Queen's Pawn Read online

  ‘Take the lot. Put them in his brief case. Leave the box here.’ Then to Belle, he said, ‘How long ago did you order the car?’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘His hat and coat?’

  ‘In his room.’

  ‘Go and get it.’

  He watched her, over Sarling’s shoulder, cross the room with Berners to unlock and lock the door for her, and she had nothing for him. No one in this room had any compassionate meaning for him. He was moving, as he had always known he would move, susceptible only to the design and the plan, no scrap of personality ever to show. Perhaps that was why the Andy stung him so … Berners would understand. Berners and he had moved like this before. So, no doubt, had Sarling and Wurther.

  He pulled the bandana handkerchief from his pocket as Berners came back from the door. He held it up in front of Sarling. ‘This is only until we get to the car.’

  Sarling nodded, and then almost sadly said, ‘You came a little sooner than I expected.’

  Raikes wadded soft tissues on the inside of the handkerchief, folded it and put the pad on Sarling’s mouth.

  There was a tap on the room door. Berners opened it. Belle came in with Sarling’s hat and coat. She gave them to Berners and then went over and threw the switch for the strong-room door to close.

  Raikes said, ‘ I’m going. Give me a hand on the roof.’

  Raikes went through the window first and then he and Berners helped Sarling through. They took Sarling up to the end of the roof run. Raikes went down the wistaria and stood below as Berners lowered Sarling over. The moment the man’s legs were swinging free, Raikes reached up and prisoned the ankles. He did not want Sarling kicking sideways and trying to break any of the window glass.

  Sarling came to the ground, swayed, and was firmed by Raikes. Berners dropped the trailing length of rope to the ground. Sarling’s hat and coat were tossed down. Raikes draped the coat over Sarling’s shoulders and put the hat on him. He wound the rope in loops over his arm, took Sarling by the elbow and moved off into the darkness.

  They went across the park, retracing a route already followed by Raikes, under a tall clump of Douglas pines, dead needles slipping under their feet, by the smooth darkness of still lake water, across a cropped length of sward where the darkness momentarily thudded with the panic of a handful of sheep, and then through a copse, rank with the smell of wet leaves, to a small gate that gave on to a side road. Raikes stood well back inside the gate and unfastened the rope harness from Sarling.

  They waited, mist settling on branch and twig above them, the slow drip of water weeping to the ground. A car went swiftly down, the road, its headlights silvering the lichen patches on the old gate in front of them. Marking time in the darkness the distant church clock struck ten. They would be in London well by one o’clock. It was the right time, not too much traffic, no huddle of cars at the lights where idle eyes swept sideways to appraise other cars and their occupants.

  Sarling coughed suddenly against his gag, shoulders kicking forward in the spasm. Raikes held him up, steadied him and thought, Tomorrow … tomorrow.

  A car came down the road, headlights dipped, slowed and stopped. The headlights died, twin points of sidelights holding small cones of drifting mist.

  He took Sarling through the gate. Berners got out from the back of the car and they put Sarling in. Belle sat at the wheel, looking straight ahead of her.

  Raikes said to Berners, ‘You get the other car.’

  Without a word, Berners turned back up the road.

  Belle driving. The windscreen wipers moving slowly against mist which had thickened to a drizzle. Behind her, seen in the overhead driving mirror, Sarling, mouth no longer gagged, slumped back into the corner of his seat staring straight ahead of him. At his side sat Raikes, raincoat unbuttoned, lying back, easy, relaxed, a cigarette in his hand. All the sprawled length of him was instant with alertness, all his consciousness occupied with the man at his side. Why had she gone to the window, pulled the curtain and slipped the catch? Some other Belle had inhabited her, another woman, less than familiar, to whom she had protested but who had moved on, hearing, but unheeding.

  For an hour she had driven and neither of the two in the back had spoken after the first few seconds of entering the car when Raikes had told Sarling that if he made any move to attract attention he would be pushed down below the seats and covered with the car rug. Winchester was far behind them and the Saturday night traffic had thinned away. For long stretches of road they had the night to themselves.

  From behind her Sarling said quietly, ‘Belle.’

  She flicked a glance at him in the mirror then turned her eyes back to the road ahead, cat’s eyes gleaming around a curve, the tyres bumping rhythmically over them.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d left you fifty thousand pounds in my will.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘No man likes to die. I know it’s no good making any plea to Raikes. But with you it could be different.’

  Raikes said, ‘ I wondered how long it would take him to get to this point.’

  ‘With you, Belle, it should be different. I need your help. Perhaps in a little way you owe it to me. If you’d gone on the way you were you would have ended in prison.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  In the mirror, fleetingly, she saw Sarling put up a gloved hand and rub his moustache, his face lost in deep shadows under the Homburg.

  ‘All you have to do, Belle, is so simple. For your own good, and for mine. You don’t want to be mixed up in murder, do you?’

  Of course she didn’t but she was. What answer could she give sitting here not wanting to be where she was, not knowing where she was going … wanting only this rotten night to be over.

  She tightened her lips, concentrating on the road, not wanting to think, not wanting any part of the two men behind her, fixing her attention on the night details skimming up from darkness into the blaze of the beams, the hump of a railway bridge, the smooth black slabs of the iron parapet, rivet heads half silvered in the light, a long length of white line eating away into the dark future.

  Raikes said quietly, ‘Of course she doesn’t want to be mixed up in murder. Nor do I. But we both are—and you mixed us up, Sarling. You and Wurther long ago when you started to collect men and women. You should have made it old masters, anything … but not men and women.’ He gave a dry grunt of contempt. ‘You want me to tell her your proposition? He’ll give you a hundred thousand, Belle. First thing on Monday morning. All you have to do is to drive this car off the road into the ditch. Break a traffic regulation the moment we hit the suburbs. Skid it. Wreck it. Ram it into a stationary van. Anything like that—and he’s free.’ His voice went on, no anger, no rise in tone, just a one-level, even-keeled voice with no emotion in it. ‘And first thing Monday morning, Belle, you’ll be rich. He’ll give you your freedom. First thing Monday morning, you get your file to add to your photostat. If you wanted to you could make better terms. Two hundred thousand, Meon Park … the world, Belle. He’ll offer you everything you’ve ever dreamt of—on Monday morning. But when Monday morning comes, you know exactly where you’ll be, don’t you. Sitting at a typewriter banging away at one of his company reports. And Monday evening, to put gilt on the gingerbread, he’ll come into your room and, even if you don’t feel like it, he’ll make you spread your legs for him. However, if that’s what you want who can stop you?’

  She cried, ‘ Stop it! Do you hear—I don’t want any more about me.’

  Behind her they were silent.

  Then, so long afterwards that she had to search for the link with the recent past, Sarling gave a little laugh and said, ‘ You’re right, of course, Raikes. I’d have offered the world and trimmed the bargain afterwards—but not as, much as you imagined.’

  ‘Just sit tight and leave her alone. It’s bad for Belle’s driving.’

  From then on she was an automaton, following the rules long established between them of this dark game of murder. Now a
nd again she heard them talking, but she heard without listening. Deliberately she shut her mind to all thought of what lay ahead. She was driving Sarling back to London. Just that. They would drive into the garage at the back of the house and Sarling would go up the stairs, up to his bedroom, and in the morning he would have died in his sleep. That was how it must be always to her, and since it had to be so, she was already making it a truth in her mind. Sarling was going to die in his sleep.

  It was twenty to one when the car pulled up in front of the garage doors. Their drive across London had been smooth and uninterrupted. Belle got out, unlocked the doors, opened them and then drove in.

  As she went back to close the garage doors, Berners, hatted and coated as Sarling still, came from the shadows and moved into the garage, carrying in his hand Raikes’s cane basket. Without a word he took Sarling’s brief case from Raikes and handed him the cane basket.

  Berners and Belle went through into the house. A blue, dim pilot light burned over the door which they shut behind them. Raikes turned to Sarling, pulling the bandana handkerchief from his pocket. Before he could begin to tie it Sarling said, ‘There’s nothing I can offer you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Any other man would have said “I’m sorry. Nothing.”’

  ‘Any other man would have made some attempt to shout or escape.’

  ‘So I would with anyone but you. All right, I’m resigned. Not to death. But to your ruthlessness and my rightness about you. That’s why you must let me speak before you put that thing on. You’re taking my life. That puts you in my debt.

  You know how it must be repaid, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Two ways. The first, perhaps of little importance to me. A matter of sentiment. If you can do it, find some way of sparing Belle. Without her you wouldn’t be here. Be kind to her if you can. People like you, like me, owe one kindness in life. Let her go and do it for both of us.’

  ‘And the second?’ There was no real curiosity in his voice, just plain, near-impatient enquiry.

  ‘You know it. I don’t even demand it, couldn’t. But you will do it. I know you will do it.’

  Raikes didn’t answer. He put the folded bandana against Sarling’s mouth, knowing that at the last moment Sarling would have shouted, knowing that against every wayward moment there had to be a safeguard. He knotted it and eased the edge of it down from the man’s nose so that he could breathe.

  He got out, wound up the driving window, checked that all the others were up and then came back to the rear door. He reached in, opened the cane basket and pulled out a canister of Z/93, GF1. He unscrewed the armature release and held the spring down with his finger, watching Sarling, knowing he might try to kick out, but not seeing Sarling as Sarling, not thinking of him in any terms but as someone, something, of no consequence to him except the last bar between him and freedom.

  His eyes met Sarling’s eyes shadowed under the Homburg. He saw the man’s body move, bound hands straining against the cord that held them to his body, saw the wild shake of his head that threw the Homburg suddenly, comically, low across his brow. He released the armature and dropped the canister into the cane basket. He closed the lid, quickly flicking its centre catch home. He shut the rear door just before the canister softly exploded.

  Turning, he went towards the inner door, walking in the thin blue light with a sureness and deliberation that he would have had were the place in darkness. Without looking back he reached up and pressed a wall switch by the door. A ventilation fan over the garage doors began to whine and then dropped to a steady purr. He went through the door into the darkness of a small black hall—darkness that was a set of photographs taken by Belle, lines and symbols on white paper by Berners, and in the nothingness of the darkness he took two steps on hard coir matting and then sat, fingertips momentarily checking its position, on a chair.

  He sat and waited. And because there was no curiosity in him about what was happening either above him with Belle and Berners or in the garage with Sarling, because he had sat many times before and seen it all clearly, he let his mind spin clear of the place, leaving only his body and its attendant, armouring senses to sit out the vigil, the hour long wait for the toxic gas to deteriorate and decompose, to lose stability and persistence. And while his body waited, his mind was back at Alverton, calmly planning the restoration of the abandoned greenhouse.

  An hour later Berners came through the darkness and put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Well?’ His word held no more sound than a breath.

  ‘Baines came out to see if there was anything I wanted. He only saw my back. Miss Vickers sent him back.’

  They went into the garage and moved down the car, one on each side, and without hurry they reached out and opened the two front doors. They moved back into the hall, closed the door and waited another fifteen minutes, side by side in the darkness, unmoving, backed by the detailed knowledge Berners had acquired of GF1, yet trusting only themselves to decide the limits of risk in this enterprise.

  When they went back the garage held the scent only of oil and petrol. Sarling was slumped in the back seat. They lifted him out. Raikes hoisted him across his shoulders and Berners moved ahead of him, carrying the loose Homburg hat, wearing his own still.

  They went through the darkness of the hall, into the darkness of a passage, and across the main hall lit by one small light. Their feet cushioned and muted by the carpet on the main flight of stairs, they climbed to the first floor. The servants’ quarters were right at the top of the house. Up the stairs, the first door on the right, into the study, curtains drawn, Berners opening and shutting the door and then switching on the light, the oak door to the strong room already open.

  Easing Sarling from his shoulder like a sack of corn before the steel strong-room door, Raikes hauled him upright, holding him from behind with his hands under his armpits. Berners slid aside the protecting plate and then took Sarling’s left hand, drew off the glove, raised the arm and carefully pressed the left thumb against the master plate.

  Raikes drew Sarling back, the man’s head dropping over one shoulder, the weight of the small body easily sustained by his hands. Berners slid the master plate into its recess. There was no anxiety in Raikes as he waited the few seconds for the scanning device to accept its data and work on it. From the moment of stepping through the window at Meon all action had become routine, mechanical, passing from one small operation to another without flaw.

  The door slid back.

  ‘Help me with him. Then collect the files.’

  Berners went to the room door and opened it. They took Sarling, comradely supported between them, across the narrow strip of landing and into his bedroom and dropped him on his bed. Berners went out.

  Belle came forward from the shadows beyond the bed-table lamp on the other side of the bed, went to the bedroom door and locked it. As she turned back she saw that Raikes was already leaning over Sarling, beginning to undress him.

  Raikes half turned his head and said, ‘Give me a hand with him.’

  ‘I can’t. I couldn’t touch him.’

  Already she had banished Sarling from her mind. Even when she had laid out his pyjamas, dressing gown, the bed-socks he always wore, she had laid them out for something without a name.

  Quietly Raikes said, ‘Come here.’ He reached back and drew her to the bed. ‘Look at him. He’s nothing. Not a man. Just something we have to arrange.’ His right hand slid up and held her chin, the fingers firm against her flesh and he gave her a little shake. ‘You can do anything I say. Get his shoes off.’

  He released her and she bent down by the bed and began to take off Sarling’s shoes. A wet oak leaf was stuck to one of the shoes. Absently she plucked it from the leather and put it in her dress pocket where she would find it a week later dried to brittle fragments, substance peeled from the leaf to leave part of the veining skeletal.

  They undressed him, put on his pyjamas and bedsocks and slid him into
the bed, Raikes making him comfortable, rumpling the pillow and sheets, Sarling’s body still pliable under his hands, a memory flashing back of talk with Berners in the Royal Automobile Club about body cooling and rigor mortis, a clothed body losing heat at the rate of about two and a half degrees an hour for the first six hours … Sarling’s body still warm to the touch, the sensation of its warmth still on his shoulder where he had carried him. Rigor mortis would be just setting in by the time Baines came to call him. Dead in his sleep, time of death around one o’clock. Everything natural, except the death itself, and perhaps even that natural for a man like this who had wanted to manipulate him and others as though they were puppets. Man tries to own others at his peril.

  He turned to Belle. She was tidying and putting away Sarling’s clothes as he would have done had he come in late on his own.

  He said, ‘Get finished quickly. Go to bed and take three sleeping pills.’ He went to her where she was standing, holding Sarling’s shirt, absently taking out the cufflinks, and he put his arms around her and kissed her, dry lips against dry lips, pulled back, slid a hand up and caressed her cheek, then turned and was gone.

  He went out and down to the garage. Berners, moustache gone, was waiting for him, holding under one arm a pile of pink, foolscap-sized files a foot high. Raikes pulled the cane basket from the car, opened it, saw the fragments of the canister on the canvas bottom, and then glanced round the back of the car to check that nothing was being left. Gloved, he took the ashtray container and tipped into his handkerchief the stubs and ashes of the three cigarettes he had smoked on the way up.

  They put the files in the cane basket. Berners went out of the garage, and Raikes stayed close up against the shut door. It was a quarter to three. Any man walking through back mews, along side streets, carrying a cane basket might be stopped by the police. Berners alone, walking to his parked car, would cause no comment, offer no hold for suspicion even if he were stopped. Ten minutes later Raikes heard the car go by. He went out, pulling the self-locking door behind him gently, and walked fifty yards to the car, stepped in, and they drove away. On the seat by Raikes lay the brief case with the photostats from Meon.