She nodded reluctantly. ‘I suppose so.’
James took another long, reflective draw on his cigarette. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘if he’d helped me willingly, and not had to be forced into doing it, everything would
have been completely different. But he was a very stupid man. He made the wrong choices. And it was wartime and I had every right to avoid being captured.’
‘Yes, if you were planning to fight another day. But you weren’t. You were running away.’
There was a long silence between them. James’s eyes had hardened and his mouth was set in a tight line. He was clearly not going to argue the point.
‘Anyway,’ Diana continued after a moment, ‘how did you know there was no one else in the house? Would you have killed them too?’
He looked calmly at her. ‘Actually, there was someone else. And no, I didn’t harm a hair of her head.’
James’s mind raced as he stood over the doctor’s body. The fat fool had obviously phoned a
gendarmerie
, but where? Then he noticed a small leather-bound
notebook clutched in the dead man’s left hand. James bent down and lifted it carefully away. It was the doctor’s personal list of telephone numbers, opened under entries beginning with
the letter G. The third listing down said
Gendarmerie
and was followed by
St-Omer
and a number.
James closed his eyes and tried to draw himself a mental map. The town of St-Omer was roughly fifteen miles due east of Licques. About three minutes by Spitfire, half an hour by car, probably
longer with all the refugees and wandering soldiers clogging up the roads. That didn’t give him much time.
But of course, there might be a smaller rural police station closer by. The St-Omer man might be alerting them right now, reporting a phone call that had been abruptly terminated by what sounded
very like a gunshot.
He chewed his lip. He’d just have to take the chance. Even if there was such an outpost, it probably wasn’t manned these days. France was falling apart.
He shoved his revolver back into his flying boot and bent down over the dead man. With difficulty, he managed to turn him onto his back. The doctor’s face was bloodied from where it had
smashed into the wall, but James was still able to detect the man’s last human emotion. He wore an expression of intense surprise.
James began going through the jacket pockets. A wallet. He flipped it open. Identity card, an old theatre ticket, and about thirty francs in five-franc notes. James grimaced. That wouldn’t
get him far. He patted the trouser pockets and pulled out the doctor’s keys. One for the house, and one for the ignition of a car. This was better. He’d spotted a wooden lean-to on the
right of the house when he’d come up the drive earlier. That was probably the garage.
He stood up and crossed back into the surgery. Two minutes of rifling through the desk drawers in there yielded nothing more than medical forms and the doctor’s prescription pad. He
stuffed the latter into his pocket with a vague feeling that it might come in useful, and was about to head back to the central part of the house when he remembered his blood-soaked scarf. He
grabbed it from the floor and stuffed it in a pocket.
When he got to the main hall he looked at his watch. It was exactly six o’clock. He’d give himself twenty minutes here, not a second more. Assuming the police were only just leaving
St-Omer, they couldn’t possibly be here before half past at the earliest. If a more locally based unit was coming, he’d just have to shoot it out with them.
There was a wide staircase in front of him, leading to a gallery that ran all around the hall. The bedrooms would surely open off that. To his left were double doors, thrown wide open, and he
could see the main
salon
beyond them. He’d start in there.
He
had
to find some cash, or something that could be readily turned into cash. He was already forming the outline of a plan for his next move, and it wasn’t going to come
cheap.
The
salon
was an elegant room, with a baby-grand piano next to French windows. They reminded him of the Dower House. On the other side of the room was a large bureau, the kind with a
slatted roll-down lid. He hobbled over to it –
Christ
, his back was hurting – and pulled the handle upwards. The bureau was locked.
He turned around. The fireplace opposite had dried flowers in a sort of pewter basin, and on either side were black iron fire-dogs. One of those would do. He carried it back to the bureau,
raised the heavy metal cast above his head and brought it crashing down on the roll-top. Several slats burst and already he could see the drawers inside. Two more blows did it and he ripped away
what was left of the cover.
The bureau was a disappointment. He snatched out drawer after drawer but found only pens, notebooks, diaries and several half-empty bottles of ink.
He was about to turn away when he noticed a glimmer of white in one of the drawer sockets. He peered closer. It was an envelope, taped to the underside of the little space.
Hello
.
He pulled the envelope free and ripped it open. A heavy steel key fell out. It was shiny and struck him as being quite new. A long serial number ending in three letters was stamped clearly on
the shank. A master-key, then.
‘So why are you hidden away, little one?’ He spoke the words aloud in the empty room, weighing the key in his hand, thinking hard. It was twice the size of the doctor’s door
key. This had to be for locking something substantial in both size and value, that was obvious.
‘I think I know what you are,’ he said at last. ‘You’re the key to a safe, or a strongbox – or my name’s not Blackwell.’ He glanced at his watch. Five
past six. Fifteen minutes left at most. Not much time to find a safe in a strange house.
He tried to remember anything he knew about safes. Hadn’t he read somewhere that most people with a safe preferred to install it in their bedroom? Something about an instinctive wish to
sleep with one’s valuables close to hand. A search of the master bedroom was clearly his best shot – indeed, his only shot, with the seconds ticking away.
James decided that he’d stop looking for anything else and concentrate on finding the safe. He just had to hope he was right about the key.
He left the salon and began climbing the stairs, like an old man with a gammy leg – dot one, carry one, dot one, carry one.
Dammit
, he wished he could move faster.
When he reached the gallery, he saw there were six bedrooms leading from it, their doors facing an ornate oak balustrade. It was obvious which was the master bedroom: it was the only one with
double doors, directly in front of him at the head of the stairs.
The doors were ajar and it was very dark inside. James slipped into the room, almost gagging as he did so. The smell in here was appalling: a mixture of sweat, faeces, and something else –
a sour medical odour.
He could see at once why it was so dark. The main window was shuttered, although thin bands of late-afternoon sun gleamed in parallel lines through the wooden slats, illuminating floating
dust-motes like aeroplanes caught in searchlights.
He crossed the room, still trying not to gag, raised the catch on the shutters and thrust them wide open. Light flooded into the room, along with fresh air. He gulped it in.
Someone behind him coughed.
He spun wildly round, fumbling for his gun.
There was no one there.
After a moment, he heard it again: a dry, papery cough. It was coming from the bed.
Gun drawn, James walked cautiously to the foot of an enormous four-poster. Light gauze curtains enclosed it, and outside them, on the bedside table to his right, were several dirty glasses, a
medicine flask, and a bottle of tablets that had fallen on its side. A few shiny red tablets had spilled out.
Very slowly, he drew back the curtain at the foot of the bed and dipped his head under the canopy.
She was an old woman. Old, and clearly very sick. James thought she looked almost as dead as the doctor downstairs. Yellow skin was stretched tight over her skull and her breathing was fast and
shallow. Her eyes were closed and as he looked at her, she gave another cough, much quieter than the first one.
He relaxed.
She doesn’t even know I’m here
.
He turned to look at the room, which with the shutters open was beginning to smell more tolerable. There were two armoires, side by side, a smaller demi-wardrobe, and a fireplace with an oil
painting hanging above it; some sort of seascape, all crashing waves under a dark, doom-laden sky.
He started with the armoires, yanking them away from the wall, suffering more crippling bursts of pain in his back, and checking for a safe behind. There was nothing, just smooth wallpaper.
The wardrobe may have been small, but it was extremely heavy. James could hardly move it and the thought suddenly struck him that perhaps it contained a strongbox. The door was locked, and the
key was missing. He decided it would be quicker to force the lock rather than waste time looking for a key. He had a penknife in his tunic pocket, but it wasn’t nearly big enough for the
job.
Cursing, he limped back downstairs and returned two minutes later with a heavy chopping knife he’d found in the kitchen. He used it like a jemmy, twisting it into the narrow slit between
the lock and the frame. After a few moments the lock burst out of its seating and flew across the room.
He threw the door open.
The wardrobe was stuffed full of old leather boots and shoes – dozens of pairs, crammed in anyhow. Some of them looked as if they belonged to the last century. He dragged the incongruous
hoard out by the armful, but they were hiding nothing apart from dust and a few mouse droppings.
He cursed again, before remembering that at least it would be easier now for him to drag the wardrobe away from the wall. But when he’d done so, it was the same as with the armoires. More
blank wall. He thumped it with his fist in frustration, then looked at his watch.
Hell.
It was now a quarter past six. He decided to extend his self-imposed deadline to the half hour. The
police couldn’t get here from St-Omer that soon, and if local officers had been despatched, they would surely have been here by now.
There was only the oil painting left. If the safe wasn’t behind that, then either it was under the floorboards, or somewhere else equally inaccessible, or it simply didn’t exist.
He went over to the fireplace and gave the painting above it a hard shove to one side. It swung heavily on its creaking wire. Good. Not screwed into the wall, then. He grasped it firmly on both
sides and lifted it up and out, tossing it on to a nearby chair.
He was looking at the safe.
It was quite small, about nine inches square. Like the key, it looked new, the door of brushed steel sitting in a heavy iron frame. The lock was in the centre of the door. James pulled out the
key from a trouser pocket, and slid it into the lock. It clicked easily into place; it was obviously the one.
He licked his lips, and turned the key clockwise. It moved a fraction, and then jammed. He tried again. Still no luck. Trying to keep calm, he twisted the key in the opposite direction. Again,
after a tiny movement, it refused to budge. He rattled the key from side to side and up and down, and tried again.
The safe refused to open.
He smacked both palms against the door in frustration, cursing aloud.
‘Hubert?’ It was the old woman. He’d woken her up. James moved towards the bed.
She struggled for breath, before calling the doctor’s name again. Presumably the dead man had been her son.
‘Hubert?’ Her eyes were still closed. He tried to recall the doctor’s gruff speech earlier at the door, and managed a throaty ‘
Oui
’.
Her lips cracked into the faintest smile and she drew breath to speak. When she did so, it was in a high, breathless squeak.
‘Hubert, always you forget! You must touch the spring
before
the key, remember?’
James’s French was patchy but he got the gist of what the old woman had said. Something about forgetting to do something, to touch something, and
then
the key.
‘
Merci, chère Maman
,’ he said. He hoped that was how Hubert addressed her.
She didn’t react.
He hurried back to the safe, but he couldn’t see anything to press. He tried pushing on the lock itself but it was totally solid in its seating. He ran his fingers around the iron frame,
feeling for any depression or slight protuberance. Nothing.
Sucking his teeth in frustration, he stepped back and tried to think of something else. He was so close! He’d found the key, he’d found the safe . . . what the hell did he have to do
to get the bloody thing open?
He looked more closely at the door. It closed into the frame snugly, but there was a hair’s breadth of a crack running all around the join. He licked his index finger, then slowly ran it
round the edge of the door. As his finger passed directly above the lock, he felt it. A tiny catch against his skin. He stared at the spot.
There it was. An almost invisible sliver of metal, between the door and the frame. It was less than an eighth of an inch wide. Whistling in admiration, he fished out his penknife. He opened the
smallest blade, and put the point against the fragment of steel. Then he pushed, gently.
There was a whirr and a sharp click.
Trying to keep his hands steady, James put the key back in again. He turned it firmly to the right. This time there was no resistance. The key rotated through ninety degrees, and he heard the
magical sound of metal moving smoothly against metal. There was a dull clunk, and the door swung open.
He almost cheered.
The safe was a black hole and he didn’t have time to find a torch. He simply stuffed his hands inside and dragged everything out on to the floor in front of him. The safe was less than a
foot deep and he emptied it in seconds, crouching down to see what he’d got, like a fisherman inspecting his nets.
This was much better. Oh, this was
so
much better.