A Fine Night for Dying (2 page)

1969

T
here were times when Jean Mercier wondered what life was all about and this was very definitely one of them. Somewhere beyond the boat in the darkness was a shoreline that he could not see, hazards at which he could only guess, and the lack of navigation lights wasn't helping.

A wind that came all the way from the Urals spilled out across the Gulf of St. Malo, driving the waves into whitecaps, scattering spray against the windscreen of the launch. Mercier throttled back the engine and adjusted his steering slightly, straining his eyes into the darkness, waiting for a light like some sign from heaven.

He rolled a cigarette awkwardly with one hand, aware of a trembling in the fingers that would not be stilled. He was cold and tired and very scared, but the money was good, cash on the barrel and tax-free—more than he could earn from three months of fishing. With an ailing wife on his hands, a man had to take what came and be thankful.

A light flashed three times, and then was gone so quickly that for a moment he wondered whether he had imagined it. He ran a hand wearily across his eyes and it flickered again. He watched through a third repetition, mesmerized, then pulled himself together and stamped on the floor of the wheelhouse. There were steps on the companionway, and Jacaud appeared.

He had been drinking again, and the smell, sourly sharp on the clean salt air, made Mercier slightly sick. Jacaud shoved him to one side and took the wheel.

“Where is it?” he growled.

The light answered him, ahead and slightly to port. He nodded, pushed up speed and turned the wheel. As the launch rushed into the darkness, he took a half-bottle of rum from his pocket, swallowed what was left and tossed the empty bottle through the open door. In the light from the binnacle, he seemed disembodied, a head that floated in the darkness, a macabre joke. It was the face of an animal, a brute that walked on two legs with small pig eyes, flattened nose and features coarsened by years of drink and disease.

Mercier shuddered involuntarily, as he had done many times before, and Jacaud grinned. “Frightened, aren't you, little man?” Mercier didn't reply, and Jacaud grabbed him by the hair, one hand still on the wheel and pulled him close. Mercier cried out in pain and Jacaud laughed again. “Stay frightened. That's how I like it. Now go and get the dinghy ready.”

With a heave, he sent him out through the open door and Mercier grabbed at the rail to save himself. There were tears of rage and frustration in his eyes as he felt his way along the deck in the darkness and dropped to one knee beside the rubber dinghy. He took a spring knife from one pocket, feeling for the line that lashed the dinghy into place. He sawed it through, then touched the razor edge of the blade to his thumb, thinking of Jacaud. One good thrust was all it would take, but even at the thought his bowels contracted in a spasm of fear, and he hastily closed the knife, got to his feet and waited at the rail.

The launch rushed into the darkness and the light flashed again. As Jacaud cut the engine, they slowed and started to drift broadside onto the beach marked by the phosphorescence of the surf a hundred yards away. Mercier got the anchor over as Jacaud joined him. The big man heaved the dinghy into the water on his own and pulled it in by handline.

“Off with you,” he said impatiently. “I want to get out of here.”

Water slopped in the bottom of the dinghy, cold and uncomfortable, as Mercier mounted the two wooden oars and pulled away. He was afraid again, as he always was these days, for the beach was unknown territory in spite of the fact that he had visited it in identical circumstances at least half a dozen times before. But there was always the feeling that, this time, things might be different—that the police could be waiting. That he might be drifting into a five-year jail sentence.

The dinghy was suddenly lifted on a wave, poised for a moment, then dropped in across a line of creamy surf, sliding to a halt as she touched shingle. Mercier shipped his oars, slipped out and pulled her round, prow facing out to sea. As he straightened, a light pierced the darkness dazzling him momentarily.

He raised a hand defensively, the light was extinguished, and a calm voice said, in French, “You're late. Let's get moving.”

It was the Englishman, Rossiter, again. Mercier could tell by the accent, although his French was almost perfect. The only man he had ever known Jacaud to touch his cap to. In the darkness he was only a shadow, and so was the man with him. They spoke together briefly in English, a language Mercier did not understand, then the other man got into the dinghy and crouched in the prow. Mercier followed him, unshipping the oars, and Rossiter pushed the dinghy out over the first wave and scrambled across the bow.

Jacaud was waiting at the stern rail when they reached the launch, his cigar glowing faintly in the darkness. The passenger went up first and Rossiter followed with his suitcase. By the time Mercier had reached the deck, the Englishman and the passenger had gone below. Jacaud helped him to get the dinghy over the side, left him to lash it to the deck and went into the wheelhouse. A moment later, the engines rumbled softly and they moved out to sea.

Mercier finished his task and went forward to make sure that all was secure. Rossiter had joined Jacaud in the wheelhouse and they stood together at the wheel, the Englishman's thin, aesthetic face contrasting strongly with Jacaud's—opposite sides of the coin. One an animal, the other a gentleman, and yet they seemed to get on with each other so well, something Mercier could never understand.

As he moved past the wheelhouse, Jacaud spoke in a low voice and they both burst into laughter. Even in that, they were different, the Englishman's gay chuckle mingling strangely with Jacaud's throaty growl, and yet somehow they complemented each other.

Mercier shuddered and went below to the galley.

 

FOR most of the way, the passage was surprisingly smooth considering what the Channel could be like at times, but toward dawn it started to rain. Mercier was at the wheel, and as they started the run in to the English coast, fog rolled to meet them in a solid wall. He stamped on the deck, and after a while Jacaud appeared. He looked terrible, eyes swollen and bloodshot from lack of sleep, face gray and spongy.

“Now what?”

Mercier nodded toward the fog. “It doesn't look too good.”

“How far out are we?”

“Six or seven miles.”

Jacaud nodded and pulled him out of the way. “Okay—leave it to me.”

Rossiter appeared in the doorway. “Trouble?”

Jacaud shook his head. “Nothing I can't handle.”

Rossiter went to the rail. He stood there, face expressionless, and yet a small muscle twitched in his right cheek, a sure sign of stress. He turned and, brushing past Mercier, went below.

Mercier pulled up the collar of his reefer jacket, thrust his hands into his pockets and stood in the prow. In the gray light of early dawn, the launch looked even more decrepit than usual and exactly what it was supposed to be—a poor man's fishing boat, lobster pots piled untidily in the stern beside the rubber dinghy, nets draped across the engine-room housing. Moisture beaded everything in the light rain and then they were enveloped by the fog, gray tendrils brushing against Mercier's face, cold and clammy, unclean, like the touch of the dead.

And the fear was there again, so much so that his limbs trembled and his stomach contracted painfully. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and started to roll a cigarette, fighting to keep his fingers still.

The launch slipped through a gray curtain into clear water, and the cigarette paper fluttered to the deck as Mercier leaned forward, clutching at the rail. Two hundred yards away, through the cold morning, a sleek gray shape moved to cut across their course.

Jacaud was already reducing speed as Rossiter appeared on deck. He ran to the rail and stood there, one hand shielding his eyes from the rain. A signal flashed through the gray morning and he turned, face grim.

“They're saying: ‘Heave to, I wish to board you.' It's a Royal Navy MTB. Let's get out of here.”

Mercier clutched at his sleeve, panic rising to choke him. “Those things can do thirty-five knots, monsieur. We don't stand a chance.”

Rossiter grabbed him by the throat. “Seven years, that's what you'll get if they catch us with him onboard. Now get out of my way.”

He nodded to Jacaud, ran along the deck and disappeared below. The engines roared as Jacaud gave them full throttle, spinning the wheel at the same time, and the launch heeled over onto one side, almost coming to a dead stop, then surged forward into the fog.

The gray walls moved in, hiding them from sight, and the door to the companionway banged open and Rossiter appeared with the passenger. He was a black man of middle years, tall and handsome, and he wore a heavy overcoat with a fur collar. He looked around in bewilderment and Rossiter spoke to him in English. The man nodded and moved forward to the rail, and Rossiter pulled out an automatic and struck him a heavy blow at the base of the skull. The man lurched to one side and fell to the deck without a cry.

What happened next was like something out of a nightmare. The Englishman moved with incredible speed and energy. He grabbed a heavy chain from the stern deck and wound it around the man's body several times. He gave it a final turn about the neck and hooked the two loose ends together with a spring link.

He turned and shouted to Mercier above the roaring of the engine, “Okay, grab his feet and over with him.”

Mercier stood there as if turned to stone. Without hesitation, Rossiter dropped to one knee and heaved the man into a sitting position. The man raised his head painfully, the eyelids flickered, then opened. He glared at Mercier, not in supplication, but in hate; his lips parted and he cried out in English. Rossiter stooped and had him across the shoulders. The Englishman straightened and the man went over the rail, headfirst into the sea, and disappeared instantly.

Rossiter turned and struck Mercier heavily in the face, sending him sprawling to the deck. “Now pick yourself up and get to work on those nets or I'll send you after him.”

He went into the wheelhouse. Mercier lay there for a moment, then got to his feet and stumbled along to the stern. It couldn't have happened. Oh, God, but it couldn't have happened. The deck slanted suddenly as Jacaud spun the wheel again, and Mercier fell on his face in the pile of stinking nets and started to be sick.

 

IT was the fog that saved them, spreading out halfway across the Channel, shrouding them from view on the run back to the French coast.

In the wheelhouse, Jacaud swallowed rum from a bottle and chuckled harshly. “We've lost them.”

“Your luck is good,” Rossiter said. “You must live right.”

“Pity about the package.”

“That's life.” Rossiter seemed completely unconcerned and nodded to where Mercier crouched by the nets, head in hands. “What about him?”

“A worm,” Jacaud said. “No backbone. Maybe he should go for a swim, too.”

“And what would you tell them in Saint Denise?” Rossiter shook his head. “Leave it to me.”

He went along the deck and stood over Mercier with the rum bottle. “You'd better have a drink.”

Mercier raised his head slowly. His skin was like the belly of a fish, the eyes full of pain. “He was still alive, monsieur. Still alive when you put him into the water.”

Rossiter's pale flaxen hair glinted in the early morning sun, making him look strangely ageless. He stared down at Mercier, his gentle, aesthetic face full of concern. He sighed heavily, crouched and produced an exquisite Madonna from one of his pockets. It was perhaps eight inches long and obviously extremely old, carved by some master in ivory, the color of his hair chased with silver. When he pressed her feet with his thumb, six inches of blue steel appeared as if by magic, sharp as a razor on both edges, honed with loving care.

Rossiter kissed the Madonna reverently, and without even a trace of mockery, then stroked the blade against his right cheek.

“You have a wife, Mercier,” he said gently, and his face never lost its peculiarly saintly expression for a moment. “An invalid, I understand?”

“Monsieur?” Mercier said in a whisper, and the heart seemed to stop inside him.

“One word, Mercier, the slightest whisper and I cut her throat. You follow me?”

Mercier turned away, stomach heaving and started to be sick again. Rossiter stood up and walked along the deck and stood in the entrance of the wheelhouse.

“All right?” Jacaud demanded.

“Naturally.” Rossiter took a deep breath of fresh salt air and smiled. “A fine morning, Jacaud, a beautiful morning. And to think one could still be in bed and missing all this.”

F
og rolled in across the city, and somewhere in the distance ships hooted mournfully to each other as they negotiated the lower reaches of the Thames on the way out to sea. Fog—real fog of the kind that you seemed to get in London and nowhere else on earth. Fog that killed off the aged, choked the streets and reduced one of the world's great cities to chaos and confusion.

Paul Chavasse abandoned his taxi at Marble Arch and whistled softly to himself as he turned up the collar of his trench coat and passed through the gates of the park. Personally there was only one thing he liked better than fog and that was rain. An idiosyncrasy with its roots somewhere in youth, he supposed, or perhaps there was a simpler explanation. After all, both rain and fog enclosed one in a small private world, which could be very convenient at times.

He paused to light a cigarette, a tall, handsome man with a face as Gallic as the Pigalle on a Saturday night, and the heritage of his Breton father was plain to see in the Celtic cheekbones. A park keeper drifted out of the shadows and faded without a word, a thing that, considering the circumstances, could only have happened in England. Chavasse went on his way, unaccountably cheered.

St. Bede's Hospital was on the far side of the park, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity in spite of its worldwide reputation. They were expecting him, and when he called at reception, a porter in a neat blue uniform escorted him along a series of green-tiled corridors, each one of which seemed to stretch into infinity.

He was handed over to a senior lab technician in a small glass office, who took him down to the mortuary in a surprisingly modern lift. Chavasse was conscious of two things the moment the lift doors opened: the all-pervading smell of antiseptic so peculiar to hospitals and the extreme cold. The vast echoing chamber was lined with steel drawers, each one presumably holding a cadaver, but the object of his visit waited for him on an operating trolley covered with a rubber sheet.

“We couldn't get him into one of the boxes, worse luck,” the technician explained. “Too bloated. Stinking like last year's fish and then some.”

At close quarters, the smell was quite overpowering, in spite of the preventive measures that had obviously been taken. Chavasse pulled out a handkerchief and held it to his mouth. “I see what you mean.”

He had looked on death many times in most of its variations, but this monstrosity was something new. He stared down, a slight frown on his face.

“How long was he in the water?”

“Six or seven weeks.”

“Can you be certain of that?”

“Oh, yes—urine tests, the rate of chemical breakdown and so on. He was Jamaican, by the way, or did you know that?”

“So they told me, but I'd never have guessed.”

The technician nodded. “Prolonged immersion in salt water does funny things to skin pigmentation.”

“So it would appear.” Chavasse stepped back and replaced the handkerchief in his breast pocket. “Thanks very much. I think I've seen all I need.”

“All right for us to dispose of him now, sir?” the technician inquired as he replaced the sheet.

“I was forgetting.” Chavasse took out his wallet and produced a printed disposal slip. “Cremation only, and all documents to the Home Office by tomorrow.”

“They'd been hoping to have him in the medical school for dissection.”

“Tell them to try Burke and Hare.” Chavasse pulled on his gloves. “Ashes to ashes for this boy, and no funny business. I'll see myself out.”

When he had gone, the technician lit a cigarette, a slight frown on his face. He wondered about Chavasse. There was a foreign look about him, but he was obviously English. A nice enough bloke—a gentleman, to use an old-fashioned word, but something wasn't quite right. It was the eyes, that was it. Black and completely expressionless. They seemed to look right through you and beyond, as if you weren't there at all. The kind of eyes that Jap colonel had had, the one in the camp in Siam where the technician had spent the worst three years of his life. A funny bloke, that Jap. One minute full of the milk of human kindness, the next smoking a cigarette without turning a hair, while they flogged some offender to death.

The technician shuddered and opened the slip of paper that Chavasse had given him. It was signed by the Home Secretary himself. That did it. He carefully stowed it away in his wallet and pushed the trolley through into the crematorium next door. Exactly three minutes later, he closed the glass door of one of the three special ovens and reached for the switch. Flames appeared as if by magic, and the body, bloated with its own gases, started to burn at once.

The technician lit another cigarette. Professor Henson wouldn't be too pleased, but it was done now, and after all he did have it in writing. He went next door, whistling cheerfully, and made a cup of tea.

 

IT was almost two months since Chavasse had visited the house in St. John's Wood, and returning was like coming home again after a long absence. Not so strange, perhaps, when one considered the kind of life he had led for the twelve years he had been an agent of the Bureau, the little-known section of British Intelligence that handled the sort of business no one else seemed to know what to do with.

He went up the steps and pressed the bell beside the brass plate that carried the legend
BROWN & CO
—
IMPORTERS & EXPORTERS
. The door was opened almost immediately by a tall graying man in a blue serge uniform, who positively beamed a welcome.

“Good to have you back, Mr. Chavasse. You're nice and brown.”

“Glad to be back, George.”

“Mr. Mallory's been asking for you, sir. Miss Frazer's been phoning down every few minutes.”

“Nothing new in that, George.”

Chavasse went up the curving Regency staircase quickly. Nothing changed. Not a thing. It was just like it had always been. Lengthy periods in which damn-all happened, and then something broke through to the surface, and the day needed twenty-seven hours.

When he went into the small outer office at the end of the narrow corridor, Jean Frazer was seated at her desk. She glanced up and removed her heavy library spectacles with a smile that was always a shade warmer for Chavasse than anyone else.

“Paul, you're looking fine. It's wonderful to see you again.”

She came round the desk, a small hippy woman of thirty or so, but attractive enough in her own way. Chavasse took her hands and kissed her on the cheek.

“I never did get around to giving you that evening out at the Saddle Room. It's been on my conscience.”

“Oh, I'm sure it has.” There was a look of skepticism on her face. “You got my message?”

“My flight was delayed, but the messenger was waiting when I got to the flat. I didn't even have time to unpack. I've been to St. Bede's and had a look at the corpus delicti or whatever they call it. Most unpleasant. He'd been in the sea rather a long time. Bleached a whiter shade of pale, by the way, which seemed extraordinary considering what you told me about him.”

“Spare me the details.” She flicked the intercom. “Paul Chavasse is here, Mr. Mallory.”

“Send him in.”

The voice was remote and dry and might have been from another world—a world that Chavasse had almost forgotten during his two months' convalescence. A tiny flicker of excitement moved coldly in his stomach as he opened the door and went in.

 

MALLORY hadn't changed in the slightest. The same gray flannel suit from the same very eminent tailor; the same tie from the right school; not an iron-gray hair out of place; the same frosty, remote glance over the top of the spectacles. He couldn't even manage a smile.

“Hello, Paul, nice to see you,” he said, as if he didn't mean a word of it. “How's the leg?”

“Fine now, sir.”

“No permanent effects?”

“It aches a little in damp weather but they tell me that will wear off after a while.”

“You're lucky you've still got two legs to walk around on. Magnum bullets can be nasty things. How was Alderney?”

Chavasse's English mother lived in retirement on that most delightful of all the Channel Islands, and he had spent his convalescence in her capable hands. It occurred to him, with a sense of wonder, that on the previous day at this time he had been picnicking on the white sands of Telegraph Bay; cold chicken and salad and a bottle of liebfraumilch frosted from the fridge and wrapped in a damp towel, strictly against the rules, but the only way to drink it.

He sighed. “Nice, sir. Very nice.”

Mallory got straight down to business. “You've seen the body at St. Bede's?”

Chavasse nodded. “Any idea who he was?”

Mallory reached for a file and opened it. “A West Indian named Harvey Preston from Jamaica.”

“And how did you manage to find that out?”

“His fingerprints were on record.”

Chavasse shrugged. “His fingers were swollen like bananas when I saw him.”

“Oh, the lab boys have a technique for dealing with that sort of problem. They take a section of skin and shrink it to normal size with the use of chemicals. They arrive at a reasonable facsimile.”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble over the body of an unknown man washed up after six weeks. Why?”

“In the first place, it didn't happen in quite that way. He was brought up off the bottom in the trawl net of a fishing boat out of Brixham, with about seventy pounds of chain wrapped around him.”

“Murdered, presumably?”

“Death by drowning.”

“A nasty way to go.”

Mallory passed a photo across. “That's him, taken at his trial at the Bailey in 1967.”

“What was he up for?”

“Robbing a gambling club in Birmingham. The Crown lost, by the way. He was acquitted for lack of evidence. Witnesses failed to come forward, and so on. The usual story.”

“He must have had a lot of pull.”

Mallory helped himself to one of his Turkish cigarettes and leaned back in his seat. “Harvey Preston arrived in England in 1938 when he was twenty and joined the Royal Army Service Corps during the Munich crisis. His mother and father followed a few months later with his younger sister, and Preston fixed them up with a small house in Brixton. He was stationed at Aldershot with a transport regiment as a truck driver. His mother gave birth to another son, who they named Darcy, on the third day of the war in September 1939. A week later, Harvey's regiment was posted to France. During the big retreat, when the panzers broke through in 1940, his unit was badly knocked about and he was shot twice in the right leg. He made it out through Dunkirk and back to England, but was so badly lamed by his wounds that he was discharged with a pension.”

“What did he do then?”

“At first he drove an ambulance, but then he underwent the kind of personal tragedy so common during the London Blitz. The house in Brixton got a direct hit during a raid and the only survivor was his young brother. From then on, things seem to have taken a different turn.”

“What did he do?”

“Take your pick. Black market, prostitution. After the war, he ran a number of illegal gaming clubs and became something of a power in the underworld. Moved into organized crime about 1959. The police were certain he was behind a very efficient hijacking organization, but could never prove anything. There were several payroll robberies as well, and he was very definitely involved in drug trafficking.”

“Quite a character. What happened after his acquittal last year? Was he deported?”

Mallory shook his head. “He'd been here too long for that. But the Yard really turned the heat on. He lost his gaming license for a start, which put him out of the casino business. It seems they breathed down his neck so hard that he hardly dared stir from his house. It was the money from the Birmingham casino robbery they were after. Even if he couldn't be tried again, they could stop him from spending it.”

“Was he married?”

“No, lived on his own. A different girl a night by all accounts, right up to the end.”

“What about the brother, the one who survived the bombing?”

“Young Darcy?” Mallory actually grinned. “Funny thing happened there. Harvey kept the boy with him. Sent him to St. Paul's as a day boy. Must have been an extraordinary life for him. Mixing with the sons of the upper crust during the day and the worst villains in London by night. He decided to go in for the law, of all things. Passed his bar finals three years ago. Cleared off to Jamaica after Harvey's trial.”

“And what did Harvey do?”

“Left the country on a plane to Rome two months ago. They just about took him to pieces at the airport, but there wasn't a thing on him. They had to let him go.”

“Where did he go from Rome?”

“Interpol had him followed to Naples, where he dropped out of sight.”