The Melting Man rc-4 Read online

  She was taller than I, but I didn't mind. You can't have too much of a good thing. I just stood there, quivering finely like a pointer, waiting for the command to flush game. She said, 'It's a nice dress, isn't it? Jacques Fath.' I said, 'I can't keep my eyes off it. I'm Rex Carver.' With a little lift of her eyes for my persisting stupidity, she said, 'I know you are. But you don't quite come up to the description Miggs gave of you. Sort of blurred around the edges somewhere.'

  'Come autumn,' I said, 'I begin to disintegrate a little. My best month is May.'

  She looked at her watch — I caught the faint sparkle of a diamond setting — and said, 'I can't wait until then, neither can my father. Are you coming or not?'

  'I was thinking,' I mumbled, 'of taking a holiday.'

  'You look,' she said, 'as though you could do with one. I'll tell my father you're not available.' She turned for the door.

  I went across the room and picked up my weekend case.

  'You're bullying me,' I said. 'But I don't mind. For you I would go anywhere.' I gave her a big smile. It was an effort, but I thought it worth it. 'Julia O'Dowda. It's a wonderful name. Wild Irish, a strong Connemara wind whistling through your hair and—'

  She moved to the door, saying. 'I'm his stepdaughter. The name's Julia Yunge-Brown. And on the way down you'll sit in the back. I don't like a hand on my knee as I drive. Okay?' The dark eyes, faintly smiling, fixed me.

  'Okay,' I said.

  Obediently I followed her through into the office. Wilkins looked up at me woodenly.

  I said, 'The next time you use the word "driver" over the phone, qualify the sex. I'm being led into captivity.'

  Julia, ahead of me, giggled. It was a nice sound, like a fast brook tumbling over stones.

  Wilkins said, 'I'll phone Mrs Meld to say you won't be back tonight.'

  It wasn't the Facel Vega, but a big black Rolls, looking a bit like a hearse and as quiet in the back as a funeral parlour. Clipped into a silver holder alongside me was a speaking horn.

  Going over Westminster Bridge, I whistled down it and then said, 'What happened to the regular chauffeur?'

  Horn to my ear, I got the reply: 'Tich? He's gone fishing with my father. Stepfather.'

  I said, 'What's all this about a stolen car?'

  'Something to do with Zelia. She's always messing things up.'

  'Zelia?'

  You had to be quick with the trumpet thing, but it was fun for a long journey. 'My sister. You'll get all the details.'

  'Where are we going?'

  'Sussex. Near Sedlescombe. You'll be just in time for the evening rise.'

  'Evening what?'

  She nipped between a bus and a petrol tanker, and then said, 'Stop talking. There are magazines in the rack in front of you.'

  I fiddled for a bit and got the rack down. It held the latest numbers of Vogue, The Field, Illustrated London News, Playboy and Reveille. And also a half-empty box of cigars, Bolivar Petit Coronas. It lit one and settled back with Playboy.

  Once we were clear of London she drove the car as though she wished to God it had wings, half hoping, maybe, that if she did go fast enough it would take off. Anyone riding in it might not have been able to hear the clock ticking in the silence, but they would have heard my heart going bump, bump against the roof of my mouth. I began to regret my hasty impulse. A good-looking gipsy girl walks into your office, wearing a Fath number that would cost more than your cigarette bill for a year, gives you a what-the-hell look and there you are — every good resolution gone, back at work again when you should be on holiday.

  I didn't try to keep track of where we were going, but it took us an hour and a half. Finally we turned in through lodge gates, the pillars ornamented with stone greyhounds, each holding a shield. I couldn't see the device on the shields because we went by too quickly. We then did a half a mile of drive through parkland. Up ahead I saw the big bulk of a country mansion, but I didn't get a long look at it because we turned off, away from the drive and down a long slope through beech and fir trees with dirty, dank-looking rhododendron growths under them.

  We came through the trees and the side drive ended in a wide circular turning space below a high grass bank. Julia swing the car round and stopped. She sat in the driving seat while I got out and went up to her.

  'Stimulating drive,' I said. 'Tonic for the nerves. When you get her back in the stables, give her a good rub down and a handful of oats. But don't let her drink for a while. Some time you can take me out in the Facel Vega and we'll really enjoy ourselves.'

  She looked at me thoughtfully, up and down and then down and up, as though I were a piece of antique furniture, a tallboy or something she fancied she might fancy, and then she said, 'You've got something. Just something — but I suspect you're trying too hard with it.'

  'Or just out of practice. All I need is a few days' country air. Where's daddy?'

  'Daddy is someone you want to be bloody polite with.'

  I knew then what it was that had boosted me off my office cushion. She was a border-line girl. Somebody you could go either way with. Get her wrong, rub the knap the reverse way, and you had, not an enemy for life (there's always hope there), but someone who just obliterated you from her memory. But get her right, handle her with the capable, finessing touch of a master, and you had a star-spangled carnival stretching ahead of you. But there wasn't any hope of that unless you were at the top of your form.

  I winked at her. 'I've dealt with millionaires before. They handle easily so long as you let them know it's their money you're after. Where is he?'

  'Up over the bank. Just ring for him. You can leave your bag. I'll take it up to the house.'

  She started the engine.

  Before she could move off, I said, 'What is it about step-daddy that you don't like?'

  I got it then, full and square for the first time; a cold, dark stare that came from surprise she was not quite able to hide. She put her foot down and the Rolls swung away from me and back into the beech trees.

  I lit a cigarette and climbed a flight of stone steps to the top of the grass bank. It was a dam, grassed on this side and faced with concrete slabs on the other. Along the top of it ran a grass walk, mowed tight. Stretching away from it was an artificial lake of about thirty acres. It was fringed with pine woods and backed at the far end by a hill studded with great oaks. On the far bank, away to my left at the end of the dam, was a boathouse and a landing pier that projected twenty yards into the water. Way out in the centre of the lake I could see a rowing boat with two men in it.

  I walked along the dam towards the landing pier. A couple of pigeons came over the pines, a pheasant called from somewhere back in the beeches and a flight of duck got up from shallows at the far side of the lake. It was a good spot and, from the state of damworks, the boathouse and pier, I guessed that it hadn't long been constructed. It must have cost

  O'Dowda a packet. Nice, I thought, when you couldn't get away to Ireland or Scotland, to have your own fishing on the doorstep.

  I made my way past the boathouse on to the pier. A fibre-glass hull with an outboard was tied up alongside. At the end of the pier was a vertical wooden post, rather like a small gallows, with a big brass bell hanging from it. I gave the tongue of the bell a whang or two. The noise rolled out across the water and I sat down, legs dangling over the edge of the pier, to wait for the rowing boat to come in.

  The men in the boat took no notice of me, though they must have heard the bell. I sat where I was, content to finish my cigarette. They'd heard. They would come when they were ready. One thing you can't do is to hurry a millionaire. If I took the job, I decided, I'd add 5 per cent for being kept waiting. A water-rat swam leisurely out from under the pier and headed for the iris beds up the bank. A swallow dipped near the dam and made a ring like a trout rising. A hundred feet up a heron went over the pines, legs trailing, unhurried, a real dowager of a bird. There was sun and some cloud, a little ripple on the water from a faint breeze, a perfect day.
Out on the lake I caught the sudden shine of sun on wet lines as one of the men false-casted. I didn't mind waiting. It suited my mood. I was almost at peace with the world.

  The next moment I was almost right out of it.

  Two things happened, simultaneously it seemed to me. First the crack of a rifle, and then the thud of a bullet smacking into the bell-post three inches above my head. A chip of wood flipped by me and curved out over the water. Before it hit the surface I was on my feet, running for the shelter of the boat-house.

  CHAPTER TWO

  'A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

  To let the warm Love in.'

  (John Keats)

  Whoever it was took another shot at me just before I reached the boathouse. The bullet whined overhead, too close for comfort. Angry, frightened and short of breath, I reached the shelter of the side of the boathouse.

  I looked back along the pier. The two men were fishing on the lake, not even looking in my direction. There's nothing like a fisherman for being truly absorbed in his sport.

  I poked my head round the far side of the boathouse and eyed the near pines. To my surprise a man in jeans and a Windbreaker came out of the cover of the trees and began to run up the side of them. In his hand he carried a rifle.

  Sportingly, I gave him fifty yards' start and then went after him, doing a zigzag along the outer row of pines so that I had cover most of the way. The ground sloped gently upwards and where the pines finished was a five-barred gate.

  The man with the rifle vaulted it and stooped to pick something out of the grass near the hedge on the other side. It was a motor scooter. He slung the rifle over his back by the sling. Seeing this, I sprinted. I saw the movement of his right leg as he kicked the engine start.

  I reached the gate just as he drove away fast down a rough lane. I leaned on the gate and watched him, making a mental note of the number of the scooter. JN4839. Twenty yards from me, he twisted his head back over his shoulder to look at me. I gave him a wave and the bastard briefly waved back. His face was coal-black.

  I went slowly back to the pier wondering what I had done to incur the wrath of the coloured races. Nothing as far as I knew, recently. As I reached the end of the pier the boat was just pulling in.

  It was being rowed by a little jockey of a man with a face like a shrivelled lemon. Round his neck was a pair of field-glasses. This, I guessed, was Tich, the chauffeur. He was in shirt and trousers and had a big cigar clamped into the corner of his mouth and on his head was an old cloth cap stuck about with trout-flies. Sitting in the stern, on a comfortable chair-arrangement which had been fitted, was Cavan O'Dowda.

  While they made the last twenty yards I had time to get a good look at him. Standing, I reckoned he would go about six feet six, and he had more than the girth to go with it. He would have had trouble packing himself into my overnight sleeper. When he'd been made there must have been a lot of spare material lying around which they'd decided to get rid of. I put him at somewhere around sixty. He was wearing a light blue siren-suit and gum-boots. His head was pumpkin-shaped and large enough, if it had been one, to take a prize anywhere. So far as I could see he had no neck and his hair was so close-cropped that it looked like a faint powdering of red-brown dust. He was wearing dark Polaroid glasses and had a cigar clamped into the corner of his mouth. His hands were huge, backed with a faint down of ginger hair — but they were good hands, capable and sensitive, as I saw when he began to fish later.

  As the boat steadied at the bottom of the pier steps, O'Dowda said, 'You Mr Carver?'

  'Just.'

  He gave no sign of being aware of the irony. 'Get in,' he said.

  As I went down the steps, he took off his glasses to rub his eyes and I saw that they were light blue, much too small for his face, and embedded in a puffy setting of fat wrinkles. He was not only the most unwholesome-looking millionaire I'd ever seen, he was the biggest as well.

  I settled myself in the bow.

  'Take her out again, Kermode.'

  Tich began to pull away from the pier and I watched O'Dowda over the back of his head.

  'Nice of you to come,' said O'Dowda. 'Good of Miggs to recommend you. He must make a couple of thousand every year out of me. Welcome, of course. Real character, Miggs. Thought we heard a shot back there just now.'

  'Two,' I said. 'Somebody using your bell-post or me for target practice. I followed him up to the edge of the wood and he rode away on a scooter.'

  The big face showed no surprise.

  He just said, 'Kermode,' and nodded at a basket at the chauffeur's feet. Tich stopped rowing, dug in the basket and handed a flask over his shoulder to me. I unscrewed and swallowed. It could have been Courvoisier VSOP. I handed the flask back. Tich took it with one hand and held the other out to me with a cigar in it. I lit up as he began rowing.

  'Ever fished?' Irish his name might be but I couldn't hear a spot of accent. It was a big, resonant voice. If anything there was a transatlantic touch to it — Canadian, maybe.

  'My father, rest his soul,' I said, 'taught me how to tie a turle knot when I was five.'

  'And damn right he was. More fish have been lost from a boshed-up half-blood than most people know. Take Kermode's rod.'

  The rod was at my side, half over the bows. It was a Hardy job and Tich had got a Bloody Butcher on the point and a couple of Invictas as droppers.

  I said, 'What have you got in here?'

  O'Dowda, beginning to fish, said, 'Rainbow and brown. And a few gillaroo. Know them?'

  'No.'

  'Irish. Find 'em in Lough Melvin and Erne. They don't do so well.'

  I worked out some line, false-casted once or twice to get the feel of the rod — it was a beauty — and then made a cast of about twenty yards. It wasn't bad, considering I hadn't touched a rod for a year. I knew O'Dowda was watching me. O'Dowda, I reckoned, was a man who watched everything and everybody around him.

  Tich held us in the wind-drift and we wet-fly-fished down the length of the lake. Halfway down I saw the quick water-bulge out by my flies and the sharp knock of a take. I struck, the line sang, and the rod-tip bowed. I played him for about five minutes and then he came in, tired, flashing his flanks, and Tich put the net under him. It was a rainbow on one of the Invicta droppers. A nice fish, just over two pounds, I guessed. I unhooked him and tapped his nose with the priest. He lay on the boards, the sunlight bringing up boldly the broad carmine band down his side, the bright colour that fades so soon with death. I looked at the bordering pine woods. The black bastard could easily come back.

  'Not bad,' said O'Dowda. 'You can have him for dinner. The chef has a way of grilling 'em with a Parmesan cheese flavouring that's out of this world. Not enough to kill the flavour of the fish. Just enough to bring it up. Did you get any kind of look at the man who shot at you?'

  'No. Not really. He was away before I was close enough. It has occurred to me, though, that he might come back.'

  'He won't.'

  'I'm glad to hear it.'

  'Anyway, he wasn't after you. He was after me. Just made a target mistake. Badly briefed.'

  We were in close to the tree-lined bank now. O'Dowda did a neat switch-cast and dropped his flies just off a clump of lily-pads. A moment later he was into a fish and Tich finally netted a big brown trout for him. Watching O'Dowda, I was wondering how badly briefed a man had to be to mistake me for him. If I took this job, I was thinking, there would have to be substantial danger money.

  We fished for an hour. O'Dowda got three brace of brown trout. I got a brown and then hooked something that finally smashed my trace and got away.

  'Must have been a big one,' I said.

  'You rushed him a bit,' said Kermode.

  'Out of practice,' said O'Dowda. Then he slewed his head at me and gave me a Polaroid look. 'Little fish land easy. Big fish… well, the time element is in geometric not arithmetic proportion. For big fish, you need time and patience. That's why I'm a millionaire.' He laughed and it was a s
ound like flood water rising rapidly in an underground tunnel. I didn't like the sound and — I had a strong feeling — I didn't like him.

  O'Dowda looked at his watch and gave Kermode a nod. Kermode reached into the hamper at his feet and pulled out a hand microphone on a flex. He spoke into it. 'Mr O'Dowda's car. Five minutes.'

  He replaced the microphone and we began to row back to the landing stage.

  O'Dowda saw me looking at the hamper, and said, 'Time and patience, Mr Carver. And always keep in contact with the outside world. Life is full of sudden emergencies.'

  I said nothing. I had no real quarrel with his philosophy. But you had to be a millionaire to be able to afford it.

  There was a big navy blue Ford Zephyr station wagon waiting for us in the turning space when we arrived. In the driving seat was a small, neat-looking man of about forty. He had a bristly little toothbrush moustache, large teeth and hard agate-coloured eyes which he kept moist by constant blinking. I wasn't introduced to him but from the conversation I gathered th3t he was called Durnford and was O'Dowda's secretary.

  The only item of conversational interest on the way to the house was O'Dowda saying, 'I want a full report on how that fellow got in, Durnford.'

  'It's the public bridle path, sir.' His voice, even to O'Dowda, was clipped, sharp, just as he had been to me on the phone. 'We've got no legal right to close it.'

  'Then find some other way.'

  That was all. The millionaire's solution. No legal right — then find some other way.

  The house was a great square construction of rag stone. You went through a small archway into an inner courtyard that was flagged with great paving stones and lined with a small raised walk, the balustrade of which was marked every few yards by nude classical statues, mostly of women with expressionless faces and large thighs. The entrance hall was small and one entered through mahogany doors which, I later learned, were steel-lined. O'Dowda and I got into a lift, went up two floors and stepped out into a long picture gallery. A manservant was waiting and O'Dowda instructed him to take me to my room. O'Dowda then gave me a nod and disappeared in one direction while I followed the manservant in the other, walking gingerly on the highly polished floorboards to avoid slipping.