The Melting Man rc-4 Read online

  So what did I do now?

  O'Dowda had the parcel. I could imagine him and Kermode, sitting up there in their wax works, laughing their heads off, and probably celebrating with a few bottles of champagne. It would be good stuff, too, as the occasion demanded. Veuve Clicquot, Brut Gold Label, 1959, probably.

  I chucked the cigarette out of the car window and swore. Aloud. One word. A good, coarse, satisfying one, and it did something for me. The key log in the timber jam slipped and the run began. O'Dowda was not going to keep the parcel. If ever God had made one man who was due for a disappointment it was O'Dowda. I elected myself as the chosen instrument to bring it about. I didn't know how, but I was going to do it. There wasn't any point in thinking of the hows and whys and whats. At this moment the only sensible course was to home on the target. But before I did I had to make sure of Julia's safety.

  I went into the post office to the telephones and called Najib.

  When he answered, I said, 'Look, there's a little hitch over the parcel. Nothing serious, but it might be rather later in the day before I can get my hands on it. Is that all right?' I tried to keep my voice normal. It wasn't easy.

  Najib said, 'Let's get one thing straight, Mr Carver. I'm trusting you over this. But I cannot go on trusting and waiting for ever. If you do not telephone saying you have the parcel by six o'clock this evening, my deduction will be that you will never have it. In that case I shall have to take other steps. Just which at the moment defeats me. But one thing is certain. If someone else gets the parcel — then you know what will happen to Miss Julia. And, Mr Carver — I shall know very soon if anyone else has it because they will not delay in letting us know. Anymore than I should delay in letting them know that I had it. Understand?'

  'Don't worry,' I said lightly. 'You'll get it.'

  I rang off and went out.

  It was difficult to keep my speed low going through the town. Once through, I put my foot down hard. But if I thought that speed would wipe out thought, I was disappointed. All the way I kept asking myself — how? How was I going to get the parcel? Long before I got there it became clear to me that the last thing I could do was to barge in empty-handed on O'Dowda. The man dealt in force, understood power. The only way to deal with him was from a position of strength. That was the logic. How did one translate it into practical terms?

  CHAPTER NINE

  'I rage, I melt, I burn…'

  (John Gay)

  I turned off the main road into the driveway to the château, but I didn't go straight to the place. I swung off up the track to the lake.

  The Rolls-Royce was standing outside the cottage on flat rear tyres. I went into the cottage, looking for something that would weigh nicely in the hand and give me a feeling of confidence. I had no luck inside. My suit was there with my passport gone, and there was a mass of fishing tackle, but I couldn't find a single sporting gun or any other weapon. The best I could do was a heavy wrench from Kermode's bench.

  But outside, an idea struck me. I went over to the Rolls-Royce. In the glove compartment was the compressed-air pistol which had been taken off me when they had jumped me in Geneva. I took it and left the wrench.

  I drove back almost to the main driveway and then left the car in the cover of some trees. I made the rest of the way to the château on foot, keeping well off the drive.

  A big shooting brake was parked by the entrance steps. I watched the château from the cover of the trees, saw no movement, and started to work my way around the back. I wanted to be inside without anyone seeing me enter. I found a side door and enough cover from a thick thuya hedge to get me to it unseen.

  I went into a wide, stone-flagged corridor. When I was half-way down it a door opened suddenly a few yards ahead of me and a man came out and dropped a suitcase on the stone floor. It was Durnford and he saw me.

  I went up to him, gun in hand, and he backed into the room. I went after him. It was a bedroom and one glance showed me that he was in the process of packing up.

  'Leaving the happy home?'

  'Yes.'

  He hadn't been drinking. He was stone cold sober. He was more than that. He was pure ice. Gone was the nervous flicker of the eyes, gone the bad-tempered officiousness. Something had happened to change him. Normally I might have tried to find out what, but at the moment I had my own problems.

  I said, 'Where are they?'

  He turned and began to stuff shirts and underwear into another case. Over his shoulder, he said, 'On the second floor.'

  'In the waxworks?'

  'Yes. Celebrating. They had a case of champagne sent up.'

  'Celebrating what?'

  'I don't know. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you.'

  He was right back to not liking me. And not only me. At this moment he wasn't liking anybody.

  I said, 'How long will they be there?'

  'Until they come out.'

  'If they had a case sent up it might be a long time.'

  'Yes. When they decide to get drunk, they take their time. They're both Irishmen. You know how drunk an Irishman can get.'

  'I know how drunk anyone can get if they really set their mind to it. You've been sacked?'

  'I handed in my notice.'

  'Same thing. Can I get into that room?'

  'Not unless they let you in.'

  'But you've got some way of communicating with them — or they with you, surely?'

  'Yes.'

  'Lead me to it.'

  'I'm not doing anything for you. You're as bad as they are. Money, that's all you're interested in. You never stop to think about anything else but that. Just money — and to hell with what happens to anyone else. People don't mean anything to you.'

  I said, 'I seem to remember a coloured number called Joseph Bavana that you helped once — to something very unpleasant.'

  That wasn't me. That was O'Dowda's personal secretary carrying out orders.'

  'Same thing.'

  He swung round from his pile of candy-striped pants and shouted, 'It is not! He's gone! Now — this is me! A different man!'

  I said, 'Work it out any way you want. I'm not going to argue. But I want to talk to them and you're going to show me how. If you don't, I'll just tell the police what I know about Bavana, and the new Durnford won't get very far. It's not something I want to do, but push me and I will.'

  He looked at me in silence for a while and then he said bitterly. 'Yes, you'd do it. You'd do anything to get what you want. Just for a while I thought that you might have something that a man could respect. But I know better now. You're like them. You'd put up any front, tell any lie that would help you to get what you want.'

  'It's an interesting point, but I haven't time to discuss it. Just show me how to talk to them.'

  For a moment or two I thought he was going to refuse. He just stared belligerently at me, hating me, hating himself more probably, and his mind all twisted up with memories of the woman he had loved who had been drowned in the lake; a mind that had been warped and commanded by O'Dowda to the point of revolt. Beyond that in fact. At this moment he wasn't sane. He was capable of anything. If he refused to show me, I knew that I could never make him.

  With a slow, cunning look, he said, 'What are you going to say to him.'

  'That's my business. I've got to have a talk with him. Come on, show me how.'

  He gave me a nasty little smile and said, 'You're still trying to make something for yourself, aren't you? Still after a profit — no matter who else suffers?'

  'I've got things to do. For my own personal satisfaction.'

  'Quite.' He snapped the word at me. Then, abruptly, he turned and walked from the room. I followed him.

  We went through a rabbit warren of corridors and finally fetched up at the foot of the main staircase. He went up ahead of me and down the wide upper hallway to the tall leather-covered steel doors of the waxwork room and halted in front of them.

  I said, 'Can't they be opened from this side? I'd like to go in unannounced
.'

  He shook his head. 'Not if they've got the trip over on the inside. And they will have. Always do when they have a drinking bout.'

  He went to the side of the doors and opened a small recess let into the wall. He pulled out a microphone speaker, flicked a switch in the recess somewhere, and said, 'O'Dowda!'

  The way he said it must have given him great pleasure. He put into it everything he disliked about the man and worked off just a little of the years of servitude behind him.

  There was no reply.

  'O'Dowda!' Louder this time, and knocking off a few more years.

  This time there was a reply.

  From a concealed loudspeaker over the top of the doors O'Dowda's voice boomed, 'Who the hell is that?'

  'Durnford.'

  'Then get the hell off my property!' O'Dowda boomed, and roared on, 'Try to steal my wife, would ya, you rabbit-eyed bastard! Get to hell with ya!'

  He'd been drinking all right, not yet drunk but expansive.

  I saw Durnford's face tighten as he held on to his control. He put the microphone to his mouth and said, 'Carver is here. Wants to see you. And one of these days I'll prove you murdered her, you black-hearted bog-trotter.'

  'Carver!' The voice boomed, and then a great gust of laughter came over the speaker. He said, 'Well now, is he? Clear off, the both of ya.'

  I said to Durnford, 'All right, you've done your bit, I'll take it from here.'

  He handed me the microphone, and said, 'If you're wise you'll get out of this place. He's not drunk yet but he's in a mad mood. Whatever you want from him, you'll never get it.'

  'You're damned right about that, boyo,' O'Dowda roared.

  'Make yourself scarce,' I said to Durnford 'When they do open up you might find Kermode at your throat. Go on.'

  He hesitated for a moment and then said, 'Even if you can, I advise you not to go in there.'

  'Don't worry.'

  'I'm not. If you don't want my advice, don't take it.'

  He turned and went away down the gallery. I watched him go and then walked down to the head of the stairs to check that he was really gone. I went back to the microphone.

  As I picked it up, O'Dowda's voice yelled, 'Are you still there, Carver?'

  I said, 'Why should I not be? I'm going to take at least five thousand pounds off you.'

  There was silence. There had to be. I'd mentioned money, and money to O'Dowda was important, so important that any mention of it aroused his curiosity.

  'And why would you be taking five thousand pounds off me?' His voice had lost some of its kick.

  'In a straight sale. That's excluding my fees, of course.'

  'And what would you have for sale, boyo?' He was coming back a bit, but I knew that I had him hooked.

  I said, praying it would be so, 'Don't tell me that you just collected that parcel from Evian and stuck it straight in your safe without checking it?'

  There was silence, a long one, and a heavy one for me. It was the kind of thing he could have done. It was what I wanted him to have done, because it was the one thing which would give me the little edge over him that I wanted, the one thing which gave me the remotest chance of getting Julia back. The silence went on. I let it. The longer it went on the better it was for me. I let it run until I knew that I was betting on a certainty.

  I said, 'Don't tell me that a careful man like you put it away without checking it?'

  He tried to bluff. It was clear in his voice.

  'Of course I checked it.'

  I laughed. 'You're a bad liar, O'Dowda. You think I'm such a fool that I wouldn't keep one ace up my sleeve? Dealing with types like you, Najib and Interpol? And anyway, I'm like you, O'Dowda, I don't trust the mails. That parcel at Evian was a phoney. Sent there to give me a breathing space if things went wrong — which I'll admit they damned nearly did at the lake. Are you with it? Are you listening good and hard? You haven't got what you think you've got, O'Dowda. If the safe's in there, check it and see — and then we'll talk.'

  I sat down on an Empire chair by the door and lit a cigarette, blew smoke, and prayed. Hard. That his safe was not in the banqueting room. If it were my bluff was called.

  I sat there, pretending to myself to be cool, knowing the runners were coming up to the last fence and mine leading, knowing that anything can happen at the last fence — and usually the thing you're praying will not happen. I blew a smoke ring and watched it spin up towards the loudspeaker over the door and then fade away like a grey dream.

  Suddenly the big double-doors whined and slid back on their runners. Kermode stood just inside the threshold and he was holding a gun on me.

  He said, 'Come in slowly and keep your hands out in front.'

  I gave him a beaming smile. Why not? I'd won the first round. I was feeling good, but being careful not to be overconfident.

  I went in and he halted me. Holding the gun at my navel, he ran his hands over my pockets. Aristide wouldn't have thought much of the job he made, or Najib, I guessed. I'd got the compressed-air pistol stuck barrel first into the inside of my left ginger suede shoe and the turn-up of the suit trousers came well down, hiding it. The pistol was ten inches long, three or four inches of barrel in my shoe and the butt just above my ankle. The only thing I had to be careful about was fast movement because it weighed just under two pounds and could be shaken loose unless I watched it. I wasn't worried. I wasn't going to make one fast movement until I reached for the gun. Kermode's hand came down my leg, over my calf and stopped short a couple of inches above the pistol. He stood back.

  'Take a seat over there,' he said. He pointed through the crowd to a divan that stood just in front of the Cairo merchant or whatever who had gypped O'Dowda in a diamond deal.

  I went over and sat down carefully, crossing my legs so that the inside of my left shoe was hard up against the front of the divan and out of sight.

  I looked around at the wax figures and said, 'Same old crowd you've got, I see. Time you made some new enemies.'

  O'Dowda was sitting at the far end of the room, just in front of the candelabra-flanked, oversized effigy of himself. He was wearing a loose oriental dressing gown for comfort, black patent leather shoes with elastic sides, and a white turtle-necked shirt. The dressing gown was black with silver peacocks on it. He was lounging comfortably in an armchair with a table at his side on which stood glasses and a champagne bottle, and a hand microphone with a flex that trailed away into a far wall recess.

  He stared at me with his small blue eyes out of a very red face, and said, 'Don't worry — you'll join 'em soon, you bastard.'

  I said, 'If you want to do a deal with me, you overstuffed bullfrog, just keep things polite, will you?'

  I was in, and I was enjoying myself, and I was full of comforting hatred for him, a warm, intoxicating desire to see all the kick and egotism knocked out of him. I'd taken a chance so far and it had worked. It had to be my day. I had that feeling that all men know… that feeling that the moment you strike the twenty-foot putt you know it's going to drop, that the moment you flick the line out with a Blue Upright on the end and it settles like a fairy on the water under the alders that a three-pounder is going to bulge up to it, that the moment you swing the gun up as they come fast and oblique down wind you're going to get one with each barrel… I was feeling good, optimistic, ready for anything.

  O'Dowda reached for his champagne glass on the table, lowered his head and sipped, watching me over the rim. Two yards from him was another armchair and a table stacked with bottles and glasses. That's how they liked it. To sit there, drinking, steadily getting tighter and shouting comments and abuse at their guests. Fun… once in a while.

  O'Dowda said, 'You're a fool. You think I believe that stuff about the parcel? You're bluffing. If you had the real thing you'd never poke your nose in here.'

  I gave him a friendly smile. 'If you really thought I was bluffing you'd never have opened the door. You couldn't have cared less about me. I'd come in the Julia category.
By the way, I've decided that I don't want anything to do with that either. Oh, I've got a weakness for pretty women, but it never goes over the five-hundred-pound mark. My price, exclusive of my fee, is five thousand pounds.'

  Kermode said, 'If the parcel isn't genuine, boss, all we have to do is persuade him, like before.'

  'Do that,' I said. 'But it won't get you anywhere. The parcel's with a friend in Geneva. If I don't call her within the hour, she'll just phone Interpol and tell them I'm out here. They won't waste any time getting here.'

  O'Dowda said, 'Her? What woman?'

  I said, impatiently, 'For God's sake what woman do you imagine? How do you think I got out here, away from Najib? Miss Panda, of course. We sort of got together, financially and otherwise, to do ourselves a bit of good.' I reached for a cigarette in my pocket, saw Kermode tighten up, reassured him with a shake of my head, lit up, and said, 'Come on — check the parcel and let's get this over.'

  I was doing well. I had them. I just told myself to go easy and not get too confident. The difficult part was still to come. I wanted the parcel brought back into this room for checking.

  The champagne helped me. O'Dowda was comfortable in his chair, he was used to having servants do things for him.

  He said to Kermode, 'Go and get it. But give me that gun first.'

  Kermode handed him the gun. Then he went out of the room.

  O'Dowda held the gun on me with one hand and drew a new bottle of champagne across the table towards him with the other. He began to fiddle with the wire around the cork, one-handed, to open it, found it awkward and gave up. Kermode could do it when he returned. Behind him the lit candles surrounding his effigy flickered and smoked a little in the draught from the open doors.

  He said, 'You could have got a price from Najib.'

  I said, 'Yes.'

  'Or from Interpol.'