Reckoning in Ice, page 14
I handed back the cutting. The man Dave spoke almost to himself. ‘No mother – worse than no father – a spirited girl like her alone in London – oh, Megan, little Megan . . .’ Then he pulled himself together. ‘I’m sorry, Mister and Jack,’ he said to both of us. ‘I don’t often talk of these things now. But I can’t stop thinking of them. It was the mention of Rhys Jenkins brought it all up.’
I could think of nothing but to buy another round of drinks. The landlord put some more coal on the fire. We agreed that it seemed a nasty evening. I said that I had a long way to go and took my leave of them.
My car was just off the road, in a narrow parking space in front of the pub. As I was getting in a biggish car, going fast, went by in the direction of Coleford. It barely registered in my mind. I turned on my headlamps and drove off in the same direction, perhaps a minute or a minute and a half after it.
I was thinking solely of the story I had heard. It seemed to have no connection whatever with the events that had brought me to Coleford. I was only vaguely conscious of passing the Clydach Engineering works and of approaching the shrubbery of Clydach House. Then it happened – the windscreen in front of me went suddenly opaque and I knew absolute, utter panic.
At such moments one’s subconscious mind takes over. I had never before suffered a shattered windscreen but I had occasionally reflected on what to do if it did happen to me. Now I found myself doing it – fist through the milky glass to make some sort of hole to see through. It was less painful than I had imagined, and there was a glorious feeling of release from the prison of the car as I could see the road ahead again.
In normal circumstances one’s instinct would be to pull to the side of the road and stop. Some deeper instinct of self-preservation made me want nothing but to get away from Clydach House. I drove on as fast as I could go, took the first turning I came to, turned off the new road at the next crossing, and continued for at least a couple of miles. There were no lights behind me and I drew into the verge. I was in some quiet lane and I waited, with the engine ticking over, for at least a couple of minutes before I relaxed. There were no lights, no sound of another car. I switched on the roof light to inspect. The hole made by my fist had enlarged the original hole made by whatever it was that had starred the windscreen, but I could tell roughly where the screen had been hit – more or less level with my eyes, but a little to the right. There seemed to be masses of a sort of glass powder over my clothes and everything. I opened the door to brush some of it out and, in doing so, looked round to the back of the car. In the metalwork at the back was another hole – a neat round hole that could have been made only by a high-velocity rifle bullet. It had missed my head by no more than half an inch.
I was not sure where I was, but wherever it might be I wanted a great many more miles between me and Clydach House. I got a spanner from the tool kit and knocked out the rest of the windscreen so that I had good vision if also plenty of cold air. The car itself did not seem damaged in any way and I drove off along the lane I was on. I met a signpost for Cinderford, followed it, and went on to Gloucester instead of turning south for the Severn Bridge. The journey back to Richmond was bitterly cold, but driving more or less in the open at least kept me awake. I got home in the small hours and was suddenly ravenously hungry. I made myself a four-egg omelette and began to feel a bit better. I got about three hours sleep and arrived at the office at precisely my normal time – a few minutes after Caroline and a few minutes before Morgan-Jones.
When Morgan-Jones arrived he looked into my room.
‘Morning, Dick,’ he said. ‘Did you manage to sort things out?’
‘I’m afraid not very satisfactorily,’ I replied. ‘It looks as if my aunt actually signed transfers giving around £4,000 in securities to the solicitor’s clerk. The poor old woman is so nearly gaga that she says she can’t remember anything about it. Fortunately she’s not badly off and loss of the income won’t, in practice, make much difference to her. Loss of the capital will, in the end, fall on me, since I’m her heir. It’s a bad business, but there doesn’t seem much that we can do about it.’
‘It’s rotten bad luck,’ said Morgan-Jones. ‘I hardly know what to suggest – as you say, if your aunt actually signed the transfer and can’t repudiate her signature, there’s little you can do. But if you want to go down again, or take a few more days from the office, please do. It’s a fair bit of money to write off.’
‘That is very good of you,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry again to have inflicted these personal troubles on you.’
*
Did he know that barely twelve hours earlier his partner had tried to shoot me? Was Rhys Jenkins his partner? Were they X and Y – or was the whole affair some outrageous nightmare of my own imagination? But the bullet hole in my car was real. That was another fact. As Paula had said, there were too many such facts.
I was staggered again by the intelligence service that the X–Y organisation seemed able to employ. When I analysed my trip to Coleford in more detail, however, I decided that it would not have been all that difficult for Rhys Jenkins to locate me. I could not know how important my activities might seem to them – I could assume, from their interest in me, that they considered them of some compelling importance. If so, they would regard any abnormal action on my part as in some way threatening them. My request for a day off to go to Cheltenham was abnormal – I would have done better to have played truant and explained urgent personal business afterwards. I had been stupid, too, in another way – I had used my own car. If Rhys Jenkins were on the alert for a possible visit from me, what I had regarded as a rather skilful cover for my absence from London had served, in fact, to give him advance notice. He could not know that I proposed to go to Coleford, but he could keep a sharp eye open for my car and he could easily have seen it, both in the afternoon, when I was driving around his house and factory, and in the evening when it was parked outside the pub. I recalled the fast car that had gone by when I was getting ready to leave the pub. If Rhys Jenkins had been in that car – waiting just up the road to see me come out of the pub – he would have had time to get to his shrubbery and take post with a rifle.
Wasn’t the rifle an appalling risk? I was not so sure. We are brought up to regard private war with guns as all but unthinkable in England – but that was England of a generation past. Shootings or attempted shootings nowadays are reported fairly often – and by no means always are they followed by an arrest. Rhys Jenkins, I thought, would be tolerably safe. He was the big man in his locality, and he had no known connection with me. Had I been killed and the car wrecked he would have heard the crash, rushed out to render first aid – and called the police. Had I stopped and been finished off, the car with my body in it would have been found later in some lonely spot a long way from Clydach House. The bullet might or might not have been recovered – I had sufficient respect for Rhys Jenkins to feel sure that whatever rifle it came from had no firearms certificate by which its ownership could be traced. Why had he not pursued me? I reckoned that he had made a miscalculation here. He could have expected either that I would have been killed or wounded, in which case the car would have crashed, or that I would have stopped. Why I did not stop I still do not clearly understand, but it was providential that I did not. To see the car drive on may have nonplussed him for a moment – and he had to return to his own car from his hide in the shrubbery before he could set off after me. That need not have taken long, but I had turned off the Coleford road very soon after the shooting, and turned again a few minutes later. He could easily have missed me. He must, I thought, have had a bad night, wondering to what extent I might be wounded, and what I would do – a man going to hospital with gunshot wounds invites inquiries by the police. Recalling my cold journey home, I hoped that he had indeed spent an uncomfortable night. Anyway, he would know soon that I had returned to London uninjured.
I felt that I needed to know more about Clydach Engineering. It wasn’t difficult to find out. International Metals has a magnificent reference library, housing abstracts from scientific journals in every language, and there is also a Commercial Reference Section, where trade catalogues and other information about companies in science-based industries are indexed and kept. The woman in charge of this section quickly turned up for me exactly what I wanted. First there was a card giving financial details of the company. Since it was a private company these were somewhat thin, but I learned that it had been registered during the war with a nominal capital of £10,000, to carry on business as electrical and general engineers. The present directors were Rhys Jenkins and a man called Adrian Young. The secretary was a Mrs Violet Parkinson, and the registered office was at Clydach Works, Coleford. A set of trade catalogues produced more information. The company seemed primarily concerned with switchgear and control systems for automatic plant, from domestic boilers to elaborate factory installations. Its literature was well produced and a page in its catalogue listing some of the firms using its products suggested that their quality was high. A small section at the end of the catalogue showed a few items of agricultural machinery which the company apparently made as well. I thought I could guess what had happened. Dave in the pub and a young Rhys Jenkins had set up together before the war in a small way of business, perhaps no more than a shed, to repair farm equipment and maybe to make a few small parts. Probably they had no legal partnership agreement. Dave had been caught up by the war but Rhys Jenkins had contrived to stay in a reserved occupation. During the war, with endless opportunity of sub-contracting for the Services, Jenkins had no doubt done well – he may have been an able engineer on the electrical side. Anyway he must have got hold of some capital, and formed the company. When Dave had come home crippled from the war the old shed had gone, there was a new company – and no place for him in it. No wonder he had been bitter.
Clydach Engineering seemed to offer a solution to one problem that had been puzzling me. The installation of the microphones at Hee House required a high degree of skill, and skill of a kind that Morgan-Jones by no means obviously possessed. He was a statistician and a brilliant businessman, but there had been nothing in his career to suggest mechanical skill. I had wondered if he were one of those men who remained schoolboys in playing with model trains or motor cars, but from what I had seen of his house there had been nothing to suggest this – and his son’s main interest was apparently in skiing. The difficulty of fitting Morgan-Jones into a part calling for great ingenuity with electronic equipment had bothered me more than I had admitted to Paula in considering the case against him. If his partner were not only an electrical engineer but had a whole engineering factory at his disposal that problem was explained.
What would Rhys Jenkins do next? Dr Johnson observed somewhere that when a man knows that he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it clears the mind wonderfully. Knowledge that one attempt had been made on my life and that there might soon be another did not seem to clear mine. I wondered again about going to the police – attempted murder by shooting was at least a crime that the police could get hold of. But what could they get hold of in this case? They could see that my car lacked a windscreen, and they could see a hole, apparently made by a bullet, in the bodywork. They could not see the bullet-starred windscreen because that was in small pieces over some miles of the Gloucestershire countryside. And why had I not gone to the police in Cinderford? Why had I waited a whole day before doing anything? And who, Mr Garston, do you think may have fired on you? And why?
I saw that I could not go to the police – at least, not without telling the whole story that Paula and I had agreed not to tell them. And half of me – the half that was ashamed of being frightened – did not want to go to the police. Paula and I had taken on this game of bridge together, and it was our job to play out the hand. But I had got to see Paula and, if possible, her father, too.
That night – Tuesday – was one of our telephone nights. We had revised our system slightly in that Paula no longer telephoned the club, and I put through all calls to the Shinness box – I thought it better to avoid the risk that anyone might notice that I always went to the club on Tuesday evening and took a call at 8.30. There was some risk in Paula’s regular visits to the Shinness box, but she got Jock to drive her, and I felt that he was a good protector. At least twice a week now Villeneuve himself looked into the box to make sure that it had no unauthorised attachments. There was no risk of eavesdropping at my end because I used a different call box, in a different part of London for every call.
Between leaving the office and telephoning Paula I had a meal, and over this I began to see the glimmerings of a plan. It required discussion with Paula and her father. I did not see how we could meet before the weekend – another absence from the office would draw all too much attention to my doings. A period of apparent inaction would be better – it would give the enemy more scope for guesswork, and more chance of guessing wrong. It would save time for our side if we could meet halfway. I looked at the road map in my diary – Whitley Bay, on the coast near Newcastle, seemed reasonably well placed. It would have hotels, and those that were open would probably be fairly empty at this time of year. There was time for some telephoning before calling Paula. The AA book was in my car at Richmond, but the restaurant where I was eating was not far from King’s Cross. There would probably be an ABC timetable in the inquiry office, and that had advertisements for hotels. Or there might be a full set of telephone directories somewhere on the station – I could look in the yellow pages. As it happened I did not have to try either. Almost the first thing that caught my eye as I got to the station was a poster exhorting me to bring the family to the North Sea Hotel at Whitley Bay ‘for the holiday of my life’. I telephoned the North Sea and booked three rooms for Saturday night. I called myself Richard Grainger and said that the other rooms were for my uncle and his daughter, Mr Paul Vincent and Miss Pamela Vincent. Paul Villeneuve was an important man and it was just possible that some enterprising local reporter might glance at the hotel register and write a piece about his visit to the North East – it was the kind of thing that might prompt all sorts of speculation, and even affect the shares of some local engineering companies.
*
Paula was as prompt on the line at Shinness as usual. I did not go into the more exciting part of my adventures because I did not want to worry her – explanations could wait until we met. I said simply, ‘Paula, something very important has happened, and I must see you and your father on Saturday. I’ve booked three rooms at the North Sea Hotel, Whitley Bay – near Newcastle. Can you both get there for Saturday evening?’
With that decisiveness so characteristic of her, Paula just said, ‘Yes.’
‘One other thing – can you bring some Hee House notepaper with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your father is Paul Vincent and you are Pamela Vincent. I’m Richard Grainger – I’m Paul Vincent’s nephew and you are his daughter – my cousin. It’s a sort of family reunion. The initials are the same in each case – saves any bother with luggage. I don’t think it matters if you come from Sutherland as long as it’s not Hee House. Lairg would be all right.’
‘Understood.’
We talked briefly of the Wild Duck. I had not been down again, but I’d had a letter from Peter giving a progress report on the extension.
‘I hope it can be the Wild Duck again soon’, she said.
*
When I got home that night I did something I hardly ever do – I bolted the door of my flat. And when I turned in I locked the door of my bedroom – a thing I had never done before.
VII
OUR LEAD
CONTEMPLATING HOW ANYONE might try to kill me, I concluded that the best way of avoiding being murdered was to pursue my life as normally as I could. Rhys Jenkins’s shot at me had been a chance affair. Having located me in the vicinity of his house he could have reasoned that I was quite likely to drive past it after dark, got out his rifle, and selected a good shooting position in his shrubbery. After that it was merely a matter of keeping an eye on my car, and waiting. I had played into his hands – he could not have wished a more obliging victim. But his planning had been all at short notice. It was impressive planning – I did not like to think how nearly it had worked. It was also planning in keeping with what I felt I could understand of his mind – a ruthless determination to take quick advantage of anything that served his purposes. Forming his company while Dave was out of the way at war was one such quick piece of self-interested thinking; his actions at Perth and immediately afterwards were of the same pattern. His was a mind to be treated with respect – but the ability to seize a quick profit from a chance situation is not necessarily accompanied by ability to bring about events.
Rhys Jenkins – indeed, the X–Y partnership – had not shown signs of any great initiative since I had come on the scene. They had followed up brilliantly – Morgan-Jones’s investigation of my car’s mileage was an outstanding performance, and so was Rhys Jenkins’s pot-shot at me. But it was all tactical deployment, not strategical planning. There was ability of a high order behind the original theft of Paul Villeneuve’s notes, the installation of the microphones and the collection of the tapes. I did not know enough of what had happened to know how much had been seizure of some suddenly offered chance, how much coldly planned ahead, but it had struck me that, having got the notes, the partners had been by no means sure of what to do with them. If Paul Villeneuve was right, and climatic conditions in Greenland were influencing action, it looked as if this had not been properly gone into before the theft.
