by Jack Higgins
‘What’s Harry been up to then? Don’t tell me you’ve managed to pin something on him after all these years?’
‘Harry?’ Nick frowned and then he remembered. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Bella. Fred Manton’s the one who’s gone in too deep. He was going to make a run for it with the contents of the safe at the Flamingo. Harry was invited down to check on things, that’s all.’
A stranger stared out from the mirror behind her. A man in a blue raincoat whose dark eyes beneath the peak of the semi-military cap stared through and beyond.
She shivered and swallowed some of her gin hurriedly. ‘Is that all you wanted to say?’
‘No, I came to tell you that Ben won’t bother you any more.’
There was something in her eyes, but only for a moment and her head went back. ‘Is that a fact? Well you can tell him to go to hell as far as I’m concerned.’
‘He wouldn’t hear me,’ Nick said calmly. ‘He’s lying on his back in the mud at the end of Hagen’s Wharf, Bella. Somebody put a couple of bullets in him.’
Until then it had been only a nightmare compounded of the rain and the fog and the night, something to be shrugged off in the light of morning, to be forgotten as quickly as any bad dream.
But now, in one terrible visionary moment of clarity she saw him lying there in the mud, the smile hooked into place, and it was only then that the full force of what had happened hit her.
She dropped the glass and put out a hand as if to ward him off and her head turned from side to side, her face contorting until the vomit rose in her throat and she staggered across to the bathroom, a hand to her mouth.
She leaned over the sink, her shoulders heaving, and Nick stood in the door and watched her, strangely calm. It was as if he stood outside himself, outside of both of them, but that was the whisky talking. He stood in the shadows of the other room looking in at himself and this woman and knew with the most tremendous certainty that he was standing right on the brink of something.
He caught her by the shoulder and jerked her round. ‘Why did Ben come back in the first place, Bella? It was to pick up the money, wasn’t it? The money you’ve been keeping for him all these years. His share of the Steel Amalgamated hoist?’
She pushed him hard against the wall and staggered into the other room. ‘Get out!’ she screamed. ‘Go on, get out!’
‘He was here tonight, wasn’t he?’
‘No, it isn’t true. I haven’t seen Ben Garvald in nine years.’
She tried to rush past him, he grabbed her by the arm and swung her back across the bed. She lay there staring up at him, terror in her eyes, and he leaned over her.
‘He told me he wouldn’t touch you with a
ten-foot pole and I believed him, so why else would he want to see you? It had to be the money.’
He reached into his inside breast pocket and pulled out his wallet and various papers, scattering them on the bed, searching through them with one hand while he held her wrist with the other.
He found the letter, opened it quickly, and held it in front of her. ‘He wrote from prison warning you he was coming, didn’t he? There’s his letter.’
Her face shattered like a mirror breaking. He released his grip on her wrist and looked at the letter, a frown on his face, and what he saw there hit him low down in the stomach like a kick from a mule.
As she started to sob hysterically, he grabbed her by the throat and forced back her head. ‘Right, you bitch, and now we’ll have the truth.’
Chapter 24
It was almost 6 a.m. when Jean Fleming opened the side gate and went into the school yard. In the grey light of early morning, the fog had receded, but rain still hammered down as relentlessly as ever, drifting in a curtain before the
wind.
She ran into the porch, searching for her key with one hand, a carton of milk in the other and a newspaper tucked under one arm. She finally got the door open and paused, a slight frown on her face. Someone was playing the piano in the music room.
Nick was tired, more tired than he had ever known. It had been a long night and now the Graveyard Shift was ending. He glanced up as Jean opened the door. She placed the carton of milk and the newspaper on top of a desk, untied the damp scarf which had covered her head and ran her fingers through her dark hair as she came forward.
She was wearing her heavy sheepskin coat, Cossack boots and a hand-tailored tweed skirt, and stood so close that he only had to reach out to touch her. He wondered whether this ever happened more than once in a lifetime? This strange blend of love and desire and the flesh that was almost physical in its pain.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said, continuing to play. ‘More beautiful than I ever believed a woman could look at this hour in the morning. Did you manage to get some sleep?’
‘Not really. I was waiting for you.’
‘But I told you I wouldn’t be able to make it before the end of my shift.’
‘Are you finished now?’
He looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘Not quite. Ten minutes to go.’
She smiled. ‘You’ve come to have breakfast with me?’
He shook his head. ‘No, Jean, I’ve come to take you downtown.’
‘Downtown?’ The smile was still there, but the eyes had frozen hard. ‘To Police Headquarters you mean?’
‘That’s right. I’m arresting you for the murder of Ben Garvald.’
And she didn’t try to deny it, that was the strange thing. She stood there looking at him, somehow completely detached, outside of all this, the sallow peasant face quite composed.
Nick stopped playing. He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, pushed one in his mouth and searched for matches. He found them, lit his cigarette and coughed as smoke caught at the back of his throat.
‘May I have one?’
He pushed the packet along the top of the piano and gave her a light. She inhaled deeply and looked down at him, quite calm.
‘Hadn’t you better get on with it?’
‘All right.’ He started to play again, his hands moving slowly over the keys, a progression of quiet, sad chords that were autumn and winter rolled into one. ‘One or two things about this business had been nagging away at me all night. The letter, for example. The one Ben was supposed to have sent to Bella.’
‘Supposed?’
‘He had to go and see Chuck Lazer to find out who she’d married, never mind where she lived. How in the hell could he have written to her? I suppose you helped yourself to a little prison notepaper when you last saw him? Easy enough. There’s always a supply on hand in the Visiting Room.’
‘You’d have difficulty in proving that.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He took a folded sheet of blue notepaper from his wallet and laid it down on top of the piano. Printed at the top was the legend:
In replying to this letter, please write on the envelope:
Number ........................................................
Number ........................................................
.....................................................................................Prison
This side of the sheet was blank. When he turned it over, Jean Fleming’s name and telephone number were written on the other side in her own hand. He produced Ben’s letter written on the same notepaper and placed it beside the other.
Jean sighed. ‘That was rather careless of me.’
It was the ease with which she accepted it, her ice-cold calm that horrified him. ‘This is all pretty circumstantial, Nick. I’d need a reason.’
‘You had one. Ben had to be stopped from ever returning here because once he found there was no money waiting for him, you couldn’t be sure how he would react. You checked on his release date, then forged the letter.’
‘To frighten Bella?’
‘Only partly. You wanted something to show Harry Faulkner. You knew he’d arrange things. A show of force, perhaps, that would fri
ghten Ben away. You made a mistake there. Ben Garvald wasn’t the sort of man to be frightened by anything. You came to us just to make it look good.’
‘You’ve been to Bella.’
He nodded. ‘Once I told her how much I’d worked out for myself, she soon came across with the rest. She even told me about the divorce. How Ben suggested she go through with it as a blind to allay any possible suspicion by the police that she just might have that money.’
‘Did she tell you she was Ben’s driver when he pulled the Steel Amalgamated job?’
‘You were her alibi. You swore to the police that she hadn’t been out of the house all night and, afterwards, blackmailed her. You put the screws on your own sister. She knew that all you had to do was open your mouth and she’d get five years.’
‘I needed that money,’ she said calmly.
‘I realize that now,’ he said. ‘Four years at University. Did you really work as a barmaid at nights, by the way? And then there was this place. You said you were paying Miss Van Heflin a percentage of your profits each year. You didn’t tell me you gave her a down payment of three thousand pounds. She did. I hauled her out of bed and spoke to her on the phone half an hour ago. A nice old girl. She hopes you haven’t done anything wrong, by the way.’
Her iron composure cracked and she slammed a fist down hard on top of the piano. ‘I had to get out of Khyber Street, Nick. You can understand that? I had to.’
‘And what about Ben?’
‘He was going to spoil everything. If he’d had some sense, if he’d stayed away, none of this would have happened.’
‘Bella told me how you arranged things. That if Ben turned up she was to give him a phoney story about the money being hidden on board a boat she was supposed to have moored at Hagen’s Wharf. You asked her to bring the gun for protection only. You were going to bribe Ben to go away. That’s what you told her.’
Jean shrugged. ‘Poor Bella, she could never really handle anything when the going got rough. I had to do it all for her, even when I was a kid. You’ll never find the gun, you know.’
‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll run a nitrate test on your hands. That’ll show whether you’ve fired a gun recently. And the mud on that wharf – a lab analysis of the dirt on your boots should tie in pretty closely. Then there’s your car. If it was parked for long in the alley outside the wharf, we can prove that, too.’ He shook his head. ‘You never stood a chance.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘You know what your biggest mistake was? You told me you hated Ben, that from the age of fourteen on, he wouldn’t leave you alone.’ Nick shook his head. ‘If there was one thing I learned during the past eight hours, it was this. Where women were concerned, Ben Garvald was the original gentleman. He’d have cut off his right hand before he’d have harmed a fourteen-year-old kid.’
‘I wanted him,’ Jean said simply. ‘Do you know that? I used to lie in bed nights and burn for him and he never laid a finger on me.’
He got to his feet, dropping his cigarette to the floor, and she moved in close, hands sliding around his neck, breasts pushing hard against him.
‘Nobody needs to know, Nick. You could handle it somehow, I know you could.’
‘If I wanted to,’ he said slowly. ‘And there’s the rub. To use the words of a man who was worth a dozen of you any day, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot barge pole, angel.’
She cracked completely, fingers hooked, clawing at his eyes. As he grabbed her wrists, the language came bursting out like a dam overflowing. All the filth of Khyber Street, the gutter years, pushed down, hidden away in some dark corner of the mind, now rising to the surface.
Grant came through the door, moving with incredible speed for a man of his weight, a constable at his shoulder. He caught her wrists, pulling her away. ‘All right, lad, I’ll take her.’
The constable took her other arm and she went through the door between them, looking over her shoulder, face twisted with hate, the stream of filth never ending, fading across the yard into the rain.
He stood staring into space, feeling for a cigarette mechanically. He placed it in his mouth and a match flared. He turned, looked into the dark, tortured face of Chuck Lazer for a moment, then leaned to the light.
‘A long night, General.’
Nick didn’t reply. He walked out of the room, passed along the corridor and stood in the porch, staring out at the driving rain.
‘A long night,’ he repeated slowly.
‘Look, I know how you feel,’ Chuck Lazer said awkwardly. ‘But she’s a woman after all. They’ll go easy on her.’
‘Go easy on her?’ Nick turned, eyes burning in the white face and all the anger, the self-loathing, the frustrated passion seemed to erupt from his mouth in a single sentence.
‘God damn her, I hope they hang the bitch.’
Jack Higgins
Jack Higgins lived in Belfast till the age of twelve. Leaving school at fifteen, he spent three years with the Royal Horse Guards, serving on the East German border during the Cold War. His subsequent employment included occupations as diverse as circus roustabout, truck driver, clerk and, after taking an honours degree in sociology and social psychology, teacher and university lecturer.
The Eagle Has Landed turned him into an international bestselling author, and his novels have since sold over 250 million copies and have been translated into sixty languages. In addition to The Eagle Has Landed, ten of them have been made into successful films. His recent bestselling novels include Without Mercy, The Killing Ground, Rough Justice, A Darker Place, The Wolf at the Door and The Judas Gate.
In 1995 Jack Higgins was awarded an honorary doctorate by Leeds Metropolitan University. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an expert scuba diver and marksman. He lives on Jersey.
Also by Jack Higgins
Sad Wind from the Sea
Cry of the Hunter
The Thousand Faces of Night
Comes the Dark Stranger
The Dark Side of the Island
Pay the Devil
Passage by Night
Wrath of the Lion
The Graveyard Shift
The Iron Tiger
The Violent Enemy
Brought in Dead
East of Desolation
A Game for Heroes
The Last Place God Made
Toll for the Brave
The Wrath of God
The Khufra Run
The Savage Day
A Prayer for the Dying
Bloody Passage
Storm Warning
The Valhalla Exchange
Day of Judgment
To Catch a King
Solo
Luciano’s Luck
Dillinger
Exocet
Memoirs of a Dance-Hall Romeo
A Season in Hell
Sheba
LIAM DEVLIN
The Eagle Has Landed
Touch the Devil
Confessional
The Eagle Has Flown
DOUGAL MUNRO & JACK CARTER
Night of the Fox
Cold Harbour
Flight of Eagles
PAUL CHAVASSE
The Testament of Caspar Schultz
Year of the Tiger
The Keys of Hell
Midnight Never Comes
Dark Side of the Street
A Fine Night for Dying
SEAN DILLON
Eye of the Storm
Thunder Point
On Dangerous Ground
Angel of Death
Drink with the Devil
The President’s Daughter
The White House Connection
Day of Reckoning
Edge of Danger
Midnight Runner
Bad Company
Dark Justice
Without Mercy
The Killing Ground
Rough Justice
A Darker Place
The Wolf at the
Door
The Judas Gate
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain by John Long 1965
Copyright © Harry Patterson 1965
Jack Higgins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-00-723492-9
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007290529
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