It was calculated blarney, but Rollo refused to be cajoled out of his mood of belated regret, even by an expert.
‘I’d still be happier if I was sure we weren’t ham-stringing Drury.’
‘Let’s keep names and personalities out of it,’ Murphy advised.
‘That’s how I feel, Joe.’
Murphy tossed his glowing butt through the window. He had a sneaking feeling that it wasn’t Drury who had to be appeased but Dan Simpson. Drury couldn’t apply the boot, Dan Simpson could and without any comeback from the NUJ for this sort of caper.
‘Tell you what I’ll do, Rollo boy,’ he said. ‘You stop at the next garage and I’ll call the paper collect. I’ll talk to Dan. I’ll leave him to reach Drury, or failing him Bill Hazard. That’ll make it look like the paper’s backing us, and by God so it should. What we’re doing is earning a bonus no one’s going to pay us. And you know something? We could even be risking our lives like bloody war correspondents. You know what that makes us?’
‘A couple of prize idiots.’
‘Rollo, boy, you’re doing your best to depress me, which isn’t kind, not even when I haven’t a drink in my hand for solace. No, boy, we’ll end up heroes.’
‘That’ll be the day.’
Joe Murphy grinned, aware that he’d overcome the other’s scruples, which were something lacking in his own make-up so he never had to bother about them. It was always other people who had scruples he had to overcome. He believed that was why he hated scruples of any kind, held for whatever reason. They were like chains on a man.
‘The next garage, and I phone,’ he said.
Dan Simpson had a few choice epithets to toss at his caller from West Sussex, but because he was a good news editor, and equally because he firmly believed a paper couldn’t be run without loyalty on the part of the staff, he growled that he would take care of the Yard end.
‘Don’t get under Drury’s feet and come back with a good story, Joe,’ he finished. ‘You do that and I don’t give a damn if you’ve broken into the Tower of London. In fact, it would make a bloody good story if someone did.’
‘Someone did and his name was Blood,’ Murphy reminded him.
‘And he hated the Irish, Joe, so watch it.’
Dan Simpson was first to ring off — hurriedly. He was still feeling he had scored when he phoned the Yard. He was put through to Drury and his feeling of complacency died a hurried death.
‘Now I’ll hold you responsible if they get under my feet, Mr Simpson,’ Drury said in a gruff voice, grinning expansively at the bare wall opposite.
‘But I’m ringing because they want you to know where they’re making for,’ Dan Simpson protested.
‘I don’t need them to tell me. I already know. So do the West Sussex police. I’ve got them on the lookout.’
Drury couldn’t see the grin these words brought to his caller’s face. Simpson hung up, shaking his head.
‘You’ve got to hand it to him,’ he said to a man with no idea of what he was talking about. ‘He never gets taken by surprise. Certainly not by me.’
But Drury wasn’t running full tilt into a lucky streak. He wasn’t to know it at the time, but shortly after he had hung up, and was preparing to have Bill Hazard drive him down to Selsey, Rollo entered Chichester and steered through the heart of the city, and in South Street had a van back into him from the blind side of a stationary petrol tanker. The constable who approached to sort out the argument and note down particulars of the mishap had his walkie-talkie set turned off and so did not identify the number of Rollo’s car as the one broadcast in a general police alert throughout West Sussex.
As a result of the constable’s failure to receive the message requested by Frank Drury in London, Rollo was allowed to continue after a delay of about twenty minutes. He drove south out of the city and crossed the A27 ring road and continued south towards Selsey Bill.
‘We ought to take a closer look at the map, Joe,’ he said. ‘We’re not far away now.’
This time when he halted they studied the map and followed the direction indicated by a red pencil line.
‘You keep a sharp eye for this turning on the right. If we turn too soon we get back towards Dell Quay. If we turn too late we’ll end up at this marina with all the other craft. What we want is this lane — look.’
Rollo held the map towards his companion.
‘It’s not numbered,’ Murphy complained.
‘That’s why we don’t have to miss it, Joe.’
But they did miss it, simply because the notice ‘Private road’ put them off. It was not until they stopped a grey-haired man on a push-bike that they realized they had to go back and take the private road.
A couple of hundred yards down it Rollo parked on a broad strip of greensward.
‘What’s the idea?’ Murphy asked.
Rollo pointed to the name of the house in the address pinned to the map. Calanque.
‘We’d better walk to make sure we’re not observed approaching,’ he said.
Joe Murphy glared at him.
‘Rollo boy,’ he said disgustedly, ‘you have more discouraging notions to offer than anyone I ever met outside an Irish church, and I’m not so damned sure I shouldn’t say inside as well.’
Rollo locked his car and they started walking. It was a narrow lane that had not been taken over by the local council, for the surface was rutted, there was no pavement, and bushes and trees at times fringed the pot-holed road surface which retained a large number of puddles from recent rain.
‘Calanque,’ said Murphy. ‘Now what the hell sort of name is that for a house in a Christian land? It sounds heathenish.’
‘It’s French,’ Rollo informed him. ‘It’s quite an apt name, I should say, for it means a fjord or inlet.’
‘An inlet is it?’ Murphy snorted. ‘Well, let me tell you, Rollo boy, we seem to be miles away from any water.’
‘We’re not. If you examined the map closely, you’ll have seen where the shoreline of the harbour winds in and out making a broken landscape with all sorts of inlets and winding waterways. Some are large, others quite small and — ’
He stopped as his companion grabbed his arm and clutched it tightly. Murphy drew him towards a hedge which offered a thin green screen, for most of the leaves had fallen from it.
‘Did you see the name? Calanque. We’re here, Rollo boy.’
‘Which is the house?’
‘I didn’t see the house, just the name. So what do we do, march up to the front door, ring the bell, and ask if they want to buy a vacuum cleaner?’
‘This is your caper, Joe.’
‘Now don’t be like that, Rollo boy,’ the Irishman protested. ‘Damn it, I didn’t know we’d find a map to bring us down here when I broke open the bureau.’
‘You didn’t know, but you were hoping, you hypocrite. So what’s in your mind?’
‘That’s the devil of it. I’m stuck, like a tinker in a wet bog.’
‘One thing we should do. Make sure any boat in the boathouse has an engine which won’t start. That should earn Drury’s approval.’
‘Bedad, that’s thinking, Rollo boy. So we — Back!’ Murphy broke off, hissing and forcing the other down to his knees as a car turned out of a drive concealed by overhanging branches from a view farther up the lane.
Rollo recognized it. He had been driven in that car from the Upper Borley bank to Cecil Weddon’s home. But the man at the wheel was not the bank manager overcome by greed. It wasn’t until the car had turned a bend in the lane that Rollo knew who the clean-shaven stranger was.
Humphrey Peel.
And the man seemed to be escaping!
Chapter 11
‘Peel — in Cecil Weddon’s car!’ Rollo said, his voice low-pitched but fierce.
The Irish crime reporter rose to his feet. ‘You sure of that, boy?’ He shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t come all this way to collect Weddon’s car. But he sure looked like a man who was suffering. I mean,
did you see that look on his face?’
Rollo rose to his feet more slowly.
‘What in hell’s wrong?’ his companion demanded. ‘You look like you’ve got palsy.’
‘I’m listening in case he turns and comes back, Joe.’
‘And why in the name of seven angels should he be doing that?’
‘He just might recognize my car parked near the opening of this lane. He would if he was watching the bank when I called on Weddon. I left my car parked nearby and went home with Weddon in his car. I collected my car later when Drury had finished with me.’
Joe Murphy nodded ponderously while they both listened.
‘Not a sound,’ he declared impatiently. ‘Now what?’
‘We call at the house. Come on.’
The drive from the front gate with the name Calanque in gold letters on varnished brown wood to the house was almost overgrown with unkempt hedges and unpruned trees. A large number of fleshy weeds, reluctant to surrender to the inevitable after summer’s departure still struggled for survival in places along the cracked cement. Parked before the house was a beige Vauxhall Viva.
‘You recognise it?’ Joe Murphy asked.
‘Never seen it before,’ Rollo told him.
The crime reporter’s natural curiosity made him open the door.
‘Hey, look, boy!’ he called softly.
He pointed to the pair of large sunglasses of the wraparound kind that someone had trodden on.
‘Peel’s,’ said Rollo.
‘And look at this.’ Murphy had found the broken window when he tried to wind it up. ‘Been trouble, wouldn’t you say?’
Rollo was by this time staring in shocked fascination at some fresh bloodstains he had found on the back seat. He cautiously and hesitantly touched one with the tip of a finger.
‘Still wet, Joe.’
Joe Murphy looked at the house. There was a grim expression on his face, but his Celtic eyes were fiery.
‘By God, this is going to be a story for sure!’
After wiping the tacky blood from his finger end Rollo followed him to the house. It was a gabled property with bare wisteria vines clinging to its once white walls and dumpy chimneys decorated with turkey cowls, proclaiming that in winter winds from the sea produced unpleasant down-draughts. The front door was open.
They walked in hesitantly, looking in the rooms opening from the square hall. In a rear lounge giving on to a garden with a boathouse at the far end they found them. The man was dead, most of the top of his head missing. The woman was also dead, but she seemed to be smiling. The front of her dress was soggy with drying blood. There was a pool of blood at her side.
In her right hand she still gripped the gun that had once pointed threateningly at Rollo.
‘Jesus, a massacre!’ whispered Joe Murphy huskily. ‘That damned Peel, he came here and shot them, and then — then — ’
He paused, shaking his head.
‘Damned if it don’t get confusing,’ he complained.
‘Then,’ Rollo took him up, ‘Peel went back to the car outside and he trod on his sunglasses when he started fumbling around. Then he spilled blood on the back seat when he leaned over to do — what?’
‘Lift out something he had with him.’
‘Something he brought with him because — ’ Rollo stopped to stare through the French windows at the boathouse.
‘He wanted to get away with it in a boat,’ the Irishman took him up. ‘So he put it in the boat. Well, we can check that much, Rollo.’
They went outside and started for the boathouse. Its door, at the rear, was ajar. They went inside and saw the boat, a thirty-foot seagoing Freeman. The brightwork shone dully, the paintwork had lost its bloom, and the craft was moored fore and aft with new-looking ropes, taut because the tide was well out.
Rollo pointed. ‘Look, Joe, more blood.’
The crime reporter’s Adam’s apple was riding up and down in his neck. He wore the look of a man prepared not to believe his own eyesight.
He said nothing, but clambered into the waist of the boat and ducked into the cabin. A minute later his head reappeared, his eyes very wide, but still glowing with excitement.
‘Four locked bags and a satchel, bedad, and one of the bags has more blood on it. Spell that one out, Rollo.’
Before accepting the invitation Rollo also climbed down into the boat. The bags had been dumped on seats that could be converted into beds. The satchel was on a small table under a port window, with a trim little galley under the opposite starboard window.
The two men looked at each other.
‘Somehow he’s pulled it off, Joe. He’s got the bank’s money here.’
‘Then why in hell did he go driving off in their car?’
The older man waved a hand in the general direction of the house.
‘You saw the gun she held,’ Rollo said softly, eyes almost closed as he concentrated on reading the scene he had imprinted in his mind like a still from some Technicolor drama. ‘He killed the man first, firing quickly and smashing the top of his head. Then he turned to the woman and took more careful aim, but he didn’t see she had snatched up a gun. He killed her, but not before she wounded him, Joe. That’s why he was in their car.’
Joe Murphy was frowning.
‘Well, go on, for God’s sake,’ he said, almost snarling. ‘Spell it all out. Why? Why not his own?’
‘A stolen car, doubtless. Perhaps it began to give trouble and he couldn’t start it again after the engine had stopped. Or he had seen the fresh bloodstains he’d left after unloading the sacks from it. The reason doesn’t matter. He took theirs.’
‘I’m still asking why. I’m damned sure he hadn’t come this far only to get cold feet and run away in a panic, leaving this stuff here.’ Murphy waved at the sacks, which were of a faded purple colour, rather like the sacks used by postal collectors, except that they bore no black-stencilled code letters. ‘Besides, look. The key’s in the ignition, ready for take-off.’
Rollo looked at the key thrust into the ignition on the instrument panel beside the wheel. He was still concentrating on that colourful still holding the gaze of his mind’s eye.
‘It’s possible he had to go into Chichester to get something to stop his own bleeding. Depends how bad he was hurt. And he broke those sunglasses. Now he’s on his own he’ll need another pair unless he’s going to try getting away in daylight nearly blind.’
‘You mean he can afford to wait till it’s dark, when his sight will be as normal as most men’s in daylight. So he’s making himself scarce and doing something about his bullet wound.’
‘Something like that,’ Rollo nodded. ‘In any case, he couldn’t risk putting off alone in this boat in daylight as he is.’
‘But he could be back any time, couldn’t he?’
‘Yes, he could, Joe.’
‘So?’
Rollo looked puzzled. ‘I don’t follow. So what?’
‘So why don’t we take off in this boat and dump her where he won’t find her? He’s armed. If we wait till he comes back he may add us to his collection of corpses, and that prospect gives me no pleasure at all, Rollo boy.’
‘When we’ve moored her somewhere else we go to the police?’
‘Whatever you say. We’ll have a story that will set the other bastards in Fleet Street screaming, and that’s what we came for.’
Rollo didn’t take long to make up his mind.
‘Okay, cast off, Joe. I’ll start her up.’
Joe Murphy needed no second bidding. He jumped on to the narrow mooring stage and unhitched the ropes fore and aft, threw them inboard, and jumped down beside Rollo as the engine roared. Rollo throttled down and engaged the gears forward and the boat nosed out of the open space into the channel of salt water beyond. He brought her round to starboard to face a wider stretch of water between reed-covered banks. As he did so Joe Murphy looked back and shouted, ‘Cops, by God!’
Rollo turned his head and followed the
Irishman’s outraged gaze. A couple of peak-capped panda car constables were waving and gesticulating.
‘They must have seen my car and been checking the houses down the lane. How the devil do you think they came to be looking for my car, Joe?’
‘You were involved with that black van and the cop took your number.’
‘No, this is something else. My guess is Drury wants us picked up. Someone’s talked.’
‘It wouldn’t be Dan,’ Murphy scowled, wanting to convince himself, ‘though he insisted on having the name of this place when I phoned.’ Rollo was watching him with about a dozen questions in his face. ‘Said he’d have to know in case Drury got bloody-minded. Well, we were practically here by then. If it hadn’t been for that damned van — ’ He punched the bulkhead housing the instruments. ‘Open her up, for God’s sake, boy. We’ve got to lose ourselves now.’
‘Then you don’t think — ’ Rollo didn’t have to say the rest, for Joe Murphy shouted.
‘No, I damned well don’t think we should turn her over to that pair. They probably think we murdered the couple in the house. We sit this out till Drury comes down. Now if only we had a photographer. Hell, what a story this could be — with pictures.’
Rollo said nothing. He could barely define his feelings at that moment. They were an acute mixture of dismay and apprehension.
He swung out of the channel which presumably gave the house they had left its name, increased the throttle in wider water, and spurted ahead. However, he was in strange waters and had no chart. Moreover, the tide was low. He slammed the boat on to a sandbank, burying her nose. The craft shuddered, the engine stalled, and as he switched off Rollo said, ‘Damnation. We’ll probably have to remain stuck here till the tide changes, unless — ’
He broke off, grabbed a boathook from the gunwale, and bent over to try to push the boat free. He went for’ard to try there after meeting with no success, and that was when he saw the boat’s name clearly for the first time, so that it registered.
Mudlark.
He was laughing when he straightened.
Killer in the Shade Page 14
