The Peace Machine

by Bob Shaw

  The special calls came very rarely. Once, when he had been in England about two years, the nameless caller — who was identified by code only — instructed him to kill a man who lived at a given address in Liverpool. Beaton had found the man, who looked like a retired sailor, and had knifed him the same night in a dark street. Back in Salford, he had read all the papers carefully, but the police seemed to be treating the affair as a simple dockland stabbing; it quickly faded from the regional news and there were no repercussions of any kind. Beaton wondered afterward if the killing had had no motive other than the checking of his own efficiency and loyalty, but such thoughts troubled him infrequently. In general the sort of assignments he received, at roughly yearly intervals, reminded him of his old tourist watching days — tasks like making sure that a given individual really was staying at a given hotel.

  The Hutchman case, however, had all the portents of a major job right from the start. It had begun a day earlier with a notification of a high priority number, a statement that Hutchman was considered a focus of “continuing interest”, and an instruction to place himself on round-the-clock standby. Since then Beaton had not strayed more than a few paces from his private telephone.

  The voice, when it came, sounded both urgent and grim.

  “Mr. Beaton,” it said, “I’m a friend of Steel’s. He asked me to call you about the outstanding account.”

  Beaton acknowledged the code by responding with his own credentials. “I’m sorry I haven’t paid — can you send me another statement?”

  “This is ultimate priority,” the voice said without preamble. “You have been following the news about the disappearance of the mathematician, Lucas Hutchman?”

  “Yes.” Beaton listened to all news broadcasts very carefully, and a less sensitive ear than his would have picked up its undertones. “I know about him.”

  “Hutchman is believed to be in your area and his papers must be transferred to folio seven immediately. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.” Beaton felt cold and excited at the same time. He had, for the first time in many years, been instructed to kill another human being.

  “Folio seven. Immediately. We have no exact location for him, but we picked up a police radio report that a black Ford Sierra had been found abandoned between Bolton and Salford in Gorton Road.”

  “Wasn’t Hutchman driving a blue—?”

  “The police reported that the car did not match the description of the tax disc. The disc said blue.”

  “That’s all very well, but if Hutchman has abandoned the car he certainly won’t have stayed in the vicinity. I mean “We believe the car was stolen from him, and then dumped.”

  An alarming thought struck Beaton. “Just a minute. We’re discussing this thing very openly on the phone. Supposing somebody’s listening? What happens to my cover?”

  “Your cover is no longer important.” The urgency in the voice had been replaced by a raw edge of panic. “There is no time to arrange meeting places and private talks. All efforts must be devoted to the Hutchman transfer. We are sending every available man, but you are the closest and must take what steps you can. This is ultimate priority — do you understand?”

  “I understand.” Beaton set the phone down and walked across his apartment to a mirror. He was not the same man who had come to England. His hair was gray now, and the years of good living had thickened and softened his body. More dismaying was the abrupt realization that the years had also softened his thinking — he did not want to hurt anybody, or to kill anybody. And yet, what would an ideal be worth unless one was prepared to serve it? And what would life itself be worth without an ideal to bring some meaning to the endless alternation of pleasure and pain? Beaton removed a cloth-wrapped bundle from the recess behind a drawer in his writing table. From it he took a well-oiled automatic pistol, a clip of 9-mm. cartridges, a tubular silencer, and a black-handled switchblade knife. He assembled the pistol, slipped it into an inside pocket, put on his overcoat, and went out with the closed knife growing warm in his right hand.

  It was early in the afternoon and a blue-gray mist was veiling the more distant buildings. The sun could be stared at without discomfort, a disc of electrum, slowly falling. Beaton got into his Jaguar and drove toward Bolton. Fifteen minutes later he parked in a narrow street and walked up an alley. It was not raining but there was enough moisture in the air to make the paving stones glisten blackly. Near the end of the alley he opened a small door and went through it into a cavernous brick building which had once been stables and now served as a garage. A mechanic looked up from the engine of an elderly sedan and eyed him incuriously.

  Beaton nodded. “Is Raphoe in?”

  “In the office.”

  Beaton walked across the oil-blackened floor and up a stair to where a boxlike office clung to the ancient wall. Paraffin fumes gusted hotly around him as he opened the door. A fat man with a pendulous strawberry nose was seated at a desk in the office.

  “Hello, Clive,” he said resentfully. “That was some horse you gave me for Friday.”

  Beaton shrugged. “If you could pick winners every time there’d be no books.”

  “So I hear, but I don’t take to the idea of my money being used to push up the odds on the real trier.”

  “You don’t think I’d do that to you, Randy.”

  “Not much, I don’t. Are you going to give me my hundred notes back?” Raphoe sneered.

  “No, but I’ve one for Devon and Exeter on Saturday which is already over the line.” Beaton watched and saw the predictable flicker of interest in Raphoe’s eyes.

  “How much?”

  “The syndicate is charging me the odds of two thousand on this one, and that’s a lot of money to lay off, but you can have it free, Randy.”

  “Free!” Raphoe gently pressed the end of his ruinous nose, as though hoping to mold it into a more conventional shape. “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch.” Beaton made it sound casual. “I just want to know where your boys picked up the black Ford Sierra they dumped in Gorton Road.”

  “I knew it!” Raphoe slapped his desk gleefully. “I knew that one was radioactive as soon as Fred drove it through that gate. As soon as I saw the bum paint job and the brand-new plates I said to Fred, ‘Get that heap out of here and bury it.’ I said to him, ‘Never nick a car that somebody else has just nicked.’

  “You told him the right thing, Randy. Where did he pick it up?”

  “You say this horse is over the line?” Raphoe asked significantly.

  “Master Auckland II,” Beaton said, giving a genuine tip. Raphoe was a notorious loudmouth, and giving him the information would set up a chain reaction of tip-offs which would bring the odds tumbling down and cost Beaton a considerable sum of money. He had an intuition, however, that he was not going to be worried about horses in the immediate future.

  “It’ll be really trying, will it?”

  “Randy, this time it doesn’t need to try. Now, about the car — where did you get it?”

  “In the car park of the Cricketers. Do you know it? It’s a good alehouse out Breightmet way.”

  “I’ll find it,” Beaton assured him, and now the knife seemed to be generating a pulsing warmth of its own, bathing his palm with sweat.

  CHAPTER 15

  Hutchman rarely recalled his dreams, with the result that when he did awaken with one fresh in his mind it seemed — although he was skeptical about precognition — to be laden with significance and psychological implications. His last remembered dreams were the two about the timid pseudo-creatures who allowed themselves to be destroyed by women. (Am I, he had wondered, a shaky artificial being which falls apart at the hands of female pragmatism?) Now, however, he had the unusual experience of expecting a dream, of knowing in advance that one was coming. It was something to do with the increasing sense of being trapped in the shabby old house, or the feeling of imminent disaster which had haunted him since his car had vanished, which by a kind of transference
made the dinginess of his surroundings seem menacing. As he lay down on top of the bedclothes on a gray afternoon, there was danger for him in the ancient brown bakelite of the room’s electrical fittings, despair in the shattered skeletal elements of the gas fire. And the dream came…

  He walks downstairs, oppressed by the gloomy unfamiliarity of the house. There is a wedding party in progress down below and the stairwell is filled with hostile northern accents. George Atwood’s voice swells and recedes with an undersea quality. There is a painful pressure in Hutchman’s bladder which must be relieved. He tries the two toilets and the doors are locked. The pressure gets worse. Afraid of disgracing himself, he asks Mrs. Atwood if there is another toilet. Not here, she says, but the house next door is empty. Hutchman hurries Out to it. The street is filled with bright pewter light, and the worn sandstone steps of the abandoned house register vividly in his mind. The front door is lying open. Dust is drifting on the bare, rotting boards of the hall as he walks along it. There is an open door to the room on his left. He looks in and sees, lying on a couch, a figure completely covered by a white sheet. Dread grips him, but the toilet is only at the head of the first flight of stairs and the pain in his abdomen is intolerable. He walks up the stairs, opens the toilet door, and finds himself staring down into an old cast-iron bath. There is a corpse in it — yellowed, frilled with fungus, bathed in the fluids of its own putrefaction. Appalled, Hutchman sways ponderously away and turns to run. But now the front door of the house is closed. And, projecting from the inner doorway he had passed, is the corner of a white sheet. The thing which had been lying on the couch is now standing in the entrance to the front room, waiting for him to come downstairs. And even if he gets past it in full flight, while he is struggling to open the outer door it will come up behind him. Hutchman tries to scream. Run! Stay! Run! Stay!

  It was still daylight when he awoke but the room seemed very much colder than before. He lay flat on his back, hands gripping the bedding as if to prevent him from falling upward while he fought off the spell of the nightmare. It had been a very basic affair, he told himself. Hammer Films stuff, and utterly ridiculous to a waking adult; but the room was undeniably colder. He got to his feet, shivering, and turned up the gas fire, causing a white front of incandescence to move up through its ruined ceramic temples, followed by bands of violet and sienna.

  Run! Stay!

  Perhaps he should have pulled up stakes as soon as his car was stolen. It might have been best to have got going immediately, not even returning to the house for the night. But he had been drunk at the time, and rapidly becoming sick, and it had seemed that the thief had done him a good turn by removing a troublesome piece of unwanted property. Now he was uncertain, and glands which had been triggered by his dream were urging him to run. He left his room and wandered slowly down the stairs, pausing at different levels in the structure as though he could and might decide to move horizontally through the air at any one of them. A woman’s voice floated up the stairwell. It was Jane Atwood speaking to someone on the telephone, cheerful, privileged to communicate with her friends outside. Hutchman felt a pang of loneliness, and he decided to ring Vicky. It’s possible, he thought in wonder. I can pick up the phone and speak to her. Dial a line to the past. He moved on down to the hall, where Mrs. Atwood was hanging up the phone.

  “That was George,” she said curiously. “A man’s been to the shop asking about you. Something about your car.”

  “Really?” Hutchman gripped the smooth wood of the banister. ”Was your car stolen, Mr. Rattray? You said it broke down when you were. …

  “I’m not sure — it may have been stolen afterward.” Hutchman turned and sprinted up the stairs, moaning inwardly with panic. In his room he threw on his jacket and ran back down to the hall. Mrs. Atwood had disappeared into another part of the house. He opened the front door and glanced up and down the street to make sure nobody was coming, then walked quickly away from the house, choosing to go in the opposite direction to the main road. Near the end of the street he saw a dark-blue Jaguar sweep round the corner. It was driven by a thick-set, gray-haired man who appeared not even to see Hutchman, but the car slowed down at once and rolled gently down the street, its wheels mushing through decaying leaves. The driver was examining the numbers on the houses.

  Hutchman continued walking normally until he had rounded the corner into a wider and empty cross-avenue, then began to run. The act of running required no effort, his breath seeming to come easier as though constrictive bands had been torn away from his chest. He sped along a line of trees, hardly aware of his feet touching the ground, moving so silently that he twice distinguished the pulpy sound of chestnuts dropping onto the pavement. Near the end of the avenue he abruptly became self-conscious, slowed down to a walk, and looked back over his shoulder. The blue Jaguar was backing out between the lines of trees, wallowing slightly with the lateral forces of the turn. It came in his direction, alternating through light and shade as it ghosted past the trees.

  Hutchman began to run again. He emerged into a long canyon of three-storey terrace houses, saw a narrow street opening on his right, and darted down it. This street was freakishly long and featureless, running slightly uphill until its perspectives faded into the gathering mist. There was no time for Hutchman to turn hack. He loped along an irregular line of parked cars, zig-zagging to avoid groups of playing children, but now running was becoming less dreamlike and more difficult. His mouth began to fill with a salty froth and his ankles to weaken, allowing his feet to slap the ground almost uncontrollably. He looked back and saw the Jaguar in its noiseless pursuit.

  Suddenly Hutchman noticed a ragged break in the confining lines of houses. He slanted toward it and entered a desolate plain which had been created by a slum clearance and redevelopment program. Its surface was composed of tumbled brick and fragmented concrete, with children moving through a low-lying mist, like members of a small alien race, bands of expeditionary Hobbits. Hutchman launched himself in the direction of the opposite boundary, another row of terrace houses beyond which the blue-white lights of a main road were already beginning to shine through the dusk. Behind him he heard the Jaguar slither to a halt. Its door slammed, but there was no time for him to take even one glance to the rear because running on the new surface was dangerous. His ankles threatened to give way every time he was forced to leap over a block of concrete or one of the rusted reinforcing rods which rose Out of the ground like snares. He aimed for what appeared to be an opening in the perimeter houses, then discovered he had wasted his strength by running. The redevelopment contractor had sealed the site off with a galvanized iron fence — and Hutchman was in a box.

  He turned with the absurd idea of trying to mingle with a group of urchins but, using the well-developed instincts of their race, they had faded into the surroundings. The gray-haired man was only fifty paces away, running strongly in spite of his bulk, looking strangely incongruous in an expensive tweed overcoat. He was carrying a slim-bladed knife in a way which suggested he knew how to use it.

  Sobbing, Hutchman moved to one side. His pursuer altered course to intercept him. Hutchman lifted a half-brick and threw it, but had aImed too low and it struck the ground harmlessly. The gray-haired man jumped over it, landed awkwardly and pitched forward, his face driving into a thicket of steel rods which projected from a slab of concrete. One of them punched its way into the socket of his right eye. And he screamed.

  Hutchman watched in horror as a surprisingly large white ball, blotched with red, sprang from the socket and rolled on the ground.

  “My eye! Oh God, my eye!” The man groveled in the dirt, his hands searching blindly.

  “Stay away from me,” Hutchman mumbled.

  “But it’s my eye!” The man got to his feet with the obscene object cupped in his hands, holding it out toward Hutchman in a kind of supplication. Deltas of black blood spilled down his face and over his clothes.

  “Stay away!” Hutchman forced his body into action. H
e ran parallel to the fence for a short distance and angled away toward the point where he had entered the site. Children darted out of his path like startled pheasants. He reached the blue Jaguar and got into the driving seat, but there was no ignition key. His pursuer had been taking no chances. Hutchman got out of the car as several children appeared in the gap in the houses. They were going back into the site, but moving differently, with an air of authority which suggested they had the backing of adults. Hutchman hurried toward the street and encountered two middle-aged men, one of them in slippers and rolled-up shirtsleeves.

  “There’s been an accident,” he called, pointing back across the desolation to where a single figure wavered in the slatecoloured mist. “Where’s the nearest telephone?”

  One of the men pointed to the left, down the hill. Hutchman ran in that direction, back the way he had come, until he was in the wider tree-lined avenue. He slowed to a walk, partly to avoid looking conspicuous and partly because he was exhausted. The easier pace also made it possible for him to think. He had a feeling the man he had encountered was not a British detective or security agent — it would all have been handled differently — but no matter how much anybody might have learned from Andrea Knight, how could they possibly have found him so quickly? There was the car, of course, but surely that would have brought the police down on him rather than an anonymous man carrying a knife. Regardless of what had happened, he decided, Bolton was no longer safe for him.