“Mr Flint,” said McHarg dully. “And Old Haystacks.”
“Don’t be sentimental,” reproved Grossmith. “It’s always a mistake and you’ve got to correct it later. Miss Woodstock, for instance. I knew that some day…but there were other voices which insisted…and you yourself, Doug. There’s no other way. It’s been tried, but you keep on coming. You always did, even in training, I recall. You never knew when to stop pushing.”
What was puzzling McHarg as the first shock of disbelief wore off was that Grossmith showed no sign of carrying a weapon. Surely he couldn’t expect to do what he clearly planned to do without a weapon? He took a tentative step forward as though just shifting his weight.
“And Morrison?” he said. “You too?”
“That’s right. He’d always been a nuisance, but since Miss Woodstock’s accident, he’d become a menace. He blamed Mr Partington mainly, so it seems. But he hid it pretty well except when he was bottled. An anonymous phone call, that’s how you got your information, wasn’t it, Doug? That was about Morrison’s strength. Booze can’t give what’s not there, can it? But you probably know all about that. We guessed it might have been him. Then he tried to sell an article about Partington’s business background—to be published if there was an acquittal. Fortunately he showed it to a friend—a mutual friend. So he had to go.”
“And the tongue?” asked McHarg taking another step.
“Our members have to know that we expect them to mean what they say,” said Grossmith mildly. “That’s reasonable, isn’t it? I am the Tyler, after all. I keep my oaths, and I make sure that others keep theirs. It’s just another form of law enforcement, Doug.”
McHarg moved.
His left hook had once been famous. Given a bare nine inches of acceleration it would lay out the hardest-headed opponent.
If it landed.
The Tyler barely moved, but the blow whistled wide. The counterpunch didn’t, however. A right, buried deep in his gut, which age and too much whisky had reduced from steelplate to foam rubber.
McHarg doubled up. For a second he was entirely vulnerable. But before the Tyler could move in, there was a low rasping scream like an angry cat’s. It came from Betty Wood-stock, who had recovered from the paralysis of terror and with desperate courage was driving the wheelchair into the attack.
Again the Tyler’s economy of movement was remarkable. His side-step was not a centimeter further than it needed to be. Using the woman’s own momentum, he spun the chair round and with easy strength sent it careering back towards the living-room door. It caught the jamb and overturned, spilling Betty into the doorway, where she lay as helpless as a decked fish.
Filled with a great anger, McHarg shook off the effects of the blow to his belly and hunched himself into a defensive crouch. Out of condition he might be, but the old skills were deeply engrained. Wesson and his mates hadn’t been able to finish him off and there’d been three of them. Freddie Grossmith, this obscene pantomimic figure of the Tyler, might be OK against old-age pensioners, drunk journalists and decrepit tramps, but this was where he met his comeuppance.
He advanced.
The Tyler watched him and then raised his arms without clenching his fists. A moment later McHarg went reeling back. His nose felt as if it was broken. And this time the Tyler came after him. Those black-skinned hands moved through his defenses as though his arms were pipe-cleaners, not solid beams of bone and muscle. What seemed the lightest of taps at the junction of his neck and right shoulder left that side of his body semi-paralyzed. Christian-like, he turned the other shoulder and lashed out with his foot, aiming unsubtly at the Tyler’s balls. Gratefully the man caught his foot and twisted it. McHarg screamed. He wanted to stay on his feet but he also wanted two feet to stay on.
As he crashed to the ground his foot dragged free from the shoe and the Tyler almost contemptuously tossed it on to his chest. McHarg through his pain thought of Wesson. There was a chain of violence as time brought its revenges. Wesson had beaten him and he had beaten Wesson. Now McHarg, the great fighter, was being taken apart. No wonder Grossmith had been unconcerned about using a weapon. This was a different man from the stylish but essentially light-weight boxer he had known two decades earlier.
This was a finely-tuned killing machine.
He could only hope his turn might soon come round again. But as the Tyler’s well-shod feet were finding their way to his body as easily as his gloved hands had done, the possibility seemed remote.
He was ready to give up, ready to embrace rather than evade the unconsciousness which the Tyler was offering him.
Then through his tear-filled eyes and between the Tyler’s mohair-trousered legs he glimpsed a movement in the living-room doorway.
A woman stood there.
It took him a painful second to realize it was Betty Woodstock.
The wheelchair lay on its side behind her, its wheel still spinning though it seemed an age since the Tyler’s attack. She was hanging onto the jamb of the door with her left hand, but her weight was undeniably, amazingly, on her legs.
And most incredibly of all, in her right hand she held the skean-dhu which he had noticed hanging on the wall on his first visit.
Two quick steps would have brought her up behind the unsuspecting Tyler, but two steps to her were like a thirty-foot leap to a fit man. Terror had got her to her feet. Now hatred pumped blood through a wasteland of muscle and she took one step forward.
But that was all. She had left the doorway and stood without support in the middle of the hall, her teeth bared like a cornered rat’s with the effort of taking the first step and despair of taking another.
The Tyler felt something behind him. Perhaps McHarg’s eyes had given the game away. He glanced over his shoulder. To a man of his expertise even an attack from a fully active woman would have presented no problem. But the glance had given McHarg his chance.
Pushing himself off the wall with all that remained of his strength, he hit the Tyler at the knees. The man staggered backwards. A fully active woman would probably have instinctively stepped aside, perhaps making some ineffectual slashing stroke with the knife.
But Betty did not, could not, move. The Tyler crashed against her. She fell backwards and he fell with her, on top of her. He was up almost immediately, with gymnastic grace. McHarg and the woman lay in a grotesque sprawl of limbs, exhausted, defeated. The Tyler put his right hand over his left shoulder with the irritated look of one who feels an unignorable itch on his shoulder-blade.
When he brought the hand back he studied it with interest.
The soft black leather was smeared with russet.
He nodded like a man who confirms the reaching of a long-anticipated conclusion.
“Funny,” he said. “All those years…you always kept corning.”
Smiling slightly, he raised his eyes from his hand to McHarg’s face.
“Want a job, Doug?” he said painfully. “I know…a vacancy…might suit you…”
Then he fell on his face between McHarg and the woman, the skean-dhu protruding from the soft sand-colored cloth like a cross from a desert grave.
CHAPTER 9
They sat opposite each other in the living-room, bathing each other’s wounds and drinking whisky.
McHarg talked, filling in all the details of what had happened at Sanderton, in an effort to soothe her nerves, but at the end of it she was pale and trembling still, unable to rid herself of the knowledge that she’d just killed a man.
“Don’t worry about it,” McHarg urged. “Put it out of your mind.”
“I thought you were in it too,” she said. “When I came out and saw you standing there, talking, like old friends.”
“We were old friends,” said McHarg. “Something happened. We all change. Something diverts us from what we might have been.”
“They should put up diversion signs, let us choose whether to go on or stay put,” she said. “Oh Christ. I’m covered with blood. It’ll ruin this dress.”
It was a wan attempt at a joke, he realized.
She said, “I’ll have to change it. Help me into my chair.”
It was the first time she had ever admitted the possibility of assistance.
He lifted her from the sofa on which she had been sitting. As he placed her in the wheelchair, she winced slightly.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. It’s my leg. You forget, I’m nostalgic about pain.”
He followed her into the bedroom. She looked at him curiously and said, “Come for the show?”
“Some other time,” he said, opening the wardrobe. Inside he found a zipped plastic suit-holder.
“OK if I take this?” he asked.
She nodded.
As he went out of the door, she said, “McHarg. What are we going to do?”
He answered, “What you planned to do, only even quicker. You’re going back to America on the first possible flight. So get together whatever you want to take.”
“And you? What about you?”
“Me? Hell. Perhaps I’ll go back to Scotland, grow a beard, run a croft with six hens and a tattie bed.”
She shook her head violently. “No you won’t. It was right what he said about you, McHarg. You’ll keep on coming. But you’ll need help, you’ll have to tell someone.”
“Not till I know who I can trust,” said McHarg. “It’s too risky.”
“I struck lucky,” she said.
They exchanged smiles and he left.
Fifteen minutes later when she joined him in the living-room, he was sitting going through the contents of a wallet.
“His?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“What the hell do you mean, gone?” she asked in alarm.
“If you must know, he’s down the corridor in number 97,” he said. “It’s vacant, I noticed the sign outside when I came in. I’ve hung him in the closet in that plastic wardrobe. And I’ve locked the door and dumped the key.”
“But they’ll find him sooner or later,” she protested. “They’re not going to sit back and just wait for him to turn up. Neither of his employers.”
“Hopefully later. And better there than here, wouldn’t you say? This is interesting, you’re not the only one who was going to America. Freddie Grossmith has a ticket too and a wadful of dollars.”
She looked scared again.
“You mean he was coming after me?”
He laughed.
“No. He’s bound for the East Coast. Boston. Perhaps there’s some international police conference on. I told you that was his speciality. One of his specialities. It must have been useful. Got him all over the world.”
“Why should he have wanted to get all over the world? As Tyler, I mean?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But certainly not to pursue attractive women in wheelchairs.”
But he wasn’t sure about that either.
“McHarg, what do you really think this is all about?”
He rubbed his hand over his face. It felt stubbly. He said, “Do you want what I guess or what I know?”
“How much is what you know?”
“About two sentences’ worth.”
“I’ll take the guesses.”
“All right,” he said. “There’s a group of men who are working outside the law probably on an international scale. Motivation, probably, though not certainly, or perhaps not solely, money.”
“Why such a large scale?” she interrupted. “Why not just a little home-grown racket?”
He shook his head. “The killings. And the rigmarole,” he said. “It must be really big to be worth protecting in such a way. And all this Freemasonry thing only makes sense if it’s really necessary. And it can only be necessary if they need an international umbrella of secrecy to work under. Who needs recognition signals if everybody knows everybody else? It’s the big organization, the Mafia-style set-up, that needs structuring.”
“But it’s so…childish!” she burst out.
“You can say that?” he demanded. “Listen, it stops being childish if you take it seriously. All those blood-curdling oaths—they mean them! The initiate—what do you call him? the Entered Apprentice—has his loyalty tested at some stage by being required to carry out the terms of his oath. That has the double effect of testing the sincerity of a man’s vocation, plus it binds him to the group almost irrevocably.”
“All right. I can see that. I still don’t know if I believe it, but I know it must be true, if you follow me. Is that as far as your guessing takes you?”
“I’m still working at it. Why they wanted to kill you I can follow.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“But me? Why me?”
“Because of Partington?”
“But I wasn’t a risk, not really. They’d obviously got that sewn up. No, Grossmith said that Elkin panicked at the reception and decided to drum up Wesson and his mates to kick my head in.”
“Because he heard you asking questions about Jim Morrison, then saw you going off with me. It must have looked very suspicious.”
“Yes, but more significant perhaps is that the Tyler wasn’t there for consultation,” said McHarg slowly. “Freddie Grossmith heard what I had to say at the Yard that morning and what he saw as the matter of prime urgency was motoring down to Sanderton where he got rid of Haystacks and old Flint as well as shutting up Wainwright.”
“Why not kill the doctor too?”
“Easier to shut him up. Attract less attention. Also perhaps, in a way, he was less important. Which means…”
“Means what?”
“The others were more important because…oh shit! I’m as thick as a Sassenach! The car. They saw the car. Jesus!”
He jumped up, went to the telephone, dialled.
When the phone was answered, he gave an extension number. Betty looked at him in surprise. His accent had changed, his voice had become flat, controlled, somehow familiar…
“Commander Grossmith here,” said McHarg. “You checked a car number on my authorization last week. That’s it, the Jaguar. Could you let me have the possibilities again? No, it’s just that the list has got mislaid for the moment. Don’t send them up, just dictate them if you would.”
A pause while McHarg scribbled on the telephone notepad.
“Thanks,” he said finally and replaced the phone.
He didn’t speak but studied the sheet of paper before him.
“What is it?” demanded Betty. “Come on, McHarg. No more mysteries, not between us.”
“They checked out the car number, or what they know of it, for me,” he said. “I saw the computer print-out. There were only three names on it, but it was Elkin who brought it in. There were four names on it when it reached him. He’d torn one off. God, it’s so simple, it’s absurd.”
“To stop you investigating it, you mean?”
He shook his head. “More direct than that. To stop me recognizing it.” He read from the piece of paper, “Captain Edward Jopley.”
“Jopley? Who’s he?” asked Betty.
“He is, or at least two years ago he was, equerry to His Royal Highness Prince Arthur,” said McHarg.
He picked up the phone again and dialled.
Betty could only hear McHarg’s part of the conversation. He spoke authoritatively, curtly almost, and at the end replaced the receiver abruptly.
“Who were you ringing?” she asked.
“The Palace,” he said, frowning.
She looked at him closely, suspecting a joke, then said, “Jesus. You know some useful numbers.”
“I don’t forget things,” said McHarg harshly.
“I bet you don’t,” she said. “So, what have you found out, for God’s sake?”
He looked at her for a long moment, but she didn’t feel that he was seeing her. She was right. What he was seeing was a wheelchair.
What he had found out didn’t carry him mu
ch further forward. Jopley was still Prince Arthur’s equerry and currently they were en route to Canada for an official visit. The Tyler had been going to Boston. Coincidence? Probably. It was a long way from Canada and what the hell could be the connection anyway?
He felt himself lost. The great decisive McHarg didn’t know where to turn. Jopley. Perhaps if he could get hold of Jopley and give him a dose of what he’d given to Wesson…
He shook his head angrily. Had it come to this? The old copper’s adage, when in doubt, hit out?
In any case Jopley was on his way to Canada and to get near him while he was on duty would be bloody hard. Dewhurst was no slouch, plus of course all those hard-nosed Canadian security men…
But he would cross the Atlantic, he suddenly decided. He had his passport, properly visa’d. He had money, his own and the Tyler’s. Why not use it? Grossmith owed him something. It would be wise to be out of the UK when they started looking for him in earnest—Grossmith’s colleagues, he meant, both in and out of the Yard. There was a trail that led, however faintly, to Boston, Mass. But even without that trail, he had business there which needed to be sorted, one way or another, before he got on with the rest of his life.
Which might not be all that much to get on with, he reminded himself with a grim smile.
The smile encouraged Betty.
“Well?” she said. “Is the oracle ready to pronounce?”
“I told you before. You’re going back to California. Get together whatever you want to take,” he commanded. “And that doesn’t mean the furniture. Five minutes.”
“And what if I don’t care to?” she asked.
“You can sit around here and wait for them to sell number 97,” he said indifferently.
“OK. I’m persuaded. And what about you, McHarg? You can’t sit around here either!”
Who Guards a Prince? Page 15
