“There’s a first time for everything,” he said; and on that sour note he left them—Paulina still looking hurt and Joby with that sullen expression on his face that he had had after the talk with Captain Green.
Walking down to the Treasure Ship he felt ashamed of the way he had spoken, and he decided to make it right in the morning—or maybe that evening if he got back early enough.
The Treasure Ship was doing the usual amount of business, and it had the usual odour of spirits and tobacco smoke with a bit of human sweat mixed in to add piquancy to the brew. The light was never good in there, but this evening it was even dimmer than usual, so Fletcher concluded that there had been a voltage cut. The electricity came from the Jamestown power station and when the generators were over-loaded it was never Jamestown that took the first cut; it was Port Morgan and the other outlying places.
He walked to the bar and ordered a rum-and-ginger, and Fat Annie served it to him; but there was no big welcoming smile to go with it, and he gathered that he was no longer such a valued customer as he had once been. Annie was the kind of person who had a very exact appreciation of the way the wind lay, and if someone happened to be out of favour with the police he was also likely to be out of favour with her.
“Thought I’d call in and say good-bye,” Fletcher said.
She appeared surprised. “You leavin’, then?”
“In the morning.”
She hardly seemed desolated by the news. “You got tired of this place, Mist’ Fletcher?”
“Maybe we should say it got tired of me.”
He saw that she understood. “That’s the way it goes.”
She moved away. He was of no further interest to her; he would be bringing no more money into the Treasure Ship.
He took his drink to a vacant table and sat down facing
the entrance. He saw a young man go to the bar and speak to Annie, and then both of them glanced in the direction of his table, so it took very little reasoning to deduce that they were talking about him. Then the young man came over and stood by the table looking down at him.
“Mr. Fletcher?”
He was the narrow-faced type of black, with a beaklike nose and slightly protruding teeth like the convex wall of a dam. He was tall and lithe, and when he moved Fletcher was put in mind of a greyhound walking; at any moment you expected him to break into an electrifying run.
“Yes,” Fletcher said.
“My name’s King,” the young man said. “Matthew King. I’d like to buy you a drink.”
“I already have a drink, Mr. King. And I don’t know why you should want to buy me one.”
King pulled up a chair. “Mind if I sit here?”
“The chair’s free,” Fletcher said.
King sat down and looked at him in silence, as though taking the size of him.
“What’s on your mind?” Fletcher asked.
“I’d like to have a word with you.”
“Well, go ahead. I’m listening.”
King glanced over his shoulder, as though fearing that someone might be creeping up on him. He seemed nervous.
“I wonder if you could spare a little of your time, Mr. Fletcher?”
“To do what, Mr. King?”
“To meet some friends of mine.”
“Why should your friends want to meet me?”
“We think you might be able to help us.”
King was keeping his voice low, on what might have been described as the conspiratorial level; but nobody was listening or apparently taking any notice—except Fletcher.
“I don’t know that I’m in the market to help anyone,” Fletcher said. “And tomorrow I’m leaving.”
Matthew King’s head jerked slightly. “Leaving?”
“Yes, leaving. Never to come back.”
He thought King looked perturbed. “You’ve made up your mind to do that?”
“Yes.”
Fletcher drank some rum-and-ginger. King was drinking nothing, which was not going to make him very welcome in Fat Annie’s eyes.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “you could have a talk with my friends before you go.”
Fletcher could not see why anyone should wish to talk to him, but he had no objection—just as long as it was friendly talk.
“Okay. You bring them along and I’ll talk to them.”
“Not here,” King said.
“You mean I’ve got to go and see them?”
“They could not talk here.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” King hesitated. “Well, let’s say it would not be wise.”
Fletcher did not care for the sound of it; there was something fishy about the thing. He had heard of people being lured into dark alleys and then being set upon and robbed, and he was not keen to become one of them; it was not the kind of experience he wanted on his last evening in Port Morgan—or at any other time for that matter.
“I’m sorry‚” he said, “but I’m not going anywhere. If
your pals can’t come and talk with me here they’ll just have to manage without the talk.”
“It’s important,” King said.
“Oh, I’m sure it is. So if it’s that important why don’t they come to me?”
“I told you—”
King broke off abruptly and there was that slow dying away of conversation that had occurred two evenings ago when the men with the gold ear-rings and the fancy suits had walked in. It was the same reason this time; they were there again, the same two, standing just inside the room and gazing coolly round as if searching for someone. Then they walked to the bar with that swaggering gait they had and spoke to Annie, and they must have been ordering drinks because that was what came up; but once again there was no money changing hands, and it occurred to Fletcher that if they did all their buying on that system the cost of living for them must have been pretty low.
And then they glanced across at his table and for a moment he wondered whether they were looking at him or at King; only the funny thing was that King was not there any longer. Fletcher had not seen him go; he had been too occupied watching the Leopards; but King had gone sure enough and there was no sign of him anywhere in the room. And he had not even waited to say good-bye, so maybe he had been in a hurry.
Fletcher half-expected the Leopards to walk over to his table and speak to him, but they were content just to look. And then, as on the previous occasion, they finished their drinks and swaggered out; and the tension eased and the hum of conversation rose again as it does in a barrack room after the orderly officer has left.
Fletcher got up and walked to the bar and bought another rum-and-ginger.
“What did they want?” he asked.
Annie stared at him with a blank expression. “Who?”
“Those Leopards.”
“They wanted drinks,” Annie said.
“Is that all?”
“What else would they want?”
He saw that if she had any information she was not going to share it with him. He was not her favourite customer and never would be again. He drank the rum-and-ginger and decided that he had had enough of the Treasure Ship. He walked away from the bar and went out through the swing-doors for the last time.
Again it was like the other time: the car was parked a little way along the street and they were sitting in it smoking cigars. When he drew level the one in the passenger seat pushed the door open and said:
“You in a hurry, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher paused. “Not particularly. Why?”
The man dropped his cigar on the ground; it was only half-smoked, but perhaps he had plenty more and perhaps they had cost him nothing, so he could afford to be profligate.
“Like we thought mebbe we’d give you a ride.”
“Thanks,” Fletcher said, “but I’d rather walk.”
He was starting to move away, but the man shot out a hand and gripped his arm.
“Like mebbe we’d rather you took the ride, man.”
Fletcher could feel the fingers digging into his arm; it was a powerful grip, but he knew that he could have broken free if he had tried. He thought of doing so and making a
run for it, because the invitation to take a ride was a bit too pressing for his taste; indeed, it was not really an invitation at all; it was more like an order. And of course it would not be just a ride; there would be more to it than that, and it might end up with a lot of unpleasantness. Nobody in his senses would have gone for a car ride with a couple of Leopards at that time of night—not if it could have been avoided.
“I don’t want a ride,” he said. “Not just now. Some other time perhaps—”
“No; this time.”
The man was out of the car now, but he still had a grip on Fletcher’s arm. The other man leaned over and spoke through the open door.
“Why you gotta argue? When we offer a ride you take it. What’s wrong, man? You scared?”
“No,” Fletcher said; “I’m not scared.” But he was not fooling himself and he was not fooling them. They both laughed, as though he had made a joke.
“You should be,” the man in the car said. “You should be shit scared.”
Fletcher discovered that the man standing beside him had released his arm. Perhaps they meant to let him go after all; perhaps they had just been playing a game. He began to turn away.
“Good night.”
The one in the car laughed again.
The other one said: “Get inside, man.”
He was playing no game; he had a pistol in his hand. It was like Fat Annie had said: they had guns sure enough. Fletcher remembered something else she had said—that they would get away with murder. He wished he had not
remembered that; it did nothing for his morale.
“Get in‚” the man said; and he sounded impatient. He prodded Fletcher with the pistol.
Fletcher looked for help, but he knew there would not be any and there wasn’t. He got into the car. The man with the pistol followed him in and slammed the door. Fletcher sat wedged between the two of them. The man at the wheel started the engine and got the car rolling.
“Do I get told where we’re going?” Fletcher asked. “Or is that a state secret?”
They both laughed. It was a deep, throaty kind of laughter and it seemed to come easy to them, though Fletcher was not sure that he cared for their sense of humour. He could imagine them laughing their heads off if somebody happened to step in front of the car and got himself run over—just as long as the car sustained no damage.
“No secret,” the man who had handled the pistol said. He had put the weapon away now; he knew that Fletcher was not going to make any attempt to escape. “We’re going to a place of business.”
It was not the most revealing of information. A place of business could be almost anything. So could the business.
“For what purpose?”
This time they just chuckled. The chuckling was, if anything, a shade less pleasant than the laughter; there was a kind of anticipatory relish in it.
“Business,” the driver said.
“What kind of business?”
“You’ll see.”
It was what Fletcher was all too afraid of. He decided not to ask any more questions but to sit back and await events.
Before long they were clear of Port Morgan and had got on to the road to Jamestown. It was a narrow road with a pretty rough surface, and there was not much traffic using it at that hour. This was just as well, since the man at the wheel was one of the craziest drivers Fletcher had ever come across; he seemed to have a death wish—which would have been fine if he had had only one passenger and that passenger had been the other Leopard. He could have killed the pair of them and Fletcher would not have given a damn, but he had rather more respect for his own skin and he wished he had been wearing a seat-belt because he had visions of being flung through the windscreen when the car ran off the road and hit a tree or a post or something of that description.
But nothing happened, and after about ten minutes of this hair-raising travel they were in among the shanty dwellings on the eastern fringes of Jamestown and going at a less breakneck speed. The place they finally arrived at looked like a junk-yard; it was enclosed by a corrugated-iron fence, and there were a lot of wrecked cars and worn-out refrigerators and old electric cookers and rusty oil-drums, all revealed by the headlights as they drove in through a gate which the non-driving Leopard had got down to open.
The driver stopped the car and fished a torch out of the door-pocket and switched off the lights. He got out and joined the other man, who had the pistol in his hand again. Fletcher remained in the car, not moving. The one with the pistol rapped on the door with the barrel, making a metallic, imperious sound.
“Move it, man. This here’s the end of the line. From here you make with the legs.”
Fletcher got out; there was no alternative. He could see the dark shape of a building of some sort in a corner of the yard. The man with the torch started walking towards it and the other two followed, Fletcher in the middle, with the pistol prodding him now and then for encouragement.
It was not a very impressive place of business; it was no more than a shack with a roof of corrugated-iron and sides of unpainted timber. The door was locked, but the man with the torch had a key; he opened it and they went in. The man with the pistol closed the door.
It seemed to be a kind of workshop; there was a bench along one side and there was a smell of oil and rubber. The man with the torch laid it down on the bench and found a hurricane lantern and lit it. He switched the torch off. The glass of the lantern was smoky and the light that came from it was scarcely brilliant, but it was enough to reveal a selection of spanners and other tools, a couple of gas-cylinders and an oxy-acetylene burner, some wooden crates, a pile of worn tyres and various odds and ends.
“So now what?” Fletcher asked. “Don’t tell me you brought me here to sell me a worn tyre. I don’t run a car.”
They laughed again. They were in a really happy mood, and it could hardly have been the drink they had had in the Treasure Ship that was making them so cheerful; so maybe it was anticipation of enjoyment to come. The laughter stopped suddenly, as though they had both decided it was time to get down to the business.
The pistol-man said: “We got a bit of persuadin’ to do.”
“Persuading?” Fletcher said.
“That’s right. We aim to persuade you this here island
don’t have the right kind of climate for a guy like you. Bad for the health, Mr. Fletcher; real bad.”
“I’ve never found it so.”
“But mebbe this is where you begin to.”
Fletcher saw that the other man had picked up a tyre lever and was hefting it in his right hand. The one with the pistol stowed it away and snatched an iron tommy-bar from the bench.
“You unnerstand, man? You get the message loud an’ clear?”
Fletcher got the message very loud and very clear. Other methods apparently having failed to make him leave the island, a different kind of persuasion was about to be tried. He wondered who had given the Leopards their orders. Colonel Vincent? The C.I.A. men? President Rodgers himself? It made no difference.
They began to move towards him.
“Wait,” he said. “There’s no need for this. I’m leaving the island anyway. I’ve already decided. You don’t have to persuade me.”
They stopped and looked at him, but he could read no belief in their faces.
“You reckon we goin’ to swaller that?” the one with the spanner said. “Man, you’re crazy. You think we’re that dumb?”
“It’s the truth,” Fletcher said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“You got an airline ticket?”
“No, I haven’t got a ticket yet, but I’ll be getting one. If I don’t decide to go by sea.”
“Or if you don’t decide to stay on the island. Man, you ain’t even tryin’. We don’t buy that.”
He knew that the fact was, they did not wish to buy it.
It was not simply that they had their orders to beat him up; they really wanted to do it; and whether they believed him or not, nothing was going to stop them now.
They began moving towards him again; the tommy-bar came swinging at him and he jumped aside and it missed him by an inch. He was close to the bench and he grabbed a spanner and threw it. The man who was holding the tyre lever took it in the chest, but it failed to stop him; he gave a grunt and came on like a tank. Fletcher tried to avoid the swing of the tyre lever, but it caught him on the left side just above the hip. He staggered away feeling hurt and sick, and he knew that it was not going to stop there but was going to be rough and brutal and sadistic.
Yet if they wanted him to leave the island they could not be intending to injure him too badly; they would not want to put him in hospital with broken bones or a cracked skull or a damaged kidney. But there was not much encouragement to be drawn from that reflection, because there was a hell of a lot of harm they could do without turning him into a stretcher-case; and maybe now that they had started they would not know where to draw the line; maybe they would even go the whole way, so that he ended up as an entrant not for the hospital but the mortuary stakes. That was a nice thought.
He had been getting away from them as fast as he could, but he suddenly ran out of space and found himself backed up against the pile of tyres, and they were still coming at him. He dragged the top tyre off the pile and used it as a shield, and the lever hit it and bounced off. But then the man with the tommy-bar made a jab at him through the tyre, and the end of the bar dug into his stomach and took his breath away. He began to fold and the tyre fell out of
his hands; and the man with the lever took another swing at him and caught him on the right shoulder as he went down.
And then he was on the floor with the tyre under him, and there was no way of defending himself or getting away or retaliating or doing anything else except crouch there and take it.
Something hit him again in the side and he was not sure whether it was the tommy-bar or the lever, but Christ, it hurt; and he knew that if he took a blow like that on the head it could be curtains for one. But so far they had been keeping to the body, and that was bad enough.
He could hear the hissing of their breath and the scrape of their shoes on the concrete floor; and then suddenly they stopped hitting him and drew back a yard or two, and the one with the tommy-bar said:
“You gettin’ the message, whitey?”
Fletcher crouched on his hands and knees, looking up at them. The lantern was behind them and their faces were shadowed, but he could see the gold ear-rings swaying and glittering, and he really hated them then; hated them so much that he knew that if he had had a gun in his hands he would have shot them both without compunction. But he had no gun, no weapon of any kind, and he could only look at them and wait, knowing that it was not finished yet, that this was only a breather and that soon they would start again with their iron bludgeons, hammering away at his body and loving it, loving it, damn them.
“You bastards!” he said. “You bloody bastards!”
That seemed to amuse them, too; the laughter came spilling out of their broad mouths while the ear-rings danced a jig.
“You feelin’ sore, man? You got bruises mebbe?” the one with the tyre lever said. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Why, man, you stick aroun’ on this here island an’ I promise you get sumpin’ worse’n that. If I was you I’d get out just as quick’s I can.”
“I am getting out. I told you.”
“Sure, man, sure. We heard. But jus’ so’s you don’ go forgettin’ what you gotta do, reckon we better give you a bit more of the memory treatment. What you say, man?”
“Keep away from me.”
They laughed again and started moving towards him, swinging the iron clubs. But they were still a yard away from him when the door opened and Mr. Matthew King stepped into the hut.
King had a machete in his hand and the broad curving blade looked as though it had had a recent visit to the grindstone; the edge had the bright cold gleam of razor-sharp steel. King moved further into the hut and another man came in behind him. The other man also had a machete in his hand, and he was as tall as King and twice as wide; he looked as though he could have pushed his way through the wall of the hut if the door had not been open.
“Ha!” King said; and Fletcher could see no sign of nervousness in him now. A little anger perhaps, but that was all.
The Leopards swung round to face the door and for a moment seemed taken out of their stride. For a moment they hesitated; then, as though with a common impulse, they dropped the lever and the tommy-bar and went for their guns. But it was too late; King and the other man stepped briskly forward and the machetes gleamed in the lantern light. There was a vicious swishing sound and then
there was blood spurting and two men sinking to the floor and dying. So quickly had it been done, and with such expert precision, that it was hard to believe it had really happened. But the bodies were there and the blood was spilling out on to the floor, and that was proof enough that it had been no illusion.
“Get their guns,” King said in a low, utterly unemotional voice. “Quickly.”
The other newcomer dropped his bloodstained machete, stooped and took the pistols from the dead men. Fletcher was struggling to his feet. King dropped his machete also and helped him up.
“Are you hurt?”
“They hit me a few times,” Fletcher said.
“Any bones broken?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You should have come with me,” King said.
Fletcher looked at the dead men and felt his stomach turn. “Would I have had better treatment?”
King smiled grimly. “You think this might have happened to you?”
“The possibility did cross my mind.”
King shook his head. “We don’t plan to kill you, Mr. Fletcher. We want you alive. We want you very much alive. Yes, sir.”
The big man had stuck the pistols in his belt. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go.” He had a deep, rumbling voice, like an echo in a vault.
“Okay, Lawrence,” King said. “Come along, Mr. Fletcher; it’s time we were away from here. You’re with us now.”
Fletcher decided not to disagree; he felt in no condition
for argument. They walked to the door. Lawrence picked up the hurricane lantern and followed them. When King and Fletcher were out of the hut he turned and flung the lantern at one of the wooden crates. The glass shattered and the oil spilled out and took fire immediately.
“Hurry now,” King said. “No time to waste.”
When they reached the gate the flames were visible through the window of the hut. There was a big blue Ford parked outside the yard with someone in a floppy sun-hat sitting at the wheel. King opened the nearside rear door.
“Get in, Mr. Fletcher.”
Fletcher’s hesitation was only momentary. With the blaze getting a real hold on the hut, it was not a healthy area to hang around in, and he had never felt less like taking a brisk walk or a hard run than he did just then. He got in and King followed him. The big man got in beside the driver. Half a second later they were away.
No one said anything until they were clear of Jamestown and heading north, away from the coast. It was one of the quietest car rides Fletcher could remember. Finally he said:
“So you’re kidnapping me?”
“I’d have called it rescuing,” King said. “You weren’t doing too well when we arrived.”
Fletcher acknowledged the truth of that. “I suppose you followed us from Port Morgan?”
“That’s so. But we lost touch for a time. We had to hunt around to find the place. That’s why we were late.”
“You knew where they would go?”
“We had a good idea.”
“Was it necessary to kill them?”
“Well, what do you think? They would have used the guns. We had to be quick. It was either kill or be killed.”
Fletcher could appreciate the logic in that. And had he not himself felt a desire to kill the men? So who was he to criticise? It had been brutal nevertheless.
“And now where are you taking me?”
“Maybe you’d better ask the driver,” King said.
The driver turned and looked at Fletcher for a moment. “We’re going home.”