A Time to Kill (10 page)

Losch was sitting on a folded awning, with a paint-pot, no longer empty, between his knees.

‘What
is
this?’ he moaned. ‘What
is
this?’

The bows rose and fell a good ten feet, and I laid my breakfast before him.

‘Just a bit of a lop,’ I replied. ‘Where would you like to be landed in France?’

I thought his answer might give me a line on Yegor Ivanovitch’s destination.

He glared at me and retched.

‘Where you please.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘No hurry. There’s another ten hours yet, and we can always cruise around a bit.’

I shut him up again and lurched back to Pink and the blessed showers of spray.

‘Got you down too, has it?’ he remarked. ‘I was afraid of that.’

I yelled at him that I couldn’t help it and didn’t give a damn. That was true. It had done me good to see Losch, even though my stomach didn’t think so

‘Any luck with the communist morale?’

‘Not yet.’

‘We’ll try a little cat-and-mouse act then. I’ve had enough of this myself.’

He took us out of the race – not, I think, without difficulty – and
Olwen
’s bows dipped and rose in the regular run of the ebb-tide from Portland to the Start. It seemed to me like release from purgatory. The wind had dropped entirely, and the sea was only a smooth swell.

I had another look at Losch. The paint-pot had upset, and he had made no attempt to pick it up or find another. He sat with his head in his hands, drawing deep breaths of relief.

‘Is that all of it?’ he asked, as if to a fellow-sufferer.

He was so overwhelmed by thankfulness that he seemed to have altogether forgotten that I had no reason to have pity on him.

‘Oh, well,’ I answered, ‘with the wind against the tide, it comes and goes, you know.’

I returned to the well and reported that we had, at last, a certain moral superiority.

‘Back we go, then, and bust him,’ said Pink. ‘Courage, Roger!’

He put
Olwen
in the race for the second time. A great, formless ghost of foam crashed on the turtle-deck forward, and streamed away. Then the stern and half the length of the ship lifted clear out of the water. I never heard the screw race. Pink was a superb seaman, quick in anticipation.

‘Short-circuit somewhere,’ he announced. ‘Do you mind working the hand-pump a bit before you talk to Losch?’

I worked that beastly pump for a quarter of an hour and showered upon it, I swear, long-forgotten meals. I still didn’t care. Even when the swoop of
Olwen
seemed to leave me suspended in mid-air, stomach and mind were determined to outlast Losch. Seasickness, yes – but none of that fearful listlessness and depression which go with it. I might have only been suffering from a bad tummy upset on land.

‘Have another try at him now,’ said Pink, ‘before he goes unconscious on us.’

That glory-hole was a hell of movement. For Losch it was like a butter-churn, except that he was never actually upside down. He had slid off his folded awning on to the floor. It was no place to lie; but his self-respect was finished.

‘You said there wouldn’t be any more. You said there wouldn’t be any more,’ he accused me.

‘One never knows,’ I answered, and gave him the rest of what I had, though God knows where it came from.

That was the last straw.

‘I am dying,’ he moaned.

The sweat and tears burst from him as he tried helplessly to relieve his nausea.

‘A better death than Yegor Ivanovitch would have given you,’ I suggested grimly.

‘No, no. I am of value. He said so.’

‘Nonsense. You would have a gun at the back of your neck the moment you stepped into that black van.’

‘The black van,’ he wailed. ‘Leave me alone. I know nothing of the black van. I’ve never seen it, I swear to you. It was to pick me up at the Haven Ferry.’

‘When did Ivanovitch tell you that?’

‘This morning on the telephone. Leave me alone, man! I don’t know anything. I only met him the night before last. Leave me alone!’

I kept on questioning him while he grovelled in filth and begged for peace. He hadn’t expected any caller at all; he had told me that merely as a precaution. Ivanovitch had telephoned him half an hour before I did, and ordered him to be at the Haven Ferry at eleven, where, on the far side, he was to get into a black, plain van. After that he was to accompany Ivanovitch abroad. He swore that he did not know how, nor from where. I was convinced that at last he was whimpering out the truth. Ivanovitch was not a man to give away unnecessary information.

‘Got anything?’ asked Pink on my return.

‘Get us out of here and let me think.’

The fact that the black van was to be on the far side of Haven Ferry meant – as soon as we were peacefully rolling again in sane water – a great deal to me. Assuming that Yegor Ivanovitch didn’t want his van to be seen at Losch’s house or in Bournemouth, there were still dozens of possible rendezvous on the outskirts, from which the roads fanned out to all Dorset and Hampshire. The ferry, however, was the nearest way from Bournemouth into the Isle of Purbeck, and a very long and unnatural way of getting anywhere else. Thus there was a strong presumption that the house where my children were held was somewhere on the peninsula.

Now, as county agent for my firm, I knew all the roads of Dorset, and at once I asked myself whether the few scrappy details I had picked up on my journey in the van could fit Purbeck. They did. The steep hill with hairpin bends could have been on the road from Corfe to Kingston. The short, level run was then east or west of Kingston, and the rough road downhill either dropped to the sea near Worth or Worbarrow, or perhaps dipped into the vale behind Swanage.

It wasn’t much to go on. I had limited the possible area to perhaps twenty square miles of country, but those miles were full of lonely farms and cottages. Then I had an inspiration. Why had they put cotton-wool in my ears? What was I not supposed to hear? The sea. The answer could only be the sea.

I put my argument to Pink, saying that the only flaw in it which I could spot was that the van must have gone through Wareham, and I was sure we hadn’t passed a town.

‘If you drove in from the north and went slap down the main street,’ he answered, ‘you wouldn’t have noticed it. Now what about those oil lamps you mentioned? Any help there?’

So far as I remembered, the Isle of Purbeck was pretty well electrified, but certainly the cottages and farms which lay down by the sea at the end of cart-tracks had no electric light.

‘It’s a nearly sure bet,’ I said. ‘If we can get any sort of confirmation on the ground, I’ll set Roland and all the police in Dorset on it.’

We decided not to put back to West Bay and pick up my car. For one thing, my grey saloon would be far too conspicuous in the enemy’s country; for another, West Bay was too small a harbour to risk leaving Losch alone on board, however tight we tied him up. Any small boy or holiday-maker might climb on board
Olwen
in our absence.

The glass had been rising steadily since dawn, and the wireless prophesied an anti-cyclone with light easterly winds. Pink thought he could risk anchoring at Swanage. We would then explore inland on foot.

He turned up Channel, cutting across the tip of the race, now comparatively innocuous as the time of slack water approached.

‘Mackerel and bacon sound all right?’ he asked. ‘You take the wheel while I cook ’em. Keep her straight for St Alban’s Head.’

He went below and routed out Losch with a roar that reminded me of hard-case American mates in the sea stories. He stripped him to his shirt and hurled his revolting outer garments overboard. Then he gave him two buckets and a scrubbing brush, and set him to cleaning out the glory-hole.

I began to feel faint stirrings of optimism. The sea had turned a summer blue, and against it, ten miles to the east, St Alban’s Head stood up like a vast, misty, yellow mountain. The smell of bacon from the galley was glorious to a stomach as empty as mine, and a pleasant accompaniment was the sound of Losch’s scrubbing brush, measured by growls from Pink and once the whack of a rope’s end and a yelp. I couldn’t help feeling that my luck had touched bottom and was on its way up.

Losch wouldn’t eat; he only wanted to sleep. So we moved the stores down from the bunk to the now spotless floor, and let him climb up. Then Pink and I did justice to the mackerel, and smoked and watched the grim Purbeck coast open up to port. I had never seen those grey cliffs from the sea before, and I said that they must have been terrifying in the old days of sail.

‘Lord, no!’ Pink replied. ‘If a skipper had weathered Portland and St Alban’s Head, there was nothing here to bother him. And in calm weather it’s been a pretty busy coast in its time.’

That was true. The sheer face of the cliffs and the terraces and ledges beneath them were largely the work of quarrymen. From the inaccessible caves cut in the rock-face, like the holes and perches of a dovecot, blocks of Purbeck stone had been lowered into barges and taken by sea and river to build the cathedrals of southern England and London itself, long before there were roads which could bear such giant traffic.

‘Good smuggling coast, too,’ said Pink. ‘Some of those ledges are like quays. On a calm day I’d take
Olwen
alongside and let you walk ashore.’

‘If Yegor Ivanovitch is using someone like’ – I was a bit embarrassed – ‘well, the sort of thing you met at Tangier, could his skipper send a boat ashore at Seacombe or Winspit or any other of those ledges?’

‘Of course he could, given a dark night and fair weather and a hand in the dinghy whom he could trust. I’d rather use Poole. Only Poole – well, the quieter places are a bit tricky even for
Olwen
’s draught, and the port control has been tightened up recently. It’s such a dam’ obvious place for any sort of racket. But look here – if the job was urgent and there wasn’t much sea running, I’d guarantee to take half a dozen chaps off any of those ledges’ – he waved a hand at the forbidding and apparently sheer face of the cliffs – ‘and pick up my dinghy and be off to sea in twenty minutes without a single bloody coastguard being any the wiser. And if he did see me and wonder what I was doing so close in, he couldn’t read my name.’

When we rounded Peveril Point into Swanage Bay, Pink stopped the engine and fell upon the sleeping Losch. We tied up his hands and feet, and gagged him with a field-dressing strapped across his mouth by plenty of adhesive tape. We had to make a port, we told him, for repairs to the engine, and he could go to sleep again without fear. Then Pink put into Swanage, and, finding no safe anchorage for craft of
Olwen
’s size, persuaded a local fisherman to let us tie up to his moorings.

We dressed ourselves from Pink’s wardrobe to resemble a hearty pair of holiday-makers. I put on sun glasses, and Pink concealed the shape of his nose with a pad of lint and sticking-plaster. In Swanage we bought two knapsacks, and stuffed them to a proper bulkiness with loaves and sweaters. Neither of us could possibly be recognized at a distance, and that was all we wanted. The occupants of the house, whoever they were, were bound to be so used to summer traffic that they would pay little attention to hikers on the cliff paths.

All this took time, and it was four in the afternoon before we left Swanage. There were still five hours of daylight, however – enough, if my theory were correct, to identify the house or the black van or both.

We strode fast over the bleak uplands between the main road and the coast, stopping only to investigate scattered farms and cottages. Often their upper windows looked out upon a horizon of empty sea, but they were set back too far from and too high above the cliffs to hear the waves in the strong wind of the day before booming into the quarrymen’s cuts and over the flat edges. I was sure that the sound which I was not allowed to hear had been the roar of the sea. It could be nothing else. Yegor Ivanovitch didn’t seem to mind my hearing any conversation of his, and the house itself must have been too isolated for him to worry whether I heard neighbours’ voices.

No house would really fit my guesswork; and those which might just be possible were so obviously innocent – desolate farms with their cows and dogs and dung-heaps, or farm cottages with the labourers’ wives feeding their poultry or chasing their children out of the peas.

We struck a little inland and followed the road to Worth. There the pub had just opened. We sat down in the bar and ordered a couple of pints. As it was a Saturday evening, three or four quarrymen were quenching their thirst already, and a couple of obvious summer visitors were starting early on their gin.

The landlord seemed to be a cheerful and communicative soul, so I told him that a friend of mine was staying somewhere in the neighbourhood, but I didn’t exactly know where. Had he seen a shabby old black van going through the village the day before, and down to the sea?

‘Don’t come down for lobsters, do ’e?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not that van.’

‘Then there’s only Mr Firpin’s van, what sells vegetables,’ said one of the quarrymen positively. ‘’E goes down to Mr Fallot regular.’

That wouldn’t do either. It seemed to me to stand to reason that the black van couldn’t be a regular visitor to the village. Yegor Ivanovitch must have whistled it up on that desperate morning when he called in his agents and decided to flit.

This Mr Fallot, however, appeared to have a house on just the sort of site I wanted. I asked who he was.

‘Come down for week-ends. Ah, and any time he can get off, I reckon,’ answered the landlord. ‘Big Birmingham jeweller he is, they tell me.’

‘Does he have people to stay with him?’

‘Not as you might say, stay. He ’as ’is friends, though.’

He gave me an intolerably vague description of the man and of a servant whom he sometimes, but not always, brought down with him, which might equally well have fitted Pink and myself.

‘My friend might have sent his children down in a grey saloon,’ I suggested.

‘Big grey motor car, was it?’ asked the quarryman.

I gave him the number.