Stray Shot, page 4
part #13 of Keith Calder Series
His reaction suggested that the gun was not loaded. Another thought followed immediately. I might not recognise a Purdey at a glance, but being around Keith had at least taught me to recognise quality. And somehow I knew that Keith would have drooled over this gun. The colour hardening on a good sidelock obscures the engraving and does not look expensive to the uninformed eye but there is no mistaking the figure and gloss of a top-quality stock. And my perception was sharpened by a recollection of a gun which had been stolen on the day of the shoot.
‘Be careful,’ I said. ‘That’s a bloody valuable gun you’ve got there.’
My words took both of us by surprise. ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘You’re full of ideas.’ He looked down.
That seemed to be my chance. I grabbed the barrels and pushed. They resisted and then flew upwards. My first thought had been wrong again. The gun fired. The blast, close to my ear, made my head ring.
The moment of action lasted perhaps a tenth of a second.
Before the gun went off, I had already launched my free hand in a blow, with all my weight behind it, which caught him on the mouth and threw him back against the car. But, at the same moment, he completed a move which he had begun when I first grabbed for the gun. His knee, aimed at my groin, caught me just above the pelvis and put me down on my back against the hedge, showering me with droplets from the overnight rain. He came off the car and kicked at my face. I managed to jerk my head aside and his boot scraped my jaw and seemed nearly to take my ear off.
There was blood around his mouth. The pain of my blow was only then beginning to affect him and I was becoming aware that my hand hurt like hell. For a moment we glared at each other. In his face I saw a fury which was being unleashed as a deliberate act of ‘psyching’. In mine, he would have seen a mixture of emotions. Fear, of course, and mystification and impotent, frustrated fury. It was unthinkable to be killed without knowing why. . . .
He backed up against the car again and levelled the gun at me. One barrel was empty, the other held my eyes and my ticket to eternity. I saw him glance around to ensure that nobody could witness the act. And I knew that, once I was gone, Alice and Boss would together be at his mercy. I tried to get a leg under me but my legs were not obeying orders.
I saw his knuckle whiten as he pulled against the trigger. But he was not used to a double-triggered gun and his finger was still on the trigger of the fired barrel. There was no way I could extract myself from the hedge and get to him before he could move his finger. Waiting was by far the worst of it.
There was a new sound in the air. A car had come over the hump beyond the house. Witnesses were approaching. I thought wildly that if he killed me he would have to kill them too. Thank God that Alice had stayed indoors.
He stooped and looked into my face. ‘You have too damn many ideas,’ he said. ‘I haven’t finished with you. Next time . . .’
I wanted to tell him to leave my dog alone or I’d kill him before he could get at me, but I was still winded and my voice would not come.
He turned away suddenly, threw the shotgun into the back of his car and himself into the driver’s seat. The car was moving before he had slammed the door. I saw that it was a Peugeot.
The oncoming car was Keith’s. I managed to pull myself up, still crouched, and to wave. I was muttering the Peugeot’s registration to myself, over and over. Keith, who had seen enough, plucked the wrong message out of my signal and stopped his car in the middle of the narrow road. I had meant to tell him to get to hell out of the man’s way.
I thought that the other car was going to plough into him. I could have sworn that there was not enough room between Keith’s car and the ditch, but he went through without slackening speed. There was a clash of metal and the sound of fragments tinkling in the road and then the blue car was vanishing over the hump. I let myself down again into the grass below the hedge. It seemed as good a place as any other to get over the shakes.
Keith was hurrying towards me and Alice was running from the house with Boss on his lead. They arrived together.
I struggled and got some of my voice back. ‘Are the police coming?’ I asked.
Alice shook her head tearfully. ‘I phoned Keith first and he said not to call them,’ she said.
‘Because,’ said Keith, ‘when Alice phoned I’d just had a call from Charlie. He sounded upset. He’d like to see us both, as soon as possible if not sooner. And he said to bring Boss. He said, above all, no police.’
‘Are you fit to travel?’ Alice asked me. ‘You look awful.’
‘You should see the other fellow,’ I said. It sounded brave. I showed them my fist which was swelling fast.
‘I did see the other fellow,’ Keith said. ‘Much closer than I liked. I don’t think my car will be drivable for a while and Molly’s away with the jeep. Would Alice lend us her Mini?’
Alice said that no way was she being left behind on her own, just as I said the same and rather more forcibly. The man might come back.
I got shakily to my feet. God, but the day looked beautiful!
Chapter Four
Keith, I could see, was in a fever to set off. Something more than the damage to his car was disturbing him. But Alice insisted on bathing my scratches, washing the blood out of my beard and stuffing both me and herself into clothes which she considered more suitable for visiting an earl. My bruises seemed to concern her much less than the appropriate garb.
She also insisted that Keith, after he had phoned the garage about his car, rang Molly. This he tried to delegate to me, but I refused. It was not the first car which had been wrecked during one of our adventures and I was tired of being the apologist. While we made ourselves presentable upstairs, I could hear his voice murmuring reassurance into the downstairs phone.
Alice drove. As a concession to my bruises, I sat beside her and Keith and Boss were tangled together in the back. The small car disliked the heavy load and protested at every hill and corner.
‘Do you know what Charlie wants us for?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t say and I hope I can’t guess,’ Keith said. ‘He’s been giving me evasive answers for the last couple of days.’ Something in his voice made me drop the subject in a hurry.
The Earl of Jedburgh must have been watching from a window. A tough-looking security man was on guard at the door but as we ground up to the front of the big house Charlie appeared at the head of the steps and brushed past. He seemed distrait. His greetings were curt, unlike his previously courteous manner.
He met Keith’s eye and shook his head. ‘Be patient,’ he said. He transferred us to a rather worn Range Rover and we were hurrying back down the drive before I was properly settled in my seat.
We seemed to be heading back towards the place where Boss had vanished. As we went, I tried to give him a brief account of the day’s events but he only grunted. He pulled up the Range Rover at the corner of the wood.
‘Does your dog like bones?’ he asked.
It seemed an odd question but I decided to take it seriously. ‘“Like” is an understatement,’ I said. ‘He’s an addict. He buries them all over the place.’
‘Good. Can you get him to dig them up again?’
I looked at Alice. She did most of the fussing with Boss in the house and garden. I looked after walks and training.
‘With a little coaxing,’ Alice said.
Lord Jedburgh turned to her. ‘Then please do me a favour. I think that he may have buried a bone in the wood. Coax him.’
Alice looked surprised but made no comment. With the air of a mother humouring a fractious child, she got down and called Boss. ‘Come on, old thing,’ she said. ‘Where’s that smelly old bone then?’ She got a short bark for an answer. They went into the wood together.
‘Charlie,’ Keith said, ‘please tell me that this isn’t about what I think it is?’
The Earl shrugged in apology. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘but I’d rather not say anything yet. I could still be wrong and, as you’ve realised, the matter’s slightly more confidential than the date of the Second Coming. If my guess is good, I’ll tell you all about it. But only because I’ll have to.’ He looked at me. ‘Mr Parbitter, describe the man who attacked you.’
So he had taken in my story. I thought back and realised that I retained a photographic impression of the man. You tend to notice somebody who means to kill you. ‘Medium height,’ I said. ‘Strong build. Short, ginger hair. The same on the backs of his hands. Small ears, sticking out. Prominent brow overhanging blue-grey eyes. Short upper lip and a full-lipped mouth. Khaki slacks and a greenish sweater.’ I paused and thought over my description. ‘If I’ve made him sound ugly, then I’ve misled you. He’s not to my taste, but he’s a handsome bastard and he knows it. He could be typecast as the heavy in a film drama, seducing the heroine and deserting her in her hour of need.’
‘What about his manner?’
‘He sounds like an American and I don’t think that it was one of those put-on accents,’ I said. ‘I’d guess that he has absolute confidence in himself and more than enough ruthlessness to go with it.’
He nodded gloomily. ‘That’s who I was afraid it might be,’ he said.
‘He’ll be fuller-lipped by now,’ I said. ‘I belted him a good one in the teeth.’
He nodded again. ‘That may be useful. What about the shotgun he was carrying?’
‘I don’t know whether it was a Purdey or not,’ I said, ‘but it was certainly of high quality. Colour-hardened action.’
‘Twelve bore?’ Keith asked.
‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘It looked huge at the time.’
‘Had he damaged it?’
‘Never mind Sir Philip’s damn gun,’ Lord Jedburgh said. ‘I hope somebody runs a car over it. That might teach the old idiot to be more careful. Did the car sound like the one which you heard driving away last night?’
I thought some more. ‘Hard to say,’ I said. ‘Not large, not tuned up, no exhaust leak. It might be the same or it might not. The driving sounded similar, but I don’t suppose there’d be much to choose between any two men taking a smallish car away in a hurry. I got the registration number, if that’s any help.’
His only answer was a sigh.
Alice and Boss had been away for several minutes. The place seemed less menacing than it had in the moonlight, but I was becoming restless. I was on the point of getting out to check up on them when they emerged from the wood.
Gently and with difficulty, Alice detached Boss from a large marrow-bone and dropped it through the window into the Earl’s lap. ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘Don’t gnaw it while Boss is around. He’s a gentle dog, but he’d have the throat out of you for that.’
‘I’ll remember.’ He managed to wait until Alice and the dog were inside before setting off back towards Aikhowe in a hurry.
*
Instead of taking us to the house, he turned off the main drive into one of the estate’s side-roads which brought us to a square of buildings which I learned had been Home Farm.
The Earl locked Boss carefully into the Range Rover and led us into the building. It had once surrounded a square courtyard entered through an archway. The original small farmhouse still formed one side of the square and was occupied by one of the security guards. The stone-built barns and sheds which had taken up the remaining sides had been converted into laboratories and, as business grew, the yard had eventually been roofed over to form the substantial machine shop into which the doors under the archway admitted us. The archway itself was now an entrance hall guarded by another security man. The Earl, I noticed, had parked where the guard could watch Boss and the Range Rover.
Three technicians were busy in the machine shop. Through glass screens in the openings in the original stone walls we could see tiled laboratories and a range of apparatus which seemed to belong in a science fiction epic. Evidently the business of high-tech consultancy had already grown much larger than I had supposed.
A man in a white coat hurried out of one of the labs. The Earl went to meet him, handed over the bone and came back to lead us into a small meeting room. We sat down at a rectangular table which could have seated a dozen.
It was all very mysterious and I said so. And I asked, ‘Is my dog in any danger?’
He looked astonished. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said. ‘Not now. Why would you think that?’
‘Digging up bones,’ I said feebly. ‘Research labs. Secrecy. I could only think of poisons or diseases.’
He managed a faint smile. ‘Germ warfare? We leave that sort of thing to Porton Down. No, the answer’s more mundane and yet rather wacky. Let’s wait until we see whether the panic’s over.’
Keith sat in glum silence. Charlie transferred his attention to Alice, chatting pleasantly, but we could see that his mind was absent. I had my first chance to gather more than a vague impression of him. His face did not suggest exceptional intelligence, nor, apart from the nose, was it aristocratic. It was just a face, friendly and slightly shy. But its movements were animated and suggested reserves of concentration and a fount of nervous energy. He was only slightly better dressed than he had been on the shoot, and for the country rather than the town.
The man who had taken the marrow-bone joined us. He was much more like my idea of a scientific earl, being delicately thin with a hatchet face and penetrating eyes. He shook his head and showed the Earl a few small pellets. When he dropped them into an ashtray they clinked metallically.
I saw Keith’s lips compress. ‘That’s what you call breaking it gently?’ he said.
Lord Jedburgh sighed and closed his eyes for a second. ‘You’d better join us, John,’ he said. He introduced us. The newcomer was Dr John Prestatyn.
‘We’ll have to tell them the story,’ the Earl said to Keith. ‘I’m sure they’ll understand that it’s in confidence.’
‘You needn’t, Lord Jedburgh,’ I said.
‘Please call me Charlie,’ he said. ‘I don’t answer to anything else. And we need to tell you. One, we owe it you. Two, thinking aloud may do some good. Three, you may be able to help. And, four, Keith will want to know the details.
‘As Keith probably told you, we’re primarily a research organisation. We do some troubleshooting, but most of our business comes from being approached with ideas which we can put into marketable form, patent wherever they need patenting, raise finance if necessary and then interest the most suitable manufacturers. We get a certain amount of government funding for that side of the work, so we must be doing some good.
‘Other, more specialised jobs come our way. In particular, we get a steady trickle of work from overseas, for companies wanting us to modify their product for the British or the European market and do the patenting. And when you think about it, that’s a hell of a compliment to our discretion. They’re trusting us with major commercial secrets.
‘This is an age of industrial espionage. The man in the street may not realise the scale of it but, believe me, it’s constant and intensive. You see, there’s such a hell of a lot of money at stake, in being first or at least in not being pipped at the post. There are firms which specialise in that sort of espionage and you can hire one of them to find out almost anything in the world. I could name one major manufacturing concern who decided to sweep their brand-new building for bugs before they’d even moved into it. They found more than three hundred microphones, apparently from eight different sources. Incredible, but true. That’s how bad it’s getting. We sweep our buildings twice a week, sometimes more. Although entry is rigidly restricted, we’ve found bugs more than once.
‘But we were lucky until recently. In Britain we have only one big and competent firm of specialists and, because we’re more use to them as friends, they’ve not only left us alone but protected us from the others. This is the one country where there’s no law against bugging devices, only against the use of them, and my lads have produced some State of the Art gadgets for that firm which would make your eyes pop. How, for instance, do you like a microphone and transmitter embedded in a rifle bullet? It can be fired into a building from a mile away and it’ll go on transmitting for three months, minimum.
‘Last summer, the boss-man came to see me here. We’ll call him Smith.’ Charlie gave a small snort of mirthless laughter. ‘I thought he was going to ask for something else out of Mission Impossible – a television camera which can be strapped to a gnat’s leg or something. But no. He’d brought the worst sort of news. One of his ablest men had gone bad. A man who you, Simon, just described almost in Smith’s own words.
‘Smith knew this character as Dave Reece, but he admits that it may not be his real name. Reece was an American, very skilled and resourceful, with a special talent for electronics and quite ruthless. He was paid by results and Smith’s opinion was that he would not have stopped at murder if that would have helped to bring his work to a profitable conclusion. Smith prefers a more restrained approach, not on humanitarian grounds but because he can well do without overt scandal or police intervention.
‘After being choked off a few times for stepping too far over the boundaries of the law, Reece walked out and set up in business for himself. He wouldn’t have clients of his own to start with, so Smith guessed that he would be looking for secrets which he could sell to the highest bidder. And, on the basis of some hints which Reece let drop before the bust-up, Smith’s guess was that he’d decided to specialise. In us.
‘Smith was right, as it turned out.
‘Since then, we’ve been haunted. Reece had some capital behind him and he didn’t mind spending it on bribes. There have been signs that our mail was tampered with and he’s certainly done some wiretapping out in the country where we can’t take effective steps. He’s had his small successes, although until now they haven’t been damaging to us.’
Keith leaned forward. ‘I thought that any success at all would damage you,’ he said.
