Gay Phoenix (9 page)

‘I’m not interested, Povey. Not in what you’re thinking of. We needn’t go over that ground again. I’m a man of imagination, you see. So just remember what I said. Scope – that’s what I’m after. You could even call it a bit of fun.’

‘It’s not practicable.’ Povey said this firmly, although he was conscious of feeling a certain stir of admiration for Butter. They did have common ground. Povey himself was now living (barring his present predicament) at ease. But he was also living dangerously, and it was something which – always within bounds – he had a taste for. ‘Our ways are going to part, Butter. Make no mistake about that. You clear out, see? But you can take a packet with you. That I don’t deny. Ready cash comes to me fairly easily, I don’t deny either. Name your price.’

‘I’m not naming anything.’

‘Come, now. You just haven’t the scale of your opportunity in your head. I’m not offering you chicken feed. This isn’t a talk about a thousand quid. Nor five thousand, for the matter of that.’

‘I’d bloody well hope not.’ Butter had spoken stoutly, but it was now clearly his turn to be startled. His eyes had narrowed, ‘Would you call yourself a millionaire?’

‘Certainly I would. A cool million’s not all that nowadays, you know. Fifty thousand is what I’m thinking of, and within a couple of days you can have it in ten-pound notes. Do you know that that much can be got into a small suitcase? A small battered unobtrusive suitcase. It’s worth thinking over. A man has plenty of scope, as you call it, with that tucked away under his bed.’

‘I might come back for more,’ Butter said. ‘Have you thought of that one?’

‘Of course I have. That’s the ABC of a situation like this. And I’ve only one point to make about it. You’d lose a friend.’

‘What do you mean – lose a friend?’

‘I mean make an enemy. We’re getting on quite well at the moment. But I promise you that would stop.’

Butter was silent. He drained his whisky and looked thoughtful. Povey employed the interval in glancing casually out of the window he was sitting beside. It commanded the pier – the longest pier in England, he believed. It boasted no ‘illuminations’ at this off-season of the year, and now displayed only a thin chain of lights. But they didn’t shut it up – or not for a couple of hours yet. And by this time, somewhere in its semi-darkness, his unknown confederates would be waiting.

‘It’s a thought,’ Butter said. ‘It’s certainly a thought. I wouldn’t say you’re not a dangerous man, Master Arthur. You were a dangerous boy at times.’

‘Well, it’s a thought you’d better think about. Unless of course, you’re still not interested.’

‘I’m bloody well not going to be hurried.’

‘One man’s hurry is another man’s dawdling.’ Povey made this not very pregnant remark at random – and perhaps to conceal a sudden sense of success as within his grasp. Butter was weakening. The prudent man in him was whispering that a bird in the hand is worth two on the bush; a concrete fortune more to be gone after than a nebulous notion of what he called ‘partnership’ in a hazardous deception. But Povey, if he felt triumph at thus gaining further ground, felt an obscure compunction as well. This – strange as it must appear – wasn’t at all because he was edging Butter towards a sudden and violent end; it was because, as a means to this goal, he was tempting and corrupting the man; using the lure of gold to seduce him from a plan which at least had a spark of imagination to it. But this was mere sentiment, and the realist in Povey himself knew that here was no time for that.

‘In fact,’ he said briskly, ‘I insist on settling this now – or certainly before we go to bed. I don’t propose to lose sleep over it. So here’s a fair offer. Accept my proposition within the next half hour, and I’ll throw in an extra five thousand. Enough to buy you a nice Mercedes, that is.’

‘I’ve got to think, I tell you.’

‘Look, it’s still nearly an hour till closing time. Go and take a little toddle. Walk out to the end of that pier. There’ll be a bit of a breeze out there. Clear your head.’

‘Are you kidding, Povey?’ It was with discouraging sarcasm that Butter produced this. ‘I don’t think! Haven’t I admitted you’re a dangerous man?’

‘Then stay put – or take a copper with you.’ Povey laughed easily. ‘Not that you couldn’t be quite clear that nobody was following you. The first couple of hundred yards of the thing are as bare as a baby’s bottom. But forget it. Just a thought again.’

‘Well, well! Do you know, I think I’ll take your advice?’ Butter had lounged to his feet, and was evidently amused. He seemed, in fact, to have thought of some witticism that appealed to him. ‘But then you’re rather given, aren’t you, to shoving inconvenient persons into the briny? So you must give me your word you won’t follow me and do that. Your word of honour as an English gentleman, Povey old boy.’

‘I give you precisely that.’ Povey successfully restrained himself from showing resentment before this impertinence. He did, however, emit a sound expressive of impatience. ‘But, no – we’ll damned well settle this now. Sit down.’

‘Too late for giving orders, Povey. You’ll be lucky if you’re not taking them from now on. Back in twenty minutes – and just you stay put. Nice to have that word of honour, of course. But – do you know? – I rather think I’ll glance over my shoulder from time to time.’

Few mental exercises are so satisfactory as the leisured contemplation of one’s own cleverness. Arthur Povey was now in a position to address himself to it. Deciding that his handling of the situation abundantly entitled him to a second whisky, he made his way over to the bar and obtained this. He returned to his seat by the window and glanced into the night. The pier stretched into darkness in front of him. He fancied he could just distinguish the vanishing figure of Butter. But vanishing whither – amid what shades?
Quae nunc abibis in loca?
Povey murmured this to himself in a sudden alcoholic gloom. (His education had been of the useless public school order.)

He realized that he was alone in this part of the pub; even the barman had disappeared behind a partition in order to attend to customers of inferior consideration. He was as alone as he had been when the last ripples had smoothed themselves out over the body of his brother in the limitless Pacific. His gloom deepened, and became tinged with alarm. He saw that he hadn’t been all that clever, after all. His thinking had stopped off one step too soon. What was going to happen next? Butter’s disappearance was not going to be absolute – or not unless his fellow criminals were equipped to carry off his dead body in a van, or had a launch to hand, ready to hurry it far out to sea. And certainly no qualified medical practitioner was going to turn up and sign on a dotted line that this hotel underling had died in an expected fashion of natural causes. There would be a dead body, suspicious circumstances, and a coroner’s inquest. There would be police enquiries in preparation for that; the barman would be questioned, and there would be a substantial chance that he himself would be run to earth. He would have to explain the very odd circumstance that he had been drinking with this menial person immediately before his death. Quite drastic consequences might follow from that.

All this was cause for uneasiness enough. But Povey felt something further. It might be described, perhaps sentimentally, as a stirring of his better nature. Poor old Butter. He hadn’t been a bad chap. Impudent, possibly, and lacking in a properly obsequious bearing towards his betters. But he had been useful in his time – as in that matter, for example, of Charles’ money box. Into Povey’s recollection there now oddly flooded a number of such services rendered. They added up to the reflection that Butter was a man capable of resource and stratagem in a very high degree. They wouldn’t help Butter now – not with ruthless professional assassins lurking ahead of him when he was reckoning with nothing but a possible amateur assailant coming up from behind. But, given only half a chance, Butter could be your man. And it was precisely in that character that Butter had offered himself.

Arthur Povey jumped to his feet. For he, too, was a man of action. And he realized he had made a mistake.

On neither hand, as he emerged from the Cock and Bottle, did there appear to be a soul on the esplanade. He broke into a run, shoved a coin into a turnstile, and was on the pier. Broad and bare and empty, it stretched into darkness tempered only by a feeble electric glimmer here and there. Except for a low lap of water, there wasn’t a sound. As yet no cry, no splash, no shot. But there wasn’t much time, if any effective intervention was to be achieved. He recalled what he could of the topography of the pier, which he had never done more than scan idly as the monstrous invention of a past age. Halfway along, there was a big bulge, which must lend it from the air something of the appearance of a boa constrictor in process of digesting a baby elephant; this was occupied by a complex of tearooms, cafeterias, snack bars and similar hideous haunts of the folk. Right at the end there was a yet larger area of the same sort, housing a kind of Kubla Khan pleasure-dome known as the Amusement Palace. It contained a concert hall, and presumably sundry other amenities as well. But all these places would be locked up, and didn’t enter the picture. What was important was that round both these large excrescences the pier itself narrowed to a species of catwalk, enabling the perambulating public to make a complete circuit of the entire structure without entering any of these places of further resort.

Povey was still running, and still without a plan: a combination of impetuosity and ill-preparedness alien to his normal habit, and no doubt indicative of his present radical confusion of mind. It did occur to him, however, that he ought to be provided with a weapon. The men he had set upon Butter were certainly armed adequately for their lethal intent. Probably they proposed simply to shoot the poor chap, since even respectable criminals native to these islands were now given to a quite lavish employment of firearms. Povey himself had never so much as possessed a revolver, although he could handle one at need. At the moment, he didn’t command so much as a walking stick.

He came to a momentary halt as the first outcrop of pier buildings loomed dimly before him. He could round it clockwise or anti-clockwise as he chose. Probably if you went right your itinerary included a Gents, and if you went left it included a Ladies. Otherwise, it made no matter. But the mere having to choose at all brought sharply to him the knowledge that he must
think
. It was no good simply charging along; he must think himself into the minds of those people – intent on liquidating their supposedly perfidious ex-associate – and calculate just what they were likely to do.

They hadn’t much scope in the way of lurking-places. There were these two long stretches of pier as bare as the back of your fist, with nothing but benches here and there, some of them enclosed in skimpy glass shelters which wouldn’t conceal a cat. They’d be no good at all for an ambush. Nor could they well wait
under
the pier, in a kind of seaweed jungle of iron girders, and from there swing themselves into action as if they were a horde of jumping and clambering Tarzans. It would be in the deeper shadow of one or other of those hulking buildings that they would crouch. And probably they would choose the larger and farther out of the two: from there any untoward sound resulting from their activities would be the more unlikely to carry to shore. Moreover they would, in the first instance, let Butter pass harmless by. They could thus ensure that he wasn’t being followed, either by his own design or that of somebody else. Their moment to close on him, and despatch him by whatever method they had in their heads, would be when he had almost completed the circuit of the Amusement Palace.

But surely it ought all to have happened by this time? Butter, of course, must have been well down the pier before Povey had experienced his strange change of heart and sprung to action as a result – so even if one allowed for the extravagant distance the structure ran out into the sea, one had to suppose Butter to have reached the end of it and begun his return journey a good many minutes ago. It was possible that Butter had paused somewhere en route – even sitting down on one of those benches to weigh the pros and cons of Povey’s offer. In this event his enemies might well play a waiting game; if he turned back they would then pursue him down the naked pier; but they would bide their time in hiding as long as there was a chance of his going on. These considerations came to Povey as he ran on again. He didn’t find them altogether persuasive. That nothing had yet happened was, indeed, crucial to any chance of success his intervention might have. All the same, it hinted at some unknown factor having entered the situation. He couldn’t think what it might be, and he felt a mounting uneasiness as he ran.

There was a single bright light – almost a beacon – at the extreme end of the pier; short of that, only widely spaced pallid pools of dim radiance showed feebly in the complete darkness; there wasn’t a glimmer on the sea on either side, and even the lights of the town now seemed very far away. But even in this setting – Povey suddenly realized – his own presence need be by no means undetectable. Every time he passed beneath one of those ineffective little lamps he would be visible to a vigilant eye at least as some sort of moving object. Perhaps he was being observed now. Perhaps they even knew his identity, or knew that he wasn’t the accomplice that the ferocious man had so thick-headedly taken him for. Perhaps, regarding him as an equivocal and dangerous character (such as, indeed, he precisely was) they had resolved to eliminate him and Butter in one operation.
That was why nothing had happened yet
. They were somehow quietly holding on to Butter while waiting for
him
.

But by the time Povey had grasped this possible dimension of the affair, he was confronting the Amusement Palace itself. Because of the single brilliant light beyond it, it showed only as a black blank wall in front of him: monstrous and almost shapeless, like a botched silhouette. It might have been a mountain of ebony, of jet, but he knew it to be in fact constructed out of some transparent substance, lozenge-like and many-faceted, designed to flash and glitter invitingly to idle holidaymakers on the beaches and esplanade. And one optical trick was at work now. From the last of the lights strung along the pier a single beam was refracted to a point a little to the left of Povey as he stood. What it played upon – what it very mysteriously played upon – was an axe. This axe, a large and alluringly wicked-looking axe, seemed to hover unaccountably in air, breast-high. Before he could in the least explain its presence, or even be wholly confident of its materiality, Povey found he coveted this axe very much. He felt at once that it was
his
axe. It was almost as if a protecting Providence had handed it down from the sky. He stepped forward, put out a hand, and touched glass.