Death Has Deep Roots (17 page)

“I’m going round in circles at the moment,” said Nap frankly, “but I may have something for you soon.”

Over the line he thought he heard his father sigh.

After lunch he thought he would take a walk and try to straighten out his ideas.

The midafternoon quiet of a provincial town lay upon Angers. He strolled along the main street, past the barracks and the offices of the Administration, and at the end of it he came, a little unexpectedly, upon the Jardin Planteölogique et Zoölogique. He pushed through the turnstile, made his way along the neatly kept path and sat down on a bench under a cedar tree, in front of a cage full of dispirited monkeys. He had to sort things out.

He was far from clear as to the final answer but some of the components in the puzzle were falling into place. The person round whom the whole thing revolved was little Maître Gimelet, the attorney. Maître Gimelet had lied to him almost every time he had opened his mouth; and behind him was Monsieur Sainte who had lied about his residence in Saumur, and behind him were the brothers Marquis who had stood surety for Monsieur Sainte when he came to England and who had employed Maître Gimelet to sell their farm.

What was the connecting link? What was the common factor which joined them to Major Thoseby and Lieutenant Wells – and to the grim proceedings now holding the stage at the Old Bailey?

The only possible indication which he had yet had was that it was all, somehow, connected with the currency racket. Mrs. Roper was the associate of a man called Stimmy who dealt in smuggled currency. And, if Madame Delboise was to be believed, he himself, immediately he had moved toward the Loire, had run into the people who managed the French end of the business.

There were a lot of questions to be answered, but terribly little time for the answers to be found.

He sat there until the sun disappeared and the chill of the autumn evening forced him to move.

Back in the hotel he found to his annoyance that he had been called twice on the telephone.

Not from England – a local call.

As he was talking the bell went again. It was a man’s voice. He was calling, he said, on behalf of Madame Delboise. He regretted that he had missed Monsieur Rimbault on the previous occasions. He had some information for him. It was not of a nature to be freely discussed over the telephone.

“All right,” said Nap. “Where are you?”

“Number 115 Rue de Piste. A wine merchant’s shop.”

“I’ll be right along,” said Nap.

When he had rung off he thought for a moment and then asked for the number that Madame Delboise had given him.

He recognised her voice at once. Shortly he repeated the conversation which he had just had.

“Very curious,” said Madame Delboise. “It is true that I have some information for you, but so far as I am aware none of our people have telephoned you. I did not think that anyone but myself knew your number. Also I have never heard of the—where was it?”

Nap repeated the address.

Madame Delboise asked him to hold on. In a few minutes she was back. “The message did not come from here,” she said.

“All right,” said Nap. “I thought that was it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I think I’d better go along and see what it’s all about. We’ve got to cut our corners if we’re going to get to the answer in time.”

“All right,” said Madame Delboise. “Only wait, if you please, half an hour before you set out. If you are asked why you did not come at once say that you were delayed by a long – distance call from England.”

By the time he got out into the street it was dusk – a clear autumn evening with a frosty twinkle of stars.

The Rue de Piste turned out to be a long road, which straggled out into the countryside northward, and by the time he had reached Number 115 he was almost clear of the town. It was a moderate-sized house of pink stucco, built, he guessed, since the war. Shop below and house above. The shop windows were closely covered with white iron shutters and seemed to be in darkness.

There were lights showing in the first floor.

Nap discovered a side door and pressed the bell.

For a minute or more nothing happened and he thought that he had not been heard. Then an outside light went on over the porch and footsteps came slowly along the hall. The door was opened by a very small, very old woman, dressed in black.

“Madame Delboise?”

She peered up at him blankly.

“Madame Delboise asked me to come here.”

“You are Monsieur Rimbault?”

“Yes.”

“Follow please,” said the old woman.

She did not go back into the house as Nap had expected. Instead she threw her shawl over her head and hobbled quickly away up the alley which separated the house from its neighbour. She did not trouble to look back.

Nap had no choice but to follow her, but he could not help reflecting that if Madame Delboise’s rescue party was stationed in a car down the road it was going to have to think and move fast. The alleyway they were going up was far too narrow for any wheeled vehicle.

The old woman turned to the right, went down some steps, turned left again. They had gone three or four hundred yards and were now approaching another main road, a road which presumably ran parallel with the Rue de Piste.

She stopped and indicated the side door of a house, which stood ajar. It was an undistinguished sort of house, but Nap could see that there were lights in the first-floor windows.

“Monsieur will go up. He will find the door on the left.”

“Thank you,” said Nap.

The stairs were steep and turned twice, and being lit only by an economical blue bulb they were not too easy to negotiate. On the landing were two doors. Nap knocked at the one which showed a light. A voice bade him enter.

There were three men in the room and as soon as Nap was fairly inside one of them moved across behind him and turned the key in the lock. It did not need this gesture to tell Nap that he had come to the right place. As soon as he cast eyes upon the man who seemed to be the leader of the three he knew what he was up against.

This was a big man, thick but not heavy, strong but not clumsy. The coat cut more tightly than was necessary across the shoulders and the biceps. The hair black and well brushed. The twelve hours’ beard across the cheekbones. The brown eyes expressionless. A direct descendant of Patron-Minette. Nap had met his like on many occasions. He had seen him put against walls and shot, blandly defiant, spitting on to the floor with delicate timing a second before the bullets went into his body. He had seen him using a machine gun and he had seen him using a knife. He had seen him during the great retreat, bundling up the bodies of Germans, alive, wounded or dead, like stooks of corn, and tossing them into the back of a blazing oil truck.

“Sit down,” said the man.

“What—?” began Nap.

“And keep quiet.”

At a signal the lights were turned out. The window was opened and they all sat in the darkness and waited. A car or two went past, but none stopped. The bell rang again. No one moved. Nap heard the old woman’s footsteps in the hall below and the front door opening. Steps coming lightly upstairs and a knock on the door.

The window was closed and shuttered, the light turned on again, and the door unlocked. It was the unpleasant youth who had spoken to Nap in the hotel in Rouen.

“He was not followed,” he announced.

“Good,” said the big man. “Get out the car, if you please, and we will go. Ramon will stay behind. Coco to come with me. You will drive.” He nodded to the little man who disappeared again.

It was all perfectly professional, unemphatic, almost casual, and Nap had a cold feeling that he had walked into something which it was not going to be very easy to get out of.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“I know nothing,” said the big man. “I do what I am told. You are going to see those who will be able to talk to you.”

“The chief of the smugglers,” suggested Nap.

There was a tiny check in all their movements.

“If you talk again,” said the man, “I will fill your mouth with sawdust and have your lips strapped with tape. It will not be comfortable.”

Three minutes later they were in the car, an olive-green Citroen. The little man was driving, and driving well. Nap sat in the capacious back seat between the other two men.

The car skirted Angers and turned west.

They were some distance out of the town – it was difficult to judge, in the dark, and at the speed they were going – but he thought they might have gone eight or ten kilometres when the big man touched the driver on the shoulder.

“Slower,” he said, “and cut out your engine.”

In the silence which ensued the big man sat with his eyes closed, his chin on his shoulder.

“We are being followed,” he said at last, “by a car without lights. But we are near the turning now. I think they are too far away to see us.”

The driver nodded. He had switched the engine on again and they were gathering speed.

Ahead of them was a long straight stretch of white road, running slightly uphill. At the top a bend. As the car rounded the bend and started to run down the other side the driver turned out all the lights. The car barely checked, made a sharp turn to the left, and they were in a small road. The surface was poor. Then left again, the engine was cut, and the car came to a standstill.

As it did so Nap heard the noise of two cars on the main road they had just left. They were big cars and they were going fast. They went past.

“Get moving,” said the big man. “They’ll come back as soon as they miss us on the next straight.”

The car bumped forward, forked right, and came out on to what looked like a private drive. They bucketed along for about half a mile, descending gradually. The state of the road combined with the lack of lights to reduce their speed to little more than a crawl.

Nap guessed that the river lay somewhere ahead of them.

The car swung off the road into a field and stopped. No one moved. For a long minute they listened. There was no sound at all.

“All out,” said the big man.

They walked together across the grass with their prisoner a pace or two in front of them. Nap’s mind was obstinately blank of ideas. He realised that the big man had lied to him. He was not being taken to see anybody. That had been said to keep him quiet. He had been taken out to be killed, and killed he would be, quietly and economically, in a very few minutes.

Suddenly he saw the river. Not ten feet ahead of him it winked under the moon, jet and silver. It ran in a great curve through the meadow which they were crossing and Nap guessed why they had come to this precise point. The river there would be deep, with the undertow of the current on the bend.

“Stop now,” said the big man. They closed up on him. Nap saw that Coco was carrying a small sack over his shoulder and from the way it swung he guessed there would be weights in it. The little man had produced a coil of insulated wire.

“Hold out your wrists,” said the big man.

Nap lifted his hands as if to comply. Then, as the big man stepped forward, he jumped. He was jumping for his life and he put all his strength and agility into it. As an athlete clears a vaulting horse, with his hands ahead of him, so Nap went head-first between the two men. He saw the blue glint of a knife coming up to meet him, but he was past and going away from the blow as it landed. A hot and stinging feeling in his side, then his hands touched a tussock of grass and he doubled up and his movement became a forward roll.

Then he was falling, and stars and moon were blotted out together as he went down into the cold black waters of the Loire.

“Your name is Charles Edward Younger. You are the doctor attached for police duties to Q Division of the Metropolitan Police?”

“I am.”

“Were you called to a hotel in Pearlyman Street on the night of March fourteenth of this year?”

“Yes.”

“What time did you reach the hotel?”

“Ten minutes after midnight.”

“You were taken immediately to one of the hotel bedrooms and there shown a body that you now understand to be Major Thoseby’s?”

“Yes.”

“You first examined Major Thoseby’s body then at about ten past twelve?”

“Yes.”

“How long, in your opinion, had he then been dead?”

“Well, that is a question I always answer with some caution. Of course, in this case, I was on the scene early enough to be reasonably accurate. I should have said, not more than two hours, certainly not less than one hour. Most probably nearer ninety minutes.”

Doctor Younger then gave, at some length, his technical reasons for arriving at this estimate.

“Thank you, doctor. Would you describe, now, to the court, the wound which you examined – there was no doubt, by the way, that this wound was the cause of death?”

“None at all.”

“Very well, then, what sort of wound was it?”

“It was a single deep incision. The point of entry was just below the sternum, three inches to the right of the ensiform cartilage. The wound penetrated the left lobe of the liver, passing upward in the direction of the left shoulder and into the heart. Such a wound would cause death in a matter of seconds.”

“Omitting all technicalities, Doctor Younger, would it be correct to say that the weapon which caused this wound was thrust upward, under the ribs, into the heart?”

“Yes, in a left-handed direction.”

“You are of the opinion that the person who used the weapon held it in their left hand?”

“It is not a question of opinion, I am certain they did.”

“Very well. You have seen this knife.” A black-handled, long-bladed, kitchen knife, sharpened on both edges, one of the exhibits, was handed to the witness. “Was the wound consistent with having been made with a knife such as this one?”

“Yes, I should think that was about right.”

“Would it need great strength to inflict such a wound with such a weapon?”

“Not at all. A heavy, well-ground knife like this would go in fairly easily, particularly in that direction.”