Touch The Devil

by Jack Higgins

  And then, the Land Rover moved out of the fog, stopped at the end of the jetty, and her heart nearly stopped beating.

  Two things happened very quickly. Barry smashed the side window of the wheelhouse with his elbow and Anne-Marie yelled at the top of her voice, “Martin, look out!”

  Barry shoved her down and loosed off a couple of shots through the broken window as Devlin and Brosnan ran, heads down, along the jetty. The gap between the Kathleen and the jetty was only about three feet now, as Brosnan jumped for the stern and dived behind the deck housing. Devlin had chosen the prow and was down out of sight on the blind side of the wheelhouse.

  “Now then, Frank,” he called, “and how are you this fine morning?”

  “Miracles is it now, Liam?” Barry called back.

  “That’s right. The Devil’s sent us straight from hell to fetch you!”

  “He’ll have to wait a while yet.” Barry got hold of Anne-Marie’s hair in one hand. “I’m going to stand up with your girlfriend, Martin,” he called. “If I go, she goes. Remember that. Try and pick me off, and my last act will be to squeeze this trigger.”

  He pulled Anne-Marie up with him and stood holding her as close as if they were lovers, her head dragged back painfully, the muzzle of the Ceska under her chin.

  “Two choices,” Barry said. “She dies now, even if I have to die with her, or you come out here and lay down your guns.”

  “No, Martin,” Anne-Marie called, and Barry twisted his fingers in her hair.

  “Don’t muck about. Yes or no.”

  There was a pause, then Brosnan stood up holding the Mauser.

  “Throw it in the water!” Barry said.

  Brosnan did so with an almost casual gesture, his eyes never leaving Barry’s face. Devlin had moved out from the other side of the wheel-house and stood only five or six feet away. He tossed his Browning into the creek without being told.

  “Right,” Barry said. “Come closer.” His voice cracked, the first real signs of stress beginning to show. “I said closer.”

  They stood together, just outside the wheel-house. “Let the girl go, Frank,” Devlin said.

  “Sure, why not?” Barry shoved her out of the wheelhouse into their arms. In the same moment he reached for the button on the instrument panel, the flap fell down and he tore the Sterling submachine gun from its brackets with his free hand.

  “My ace in the hole, Liam.” He grinned. “I learned the importance of that one from you, remember?”

  Devlin said, “What happens now? Another execution?”

  “Not yet,” Barry said. “First, I’m going to put you to work. A few hundred yards down that creek there’s a pool in the reeds with a boat on the bottom. There’s something in the cabin I very much want. You can go swimming for me, Martin.”

  “The rocket pod?” Devlin said. “Very ingenious.”

  “You’re remarkably well informed,” Barry said. “But enough conversation. Martin, you and the girl move along to the top of the companionway. Nice and slow. We’ll have you two below in the cabin while we get this thing moving.” He swung the barrel at Devlin. “You walk ahead of them, right along to the stern.”

  Devlin moved first, and Brosnan pushed the girl in front of him and turned, backing away, protecting her with his body, his burning eyes never leaving Barry’s face. Barry stayed where he was in the wheelhouse entrance, the Sterling ready.

  Brosnan said, “You should have stayed behind at the farm, Frank. You made a bad mistake using rubbish like those three hoods from Nice. They wouldn’t have lasted one bad Saturday night in Belfast.”

  “Yes, this time I’ll see to it myself,” Barry told him.

  Brosnan turned, put a hand in Anne-Marie’s back, sending her tumbling down the steps, dived over the rail into the creek, and went down deep into the brown stinking water, turning to pull himself under the hull, his feet kicking desperately in the thick ooze of the bottom.

  The burst Barry fired from the Sterling chipped the rail, already too late, and he ran forward and fired again into the water. Of Brosnan there was no sign. Anne-Marie reappeared, crouching in the companionway. Barry ran to the other rail and loosed off another burst into the water.

  Devlin said, “No good, Frank, you’ve lost him.”

  “You shut your mouth,” Barry said.

  Devlin took his time lighting a cigarette, and Brosnan, clinging to the prow, heard him say, “You always were a small man when it came down to it, weren’t you, Frank?”

  Barry stepped toward him. “Big enough to bury you.”

  “You tried once and made one hell of a mess of it.” Devlin walked forward slowly. “I don’t think you can do any better now.”

  Barry fired a single burst of four or five rounds that shredded Devlin’s raincoat on the left side of his chest, spinning him around. He cried out and bounced off the side of the deckhouse.

  Anne-Marie crawled toward him, pulling herself along on handcuffed hands, and Brosnan slipped under the port rail and reached inside the wheelhouse for the Smith and Wesson.

  Barry, aware of the movement, started to turn and Brosnan shot him in the right arm, the force of the blow knocking him back. Barry tried desperately to hold onto the Sterling, but it slipped from his grip and slid over the rail, disappearing under the surface of the water.

  Barry stood there clutching his bloody arm. Brosnan said, “The keys for the handcuffs, Frank. Let’s have them.”

  Barry felt in his pocket with bloodstained fingers, found the keys and dropped them on the deck where Anne-Marie retrieved them and set about unfastening herself.

  “By God, but you’re the tricky one, Martin, you always were, but I never thought to see you end up working for the opposition.”

  “This isn’t for them,” Brosnan said, “This is for Norah. For what you did to her. She died screaming, Frank, strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, and that’s down to you.”

  “Whoever told you that is a liar.” Barry looked genuinely horrified. “It was the French who did that to Norah, those SDECE Service Five bastards. You know what the barbouzes are like. They tried electricity to break her. When that didn’t work, they moved onto drugs and went too far.”

  Liam Devlin, leaning against Anne-Marie, blood on his shoulder said weakly, “You’re lying.”

  “It’s the God’s truth.” Barry turned wildly to Brosnan. “Kill Norah, is it? Martin, she was the only woman I ever loved. The only person I ever put before myself.”

  “Liar!” Brosnan cried and fired three times very fast, his first shot catching Barry in the shoulder, turning him, his next two in the back, driving him headfirst across the rail into the water.

  Birds called wildly to each other, rising from the reeds in clouds. Brosnan clumped down on the deck housing.

  “Liar,” he whispered and looked at Devlin. “Wasn’t he?”

  But Devlin’s eyes were closed in pain and there was no answer there, only the pity in Anne-Marie’s face that he turned away from. He had to steel himself. The hired guns like Barry would always be replaced by other hired guns. Even the French torturers would be replaced by others. The blame went with the responsibility, whoever gave the orders. Ferguson? The Prime Minister?

  He wished she wasn’t a woman. It would be easier to kill a man.

  Devlin’s waistcoat had proved its worth again, taking the brunt of the burst Barry had fired at him, but one round had caught him across the right shoulder and another had gone through his upper arm.

  Brosnan finished bandaging it expertly, the boat’s first-aid box open on the bunk beside him. When he was finished, he took out one of the emergency morphine ampoules.

  “That should take care of the pain for a while.”

  Devlin, his face gray, managed to smile. “You’d have made a fine doctor, Martin.”

  Anne-Marie said, “He needs a hospital now.”

  “Yes, but not here, not in England. The surest way to a prison celL Do you still have that launch in Nice, like the old day
s?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “So you could handle this?”

  “Of course, no problem. This is a superb craft.”

  “Good. I reckon you’ll make Ireland in eight hours. Liam will tell you where to go in.”

  “Liam?” She frowned. “You mean you’re not coming? But I don’t understand?”

  He ignored her, picked up Barry’s briefcase, which he had found in the wheelhouse and opened it, showing the money it contained to Devlin.

  “At least thirty thousand quid there, Liam, probably more. Give me one name, one man in London who will do anything for that kind of money. No politics, just an honest crook.”

  Devlin said wearily, “Leave it, Martin. There’s no profit in it now.”

  “Ferguson lied to us about Norah, Liam.”

  “All right,” Devlin said. “So he lied. He thought the end justified the means. He wanted Frank Barry dead.”

  “They all wanted Barry dead,” Brosnan said in a low voice. “Ferguson, D15, the Cabinet, the Prime Minister. Where does it stop? Somebody has to pay, Liam. I’m tired of being used for other people’s purposes, dragged through the fire like some corn king for the sake of the rest of you.”

  Devlin shook his head. “No, Martin.”

  Brosnan said deliberately, “You owe me this one, Liam. You got me into it in the first place.”

  “I helped you get free, damn you!” Devlin flared.

  “Free?” Brosnan laughed harshly. “Who’s free?”

  It was Anne-Marie who astonished them both by saying, “Tell him, Liam. Give him what he asks, and let’s get out of here. Let him go to hell his own way.”

  She turned and went up the companion way. Brosnan said, “Well?”

  Devlin reached for a cigarette, and Brosnan lit it for him. “I can’t give you the name of a man, but there’s a woman I knew some years back. Nothing to do with politics. Not even Irish. A German Jew originally. Lily Winter. She used to have a place on Great India Wharf in Wapping. I think she might be what you’re looking for.”

  Brosnan closed the briefcase and stood up. “And Ferguson’s telephone number.”

  Devlin told him, and Brosnan nodded. “Thanks. Good-bye, Liam,” and he turned and went up the companionway.

  Anne-Marie was searching the wheelhouse, and he took the ignition key from his pocket. “Is that what you’re looking for?”

  She took it from him and switched on. The engines rumbled into life. “That’s all right then,” Brosnan said.

  “What do you want me to say?” she demanded angrily. “May you die in Ireland?”

  It was the most ancient of Irish toasts. Brosnan said, “An excellent sentiment, but hardly likely.”

  He stepped over the rail and watched as the Kathleen pulled away from the jetty and turned downstream; disappearing into the fog. Only then did he walk to the Land Rover.

  * * *

  The selection of clothing in Salter’s bedroom was so extensive that Brosnan could only assume that over the years the undertaker had made a practice of robbing the dead. He showered, washed the stink of the creek from him, and chose a gray tweed suit, woolen shirt, and a tie to go with it. He selected a raincoat and went downstairs to the living room where he’d left Salter tied to a chair.

  He glanced at the clock. It was still only nine A.M., and he said to Salter, “What time does your staff come in?”

  “After Sinclair phoned me, I told them to take the morning off.”

  “So they’ll be in around noon?”

  “That’s right.” Salter moistened dry lips.

  “I’ll do you a favor and leave them to find you tied up. That way it gives you a chance of claiming to be an unwilling part to whatever took place here, when it comes out.”

  Salter said, “I’m very grateful. May I ask you something? Is Mr. Sinclair dead?”

  “Yes,” Brosnan said, and he went out, closing the door.

  A few moments later Salter heard the sound of the Land Rover starting up. It moved away down the drive and faded into the distance. He eased his hands as much as he could and sat there trying to work out what he was going to say to the police.

  FIFTEEN

  At one time, the Pool of London and the lower reaches of the Thames had been the center for world shipping. Those days were long gone, and as Brosnan walked down toward the docks through Wapping that Tuesday evening he found only decay, rusting cranes pointing at the sky, empty warehouses, their windows boarded.

  Somewhere a ship, easing down the river, sounded its fog horn. Except for that somber sound, he might have been the only living creature left in the world.

  He turned onto Great India Wharf, walked on past docks empty of shipping, and came to a warehouse at the end facing out across the river. The sign said Winter & Co—Importers. Brosnan opened the little judas gate in the main entrance and stepped in.

  The place was crammed with old furniture of every description. It was very dark, as it had been on his last visit, but this time music drifted down from the small office high above, at the top of a flight of steep stairs.

  “Mrs. Winter?” he called.

  The office door opened, the music flooding out. “Is that you, Mr. Brosnan?”

  “Yes.”

  She switched on another light to see him and peered over the railing. She was at least seventy, her hair drawn back from a yellowing parchment face in an old-fashioned bun. She wore a tweed suit with a skirt that almost reached her ankles. Her right hand had a secure grip on the collar of one of the most superb dogs Brosnan had ever seen in his life—a black and tan Doberman.

  Her English was excellent, but with a German accent. “You know, you interest me, Mr. Brosnan. Karl didn’t make a sound the first time you visited me, and he hasn’t now. I’ve never known him to do that before.”

  “You know what they say?” Brosnan said. “Children and dogs, they can always tell.”

  He went up the stairs and gently caressed the dog’s head as he followed her into the office. A cassette recorder on the desk was the source of the music. The song was A Foggy Day in London Town, but Brosnan didn’t recognize the singer.

  “Al Bowlly,” she said. “The best there ever was. He was killed in the London Blitz. I used to hear him sing at the Monseigneur restaurant in Piccadilly with Roy Fox and his band. That was back in nineteen thirty-two before I was foolish enough to return to Germany after my father died.”

  Brosnan lit a cigarette and sat down on a chair on the other side of the desk, listening to that haunting voice singing a song from another world that for some reason touched something deep inside him.

  “You like it?” she said.

  “Oh, yes. I always loved cities by night or very early in the morning. Fog, wet streets, that total certainty that somewhere up ahead, just around the next corner, something marvelous and astonishing is waiting. That’s when you’re young, of course, and still believe.”

  The song came to an end, and she switched off the cassette player. “I stopped believing in Dachau, Mr. Brosnan.”

  She pushed up her sleeve and showed him the number tattooed on her arm. Brosnan took off his jacket and unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt. She pulled his arm across the desk and examined his prison number incredulously. “But you couldn’t have been in the camps, you’re too young, I don’t understand.”

  “Somewhere similar,” he said. “We didn’t have the ovens, but the usual way out was feet first.”

  “Except for you?”

  He pulled on his jacket. “You might say I was an exception.”

  She fitted a black gold-tipped cigarette into an ivory holder and looked at him searchingly as he gave her a light.

  “You’ve brought the money?”

  “Yes.” He put Barry’s briefcase on the desk and opened it.

  She looked at the packets of twenty-pound notes inside and picked one up. “How much is there?”

  “Thirty-five thousand pounds.”

  She sat staring down at the
case, then closed it. “That’s a great deal of money. After Dachau, when I came back to England in nineteen forty-five, money was the only thing that mattered to me, Mr. Brosnan. I’d stopped believing in people, you see.” She got up, went to a side table, and poured coffee from an electric pot into two cups. “I became, by chance really, a receiver of stolen goods, the most successful in London before I was finished. I dealt with all of them. All the princes of the underworld. The Kray brothers, the Richardson gang…”

  “And Liam Devlin?”

  “Liam, dear Liam.” She smiled. “He was different. Him, I liked.”

  “And the business he was involved in?”

  “Didn’t interest me in the slightest. When he needed passports, I got them for him. Arms dealers in Europe or the name of a reliable doctor. Things like that, but all that was a long time ago. Now, as you can see, I deal only in furniture.” She paused, then opened the briefcase again. “It really is a great deal of money.”

  “All yours, if you can help me.”

  “To do what, Mr. Brosnan, that’s the thing? What do you intend?”

  “That’s my business.”

  She shook her head. “You have an angry aura, Mr. Brosnan, and that is not good. Give me your hands.”

  “My hands?” he said.

  “Yes. I’m clairvoyant. Psychic. Surely you are aware of that? I’ll show you.”

  Her hands were cool and flaccid, making him remember, for no accountable reason, his maternal grandmother in Dublin when he was a child, clean linen sheets, rosemary and lavender, and then she tightened her grip and he was aware of a sudden tingle as from a minor electric shock. She had her eyes shut and opened them and reached out and touched his face and she was smiling.

  “Yes,” she said. “Now I see it all.”

  Brosnan said, “I don’t understand?”

  Her voice had changed, and she was brisk and businesslike now. “The woman you seek may be found at home tomorrow evening.”

  “At home?” Brosnan’s voice was hoarse. “But that’s Ten Downing Street. No way known to man of getting in there.”