Authors: Philip McCutchan
Slowly, meditatively, Don Jaime sipped, the pale-amber liquid moistening his full red lips. He took his time; and when the glass was empty he lit a cigar and rang for the butler. When the man reappeared Don Jaime said, “Send Señor Martin to me.”
“Si, señor.”
The butler bowed, slid away silently. A minute later a dumpy, anxious little man scuttled urgently on to the veranda. Don Jaime grinned inwardly, rumbling away into his vast expanse of shirt-front. Martin, third of his four secretaries, was a fuss-pot. Gravely Don Jaime indicated a chair and Martin sat practically on the edge of it, his mouth pursed up as though trying to keep back the torrent of words of which it wished to be delivered. His stomach seemed to vibrate. The butler filled two glasses. Don Jaime knew with amusement that Martin wouldn’t dare to intrude with his business until the polite formalities were over. Meanwhile, let him sweat!
“
Salud
, Don Jaime.”
“Salud.”
The two men drank. For some minutes Don Jaime held his third secretary in conversation on the merits of the Amontillado, seeking his opinion on the blend of the years. And then, when he saw that the moment was approaching, the little man sighed and gave a delicate cough, his plump body quivering, his posterior edging right to the limit of the chair’s seat. Don Jaime lifted an eyebrow. He said solemnly, “You may proceed.”
“Señor!” Martin sat bolt upright, mopped at his face with a red silk handkerchief. “The matter is very urgent. There was a telephone call—two telephone calls.” He paused, then added importantly, “From the Policia Municipal at La Linea.”
“The police—at La Linea?” Don Jaime’s brown eyes scanned the secretary’s face. “And what was their business, pray?”
“Don Jaime, they have taken into custody in la casilla last night a man who was drunk.” The secretary swallowed, gabbled on. “If you will permit the use of the word, señor, the man was found not far from a—a brothel. The man asks for you, Don Jaime.” He looked away, drawing in his breath sharply.
“For me?” Don Jaime’s eyebrows went up in surprise, but there was a new alertness in his manner. “What have I to do with a drunken man found outside a brothel?”
Martin raised his hands almost in supplication. “Señor, I do not know! That is what I asked the sargento, but he was insistent. The man had threatened terrible things if they did not telephone to you at once.”
“And the name of this man?” The eyes were slits now.
“It was Pedro Gomez, a worker in the dockyard at Gibraltar—”
“Pedro Gomez—Gibraltar!” Don Jaime’s body heaved; the table at his side fell, the sherry decanter and the glasses flew, smashed to splinters. Martin went pale, his mouth opening in alarm. Don Jaime didn’t notice; he stood up. “Get me the La Linea casilla at once . . . and then my car, the limousine. And do not speak of this to a soul, you understand? Thousand-fold fool!” he roared, his face a dark, suffused red. “Dolt—not to tell me at once of this!”
He stormed off the veranda, the terrified secretary scuttling after him on rapid, twinkling feet, rolling his eyes despairingly to Heaven. Working for the rich Don Jaime could be so wearing, so upsetting. How was he to know? There were hundreds of men named Pedro Gomez in Andalusia, and probably very many of them were in prison. Yes, Don Jaime was very difficult; the only consolation was that his sudden and unreasonable rages never lasted for very long, and afterwards they were quickly forgotten.
Two nights before, the Studebaker, its headlights dipping and rising again, had wound upward towards Ronda.
It had made good progress until it had come to a better stretch of road below Vercín, where the way switched right for Ronda, and then over-confidence had taken charge. As soon as he felt the wheels take the good, hard surface the driver slammed his foot down hard, and the Studebaker, tyres whirring on the road, shot ahead at something like ninety miles an hour, the old walled town of Vercm high above them on its mountain crest like an ancient castle-fortress guarding a valley, tall stone tower reaching into the night sky and seeming almost to touch the low-slung lanterns of the stars.
Then the blow-out came. The Studebaker had eased for a turn and she wasn’t travelling all that fast; but she seemed half to leave the road, the rear swaying and twisting upward like a bucking horse; then the whole car appeared to hurtle through the air like a flung stone. It lurched sickeningly to the verge, quite out of control, ploughed through earth and stone and sand when it touched, and then, fair and square, it hit the bole of a big cork-oak; its radiator burst into a cloud of steam and spurts of boiling water, and the bonnet crumpled until the shattered windscreen went dark and blank behind the mass of upturned metal. The steering-wheel drove full onto the driver’s chest, the column piercing him like a bayonet as the wheel itself splintered into a hundred fragments, the spokes disintegrating. A bloody foam appeared on the driver’s lips and he gave no sound beyond a sighing exhalation of breath. The big man in the rear seat went head first through the roof, face and hands smashed and lacerated, his neck broken, to be hurled like an unwanted kitten against the tree. Mr Ackroyd shot forward and his head was caught cruelly against the back of the front seat. Head down, his legs circled upward like a maddened pendulum, caught in the jagged, splintery hole in the roof. He hung there for a moment, and then his feet slipped free and slowly he slid downward on to his head and lay crumpled up in the space between front and back seats, a pathetic little scrap of scarcely living human wreckage, whimpering and muttering through a haze of unconsciousness.
For a long time he lay there. And then, as he began to come back to life, something stirred in his crazy, unhinged mind, and he moved a little. He gave a yelp of pain as his left arm scraped against the front seat. He didn’t quite realize it then, but that arm was one big bruise, though it had not broken. After a while, still whimpering, Mr Ackroyd dragged his protesting body on to the back seat, which was canted up at a sharp angle.
He lay back, panting, spent.
After a long, long time he felt a little strength seeping back into his tortured body, and he began humming to himself, grotesquely: on a sombre note, constantly repeated,
dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . . .
It was a gruesome, horrifying sound, that humming in the wreckage of the car; but—as yet—there was no one there to hear it. Mr Ackroyd realized, in a dim kind of way, that his refrain had some significance, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was, except that it was desperately important that he should get out of that car and get back to—back to where? Mr Ackroyd thought for a bit, got nowhere, and gave it up. He started humming again; later, when he grew tired of that, he remembered, in some curious way, that there was something he had to do, something he just had to do before he could go back to wherever-it-was he had to get back to. It was something that had been on his mind a lot just recently, and it was to do with that woman —the perfumed woman, and the awful beatings he’d had, the dreadful, wicked beatings that always came when he smelt that scent, the beatings that had left his whole body red and raw and bleeding and still most terribly painful however he sat or lay. There was something yet to do, something imprinted in the little man’s hazy memory because it was so wrapped in those beatings.
Mr Ackroyd, praying to his Maker for more strength, began to do it.
It had been the man who’d been driving who had had the thing, Mr Ackroyd thought shakily—he remembered the woman giving it to him. Mr Ackroyd, with difficulty, dragged his body upright, leant over the driving-seat. When he saw that shattered, squeezed body that hung dead on the steering column Mr Ackroyd felt very sick and giddy for a bit, and then forced himself to go on. He reached down and went through the pockets, groped through the oozing blood which was starting to congeal now where the metal bar had entered the man’s body, felt then for the wallet in the breast-pocket which the steering-column had only just missed. He drew out the wallet, felt something hard in the folds of the soft, sleek leather.
Utterly exhausted, Mr Ackroyd flopped back in the seat and closed his eyes, the pain from his arm sparking into his body. It was some minutes before he found the strength to open the wallet. When he did so he found tucked down the back pocket a thin, flat strip of metal with a hole in one end and a convex half-circle at the other. It was a delicate piece of work, almost wafer-thin, and the semicircular end had little teeth beautifully worked, very tiny and very even—sharp little teeth which were made to engage in another piece of metal. Mr Ackroyd felt those teeth, and gave an odd little, dry cackle. It was important, was that bit of metal, but Mr Ackroyd still couldn’t remember why, couldn’t for the life of him remember . . . and perhaps it didn’t matter very much now after all, for the woman hadn’t got it, which was the important thing; and as for Mr Ackroyd himself, he was assuredly going to die. No man could go on living in such pain.
Mr Ackroyd gave a dry, choking sob as he thought about his death like that, and then he started humming again.
Dum-da, dum-da, dum-d
a—it did cheer him up a little, that refrain, somehow brought him close to a necessary part of his life. His head seemed to float away from him, up into those lantern-like stars above the little town of Vercín, and he thought confusedly of Liverpool and Mrs Ackroyd and Annie and Ernie Spinner and such a lot of things like that. And as he sat and thought, and hummed at intervals, and clutched his little piece of metal with the sharp teeth—the little piece of metal that would have made things right in Gibraltar within five minutes—a group of shadowy forms led by a guardia straggled down the steep, rocky track from the walls of Vercín.
In Gibraltar very few knew the truth. Very few knew, but a good many heard vague rumours of untoward things, and they sniffed the air and were not happy. Very few knew, but many put two and two together; none of their guesses made four, but a few intelligent persons in official circles made very good shots indeed—but because they were intelligent people they kept these guesses to themselves, and did not start to spread the half-truths which would undoubtedly have led to a panic.
All the same, vague, half-defined whispers did go round the town and the garrison, and a general atmosphere of unrest soon became apparent, a nasty wordless feeling that all was not well, and that something rather dreadful might be going to happen. The comings and goings at the Governor’s residence at The Convent, at The Mount, where the Flag Officer lived, at the Tower in the dockyard, and in the City Council chambers and the Legislative Council building— this all helped the rumour-mongering. It was, of course, inevitable. The Yacht Club buzzed; officers and men of visiting ships felt the difference in the atmosphere of the Rock from last time they’d been in. In the Garrison Library members tended to talk in whispers—whispers which died away as newcomers joined the little groups, and then started up again. It was the same in the hotels.
H.M.S.
Cambridge
was moved and berthed beneath the Tower; that for a cruiser was sufficiently unusual in itself, in all the circumstances, to give fresh life to the rumours.
The brass was alarmed about something, that was clear enough. A few voices, loud ones, were raised against ‘all this secrecy’; but, except for these few voices, Gibraltar’s 24,000 odd inhabitants—Service, civilian, and local—trusted their Governor and Commander-in-Chief.
Which trust Sir Francis Hammersley found very sustaining—but at the same time worrying, and very humbling.
General Hammersley had had barely four hours sleep since Shaw had crossed into Spain, and that was now more than thirty-six hours ago. During that time no word of Shaw, or of any progress, had reached Gibraltar.
Tired, Hammersley tapped out his pipe in a gleaming copper ash-tray on the polished leather top of his desk. His eyes were red-rimmed, his uniform crumpled and clammy. He seemed to have aged quite a lot in these last two days of supreme (and supremely lonely) responsibility. It weighed very heavily upon him that so many men, women, and children depended for their lives upon his handling of a unique situation, depended upon his accurate, or otherwise, assessment of the chances. For, of course, there would come a time when he would no longer be justified in waiting for Shaw to achieve something: there would come a moment when catastrophe would be certain to occur within a short time after, and there would then be no further point in maintaining secrecy. The explosion which would send the Rock hurtling down on the town to crush its inhabitants to a frightful death would also end Project Sinker and everything connected with it. And when that moment came it would be up to Hammersley to recognize it, and to order the immediate evacuation of Gibraltar in an attempt to get as many people off the Rock as possible before the end came.
Hammersley drew a hand heavily across his forehead, found a sticky cold sweat there.
It seemed to him at times that the scramble line to London hadn’t been idle for a minute since the first word of Ackroyd’s disappearance had been flashed to Whitehall. Counter-proposal followed proposal, and refusal followed counter-proposal; and the tense voices of Whitehall and Downing Street drummed into General Hammersley’s ears, and those of other high-ranking officers holding responsible positions; and in the end something of a scheme had been thrashed out.
When and if that moment, that point, as it were, of no return, should appear to be in sight—and it was left entirely to Hammersley to say when that was; the action signal was his alone to give—all entries to Gibraltar would at once be prohibited, and a number of complicated movements would be set in motion under the collective code-name of Exercise Convoy, which, when the evacuation actually started, would be stepped up to Operation Convoy. In the first place, upon the Gibraltar Governor’s Most Immediate call to London, the liner
Queen Elizabeth
—at this moment, as Hammersley refilled his pipe in his office, leaving New York for Southampton via Le Havre—would increase to her maximum emergency speed, land her passengers and all excess catering staff at Plymouth, and steam flat out for Gibraltar, where she would anchor in the Bay and immediately take off evacuees from tenders. The
Queen Mary
was unfortunately undergoing refit, and was therefore not available; but the
Queen Elizabeth
could be backed up if necessary by the Orient liner
Orsova
, which, homeward bound from Sydney, was already well into the Mediterranean, and might be ordered to disembark her passengers at Naples and proceed at full speed into Algeciras Bay; while the P. and O. Company’s
Stratheden
, also inward bound from Sydney, was due to enter the Mediterranean shortly—though at the moment she was awaiting Canal entry at Port Tewfik, and would therefore probably be too late. A host of small shipping, all that happened to be near at hand when the signals went out, could be given diversionary orders as necessary; the big troop-carriers of R.A.F. Transport Command, backed up by B.O.A.C. and B.E.A., would be alerted to start a continuous shuttle-service from Gibraltar’s airport; the British Mediterranean Fleet in Malta had sealed orders, dispatched by air to the Commander-in-Chief, which would be opened on a signal from the Admiralty if necessary. Meanwhile the warships—an aircraft-carrier, two cruisers, and smaller vessels—were being held at immediate notice for steam, the official reason being that they might be required to take part in the big exercise in Royal Navy and Merchant Service co-operation to be known as Exercise Convoy; so that, if Shaw should bring his mission to a successful conclusion in the meantime, secrecy would not have been needlessly jeopardized.