Killer in the Shade (20 page)

‘It's possible he had to go into Chichester to get something to stop his own bleeding. Depends how bad he was hurt. And he broke those sunglasses. Now he's on his own he'll need another pair unless he's going to try getting away
in daylight nearly blind.'

‘You mean he can afford to wait till it's dark, when his sight will be as normal as most men's in daylight. So he's making himself scarce and doing something about his bullet wound.'

‘Something like that,' Rollo nodded. ‘In any case, he couldn't risk putting off alone in this boat in daylight as he is.'

‘But he could be back any time, couldn't he?'

‘Yes, he could, Joe.'

‘So?'

Rollo looked puzzled. ‘I don't follow. So what?'

‘So why don't we take off in this boat and dump her where he won't find her? He's armed. If we wait till he comes back he may add us to his collection of corpses, and that prospect gives me no pleasure at all, Rollo boy.'

‘When we've moored her somewhere else we go to the police?'

‘Whatever you say. We'll have a story that will set the other bastards in Fleet Street screaming, and that's what we came for.'

Rollo didn't take long to make up his mind.

‘Okay, cast off, Joe. I'll start her up.'

Joe Murphy needed no second bidding. He jumped on to the narrow mooring stage and unhitched the ropes fore and aft, threw them inboard, and jumped down beside Rollo as the engine roared. Rollo throttled down and engaged the gears forward and the boat nosed out of the open space into the channel of salt water beyond. He brought her round to starboard to face a wider stretch of water between reed-covered banks. As he did so Joe Murphy looked back and shouted, ‘Cops, by God!'

Rollo turned his head and followed the Irishman's outraged gaze. A couple of peak-capped panda car constables were waving and gesticulating.

‘They must have seen my car and been checking the houses down the lane. How the devil do you think they came to be looking for my car, Joe?'

‘You were involved with that black van and the cop took your number.'

‘No, this is something else. My guess
is Drury wants us picked up. Someone's talked.'

‘It wouldn't be Dan,' Murphy scowled, wanting to convince himself, ‘though he insisted on having the name of this place when I phoned.' Rollo was watching him with about a dozen questions in his face. ‘Said he'd have to know in case Drury got bloody-minded. Well, we were practically here by then. If it hadn't been for that damned van — ' He punched the bulkhead housing the instruments. ‘Open her up, for God's sake, boy. We've got to lose ourselves now.'

‘Then you don't think — ' Rollo didn't have to say the rest, for Joe Murphy shouted.

‘No, I damned well don't think we should turn her over to that pair. They probably think we murdered the couple in the house. We sit this out till Drury comes down. Now if only we had a photographer. Hell, what a story this could be — with pictures.'

Rollo said nothing. He could barely define his feelings at that moment. They
were an acute mixture of dismay and apprehension.

He swung out of the channel which presumably gave the house they had left its name, increased the throttle in wider water, and spurted ahead. However, he was in strange waters and had no chart. Moreover, the tide was low. He slammed the boat on to a sandbank, burying her nose. The craft shuddered, the engine stalled, and as he switched off Rollo said, ‘Damnation. We'll probably have to remain stuck here till the tide changes, unless — '

He broke off, grabbed a boathook from the gunwale, and bent over to try to push the boat free. He went for'ard to try there after meeting with no success, and that was when he saw the boat's name clearly for the first time, so that it registered.

Mudlark
.

He was laughing when he straightened.

‘What's so funny?' Murphy asked sourly.

‘Look at the name on the stern, Joe.'

‘I don't have to. I saw it back in the boathouse.'

‘Well, don't you think it funny — even in a wild way appropriate?'

Murphy scowled. ‘What I think is only a damned fool would call a boat by such a name, and only a bigger fool would be ready to go driving around in a boat so named.'

‘And what does that make us?' Rollo asked quietly.

Murphy swore with a strange pothouse fluency that would have been impressive if Rollo had been waiting to hear. But he had restarted the engine and had put the gears in reverse. He gave the craft plenty of throttle.

Whether this manoeuvre might have pulled
Mudlark
free of whatever underwater reef she had nosed into was not to be demonstrated, for at that moment the engine coughed and died.

‘We're out of fuel,' Rollo announced.

The idea came to Dan Simpson after swallowing a cup of coffee that was lukewarm and too sweet, just the way
he hated it. He went to Rollo's desk, hunted through his private papers until he found the phone number he wanted. He rang the Cadman home, spoke to Carol and learned that Drury had been talking to her about what her fiancé had done the previous evening. He then said, ‘Would you be prepared to go down to Sussex with a photographer? I think your boy friend's going to get a real exclusive which will be worth pictures. But you'll have to point him out to my man with the camera.'

‘Won't he recognize Joe Murphy?' Carol asked.

‘He's a free-lance. I can't spare anyone else.'

Carol thought about it and said, ‘What you mean is, Mr Simpson, you don't want another staff man running foul of the police.'

‘Any time you want to work for a newspaper, Miss Wilson, ring me,' Simpson said. ‘I work with so many damned fools it's nice to know there's still a few youngsters with a head they know how to use. Will you go?'

‘After that, how can I refuse?'

‘I was hoping you couldn't,' Simpson said shamelessly. ‘He's a fast driver and free with his hands whatever the speed, but I'll warn him off that course. Just to remind him, keep your engagement ring on display. Oh, and his name's Pettifer — Sam Pettifer. He's charming when he wants to be, drinks like a fish when someone else is paying, and has littered E.C.4 with bruised female hearts. But to be fair, I don't think he's ever quite broken one. He's got a better sense of timing than an astronaut on a moon flight. Oh, yes — thanks.'

He rang off.

Forty minutes later she opened the front door to a smiling young man with a beard and merry eyes and a camera dangling from a strap round his neck like a kerbside photo tout's. He wore an open velvet jacket over tight-fitting jeans and a dazzling pink shirt with a wide blue tie, as big as a bib, covered with psychedelic whirls and blobs.

‘My,' he said, showing teeth that somehow made his whiskery mouth
inviting, ‘ready and waiting. You are Carol Wilson?'

‘I am. Let's go. Sussex is some way over the horizon, in case your geography's faulty.'

When she was beside him in the E type he took off as though fully confident that the car would grow wings. She glanced at him and tried to keep her voice neutral when she said, ‘And you're Sam Pettifer. I must say you look with it, Sam.'

His retort came without pause.

‘And I've been told to keep it, girlie. Only goes to show what a bad reputation can do for you.' He grinned at her with interesting insolence. ‘You get promised a bonus for not being yourself.' The grin spread. ‘I mean for being good. And a close next to hot dollies, in my dossier, comes cold cash.'

‘So we'll keep this strictly commercial.'

He sighed theatrically, enjoying himself. ‘I learned early, the hard way, one can't have everything.'

She humoured him just to assure him she wasn't unfriendly.

‘Whatever do you do to compensate?'

‘I go around expecting surprises. Pleasant of course, because I never waste time expecting the other sort.'

He certainly drove fast.

By the time he had cleared Billingshurst on the A29 he was in front of the car driven by Bill Hazard, with a thoughtful Frank Drury beside him, smoking a pipe and considering the chance of getting an early night for a change — always supposing the West Sussex police had performed as he had hoped.

He knew someone was in for a big surprise.

What he didn't know was that the someone he hadn't considered was himself.

The young female assistant behind the cosmetics counter spoke to the man in the cap who was waiting his turn at the chemist's counter. The man was holding his side and his face was twitching. His eyes were screwed up as though the sunlight outside had affected them.

‘Can I help you?' she inquired.

The man in the cap turned and stared at her through his almost shut eyes.

He took a hand from his pocket while still holding his side with the other, and said, ‘I'd like a crepe bandage and a lint bandage. Both of them as long as you've got.'

‘I'll see what we have,' she said and went behind the man in the white coat who was explaining to an elderly woman why he couldn't supply her with what she required without a doctor's prescription. As the woman was deaf and persistent, he had his work cut out in making her accept refusal.

The girl from the cosmetics counter took a crepe bandage wrapped in transparent paper from a wall box and an ordinary lint bandage from a glass case.

‘That all?' she inquired of the man in the cap, who seemed to be more bowed than a couple of minutes before.

‘Some safety pins.'

She looked in two more wall boxes, consulted the chemist having a hard time with the deaf elderly woman, and came back to announce that they had no safety
pins, but would a box of Band-Aids do, as she presumed he wanted them to fix the bandages.

‘They'll do,' he nodded, his voice gruff as though he was in pain. ‘And give me a pair of polaroid sunglasses.'

She looked surprised at this request but said, ‘Yes, sir.'

She brought the box of Band-Aids, put it beside the bandages on her side of the counter, and held out a pair of dark polaroid spectacles.

‘Perhaps you would try these on to see if they fit?' she suggested. ‘They're two pounds thirty-six.'

She held out the polaroids over the counter. He reached for them with the hand that had been holding his side. That was when she saw the blood on his fingers, and looking down glimpsed the dark stain that had come through his clothes.

Perhaps, as someone working behind a cosmetics counter, she did not require as stern a stomach as an assistant behind the counter where pharmaceuticals were sold. She screamed.

The man in the cap swore, dropped the polaroids on the floor, and as he turned around trod on them without noticing, for he knocked another customer sideways in his hurry to get out of the shop.

On the pavement outside he hesitated, gasping, shaking his head as though to clear it, then stumbled to the kerb, hesitated again, and began running across the road.

There was a shout. A car's horn blew. Tyres squealed as they locked on a hard, unyielding road surface, but they couldn't stop in time.

The man in the cap who had run from the chemist's shop went down under a bus whose driver couldn't avoid him. There was a sudden red stain on the offside front wheel of the bus and on the bright green paintwork above the tall tyre.

Drury and Hazard arrived at the hospital, accompanied by a uniformed superintendent of the West Sussex police, about five minutes after Humphrey Peel died.

The Yard superintendent asked the constable who had accompanied the ambulance, ‘Did he make any statement?' but was answered by the doctor.

‘He didn't recover consciousness. Nothing we could do. He had been shot and was probably dying when he ran into the road, but the bus killed him. The bullet hole was clean, but the bus made a real mess.'

Drury nodded at the form concealed by a stained white sheet.