Operation Pax (15 page)

Routh’s heart sank. ‘We thought he had it in him, all the same, sir.’

‘You astonish me.’ And the centenarian looked about the bus, as if this announcement ought to be of very general interest. ‘You astonish me, Carrington-Crawley. But, no doubt, you knew each other best, knew each other best…’ The old person’s asseverations died away in a diminuendo, and for some moments he remained silent in what appeared to be a sombre reverie. Routh nerved himself to look again at Squire. The bus was crowded, but he judged it not impossible that his enemy might simply hold it up at the revolver’s point and then hustle him into some high-powered car hovering behind. In that case.

‘When did you last see Carrington-Crawley?’

Routh jumped. ‘Carrington-Crawley?’ he repeated blankly.

The centenarian nodded impatiently. ‘Carrington-Crawley, I said, Carrington-Crawley. When, my dear Todhunter, did you last see Carrington-Crawley?’

Routh’s head swam. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘But it was a good long time ago.’

‘Precisely!’ the centenarian was triumphant. ‘Nobody ever sees Carrington-Crawley. Precisely, precisely, precisely.’

There was a silence in which Routh felt that something further was expected of him on this topic. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Carrington-Crawley was always a retiring fellow.’

‘Retiring?’ The centenarian was momentarily at a loss; then he broke into a ghostly but unrestrained laughter. ‘Very good, Todhunter, my dear boy – very good, very good. Retiring, indeed! Tcha! Disagreeable young poseur that he was! But here we are, we are, we are. Come along, along, along, I say, along.’

At this moment, and while Routh’s ancient friend was preparing to hoist himself to his feet, Squire acted. The seats facing each other at the rear of the bus each had room for three people, and beside Routh a place was now empty. Squire rose, slipped into it, leant across Routh, and addressed the centenarian – and at the same moment Routh felt something hard thrust into his ribs. ‘Excuse me, sir, but you are mistaken in supposing this to be a former pupil of yours. He is, in fact, a friend of mine who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and we are getting off together at the stop after your own.’

‘Rubbish, sir!’ The centenarian had risen to his feet and was regarding Squire with the utmost sternness. ‘Stuff and nonsense! Do you think I don’t know my own old pupils? Do you think I don’t know Rutherford here, of all men – a student who was genuinely interested in the
Risorgimento
– in the
Risorgimento
, I say, the
Risorgimento
?’

‘You are quite wrong. My friend is nervously disturbed and extremely suggestible. And his name is certainly not Rutherford.’

The bus was slowing to a stop. Routh felt what must be Squire’s revolver digging yet harder into his ribs, and he was frozen beyond the power of act or utterance. The centenarian, however, proved to have decided views on how this sort of thing should be met. He raised a gloved hand in front of Squire’s face. ‘Rascal!’ he said. ‘Are my grey hairs – my grey hairs, I say – to be no protection against public impertinence? I pull your nose.’ And suiting the action to his words, he pulled Squire’s nose – so hard that the latter sat back with a yelp of pain, to the considerable surprise of a number of people farther up the bus. ‘And now, my dear Rutherford, off we get?’

Routh’s ribs appeared to be no longer menaced. He got to his feet, and found it difficult to refrain from clinging literally to the centenarian’s coat-tails – like a child to his mother’s skirts when afraid of being left behind in some frightening place. But as he stepped off the bus his wits were working again. Would Squire follow at once? Had he reinforcements in a car or van just behind? These were practical problems. But Routh also wondered how Squire had found him, and why the foreign-looking man had leapt so desperately if he knew that Squire was on the job.

The centenarian had set off at a brisk pace down a long suburban road. Routh scanned it anxiously. It was quiet, but not too quiet. Three or four young men in skimpy white shorts and voluminous sweaters and scarves were congregated round a small sports car by the kerb. An elderly man was clipping a hedge. Farther along, a couple of men were high on a telephone pole, leaning back on leather slings as they worked at it with spanners. And scattered here and there were about half a dozen small boys in dark-blue blazers bouncing balls or circling idly round on bicycles. Routh glanced over his shoulder. There was as yet no sign of Squire or any other pursuer. If only he could gain the centenarian’s house before –

‘And now about the
Risorgimento
, Rutherford. What did you think of Count Fosco’s book?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.’

The centenarian made a disapproving noise. ‘Keep up your scholarship, Rutherford – your scholarship, I say, your scholarship. Busy as you senior officials at the Treasury always are, you should find time for your purely intellectual interests.’

Routh declared his intention of reading Count Fosco at the earliest possible moment. It was dawning on him that there were very considerable possibilities in this old man. Although not without abundant vanity, Routh had a tolerably accurate notion both of his own present appearance and of the social stamp he carried permanently about with him. He saw that anyone, however vaguely in contact with the external world, who took him for a senior Treasury official must be pretty far gone. He should have no difficulty, therefore, in continuing to deceive this old fool. There was money, for instance. He now desperately needed that. Well, the old fool probably kept a good deal in the house, and he ought to be able to clear him out of it without difficulty. Unless – and Routh turned to his prospective dupe. ‘Is your household the same as ever, sir?’ he asked. There might well, it had occurred to him, be unmarried daughters, or people of that kind – middle-aged folk still sufficiently in possession of their wits to see at once that there was something wrong.

‘Precisely the same, Rutherford. My dear old sister and our dear old housekeeper. My sister is quite blind now, I am sorry to say; and Annie is very frail, very frail. A woman comes in during the morning and does most of the work, yes, most of the work, most of the work.’

For the first time for many hours Routh allowed himself an evil grin. This was better and better. If he failed to get what he needed by spinning a tale he could very easily clout the three old dotards on the head and take it. He was playing for high stakes, after all, and need not boggle at a broken skull or two. Particularly now that the stars in their courses had declared for him. Ruthless Routh. He looked behind him. There was still no sign of Squire.

The centenarian had stopped before a small detached villa lying behind a low brick wall from which the iron railings had been cut during some wartime drive for metal. As they walked up a short garden path Routh decided that the house was on the way to decay somewhat ahead of its owner. But what much more engaged his attention was the fact that he had gained its shelter without the observation of his enemies. For he was off the road and still there was no Squire.

‘Come, my dear boy, come straight into my library – into my library, I say, into my library.’ Routh was aware of a small gloomy hall, of a passage where his feet stumbled on an untidy rug, and of his protector throwing open a door at the end of it and beckoning him to follow. He was well into the room before he saw that it was entirely unfurnished. The centenarian stood by the single window, which was barred. He had thrown down his hat – and with his hat he had thrown down his beard as well. Routh heard a step behind him and spun round. Squire stood in the doorway.

‘Put up your hands.’

Squire had him covered with a revolver – the same, no doubt, which he had covertly employed in what Routh knew now to have been a grisly comedy on the bus.

Routh put his hands above his head. He was caught. For a moment it seemed utterly incredible. For a moment the ramshackle structure of his self-confidence stood, even with its foundations vanished. And then it crashed. They had got him, after all. For behind him was a barred window, and in front Squire’s square shoulders were like another and symbolical bar across the door.

But – oddly – he no longer felt fear. Somewhere in him was a flicker of anger – anger at the cleverness of the thing because it had been cleverer than the cleverness of Routh. Apart from this faintly stirring emotion the moment held a dreamlike calm and an extreme visual clarity. He saw that his centenarian stood revealed as an elderly man with the air of a broken actor. He saw that the house was untenanted and indeed derelict. Paper hung in strips from the walls; there were places where the skirting board had fallen away in tinder; the floor, which lay thick in dust, was loose and rickety from some sort of dry rot – it would be a good spot, he suddenly thought, under which to dispose of a body. But still he felt no terror. Far away he heard a bicycle bell and children’s voices, and these mingled with the limp arabesques of the peeling paper and the sour smell of decaying timber in one complex sensory impression.

‘Get the van round the lane at the back – at once.’ Squire, without taking his eyes off Routh, snapped out the command to his accomplice. And the man went – keeping well clear of Squire’s possible line of fire.

As soon as he was alone with Squire, Routh experienced in every limb and organ the flood of fear that had in the past few moments eluded him. For he recognized in Squire’s gaze a lust deeper than the promptings of the predatory social animal and the gambler for high fortune.

It was something in the way that Squire’s glance moved over him. He was studying the several parts of Routh’s body in anticipation of the exercise of a sheer and disinterested cruelty. Routh felt giddy. He shifted the weight on his feet to prevent himself from falling. For a moment he thought that he was really going down – that the power of self-balance had left him. Then he realized that it was his footing that was unstable. A floorboard had given and sunk beneath his heel. And his senses, again preternaturally sharp, glimpsed a faint stirring in the dust immediately in front of his enemy. Routh was at one end of a loose board. Squire was at the other. And the board would pivot halfway between them.

But the revolver was pointing straight at his heart. Surprise must be absolute. And time was short. Routh wept. Without any effort, tears of rage and weakness and terror flowed from his eyes. ‘You can’t do this to me!’ he cried – and his arms, still above his head, shook in helpless agitation. ‘You can’t – you can’t!’

Squire smiled. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

‘I tell you, you
can’t
do it – you can’t!’ Routh was now no more than a terrified and bewildered child. He stamped with one foot – weakly. Then with all his might he stamped with the other. The board leapt up. Squire’s evil face vanished within a cloud of dust. His revolver exploded in air. Routh sprang forward and with clenched fist and the weight of his whole body hit Squire behind the ear. And then he ran from the room.

There would be the men working on the telephone pole, the man clipping the hedge, the group of athletes gossiping round the sports car… He was out of the house and had bolted into the road. Directly in front of him, one small boy was tinkering with a bicycle at the kerb. Otherwise, there wasn’t a living soul in sight. It was disconcerting. Squire would be staggering to his feet at this moment, and groping in that blessed dust for his gun. Routh had seconds, not minutes, in which to vanish from the landscape.

Although the telephone men had disappeared they had left their equipment behind them: a ladder running halfway up the pole and a litter of stuff on a barrow. Sheer inspiration seized Routh. He grabbed the stout leather sling in which he had often seen such workers buckle themselves. Then he ran to the ladder – making a gesture as he did so to the small boy; a gesture that was an instantaneous invitation to complicity. He scrambled up the ladder, got the length of stiff leather round the pole and buckled again, and then mounted by the metal cleats to the wires. When Squire rushed from the house a moment later Routh was no more than legs and a bottom, a foreshortened trunk, and an arm working industriously as if at some screwing or tightening process.

Covertly, Routh peered down. It all depended on the boy. And Squire, glancing up and down the road, was talking to him now. The boy raised an arm and pointed. He pointed straight down the road in the direction which Routh and the false centenarian had been taking before they turned into that horrible house. And Squire at once set off at a run. Routh waited until he had disappeared: then he clambered rapidly to the ground. The small boy had placidly resumed tinkering with the bicycle. But as Routh came to earth he glanced up at him. ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely, ‘but are you Dick Barton?’

‘I’m Snowy. And thank you very much.’

‘I wish I had my autograph book with me.’

Routh realized that he was being addressed with irony; that the small boy shared, in fact, in the general queerness of the place. ‘Look here,’ he said urgently, ‘how can I–’

The small boy pointed across the road. ‘There’s a narrow path between those two houses. My plan is that you should go down that. It comes out by my school. Hide in one of the form rooms, if you like. There won’t be anybody there.’

‘Thanks a lot.’ Routh gave an apprehensive glance up and down the road, and then began to cross it. ‘You’d better get home, sonny,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘If he comes back he mayn’t like you.’

‘Oh, I’m not frightened of him, thank you.’ The boy’s voice, which held a muted and urbane mockery, was succeeded by the composed chinking of a spanner. Routh lost no more time, but bolted for the shelter of the path pointed out to him.

It ran first between two houses and then between long, narrow gardens. He saw the school, and hesitated. But instinct warned him against these empty rooms and outbuildings. Were he the hunter, he would be prompted to range through them at sight. So he went on, and presently found himself in another quiet suburban road. He walked down it, feeling his back immensely vulnerable. It became clear to him that he was fatally without a plan. His helplessness turned on the cardinal fact that he was penniless. There was now no possibility of hiring a car as he had proposed. He was so shabby that nobody would think of driving him a long distance without asking to see the colour of his money first. If he could get back to that pub he might with luck recover his wallet. And working his way back into the city would be no more hazardous than any other sort of wandering. Indeed, it was these quiet and unfrequented places that were supremely dangerous. Squire had probably begun a rapid scouring of this whole suburb in his van by now. And if that van came round a corner behind him at the present moment he would have hardly a resource left… Routh glanced nervously behind him. A small closed van had rounded the far corner. From the seat beside the driver somebody was leaning out and scanning the road ahead.