Death of a Raven

by Margaret Duffy

  “His throat was cut,” Mark said thickly from the floor. “Two tries. The Major doesn’t need two goes at cutting someone’s throat.”

  Perhaps we were all mesmerized by these two men, by their almost obscene obesity and pig stupid bloodshot eyes. For during the next couple of seconds during which Rab kicked Mark twice and Patrick reversed his grip once again on the beam no one moved or spoke.

  “Bloody pongo,” said Bryce to Patrick. “Someone said you were a bloody pongo. Tell me what that is.” He gave the rifle to his brother.

  “It’s British slang for soldier,” I said.

  Bryce took a knife from his pocket and moved in my direction. “What kind of soldier?”

  I stared at him, trying not to see the knife, my mind an utter blank.

  Patrick said, “A soldier from a special unit trained to fight without weapons.”

  Bryce forgot about me and went back to Patrick. “Fuckin’ lyin’ bloody pongo.” The knife point drew a red line down Patrick’s breast bone and then jabbed, twisting slightly. Blood welled and trickled and there was a thud behind me as someone fainted.

  A small sound escaped through Patrick’s clenched teeth and he had to grab for a hold. Bryce chuckled at the desperate endeavour, hands reversed again, thumbs gripping the bottom of the beam, fingers curled right over the top.

  “I’ll show you,” Patrick whispered and spat accurately right in the big man’s face.

  Bryce involuntarily took a couple of steps backwards and thus positioned himself to receive both of Patrick’s feet in the mouth. He went over backwards like a poleaxed bullock.

  I went for Rab, intent on getting the rifle away from him. He kicked out at me, hacking me on the shin, but I kneed him in the groin and he dropped the weapon. But he wasn’t finished. He grabbed me in a bear hug, obviously with the idea of turning me into a shield. I can deal with bearhugs but hadn’t reckoned on another knife. It was held to my throat, I could feel the blade against my skin.

  Aligning an armed attacker for a heart shot involves committing to memory a series of complicated movements, split second timing and surgical accuracy on the part of one’s working companion. This degree of accuracy had, for obvious reasons been assessed with a pistol armed just with a laser light beam. I had only my memory to rely on at this moment but I performed the movements wondering if Hurley would have the presence of mind to hit Rab over the head with a chair.

  It was a shock then to hear the Smith and Wesson fire, and to know that the soft nosed bullet had taken Rab under the right arm, through ribs, intercostal muscles, pulmonary vein and then into the right atrium.

  Rab died.

  For a moment there was silence but for Bryce gargling on blood and smashed teeth. Then, uproar.

  Patrick bent over Mark who was still choking from the kicking he had been given and had badly cut lips. Then he came to me.

  “I don’t know how you did that,” I said, and he knew that I meant holding the gun. It had fallen from his hands and directly into Hurley’s as soon as it had fired, Hurley told me afterwards.

  “I think Bryce is dead,” Fraser said during the next con-fusing moments when I had my arms around Patrick and seemed to be holding him up rather than vice versa.

  He was. The grossly overweight man had suffered a heart seizure.

  *

  It was another bad blunder. The very last thing we needed, as Patrick so succinctly put it just after midnight, was for the whole of Port Charles to be made aware that the British Army, special operations variety, was in residence at Ravenscliff. He didn’t mention what we were all thinking, that he himself was about to suffer the adulation of the entire neighbourhood for finally ridding it of long standing bully-boys.

  To Le Blek, however, Patrick was not a hero and he took him away for questioning.

  “Took him away?” queried Leander Hurley when I tracked him down in his office in the Naval dockyard in Port Charles the following morning when Patrick still had not returned.

  “Careless sentence construction,” I said. “He went with them when requested to do so. Can you do anything?”

  “To get him out?”

  “Don’t you know any words with more than two syllables this morning?” I raged. “What else could I damned well mean?”

  Hurley doodled on an otherwise virgin blotter. “I don’t think he’ll come to any harm, and that’s the opinion of an honest man.”

  “We’re talking about something a little further into the grown-up world than your department zapping MI5.”

  He laid down the pen. “Even if Le Blek does get a little impatient, and perhaps doesn’t let him have much sleep or anything to eat —”

  “Or wash or relieve himself or sit down,” I interrupted. “No, you’re right, he’s had plenty of dress rehearsals along those lines. But didn’t it strike you that those drunken lunatics rolled up rather neatly on cue last night?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “D’you know where the expression pongo really comes from?”

  Hurley showed slightly more than polite interest.

  “It’s Royal Navy slang for a soldier,” I informed him. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard it before. Someone described Patrick to Bryce Gaspereau in those terms and I reckon whoever it was arranged for them to arrive when they did. They would have killed him.”

  “I think Le Blek realizes that.”

  “So why has he taken Patrick in?”

  “He might be suspicious that your husband knows a lot more about what’s behind this whole business than he says he does. The RCMP don’t like foreign agents on their patch.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me neither,” he agreed. “If your government is conducting in-fighting on Canadian soil we want to know about it — every last detail. Put yourself in our position.”

  “I believe you’ve been given sufficient information to satisfy protocol.”

  He sat back in his chair and looked me straight in the eye. “Where do you fit into all this, Mrs. Gillard?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. “But it was you who kept the party going by making Patrick perform for money last night. You also fed Paul the clams and just happen to be in a position to call someone a bloody pongo.”

  “Ouch,” said Hurley, looking out of the window.

  The dockyard siren wailed an invitation to a lunchbreak that had begun unofficially some five minutes earlier when cars had begun to stream past the window and out through the gates. Moments later the hooter of Port Charles Shipbuilders, next door, seconded it eerily into the thick Fundy fog, a tin whistle to a bassoon.

  “Then there’s Emma,” I continued.

  “What about her?” Hurley asked carefully, giving me his full attention.

  “She’s spiteful enough when the mood takes her to fill your mind with all kinds of rubbish.”

  “Ma’am, I take no notice what a woman says when I’m bedding her.”

  “No? Then why bother with her? You can have any woman you like.”

  Hurley’s eyes bulged slightly. Then he smiled, more of a leer really. “Why — are you game?”

  “No,” I snapped. “Was Margaret Howard?”

  “Even if she was, let me ask you something. Is it your job to do the same as Emma, find out what you can and report back?”

  I had to look away from him, recollecting how Patrick had clung to me and thanked God that the bullet hadn’t hit me too.

  “Perhaps not,” said Hurley. He picked up the pen again and recommenced doodling. “The KGB was mentioned to Le Blek …”

  So the conversation at RavensclifF had been reported to Hurley. I kept quiet.

  “Don’t say that you’re not involved. If you weren’t the Major would have sent you packing when he was telling Le Blek to get off his backside. I think that everyone agrees that you’re both here to keep an eye on these guys, but whether the threat was really made or whether you’re doing something else on the side …”

  “Ask Fraser,” I said. “He recei
ved the letter.”

  “I have.”

  “Well?”

  “He showed me a photocopy of it. Anyone could have cobbled it together in five minutes.”

  I grimly hung on to my temper. “Hasn’t there been any communication between MI6 and your department over this?”

  “Not that anyone’s managed to trace.”

  I gazed at him in utter disbelief.

  “But you don’t know anything about it,” Hurley mocked in a sing-song voice.

  “I go with him on some of his assignments,” I told him. “It gives me a break and I find plenty of material for my novels. He likes having me around if all he’s doing is socialising and keeping an eye on things. It makes his presence less obvious.”

  “It won’t do,” Hurley said shaking his head. “I was there when you kneed Rab Gaspereau in the goolies, remember?”

  “For heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed. “Don’t Canadian women attend self-defence classes?”

  “To learn commando holds and place a man in position for a difficult heart shot? You learnt your lessons well, Ma’am, you didn’t pick up that rifle afterwards the way any housewife would. It was all ready to blast the head off any friend of the Gaspereau family who might have burst in.”

  I wanted to convince myself that Hurley was merely totally unsubtle, a stickler to his job and could therefore be trusted. But there was a streak of irresponsibility about him. As Earl Lawrence had said, he was like a big kid. And a big kid with power was highly dangerous.

  In the aftermath of the killings I had forgotten to draw Patrick’s attention to what Carol had told me. At the time, I suppose, it had hardly seemed important. Now, I had no intention of giving this information to Hurley, nor for that matter buying Patrick’s release by co-operating in any way.

  It did not seem too rash to assume, in fact, that Hurley was responsible for Patrick being taken in for questioning. Also, if Six hadn’t smoothed the way for a small unit in Five to do a job then we had deliberately been thrown in the deep end. There could be several reasons for this but one might be that someone was now working for the wrong side and given enough rope would hang himself. In no circumstances should Hurley be made a party to this.

  But I saw no reason why Patrick should be hanged first.

  Hurley said, “The poisoning was an accident. I ate some of the clams too. Quade’s car hit a tree because he wasn’t used to our vehicles and roads, and that mark on the chassis was where a stone hit it in the crash. Lanny was standing around on that spot because he was going in for a spot of illegal hunting, it’s a well known place where white-tailed deer cross the road. Then one of his many enemies caught up with him on a dark night. This story can be re-written in many ways.”

  “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” I said. “Where was Lanny’s rifle when his body was found? Has anyone mentioned to you that Fraser’s cars were sprayed with acid before he flew out here? Did you actually bother to look at Fraser when you were asking him questions? Beneath the bland exterior he’s half out of his mind with worry.”

  Hurley stood up. “I’ll take you to your husband. We’ll both check that he’s still smiling.”

  I had no choice but to go with him.

  “Of course this is just what an enemy would wish,” I said when we were seated in his car. “Suspicion, contusion and time-wasting among allies.”

  “I have to be quite sure that we are allies.”

  The impatient retort sprang to my lips but I didn’t utter it. If Six hadn’t ensured a security clearance for us because of an internal investigation all Hurley had to do was make a few phone calls. David Hartland was the most accessible representative of Six but might not have the seniority to vouch for this. It was possible that he himself was the one under scrutiny.

  We took the Fredericton road and then branched left towards Tracy, crossing by a quirk of topography from King’s County, across part of Queen’s, nipping a corner of Charlotte and then into Sunbury. I didn’t need a map to know this. I had memorised the countryside around Port Charles in a radius of a hundred miles.

  Two miles after Blissville, Hurley swung the wheel and we entered a long driveway that wound for about two miles through the trees. Always the trees. In every direction, everywhere one looked, were trees. And on the coast, where they grew with precarious hold on eroded cliff edges, it seemed that they only gave way reluctantly to the ocean.

  We drew up at a house clad in the familiar white weather boarding. I opened the door of the car myself and stepped out. If I was to be delivered like a parcel then I would walk in front and Hurley could follow. He did nothing to prevent me.

  I went straight in without knocking and felt a glimmer of satisfaction when my sudden ingress caused a man standing in the hallway to start violently. He began to smile at me but changed his mind when he saw Hurley, thought about shaking hands and then chickened out on that as well.

  The ground floor seemed to be an office of sorts; phones rang, people wandered around with files tucked under their arms, through an open doorway near where I stood I could see a woman typing. The general aura of the place was pleasant enough, a lot of white paint, prints on the walls, a few expensive house plants well looked after. It was a bit like the reception area of a secure mental hospital I had once visited.

  Inspector Le Blek came down the staircase directly in front of me, not at all surprised to see me, obviously having watched my arrival courtesy of security cameras.

  I said, “I take it you’re a visitor too.”

  He smiled politely at me and gave an envelope he was holding to Hurley. He didn’t confirm what I already knew, that we weren’t at the local headquarters of the RCMP. He didn’t say anything, just regarded Hurley in hostile fashion.

  Hurley slit the envelope open and walked away a few paces to read what it contained. “Nothing else?”

  “That’s all,” Le Blek replied grittily.

  Hurley screwed the sheet of paper into a ball. “You’d better take her up.”

  “I think I’d rather you brought Patrick down,” I said.

  “He’s sleeping,” said Le Blek.

  “What would you do if I walked right out of here again?”

  “Nothing. You’re free to do as you like.”

  I turned to Hurley. “Would you drive me back to Port Charles if I asked you?”

  “I’ll take you both back when he wakes up.” Hurley wasn’t really listening to me, frowning to himself, still kneading the ball of paper in one hand.

  The three of us went up the stairs, Le Blek leading, then me and Hurley bringing up the rear. They had been honest with me. In a front bedroom Patrick was asleep on a double bed, fully dressed. I heard the door close and lock behind me but paid no attention.

  He had been laid down in the first aid recovery position, on his stomach, left knee drawn up slightly, his head on one side. A towel had been placed beneath his head. I removed it and folded it so that the patch of vomit was inside, cleaning his face with tissues from my bag before I put it back.

  I was sitting on the bed when the door opened. I didn’t look up. It didn’t take much intelligence to realize that they were about to do the same to me.

  Chapter 15

  “Have you any idea,” I said to Leander Hurley, “of the effect of this stuff on an unborn child?” He was, for the first time, looking slightly out of his depth.

  “Not very original,” commented the female paramedic, the needle almost touching my arm. “They all try that one.”

  “Are you pregnant?” Le Blek asked.

  “Yes,” I replied and wrenched my arm from the woman’s grip. Her nails raked my wrist. “Not beyond the wit of the Canadian Army Medical Corps to check, surely?”

  She straightened up and glared at me. “It’ll take ten minutes, that’s all — you’ll have gained nothing.”

  “There could be one hell of a row,” mused Hurley, gazing down at Patrick.

  The woman hooted in derision. “She’s his trollop? Not a cha
nce. Didn’t you read Doctor Reid’s report? He only has half a testicle.”

  And with that she repossessed my arm and banged in the hypodermic.

  My free hand connected with her head, a real sideswipe with my arm straight and rigid. She lost her balance and toppled sideways. The pain was so bad when the needle was dragged out that I screamed. I really saw red then, thought about how my wedding ring was there as large as life for the bitch to see and kicked her on the side of the jaw when she tried to stand up. This time she stayed down.

  “Is that it?” I yelled at Hurley. “I’m a criminal? An undesirable alien to be filled up with your filthy drugs? And I suppose that afterwards you’ll deny having brought us here, so that Canada and Great Britain can carry on being buddies for ever and ever. Until the next time MI5 sends someone who just happens to be able to arm wrestle you to the floor and doesn’t have to rely on screwing and drugging women as his sole source of information.”

  While all this had been going on Le Blek had been lounging against the wall by the window.

  “Perhaps you’d better check,” he said.

  “What exactly did Gillard say?” Hurley barked.

  “I gave you the report.”

  “All three lines of it. People talk when they’ve been given the truth drug. What did the guy actually say?”

  Le Blek levered himself off the wall. “We asked him all the usual questions. He said who he was and who he was working for, just what he told me when we first met. He said why he was here and who his wife was and when it was her birthday and what he was going to buy her. Then we lost him for a bit — he’s a very bad subject — didn’t listen, kept singing to himself and trying to go to sleep. I told you, if you remember, that I thought he was too tired.

  “Then he came on stream again and sang a bit more. Rather good. I should imagine he used to be in a choir. Said that his Dad was a priest and how he was thinking of doing the same one day. We asked him about Fraser and he said that the man was a part-time soldier. Gillard didn’t sound as though he trusted him all that much. I wrote that down. It is the only really interesting thing as far as you’re concerned. Listen to the tapes if you want to, there’s a hell of a lot more — about the army, how he’s meaning to collect all the Beethoven symphonies, all sorts of stuff. They’re in the next room with the recorder.”