Werewolf (Commander Shaw Book 16)

by Philip McCutchan

  “No, sir,” the DS said. “So long as I know where to find you. Are you remaining in the vicinity of Helmsley?”

  I said, not necessarily; I would be trying to get a line on Jason Clutch. So would the police be, the DS said. I said I could always be contacted through Focal House. We took our leave of the police and of Miss Salderthwaite and went out to the Volvo. I half feared to find it had been immobilised by Jason Clutch, but no doubt he had considered the well to be immobilisation enough and the Volvo was intact.

  I drove off, but not far. I intended paving the rectory a visit. It might be time wasted, but it could prove a good starting point and currently I had nothing at all to go on. I needed a lucky break to put me anywhere near Clutch’s track and he was now all I had alive to follow up.

  I took the Volvo up an overgrown drive, all ruts and branches and dilapidated hedges. Here the snow was fairly light on the ground, but I picked up tyre tracks in my headlights — according to Miss Salderthwaite, the fall had stopped early so the outward tracks, as I took them to be, of Jason Clutch had not been covered. I stopped by a stone porch and got out to stare at a paint-peeled front door, while Felicity stayed in the car.

  I tugged at an old-fashioned bell-pull. From somewhere deep inside the rectory there was a tintinnabulation that would once have brought a servant hurrying to the front door. I waited; this evening it brought no-one, not even Mrs Barnsley who ‘did’ for the rector. She was probably still watching for his return from her cottage window. I rang again, just to make sure, then when there was another blank I told Felicity I was going to walk round to the back.

  “Watch it,” she said.

  “I’ll do that.”

  Round I went; the whole place looked neglected when I shone a torch on it. Weeds protruded through the thin snow on the paths and the hedges everywhere were sadly overgrown. The window-frames all stood in need of a coat of paint; they had once been white but were now all mildew and what looked like rot. The back door was actually at the side and was as firmly shut as the front door. Extending from the back of the house was an unkempt lawn that could in more ecclesiastically prosperous times have been the tennis lawn; but no longer. The moles had taken over. Beyond it was an equally dilapidated orchard.

  I walked back to the Volvo.

  Felicity asked, “Well?”

  I said, “I found nothing round the back. I’m going in.”

  “What for?”

  “Just a check.”

  “He won’t have left anything behind.”

  “You never know,” I said. “He could have been careless. After all, he’ll be believing us dead.”

  She nodded. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you won’t. That’s an order, Miss Mandrake,” I said formally. “I want the Volvo taken care of. Any trouble, sound the horn.”

  She didn’t like it, but she had to put up with it. The Volvo was currently a very valuable asset; the police would be leaving soon and the telephone could go off the beam again and there was no other transport beyond Appleyard’s Land Rover and I didn’t feel the farmer would be especially co-operative. I turned back to the front door. Beside it there was a window; I had shone my torch through earlier and had seen a large, square hall. That would be the best way in; if I broke through into a room, I could he delayed by a locked door. I hunted round for something heavy and found a small rock that would do nicely. I used it to smash a pane, and the racket sounded out loud and clear in my ears. It could carry, but the chances were that Mrs Barnsley would have the telly on, or anyway the radio, and I didn’t think Miss Salderthwaite would venture out in the dark now that she was on her own — not after all that had happened.

  I reached in and unfastened the catch. I lifted the window and climbed through. I didn’t flick on any lights but shone my torch around. The place smelled musty, and there was a good deal of dust. Miss Salderthwaite had told me the rector was single, and the rectory looked like it. I opened doors, the keys of which were turned on the outside, a burglar’s paradise once through the hall window; Jason Clutch should have asked police advice on home security. I went into a dining-room, then a drawing-room, then what looked like a morning-room or maybe a music room: a grand piano stood across one corner. There was very little furniture, just the bare essentials, and cheap stuff at that. I went into the rector’s study; here, Jason Clutch would have composed his sermons, presumably, unless he bought them. There was a desk, not a very big one, and the walls were lined with heavy mahogany bookcases, the only decent bits of furniture I’d found and probably left by the previous incumbent. They were mostly empty. None of the desk drawers were locked and I soon discovered why: they were mostly empty too and what was in them was trash: a couple of pencils, an empty bail-point, a half used pad of Queen’s Velvet writing paper. Other things of a similar lack of value.

  I left the study, feeling that Felicity had been right.

  I went up the stairs, and they creaked loudly. The place had an inimical feel somehow, like a mortuary. The silence hut for the creaks, the biting cold, the aura of desertion, all tended towards the chill in the spine. The landing was bare. Six bedrooms opened off that and off a passage leading from it; they were bare too-only one, Clutch’s presumably, had any furniture at all and there wasn’t much of that: an iron bed with brass bobbles, an old-fashioned wash-stand with jug and basin, a bedside cupboard containing a chamber-pot, a wardrobe that still held clothes. I went through the pockets: nothing.

  I had wasted my time.

  However, since there was an attic, I decided I’d waste a little more and it was just as well I did. The attic contained five small rooms with low ceilings. Four of them, like the bedrooms on the first floor, were empty — they would once have been servants’ rooms. The fifth was crammed like a junk-shop, all sorts of odds and ends, chuck-outs, things thrown in because there was nowhere else for them. A broken chair, a table with a leg missing, odd pieces of china — again, they could have been left by Clutch’s predecessor. There were some old trunks and suitcases with broken locks or split tops, and there was a wooden chest, rather like a sea-chest, only in (ac t it was military. When I shifted an old mattress I saw the words stencilled in cracked white paint: Oberleutnant Ernst Henschel, 2 Westphalian Regiment.

  Jason Clutch’s mother had been a German: could this be the grandfather?

  It could.

  The chest was roped; I untied it. It was locked, but the lock was shaky with age and with woodworm in the surrounding timber. I smashed it away with a leg that I broke off the three-legged table. When I opened the lid, the chest was three-quarters empty. It contained some thirty or forty copies of Fiesta and at first sight that was all; but when I had cleared away the naked ladies and the adverts for sexual hardware, I found something else of more immediate interest: some sort of Hitler Youth certificate in the name of Irma Henschel, sharing a rubber band with a seedy photograph of the Fuehrer in full verbal spate, mouth open and arms waving. Probably at a Nuremburg Rally. And there was another photograph, this time a more up-to-date one, of a very old but soldierly-looking man with a Hitler moustache in white and a Hitler forelock, also white, dressed in a collarless shirt and corduroy trousers, standing very upright and giving a Nazi salute against a backdrop of mountains with snow on their summits and trees growing on the lower slopes. It didn’t, somehow, look to me like Germany.

  Chile?

  I turned the photograph over.

  On it was written in German characters: Feldwebel Ublick at Buco. Buco sounded like Chile. Another name was written, upside down in relation to the first one: Klaus Kunze, 14 Spitzbergen Plaz, Uelzen. I had no idea who this might be. Anyway, I put Ublick’s photograph in my wallet and stacked the girlie magazines back in the chest which I shut and re-roped and put the mattress back on top of it. I was about to withdraw from the search when I heard the Volvo’s horn going like a ship’s siren.

  It stopped, and there was a total silence.

  I decided to use the side door, and kind of co
me up in rear of the Volvo rather than show myself in a frontal attack from the main entrance to the rectory.

  I was in the open air within thirty seconds flat and coming round the angle of the building. I saw the driver’s door wide open and the interior light on. Nothing else: no Felicity. I looked around, using my torch on the snow. There was a flurry of footprints near the driver’s door, and one single set leading down the drive between the tyre marks. Felicity must have been carried. I was about to run for the car and start the chase when two things happened very nearly simultaneously: I heard a powerful engine start up way down the drive and then a split second later the Volvo turned into a ball of fire as a vast explosion took place inside. A bomb, probably just chucked onto the back seat after Felicity had been hooked away. The Volvo glowed and I felt the heat from it. It wouldn’t move again. I turned and ran down the drive like a maniac, knowing it was hopeless. I heard the car in the distance, beating it at high speed out of Loxa Mill for the main Helmsley — Stokesley road. As I reached the bottom of the drive, two figures emerged panting from the night, one of them carrying an old-time bicycle lamp powered by acetylene. They had to be Miss Salderthwaite and Mrs Barnsley and they were, lending each other courage.

  “It’s that Mr Shaw,” I heard Miss Salderthwaite say. “Right,” I called. “Did you see anything?”

  “I saw nowt,” Miss Salderthwaite said, approaching me. “I heard summat, a great big bang, like — ”

  “My car,” I broke in. “A bomb. Miss Mandrake’s gone — vanished, I mean, before the bomb went up. There was a car.”

  “Rector’s?” Mrs Barnsley asked.

  “I don’t know. I suppose it could have been. You didn’t see anybody arrive?”

  Mrs Barnsley shook her head in self-accusation; her vigil for the rector had slipped at a crucial moment. Just then the snow started again, a flurry that grew to storm proportions almost within seconds. Followed by the ladies, Miss Salderthwaite bearing the key, I made for Stummerl’s cottage. Behind me, the Volvo blazed into the sky, giving the snow a reddened aspect as though it were falling on hell fire.

  *

  The police car that had come in earlier had gone, leaving a DC to guard the corpse. The DC told me the car was wanted urgently in Helmsley where a road tanker had overturned on the ice and was spilling something dangerous. In the meantime, just in case, a call would be put out for the rector’s car — the mobile’s crew hadn’t even been permitted to linger in order to look over the rectory. I rang the Helmsley nick: they said a police ambulance was on its way from Malton sub-division to collect Stummerl’s body and it could pick me up as well. I cursed the delay; police ambulances, meat wagons, were not the swiftest things on the roads, but the voice from the nick was adamant that a car couldn’t be spared. While I waited Miss Salderthwaite made another pot of tea from the dead man’s teabags. Mrs Barnsley stayed too, scared to go back to her lonely cottage, eyes wide and ears a-flap. It would all be something to tell her friend in Commondale. I pumped her about the Reverend Humphrey Rowbottom, but she hadn’t much to reveal. He had never mentioned Hitler, not in her hearing, and she didn’t know his politics nor those of his infrequent outside visitors. He was, she said, a solitary kind of man, but did make longish excursions out of the ring of parishes within his ministry, sometimes staying away for as much as three weeks on the trot, during which time the parishes were cut off from God.

  “No guinea-pigs?” I asked.

  “Pardon?” The term was evidently too old-fashioned even for Mrs Barnsley, so I interpreted. I told her I meant deputising priests, fillers-in, parsons who accepted a fee per service, a guinea in pre-inflationary days.

  “Can’t get ’em,” she said with a sniff. “Young men these days, they’re not coming into t’ Church. If they do, they doan’t like the moors parishes. If rector doan’t come back, we’ll likely get nowt at all.” Mrs Barnsley launched herself into a discourse on the present day, which she was not keen on, and the Church, which she was. She was interrupted much sooner than I had expected by the arrival of the meat wagon, and also of a team from forensic at Wetherby. The routines were gone through, examinations made of the site, photographs and measurements taken, and then Stummerl was wrapped in a polythene bag and carried through the living room to the transport. I took my leave of the ladies and went with him, sitting up front with the driver, who took the road so carefully that I despaired of reaching Helmsley before morning. I couldn’t blame him, of course; if Stummerl was spilled out into a ditch, all manner of vital clues might be obliterated. The polythene bag didn’t look all that strong.

  In point of fact we got to Helmsley not long after ten p.m. and reached the police station after a detour to avoid the dangerous liquefied gas that had seeped from the tanker. The little town seemed to be a great glow of light from the police mobiles and fire-engines. In the nick I took a chance and rang through on the open line to Focal House, reporting Felicity’s disappearance and passing the names on the rector’s photograph: Feldwebe! Ublick, and Klaus Kunze of Uelzen. I asked for a check with our lot in Bonn. The response was fast, the quest having, in Kunze’s case, been dead easy: Klaus Kunze was a member of the Bundestag and was believed to have pro-Nazi tendencies. This seemed to check well enough: for my money, he had to be the German who had contacted the old NCO in Chile, now assumed with reasonable certainty to be ex-Feldwebel Ublick.

  Down the phone I said, “Thanks a lot. I’ll bum a police lift into Leeds airport. I’ll be on the first flight available.” By this time the tanker panic was dying down and I was going to demand transport in Max’s very own name if need be. But they told me there was no flight out to Heathrow before 0720 hours next morning, so, after hearing that no trace of Clutch’s car had been reported, and instilling into police ears that I was to be informed immediately if there was any contact, I checked into the Black Swan and managed to find some much needed sleep in the intervals between nightmares about Felicity Mandrake.

  *

  “Germany or Chile?” Max asked early next morning. “I want your views.”

  I shrugged. “Toss a coin. Each has its attractions. Klaus Kunze might be a short cut.”

  “Or might not. Time’s getting short — too damn short!” Max got to his feet and moved across to a window, w here he stood looking down. ‘This, he always did when he was worried; the view seemed to lend him strength, or perspective, or something — maybe it was just patience. “There’s no sense of urgency in top places, blast the buggers. I’ve got the PM to agree to step up airport security, that’s all. More plain clothes men milling around, but uniformed men played down, likewise troops — they don’t want to start a panic.”

  “Still no brain snatch on our part?”

  “Positively not in U.K. I’ve tried to get agreement for an RAF plane to escort the brain plane, or anyway shadow it, in case of a hijack. Answer, no.” Max came back, sat down and prodded his forefinger at me. “We’re left with the one solution: get hold of that maniac’s bloody brain before it leaves Chile — Santiago airport. There could be time-just. But it won’t brook delay.”

  “You mean you’ve already decided on Chile?”

  “Yes!” Max snapped savagely. “And right away. Put the screws on that feldwebel, who’s old enough to know better than to play with fire. I’ll get Bonn to deal with Klaus Kunze. Oh, and one other thing for your information, Shaw: my request for a shift to Gatwick is being considered at high level.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Being considered? No more than that?”

  “At present, no. The top brass — military and police — are scared of trouble developing in an airport where there’s always a damn great crowd — ”

  “In January?” I interrupted. “At night? It’s not the tourist season, after all — strike delays and — ”

  “Go and talk to the PM yourself,” Max snapped. “If you’ve never met real obstinacy before, you’ll meet it at Number 10.”

  I left Max to simmer; he had simmered all through the inter
view, largely because we had started off by having a row. The row was over Felicity Mandrake. I had wanted to concentrate on getting her back from Jason Clutch. I had known Max wouldn’t agree but I had tried. He said a good agent didn’t get personally involved; I knew all that guff. I said it wasn’t a case of personal involvement at all — or not wholly, I told myself — but of sheer need to get her back to safety before she was murdered or was made to reveal things that shouldn’t be revealed. Max brushed that aside and said brusquely that she didn’t know anything that the brain mob didn’t know and the job itself must take priority. In any case, it wasn’t entirely unlikely that she was being held simply as some kind of hostage to twist our arms and in that could lie an immunity to murder. Max wouldn’t budge from his position; he was far from being a sentimentalist.

  I went down in the lift to the armoury and exchanged my automatic for a shooter that hadn’t been soaked in well water. This time, I chose something heavier. I had a feeling that what I would need in South America was good stopping power. So I selected a Colt Python firing magnum calibre rounds — nice, soft lead bullets with a good contact spread that would hit like supersonic bricks. But I also took a small automatic for a shoulder holster: a handbag-size Sauer & Sohn 6.35 mm. From the armoury I went along to the South America section for a concentrated fill-in on the current Chilean political scene. While I was there, a sealed envelope came down for me from the section dealing with East Germany; when I opened it I found what I had expected: a summary of the backgrounds of Lothar and Lotte Bolz, prospective brain bearers for the Werewolves of West Germany if they but knew it.