No More Dying

by David Roberts

  ‘I believe it,’ Verity said firmly, taking his hand. ‘You may have saved our lives but, you know, I’ve got to have it out with him. I can’t go on with my life until I do. I can’t walk around always expecting David to jump out at me.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ Casey said excitedly, ‘so I’ve made a plan. Will you trust me?’

  Why should she trust him? Casey thought, trying to put himself in her shoes. Ought she not to fear him rather than Griffiths-Jones? He could declare himself to be innocent until he was blue in the face, blame everything on Griffiths-Jones, but he could not prove it. He knew he would not believe his story if he were Verity. He must somehow get them face to face so she could hear it from Griffiths-Jones’ own lips, but, of course, that would be very dangerous. He scanned her face anxiously.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she said at last.

  ‘So you do trust me?’ he said, the relief in his voice almost palpable.

  ‘I do, Casey. I know David has always hated Edward and only tolerated my relationship with him because he thought I could spy on his friends. When he found out we were getting married, I think he realized for the first time that I had gone over to the enemy.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m still a Communist at heart but I’ve come to believe that the Party itself is no longer the one I joined. People like David have betrayed the ideals we had.’ Verity spoke sadly but she had never been a sentimentalist. She would not hang on to dreams for comfort. She would rather face reality, however ugly. ‘So you are convinced David intends to try and kill me?’

  ‘I’m afraid I am, yes,’ Casey said bleakly. ‘He no longer trusts you. He thinks you betrayed O’Rourke to the police for one thing, but the main point is you know more about him than almost anyone. He simply can’t afford to let you live.’

  ‘I see.’ She suddenly felt very cold.

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘And what? Tell me, Casey.’

  ‘He would never acknowledge it but he thinks he loves you. He’s certainly deadly jealous of Edward.’

  Verity did not want to think about it. It sounded absurd . . . mad . . . She took a deep breath and turned back to Casey. ‘So what must we do?’

  ‘He knows where you are staying. He’ll be watching the hotel and waiting for you to return. He’ll want to catch you on your own – without Edward. I suggest you go along with it. Maybe, if he doesn’t approach you, look out for him and act surprised. Take him somewhere quiet and let him tell you why he’s in St Moritz.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather dangerous?’ She could just imagine what Edward would think of the plan.

  ‘Come outside. I’ve got something for you but I can’t hand it over in public.’

  Behind the log cabin, he looked round to make sure that no one was watching. ‘Take this.’ He took out of his pocket a small, sleek, black pistol and handed it to her. ‘You won’t need it because I’ll be close by and when, or if, he tries any rough stuff I’ll jump in and . . . you know, stop him.’

  ‘I’m not sure. It all sounds rather vague.’ Verity looked at the gun and then at Casey. ‘I’m not very good with guns. How does this one work?’

  ‘Take the safety catch off . . . see . . .’ he showed her, ‘and then aim and pull the trigger.’

  ‘Is it loaded?’

  ‘Of course, but you won’t need to use it.’

  ‘I’m still not sure . . .’

  ‘Well, you could always run away,’ Casey said calmly, ‘but I thought you said you wanted to have it out with him.’

  ‘I did. I do. You don’t think it would be better to wait for Edward?’

  ‘No, I don’t. He won’t come near you if he sees Edward.’

  ‘He’ll be most awfully cross if I don’t tell him about this. He is my husband, after all,’ she added for no good reason.

  ‘You don’t need to worry. I’ll be there and you said you trusted me.’ Casey sounded reproachful. ‘Take Griffiths-Jones up to the top of the Cresta Run. There’s a pavilion at the start where no one will see you. I’ll hide behind a pillar.’

  ‘Won’t there be lots of people around?’

  ‘Not today. There’s no racing today as a mark of respect for some fellow who died recently.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. Brab mentioned it. You’re right,’ she said, suddenly coming to a decision. ‘This is my battle. I don’t want to put Edward in danger.’

  ‘Don’t forget that he thinks I’m a murderer.’

  Verity’s eyes widened. ‘But you’re not, are you?’ she said, shrinking back. Before he could answer she answered for him, ‘No, you aren’t. I believe you are a true friend.’ She shook her head as if to clear away the confusion she felt. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  ‘Good girl! Then you can go back to London with Edward and live happily ever after. You deserve a little happiness.’

  She stopped in her tracks. ‘But what’s the point of getting David to incriminate himself if there’s only me and you to hear it? I mean, what’s my word against his?’

  ‘I’ve thought of that.’ Casey sounded excited. ‘I’ve managed to get hold of a clever new machine our technical people have come up with.’

  ‘What machine?’ she asked flatly.

  ‘It’s a wire recorder. A very small one but it works just as well as one of those big machines you had to hide under a bed or something. You wear the wire round your neck and switch it on by pressing a button on a wire in your pocket. He’ll talk and you’ll record. Simple.’

  ‘And what if he suspects?’

  ‘He won’t.’

  Verity was silent for a moment and then sighed heavily. She had a horrible feeling in her stomach that something would go wrong but what was the alternative? ‘All right. I can’t leave here with nothing resolved, as you say. I’ll do what you suggest but just be nearby, will you? To tell the truth, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No need to be, I promise you. I have my revolver,’ he said, patting his pocket, ‘and I’m a trained shooter.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to David anyway. I want to make sure he’s understood that I no longer consider myself a member of the Party. I tore up my Party card in front of him but I’m not certain he noticed,’ she added with a grim little laugh.

  17

  It all went according to plan – but whose plan, Verity wasn’t sure. They skied back to the village and stopped off at Casey’s hotel, hardly more than a bed-and-breakfast. He smuggled her up to his room and fitted her with the tape recorder. It was a clumsy machine despite what he had said and made odd bulges under her clothes.

  ‘I can’t wear this,’ she said at last, tearing the wires off. ‘I’m sorry, Casey, but it’s bad enough having a gun in my pocket. All these wires . . .’

  ‘All right then,’ he said, seeing she had made up her mind. ‘I’ll wear it and hope I can get near enough to record whatever you can get him to confess. When we leave here, you go first and I’ll trail you. For all we know, we may already be being watched.’

  When she arrived at the Kulm, she could not see David so she parked her skis and went to have a drink on the terrace. She had been there ten minutes and was beginning to think he would not show. The adrenalin stopped pumping and her eyes closed. The sun was still on the terrace and she had an almost overwhelming desire to sleep. She hadn’t slept much the night before and all the unaccustomed exercise and fresh air was soporific. Her anxiety had left her. It was her fate to meet her enemy today, at this place, and she would not avoid him.

  She suddenly realized the shadow David had cast over her for so many years. She didn’t see him for months and then he would turn up and require her to do something she found . . . distasteful was a feeble word but that was often all it was. He never asked her to commit a crime but there was always something underhand and mean about what he proposed, and it was always ‘for the good of the Party’. She knew now that she could no longer believe in the Party. Friends, whose probity she could not question
, had returned from Moscow with terrible stories of persecution, torture and plain murder. And the victims were not just political enemies but totally innocent, loyal members of the Party who had been – what was the word? – ‘denounced’ by neighbours or so-called friends. There was no trust left and the utopia she had once imagined the Soviet Union to be had never existed. The Revolution had been just another false start on the road to the egalitarian society she yearned for. Communism had become yet another tyranny, as vicious and ruthless as that in Germany. It hurt her to admit it but she was no coward and she had to face up to it. Her ‘truth’ had become a lie.

  She felt, rather than saw, David sit down beside her on a wicker chair. The sun was behind him and she had to shade her eyes to make out his features. He was so handsome and, as he looked at her with an expression she could not read, she felt a moment of regret. How easy it would be to surrender herself to him and worship at the altar he had set up. He was wearing dark glasses so she could not see his eyes. As if he could read her mind, he took them off and looked at her without saying anything.

  ‘I thought I saw you. Did you come specially to see me?’ she inquired calmly, though her heart was pounding.

  ‘How like you, Verity, to think that the world revolves around you. No, of course I didn’t come to Switzerland especially to see you. I had business in Geneva.’

  ‘Party business?’

  ‘What other business would I have? You think I might turn into one of those fat businessmen . . .’ He gestured to a party of skiers who had just come on to the terrace with their women and were shouting at the waiter to bring them drinks. ‘Come for a walk with me. I have something to say to you.’

  ‘Can’t you say it here?’

  ‘No, I can’t. I can’t hear myself above this noise.’ And it was true that the loud, braying voices of the men and the screams of the women were ugly and intrusive. ‘Let’s walk up beside the Run. There’s no one about today.’

  ‘Yes, let’s. As it happens, I wanted to speak to you, David, so I’m glad you found me.’

  They walked in silence for the ten minutes it took them to get to Top Hut – an octagonal wooden pagoda with a single entrance a yard or two from the start of the Run. About twelve feet wide with benches along the walls, it had a small stove in the centre to warm riders waiting their turn but today this was unlit. Apart from a dartboard on one wall, there was no other furniture. A few toboggans lay scattered around.

  ‘It’s strange to be here, David, because this is so like the pavilion at Cliveden where you dumped Tom Wintringham’s body after you had killed him.’

  He looked at her properly for the first time. ‘So Casey’s been telling you a tale, has he?’

  ‘You deny you killed Tom, then?’ Verity spoke almost wearily, as though she could hardly be bothered to listen to his lies and excuses. ‘It was for the good of the Party, was it?’

  ‘You always were a little idiot, Verity, but I tolerated you for – yes – the sake of the Party. You were useful despite your love of the bourgeois life which ought to have disgusted you.’

  ‘There was a moment when I thought you loved me,’ she could not resist saying, almost wistfully.

  ‘How pathetic!’ he sneered. ‘A week or two of not very good sex and you think it’s love. I never loved you and I never pretended to. How could I love someone as selfish, snobbish and thoroughly rotten as you?’

  She was stirred to anger. ‘Don’t call me rotten. I joined the Party to fight Fascism in Spain and at home and you used me, as you used so many of us, to build a new tyranny. It is you and the Party that have gone rotten. I never thought I would be ashamed to call myself a Communist.’

  Now it was David who was angry and there was something snake-like in the way he hissed at her: ‘Your infatuation with your pet aristocrat has led you to this. Do you know what we do with comrades who have betrayed the Party?’

  ‘I have betrayed only myself,’ she replied, jutting out her chin. ‘Yes, I do know what you do with your enemies. You torture them, imprison them and persecute their family and friends.’

  ‘And then we kill them,’ David said, drawing a knife from the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘There it is! Did you use it in Spain? The assassin’s poniard, the coward’s weapon, the stab in the dark. How many have you got? Did you buy a quiverful because you must need them often? That’s how you killed Tom, isn’t it? And poor, stupid little Lulu, and Eamon Farrell who showed a loyalty to his friends you couldn’t possibly understand.’

  David said nothing but the light in his eyes said it all. He was pure hatred, she thought and she suddenly felt sorry for him. He really did not know what it meant to love. He had no friends. He was a creature of this horrible, hateful world he had helped create. Knowing he meant to kill her, she ought to have been frightened. She ought to have run away or screamed. Instead she felt quite calm as she stood in this strange ice house and thought of that cold, shrivelled heart. How did you talk to a man who did not know how to love, only how to hate? He had dedicated himself to an organization which had dehumanized him. He was to be pitied. Perhaps he saw the pity in her eyes and could not stand it because he grabbed her and, as he did so, he felt the gun in her pocket. Holding her in a vice-like grip with one arm, he extracted the gun and looked at it with contempt before throwing it into a corner.

  He laughed. ‘That was Casey’s, was it not? Well, I shall deal with him next. Is he skulking outside? He is? Good.’

  Suddenly, Verity no longer felt fatalistic. Fear flowed through her veins and she shouted, ‘Let me go!’ She struggled but he held her tight. ‘I was going to shoot you but I couldn’t bring myself to do it,’ she panted. ‘Shouldn’t one shoot a mad dog?’

  At that David laughed again and this time it sounded more genuine. ‘How typical! You can’t even manage to do something so simple as pull a trigger. Your bourgeois sentimentality stops you doing anything worth doing. You’re useless. And you know what we do with the useless?’ He raised his hand and the long thin knife glinted against the light from the ice. For a second he was dazzled. His hold on her weakened and, with a huge effort, she wrenched herself out of his grasp and fell to the floor. Putting the knife back in his pocket so that both his hands were free, David took a pace towards her, lifted her to her feet so that she had her back to him and felt for his knife.

  At that moment, Casey appeared at the door with his gun in his hand.

  ‘Not so fast, comrade,’ he shouted. ‘Drop the knife and let Verity go. You know I won’t hesitate to kill you if you don’t.’

  David stared at him as though he hardly recognized him. He hesitated before very reluctantly letting go of Verity, and Casey reached out to her with his free hand. ‘I see I was wrong about you, Casey,’ he said with a half-smile. ‘I told you I would let you run back to America if you didn’t interfere. I had an idea I was being too generous. Now you have interfered so you too must die.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Casey replied, almost gaily. ‘But who has the gun? It is you who cannot escape. In this beastly world of ideas we have made, what could be more horrible than the fanatical idealist? Instead of people, you care only for ideas and theories. Your utopia – if, God forbid, it ever came into being – would be hell on earth. You may despise America but it stands for freedom – for the fight against your sort of tyranny.’

  Verity never knew what would have happened next if Edward had not materialized behind them. Would Casey have shot David? She thought not unless he had sprung at him with his knife. Edward took in the situation and immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion. He saw Casey holding Verity against him, a gun in his hand. He saw David, apparently unarmed, standing in front of them. It all happened in a moment. With a hard blow to Casey’s arm, he sent his gun clattering across the floor. Verity screamed and stumbled to one side. David stepped forward and plunged his knife in Casey’s chest.

  ‘No, Edward!’ Verity’s despairing cry came too late. ‘It’s David. He tried to kill me and Casey .
. . oh God!’

  Not caring that David had withdrawn the knife and was now standing over Casey as though transfixed, she knelt beside the dying man. ‘Casey! Please . . .’

  He was trying to say something but blood filled his mouth and silenced him.

  Realizing the terrible mistake he had made, Edward went for Casey’s gun but, by the time he had picked it up, David had vanished. Edward went to the door and watched helplessly as David threw himself on a toboggan which had been left at the start of the Run. Edward saw him kick off and gather speed down the first steep slope. In seconds he was out of sight but Edward knew that, without spikes on his feet to slow him or a helmet and goggles, he could never survive.

  He turned and saw Verity cradling Casey in her arms. ‘I’m going after David,’ he shouted to her but he knew that there was no hurry. David would reach his journey’s end long before he could get to him.

  When Edward arrived at Shuttlecock he found, as he had expected, a knot of people staring down at a crumpled body splayed out beside the track. It was a miracle that David had got as far as he had.

  Joe Jr happened to be one of those who had witnessed David’s final moments.

  ‘Edward! What happened? He came out of nowhere. It was all so quick. For just a second we saw him on the ice. I knew at once he was going too fast. There was nothing he could have done. Do you see, he wasn’t even wearing a helmet? His wagon leapt thirty feet in the air before falling back on top of him. I’m afraid his neck’s broken. He must have hit the ice bank at seventy miles an hour. Poor guy – do you know him?’

  Edward knelt beside David but, as Joe Jr said, there was nothing to be done.

  ‘I knew him, yes,’ he said grimly. ‘His name is David Griffiths-Jones and he has just murdered Casey Bishop. Will you be a good fellow and go to the hotel and call the police? I’ve got some unfinished business back at Top.’

  He found Verity as he had left her, rocking backwards and forwards with the lifeless body of the young American in her lap. Gently, Edward went to her and dropped down beside her. ‘David died on the Run.’ He gave the news starkly without trying to spare her.