The Mysterious Commission (21 page)

There wasn’t a sound. There wasn’t a sound to suggest that the three men supposed to be asleep upstairs had awakened and become conscious of anything amiss. Sinon (whose treacherous duty it had been to set some snare – at a stair-head, no doubt – which would hopefully break their necks) – Sinon (who
must
be alerted and alarmed) had presumably not ratted anew and warned them. Honeybath had a poor opinion of Sinon; he judged it probable that the wretched youth was merely cowering in a cupboard, or perhaps endeavouring like a rat to escape through the cellarage. As for the Mariners in their annex, they (and the respectable woman, if she lived ‘in’) seemed not to have been aroused either. Almost certainly, they couldn’t simply have got away. Since just after midnight, it seemed, every possible escape route had been sealed off. The fortress had become a baited trap – to which the entrance was still Sinon’s open door.

‘I think you and I will make part of the outside reception committee,’ Keybird murmured to Honeybath. ‘Interesting to see your former friends arrive, wouldn’t you say?’ He could now be thought of as treating Honeybath RA as he would treat a colleague of a rank precisely equivalent to his own. ‘It’s possible, of course, that they just won’t. Young Sinon didn’t drop any hint that he had to give the green light?’

‘Some signal that all was in order? No, he didn’t. But I suppose it would be an obvious precaution.’

‘Except that almost any kind of signal would carry a slight element of risk. We’ll just move a little up the drive.’

It was a chilly night, but Honeybath’s first thought was that it felt marvellous to be once more in open air. He realized that on several occasions he had been reckoning it quite improbable that he would ever experience anything of the kind again. The police, who in those bizarre moments of first encounter inside the house had appeared so comically obtrusive and uncatlike of tread, gave no hint of their presence without. Yet they were probably quite as numerous as they had been on the scene of the wretched Peach’s capture. This was now an undeniably comforting thought.

Suddenly a train whistled in the night. The sound was quite far away, but it made Honeybath jump. For a moment it was almost as if the walls of Imlac House were raising themselves invisibly around him. He wondered whether he would ever again set eyes on Mr X – let alone on Mr X’s portrait. It was a weird thought that Imlac might be no more than a few miles off. Two fastnesses of robber barons at deadly enmity, no farther apart than that. It was a mediaeval notion. But then England was perhaps turning mediaeval again in certain ways…The whispering voice of Detective Superintendent Keybird broke into this philosophical reflection.

‘The high road’s about half a mile away. They won’t risk bringing their cars nearer than that. We may catch a glimpse of lights as they park.’ Keybird glanced at the illuminated dial of his watch. ‘But I don’t much like the look of it. They’re late.’

‘Unless some of them are creeping up the drive, or through the gardens, now.’

‘Look!’

Far away – to Honeybath’s eye it was farther than half a mile – first one and then a second beam of light had appeared, swerved slightly, gone out.

‘That’s them,’ Keybird said aloud and confidently. ‘There’s been a hold-up of some sort, but in twenty minutes we’ll be having a chat with them. Time for a pipe, if you ask me. I keep mine for occasions just like this.’ He seemed to fumble in a pocket, and then to think better of it. ‘But you never know,’ he murmured, with a return to his former caution. ‘They may just possibly have a scout in the grounds already. We’ll just stay snug.’

They stayed snug – although snug was scarcely the word for it. Honeybath, who now felt uncommonly keyed up, nerved himself for a short but shivering vigil. Five enormous minutes went by. Then suddenly behind them there was a muffled report, an odd hiss in air, and high above their heads there hung briefly in the heavens a blazing red star.

‘Damnation!’ Keybird had leapt into the drive, was flashing a powerful torch, and at the same time blowing furiously on a whistle. He was for all the world – Honeybath inconsequently thought – like a French
gendarme
, hysterically endeavouring to control the traffic. ‘We’ve underestimated your bloody Sinon, I’d say. That’s his light – and it’s not a green one. But here we are. Bundle in.’

As if magically, a car had appeared beside them. Its dipped headlights cast a hard merciless light on the drive in front of them, and it was itself bathed in the lights of a second and seemingly identical car immediately behind it. They were very powerful-looking cars. Honeybath found himself inside the first – and this point being instantly and alarmingly in display – before he had fully understood what was happening to him.

‘Imlac House,’ Keybird was saying – and with his old trick of speaking to empty air.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Find it on your map. No distance from the railway-line, and on its south side.’

‘Located, sir.’

‘Then go there. And forget that book of rules. If you crack our skulls open, remember the wives and kids get the medals.’ This remark (which Honeybath interpreted as a pleasantry prescriptive upon such constabulary occasions) appeared to afford Keybird no particular relief. When he sat back, he was swearing softly.

‘But do you think,’ Honeybath asked, ‘that they’re at all likely to go back there?’

‘It’s at least a possibility.’ Keybird’s voice was grim. ‘They’ll have been thinking of it as a secure base for a little time ahead still. No notion we’ve contacted you, for example. No notion they wouldn’t be returning to it tonight with their prisoners or booty or whatever damned thing they were after in this house behind us. And their get-away set-up – the big emergency thing – will certainly be located there. Funds, and so on, waiting to be grabbed there too, likely enough. In and out of it in ten minutes will be their idea, if you ask me. Did you see anything that would serve as a runway?’

‘I’ve told you I saw hardly anything at all. Do you mean–’

‘Yes, of course. These fellows have rather a fancy for taking to the air nowadays. We’ll see.’ Keybird lowered his voice. ‘If this nursemaid in front will just push along her bloody pram,’ he added savagely.

This sudden evidence of a certain agitation in Keybird impressed Honeybath unfavourably. The car, and the supporting car behind it, were already travelling at what he judged a madman’s pace, such as no eagerness to apprehend a bunch of crooks, however eminent, could by any means excuse. The tyres screamed at every bend. The nocturnal scene flew indistinguishably past as if gone molten under the heat of an atomic explosion. From time to time lights momentarily appeared ahead of them – only to slew violently aside as if brutally propelled into a ditch. Honeybath tried to tell himself that here was excitement at last. He found that he had abruptly lost his sense of time. It must be funk again. He recalled shamefacedly that he’d thought he’d got clear of funk.

‘House straight ahead, sir,’ the driver’s voice said calmly. ‘Do I–’

‘Go on, man!’ Keybird’s tone suggested fury held on an uncertain leash. ‘Drive right up to their damned front door.’

At least there was no difficulty in identifying the front door of Imlac House. It stood wide open, and light was blazing out of it. Indeed, the place was lit up in rather a big way; one might have supposed, if it hadn’t been so extremely improbable, that Basil Arbuthnot and his associates were giving a large party. Only one wing lay in darkness, and from its windows Honeybath was momentarily aware of a dull reddish glow. The night was over, he told himself, and here was the first reflected glint of sunrise. But this effect vanished as first the second and then a third police car drove up beside them, and the whole mansion became saturated in their headlights.

Keybird had tumbled out of the car, and Honeybath – still very aware of his bruises – scrambled after him. The final stretch of the drive was a scattering of policemen, all baring for the house. Honeybath ran with the rest, although he felt quite certain that the assault was too late. Arbuthnot and whatever confederates he had would by now have grabbed what they required, and departed. But now, and even as this conviction came to him, there appeared, silhouetted in the front door, the figure of a woman carrying a suitcase. She paused irresolutely, and then ran down the steps and along the front of the house. It wasn’t a very bright proceeding on this last straggler’s part. But she had a fair start on the nearest constable, and was still uncaptured as she vanished round a corner of the building. Her momentary appearance had served one purpose. Honeybath now knew that here was the seat of his late adventures, without possibility of mistake. For the woman had been Sister Agnes.

The entire body of police were now following her – this at some shouted command from Keybird himself. And in a moment Honeybath knew why. From somewhere behind the house – which was perhaps the side on which the park lay – there had come the splutter and roar of an engine starting into life. It wasn’t the engine of a motor car. Honeybath recalled Keybird’s saying that big-time crooks of Arbuthnot’s sort had a fancy nowadays for taking to the air.

Honeybath found himself, rather to his surprise, in the van of the pursuers. He recalled, in a confused way and as if out of somebody else’s biography, that he had been a faster sprinter than the future PM at that private school. But ahead of any of them was now a vehicle: a multi-wheeled affair of a paramilitary sort which the police had somehow conjured out of thin air. This had what might be called a young searchlight mounted on its roof; the beam from it swung wildly about as the vehicle recklessly charged down a flight of steps from a terrace and over what appeared to be a rockery. It slowed abruptly, and came to a halt. When the searchlight steadied, what it picked out was a helicopter.

To charge down a helicopter about to rise in air would appear to be a feat of some difficulty. The running policemen did for a moment hesitate, and it looked much as if their bag would consist of Sister Agnes alone. For the door of the helicopter had been shut, and for the abandoned woman – now insensately yelling at it – it showed no disposition to open again. The engine roared and spluttered, roared once more and again spluttered rather badly. At this point the para-military vehicle (not, Honeybath thought, at Keybird’s command, but simply as developing a mind of its own) charged forward again like a bull at a matador. For this particular matador the only evasive action possible was on a perpendicular dimension. And, sure enough, as the bull hurtled forward the matador rose in air. The motion had every appearance of triumphant power. The helicopter, in fact, had vanished into the heavens with all the confidence of a briskly levitating saint.

The pursuing vehicle screamed and jerked to a halt, baffled. Its searchlight swung upward on an arc, and for a moment searched the skies in vain. Then it found the helicopter, and held it – a fast diminishing object, soaring into the pale-grey dawn. The roar of its engine grew fainter. The roar of the engine abruptly stopped; there was a brief splutter again; the helicopter vanished from within its halo of light. A moment later, and from ground-level, came a crash, a shattering explosion, a leaping sheet of flame. And within the same fraction of a second it was just possible to distinguish another and totally different sound. In itself this sound would normally have been quite something, since it represented the shattering of every pane of glass on the vulnerable side of Imlac House.

Finally, there was Detective Superintendent Keybird’s voice. It spoke close to Honeybath’s ear, but might have been a dwarf’s.

‘Poor bastards,’ Keybird said. ‘No time to warm up their bloody bus.’

From this appalling spectacle Honeybath turned away – literally and through an angle of 180 degrees. The result was not exactly relaxing. Imlac House was on fire too.

And it was quite an independent affair. For a moment, indeed, it was natural to suppose that the one disaster was a consequence of the other; that incendiary material from the helicopter had somehow transmitted itself to the building. But this was impossible. The helicopter’s fate had overtaken it only seconds ago. Imlac was already well alight. Honeybath remembered the dull glow he had remarked in the windows of one wing. That had been the start of what he was witnessing now. The gang, in fact, had fired their stronghold as they left it. It was an awesome thought. To kindle one conflagration and be destroyed by another almost at once was as macabre a feat as could be conceived.

But for what rational purpose had Arbuthnot and his crew paused to effect the immolation of Imlac? The answer was clear. They had been determined to leave as few intelligible traces of themselves as possible. And the best means of securing that end had been indiscriminate destruction. There would be things impossible to carry away in a hurry which might yet–

Charles Honeybath found that he was running again.

So, whether in one direction or another, were most of the policemen. They were being required, he supposed, to turn themselves into impromptu firemen as best they could until the real Fire Brigade arrived. It was as a consequence of this necessity, no doubt, that his immediate conduct went unremarked.

There could be little chance of the fire’s not rapidly spreading through the entire extent of Imlac. It had been started with calculated skill at the windward end of the house, and dawn was bringing with it a freshening breeze which must already be assisting the flames on their way. But what emerged from the central block at present was mostly smoke. Rather a lot of smoke, it was true. But smoke incinerates nobody, and you can probably make a dash through quite a wall of it, if only you treat it as a diver treats water. Or so Honeybath speculated, and decided that the speculation was to be acted upon.

Unfortunately he had to waste time in getting round to the farther side of the house. That open front door, glimpsed as he had been driven up, represented his only notion of how to get inside. On the other hand there was just a chance that by entering that way he would find himself on not totally unfamiliar ground. He did have a dim memory of a large hall, and also a curiously sharp visual impression of that lift and its immediate surroundings. And the lift, could he gain it and operate it, would take him to territory his knowledge of which was not in doubt.