Red Christmas

by Reginald Hill

Boswell was, in fact, more than a little concerned that no attempts whatsoever seemed to have been made to contact the hotel. He knew he was right to act as if it wouldn’t be. Escape had been instinctive. In fact, after Arabella’s efforts in the dining room, not to escape would have seemed most unchivalrous. But secretly he had felt that his efforts would be swiftly negatived by the arrival of an investigatory team sent by headquarters who must be concerned at the breaking of contact with Dingley Dell. Sure, it was Christmas Day. And of course it would take time to organise a snow-plough and men. But the blizzard has been finished for two hours at least. Even a helicopter flight was possible, though the snow would make landing difficult.

  But something must be happening. If it wasn’t, if British Security this holy afternoon was being served by sleeping the sleep of the gluttonous through Her Majesty’s tele-speech, then Jimmy became very important. And he had rather less trust in the old tramp than he had implied to Arabella.

  Below, the pursuer seemed to have got himself out of the deepest of the snow and was now moving comparatively swiftly in a series of zig-zags, using his gun as a prop and a depth-tester. He was within range, but it would have been a very difficult shot, uphill and in the snow. Now and then he stopped and seemed to be looking speculatively up at them.

  ‘He thinks we’ve still got a gun,’ said Boswell. ‘He’ll get as near as he thinks he can safely. Then he’ll start blazing away.’

  ‘I propose we don’t wait for that,’ said Arabella seriously.

  ‘Carried nem. con.,’ answered Boswell.

  They resumed their climb and held their own, perhaps even gained a few yards on their pursuer whom Boswell had identified as the bass guitarist.

  ‘He’s in no hurry,’ said Arabella.

  ‘Why should he be? We’re not going anywhere that bothers him. In fact we’re getting nearer to the house all the tíme.’

  They were almost at the top of the ridge now. A few more yards would see them in the trees. Boswell glanced back. The bass guitarist had stopped and was kneeling in the snow. He must have decided that he couldn’t let them reach shelter without making some kind of effort. It was a decision perhaps not too far removed in feeling from Boswell’s own act of escape.

  ‘Oh look!’ Arabella called.

  Ahead of them, startled by their approach, a hare sat up in the snow, long ears twitching. Boswell moved his feet and the noise made up its mind for it. With an athletic bound, it took off down the hillside in a flurry of white, disappearing completely sometimes as it landed, then reappearing, comically, beautifully, in a series of tremendous leaps. It swept round in a wide arc which took it close to the guitarist who abandoned his preparation to shoot in favour of watching the beast.

  Finally it disappeared from sight. The man turned and looked up the slope. Then awkwardly, rather shyly, he made a small movement of the gun and resumed his climb without firing.

  Boswell lifted his hand to shoulder height and turned to Arabella.

  ‘What was all that about?’ she asked.

  ‘I think he’d rather be enjoying his post-Christmas-pud indigestion too. Come on before he changes his mind.’

  Under the trees the snow was much thinner. Quickly they made their way across the ridge till they found themselves once more looking down on Dingley Dell, a little higher than their walk the previous day had taken them.

  ‘What now?’ asked Arabella.

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Boswell. ‘I just wish to hell I knew what was going on, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s only one way to find out. Let’s get back into the house!’

  He looked at her in amazement.

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘You try me! Not by the front door, you fool. Through the back kitchen, perhaps. Or a window. What do you want to do? Wait here for Segovia to catch up with us, and go back inside at the end of a gun? Or in a wheelbarrow? Come on, Boz! Let’s have some constructive thinking.’

  So saying, she marched indignantly away down the slope.

  ‘Arabella!’ yelled Boswell. ‘Hold on!’

  She ignored him, and strode on.

  ‘Watch out, Arabella!’

  She cast a scornful smile over her shoulder and took another step.

  Her smile didn’t even have time to become surprise before she disappeared completely from sight.

  Horrified, Boswell rushed forward, slowing as he neared the point of disappearance. It would do no good if he too went over the edge. It was, of course, the small quarry they had examined the day before. The snow had drifted into it to such an extent that the edge had completely disappeared and the bank of snow did not begin to slope away for another yard and a half.

  Cautiously he peered down. For a moment he feared complete disaster. Then the smooth surface of the snow drift began to be disturbed about twelve feet below. First a hand came out, then an arm. Finally with an eruption like a white volcano, Arabella’s head and shoulders broke the surface. She stood there, gasping and spluttering, as she wiped the snow from her face.

  ‘Are you OK?’ hissed Boswell.

  She looked up at him with an expression of fury and indignation which was its own answer. Boswell’s next words did nothing to disperse it.

  ‘Lie down!’ he whispered hoarsely.

  ‘What!’she cried.

  ‘Sshh! Lie down. Play wounded!’

  Understanding dawned. She was to play the staked goat again. It had worked once, in a kind of way. It might work this time. She stretched herself out at full length in the snow, twisting her limbs awkwardly. Naked on an iron bedstead had been bad, but this was far worse. Opening one eye, she looked up for sympathy. Boswell was nowhere in sight. She closed her eye again.

  The bass guitarist came cautiously through the trees. He was cold and wet and rather bewildered. He had been trained for this kind of work, true. But that had been nearly ten years earlier. Back in the Centre, his controller had already then conceived the idea of using this new, decadent, English pop-cult as a cover for operations. It was fluid, kaleidoscopic, idiosyncratic, permissive; yet at the same time respectable, even reverable, international. Traherne had been the first. Slowly the group had been built around him. Its composition sometimes changed; sometimes one or more of the members had been legitimate. But for the past three years they had all been operatives.

  They had done their work well. All their work. He had enjoyed it all. They had been in the charts. Even appeared on television. God, how that must have made them laugh back home! Five Soviet agents, long-haired, sexual, singing about the need to forget politics and love everybody! It had been fun.

  But now it was all done. All finished. At best they might get back to the USSR, perhaps even be kissed on the cheeks by someone important, given a medal. But there weren’t many openings in Moscow for a twenty-eight-year-old pop bass guitarist who had half forgotten his native language.

  He stopped at the edge of the trees and cautiously surveyed the scene before him. No sign of movement, but tracks, broad deep tracks through the snow for about ten yards. Then they seemed to stop.

  Carefully he moved forward. The roof of the house was in sight. It was warm in there. On the other hand, Tarantyev, the madman, was in there. Perhaps it was better to be outside after all.

  He reached the place where the tracks ended and saw why. The ground fell away sharply here. He peered down and drew in his breath in a sharp hiss, at the same time bringing his gun up to the ‘ready’ position. Below, lying twisted on her side, was the girl. His stomach churned at the sight. He had had no desire to shoot anybody, certainly not a girl. But he must be at least partly to blame that she was lying so twisted and still down there.

  Ten years was a long time. Immediately after his training ten years earlier, he would never have forgotten the man.

  Boswell burst out of the snow beneath which he had buried himself and hurled himself at the guitarist’s back. Had the attack taken place on level ground, the element of surprise would have been complet
ely triumphant. But the force of his rush proved disastrous.

  The guitarist half turned, tried to bring his gun round. Boswell’s outstretched hands took him round the throat. He was hurled backwards and, locked together, the two men plunged out of sight into the snowdrift. It was nightmarish down there. The guitarist had lost his gun but managed instinctively to get a grip on Boswell. Neither man dared release his hold on the other. It was a question of company as much as contention. To be alone beneath that cold, powdery, flaky, clinging greyness was unthinkable. They rolled over, flinging token blows at each other. For a second Boswell managed to free himself and stand up, his head appearing through the snow a couple of yards from Arabella who looked at him, half amazed, half amused. Then his feet were swept from under him and he submerged once more.

  Finally, locked in each others arms like passionate lovers, the two men rolled together out of the drift, only letting go of each other and rising to their feet when they realised they were back in the open air.

  They faced each other warily, both puffing and panting from their exertions. A light steam drifted up from their bodies, so violent had their recent activity been. The guitarist’s face drifted to Arabella and registered betrayal when he saw her standing there uninjured. She felt oddly uncomfortable.

  ‘Hold it,’ she said, as the men began making tentative movements towards each other. They stopped.

  ‘Look,’ she said to the guitarist. ‘It’s two to one. I’m not just going to stand by and watch like a helpless damsel, you realise. The minute I get a chance, I’m going to beat your head in. Why not sit down and talk things over?’

  The guitarist cast an ironic look at the snow ground.

  ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘you talk sense. Just remember, it’s guns that count and all the guns down there belong to us. So it’s you who’s outnumbered. Why don’t we all stroll down together and get out of these wet things?’

  He had a pleasant flat North London accent. He smiled as he spoke, but he didn’t really seem happy.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Boswell. ‘There’s a man called Tarantyev down there and I think he’d shoot us just for kicks.’

  The guitarist looked even unhappier.

  ‘No. No,’ he said uncertainly. He took a step towards Arabella and stretched out his hands pleadingly.

  ‘No one need get hurt,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ she began, quite moved. Then one of the pleading hands grabbed her forearm, she felt herself spun round and hurled bodily towards Boswell. He seemed uncertain whether catching her or avoiding her was the best thing in the circumstances and the result, as so often in cases of hesitation, was collapse. The guitarist meanwhile had dived back into the snowdrift and was already surfacing with the sub-machine gun in his hands. Boswell tried to push the girl from athwart his body, but without much success. Arabella, very winded, had just enough strength to raise her head and look at the guitarist, wondering if he would fire. It needed a deus ex machina to save them now.

  On cue, the machine arrived. A distant muttering became a threshing roar and down from the greyness above stooped a silver and white helicopter.

  It moved twice round the house, finally hovering low over the area between the barn and the frontage. The draught from its rotors beat the snow below into a whirlwinding fury as frightening as the blizzard the night before. It took a few seconds for Boswell to see that this was purposeful, a deliberate clearing of an area to make a safe landing.

  So his confidence in the efficiency of HO, even on Christmas Day, had been right. He only hoped to God they could handle the situation down there. There could still be a disaster. Whatever else they expected, it would hardly amount to five men with sub-machine guns.

  The helicopter landed, the hatch slid open, two armed men leapt out and to his horror ran straight towards the house. He rose to shout at them, not that there was any hope of his voice being heard above the slackening note of the ’copter’s engine, but Arabella held on to his arm and, looking back, he saw the guitarist, gun held very steadily, shaking his head.

  When he looked back the men had disappeared into the house. There was a long pause. Then a short burst of automatic fire. He felt sick to his heart. It didn’t seem likely that the gunfire could mean anything except disaster for the newcomers. Unless those held captive inside had taken a hand. There were experts enough present after all.

  The front door of the house burst open. Out into the snow sprinted a man. Only death at your back moved a man like that, thought Boswell, remembering his own panic as he ran for cover behind the barn. From inside the house came a vicious, prolonged burst of fire. The running man was caught in the shoulder so that he spun round to face the house. His chest bubbled in a cauldron of red, visible even from Boswell’s distance. The firing stopped and the lifeless figure subsided on his back into the snow.

  The shock of the scene was scarcely alleviated by his recognition of the dead man. It was the pale drummer. The new arrivals must be in control. But the violence they had just seen enacted before them had nothing to do with good and bad, right and wrong.

  The guitarist was shaking all over as he moved forward to look down the hill at the body. He made no effort at resistance as Boswell took the gun fom him.

  ‘It’s Johnny. They killed Johnny,’ was all he could say.

  ‘Come on,’ said Boswell, putting his arm round him to give support. ‘Let’s go down now.’

  Carefully they made their way down the hill. The guitarist wanted to go over to his friend’s body, but Boswell prevented him. There would be time enough later when strangers had disguised some of the obscene horror.

  The centre of activities in Dingley Dell seemed to have moved from the dining room to the parlour. One of the rescue team, a yellow-haired broken-nosed man not known to Boswell, stepped out to meet them, gun levelled.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Boswell wearily. ‘I’m Boswell.’

  Without answering the man took the machine gun away from him. A wise precaution till you were absolutely sure, thought Boswell.

  At the bottom of the stairs another of the Martlets lay dead. Through the open door of the parlour he could see Traherne standing, hands clasped on his head, face expressionless. He should have felt triumphant, but somehow instead he felt empty, desolate.

  The yellow-haired man waved them through the door with his gun. Gently he pushed the guitarist before him. What happened next was a complete shock. The guitarist stopped in the doorway. His slack, lifeless pose vanished, it was like a marionette when someone tautens the strings; he became upright, rigid. Then with an unintelligible cry, savage with fury, he jumped forward into the room. Immediately there was a shot, just one, but close enough to fling the man back into Boswell’s arms, blood oozing from his chest.

  ‘You stupid … what the hell… who?’ cried Boswell in an agony of protest. The door swung fully open now. Next to Traherne he saw the other Martlet, Split. Then Leclerc. Brucciani, Swinburne, Winterman, all the delegates, all with their hands clasped docilely on their heads.

  ‘Be welcome to Dingley Dell, Mr. Boswell!’ boomed out a familiarly jovial voice.

  Standing in the centre of the room, his still smoking weapon pointing straight at Boswell’s chest, was Robert E. Lee Sawyer, né Tarantyev.

  But it was not Sawyer who had spoken.

  Unbelievably, terrifyingly, standing by his side smiling widely in enthusiastic welcome, was Wardle.

  15

  Can I view thee panting, lying

  On thy stomach without sighing;

  Can l unmoved see thee dying…

  MRS. LEO HUNTER

  ‘Sit you down. Have a brandy. You too, Miss Allen. I’m touched that my resurrection causes such a shock. Of delight, I’m sure!’

  Wardle bustled around them with every appearance of genuine concern while Sawyer looked on with sardonic amusement. The stout man was dressed in a modern sports jacket and trousers which looked strangely anachronistic on him.

&n
bsp; ‘Nice of you to come back just at this moment,’ drawled Sawyer. ‘It makes walking out of here to our transport just that bit safer.

  ‘What’s going on, Jack?’ asked Boswell quietly. ‘Are you a double?’

  ‘Hell, no!’ Wardle sounded indignant. ‘I’ve done a good straightforward job of work for years. With precious little thanks from things like that!’

  He nodded with contempt at Swinburne.

  ‘All right. What’s all this about then?’

  ‘Talking time’s over,’ interrupted Sawyer. ‘Now it’s walking time. We’ve got a schedule.’

  ‘All right. All right. Get things organised then,’ snapped Wardle.

  Sawyer looked at him coolly for a moment, then went and spoke to the yellow-haired man who left the room.

  ‘Who was it in the pond?’ persisted Boswell. ‘Colley?’

  Wardle nodded gloomily.

  ‘I’m afraid so. It was accidental; well, almost. He bumped into me in the barn, told me what was happening, that you’d sent him to get to the village. Well, I couldn’t let that happen. There was a scuffle; I had to kill him. Afterwards I swopped coats with him. Mine was a bit distinctive and I didn’t want anyone taking particular notice if they caught a glimpse of me around the place. And I didn’t want anyone finding Colley’s body either, so I lugged it round to the pond and slid it into the hole the Kraut had made.’

  ‘We thought it was you,’ said Boswell.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  The yellow-haired man reappeared with a cardboard box. It was full of pairs of handcuffs. He started down the line of delegates, dragging their hands off their heads and manacling them behind their backs.

  ‘Why did you have to disappear anyway?’ asked Arabella suddenly.

  ‘Well, it was this lot, really.’ He nodded towards Thomas Traherne. ‘As far as they were concerned, this was a nice quiet operation, just keeping an eye on what was happening here. We couldn’t manage everything on our own and even with me in charge of security arrangements, it would have been bloody difficult to get a heavy mob in here, willing to do the work.’