by V M Knox
A minute later, he signalled Reg who joined him at the side of the house. Reg dropped his pack on the ground and withdrew his Sten gun, assembling it quickly then swinging the pack over his shoulder. Together, they crept along the side path. Clement checked the windows above their heads but the curtains remained drawn. He paused at the back corner of the house and peered around the edge. No guard stood there either. In the strong moonlight, he saw washing still hanging on the line. Isabel. He paused, his mind racing. He had never believed the girl was involved with the group for anything more than domestic duties but did the presence of washing indicate she was still there? Clement thought back to his home in Fearnley Maughton. He knew Mary never left washing out at night. Something to do with damp. Had Isabel been sent home? Or was she in the house?
Hunching low and running forward, they squatted by the rear door, Reg keeping his Sten up across his chest, his finger poised by the trigger as Clement reached for the lock-picks and rotated the barrel. Within seconds they entered the house.
Clement lingered by the door and waited. No one came. He slipped inside, Reg following him. Reg checked the blackout curtains then flicked on the torch and scanned the room. It was the scullery and kitchen. The room was long and narrow with two doors leading back into the house. Everything looked tidy and no dishes or foodstuffs were left out. Clement crept towards one of the internal doors and gradually opened it. Beyond was a large dining room. Silently closing the door, he went to the other and opened it. This door led into a hall. Leaving the rear door unlocked and the internal door ajar, they tiptoed along the corridor. To his right were several doors. He opened each in turn until he found the one to the cellar. Opening the door, Reg waited at the top while Clement descended. It smelt damp and musty. Clement shivered, forcing the memories of the last time he was imprisoned in a cellar from his mind. He flashed the torch around the dark space but no one was being held there. He checked the walls and floor but there wasn’t another way out. Hurrying back upstairs, he rejoined Reg in the hall. Together they checked the front rooms. Standing by a window that faced the front of the house, Clement pulled back a curtain and stared out into the night. He pulled the binoculars from his coat and trained them on the driveway. In the moonlight he could just see Morris’s car parked beside the drive, under the large oaks.
Leaving the front room, he checked the next room; Armstrong’s study. It was an elegant room with a large ornate desk in the Napoleonic style. A bust of Adolf Hitler sat on the desk. Clement glanced at Reg who, Clement felt, would like to have broken it. He then checked the desk drawers but they yielded nothing of interest. He stood, his gaze slowly taking in every aspect of the room. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was there. Yet the house and the rooms, other than where Isabel worked, looked vacated; as though it had all been packed away and the house closed up, but his skin prickled with anticipation. They left the room, crossing the hall. Opposite was a sitting room. Here large dust cloths had been draped over the furniture. Whoever was now in charge of the group wasn’t intending to return any time soon. Clement walked into the hall. Nothing. Lifting his leg, he placed his foot on the lowest stair. Reg close behind him.
A light, fierce and blinding, flashed into his eyes from the top of the stairs. He shielded his eyes from the intense glare with one hand and slipped the catch on his Welrod with the other. In that second, Reg swung around and crouched behind the stairs, his Sten in his grasp. That no one had fired at him told Clement that, whoever it was standing at the top of the stairs, it wasn’t Armstrong. Armstrong wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. ‘Show yourself or I shoot,’ Clement threatened. He waited two seconds for a response then let off two quiet thuds into the side wall hoping that whoever stood above him on the upper landing wouldn’t return fire. A scream followed.
‘Isabel?’ Clement shouted.
The girl screamed again, dropping the torch. Clement heard her pounding footsteps as she ran back along the corridor. A door slammed shut.
‘Isabel? We don’t mean you any harm,’ Clement shouted, cautiously climbing the stairs. He moved slowly along the corridor towards the back of the house. ‘Are you alone in the house?’
Silence.
Clement repeated his question. ‘I’m coming in. You’re safe. I mean you no harm.’
Clement kicked the door, the lock shattering. The girl screamed again.
‘Isabel? Don’t be afraid.’
‘I thought you were dead,’ she stammered.
‘Is anyone else in the house?’ Clement asked.
‘Just me,’ she said, hysteria taking hold.
‘How many people were here, Isabel?’
‘Six. Five if you don’t count Sir Hector.’ She paused. ‘You killed him, didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to escape and he came into the barn as it blew up. Did Mr Bainbridge go with them?’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Bainbridge,’ Clement repeated. ‘I saw him with the important visitor,’ Clement said.
‘I don’t know who you mean. I don’t know anything,’ the girl sobbed.
‘Isabel, has the important man with grey hair gone with Mr Hugh Armstrong?’
She nodded, her whole body visibly shaking.
‘Do you know where they’ve gone?’ Clement said, his voice calm.
Isabel shook her head. Tears were streaming down her face and Clement could see that the girl was terrified. ‘I don’t know. Really. They’ve gone. That’s all I know.’
‘How did they leave? By car? Or lorry, perhaps?’ Clement said his voice soft.
‘Mr Hugh took the visitor in the sports car. The others went in the lorry.’
A noise, like the sound of a chair falling over, crashed onto a wooden floor somewhere further along the corridor. Clement shot a glance at Reg. ‘Isabel, who else is in the house?’ he demanded.
Isabel stood trembling, her whimpering unintelligible.
Clement nodded to Reg who ran along the corridor and kicked open a door further along the corridor.
‘Clement!’ Reg called.
Clement grasped hold of Isabel’s right arm and pulled her along the hall. He knew if it had been Armstrong in the room he would have come out shooting. Someone was held captive there. Clement opened the door and shone the torch into the darkness.
Chapter 24
Reg cut the ropes. ‘You alright, lad?’
The boy’s eyes were wide and mistrustful.
‘Do you remember me?’ Clement said, kneeling down so the boy could see his face clearly. ‘I came to your school with Superintendent Morris.’
The boy nodded.
‘My friend, the policeman, is outside. Come with us now. Do you have a coat?’
‘He can’t leave,’ Isabel said. ‘I’ll be in terrible trouble if he isn’t here.’
‘I think you should come with us too, Isabel,’ Clement said, standing, his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘Leave the boy where he is!’
Clement heard the voice. It was a voice he knew. He spun on his heel. His eyes fixed on the pistol levelled at him. He looked into the face of Gabrielle Warrender, his housekeeper. Her blue eyes were like steel, her square jaw fixed with determination and hostility. Seconds passed and neither spoke. Clement saw she was wearing a thick travelling coat and he realised that she had been left behind to take the boy somewhere. Then Clement saw it, the thin blue line in the weave of her coat, repeated every six inches or so. He’d seen it before in the trousers of the dead man in Morris’s mortuary; the thick, hand-spun cloth, the same pattern with a single thread of blue.
‘The boy is innocent. It’s me they want, Ailsa. Or is it really Gabrielle?’
The woman laughed. She cocked the gun. ‘Don’t think for one minute your life means anything at all. Insignificant people don’t matter.’
Clement kept his eyes on her. ‘Did you kill the porter at Trinity Hall?’
The woman smiled. ‘It was so easy. And they arrested you!’
‘I told you, insignificant people don’t matter. He knew too much and he was seen talking to you. Besides, he knew about the boy.’
‘Why do you want him?’
‘While he is with us, his father will do as we require.’
Clement kept the eye contact between them. Had Bill Hayward really died because of him? Or was she just trying to unsettle him? Either way, he felt some degree of guilt for the man’s death. In his peripheral vision he saw that Reg had quietly withdrawn his knife and was holding it by his side.
‘Why don’t you let Isabel go then. She’s of no use to you.’
‘Not while the boy is here.’
‘Where are they taking him?’
Outside, Clement heard the sound of a vehicle on the gravel drive.
The woman smiled. ‘Your end has come, Reverend Wisdom.’
They heard the sound of a car door slam. Then the front door opened, a cool breeze wafting up the stairs.
‘That will be Mr Armstrong come for the boy. Isabel, go and bring Mr Hugh here.’
Clement stared at the woman as Isabel ran from the room. ‘Aren’t you interested in how your brother died?’
‘My brother died years ago.’
‘I’m not talking about Bill.’
She paused but Clement saw the fleeting reaction in her steely eyes. ‘I have no other brother.’
‘I think you do. Another brother named John. He is currently in the police mortuary in Cambridge waiting for his family to give him a decent burial.’
‘Then he’ll be waiting a while. He was a traitor. And he died as one.’
Clement saw the hatred in her eyes. He didn’t understand it. Had she meant her brother was a traitor to their cause or was it to Nazi Germany? Clement heard the footsteps on the stairs. ‘And what are you to Hugh Armstrong?’
‘A patriot and loyal servant to the League,’ she said, her finger moving to the trigger. Reg lunged forward, taking her around the neck and pulling her backwards. The gun in her tight fist discharged into the ceiling. Clement turned the boy to face him and held him tightly as Reg drew his knife across the woman’s throat. The footsteps on the stairs had stopped.
‘Is there a back way out?’ he whispered to Michael.
The trembling boy nodded. Opening the door, Clement peered out, back along the corridor. The front stairs were a distance from the back bedrooms. A door, usually closed, divided the front bedrooms from the servants’ quarters at the rear. A light had been turned on downstairs. Clement tiptoed along the corridor to the dividing door. In the glow of the light below, he saw Armstrong’s shadow on the wall, a pistol in his grasp as he slowly and noiselessly climbed the stairs. Clement beckoned behind him to Reg who carried the boy along the corridor to the rear stairs. Clement joined them. Descending the servants’ stairs, they hurried to the scullery at the rear of the house. Isabel sat wide-eyed on a stool by the stove. Clement signalled with his finger against his lips for her to remain quiet. ‘Go home, Isabel,’ he whispered. For one second, he wondered if he should take her too but he could see she was paralysed with fear and there was no time for remonstrations. He believed Armstrong was unlikely to harm her, simply because she was of no significance to him.
Leaving by the kitchen, they crept around the house in a wide arc and crouched by a fence in the adjacent field. The front of the house was in the centre of his vision. Clement took his binoculars and trained them on the house. The Lagonda was parked on the driveway, turned around and ready to leave. Clement estimated it would only be a few minutes before Hugh Armstrong found the woman’s body and that the boy was no longer in the house. Not that Clement thought Armstrong would be dismayed by the woman’s death. The boy, however, was a different matter.
Clement kept the binoculars on the car. Armstrong, Clement guessed, had returned for the boy and the Lagonda had only two seats. But it didn’t mean that Armstrong had returned to the house alone. The Scot could still be in the vicinity. Clement closed his eyes for a second. Why, if the boy was still of value to them, had he not gone in the lorry with the others? Why was it necessary for him to be transported in the car? Was it possible the lad was to be traded with someone? Clement couldn’t think about it now. The boy’s immediate safety was all that mattered and Clement needed to get him away from Hitcham Hall. Reg reached for the binoculars, scanning the driveway and gardens for Morris’s car.
‘He’s not there, Clement!’ Reg said.
‘What?’ Clement felt his stomach churn. ‘Check again, Reg.’
‘I could go and look, if you’d like?’
‘No. I can’t lose you as well.’ Clement paused. ‘We take the boy with us to the boat.’
Reg picked up Michael, and carrying the lad on his back, they headed out across the fields.
As Clement ran he wondered what had happened to Morris. It wasn’t like him to change a plan. Did that mean Armstrong, or more likely the Scot, had either killed or taken Morris? Was Morris a hostage now? Clement glanced up at the boy on Reg’s shoulders. Was Michael more important than Clement had realised? He remembered the woman’s words about the boy’s father. What role did Sir Cedric Hasluck play? No man would trade his son for an unknown policeman? As Clement ran he realised Armstrong’s intent. Morris was to be traded but the trade wasn’t with Michael’s father. It would be he, Clement, who would be forced to choose; Morris or the boy.
Clement checked his watch, his mind racing. They struck out over the fields, weaving their way from fence to fence or through wooded areas. The gate into the copse adjacent to The Bridge was ten feet away when they heard a shot. Clement stopped and turned. He thought of Morris. ‘Keep running!’ Clement said, hoping the gunshot was a bluff. Clement believed that while he had the boy, Morris would remain alive. Jumping the fence they crossed the road and went straight to the river but Clement knew what lay ahead. Armstrong intended a confrontation and when it happened it would be personal and deadly.
Crossing the narrow woodland path, they waited by the road. Jumping the fence, Clement ran into the rear gardens of The Bridge. He saw no one. He signalled Reg. Drawing his Welrod, he watched the road and inn as Reg and Michael joined him by the sprawling trees. Together, they ran across the grass to where Reg had tied up the dinghy.
‘Clement, you stay with the boy and row the boat to Horningsea. I’ll get the film from the camera by the gate at Hitcham Hall and meet you there. That should tell us what happened to Morris.’
‘Agreed. And Reg, be careful.’
Reg smiled and disappeared into the night.
Minutes later, Clement put the oars into the rowlocks and started to row upstream.
‘Are you alright, Michael?’ Clement whispered.
The boy nodded but Clement could see fear and exhaustion. The lad had seen enough malevolence for one lifetime and Clement wanted to get him to safety as soon as possible. ‘Just sit tight there for a few more minutes. Once we are safe you can tell me all about it.’
Clement leaned into the rowing, dipping the oars carefully into the running water, his shoulder pain the least of his concerns. From time to time he turned around, hoping to see the spire of St Peter’s. Half an hour later, it appeared. He smiled again at Michael. ‘Nearly there,’ he whispered. But his mind was on Morris and Armstrong and what lay in store. Pulling hard on one oar, Clement rounded the dinghy so that it came up beside the timber platform.
Tying the dinghy to the jetty, he stood and stepped from the boat, his eyes firmly on the shore and the hill above the jetty. Assisting Michael out of the dinghy, he and the boy hurried up the grassy bank towards the dark edifice of St Peter’s Church, his senses on high alert.
Standing beside the old stone church with Michael beside him, Clement waited at the corner and peered around to the church’s front door and its covered porch. Crouching low, they ran towards it and hid beside a pillar. Clement scanned the scene before him. Large trees dotted the graveyard. It was dark. A light wind was rustlin
g the leaves in the large trees. Odd shadows flickered over the headstones. Beneath one of the trees, he saw the silhouette of a man. Clement waited, his ears straining for sound. Nothing. The figure hadn’t moved. Clement stared at the scene for what seemed like minutes. He knew from the size of the man it wasn’t Armstrong and although he couldn’t be sure, he didn’t think it was the Scot either. The trees swayed and leaves continued their rustling but something about it wasn’t right. As the seconds passed Clement had a growing sense of unease. He put his arm around Michael. No matter what this man wanted, Clement knew he couldn’t expose Michael to further danger. Yet Clement was unwilling to leave the boy alone. He studied the figure. Pulling his Welrod from its holster next to his chest, and holding the boy firmly, Clement tiptoed forward.
‘Show yourself!’ he said in a low voice. The figure remained, unmoving. Clement felt the realising shiver. The sight was spellbinding. He slipped the catch on the pistol. His eyes flicked around: the church, the trees, the headstones. He and the boy were vulnerable now. With his eyes as wide as possible, and his ears straining, he advanced towards the figure. Five feet from the man, Clement froze. His hand covered the boy’s face.
Clement felt his heart almost stop. He stared, his eyes wide, his brain frozen in horror. Reg was tied to a tree trunk. A myriad of questions screamed to be answered. Was he alive? Was he wired? Was Hugh Armstrong waiting in the graveyard ready to detonate a fuse? Clement felt the breeze on his face yet he felt hot. ‘Stay here, Michael,’ Clement whispered, his voice almost inaudible. Crouching beside the boy, he turned the lad’s face away from Reg. ‘Hide behind that headstone there and don’t come out, no matter what you hear or see. I’ll be back for you and that’s a promise,’ Clement whispered into the boy’s frightened face, his hands gently holding the lad’s shoulders. He saw the boy slip behind the stone, then Clement stood and slowly advanced. He stared into the face of his old friend, comrade and neighbour, but he knew Reg was dead. Clement began to shake. A rope bound Reg to the tree. It wrapped around his torso and was drawn tightly around his neck. Reg’s tongue protruded from his open mouth and his face was swollen and smeared with blood. Clement felt the breath leave him and nausea well up. He swallowed. No time. No time for horror or grief. Clement could almost feel the sadistic presence of Hugh Armstrong. He needed to think; to act rationally. If Armstrong was nearby, then his car was also. Clement crouched behind a nearby headstone and gulped in air, trying to quell the rising panic. Glancing back to where Michael had hidden, he could just see the boy seated behind the tombstone, his leg’s drawn up. For now Michael was safe. Waiting only a few seconds, Clement ran towards the adjacent stone building that bordered the graveyard. Barrels stacked outside reminded Clement it was the public house, The Crown and Punchbowl. No lights were visible. He ran along the northern side of the building, crouching at the corner. In front of him was the sealed road. Parked by the inn’s front door was the Lagonda. Clement stared at it. No one was in the vehicle. No one was anywhere. Reg had been placed so that he would be found. And not just by anyone. Clement’s heart pounded as he crept up to the car and ran his hand over the bonnet. Warm. He looked around. Nothing. Yet he sensed Armstrong, waiting, watching, the ever-present sneer. Clement knew he had to make a decision. He could use the car to get Michael to safety. Clement put his hand on the car door. Surprisingly it was unlocked. He hesitated. Was it wired, a delayed detonation? He swung the car door wide and jumped back. Nothing. Sitting inside the car, he remembered a skill Reg had taught him while in Scotland. His hand reached under the dashboard, his fingers searching for the wires.
