Hostage (18 page)

I also suspect that Special Branch, whose chiefs must have been present at that agonising cabinet meeting, had reason to be more confident. Have they got a new lead? I hope to God they have.

But I have made a bad mistake as a result of this unexpected move. Elise will see a morning paper. How can Mick explain my story that we had rescued Clotilde? And what is Elise going to say in conversation with her?

Holed up and defiant. Let these urban guerrillas catch me if they can! The police are now far more dangerous since Julian Despard has come to life for them. By now they must have matched his fingerprints and know that he is Herbert Johnson. I wish they could also know that he is the one person with a faint hope of preventing the holocaust.

Prove it, they would demand; but I cannot. The only proof is the bomb itself. Rex’s identity unknown to me. Mallant’s involvement without a scrap of evidence. In a matter of weeks or months, starting from what I can tell them, they might be able to penetrate Magma and smash it. But they have not got weeks or months. Hours? It could be hours.

I should have foreseen it. I should have burned that wrecked car. There it was, crying aloud for investigation of the bullet hole in the windscreen and Clotilde’s blood in the ditch alongside. But I had no time to set fire to it. As it was, Mick and I were lucky to get clear just before the oncoming headlights were near enough to read the number of the estate car.

That second-hand car of mine was registered in the name of Herbert Johnson with a false address. A common name. In the normal way it would have taken some leisurely passing of files before the police traced the identity of the owner. But they are fighting for life – their own as well as that of the city – and God knows how many memory banks are ticking away to the tune of Roke’s Tining. A few seconds of computer time would be enough to show that a Herbert Johnson, publisher’s representative, called on Sir Frederick Gammel with a hired car and a not very satisfactory story of what had happened to his own. And the fingerprints on that wreck in Pednor Bottom? One collective yell of triumph from Special Branch! They are Julian Despard’s.

This morning I drove back into the Cotswolds determined to extract from Clotilde whatever William the Builder meant to her. Having parked the estate car in Chedworth as usual, I walked to the cottage to wait for Mick whom I had instructed to call there every day about two o’clock in case I had returned with news. It was far too risky to telephone my movements.

When he turned up he was worried and depressed. Police had been at Roke’s Tining the previous afternoon for a further search of the spot where Vladimir had been killed and the leaves where he had been buried. When Elise telephoned he thought it best to tell her to stay at Andoversford for the night and come out in the morning.

On her arrival she told him that she had read the Government’s reply to the ultimatum. Mick was in a quandary and took refuge in silence, always effective with Elise who never committed the security sin of asking questions. He guessed that when I had ordered her out to Roke’s Tining I might have dropped the story of Clotilde’s treachery and accounted for her presence by the simpler, more convincing explanation that we had rescued her. But now that would hardly do. He had decided to let the matter ride until she had talked to Clotilde and he knew what line of defence he must take.

Elise went in at once to Clotilde, fired him out of the room during her examination – he should have refused to go, but one must forgive the dog-like obedience of the lover – and remained half an hour. He did listen at the door but it was of sturdy oak five hundred years old and the bed was far away from it; so he heard nothing but a cry of horror. When Elise came out, her face was pale and set and her eyes blazing. She refused to speak to him, saying that she would carry out her medical duties and nothing more.

I asked what she had said to Sir Frederick.

‘Stonily polite she was. Treated him as if he was a screw in a gaol for high-class tarts. Poor old Fred is suffering from conscience. He doesn’t believe in knocking ’em about.’

‘He doesn’t think we knocked Clotilde about, does he?’

‘Put it this way, Gil! He thinks we should have taken care she wasn’t knocked about, thinks we should have said: “please, Madam, be good enough to step out of the way of the car and point that gun t’other way”.’

When I arrived at the house I got the same treatment from Elise. No more dewy eyes. For all she knew I was still her Group Commander, so I was stern. She responded with equal sternness, omitting any report of what had upset her as if I must know it already.

I went up at once to see Clotilde. Gammel had chosen her room intelligently. It was on the third floor with a window looking only on to the courtyard. No tempting ledge or drain pipe was near it and she could not escape – being unable to knot sheets with one hand – without a shattering drop to the cobbles below. There was a wash basin in the room with an old-fashioned geyser for hot water and she had been provided with an antique mahogany commode for her needs.

She looked better than when we had moved her from the cottage and, as I recognised from the lowered lids, in the mood for attack. It was difficult to re-start interrogation on new lines because I had already claimed to know where the bomb was concealed. She herself had not been in the secret, but my mention of Argyll Square had revealed to her a possible hiding-place and the man who had constructed it.

I began to talk round the transport from Roke’s Tining to Hoxton and Hoxton to the prepared site, but got nothing out of her except that William the Builder was a cell leader.

‘He made a good job of the cache,’ I said.

‘Of the garden railings? Yes. He left the hole underground when he repaired them a year ago.’

‘Try again, Clotilde! The police would have found it.’

‘Who sent them to Argyll Square, Gil? Rex could think of no one but you.’

‘If I meant them to find it, I should have sent them to the right spot.’

‘But you couldn’t because all you know is that it is in a drain pipe. You were quite convincing, my minor Trotsky, but you shouldn’t let prisoners lie in a comfortable bed with time to think.’

What she had had was not time to think, but the news in the morning papers. I tried the line of swearing I had rescued her because I could not contemplate the long sentence she would get.

‘Long sentence? They can prove nothing. You hoped to screw information out of me which the police never could. But it won’t help you, Gil, and I will tell you lie after lie to avoid more torture.’

‘Torture?’

‘Elise considered my tooth was knocked out by a blunt instrument. A round mallet, say.’

‘If she can’t tell the difference between a swipe from a car and a block of wood. …’

‘The car hit my shoulder. If it had hit my face it would have broken cheek and jaw, not just knocked out a molar. Look at the round bruise!’

‘Evidence insufficient. You must have fallen on the stump of a sapling or something.’

‘Oh, there is more evidence, Gil. You ask little Elise!’

So she had convinced Elise that I was not only double-crossing Magma but a determined and brutal interrogator. By God, she made me think seriously of torture! Useless, of course. She would, as she said, have told me lie after lie till I was sick of it.

I went out to deal with Elise, meaning to be gentle for it was not her fault that she had been deceived. The only certainty the poor girl had was that the Government held Clotilde and that it stood to reason I must be a government agent.

I found her in the garden, flitting up and down with her fists clenched, and asked her whether she believed it likely, from all she knew of us, that Mick and I were working for the police.

‘Mick, no!’ she replied bitterly. ‘I think he is your stooge like I am. And you – I accept your orders because I don’t know any better, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wonder about them. Who is using me? The police, the Committee or you for some game of your own?’

‘What did Clotilde tell you I wanted from her?’

‘To know where the new arms depot is.’

‘What sort of arms?’

‘I suppose those we landed at Blackmoor Gate.’

‘And when she wouldn’t tell me?’

‘You tortured her. You cannot deny it.’

‘She was knocked down by a car when trying to kill me and hit her cheek on a stump in the hedgerow.’

‘And hit her pubic hair on a stump too?’

I told her to come with me at once to Clotilde’s room. She was ready for us, hunched on her side and turning only her head with now open and innocent eyes.

‘Not again, Gil! Not again!’ she moaned.

I was brutal and foolish. I threw off the bedclothes and ripped off the dressing. Elise tried to prevent me but Clotilde cleverly put up no fight at all. She had deliberately burned those rare golden curls with a match and then pressed on the bare skin in two places a coin – or something round – heated on the element under the geyser. I do not know whether a doctor or torturer would have been deceived, but to Elise it was obvious that two electrodes had been attached to the private parts. Nobody but Clotilde could have thought it up and endured the pain.

It had been done of course before the arrival of Elise and was not meant for her at all. It was for Sir Frederick’s benefit – if the Clerk in Holy Orders could be persuaded to have a good look. And it would have worked. He would have secretly set her free while Mick and I suspected nothing and never spoken to us again. She had summed him up to perfection.

As for her choice of such a delicate and traditional spot to be tortured, I feel there was in it an element of personal revenge as well as a symbolic destruction of her former affection for the rat, Gil. It is so often from such trivialities, like the stumble of a skier which starts an avalanche, that disaster broadens and thunders on to us.

In the late afternoon Ian Roberts telephoned to Sir Frederick from Gloucester to say that police had just left his shop after questioning him about the movements and character of Herbert Johnson whom they had certainly muddled up with some badly wanted criminal using the same name. They were on their way to Roke’s Tining to interview Sir Frederick. He was not to be alarmed. Johnson was well known and above suspicion.

The hell he was! Mr Johnson was at Roke’s Tining while Shallope and his bomb were still in residence. He called again when it had just been removed. And Mr Johnson’s prints were those of Julian Despard, anarchist and gaol-breaker.

Myself I could disappear, but all that was damning evidence against my dear baronet. There could be still worse. If his study had been bugged and if the tapes were re-run now that fresh suspicion had been aroused, they were likely to show the possible movement of a second person on the very night when Vladimir was brutally murdered.

Sir Frederick begged me to run for the cottage at once.

‘I shall swear that I have never set eyes on you since the afternoon when you called with Roberts’ message of sympathy. I regret that I must tell a lie, but it is a moral imperative.’

I told him that he would have to talk in the end. As it was it had taken him a fortnight to persuade Special Branch of his innocence and he would never be able to do it again.

‘And with Clotilde under your roof, nobody will believe you.’

‘What are you going to do with her?’

‘Leave her. In half an hour she will be getting proper treatment in a hospital under guard.’

‘Then I shall come with you and share with you,’ he answered. ‘It is not only to the police that I have to prove I am not guilty.’

‘Who else?’

‘Myself.’

If he had insisted on staying on I should have had to remove Clotilde to save him; but if the house were emptied I could leave her. Let the police find her and take her away! We were no worse off, and our parliamentary rulers would be amazed to discover that for once they had told the truth.

Hurriedly we consulted Mick. It was essential that he, too, should clear out at once. Nothing was known against him by the police and nothing by Magma as long as Clotilde was out of circulation.

He reminded me that Elise’s car was in the courtyard – very naturally since she had applied for the job of housekeeper – and that we could all escape in it provided we started immediately and had the luck not to meet the police arriving. But Elise herself was another problem. I was sure that in her present mood she would not desert Clotilde and I intended to leave her behind. I had had enough of her. She had a good chance of being able to brazen it out by swearing she had come for a job and found herself nursing a mysterious, tortured woman. Clotilde would back her story.

‘You mustn’t leave her,’ Mick insisted. ‘She’s in the clear as I am. You may need both of us and I can manage her. Once in London I know a place for you.’

‘Shall I pack?’ Sir Frederick asked.

‘For a night or two. Quickly!’

‘But we may be away for weeks. On the run, I believe you call it.’

‘You’ll be in the area of maximum devastation, Fred,’ Mick said. ‘One way or the other you won’t need clothes for long.’

We ran upstairs to Elise’s room and told her that we had to move out fast. Explanations later.

‘Who will look after Clotilde?’ she asked.

‘Sir Frederick.’

Gammel spoilt that one by trotting up to join us, bag in hand.

‘But he is going too.’

I was just about to grab Elise and bundle her downstairs and into the car by force when Mick spotted my intention.

‘Why not take Clotilde back to the cottage?’ he suggested.

I saw what he was after. He didn’t want to share the blame for violence on his Elise and, as he had pointed out, both of us might need her if we could recover her goodwill. So I hesitated, wondering whether the cottage was a possible alternative.

Deadly indecision lasted just long enough for Elise to dash up to the third floor. Seconds later she was back again assisting Clotilde, still in her blood-stained sweater and velvet trousers. It was an intolerable position – one reverend and too chivalrous baronet, one foolish girl determined to save Clotilde from more torture by me and arrest by the police, and Mick with an impulsive plan which couldn’t work. It had been essential all along that Clotilde be left in her bedroom unsuspecting.