Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  ‘Turn round slowly, and come over here. No sudden movements.’

  Dougal and Amanda let their hands fall to their sides and moved round to face Lee. He was at the doorway to the yard, leaning heavily against the jamb. His face was grey and lined. In his left hand was a bloodstained handkerchief, with which he must have dabbed the wound on his scalp. He looked almost pathetic; Dougal had the fleeting impression that he had palpably shrunk. But the Walther in his other hand was still levelled steadily in their direction.

  Lee gestured to them with the gun and they obediently came over and stood, one on either side of him. He swayed slightly. ‘Take my arms.’ He crossed them over his front. Dougal was on Lee’s right. The muzzle of the Walther dug into Amanda’s side. ‘Now. We walk slowly down to the boat.’ Behind them, Tanner’s body shifted fractionally as a sudden gust of wind swirled up from the estuary.

  They moved forward with united deliberation, like nurses accompanying a geriatric patient on an outing to the television room. With maddening slowness, they crossed the cobbled stable yard and the lane beyond and reached the first field. The exercise seemed to revive Lee: he began to need less of their support. A bad sign. He prodded the gun viciously into Amanda. Dougal saw her wince.

  As they followed the footpath, their speed increased. Dougal surreptitiously glanced around him. On one side the field was empty: no help there. On his right was the hedge, a formidable barrier six feet high, which winter had failed to make any less impassable. Dougal’s mind shot off on a tangent: the hedge must be old, to be so thick. Couldn’t you tell a hedge’s age by the number of plants it contained? . . . Anyone on the other side was effectively in another world. Not that there would be anyone.

  The line of the hedge altered in the second field, and the estuary swung into view. It looked murky and secretive. Its surface was empty of moving boats, its waters moved in their own unalterable rhythms, oblivious of humans. The picture froze in Dougal’s mind – not because he liked it at present, but because this might be the last time he ever saw it.

  Dougal tried to think calmly. Lee would probably kill them as soon as he felt it practicable. Would he do it as soon as he knew that they had cheated him over the diamonds? Perhaps, if he found out where the stones really were, he would force them to extend the nightmare into tomorrow and go with them to Cambridge. Equally possibly, his rage – and the intrinsic pleasure of the action – would lead to him killing them on the spot. Which he would have done anyway, if the diamonds had been there. That was the trouble. Lee wanted the diamonds, but he also wanted to kill them. That was the difference between him and Hanbury; the latter, Dougal suspected, had only killed when he felt it to be necessary, not because he enjoyed it.

  If they were going to die anyway, Dougal realized that he might as well take any chance, however slim, to overcome Lee. He almost wished there had been no chance left at all – it would have been simpler.

  They reached the stile. Lee’s face was expressionless as he stared out to the Sally-Anne. He climbed over almost unaided. There was a tree stump a few yards away. He lumbered over to it and sat down heavily. The walk might have increased his strength, but it had done nothing to improve his temper.

  ‘You,’ Lee spat at Amanda. ‘You’re going to get the diamonds. Your boyfriend stays with me and gets his head blown apart if you try any funny business. And remember, this little toy of mine can reach you too, my love. And will, if necessary.’ Rubbish, thought Dougal. The Sally-Anne was at least fifty yards away, probably further, and if Lee could make the Walther shoot accurately at that distance he was a bloody genius. ‘Go on. Off you go.’

  ‘Shall I push her off?’ asked Dougal politely. ‘She’s not very good with oars and things.’

  Lee thought for a moment. It was cold, out here on the estuary, and it suddenly occurred to Dougal that Lee wasn’t enjoying waiting around here, either, though not for the same reasons. Lee huddled on the tree stump in his anorak, measuring the distance from where he sat to the dinghy. Dougal glanced at Amanda and felt deluged with helpless tenderness: she looked so pale standing there – not like herself at all, but some poor quality imitation. Dougal shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wondering if he looked as ghostly as she did.

  ‘All right,’ said Lee at last. ‘Walk slowly, though, and no talking. When it’s done, you’ – the gun barrel swung towards Dougal – ‘come and sit in front of me. You’ – the Walther turned on Amanda – ‘don’t you waste any time, or pop goes lover boy here. Got it?’

  Silently they nodded. Dougal was swearing to himself. Lee must have the constitution of an elephant – his voice sounded almost normal now. If only he had had the sense to follow up the blow on the head with a quick thrust of the knife.

  Dougal unlooped the dinghy’s painter from the stake which served as a bollard. Amanda clambered in and awkwardly set the oars in the rowlocks. As Dougal swung the boat round by the stern, the muddy water splashing greedily up at his hands, he mouthed, ‘Lie on the deck in the saloon. Don’t move until you hear me shout Caroline. If not, wait till it’s dark, and row up with the tide to Albenham, police.’

  She looked up, not at him but over her shoulder. Two spots of startling red had appeared in her cheeks. It was impossible to tell if she had understood.

  Dougal pushed off the dinghy. Amanda began to row inexpertly towards the Sally-Anne by a zigzag route. Dougal turned away. Lee stared impassively at him, and then waved the gun at a spot a couple of yards in front of him. Dougal walked over and sat down, facing the Sally-Anne. The damp seeped through the seat of his jeans. No need to worry about rheumatism now. He stared at the diminishing figure of Amanda, as if he was trying to fix her image in his mind forever. His awareness of Lee’s presence behind him was like a weight on his shoulders.

  Amanda scrambled over the stern of the Sally-Anne, leaving the dinghy rocking violently behind. She looked briefly back towards the shore; the distance was too great for Dougal to catch the expression on her face. She vanished down the companionway to the saloon.

  Dougal let thirty seconds crawl by to the end of the world. He and Lee were like passengers waiting for a train – terrified to move in case it passed through the station without them noticing. Only the river had motion: the water rubbed and slapped against the mud, its surface movement rocking the boats deserted at their winter moorings in the estuary.

  Water.

  ‘Mr Lee.’ Dougal half-turned his head. ‘I’ve got to piss. May I stand up?’

  There was a chuckle behind him, with an undertone of derision, as if the weakness of Dougal’s bladder confirmed Lee’s overall opinion of him. ‘Yes. Do it where you are. Where I can see you.’

  Dougal slowly got to his feet. The muscles in his legs, especially around the knees, shrieked at the change of position. The cold seemed to have permeated every cell of his body. He flexed his fingers and made as if to fumble with his flies. His shoulders were tensed – hunched of their own accord. Would Lee notice?

  Three – two – one—

  He spun round and flung himself in a dive which was almost horizontal at Lee’s right hand. Before impact, he noticed several things so quickly that they blurred into one another in his brain: Lee wasn’t even looking at him – he was staring blankly at the Sally-Anne as if she was the promised land; the gun dangled from his hand, barrel downwards; and the patch of drying blood on his head glowed somberly against the dull winter background.

  Dougal’s body hit the frozen ground with a jolt; simultaneously, he grabbed Lee’s gun arm with both hands. His momentum toppled Lee from the tree stump. Dougal used his right hand to club the wound on Lee’s head – not once but again and again, until his clenched first was smeared with warm blood.

  Lee’s body went limp, giving Dougal the chance to scoop away the Walther and knee his adversary in the crotch. Then, as before with Cedric, all element of calculation deserted his actions. Dougal found himself on his feet, sobbing helplessly and kicking Lee again and again, anywhere
and everywhere. His boots thudded against Lee’s torso, deflected to batter that bulbous, badgerlike nose and elicited squeals of pain from lucky shots in the solar plexus and the kidneys. The only coherent thought Dougal was aware of was regret that he wasn’t shod with steel.

  It was weariness that stopped him. He gave Lee’s groin a final kick, but it lacked the frenzied conviction of its predecessors. He found himself shaking uncontrollably as he stood there staring down at Lee and at the mud and the blood which covered him. Oh, you bastard, he mouthed at the squirming shape on the ground, why did you make me do this? His vision dissolved out of focus. He realized his cheeks were wet with tears. How long ago since I cried?

  He supposed he should look for the pistol – mustn’t repeat the mistake of last time. A bullet in Lee’s head and the business would be settled. It would be like a mercy killing, though he wasn’t sure to whom the mercy was going to be shown.

  Wiping his face with the back of his hand, Dougal turned and stared along the bank of the creek. He saw the Walther, its butt in the air and its barrel buried in a clump of grass; he had thrown it further than he realized – it must be a good ten yards away.

  A brawny blue arm flashed out and flicked his feet from under him. For the second time that day, the coarse grass and iron-hard ground of the river bank rushed up to meet him. Before he had had time to absorb the first agony of impact, Lee crashed down on top of him. Dougal shrieked with pain and fear, a high, mindless keening which lost itself in the grey dome of the sky.

  When his perceptions cleared, Dougal realized that Lee was sitting astride him, crushing his rib cage with his weight and driving his back into the unyielding ground. Lee’s thumbs were locked into position underneath Dougal’s jaw. He could see the stile out of the corner of his eye, the beginning of the path to comfort and normality. Which was now forever impassable.

  Lee’s thumbs relaxed their pressure fractionally, and hope leapt unreasonably within Dougal.

  ‘Now,’ said Lee calmly, in a voice which murdered hope, ‘that’s it, you tricky little bugger.’ The softness of the brogue was even more at odds than usual with the slablike face. Lee’s nose was bleeding; the drops showered down on Dougal like crimson rain.

  ‘That snotty girlfriend of yours has left you in the lurch, hasn’t she? Stupid of her, in the long run. And you’ve tried to pull one too many fast ones on me. Don’t you know who you’re dealing with? God I hate you poncey-faced English with your snotty little accents and your mean little minds. I’m going to squeeze the life out of you, slowly, so you know just what’s happening to you. With pauses, so you can beg me to stop. I’ll maybe make it slightly easier, that little bit quicker, if you tell me what you’ve done with the diamonds.’

  Lee’s thumbs dug viciously into Dougal’s neck, and then withdrew to give him the chance to speak.

  As the unbearable choking sensation eased, a movement in the field beyond the stile pulled Dougal’s eyes away from Lee’s face. There was a man standing by the stile, his features weatherbeaten and partially obscured by a patriarchal beard. He wore a battered pork-pie hat and a voluminous waterproof. His left hand held a stout stick, his right was in the pocket of his coat. He radiated the surly, unassuming arrogance of a farmer on his own land – though Dougal knew this certainly wasn’t old Spencer from Havishall village who rented the fields around here.

  Dougal’s teeth were chattering, but he forced the words out.

  ‘There’s a man behind you.’

  The feeble whisper enraged Lee. His thumbs began to tighten.

  ‘Oh, crap. That’s the oldest . . .’

  ‘What the hell are you doing on my land?’ shouted the stranger. ‘Here, boy,’ he added over his shoulder and Dougal had a vision of a gigantic avenging hound rushing down the field to savage these trespassers on his master’s territory.

  Lee turned angrily. ‘What the f—’

  There was a crack, initially sharp but sending dull echoes bouncing over the estuary. Lee seemed to rise slightly, as if caught in the grip of a gust of wind. Then he slumped heavily down. Dougal became aware that there was something warm and sticky on his face. It was dark, lying here under Lee.

  ‘Something along the lines of Doctor Livingstone, I presume would be appropriate at this juncture, wouldn’t it?’

  Dougal went rigid – not with mere physical fear this time, but with a terror which had more eerie origins. The newcomer’s voice had replaced its flat East Anglian twang with the fruity vowels of middle-class English. That wasn’t the trouble.

  The voice belonged to James Hanbury.

  21

  A black tide of terror flooded over Dougal, engulfing his fragile certainties and suspending him in its oily slime, as helpless as a foetus in its amniotic fluid. Then, just as suddenly, the fear ebbed, sucked back into those hidden recesses of his mind where nightmares lay embalmed. In its place came words which shaped themselves and clustered in comforting, protective sentences.

  The dead, they said, don’t walk in the afternoon. Their methods of killing people are subtle and bloodless: they don’t use bullets. Hanbury must be alive. And I am lying here under Lee, with the taste of his blood in my mouth.

  Light and air returned to Dougal simultaneously, as Lee’s body was rolled off him. The farmer stood over him, looking down with Hanbury’s large, pale eyes and holding a brilliantly white handkerchief in his left hand.

  ‘Here,’ said James Hanbury. ‘Take this. I expect you’d like to wipe your face.’

  ‘How thoughtful,’ said Dougal, because it was. ‘How did you—?’

  ‘Explanations later. Suffice it to say, you can’t keep the good man down. But first, how had you planned to get rid of the debris?’

  Dougal outlined the scheme that he had never really believed they would be in a position to implement. If they could get the bodies to the Sally-Anne, it would be possible, under the first cover of darkness, to ferry them just beyond the sandbank which partially blocked the mouth of the Alben estuary and drop them, suitably weighted, over the side. ‘The tide will be ebbing fast by then and they will just be washed out into the North Sea.’ In fact, Dougal knew, the tide would tug them north, up the coast, rather than east. He had worked out the details earlier today, picking his way with some difficulty through Reed’s Almanac and the Admiralty Tide Tables.

  ‘Very neat,’ approved Hanbury. ‘I suppose there’s no chance of them being washed ashore inconveniently soon?’

  Dougal shook his head. ‘Not if they’re weighted down. And it’s a spring tide this evening, which should help.’

  With sudden remorse he remembered Amanda, waiting cold and fearful on the Sally-Anne; he should have called her earlier. He shouted Caroline across the water. Hanbury stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching everything with bright interest.

  When Amanda reached them, Hanbury allowed no time for conversation or for coming to terms with the fact they were still alive and likely to remain that way for the forseeable future. Probably, Dougal reflected, the physical activity required was not only expedient but therapeutic.

  The three of them laboured like a team of professional undertakers for nearly two hours. The light faded into darkness as they did so. First, two trips with the wheelbarrow were necessary – one for Tanner and the other for the contrivance which had killed him.

  Hanbury surveyed the pendulum with amusement.

  ‘I didn’t really have time to see it properly on my way down. It’s really very ingenious. Reminds me of Heath Robinson.’

  Transporting Tanner to the estuary was extremely difficult, largely because of his length. His limbs, as yet unconfined by rigor mortis, flopped over the sides of the wheelbarrow, impeding their progress whenever they could.

  Hanbury went through the pockets of both corpses on the river bank, putting what he found in a green plastic carrier bag which had come from Harrods. He straightened up and remarked that at least there was no need to go through their clothing and snip out the labels. It
was all chain-store stuff. It usually was, these days.

  The worst part of the operation was getting the cargo from the shore on to the Sally-Anne. Three trips in the dinghy were called for. Dougal didn’t mind the rowing – it was transferring each load into the cockpit that was the difficulty. It was odd, too, how a part of Hanbury’s assurance dropped away from him as he left the land. Dougal found that he was giving the orders during this stage, an experience he failed to relish.

  Just before six, Dougal started the engine, slipped the mooring and set off towards the mouth of the estuary. Beside him in the cockpit, Hanbury was weighting Lee and Tanner with scrap iron from the stables. Dougal gave him a length of nylon rope and the CQR thirty-pound anchor to help him in his task; Malcolm would be furious. Amanda stood on the companionway, lighting Hanbury with a shaded torch.

  Dougal kept their speed low, lit no navigation lights and hoped for the best. The sandbank and the sea lay one and a half miles downstream. Navigation wasn’t a problem – he’d done this trip with Malcolm several times in darkness. If he kept the Sally-Anne on the north side of the estuary and steered steadily south-southeast, they would be all right. There were two farms on the north bank and one to the south – their lights were useful as a check. Lastly, as Dougal’s eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he found he could make out the dim outlines of the bank on either side.

  They crossed the sandbank at the mouth of the estuary and tipped the bodies into the shifting surface of the sea. Lee and Tanner slid soundlessly into the watery anonymity of their graves.

  As they returned to the mooring, Hanbury and Amanda went below to boil a kettle and try to get warm. Dougal could hear a murmur of voices from the saloon and, occasionally, the gurgle of Amanda’s laughter. He lit a cigarette and stared at its glowing tip. It must be the hottest thing for miles around. Pity it wasn’t rather larger.