Shadowplay

by Norman Hartley

  I couldn’t help smiling at the contrast with Sellinger. Pike was almost diffident with McMurdy. I gathered that the inspector had once served under him, but there was no more than a hint of that in Pike’s manner. I’d seen him use the approach before. ‘I think it’s time to pour a little oil,’ he would say with a wink and proceed to charm the victim with devastating man-to-man frankness and a dash of Cockney humor.

  But I knew it wasn’t going to be straightforward. Jim was a policeman above any other loyalty and he would never put McMurdy into an awkward situation by asking him to break a law as a favor.

  The inspector had obviously agreed already to let us talk alone and when the inspector and the constable had gone, Pike said gruffly, ‘Well, you’ve got yourself into a right one here. What the hell have you been doing?’

  I made a sign, asking if he thought the room was bugged, but he shook his head. ‘Just give it to me straight and we’ll see what we can do.’

  I told him almost everything, describing the attack in France and the problem with Seagull, but without going into all the details of Starburst. ‘I saw her downstairs,’ he said. ‘She’s with your man. Cox, isn’t it? She still looks a bit dopey but they were talking.’

  ‘Then we’ve got to get a move on,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to talk to her.’

  ‘Now just hold on. You’re not going to be walking out of here that easy, especially after what that American ponce has been up to.’ Pike grinned. ‘I’ll tell you something, if he comes back again to plead for you, we’re all going to end up in the fucking Old Bailey.’

  When he’d asked a few more questions, he said, ‘You say you can’t give any reasons at all. But how much could you tell the Director of Public Prosecutions, if I could persuade the DI to let it go that route?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘At least not yet.’

  ‘Then we have got a problem,’ Pike said thoughtfully. ‘If you won’t even talk to the D of PP, McMurdy’s in a spot. He’s got a signed statement from an independent witness saying you launched an unprovoked attack; we might be able to get him down to section twenty, but if we’re going to get you off the hook altogether, we need a new angle. I’ll go and see if I can get McMurdy to hang fire a bit, while I go and talk to the two lads in the car.’ He looked at me hard. ‘Now you’ve had time to think, do you think they were after you?’

  ‘Jim, to be honest, I’ve no idea. I believed it at the time, but they didn’t handle themselves like pros. I could have gone off half-cocked.’

  ‘All right. Just sit tight. I’ll go and see what I can do.’

  I stayed in the interrogation room and I was brought a cup of tea. McMurdy’s attitude seemed to have softened slightly, but the waiting didn’t improve my nerves. Jim was gone over an hour and a half and when he came back, he talked in private to McMurdy for another half an hour.

  Finally, he came back into the charge room.

  ‘John,’ he said, ‘you are a very lucky feller. You have just been very close to disaster, mister, I’m telling you.’

  He sat down and lit a cigarette and gestured toward the door. ‘The DIs just doing the paperwork. He’s letting you go. You’ll be out in about ten minutes.’

  ‘Christ, Jim,’ I said. ‘How ever did you manage it?’

  ‘You were lucky, that’s all. I went over to the hospital and saw the two kids.’ He grinned. ‘I told the nurse I was ‘Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Pike,’ but I managed to slur the ‘ex.’ Anyway, they weren’t after you. You scared them shitless, as a matter of fact. But they weren’t hurt as bad as the DI thought. One fractured ankle and a few nice bruises between them. The Jag belongs to the driver’s dad. He’s a bookie over in West London. They’d had a few drinks and anyway, the kid wasn’t insured to drive it. I explained that there could be a few nasty moments for him in court if this thing went ahead. I couldn’t make any deals of course, but I said I was sure you’d be more inclined to pay for the Volvo and not make any countercharge of dangerous driving, if he forgot the whole business. The DI could still have insisted on charging you, but he’s a good lad. I had him on my team at Harlesden.’

  I started to thank him, though I couldn’t think of any words to say it properly, then I heard a sound of a scuffling in the corridor. The door opened and Cox came in, looking very agitated. McMurdy was close behind him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Chief, I’m sorry, Seagull’s gone and I think she’s with Sellinger.’

  ‘How with Sellinger?’

  ‘Apparently he came back. Very quietly. There was no fuss. No scene. I was being questioned again. She was in the waiting room when I went in. When I came out they were both gone.’

  ‘And he took her?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. The desk sergeant says Seagull left first.’

  ‘So there’s a chance she isn’t with him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cox said, ‘there’s a chance, but Sellinger left a note with the desk sergeant.’ He handed me a slip of paper handwritten on a sheet torn from the entry pad. ‘John, don’t worry,’ it read. ‘I’ll take charge of Ms. Ross.’

  13

  It seemed obvious, once we had talked the situation through, that if Sellinger did have Seagull, he would take her to Kent, to Samman’s Farm—the one place I would have least wished them to be.

  It was the obvious place. It was remote—not overlooked by any of the handful of cottages in the same valley—and it was large enough for him to interrogate Seagull in complete privacy, even if Nancy were there, and she probably wouldn’t be in this perfect flying weather.

  There were no dissenting voices when we discussed it at a council of war in a drinking club called the Hunter’s Den close to the police station: a shabby basement room with mock tiger and zebra skins on the walls and pairs of crossed spears stained with excess polish and with fragments of polishing cloth still adhering to the dented edges.

  But Pike didn’t agree that I should go down there as quickly as possible to confront Sellinger. When I insisted, he raised his beer mug to eye level and peered at me quizzically over the rim.

  ‘You’ve still got that little soft streak, haven’t you?’ There was no point in pretending I didn’t know what he meant.

  ‘I’m not going soft,’ I said. ‘But if Seagull has to be thrown around by the hair to find out what’s going on, I intend to be the one to do it.’

  Jim shrugged, unconvinced. ‘I won’t argue,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to change.’

  But I knew I couldn’t bet only on Samman’s and I knew too that I was going to need help. I asked Jim, tentatively, if he’d be willing to come on the World News payroll, initially to help look for Seagull if she wasn’t with Sellinger.

  ‘I did promise the missus I’d build her a patio,’ Pike said, then his face broke into a grin. ‘But my arm could be twisted. But finding her isn’t going to be easy if she’s not at this farm place. We’d need some help. I’ve got some mates, men who were with me on the squad. I figure I could round up a posse— if you can afford it.’

  It was a better offer than I’d dared to hope for, but when I tried to thank him properly, he said gruffly, ‘You always could use a decent minder about the place. You’re still a bit too nice. I never did manage to make you into an out-and-out bastard.’

  I left Cox with the delicate job of stalling Ryder, to buy me a little more time before the authorities stepped in.

  ‘But don’t contact him immediately’,’ I said. ‘I’ll phone you here at the Hunter’s Den when I’m almost at Samman’s. Then you can call Bob and break the good news that we’ve lost Jennifer.’

  For the journey to Samman’s I borrowed Pike’s three-litre Rover and I really put my foot down on the motorway leading down toward Kent. It felt good to be free of the police station and to be doing something—anything—rather than sitting around a table speculating, and I was relieved, too, to have someone as competent as Jim on the team. But once I was off the motorway and into the last fringes of outer
suburbia, I felt the world closing in on me again and the old fears of Sellinger coming to the surface. The bastard was winning; there was no doubt about that. And if you’d back me against a wall and made me admit what I really feared most, that was it. I tried to tell myself that it was Western defense that was important, and my career and the standing of World News, but the bottom line was always the same: most of all, I didn’t want Paul Sellinger presiding over my downfall.

  I tried to take my mind off it by driving the Rover to the very limit of its ability to hold the road, but when I overshot a hidden police observation point, I came back to my senses. All I needed was to be arrested for dangerous driving. When the police let me pass without giving chase, I braked down to sober speed and cruised fast but legally into the Kent countryside.

  I paid the call to Cox from a phone box right on top of the Pilgrim’s Way looking down toward Samman’s. The clay subsoil of the ridge had obviously shrunk and subsided in the intense early summer heat and the box was heeling over absurdly. The angle was so steep that I had to lie back, resting full-length on the glass, like the pilot of a space capsule, and when I’d given Cox the instruction to call Ryder, I stumbled out with the feeling that I’d probably made the last call before the box finally toppled into the ditch beside the road.

  Only in England, I thought as I sat down on the grass to collect my thoughts for the confrontation with Sellinger. Yet it was a reminder, too, that though I was less than thirty miles from London, this was a genuinely rural area, of farmland and hop gardens, with only a few insignificant pockets of high-class commuter homes clustered around the outlying railway stations. It was almost seven o’clock and the heat of the day was just beginning to ease, and the Kentish landscape looked magnificent. The prolonged heat wave had given the valley an almost Mediterranean tinge of yellowish-red instead of the familiar mixture of a hundred shades of green, but there was still enough grass and woodland in every direction to soften any signs of drought.

  As I looked down toward Samman’s, I remembered how much I’d once loved the house, in childhood first, then when I had inherited it from my uncle. If I’d been richer, I might have gone on loving it, but once I became the owner, the dream house had turned into a financial nightmare. My uncle had bequeathed it freehold and clear of mortgages and with a legacy intended to pay for its upkeep. But by my standards it was a huge property, and in inflationary times the money barely had covered the first two years’ maintenance. Then a major roofing problem had taken most of my savings from World News, and after that maintaining the house had become an obsession.

  I should have sold it, but I held on because Nancy loved it so. Partly I stayed out of stubbornness and partly because I wanted her to live where she wanted to live, as a compensation for my increasing absences as I rose in World News. In the end, it had gone to her in the divorce settlement, and in a gesture timed deliberately to annoy me, Sellinger had paid off the mortgages I had been forced to raise, as heedlessly as if he had been buying an extra dress for the honeymoon. In addition, he had done in six months all the repairs and restoration that I had wrestled with for almost seven years. That part, though, I’d only heard about secondhand; since the divorce I’d kept a private vow never to set foot in Samman’s again.

  Until today. The thought stirred my anger again, and I drove the last five miles through the lanes at crazy speed, knowing there were never any radar traps and that the brakes of Pike’s Rover, which he kept in Flying Squad condition, could deal with any tractors or groups of hikers that might appear round the half-blind corners overgrown with Queen Anne’s lace and elephant grass.

  When I reached the last house at the top of the hill above Samman’s, I felt my stomach tightening and I roared down the last, long curving lane touching almost eighty. Instinctively, I braked extra hard at the bottom, ready for the turn into the unpaved private road that led to the house. There was a sharp little edge where the macadam met the old cart track and the potholes of Samman’s Lane had to be negotiated prudently at the risk of a broken exhaust.

  But when I turned, there were no telltale drop and no potholes. The lane was still paved but it was white and smooth with a thick surface of roadstone of a grade I had always thought of as a private standard of unattainable luxury. Old reflexes made me cost out the repair: five tons at least of number-one washed roadstone; eight men for God knew how many days to remake all the ditches and grade the surface. Two thousand pounds at least, perhaps three. Then I saw a discreet little board on the shoulder announcing that the work had been done by Masons’ of Edenbridge, the best and most expensive contractors in the district. So double the first guess; no rough and ready handshake deals on the black economy for Mr. Bloody Sellinger. God, how I hated that man and his money. And if he had Seagull too …

  As I slowed to take the last bend before the house, I suddenly saw Nancy. She was standing at the gate of the walled rose garden. When she saw the car she signaled me to stop and I realized that she must have been waiting for me. I parked the car out of sight of the house and Nancy motioned me to come through the gate. She was wearing a short sundress in a clinging, shimmering material which turned almost blue when the light caught the folds as she moved.

  ‘Nancy,’ I said gently. ‘How nice. I thought you’d be off flying somewhere.’

  ‘John,’ she said urgently. ‘Never mind the niceties. I’ve only got a few minutes. I came to tell you that Jennifer’s not here.’

  ‘Nan, I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you do. Paul knows she’s missing. He left you that note at the police station to try and get you down here. It’s a trap. He’s set a little scene. He’ll be all calm and offhand; you arrive in a fury, thinking he’s kidnapped Jennifer; he provokes you a bit, then gets you to admit you’ve lost her. He’s been planning it with Robert. I overheard the call.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘If you admit you’ve lost Jennifer, they’re going to have you arrested. But the board won’t be told about the intelligence angle. They’ll use the scandal, tell the board you’ve been chasing around the South of France after a woman who would have compromised you; got so agitated you beat up those kids on the way back from Heathrow; came down here looking for her. You thought she was coming to Robert for protection or some such. You’ll either have to go along with it, or admit publicly that you’re being questioned as a potential spy.’

  I reached out and gave Nancy’s hand a little squeeze.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s another one I owe you. One of so many.’

  Nancy quickly withdrew her hand. The gesture wasn’t abrupt but it was firm. ‘John, I’m not trying to go down memory lane,’ she said.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I just wanted you to know that I didn’t think you deserve all this. I don’t care about Jennifer, or the sleeping-bag business. I know how you must have been feeling and that’s all in the past anyway. I won’t insult you by saying I know you’re not a traitor. That’s too absurd. I’m just sorry at how it’s all turned out.’

  She broke off. ‘You’d better hurry. Paul’s waiting for you.’

  ‘I wish there was one way I could thank you,’ I said.

  ‘There is.’ She gave me a grin that took me back a lot of years. ‘Just don’t let the bastard win.’

  As I got back into the car, I thought how absurd it was to feel so cheerful. I’d just been told that I was a step away from being arrested. I’d lost Seagull and I’d no idea whether I would find her again, and I’d almost made a total fool of myself by falling into a very simple Sellinger trap.

  But Nancy’s smile wiped out so much and it had given me one last extra little incentive to win the war against the Sellingers.

  I drove the final stretch of Samman’s Lane at close to sixty, scattering the new roadstone savagely into the ditches, and I made the last turn with a deliberate skid that cut deep black wheel marks into the elegant white surface.

  As I braked and turned into the drivewa
y, I saw Paul standing in the kitchen garden at the side of the house. He was dressed in what he probably thought of as garden clothes: lily-white flannels, whose line was spoiled only by the bulk of his gut; and a matching silk shirt, topped by a stupid tennis umpire’s hat which flopped over his ears. He was holding a stainless steel trowel which didn’t have a scratch or a soil mark on it, and a designer version of an old-fashioned barrow with a couple of weeds laid pathetically on the rim.

  Even without Nancy’s warning I would have recognized it as a piece of scene setting, but after what she had said I could just hear Paul describing my arrival in a confidential chat with a board member. ‘Christ, John was agitated. First he beat up those two kids on his way into London. A really savage beating. Put them both in the hospital. Then he lost the damned woman and thought he’d blown his last chance to keep his name out of the papers. Came roaring down to Samman’s looking for her. Caught me when I was in the garden…’

  But thanks to Nancy, I was ready for him.

  Paul strode over to the car.

  ‘John. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘What happened? Are you out on bail?’

  ‘No. I’ve been released. There won’t be any charges.’

  Paul hid his disappointment well, but I could see the cloudy look coming into his eyes.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I was able to bring those cops to their senses.’

  Short of hitting him, there was nothing I could say to that, so I waited for his next thrust.

  ‘So what’s happened with this Jennifer woman?’ he said. ‘What’s the situation?’

  ‘I thought you were in charge of the situation,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘You mean my note. I was afraid they wouldn’t let you out. But my people couldn’t find her.’

  ‘That’s because they’re not as quick off the mark as mine are,’ I said airily. ‘She tried to walk out of the police station. We picked her up within two minutes.’