Paul Temple and the Harkdale Robbery

by Francis Durbridge

  ‘Paul Temple said you were using me,’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘He came to see me yesterday at the club. It’s all right, I didn’t tell him anything. But you wouldn’t use me, would you, Des?’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you really love me?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They were still on the motorway and passing signs that indicated the turning off to Slough. Betty wondered when they would reach the airport. She got confused by all the M roads and A roads which never quite went to the same places. As far as she could remember Heathrow was on the A4.

  ‘He seemed to think you were using me to get the money out of the country.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘No, Des, of course not.’

  Suddenly they were passing through Reading and she saw that they were turning off along the road to Oxford. They had left Heathrow a long way behind.

  ‘Where are we going, Des?’ she asked softly. ‘Aren’t we going to Ireland?’

  ‘We’ve had to change our plans, haven’t we?’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ She blew her nose and shrank into the seat. ‘I thought we were going to Ireland.’

  ‘We would have done if you hadn’t talked to Mr Paul bloody Temple!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She knew the way they were going, she remembered it from Saturday night when Des had picked her up outside the front door of her parents’ house. But they didn’t go to the caravan site this time. They took a different road round Banbury and went up a hill with trees on either side. At the top they turned left along a bumpy ridge.

  Betty looked at the lights of Banbury spread out away in the distance and thought how beautiful it was. She supposed she ought to feel like a bride coming home. Perhaps they were going to live here for a while, until it was safe to go to Ireland. It looked remote enough. Des was still driving at an unnecessary sixty-five miles an hour, as if they were being followed.

  Some gates flashed past and they were driving towards a large house which stood against the sky, black and gothic, perfectly remote from the police and all those people who wanted to spoil her chance of happiness.

  As they drew up before the front door a small fox terrier ran out barking at the wheels of the car. Des tried to swerve the car at it, but they had stopped and the dog was unhurt.

  ‘Des! You nearly killed –’

  Her voice broke off as he took a Walther PPK pistol from the glove compartment. He was aiming it at the dog when he saw a woman standing by the Hillman Imp at the side of the house. He pointed it at the woman instead.

  Steve had been watching television by herself when she realised that Paul had missed the point. She should have been sketching out a few ideas for a series of book jackets, but that would have meant reading the books. She was watching television, wondering how to persuade Paul to read the books and tell her what they were about, when she saw on the news that Arnold Cookson had been arrested at the Red Trees Caravan Site.

  The police wished to interview Desmond Blane and Betty Stanway. They had disappeared, and anybody who could provide information was asked to contact New Scotland Yard. Their two photographs were flashed briefly on the screen while it was explained that they might be making for Ireland.

  Paul would be busily tracking them down, she thought, away for days in the cause of justice and Charlie Vosper. She would have to read the books herself. First novels by women; perhaps it wasn’t necessary to read them; there would be the one about a girl at university having an abortion, the one about a girl hitting London and marrying a painter, the one about a sensitive young wife coping with children in NW1. Maybe the fourth book would combine all three plots. Steve smiled. It would be more interesting if the girl were abducted by a bank robber and kept a prisoner at…

  I know where they are, she thought to herself.

  Paul had missed the point when she had told him about Red Trees Farm. He had gone off with the police to the caravan site and they had made their arrest. But it was the farm itself which Cookson had sold to somebody in London.

  ‘Come on, Jackson, we’re going for a walk.’

  The dog was asleep under the television set. He growled at an imaginary Siamese cat, wagged his tail, and continued sleeping.

  ‘Let’s go for a car ride.’

  Jackson knew his way about, as usual, and he barked in recognition when they passed the caravan site. Steve was grateful for his company. He wouldn’t be much protection in an emergency, but at least he would warn her if Blane was lurking about in the dark.

  When they reached the top of the hill and parked beside the farmhouse Steve began to have second thoughts about showing Paul how clever she was. Blane was a ruthless killer, and the reason everybody was so keen to find him was that he intended to kill again. Betty Stanway, Steve Temple, what was one more to him? Perhaps Steve had been rash.

  The house appeared to be empty. There were no lights and she couldn’t hear any movement. After waiting a few moments in case anybody had heard the car she stepped onto the gravel driveway. Jackson remained on the back seat.

  ‘Coming?’ she murmured. ‘They don’t seem to have arrived yet.’

  He was probably afraid of the dark. Steve shrugged understandingly and went silently round to the back of the house. She noticed a barn twenty yards away, which might be useful if she had to hide. The farmhouse was probably eighteenth century; a few small latticed windows and thick stone walls; it had not been very well kept during the past few years. She noticed a broken window on the first floor, within easy reach of anybody who was standing on the back porch.

  She kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the porch. Her stretch ski slacks would never be the same, but she got there and balanced precariously on the slate roof while she opened the window and slithered inside. She could feel her heart beating rapidly as she crossed the bathroom and went into a bedroom which occupied the front corner of the house. She hoped it was the exertion, but it might have been nerves. From that corner of the house she assumed she would see any car approaching the drive.

  Steve made a rapid tour of the building, switching the light on and off instantaneously in each room, memorising the geography and learning what she could of the place. It was not lived in, but obviously somebody had been there recently because the kitchen was noticeably warm. Presumably a manager worked there during the day, responsible for the caravan site. He couldn’t be responsible for the farm, because it wasn’t farmed. Steve wondered whether there were laws to compel farmers to use their land, but she couldn’t remember.

  The telephone was in the hall. She rang the house in London, but Paul didn’t answer. While she was wondering what to do next she heard Jackson barking outside. She dialled nine nine nine and asked for the police as she heard the car.

  ‘Can you send out to Red Trees Farm immediately, please? I think Desmond Blane has just arrived.’

  She hurried to the side door and found that she was right. Desmond Blane was pointing a gun at her.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Steve Temple. I’ve heard a lot about you. Hello, Betty. I’ve been expecting you.’ She smiled and held the door open for them. ‘I was about to make a pot of tea. You’re probably thirsty after the journey.’

  ‘I’ll do the organising,’ said Blane. He turned to Betty and asked, ‘Is this the woman who gave you a lift with Paul Temple on Saturday?’

  Betty nodded.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Steve laughed. ‘I would have thought that was obvious. I came to prevent you from killing Betty. She didn’t mean to become involved in your squalid little robberies, and I doubt even now whether she has the remotest idea what is going on.’

  Blane was hesitant. He ushered them into the kitchen and hunted through the cupboards for something to drink. He clearly didn’t know his way around very well, but he had been
there before. He found a bottle of whisky in the pantry.

  ‘How do you mean to stop me killing Betty?’ he asked.

  Betty was so pale that by contrast with her auburn hair her face looked almost sallow. She wasn’t speaking. Bad as things were she probably knew they would get worse if she spoke, worse still if anybody acted.

  ‘I called the police,’ said Steve. ‘They’ll be here any moment.’

  He nodded. ‘I believe you.’ He raised the Walther again, pointed it at her heart and squeezed the trigger.

  Steve heard the bang and heard the scream. For a second or so she wondered when she would die, and whether there would be any pain. Then she realised that Betty had grabbed Blane’s arm. The shot had gone into the floor and Blane was using the gun as a club on Betty’s head.

  Steve threw herself across the room and wrestled for the gun. She wished she hadn’t discarded her shoes. It was a doomed battle, two women and a playful dog were no match for Desmond Blane. She was hurled brutally to the stone floor and the impact stunned her.

  ‘You beast,’ she muttered as somebody sat her up.

  But the fight seemed to be over. Somebody else was holding the gun and Desmond Blane was running from the house. Then somebody said, ‘Darling, that’s no way to speak to your husband. Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right,’ she gasped. ‘I just don’t like dogs licking my ears.’

  ‘Des! Des, take me with you!’

  Betty Stanway had a trickle of blood running down her face as she staggered to her feet. She was crying as she stumbled out of the doorway. The black Triumph 1300 was already moving when Betty pulled open the passenger door and fell into the car.

  There was a roar from the engine, a hail of gravel from under the wheels, and the car shot away from the house towards the headlamps of a car coming towards it.

  ‘Oh God,’ murmured Steve.

  Desmond Blane drove straight at the on-coming car.

  ‘Control to X Henry One. Proceed to Red Trees Farm immediately. Suspects Blane and Stanway thought to be in the vicinity. Take extreme caution, X Henry One, the suspect is dangerous and probably armed.’

  PC Bob Newby liked the bit about extreme caution. This was his own personal criminal and he intended to deal with him in his own special way.

  ‘Can’t you go any faster?’ he said unpleasantly to PC Brooks.

  Horace Brooks stepped on the accelerator and went through Banbury at seventy-three miles an hour. They took corners with the rear wheels slithering up onto the pavements, hit a gate on the narrow lane out of the town and sped on up the hill.

  Bob Newby could hear the arrangements being made over the radio to send every available car out to the farm. It sounded as if nearly twenty cars would be joining them.

  ‘Come on, for God’s sake. I want to get there first.’

  Brooks smiled. ‘We’ll get there first. I’m the best driver in the force.’

  They turned sharply left at the top of the ridge and hurtled along the bumpy lane. Bob Newby was on the radio telephone saying, ‘X Henry One to Control’ when he realised that a car was driving straight at them.

  ‘Pull over!’ he shouted. ‘Christ –!’

  Brooks stamped on the brakes and swung the wheel, they skidded towards the trees with the back of the car coming round to meet them as the oncoming car crashed into their side.

  Betty screamed at the last moment, and threw herself against Desmond Blane’s shoulder. She added to the impact as he was thrust against the steering column. The car buckled against the windscreen and showered her with fragments of glass. It seemed like minutes later that she pulled Des back from his position hunched over the wheel. He was obviously dead and blood was oozing across his chest.

  The drive was instantly busy with policemen, running to the cars which had crashed and slamming doors, calling out instructions and running away again.

  ‘She’ll live,’ someone said inanely as he examined Betty.

  They had hit the rear side of the police car as it was moving off the road, ramming it several feet into the woods and probably wrecking the engine. But the occupants of the car were unhurt. Betty watched helplessly as Paul Temple and Steve came over to her. Paul Temple prowled about, looked at Des, glanced at the back seat and then opened the boot.

  ‘Hello, Betty,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry it has ended like this. We did try to avoid it.’

  ‘We were going away together, to Ireland,’ she said dully. ‘We were going to live in a big farmhouse.’

  ‘He was only using you,’ Steve said firmly. ‘He had intended to use you to get the money out of the country, and then he was going to kill you.’

  She shook her head. ‘I asked him about that, and he said he loved me.’

  Paul came round from the back of the car with Inspector Manley. It was the inspector who spoke. ‘Miss Stanway, is this your holdall?’ When she shook her head he continued, ‘Do you know what it contains?’

  ‘No. And I don’t want to listen to all your lies about Des –’

  Her voice trailed into silence when Inspector Manley opened the holdall. It was stuffed with bank notes.

  ‘Come on,’ said Paul Temple, quietly, ‘we’d better take you home.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘I don’t think you would enjoy the Love-Inn,’ said Paul. ‘They don’t really cater for women customers –’

  ‘If you think you’re going to enjoy it alone,’ said Steve, ‘you’re wrong. I’m coming with you.’

  Paul shrugged in agreement and drove on past their house in Vincent Mews. It was early afternoon, so there wouldn’t be any riotous football crowds in the club.

  ‘We’ll just pop in with Betty for a few minutes,’ he said, ‘and clear up the last few details of the case. It shouldn’t take fifteen minutes.’ He drove slowly across Chester Square in case Steve should change her mind. ‘You could wait in the car –’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Betty sat in the back seat as she had done on Saturday evening, only three days ago. It seemed longer. She was glumly silent, unappreciative of Steve’s suggestion that she join a tennis club and meet a few nice insurance brokers and articled clerks. ‘It isn’t so bad being a dull little housewife,’ Steve assured her.

  ‘Des would have got away with it,’ she muttered, ‘if I hadn’t hitched a lift from you.’

  ‘And at this precise moment you would have been stranded in Dublin.’ Paul spoke with what he hoped was brutal kindness. ‘If that telephone box hadn’t been out of order you would have taken the plane by yourself and gone to Dublin with a hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘Why is everybody so obsessed with money?’ Betty asked wearily.

  She had spent the night at Random Cottage and slept until eleven this morning. Her head no longer ached and the horror of Red Trees Farm was already becoming as remote as a nightmare. It was over, and she had to go on living in Belsize Park.

  Betty watched Steve Temple with envy, because she had and took for granted all of the happily married things which Betty had wanted so much from Des. It wasn’t only the home and enough money, it was the self assurance. Betty wondered how people could be so self assured. Even after they had nearly been killed Steve Temple had gone home and made them all cups of cocoa. She asked how Paul had known where to find them, as if it were unthinkable that he shouldn’t have known.

  ‘I knew because of something Rita Fletcher said,’ he had explained. ‘She said that Arnold Cookson was an estate agent. She wouldn’t have known that he was an old con, and obviously when he went to the Love-Inn on New Year’s Eve it must have been in his professional capacity. I wondered whether it was to sell a large piece of farmland.’

  ‘I thought you had missed the point –’

  ‘I had. But when I came to think about it I realised that the robbers using the caravan site couldn’t be wholly coincidental. I realised that was what you had meant, and of course I panicked.’ Which seemed improbable, Betty thought rese
ntfully. ‘I knew that you would be pottering about at the farm getting into a scrape. I don’t think I’ve ever driven so fast in England.’

  They had laughed together and gone up to bed. Betty had stared at the stars for more than an hour in the clear night sky, and then the cocoa and the sleeping tablets had begun to work.

  Betty hadn’t wanted to go back to the Love-Inn, but what she wanted didn’t seem very important. Steve Temple had arranged it all, and here they were.

  Paul parked behind the Love-Inn, fed the meter, and walked through to the stage door. That way at least Steve missed the photographs of pink bosoms and ecstatic smiles, the ambiguous advertisements and the queue of men in shabby raincoats waiting to see somebody else’s fantasies enacted.

  Paul said good afternoon to the toothless old stage door keeper. ‘Is Mr Coley about?’ he asked. ‘We’re returning one of his absconding girls.’

  ‘If you’d like to wait in the office, Mr Temple,’ he said with a disconcerting three fingered salute. ‘I’ll tell Mr Coley you’re here.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ve also arranged to meet Inspector Vosper –’

  ‘No, he hasn’t arrived. Are we being raided?’

  They went into Rita Fletcher’s office and waited. Steve wandered round examining the photographs on the walls while Paul tried to be reassuring to Betty. The brassy blare of the band close at hand indicated that the afternoon show was in progress, and eventually Steve went off to stand in the wings. Paul shrugged his shoulders. She was over twenty-one.

  ‘When you see the inspector this time he’ll want to know all about a bank clerk called Tony Sampson. He’ll ask you –’

  ‘Tony Sampson?’ Betty repeated in surprise.

  ‘Yes. Tell him the truth, Betty, tell him everything you know about Tony Sampson.’

  Betty was disbelieving. ‘I don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, I know he’s Gloria’s boyfriend. But I’ve only spoken to him half a dozen times. I don’t even like him.’ She considered for a moment. ‘Why should the inspector be interested in him?’