your backs to that tree,’ he said, and when they had complied, ‘Undo your laces. Tie them again, tightly, in knots instead of bows. Now join them all together, or I’ll find some other way of preventing any sudden activity. Now stay put.’

  Keith searched among the weeds until he found the cosh and the handcuffs.
The cuffs were of a common American design. He had stocked similar ones in the shop. Gun-collectors often branch out into military or police equipment. ‘On your feet,’ he said. He tossed the handcuffs to the smaller man. ‘Cuff yourselves together, through that fork.’

  Cursing and arguing but taking no chances on Keith’s good nature, they obeyed. A whole string of lorries rumbled by on the road above. Keith laid down his gun. He could feel his knees trembling. Yet, now that it was over, he felt disappointment. Sometimes he chafed at the prosperous life that he had built for himself and hankered for rougher days gone by.

  He searched the two men, ignoring their protests. They seemed to be carefully devoid of identification but well equipped. He found bugging devices, picklocks and other small housebreaking tools, a miniature camera, small, folding binoculars, but no notebooks. The only paper that they had between them was the stock of currency in the smaller man’s wallet.

  ‘How much would you reckon a broken window in my car?’ Keith asked. ‘Twenty-five quid?’

  Warrender’s face, damaged as it was – the eye was almost closed already – produced a parody of a smile and he spoke for the first time. ‘To you, fifteen,’ he suggested. His voice was London, Cockney Keith thought, with perhaps a hint of Hebrew.

  ‘You can still joke, can you?’

  ‘Not a lot.’ Warrender lapsed into cautious silence.

  Bardolph was chuntering on with mixed complaints and epithets. Keith ignored them and spoke to Warrender, who seemed the more intelligent of the two. ‘You’re from the Granton and Green agency,’ he said.

  Warrender’s face tried to hide his consternation and calculation. ‘We’re on our own,’ he said. ‘Now,’ he added reluctantly.

  ‘Then I expect Granton and Green’ll be glad to get these bits and pieces back through the post. You’re Cyril Warrender, and this is Jim Bardolph. Right?’

  Warrender hesitated and then nodded.

  ‘Who’s your client?’

  ‘You can’t expect that!’ Warrender said quickly.

  Keith paused and took a calculating look at the pair of them. Even after a fight, and almost hanging by one wrist, Warrender looked dapper. Bardolph was, in the words of Charlie the porter, ‘a scruff. Keith concluded that Warrender supplied the brains and Bardolph the muscle. He spoke to Warrender. ‘You’re not getting the picture,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any more interference from you, I don’t want to have to keep looking over my shoulder, and I don’t want any threats. If I’ve got the name of your client I can get you called off by fair means or foul –’ Keith had no way of knowing how closely he was parallelling Mrs Heller’s argument to Mr Green ‘–but otherwise I’ll have to put you out of action. Four broken kneecaps should just about do the job. It’s wonderful how a limp in both legs slows a man down – and makes him easy to describe. Take your choice.’