A Time to Kill (13 page)

He was at the man’s throat before I could stop him or even clearly remember his deadly, justifiable hatred of Ritter. They splashed together, Pink uppermost, into the water of the narrow passage where the dinghy had been moored. The channel swallowed them, and returned to its sullen heaving and swirling. Then, at the short limit of vision, I saw two hands break the surface, one holding a pistol and the other clasped over it – such a nightmare as had seemed to me to be in keeping with that vile black water when I was alone upon the rock. I dived in, but the submarine battle had moved away. When I grabbed at a hand which touched my face, I felt only a long ribbon of cold weed.

There was a flurry at the lower end of the passage, and a wet back was outlined by froth and bubbles. When I swam to it, I found only a white yachting cap bobbing in the disturbed water which broke back from the rocks. Then they must have got their feet on solid bottom, for their heads and shoulders reared up with the fury of fighting seals, and someone flung the pistol to shore. The only voice I heard was Pink’s – a coughing roar that shot the water out of his lungs. Again there was silence, and the sea pulsated between the confining rocks. Pink swam up the channel, and climbed, gasping, on to the ledge.

‘Fixed the bastard,’ he said.

I hoisted myself out behind him, and he whipped round with fingers outspread for my throat. When he saw who it was, he asked:

‘You’ve been in too, damn you?’

I said I had done my best, but couldn’t find either of them.

‘Find? Find?’ he cried hoarsely. ‘No one will find him but the crabs. My God, and I suppose you’ll blame me again now! I’ve killed Ritter, I tell you, and I don’t care. If I’ve wrecked your plans, I don’t care. I don’t care, you hear me!’

He glared as if he were ready to jam me, too, in a crack of the rocks for the crabs to eat.

I quietened him as best I could. I was so thankful to see him, and I left no doubt of it. I would have preferred, it is true, that his personal feud with Ritter hadn’t come up to complicate my own desperate quest; but mine was already so complicated that it was beyond telling whether Ritter’s death in the darkness was for good or for disaster.

Pink clung to me – not, I mean, with his great arms, but with that momentary spiritual agony of the soldier who has been let in for something beyond his powers and succeeded, and wishes to God that he were dead and covers it all with stupid laughter. And of course his loyal conscience was tortured. He knew very well that he had pulled a Pink on me at a critical moment.

This particular Pink, however, had acquired a Luger with ten shots in the magazine. That was itself a temptation to closer action, and closer action was necessary. Why had Ritter been going back alone? Had the transfer of passengers been given up? Or – probable and past bearing – had it been successfully accomplished somewhere else?

We went up to Fallot’s house. To my surprise, there was now a light in a downstairs window. We crept round the blackness of the house wall, and looked in through the curtains. Fallot was thrown back in an armchair, his hands dangling, his eyes half-shut, in an attitude of infinite relief that told us more than all the mysteries of the night. Except for a lighted cigarette on an ashtray and the whisky and soda at his side, he might have been dead. He was a pale, podgy man of fifty, and after putting up such active visitors I daresay he felt it.

The window was open at the bottom. I pushed it up, and Pink went through with the Luger pointed at that very fitting target.

Fallot thought at first, I believe, that these two savage, dripping arrivals were some of his own guests. No doubt he had seen as little of them as possible, and averted his shifty eyes from what he did see. He started a whole string of incoherent protests.

‘I haven’t left the house,’ he cried. ‘I haven’t seen a soul. I won’t talk. I swear to you that …’ and then at last he seemed to realize that he had never seen either of us before. ‘But who are you? Is one of you Losch?’

‘What do you know of Losch?’ I asked.

‘Only that I heard them say … they wondered if I had warned him … they sent me to telephone …’

He went on squealing as if there could be no more hope in the next world than in this for crooked jewellers of Birmingham.

‘There are two children here, Fallot?’

‘There were. Yes. Belonging to one of them. I don’t know which. I don’t know anything. I had to do what I was told.’

‘And how many men?’

‘Five. But they’re not here. Not here any longer.’

‘Where are they? On board?’

He didn’t want to admit that he had any knowledge of a ship. I drew the knife that Pink had given me.

‘Yes. On board,’ he screamed.

‘Have they sailed?’

‘Yes.’

I was mad with fury and disappointment, and I think I might have killed him then and there if Pink hadn’t quickly interrupted:

‘What? Sailed without Ritter?’

Fallot pretended he didn’t know who Ritter was. Perhaps he did not. He whined that it was a long time since he had known any names. The skipper, he said, had gone back to his ship in the dinghy.

All this took less than three minutes. In the fourth minute Fallot was showing us his cellars. He didn’t dare to deny their existence. He knew that death had come up from the sea into his room.

In his sleeping quarters at the back of the house was a large built-in wardrobe. He unlocked the door and pulled out the parquet flooring of the cupboard in a single block. Beneath it was an ordinary trap-door of deal.

Pink grabbed him by the collar so that his body was a shield, and made him lift the trap and light the hanging lamp beneath it. We saw a steep, narrow flight of a dozen steps leading down to a roughly squared chamber. Three sides were of natural rock; the fourth side of solid stone walling in which were doors.

We leapt through those doors one after another, Pink leading with Fallot in his left hand and Ritter’s Luger in his right. There were three rooms, and they were empty. One was that in which I had been confined; it must have been Fallot’s office for the interviewing of very private guests. The next was a cellar or warehouse, and had a safe in it. The third had not long been vacated. It was foul with cigarette smoke. Dirty plates, empty bottles and full ashtrays stood on a table of packing-cases. The room had been hastily furnished with deck-chairs, plain kitchen chairs and two camp beds. I made a quick search, for Jerry could be trusted to leave something behind him wherever he stayed. I found his tie. He had been amusing himself by weaving it in and out of the laces of the canvas bed.

‘Where’s the way out, Fallot?’ Pink ordered. ‘Jump to it, and remember that you’re going in front of me!’

That was just what Fallot did remember, and he didn’t like it at all. He tried to persuade us that of course there was no way out but that through which we had come. In the warehouse, however, was a locked door like that of a cupboard. I burst it open. Within were cold, damp and silence.

Fallot insisted that the space was only an old quarry chamber. I twisted his arm till something jumped out of its socket. I – well, I do not look back on that night with any pride. But I think their mother, gentle though she is, would have done much as I if had been given to her the strength and training.

With Fallot’s limb revoltingly loose, we got a civil answer to questions. He told us that the quarry workings came out on the cliff face, some fifty feet above the sea. Immediately below the opening were two and a half fathoms of water at low tide. I gathered – for he was not always coherent – that there was an emplacement for a winch at the mouth of the quarry, and that he had received small consignments without ever knowing the name of the ship which brought them, or seeing more than vague movement on a deck below.

How did he know, Pink asked, that all the party was on board? He didn’t, he screamed. That was the trouble; some of them might still be waiting at the mouth. It would take time to lower one man after another, and the two children.

Why wasn’t he there? They didn’t want him. They had worked it all out. They’d seen the place. All he had to do was to wind up the cable when they had all gone, and put the winch back, before daylight, where it could not be noticed from the sea.

Pink wouldn’t give up the Luger, so he went first – behind Fallot, that is. The passage at first was roomy, at least eight feet across and as much high. It had evidently been cut out long ago without any purpose beyond the extraction of Purbeck stone or marble. It sloped a little upwards, and my compass showed the main gallery to be more or less parallel to the ledge, and bearing west.

Then we came to a narrow and very rough cutting, the floor steep and uneven and strewn with chips. This must have been made in the great eighteenth-century days of smuggling to connect together two systems of quarries, and to give access from the sea to whatever building had then been on the site of Fallot’s house.

After a minute or two of this dismal corridor, which wasn’t much larger than a coffin set on end, we came up into a well-cut gallery, and then into the main level of the second system. My torch showed a space like the crypt of a considerable church, its roof supported by pillars of piled stone. We were under the small headland which formed the western horn of the crescent around the ledge. Fallot led us out by another gallery which sloped very slightly towards the sea. We were following the track along which the blocks of stone had been moved by levers and rollers to the face of the cliff, whence they could be lowered into the waiting barge.

We had a fair idea of what the end of the gallery would be – a mouth like those of the two caves above which I had signalled to Pink, but smaller, less conspicuous from the sea, and certainly no place for any sort of struggle.

As we approached the sea, the cleaner, warmer air was very welcome, and we shivered less in our wet clothes. They were a nuisance, those clothes. We couldn’t move quietly. Every step was a loud squelch.

From the darkness ahead of us someone called sharply:

‘Who is that?’

‘Me! Fallot!’ he answered, quickly prompted by Pink.

‘Who is with you?’

Pink put on an imitation of Ritter’s harsh voice. Booming out of the depths of the quarry, it was convincing enough.

‘Ritter! My man has gone off with the dinghy.’

If it had not been for the challenge, I should never have noticed that we were nearing the end of the gallery. It showed only as a square of blackness defined against the other denser blackness. We were allowed to advance a few more steps, and then the figure at the entrance turned his torch on us.

We were at the limit of the beam and in single file close to the wall, so he couldn’t see much. I reached an arm over Pink and Fallot, and blinded him with our own light. He was Yegor Ivanovitch, standing erect in the middle of the opening. I was already nearly certain of it from his voice.

‘Kill him if you can,’ I whispered quickly to Pink.

Pink fired and missed. I ought to have taken Fallot off his hands first, but there was no time for concerted action. At the shot both Ivanovitch and I snapped off our lights. The position was not healthy. We had no sort of cover, whereas Ivanovitch could jump in and out of the quarry mouth as he liked.

He was still doubtful what to make of us.

‘Don’t be a fool, Ritter,’ he shouted. ‘This is I, Yegor Ivanovitch. Fallot, who is with you?’ he asked again.

I applied a little too much pressure to the arm, and Fallot screamed:

‘Ritter, Ritter, Ritter!’

That terrified shriek was the end of all possible bluff.

‘Shine a light on your faces and come out,’ ordered Ivanovitch. ‘If you don’t, I fire.’

We dropped flat alongside the wall of the gallery. The shot ricocheted off the floor and went howling into the depths. I reckoned that Ivanovitch was using some light weapon like a .32. That was all to the good. If he had had a tommy gun or machine-pistol, he could have squirted bursts into the tunnel and been fairly sure of bagging us with direct hit or ricochet.

As we dropped, Fallot broke away and dashed down the passage, shouting his identity. Ivanovitch shot him dead as soon as he reached the mouth. Personally I should have preferred to hear what Fallot had to report; but Ivanovitch was taking no risks, and, I expect, had been itching to bump off his very shaky ally for the last twenty-four hours.

‘I shall not leave you behind, Ritter,’ he threatened. ‘Come out, or I’ll get help and fetch you out.’

The red stab of the pistol had come from the right of the cave-mouth. I whispered to Pink that I was going to crawl along the angle of floor and wall, and that he should keep his covering fire high. Ivanovitch could not know that there were two of us, and, if Pink could stop him showing his head or a light, there might be a chance of getting a knife into him before he ever did know.

I silently took off my shoes and coat and trousers, so that I could move unencumbered by drippings. That left a light gap between the dark of sweater and socks, but I comforted myself with the thought that it wasn’t much lighter than Purbeck stone. I had about fifty feet cover, and I told Pink that I was going to do it mighty slow.

Pink gave me a couple of minutes and then fired two rounds. Ivanovitch replied at the flash, and I saw more or less where he was – behind a black something at the quarry mouth. I crept on until I reached it. There cannot have been more than three feet between myself and him, but the three feet were of solid stone.

My eyes, after the absolute darkness of the quarry, were more at ease on the edge of the outer world. The night, also, may have grown a bit lighter. I think it had. I could see the rock platform beyond the entrance to the gallery, and the winch and Fallot’s body. The block of hewn stone between me and Ivanovitch stretched diagonally across the mouth, and was about the size of a single wardrobe lying on its side. If he chose to lean over it, he couldn’t avoid seeing me; if he didn’t, I had a chance of working round the end.

I followed along the inner side of the stone, inch by inch. Pink at this moment was inspired to fire a beauty which clipped the top of the block and must have encouraged Ivanovitch to keep his head down. I got my shoulders past the end of the barrier and out into the open, and then came to a full stop. Instead of the clean-cut stone beneath me, I felt rough grass and chippings. I could crawl no further without making a whole variety of little noises, and I hadn’t a hope of reaching Yegor Ivanovitch over the top of the block.