The End Game

by Michael Gilbert

  At intervals, through that endless day, he climbed back into the loft and lay flat on the floor easing the cramp out of his tortured leg muscles.

  “You’re a bloody fool, David, boy,” he said. “But so what?

  You’ve been a bloody fool all your life. Too late to change now.”

  The masons who had built the chimney had known their job. It was only with infinite pains that David drove his chisel through the rock-hard mortar on each side of the brick he had selected. Then he enlarged the hole on one side of the brick until it was big enough for the claw to go through. Then he used his weight on the end of the claw and felt the brick shift.

  He celebrated this success with a quick snack and a drink of cold tea. Thereafter the work was a little easier. By the time he knocked off, six bricks were out and had been dropped down the main shaft. David replaced the sheet iron carefully and tidied up.

  Moule was one of the first of the lodgers to arrive. He came straight over to his corner and grabbed him by the arm.

  “You’ve got it for me. You promised you would.”

  “Relax,” said David. “And leave go of me. You must know by now that when I say I’ll do something, I do it.”

  “That’s right. I know I can rely on you.”

  “Two tablets. Two quid.”

  The exchange was made, and the ritual of the injection took place.

  Hours later Dennis Moule came slowly back to earth. By this time all the regular lodgers had arrived. None of them came near the corner where David and Moule were lying. It was recognised by now that they had something going between them, and they were left to themselves.

  This was the time for confidences. Having been deprived of the drug for twenty-four hours and then taken a double shot, Moule was closer to his old civilised self than David had ever seen him. At one moment he startled him by breaking off a long, whispered monologue, saying, “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “Wassat?” said David. He was desperately sleepy after the efforts of the day.

  “I said, who are you?” To his surprise, Moule was chuckling. “What the hell are you doing here? You don’t really belong. You can’t fool me. You’ve got some game on, haven’t you?”

  “Shurrup and go to sleep,” said David.

  Moule chuckled again. He was back, God knows where, in one of the long corridors of his youth. The rain, which was beating down on the roof, seemed to remind him of something. He said, “It was raining hard on that afternoon. I shall never forget it. Never. They were worried about something. I could see that. Phyllis told me. She said, ‘Blackett’s in bad trouble, and Julius’—she used to call Mr Mantegna Julius, though not to his face of course —‘is worried stiff. Blackett ought to have showed him the papers before he signed them, not afterwards.’ But that’s clients all over, isn’t it? Get themselves into trouble and then come along when it’s too late and ask you to get them out of it. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said David. But he was wide awake now.

  “Phyllis showed me the folder the papers were in. A blue folder. She was putting it away in the private cabinet. Do you know what she said? She said, ‘This folder’s dynamite.’ And I said, then you’d better lock it up before it goes off, hadn’t you?”

  This piece of repartee seemed to amuse Moule, and he started to laugh. The laugh turned into a cough, and quite suddenly David realised that he wasn’t laughing any more. He was sobbing.

  “What is it?” he said. “What’s up?”

  “They all died,” said Moule. “That same afternoon. In the rain.”

  And that was all he would say.

  25

  “You think it’ll come to a head tonight?” said the Assistant Commissioner. He was looking out of the window at the weeping grey sky.

  “Tonight or tomorrow night,” said Morrissey.

  “And you’re leaving the ring clear and watching to see which way it goes.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a bit cold-blooded.”

  “We’re dealing with a cold-blooded type,” said Morrissey. “I’m aiming to stay out of it as long as I can. But, if I have to go in, I’ve organised a force big enough to swamp any opposition.”

  “What have you told the men?”

  “Nothing.” Morrissey grinned. “But one of my sergeants let it slip, casual-like, that we expect trouble at the National Front rally in Lewisham.”

  “We may get that, too.”

  The Assistant Commissioner had known Morrissey since they had worked together, twenty years before, at the rough end of Southwark. He said, “I’d be happier if I could see how it was going to come out. You realise that if they catch up with Morgan, he’ll be in real bad trouble.”

  Morrissey said, “The thing Morgan’s best at is getting out of trouble. He’s an expert at that.”

  “I saw him playing rugger once,” said the Assistant Commissioner. “For the Glamorgan Police against the London Welsh. He was playing scrum half. One moment he’d be at the bottom of a heaving mass of forwards. You’d think they were murdering him. The next moment he’d be ten yards away up the field. A remarkable performer. I believe he’d have got a cap for Wales, except that they’ve got more scrum halves than they know what to do with.”

  The second day’s work was easier. The removal of the first few bricks had made all the difference. There was one interruption, when David heard a fearsome scream from below. He came down quickly. At the far end of the loft an old tramp was sitting up in the straw, his face purple. As David looked at him, he fell back. David could smell the methylated spirits, before he saw the empty bottle with which the old man had been dosing himself. He was breathing in huge, tortured gasps. There was a rattle, and the gasping stopped. The man was dead. There was nothing David could do about it. He covered him with newspapers and straw and went back to work.

  By midday the hole was large enough for him to wriggle through. He had a small torch, which he used sparingly, as the battery was on the blink.

  He had broken into the space between the top of the ceiling and the underneath of the tiles. Its floor was formed by ceiling joists, and this made progress slow and painful. He worked his way along the main building on the east side of the block and turned the corner, which brought him above the shorter, southern, wing. When he had reached what he judged to be the middle of this, he broke through the ceiling by stamping a hole in the lath and plaster and peered down into the room.

  “Easy does it, now,” he said. “Got to think about getting back again.”

  The problem, once posed, was not too difficult. He saw that the mistake he had made was breaking through the ceiling in the middle of the room. What he had to do was break through again alongside the room wall. Then it would be possible to scramble back. It proved even easier than he had thought, since his second entrance point was immediately above the mantelpiece.

  “Forethought, boy,” he said. “That’s the ticket. Forethought.” He found he was talking to himself a good deal. He had eaten very little and slept hardly at all for the past two days, and he was beginning to feel lightheaded.

  The room he had broken into had once been an office. Rather a superior office, with two good southern windows. The iron frames were rusted, but David got one of them open and peered out.

  With the approach of evening the rain had eased off and was now a drifting curtain.

  “Just what the doctor ordered,” said David. It was a fair drop to the open ground at the back of the building, but negotiable at a pinch. The windows at ground-floor level would, he guessed, be barred.

  A staircase led down into the front hall. This had two doors on either side of it and a small, walled-off cubicle at the far end. David reconstructed the setup in his mind. This was the reception area. Visitors would come through the front door and would be put into the smaller front room on the left to wait. The cubicle would take a receptionist and maybe the telephone exchange. He walk
ed up the hall and looked in. There was a hatchway which gave on to the second larger room on the left. General office, thought David. The heart of the organisation. The inner citadel, held by the remnant of the garrison as the enemy closed in round them. The scene of the last stand.

  One battered desk and two chairs had been left behind when they went. There was a double row of lockers on either side of the fireplace in the far wall. David walked in and opened them. They were all empty except one, which contained a milk bottle filled with a fine growth of matured mould. The light was growing dim now, but he could make out graffiti on the bare plaster walls. Most of them were pictures of girls drawn by an artist with more imagination than sense of perspective.

  Underneath, in smeared letters, someone had written, “The sun never sets on the British Empire” and underneath that, in another hand, “Why, ‘cos there ain’t no Empire left for it to set on.”

  David shivered. The room was dank and horrible and desolate. The weather would soon be bringing in the homeless men who had inherited the building. There would be less of them tonight. The cold and wet would have driven some of them to the discomforts of the spike and the tramps’ lodging houses. He climbed back the way he had come, refixed the plate of sheet iron and settled down among the debris to wait. He was still shaking. Cold and lack of food, he told himself. But he knew that there was more to it than that.

  Moule was among the first to arrive. In his eagerness to reach David, he tripped and finished the journey on hands and knees. He was in a pitiable state, dripping with moisture, his face yellow and his teeth chattering.

  “We’re a pair,” said David. “That’s what we are. A pair of real beauties.” He handed over the two tablets. Moule’s hand was shaking so badly that he could hardly hold the syringe. In the end, David had to give him the injection. He needed Moule back to some semblance of normality. The difficulty was staying awake himself. To give himself something to do he shifted two large empty cartons, which somewhat increased the privacy of their corner.

  A succession of racking coughs was the sign that Moule was wrenching himself out of Arcady and back into the grey, unprofitable present. Presently he yawned, hoisted his back half up against the wall and said, “You’re still there? I’m glad of that. I dreamed I’d gone a long way away and lost you for good.”

  He put one thin hand on David’s arm as if to make sure that he was really there. David switched on his torch. Its feeble light produced an illusory effect of snugness and security.

  He thought, “We’re two explorers, in a cabin, at the top of a high mountain. We’re shipwrecked sailors on a raft in the middle of the wide, grey sea. We’re the last men on earth, the only two survivors of an atomic holocaust.”

  Moule seemed to be reading David’s thoughts. He said, “There’s something wrong with you. What’s happening?”

  David said, with calculated brutality, “What’s happening is that I’ve had enough. I’m getting out.”

  Moule stared at him. Then he said, “What about me?”

  “I’m not your father and mother. I’m not your bloody nurse. What about you? What the hell do I care about you?”

  “You promised—”

  “Anything I promised, I’ve done. And done more than I promised.”

  “Yes, yes.” The slave was anxious to propitiate a master who had turned suddenly stern. “You’ve been very good.”

  “And I could be better. Look at this, will you?” David had an envelope in his hand. He said, “Hold the torch. I want to count.” He spread a khaki handkerchief on to the straw between them and trickled out on to it first ten, then another ten, then a final ten of the white tablets.

  “Thirty,” he said. “Thirty of them. Now say that I don’t keep my promises.”

  Moule’s voice was shaking. He said, “Oh, you do. You do. I haven’t quite enough money for all of them—”

  “I’m not interested in money,” said David. He was tipping the tablets carefully back into the envelope as he spoke. The last one escaped and rolled into the straw. David shone the torch down, located it and picked it up. He did all this slowly and deliberately.

  There was a moment of silence in their tiny bivouac. Then Moule said, framing the words with difficulty, “Please—please tell me what you want.”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I don’t. Really I don’t.”

  “I want those papers. The ones you hid.”

  Moule didn’t pretend not to understand him. He was leaning back, his face working. If he doesn’t break now, thought David, he never will. Deliberately he crushed the tablet he was holding and scattered the white powder into the straw.

  “One of those goes away every minute until you make your mind up.”

  The tortured indecision on Moule’s face was horrible. As David took a second tablet out of the envelope he said, “Stop. Don’t do that. Wait for a moment. You don’t understand. If I tell you and you take the papers, people will know.”

  “Know what?”

  David turned the tablet over between his fingers.

  “Know that I’ve told you.”

  “Your name won’t be mentioned.”

  “They’ll guess.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  Moule gave a dry sob. It was like a boy who has been beaten so often that he can cry no more. He said, “All right. I’ll tell you. It was the audit.”

  “What audit?”

  (Keep him talking.)

  “I used to do audits for Mantegna. It meant going out and spending the day—several days—in the office of the firm we were auditing.” Moule had lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. David turned off the torch. Darkness might help the confessional. “When you’d done the same audit for several years, you got to know the chief accountant quite well. It was a sort of joint effort, to get the accounts presented in good order. You weren’t on opposite sides, really. You were on the same side. You understand?”

  “I understand,” said David.

  “This cashier and I became very friendly. He—well, he liked to take a drop from time to time, and I was a bit that way myself. It was on account of Phyllis.”

  “I know about Phyllis. Go on with the cashier.”

  “He always had a bottle of Scotch handy. Of course, we used to wait until the junior cashiers had gone to lunch; then he’d pull it out and we’d have a small one, or maybe a couple. One day the Managing Director came in and nearly caught us.” At this point Moule giggled. “I got the bottle into the wastepaper basket, just in time.”

  (Don’t be impatient, boy. We’ve got all night in front of us.)

  “Well, anyway, the point was, he had a particular place where he kept this bottle. He didn’t want some nosey typist finding it, you see, and reporting him to the boss.”

  “Creepy Crawley.”

  “What was that?”

  “Just a thought. Go on. Tell me. Where did he hide it?”

  “There were these lockers, on either side of the fireplace. They were built up on a sort of stand. The wooden piece at the bottom looked solid, but if you got your fingers round one corner—that was on the fireplace side—you could move it out. I thought of this afterwards, you see.”

  “After what?”

  “Why, after the firm went bust. We were put in by the liquidator. I suppose I was one of the last people to use the place—after everyone else had gone away.”

  The truth, the incredible truth, was beginning to dawn on David at last.

  He said, in a voice which he tried to keep matter-of-fact, “What was the name of this firm?”

  “I told you, didn’t I? Hendrixsons.”

  “This place?”

  “That’s right. That’s why I used to come back here. I felt I was sort of keeping an eye on the papers.”

  “You put those papers under the lockers, in the cashier’s room?”

  “I knew they were going to shut it down. All the places round here were being closed down. It seemed a very safe sort o
f place.”

  ‘It was an excellent place,” said David. “Oh dear, yes. It was the best place you could possibly have thought of, in the whole wide world. You’ve no idea how excellent.” He had clambered to his feet.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get them.”

  “You can’t get in. It’s locked and barred.”

  “That’s just the point, my lovely boyo. I can get in and I’m going to get in. I’m Father bloody Christmas with a difference. He comes down chimneys, I go up them.”

  He had moved the sheet of metal and was starting on his way up the shaft when it happened.

  A strong beam of light shone up through the hole in the floor, and a voice—loud, confident, authoritative—bellowed, “Come out of it, all you stinking toe-rags. Come out quick, or we’ll burn you up.”

  Smoke was already trickling up between the floorboards.

  26

  There was a squealing and a scurrying like a rats’ nest disturbed by terriers, as a dozen frightened tramps rolled from the straw and made for the one exit.

  It turned out to be more smoke than fire. Trombo and his assistants had set fire to bales of straw and doused them with water as soon as they were alight. The tramps tumbled, one after another, down the steps and were seized by the men there and pushed up against the inner wall, where they stood blinking under the powerful headlamps of three trucks which were parked in the yard.

  Trombo stood in the middle of the open space. He was wearing a long-skirted, belted seaman’s coat, and the rain had smoothed the hair over his curiously rounded head. Irish Mick was standing beside him, examining each of the tramps as they were dragged forward for inspection.

  “That’s Percy,” he said. “That’s him.”

  “Ah,” said Trombo. “So this is my old friend Mr Moule. And where is his friend Mr Morgan?”

  Mick darted up and down the line of tramps and came back, shaking his head. “He’s not here,” he said. “He must be hiding upstairs. He’s there, all right. I saw him come in.”