The Silence of the Night

by Roger Ormerod

  ‘Mallin!’ he said dangerously.

  ‘Or shall we manage without Henry?’ Beanie seemed to be choking. ‘All right, then we’ll go ahead. Beanie, can you remember something that was said on the phone?’

  He shook his head. His face and neck were becoming very red. Then he forced out a few words. ‘How the hell can I remember! I’m warning you ...’

  ‘Well, never mind. So we all say something typically American. How about: “You dirty rat, I’ll pump you full of lead”?’

  Fisch thrust himself forward, and came very close to death. He was grey, taut, trembling. ‘I shall not become involved in this fantasy. I will not say such words.’

  ‘Shut your trap!’ said Beanie.

  ‘In English or American,’ Fisch amplified.

  ‘And hardly typical,’ said Bloome plaintively.

  ‘Then why not,’ I suggested, ‘a quotation from Shakespeare? They’re all classical scholars. D’you know any Shakespeare, Vale? Love’s Labour’s Lost, perhaps?’

  I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep it up, but it was only by maintaining some sort of facetious atmosphere that I was holding Beanie in check. He might have been very close to apoplexy, but Beanie calm and collected would have been apt to kill everybody to make sure. And I was playing for the odd incident that might break a murderer’s nerve.

  Vale suddenly stuck his hands in his trousers pockets, glared at me, and turned away.

  ‘You!’ Beanie howled. ‘You stay right where you are.’

  Vale hesitated, raised his eyebrows, and stood where he was.

  And just then Henry walked in through the window behind Beanie.

  ‘Mr Keane, I saw somebody sneaking ...’

  I was poised to move fast, but not at Beanie, because Beanie was being useful. For one second the scene hung on the edge of explosion, but Beanie’s reactions are fast and he’d moved to one side before Henry registered the situation.

  ‘Keep moving,’ he snapped. ‘Over there with the others.’

  Henry moved, reluctantly and with the loping ease of an athlete. I saw that he was going to try it, and could not possibly succeed.

  ‘Henry,’ I said quickly. ‘How’s your Yank accent?’

  He was baffled at the interruption, as every muscle had been coiled to pounce. ‘Mr Mallin?’

  Then I got his arm, and he was safe. ‘Never mind.’

  But it hadn’t improved Beanie’s nerves. That gun in his hand was jumping around in an unnerving way.

  Henry said: ‘I watch telly all the time.’ He thought. ‘Get the hell outs here, ya punk,’ he said, in his broad local accent.

  ‘You can see the difficulty,’ I said to Beanie. ‘There’s not one person here who can give you a phoney American accent.’

  ‘They can just talk, can’t they?’ Beanie demanded desperately.

  ‘They’ve all been talking. But you haven’t got anywhere.’

  Beanie growled deep inside. ‘They can start doing some more talking. Taking it in turn. You. Little guy. Say something. I ain’t heard you yet.’

  ‘I spoke to you at the pub,’ said Uncle Albert, ‘but I know more about you now. I shall certainly not say a thing. You don’t intimidate me.’

  I saw he was correct. He’d been baptised by Alwright. Or immunised.

  ‘For Chrissake!’ Beanie bellowed, and that gun jerked around so much I thought it was about time to put a little space between it and us.

  ‘I’ll have to sit down,’ said Elaine weakly.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘The ladies can sit down.’ Beanie glared, but I went on, ‘And Beanie, be sensible. You know how the phone distorts voices. Well, maybe if we all spoke to you over the phone ...’

  ‘If you think,’ he roared, ‘I’m going to let one of you out of this room to use a phone ...’

  ‘But it’s not necessary,’ I soothed him. ‘Look. There’s an extension at each end of this room. You go to one phone, and we — the men — we’ll go to the other, and we’ll talk to you on the phone, one at a time. Now ... how’d that do?’

  Beanie thought about it. His head jerked from one side to the other. ‘It’s a trick.’

  ‘No. You’ll know then, and you can blast whoever it is.’

  ‘Yeah. So all right. But no tricks. See.’

  ‘Then we’ll go down the bottom end, and you go up to that one ...’

  ‘No,’ said Hillary forcefully. We looked at him. ‘My engravings and etchings,’ he explained. ‘They’re all along that wall. If he fires — and misses — irreparable harm could be done.’

  ‘Beanie,’ I said, after a deep breath, ‘he’s right. You the bottom end, and we at the top.’

  ‘So help me, Mallin, I’ll kill you if this is a trick.’

  ‘I’ll go first,’ I promised.

  Well, at least it got about a hundred feet between us, though Beanie was still deadly at that range. That was a 9 mm Walther he was holding. One difficulty, though, was the women, who remained in the middle, and though Elaine went to one side to sit out of the direct line, Elsa, from some sternness of pride that I saw she wouldn’t relax, stood straight and proud in the centre, beside the vase pedestal.

  I took up the phone and watched Beanie doing the same.

  ‘It’s Mallin,’ I said. Then I turned my back to him. ‘It’s me, you dirty rat. I’ll fill you full of lead ...’

  ‘Cut it out.’ His voice crackled in my ear. ‘And turn so’s I can see you.’

  I turned. ‘Why on earth —’

  ‘I wants see it’s you. See your lips moving.’

  And then a wave of elation swept through me because the farce was over, and I knew. I put down the phone, stepped to one side. ‘Beanie, you can hang up now. We don’t have to go on with this. I know who’s done it, and I can prove it to you. How’ll that suit you? Then you can shoot him in your own time.’

  Beanie slowly hung up. He was quite uncertain of me, but I was dead serious just then.

  ‘Is that true, David?’ said Hillary.

  ‘Very true. I’ve just realised why somebody wanted me killed, and now I know why I know who. Beanie, can you hear what I’m saying?’

  He could. But now, no longer tied to the phone, he was moving slowly up the room, head thrust forward, no sign of his strut to be seen. ‘What’s going on?’ he complained.

  ‘And it’s so damn simple, Beanie,’ I said. ‘There’s something you don’t know, about the vase that was smashed. It wasn’t smashed here, but somewhere else, put in a calico bag ...’ I whipped it out of my pocket ... ‘and brought here in pieces. The idea, you see, was to do it quietly, just scatter the bits on the floor in a reasonable way. But at the same time a man called Frazer was killed. It probably wasn’t intended as murder, but only to put him out for a while. But what nobody could understand was why Frazer was attacked at all. You follow me?’

  ‘Just tell me who,’ said Beanie.

  ‘I’ve got to convince you, Beanie. Frazer, you see, was deaf, and there was no reason for your employer to even go into that library to attack him. If he had been smashing a fake vase, actually creating a noise, Frazer wouldn’t have heard it anyway, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. But if he hadn’t been smashing a vase — if he’d been making no noise at all — and he wanted to give the impression he had smashed a vase, then whether Frazer could have been able to say he hadn’t heard it is a very important point.’

  ‘But you said he was deaf,’ Beanie objected.

  ‘Exactly. And that’s the point. There was a line of light under that door. It was obvious Frazer was in there, as he’d said he’d be. So if our murderer thought Frazer could hear normally, he wouldn’t have been able to risk Frazer not hearing the vase smash. He’d have to have Frazer unconscious for a while, in order to cover the silence when there should have been noise. So the murderer was someone who did not know Frazer was deaf and could lip-read, and that’s why I knew who it was, and why, when you told me, Beanie, you couldn’t see my lips move. Beanie, old frien
d, you solved this. Isn’t that clever of you? Because now I can see what it was the murderer didn’t want me to remember.’

  Beanie was halfway down the room, standing close to Elsa. She, and Elaine, were well outside the line of fire. I could relax.

  ‘We’d been talking,’ I said, ‘about Frazer. Everybody was talking about Frazer, and why they’d want to kill him. But this one was different. This was about cars that Frazer ruined. This one was the man who said he wished they’d realised he was deaf, because then they’d have saved a lot of trouble. He didn’t know until the morning after the murder!’

  It all happened in a second. Martin Vale dived a hand into his jacket pocket for my gun, which he’d found while he was looking for somewhere to plant the calico bag. Beanie’s not the sort to let a movement like that go by. He fired instinctively, and perhaps Elsa’s reaction distracted him, because Vale was not instantly dead. He screamed, and the gun fell from his hand as his wrist was smashed. At the same time Elsa carried through her reaction and smashed the T’ang over Beanie’s head. Beanie crumpled, and Vale screamed again, perhaps over the T’ang.

  I scooped up my gun, because Vale had got another hand, and ran towards Beanie. But Elsa had done a good job, on both Beanie and the T’ang, which was shattered around Beanie’s stretched-out body.

  ‘Oh!’ said Fisch, a kind of sobbing, indrawn horror, and he fell to his knees, pawing at the pieces in agony.

  Hillary said: ‘Edmund! It’s all he deserves.’ He looked round at Vale. ‘It’s symbolic that his T’ang should be smashed in saving his life.’

  I was looking at Elsa, her right hand in my left. She was white and strained, but I’ll swear she’d enjoyed it. ‘That was magnificent,’ I said. ‘I forbid you to do anything like that again.’ My heart was still fluttering.

  ‘Forbid, David?’ But this time she was whispering it, wistful. ‘How can you prevent me?’

  Before I could tell her, Fisch came scrambling to his feet, one of the pieces in his hand. I spoke first.

  ‘It wasn’t Vale’s, Hillary. It was yours.’

  Slowly the blood drained from his face.

  ‘But it’s a fake!’ Fisch cried, waving his piece. ‘What do you mean — Hillary’s?’

  ‘After Vale had stolen the thing, it was an obvious place to hide it — on its own pedestal. Hillary, you’d just told him to take it away when my friend Beanie arrived. It was what he was angling for.’

  Elsa said plaintively: ‘David, how would you prevent me?’

  ‘But it’s a fake!’ Fisch said again. ‘Hillary’s got a laboratory certificate.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I agreed. ‘But that was before he sold the original. Isn’t that so, Hillary? The money to mount this show had to come from somewhere. Lord, how it must have hurt to exhibit a fake T’ang.’ And if there was more than a little sarcasm in my voice, it was because I had finally decided about my feelings for Hillary Keane.

  ‘But a very good fake,’ Hillary protested with dignity, and he glanced with something like sad amusement at Fisch. But I saw that he had lost a friend.

  ‘I’m still waiting,’ said Elsa, tugging at my fingers.

  ‘Somebody ought to phone the police,’ I said. ‘And an ambulance.’

  ‘David,’ she said sharply, ‘I’m asking you to marry me. Do pay attention.’

  ‘How can I kiss you with a gun in my hand?’ I asked.

  But I tried it, and it’s possible. I moved her slowly round in a circle. She removed her lips from mine. ‘Why are you waltzing me round like this?’

  ‘I’ve got to keep an eye on your friend Vale,’ I told her, resting the barrel on her shoulder.

  I never told her that it was she who had nearly brought about my death, because she had gone to Vale’s with the Porsche, had left my Oxford at the garage, and he’d have been worried about the planted calico bag, and would have phoned Ginger ... You see what I mean.

  I bought the engagement ring out of the insurance money for my car, and it was much later I realised that in fact she’d paid for it herself. If you work it out.

  Perhaps that made us quits.