Caroline Minuscule (24 page)

He supposed he should look for the pistol – mustn't repeat the mistake of last time. A bullet in Lee's head and the business would be settled. It would be like a mercy killing, though he wasn't sure to whom the mercy was going to be shown.

Wiping his face with the back of his hand, Dougal turned and stared along the bank of the creek. He saw the Walther, its butt in the air and its barrel buried in a clump of grass; he had thrown it further than he realized – it must be a good ten yards away.

A brawny blue arm flashed out and flicked his feet from under him. For the second time that day, the coarse grass and iron-hard ground of the river bank rushed up to meet him. Before he had had time to absorb the first agony of impact, Lee crashed down on top of him. Dougal shrieked with pain and fear, a high, mindless keening which lost itself in the grey dome of the sky.

When his perceptions cleared, Dougal realized that Lee was sitting astride him, crushing his rib cage with his weight and driving his back into the unyielding ground. Lee's thumbs were locked into position underneath Dougal's jaw. He could see the stile out of the corner of his eye, the beginning of the path to comfort and normality. Which was now forever impassable.

Lee's thumbs relaxed their pressure fractionally, and hope leapt unreasonably within Dougal.

‘Now,' said Lee calmly, in a voice which murdered hope, ‘that's it, you tricky little bugger.' The softness of the brogue was even more at odds than usual with the slablike face. Lee's nose was bleeding; the drops showered down on Dougal like crimson rain.

‘That snotty girlfriend of yours has left you in the lurch, hasn't she? Stupid of her, in the long run. And you've tried to pull one too many fast ones on me. Don't you know who you're dealing with? God I hate you poncey-faced English with your snotty little accents and your mean little minds. I'm going to squeeze the life out of you, slowly, so you know just what's happening to you. With pauses, so you can beg me to stop. I'll maybe make it slightly easier, that little bit quicker, if you tell me what you've done with the diamonds.'

Lee's thumbs dug viciously into Dougal's neck, and then withdrew to give him the chance to speak.

As the unbearable choking sensation eased, a movement in the field beyond the stile pulled Dougal's eyes away from Lee's face. There was a man standing by the stile, his features weatherbeaten and partially obscured by a patriarchal beard. He wore a battered pork-pie hat and a voluminous waterproof. His left hand held a stout stick, his right was in the pocket of his coat. He radiated the surly, unassuming arrogance of a farmer on his own land – though Dougal knew this certainly wasn't old Spencer from Havishall village who rented the fields around here.

Dougal's teeth were chattering, but he forced the words out.

‘There's a man behind you.'

The feeble whisper enraged Lee. His thumbs began to tighten.

‘Oh, crap. That's the oldest . . .'

‘What the hell are you doing on my land?' shouted the stranger. ‘Here, boy,' he added over his shoulder and Dougal had a vision of a gigantic avenging hound rushing down the field to savage these trespassers on his master's territory.

Lee turned angrily. ‘What the f—'

There was a crack, initially sharp but sending dull echoes bouncing over the estuary. Lee seemed to rise slightly, as if caught in the grip of a gust of wind. Then he slumped heavily down. Dougal became aware that there was something warm and sticky on his face. It was dark, lying here under Lee.

‘Something along the lines of
Doctor Livingstone, I presume
would be appropriate at this juncture, wouldn't it?'

Dougal went rigid – not with mere physical fear this time, but with a terror which had more eerie origins. The newcomer's voice had replaced its flat East Anglian twang with the fruity vowels of middle-class English. That wasn't the trouble.

The voice belonged to James Hanbury.

A
black tide of terror flooded over Dougal, engulfing his fragile certainties and suspending him in its oily slime, as helpless as a foetus in its amniotic fluid. Then, just as suddenly, the fear ebbed, sucked back into those hidden recesses of his mind where nightmares lay embalmed. In its place came words which shaped themselves and clustered in comforting, protective sentences.

The dead, they said, don't walk in the afternoon. Their methods of killing people are subtle and bloodless: they don't use bullets. Hanbury must be alive. And I am lying here under Lee, with the taste of his blood in my mouth.

Light and air returned to Dougal simultaneously, as Lee's body was rolled off him. The farmer stood over him, looking down with Hanbury's large, pale eyes and holding a brilliantly white handkerchief in his left hand.

‘Here,' said James Hanbury. ‘Take this. I expect you'd like to wipe your face.'

‘How thoughtful,' said Dougal, because it was. ‘How did you—?'

‘Explanations later. Suffice it to say, you can't keep the good man down. But first, how had you planned to get rid of the debris?'

Dougal outlined the scheme that he had never really believed they would be in a position to implement. If they could get the bodies to the
Sally-Anne
, it would be possible, under the first cover of darkness, to ferry them just beyond the sandbank which partially blocked the mouth of the Alben estuary and drop them, suitably weighted, over the side. ‘The tide will be ebbing fast by then and they will just be washed out into the North Sea.' In fact, Dougal knew, the tide would tug them north, up the coast, rather than east. He had worked out the details earlier today, picking his way with some difficulty through
Reed's Almanac
and the
Admiralty Tide Tables
.

‘Very neat,' approved Hanbury. ‘I suppose there's no chance of them being washed ashore inconveniently soon?'

Dougal shook his head. ‘Not if they're weighted down. And it's a spring tide this evening, which should help.'

With sudden remorse he remembered Amanda, waiting cold and fearful on the
Sally-Anne
; he should have called her earlier. He shouted
Caroline
across the water. Hanbury stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching everything with bright interest.

When Amanda reached them, Hanbury allowed no time for conversation or for coming to terms with the fact they were still alive and likely to remain that way for the forseeable future. Probably, Dougal reflected, the physical activity required was not only expedient but therapeutic.

The three of them laboured like a team of professional undertakers for nearly two hours. The light faded into darkness as they did so. First, two trips with the wheelbarrow were necessary – one for Tanner and the other for the contrivance which had killed him.

Hanbury surveyed the pendulum with amusement.

‘I didn't really have time to see it properly on my way down. It's really very ingenious. Reminds me of Heath Robinson.'

Transporting Tanner to the estuary was extremely difficult, largely because of his length. His limbs, as yet unconfined by rigor mortis, flopped over the sides of the wheelbarrow, impeding their progress whenever they could.

Hanbury went through the pockets of both corpses on the river bank, putting what he found in a green plastic carrier bag which had come from Harrods. He straightened up and remarked that at least there was no need to go through their clothing and snip out the labels. It was all chain-store stuff. It usually was, these days.

The worst part of the operation was getting the cargo from the shore on to the
Sally-Anne
. Three trips in the dinghy were called for. Dougal didn't mind the rowing – it was transferring each load into the cockpit that was the difficulty. It was odd, too, how a part of Hanbury's assurance dropped away from him as he left the land. Dougal found that he was giving the orders during this stage, an experience he failed to relish.

Just before six, Dougal started the engine, slipped the mooring and set off towards the mouth of the estuary. Beside him in the cockpit, Hanbury was weighting Lee and Tanner with scrap iron from the stables. Dougal gave him a length of nylon rope and the CQR thirty-pound anchor to help him in his task; Malcolm would be furious. Amanda stood on the companionway, lighting Hanbury with a shaded torch.

Dougal kept their speed low, lit no navigation lights and hoped for the best. The sandbank and the sea lay one and a half miles downstream. Navigation wasn't a problem – he'd done this trip with Malcolm several times in darkness. If he kept the
Sally-Anne
on the north side of the estuary and steered steadily south-southeast, they would be all right. There were two farms on the north bank and one to the south – their lights were useful as a check. Lastly, as Dougal's eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he found he could make out the dim outlines of the bank on either side.

They crossed the sandbank at the mouth of the estuary and tipped the bodies into the shifting surface of the sea. Lee and Tanner slid soundlessly into the watery anonymity of their graves.

As they returned to the mooring, Hanbury and Amanda went below to boil a kettle and try to get warm. Dougal could hear a murmur of voices from the saloon and, occasionally, the gurgle of Amanda's laughter. He lit a cigarette and stared at its glowing tip. It must be the hottest thing for miles around. Pity it wasn't rather larger.

When the
Sally-Anne
was back at her mooring, they sat around the table in the saloon with mugs of tea. Dougal and Amanda sat on one berth and Hanbury on the other. It was rather like an interview, Dougal decided, though he wasn't sure who was interviewing whom. He noticed, with a flicker of surliness which he tried to suppress, that his hands were bluer and his clothes were wetter than the others'.

Hanbury had removed his beard on the way back to the creek and borrowed some face cream from Amanda to expunge his weather-beaten complexion. His plump, unlined face beamed across the table at them, looking as prosperous and as vaguely distinguished as it had done when Dougal had last seen it, in Lamb's Conduit Street.

‘Well,' he said. ‘I think that just about wraps up this phase of the operations. Certainly there's nothing else to worry about – Lee was as close as Delhi in the hot season. Only Tanner knew something of what he was after, and of course he's no longer a problem. Jolly good.'

Hanbury's tone, Dougal thought, was that of a commanding officer commending the actions of two promising subalterns at the close of a tricky campaign. The gentlemanly Machiavelli of the Lamb had changed into the equally well-bred colonel on active service. Or, to be more precise, the actor had changed roles. Hanbury wasn't like a real colonel, but like the public image of one, as publicized by hundreds of war films.

The clipped voice continued.

‘We've got some mopping up to do, but we can safely leave that till later. We should take the Lancia up to London, I think, rather than have it found down in Suffolk. And we'll have to wait until daylight to tidy up the last traces of this afternoon's fracas.'

Dougal nodded. ‘Yes. We'd anticipated that.'

‘Now—' Hanbury glanced down at the table, as if he expected to find a neatly typed agenda awaiting his eyes ‘—your story or mine?'

‘Yours,' said Amanda firmly. ‘We're more in the dark than you are. Besides, you're dying to tell it to us.'

Hanbury chuckled and inclined his head towards Amanda, acknowledging the hit. Dougal suddenly wondered if women found him sexually attractive. He had the assurance and charm of a well-preserved chameleon which managed to imply, rightly or wrongly, a mysterious inner identity. Perhaps Hanbury appealed only to curious women.

‘It has been something of a coup, I suppose. Though I can only claim part of the credit. Some of it must go to you two. And we've all been very lucky. Can I assume that Miss Jackson—'

‘Amanda. Please.' They smiled at one another in the yellow lamp light.

‘—Amanda knows the details of our previous meeting and my letter to you, William?'

‘Yes. She knew everything from the beginning, actually.'

‘Good. Well, I wrote that letter in perfect good faith. I left the hotel that evening in a taxi, but I must have been followed. They caught up with me when I was on foot – Tanner and another one of Lee's creatures whose name I don't know. It was the old technique – make it look like a mugging – the work of amateurs who went too far. They damaged me rather severely, rifled my pockets and left me for dead. I suspect they must have heard somebody coming – Lee's subordinates didn't make that sort of mistake usually. I was merely concussed and rather picturesquely damaged.' The skin around Hanbury's left eye was still slightly discoloured, Dougal noticed.

‘Some good Samaritan called an ambulance and in the morning I woke up with a severe headache, swaddled in bandages.

‘I lay in hospital for most of the day. I gave a false name and discharged myself in the evening. The hospital authorities weren't terribly happy about it – for one thing I hadn't been seen by the police, quite apart from my physical condition. But of course there was nothing they could do.

‘That day in hospital was very valuable – it gave me time to assess my position. The important thing was that Lee must assume me to be dead. His two hooligans were probably pretty sure they'd killed me, and they certainly wouldn't have allowed Lee to think there was a chance they might have failed.'

‘How could you be so sure?' Amanda asked.

‘I wasn't, at the time. It was just a reasonable assumption based on what I knew of the people concerned. And it happened to be right.

‘Anyway, I decided to vanish. I have a little
pied-à-terre
in Acton – rather a squalid little bedsitter, as a matter of fact – which I maintain for just such emergencies as this. From there, I inserted a notice of my death in
The Times
and the
Telegraph
. (Did you know Lee took the
Telegraph?
One would have expected the
Sun
or the
Cork Examiner
. It just shows how complicated people's characters can be, doesn't it?) I must confess, I rather enjoyed seeing my name there. If Lee had any lingering doubts about my death, that must have settled it. Printing something makes it sound so authoritative, doesn't it?'