Redcap

by Philip McCutchan

  Shaw raised an eyebrow. “The nuclear-powered job? Why not an H.M. ship, sir?”

  Latymer growled, “Allow me for the second time to use the phrase ‘suspicious bastards.’ No country would agree to its being put aboard a warship of any other country and it’s far too big to fly out, so a merchant ship was the obvious—the only—answer. REDCAP was built in England, and as it happened the New South Wales fitted in very nicely indeed, with her dates and her comparatively high speed and so on, and also the fact that she wasn’t fully booked made it possible to get a MAPIACCIND escort party abroad her almost at the last moment—incidentally,” he added, “REDCAP’s whereabouts are supposed to be a close secret, right the way along, at any rate until it gets to Bandagong. It’s under the charge of a Colonel Gresham, late the Royal Engineers, and a small party of MAPIACCIND men. As to the ship’s company, the only ones who know they’ve got REDCAP aboard are the Master, Staff Commander, Chief Officer and one or two others at the Master’s discretion—all trusted men who’re directly concerned with cargo. The thing’s crated as machine parts.” Latymer tapped the desk with the ebony ruler. “And now I’ll tell you something. Right from the start I had an uneasy feeling, a hunch if you like, that something was going to happen to that liner. It’s a horrible thought, seeing she’s got upwards of three thousand people aboard her.” Latymer was looking directly into Shaw’s eyes now, leaning massively across the desk. “Donovan’s news doesn’t help that feeling . . . and I’m convinced that it’s aboard the ship that the danger, whatever it may be, is most likely to develop. And it’s most likely that’s where Lubin’ll be. If China’s behind him we don’t know what may happen.” He added quietly, “That’s why I’m sending you to join the New South Wales, because it’s vital Lubin should be picked up as fast as possible.”

  Shaw nodded. “I understand, sir. But couldn’t REDCAP be oil-loaded en route and transferred to another ship?” Latymer snapped, “God give me patience. Don’t be silly, the threat’s the same whatever ship it’s in. And to change the plans now would be to let all concerned know we’re on the trail. In any case I can’t get anything done until I get enough proof to make the Cabinet believe me. I’m sorry, but the New South Wales will have to carry the danger. World security must take priority over—over”

  “Over more than three thousand men, women, and children?”

  Latymer’s face hardened. He said evenly, “If you like to put it that way, yes. Lesson Number Two in the book, I believe. Do I have to go into all that again?”

  Shaw sighed. “No, sir. I know you’re right, of course.”

  “Thank you. In that case I’ll go on. You accompany REDCAP all the way to Bandagong, if you haven’t bowled Lubin out before Sydney—and remember it’s Lubin we want and not any hangers-on, minor operatives. Don’t scare the birds too soon. Until REDCAP’s safely in Bandagong, it’s firstly a British and then an Australian responsibility, and we can’t afford a single slip.” Latymer sat back. “Well—that’s it, then. You’ll board the New South Wales, probably in Naples, as soon as I can make certain arrangements. I’ll be sending for you again later on to-day, to give you your final orders and to let Captain Carberry have a word with you.” Carberry, the Outfit’s Number Two, was in charge of all details such as documentation and overseas contacts, and was also the technical expert on certain matters. “In the meantime, go home and look after the ladies. Get your Miss Delacroix to rustle you up a meal, and then get some sleep.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Latymer stood up, stretched. He said, “You’re not to leave your flat at all for any reason whatever—I’ll want you at the end of a telephone from now on, Shaw. Meanwhile,” he added more kindly, “don’t worry about those girls while you’re out of the country. I’ll not forget to have them watched! They won’t come to any harm.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “All right, Shaw. Off you go now. I’ve got a lot to do. I won’t keep you waiting long.”

  In something of a daze Shaw left the room, went through Miss Larkin’s office into the corridor with its dark panelling, down the broad, thickly-carpeted staircase. Out in Trafalgar Square the day was bright and fresh, everything was peaceful and ordinary. Shaw could scarcely find it in his heart to believe that a threat could possibly exist to the peace mechanism, that any man, any country, could seek to disrupt all this, to stop the world going on as usual about its lawful occasions, its happy occasions, to bring everything to a sudden end.

  But he hadn’t liked the look in Latymer’s face when the Old Man had hinted about direct danger to that great new liner, now thrusting through the seas, unsuspectingly, into the Mediterranean blue. And Latymer had seemed to believe implicitly in his hunch. That was bad. Latymer’s hunches weren’t often wrong.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A little later Shaw ran quickly up the steps to his flat, turned his key in the lock and went in. He found Thompson sitting in the hall drinking a cup of tea.

  Shaw chucked his hat on the stand. “Hullo there, Thompson. All quiet—no visitors?”

  “No, sir, quiet as mice.” Thompson stood up, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

  “Are the young ladies in the sitting-room?”

  “Yes, sir.” The ex-petty officer hesitated. “Miss Delacroix, she did ask me to have my cuppa in there, but the other young lady, she’s a bit upset like, and so I thought, well, she won’t want to be bothered, sir.”

  Shaw clapped him on the shoulder, crinkled up his nose in a smile. He said, “Thanks for staying, anyway. Better get along now. Mr Latymer may want you.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Thompson gave him a critical look, screwing up his leathery face in concern. He said warningly, “You look like you need a rest, sir.”

  “Probably, but I’ll be all right.” As Thompson picked up his cap and let himself out of the flat, Shaw walked on into his sitting-room. Judith Donovan—as Shaw naturally thought of her—was over by the window, looking out into the bright day and the sunshine, looking unseeingly into space. She seemed so forlorn, Shaw thought anxiously ... he felt a rush of pity, of sympathy for her, so young, so defenceless. She was very pale, with big dark circles under her eyes. She hadn’t heard him come in; she was far away, probably seeing again that terrible bullet-swept driveway. That would be a scene she couldn’t ever forget, Shaw knew.

  Quietly he walked across the room to where Debonnair was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, long nyloned legs drawn up. She had been making a pretence of reading a book, and she’d glanced up as Shaw came into the room, and had put her book aside, given him a warning glance and inclined her head towards Judith.

  He asked in a low whisper, “How’s she taking things, Deb?”

  She said, “Not too well. She’s been terribly weepy.”

  He shook his head. “She ought to see a doctor. Have some kind of a sedative and go to bed.”

  She nodded, and her fair hair caught the sunlight. “Yes,” she said, “I know. I told her. She won’t hear of it. I gave her a couple of aspirins and a nip of your whisky, and that’s just as far as she’d listen to me.”

  He said quietly, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  As he moved away, she caught his sleeve. She said, “No, please, Esmonde. Just leave her. She’s working things out in her own way. It’s best she does that.” She wrinkled up her nose, shook her head in puzzlement. “There’s something brewing in her mind. I don’t know what. But she’ll come through this soon. She’s been brought up to expect her father’s death almost every day, remember. In a while, she’ll see this as a relief that that’s all over.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he murmured. He added abruptly, “Deb, I’m sorry, but I may not have much time—can you rustle me up something to eat, quickly?”

  She looked up. “Sure. What’s in the kitchen?”

  “Oh,” he said vaguely, “enough . . . I don’t know.”

  Her eyes narrowed in sudden anxiety. “You don’t care either, do you. You’re not re
ally hungry, are you?”

  “No, but—”

  “But you’re obeying orders?”

  He gave her a quick glance and nodded. She sighed a little, got up, and put her hands on his shoulders. She’d gone rather pale, because she knew from Shaw’s expression that this was it once again. That leave . . . dear God, she thought in anguish, we were so dam happy it just couldn’t last. She said quietly, “I’ll get lunch.” She made herself smile as she moved away, looking back over her shoulder. “Don’t blame me if it’s not up to Fouquier’s standard. I’m not a bad cook, but I’ve just a rough idea what your store cupboard’s like, my pet!”

  She went along to the small, converted kitchen and delved about in the cupboards, miserably. Latymer could never leave Esmonde Shaw at home for long and this time—after last night—she had good reason to know the dangers of this assignment. It always was dangerous, of course, and she never did know when if ever she would be seeing Esmonde again —it was just the same every time he went away except that it got a bit worse as time went on. But one day—one day sometime, she told herself with determination—Esmonde Shaw wouldn’t belong to the Outfit any longer, and then they would get married and settle down and have lots of children in peace and security and contentment. One day— if God was kind in the meantime. The undercover game was a young man’s game, and Esmonde wouldn’t be young for ever. Sometimes, though, agents were never allowed to grow old. . . .

  She put those thoughts out of her mind.

  From the other side of the kitchen partition she heard water splashing into the bath. That reminded her that he would want that arm of his dressed again. She tapped on the hardboard, called: “Are you decent, darling?”

  His voice came muffled, preoccupied. “Not very. Why?”

  “I’m coming in. Put a towel on if you’re bashful.”

  There was an indistinct protest, but she took no notice. She went into the bathroom, tap-tapping along on high heels. The place was full of steam that swirled around Shaw’s thin, wiry body.

  As she started to deal with his arm, and stripped off the now blood-caked bandage which the Paris doctor had put on, she suddenly risked one of the harmless, almost wifely questions which were all she allowed herself unless Esmonde chose to confide in her, as sometimes he could—and did, for her own former Foreign Office experience made her opinion on things worth having. Her head bent intently, she asked:

  “Is it going to be for long?”

  He said tenderly, “My dear . . . I just don’t know.”

  She gave him a glance, but he didn’t say any more, and so she guessed that this was one of the things he couldn’t talk to her about. She said quietly, “I see. It’s like that, is it?”

  He nodded. She looked up at the strong, sensitive face and a rush of tears blinded her for a moment. She went on with her work, blinking back the tears. Then she asked, “Isn’t there anything I can do? Perhaps look after Judith?”

  He said, “I was going to ask you that, Deb. It’d take a load off the Old Man’s mind too, I think, though he hasn’t said anything about it yet. Could she stay with you for a while in Albany Street?”

  “Of course. I’ll be glad of the company. What about while I’m at the office, though?”

  “That’s all right,” he told her. “It’s just a question of her having somewhere to call home. Latymer’s going to put a man on.”

  “Uh-huh. That’ll be like old times, anyway! When do you have to go, darling?”

  “I don’t know. There’ll be a phone call, and after that I shan’t have long.”

  “Shall I get a bag packed?”

  He said gratefully, “Would you?”

  They were left in peace rather longer than Shaw had dared to expect.

  At lunch Debonnair watched Shaw eating and there was a glint of secret and tender amusement in her eyes as she did so. Esmonde, ‘doing’ for himself in this bachelor-bare flat, was just the funniest thing . . . sometimes . . . perhaps after all she wouldn’t wait till he’d left the game before she agreed to marry him, and then he would have a better time of it between assignments. If she had more guts, she told herself, she could make things so much more easy for him, but she still felt it wasn’t right to marry and bring children into the world when they could so easily and so suddenly be left fatherless. Esmonde’s job was too dangerous, the risks too frequent and too severe, the whole existence of an agent too chancy. But she knew that if anything happened to Shaw on this job she would never forgive herself for not having taken that chance.

  After lunch Shaw went to bed. But not to sleep. His mind was too full of the job ahead for that, and he had no illusions as to the dangers even though the thing was so vague. Several men had died already in connexion with Donovan’s titbit of news; and even in this game people didn’t die unless the news they had was pretty hot and couldn’t be allowed to spread. And there was this implied threat to the New South Wales.

  How many families all over the British Isles would be affected if that great ship should suffer? Shaw felt a shiver running along his spine. Suddenly he was filled with a nostalgic yearning for the ordinary life, the life that was so far removed from the artificial existence that had been forced on him by the stomach condition which, so far back in the war days, had rendered him as a young midshipman unfit for sea service and had led him, because of a first-class brain and an essential quality of imagination, into Naval Intelligence. That life was so far removed from the ordinary that he and the people he saw in tubes and buses and in the streets might be in separate, watertight compartments. His was the way of life which involved the sudden shot in the darkness, the killings which he detested, the constant strain and the suspense under which he lived sometimes for weeks on end, the being away from all he held dear, from the little joys of life which were never missed until they were no longer to be had for the asking. He shivered again, but he knew enough about his own make-up to realize that his thoughts were only taking their normal turn, that he’d been cool enough when the trouble started the night before, that he would be cool again once he’d got his teeth into this assignment properly. It was the waiting period that was the worst, the time when his imagination strayed and remembrance came back to him of what he’d had to do in the past, the time when the ghosts walked again.

  He fell into a light doze eventually, but he had half an ear waiting for the telephone. Later he got up for a supper of scrambled eggs and coffee. Steaming breakfast cups of coffee, with a small nip of whisky laced into Shaw’s cup. Debonnair on a low leather pouf that he’d brought back once from Morocco, knees drawn up to her chin to reveal a seductive frill of pink underslip beneath the tight skirt, her eyes steady but sad in a tawny, freckled-dusted face; and Judith Donovan, looking a little more composed now and with something of an air of determination about her mouth, in an armchair.

  Shaw looked at the girl cursorily, wondered what that self-contained resolve meant. Then his hand reached out, gently touched Debonnair’s. It was cosy in the room, and intimate, and relaxed. But as the time passed Debonnair’s nerves tautened like violin strings, and she got a prickling feeling all over when the telephone finally rang, just as Shaw was lighting a cigarette.

  The strident jangle of the bell made Shaw too jump a little. He put down his cigarette in an ashtray and took up the receiver. He said, “Shaw here.”

  The voice came abrupt, sharply metallic. It was Latymer himself. “Action Stations, my boy. Come along at once.

  Thompson’ll be with you any minute now if he’s not there already. He’ll bring you along with your gear.”

  The line clicked off, and it was only half a minute later that the front-door bell rang. Thompson carried Shaw’s cases down the steps into the boot of the car. Shaw took Debonnair in his arms, held her very close. When he released her, Judith was coming out of the sitting-room. There was a look in her eye . . . that odd determination again, a purposeful determination. Shaw didn’t know what it could mean, but there wasn’t time to worry about that now. L
atymer had said ‘at once,’ and ‘at once’ in the Outfit was no figure of speech. Shaw took Judith’s hand in his, held it for a moment, said:

  “So long, Judith. I’ll be seeing you again soon. And—try not to think too much, my dear.”

  Then he turned and ran down the steps, got into the car. Long and sleek and shining black, the car pulled away. Debonnair walked slowly back into the sitting-room and she looked for a long, long time at the smoke spiralling up from that cigarette, the cigarette which Shaw had lit so short a while ago. Her heart seemed to contract painfully as she watched the lengthening ash.

  Latymer said briefly, “Well—there you are.” He pushed a neat cardboard folder across the desk. “It’s all there.”

  “Yes, sir.” Shaw took the folder and opened it. There was a ticket for the next B.E.A. flight to Naples, leaving London at 3.20 in the morning. There was a first-class passage ticket from Naples to Sydney in the New South Wales, and there was a hotel reservation for one night at the Hotel Vittorio in the Via Podana.

  Latymer said, “While you’re in Naples, you can keep your eyes skinned—you’ll have nearly two days and you may pick up something perhaps. Now—once you’re aboard the liner make your number with the Captain and with Colonel Gresham. They’ll have been warned to expect you. When you land at Sydney, get in touch with a certain Captain James of the R.A.N. You’ll find him at the base at Garden Island. He’s a friend of mine, and he’s the Intelligence man out there— he’s an Australian—and Foster’s there too, of course.”

  Shaw nodded. Tommy Foster had worked in the Outfit in England, had been transferred some time before to the RA.N. Latymer went on, “Captain James will help you all he can whenever you need it, and you can contact him ahead if there’s anything you want done before you get to Sydney yourself. I’ll see he’s put fully in the picture at once, so that he can be working on this from his end meanwhile, but I want you to regard yourself throughout as personally responsible to me. Understood?”