A Time to Kill (8 page)

‘Because he couldn’t just vanish,’ I answered. ‘Because he’s a respected citizen of Bournemouth. Ivanovitch must have left him free to clean up his affairs, whether he liked it or not.’

‘Why doesn’t Losch go to the police? Does he expect any mercy when he gets to Russia?’

‘He might,’ I answered. ‘More than here, at any rate. And Ivanovitch has a way with him.’

‘Oh, you!’ she cried. ‘You can’t think badly of anyone who offers you a drink. But Losch?’

‘How
can
I know what he hopes? They may have offered him a laboratory beyond the Urals where he can’t get into trouble. Something of that sort would be their game.’

‘Would he be watched?’

‘How can I know?’ I repeated hopelessly. ‘Perhaps. But Ivanovitch can’t have men for everything. They may just fetch him when they are ready.’

‘Get him first,’ she said. ‘You and Pink.’

I couldn’t even judge her proposal on its merits. We were so limitlessly apart that nothing either of us said had meaning. I was determined not to compromise the children. I insisted that it was too great a risk.

‘There isn’t any risk that is too great,’ she answered frantically.

I didn’t agree, but her tone stung me at last into constructive thinking. It might well be that Yegor Ivanovitch had left one untidy end in all his quickly improvised planning; after all, it was only a little over twelve hours since Pink had made his disastrous appearance at my car.

Cecily perceived my change of mood – though I do not remember saying a word – and her eyes were fixed on me more kindly.

‘Don’t stay with me,’ she said, ‘and don’t listen to me! But just remember Losch! When you are with Pink, you’ll – oh, you’ll see more clearly. I can’t advise you.’

I wanted her to go away for the weekend – partly so that she wouldn’t be alone in the house, and partly so that I could communicate with her safely. She wouldn’t hear of it. She couldn’t bear the thought of the children coming home – unlikely though it was – and finding the door locked. She understood that she might be condemning herself to remain without news of any of us beyond, perhaps, a very guarded telephone call. Such patient courage is beyond me.

I changed out of my London suit, and took with me kit for a couple of nights. I looked longingly at my old army revolver, but I had no ammo for it, and I’d had enough of empty pistols. Then I drove down to the office and told my clerk that I was taking the children away for the weekend and might not be back till Tuesday.

I found a message on my desk that Dorchester police had telephoned. I called them back, in an intolerable mood of wild hope that they were going to report some suspicious circumstance which might lead straight to my boys, and of dread lest they had found out just enough to force my hand, and no more.

The reason for the call was plain routine. The inspector wanted to know if the person who had talked to a constable in Bournemouth at 2 a.m. had really been me.

‘I didn’t know you collected moths,’ he remarked invitingly.

He was the same inspector who had been just too late to run me in the previous autumn. Ever since he had regarded me as a first-class subject for nods and winks and knowing conversation.

I couldn’t pull myself together, and made some stammering reply to the effect that I’d caught butterflies ever since I was a boy. He thought, I am sure, that I was embarrassed at being detected in so infantile a hobby.

‘What was it all about?’ I asked him.

‘Someone broke into a Dr Losch’s house. Nothing missing, though he did a power of damage in getting out. You ought to know of Losch if you collect moths.’

I nearly said I didn’t, and then had a flash of inspiration.

‘I did just meet him once,’ I replied. ‘He struck me as a nervous sort of chap.’

‘What made you think so?’ he asked at once.

‘Oh, just an impression.’

‘Well, you summed him up all right. He was burning something in his chimney early this morning, and now he has told Bournemouth police that he is so upset he has to go away for a week or two.’

‘You seem to know a lot about the case,’ I said.

‘Oh, as soon as your name came up, I thought I might as well find out all I could, you see.’

‘No,’ I assured him, ‘I wasn’t pinching his spoons for the prime minister or anything. By the way, who was that officious ass who wanted to have me run in?’

‘Just a journalist of some sort who has had rooms across the road from Losch for the last fortnight.’

I wanted to suggest to the inspector that Bournemouth police should check the antecedents of the journalist; but such a lead could only mean that I knew something and that I had not been on the scene by the merest accident. I was in no mood to be questioned. I had to tell the police all or nothing. And if I told them all –
you might make it impossible for me to return them
Ivanovitch had said.

I got to West Bay about six, and ran my car into a hotel garage where it wouldn’t be seen by every casual passer-by. I was sure I had not been followed, but it was well to assume that I might at any time be in Ivanovitch’s neighbourhood. I didn’t know where in all Dorset he was, and had not the least clue.

The wind had been freshening all day. The headlands of Devon were a long black line in the west with black clouds above them; but the sun was out, and the even, white-capped seas racing across Lyme Bay looked more exhilarating than dangerous.
Olwen
was not in the little harbour nor in sight. I waited for half an hour, and then I saw a speck of white, part solid and part a moving fountain of spray, coming up from the west.

I watched Pink round the breakwater with beautiful ease, and heard him exchange hails with some official on the quayside. He claimed to be making a passage from the Exe to Portland and coming in for shelter. You couldn’t have disbelieved him. He was clean-shaven and fresh and merry with the sea. His white sweater and shorts, when he peeled off his oilskins, were properly expensive and weather-beaten, and, I thought, in convenient contrast to the dark clothes known to have been worn by Dr Losch’s burglar. He was the very picture of a simple, healthy naval officer on a holiday. It might be considered a little odd that
Olwen
and her owner belonged to no yacht club, but their respectability couldn’t be questioned.

It was the top of the tide, and he took
Olwen
up through the lock-gates into the lagoon at the mouth of the Brit. I hailed him with a surprised Good-Lord-who’d-have-thought-to-see-you. He played up splendidly and shouted something about not having met since Alexandria. Then he paddled the pram over and fetched me, and I went down into that desolatingly neat cabin.

‘You’re back from London soon,’ he said.

I couldn’t bring myself to give him more than an unrevealing, brutal outline of the facts. It wasn’t that I had any resentment against Pink. He was in trouble enough himself. My story, when I came to tell it, seemed such a shameful admission of inefficiency and defeat.

Pink was gentle as a mother. I didn’t expect him to have that characteristic. Yet I shouldn’t have been surprised, for I well remember one of my company commanders who was an angel to his men but couldn’t be trusted to obey an order without embroidering upon it some fancy of his own which could involve a whole division. Pink wouldn’t let me blame myself at all. That, I suppose, was what Cecily hoped or foresaw, knowing that she herself could only throw me into worse distress.

‘Any idea at all where they took you?’ he asked, after he had made me repeat and expand my wretched report.

‘No. We went up and down a considerable hill, and we never seemed to pass through a town. That looks like the north of the country.’

‘You can make your mind easy on one score,’ he said, ‘they won’t leave tonight. For one thing, we’re in for a real blow, and for another your cloak-and-sickle man can’t have had time to lay on the private transport he mentioned. After all, I know a bit about it – sea or air, whichever you like. And I tell you we’ve got at least twenty-four hours to play with. Look here, we’ll get back into the harbour while the tide serves. We might want to go to sea in a hurry.’

He took
Olwen
through the lock gates, and anchored in the outer pool. Except for a little coaster tied up to the quay, we had the port to ourselves.

‘Had anything to eat since breakfast?’ he asked. ‘No, I thought not. Well, we’ll put that right first.’

He produced a cold pie and salad and a bottle of wine.
Olwen
unexpectedly possessed a refrigerator.

‘When you know you’re going to be alone, and fitting out to be alone,’ said Pink, ‘you can find room for a lot more comforts than usual.’

As soon as I felt a more useful member of society, he asked:

‘What does your missus expect us to do with Losch?’

‘God knows. Exchange him, perhaps.’

‘Bad bargain from their point of view,’ Pink said. ‘The moment you had your boys back, you’d go straight to the police.’

‘I don’t think she had any definite plan,’ I said. ‘She just spotted a hole in their arrangements.’

‘We might as well see if he can be got,’ Pink suggested cheerfully, ‘and open up the game a bit.’

I didn’t much care for opening up the game without having the faintest notion how to win it, but I was too grateful to think hardly of Pink. He hadn’t said a word of his own troubles and of the fate that awaited him when Yegor Ivanovitch supplied the Portuguese police with a name for their set of finger-prints.

‘If we could get Losch down in this cabin, we could probably make him talk,’ Pink went on. ‘I don’t know, old man, where you’d draw a line.’

‘Nowhere – so long as you’ve got a heavy weight to sink what’s left of him.’

‘That’s the spirit!’ he said. ‘Now here’s another line of country. If I were copped, the police would want Losch to identify me. Now, if I gave myself up, would that delay the whole party?’

I couldn’t see that it would. The identification parade could not take more than an hour or two. I was thinking so deeply and selfishly that for a moment the magnanimity of Pink’s offer went clean over my head.

‘Good Lord, Pink!’ I exclaimed. ‘If I thought it would do any good, I’d probably have handed you over already!’

‘That’s the spirit!’ he said again.

He made himself comfortable on the settee, and poured out some brandy. It was the first drink I had tasted without the feeling that I had no right to enjoy it.

‘How many men has this Ivanovitch got?’ he asked.

‘Well, everything he has done could be done with four and himself.’

‘Four’s a lot. He could spare a man to keep an eye on Losch, or he may be right there in the window himself on top of his typewriter. If he is, shall we just bust in and tear him apart?’

It was a pleasant thought, but my mind was running on ways and means of getting Losch away from all windows and possible watchers. Identification parade – I kept returning to some idea vaguely glimpsed in those words. At last I had it.

‘I wonder if we would be caught if we telephoned Losch to come down to the police station and identify his burglar.’

‘Why the devil should we be?’ Pink exclaimed heartily. ‘And we must take a chance somewhere.’

His enthusiasm put me off. Suppose Losch telephoned the police station to have the request confirmed? Suppose Ivanovitch or one of his men accompanied him? Suppose we were arrested while trying to kidnap him?

‘Yes,’ said Pink, and suppose Ivanovitch doesn’t see why he should return Jerry and George, anyway, and brings ’em up to be bloody commissars!’

That clinched it. I doubted whether the plan could succeed, but, if it did succeed, we might have Losch to ourselves for a day or all eternity. Assuming he had settled up his affairs and paid off his servants, no one would ask after him. The police would take it that he had done as he said he would, and gone off for a holiday to restore his nerves. Ivanovitch would think he had bolted.

‘I hope he doesn’t know much about English police methods,’ I said.

‘Don’t care if he does,’ Pink answered. ‘But I tell you – because I’ve listened to ’em and I know – that a German in his position is going to have nightmares about the British Secret Service. Losch will think there’s no limit to what they might do. God, he ought to see Roland calling a conference to decide whether it’s safe to pass a traffic light!’

I went ashore and called Cecily, just to say that all was well, and the night too dirty for anything but regular cross-Channel services to run. Then Pink and I worked out a detailed plan for the morning, and turned in. I tried to keep my imagination away from the three beings who were most precious to me, but I doubt if I slept at all.

We were away in my car at six. An early start was essential, for if we weren’t back by eleven we should have to stay in that very public little harbour till the evening. Pink, knowing me to be an ignorant landsman, impressed it on me strongly that we had to race against the tide. We had plenty of time so long as Losch was an early riser.

At half-past seven we were exploring Bournemouth. We didn’t care for its central police station; there was no handy quiet spot in which to leave the car, and far too much traffic. So we decided to invite Losch to Poole. It was highly probable that Poole police would have picked up the supposed seaman who had broken into Losch’s house, and unlikely that any cop who knew Losch by sight would be on duty at the station.

At half-past eight Pink went into a telephone box and dialled Losch’s number.

‘Dr Losch?’

‘Speaking.’

‘’Ere’s the doctor for you, sergeant,’ he roared. ‘And yer tea’s getting cold.’

I swallowed and twice tried to speak, and then my nervousness passed.

‘This is Poole Police Station, sir,’ I said. ‘Very sorry to call you so early in the morning, but we should be grateful if you could come down and identify a man.’

Losch seemed thoroughly flurried. Yes, yes, he’d be delighted to. No, no, the sooner, the better. I told him that unfortunately our cars were all out, but if he would take a taxi we would refund the fare.

‘For how long will you require me?’ he asked. ‘I am expecting a caller.’