Dying to Tell (17 page)

But was I the man to do either? Even I wouldn't have answered that question with a resounding and unambiguous yes. Just as well when you came down to it, then, that I didn't have much choice about volunteering for the role. The nameless marksman who'd snuffed out Hashimoto's life would come after me. I was sure of that. I was unfinished business. I could go back to England and try to resume a normal life, but the Townleys wouldn't let me. Sooner or later, they'd track me down.

I fished the tape out of my pocket and stared down at it nestled in my palm. Had Rupe really sold out? Or was his message a fake? I have the letter. I am in Berlin. We must meet." Short, simple sentences, comprising a message left only when it was certain he couldn't speak to me. A spliced tape, maybe, made up of parts of a previously recorded conversation. It was possible. In the right hands, it was probably even easy. An expert would be able to tell. But I wasn't likely to run into one of those. I'd just have to guess. And wait until I could prove I'd guessed right.

If the tape was a fake, then it was also a clue to what Rupe had done in Berlin. "I have the letter". "We must meet". He hadn't been talking to me. He'd been talking to the Townleys. Of course. They'd recycled Rupe's blackmail call. "Trust me' meant You'd better believe I'm serious'. And they had believed him. What they'd done to neutralize the threat he posed I didn't know. But it hadn't been enough, not quite. They still didn't have the letter. Erich's behaviour proved that. They didn't have it and they were prepared to kill anyone who stood between them and suppression of the secret it held.

But what kind of a secret did that make it? What could it possibly be? Hashimoto could have told me. Maybe he would have done, if I'd pressed him harder. "You are better off not knowing," he'd said. "You are safer." Well, I didn't feel very safe. And I wasn't going to, unless I found some way to expose the Townleys for whatever it was they truly were. "For everyone who knows," Hashimoto had said, 'there is the danger that they will tell." Too right. If I ever found out, I meant to tell anyone who'd listen.

And how could I find out? There was only one way. The realization of what it was seeped slowly into my mind as the taxi headed west out of Tiergarten. I unzipped my bag and took out Erich's wallet. What did we have here? Credit cards that were no use to me, tempting though they were Erich's credit limit had to be higher than mine (probably by a factor of ten), but plastic leaves a trail and I couldn't afford to do that. What I needed was hard cash. Fortunately, Erich seemed to be a serious fan of folding money. He had about three thousand Deutschmarks on him, plus several hundred US dollars. "Thanks very much," I murmured, transferring the cash to my own wallet. It was enough to take me a long way. And I had a long way to go. What else was there? Nothing much that I could see, apart from a clutch of membership cards for various clubs.

But hold on. One of them was more of a business card. Gordon A. Ledgister, Caribtex Oil, with an office address in Houston, Texas. He had to be Erich's brother-in-law the oil executive Jarvis had said Barbara Townley had married. You never knew when I might want to contact him. That went into my wallet as well. The rest was destined for a rubbish bin at the airport. I had as much of Erich's as I wanted.

Thanks to Erich's fondness for the crinkly stuff, added to Hashimoto's generosity with money, I was able to pay cash for my ticket at the Lufthansa desk. I'd be travelling economy, of course. Only two days before, I'd been downing champagne in club class. But champagne complimentary or otherwise -was the last thing I wanted now.

Just about the first was speed. But that wasn't easily had. Where I was going meant changing planes in Frankfurt and an arrival some time the following afternoon. Would the police come looking for me before I set off? I reckoned not. They were probably still trying to trace which hotel Hashimoto had been staying at. But that didn't mean the wait for the connecting flight wasn't hard on my nerves.

Sitting in the departure lounge at Tegel, trying to stop my thoughts whirling in on themselves, I suddenly realized that there were other people than myself to consider. And I badly owed a couple of them a telephone call.

The first was my father, who seemed strangely unsurprised by my urgent request for him to call me straight back on a Berlin payphone number.

"I spoke to Miss Bateman yesterday," he explained when we were talking again. (I had to think for a moment who he meant.) "She told me you'd gone to Germany. What's this all about, son?"

"Too complicated to go into, Dad. We don't want to overload your phone bill, do we?"

That's true." (I'd known the point would appeal to him.)

"Why did you contact Echo?"

"Miss Bateman, you mean?" (So, the crusty old sod was determined to cling to formality.) "Because you asked me to have a word with Don Forrester and let you know the outcome."

"And what was the outcome?"

"Well.. ."

"Come on, Dad. Remember: you're paying."

"All right. But Don was reluctant to go into it at first, I can tell you. It took some doing to talk him round."

"You managed it, though."

"I did, yes."

"And I'm grateful. So .. . ?"

"Well, apparently the police considered the possibility that Peter Dalton had been murdered by a friend who'd been staying with him at Wilderness Farm. If the friend left before the shooting, he was obviously ruled out as a suspect, but it was never determined when he actually left, because he was never traced. And the pathologist narrowly favoured suicide as a cause of death, so '

"Was the friend called Stephen Townley?"

Townley? Might have been. Don couldn't remember the name. What he did remember, though, was that after finding the body upsetting enough, you'd have thought Howard Alder virtually accused this friend of murdering Dalton. The police might never have known about him otherwise, though neighbours subsequently confirmed his existence. What's more, Howard showed Don a photograph of the fellow, taken at '

"Ashcott and Meare railway station."

"How did you know that?"

"I've seen the photograph. On Rupe's kitchen wall. But that doesn't matter. What efforts did Don make to track down Townley?"

"None. Officially, it was never a murder inquiry. And Howard wasn't exactly a reliable witness. Although '

"What?"

"Oddly enough, he did come up with a motive for murder."

"Really? What was that?"

"Howard had taken to sneaking around Wilderness Farm that summer, apparently. A few days before the shooting, he was in the yard, spying through the kitchen window, and he saw claimed he saw a holdall full of five-pound notes standing on the kitchen table. Well, there was no holdall full of cash at the farm when the police searched it. Howard suggested it was the proceeds of a crime and that ... Townley, as you call him .. . had stolen it, after murdering Dalton."

"What did Don make of that?"

"He reckoned Howard had dreamed it up. This was just after the Great Train Robbery, remember. The papers were full of speculation about where the robbers might have hidden the money. Don's theory was that Howard got the idea about the holdall from such stories and used it to blacken Dalton's reputation."

"Why would he want to do that?"

"Ah, well, that brings us to the reason why Howard was hanging around Wilderness Farm. In some ways, it's the most surprising part of the whole thing." Dad lowered his voice, as if afraid we might be overheard. "It seems Peter Dalton was sweet on Mildred Alder. So Howard believed, anyway. And he didn't approve of Dalton as a suitor for his sister." (Never mind approval. I was having difficulty even imagining the possibility.) That's why he was spying on Dalton. And why he was out to discredit him."

"Did Don ask Mil about this ... relationship?"

"Tried to, apparently. But George told him it was just a fantasy of Howard's and Don left it at that. Although he did say that when he called at Penfrith it was obvious Mildred was upset about something. Very upset. Of course, if Dalton really was courting her, it makes suicide less credible."

"And murder more credible."

True enough. But it's all a very long time ago. That's the only reason Don was willing to tell me about it. He doesn't believe in the jinx, of course. Reckons the deaths were just coincidental."

"And that George Alder drowned accidentally?"

"He's not sure. He seems to think suicide is a possibility. That might explain why the Alders put the idea about later that George had drowned in Sedgemoor Drain a more likely place for an accidental drowning than the Brue."

"Why would George want to kill himself?"

"It hardly seems likely he would want to, does it? Not with a child on the way. Don was flummoxed. Still is, come to that."

"I'll bet he is." (So was I.)

"That's about all I can tell you, son. You could always try asking Mildred about Peter Dalton, of course. Just don't ask me to."

"I won't. Maybe I'll do it myself when I get back."

"When's that likely to be?"

"Not sure."

"Do you want your mother to take any kind of message to the Alders?"

"No. I don't want you or Mum to contact them. Just ... drop it."

"Drop it?

"The whole thing. Do nothing. Say nothing. It's best, believe me."

"I was just beginning to enjoy myself."

"Then quit while you're ahead. I wish I could."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. I've got to go, Dad. Don't worry, OK? I'll be in touch."

"Yes, but ' "Bye." I didn't enjoy putting the phone down on him, but cutting him off from what I'd become involved in really was the best way to protect him.

And the same applied to Echo. I found her at home, resting up after a long morning on the post round. She sounded not just pleased to hear from me, but relieved.

"Is there something wrong, Echo?"

"I had creepy Carl round here last night, asking where you were and what you were up to."

"What did you tell him?"

"That you'd gone away without saying where or why."

"It's a good line to stick to."

"Didn't make it any easier to get rid of him."

"But you succeeded in the end?"

"Just about."

"Good. Now, you remember what you said to me Friday night about moving out?"

"Yen."

"I think you should. As soon as possible."

"Why? What's happened?"

"It's better you don't know."

"I hate it when people say that."

"So do I. But it really is better. Find lodgings somewhere else, Echo. Forget Rupe. Forget me too."

"I can't do that."

"Try."

"Are you at the airport, Lance?"

"Yeh. How'd you know?"

"I can hear the flight announcements in the background."

"Right."

"You're leaving Berlin?"

"I am, yeh."

"And not to come home?"

"No."

"Where are you going?"

"I'll have to pass on that."

"You're not quitting, though, are you?"

"No."

"Don't you think you should?"

"Definitely."

Then why don't you?"

I had to think about that for a moment. When the answer came, it was neither illuminating to Echo nor consoling to me. But it was true. "Because the time for quitting has come and gone."

TOKYO

CHAPTER TEN

I reached the Land of the Rising Sun just as the sun was setting. My confidence wasn't exactly in the ascendant either. While most of my fellow passengers had slept through our night over Russia, I'd spent the blank hours thinking so hard about the bind I was in that my brain had turned to mush by the time another day dawned. Then, eventually, I did sleep, deep and dreamlessly for all of forty minutes before landing.

Travelling as light as I was at least meant I didn't have to hang around the baggage hall at Narita Airport. I made straight for the bureau de change, swapped my Deutschmarks for yen, then hit the information desk. The legendary courtesy of the Japanese is the only possible explanation for me going away with a street map of Tokyo on which neat red crosses marked the locations of the Golden Rickshaw bar and the Far East office of the Eurybia Shipping Company, along with a note of their addresses in Japanese. (There'd turned out to be three Golden Rickshaws in the Tokyo telephone directory, but one in such a remote suburb that I ruled it out as a former haunt of American GIs and another, logically enough, was actually a rickshaw-hire firm.)

I studied the map as the N'Ex train sped me into the city. The Golden Rickshaw was in a side-street a shortish distance east of Tokyo's central station. To that extent, my luck was in. (Though the wiseacre I'd sat next to on the plane had assured me that tracking down addresses in Tokyo was like looking for a haystack in a galaxy.) Eurybia's office was quite a way to the south-west, however, so Rupe wasn't likely to have chanced on the Golden Rickshaw while sampling nearby bars. Since it was bang in the centre of the city, he wasn't likely to have lived just round the corner from it, either. No, he'd sought it out. He'd known what he was looking for all along. Though exactly what that was.. .

The Tokyo rush hour was in full swing when I got off the train. It was the usual big city swirl of bright lights and dim humanity, amped up to an oriental pitch I was in no state to deal with. It was also raining hard enough to soak my map as I battled out of the station through a swarm of brolly-wielding commuters. I immediately set off in the wrong direction, then had to double back and soon lost count of how many blocks I was supposed to cover. A department-store doorman eventually put me right and I found the side-street I was looking for. There were several bars along it, all doing a brisk trade, but no immediate sign of the Golden Rickshaw, so I tried my luck in one of the friendlier-looking establishments. A barman wearing sunglasses was a first in my experience, but the inky lenses didn't stop him studying the piece of paper on which I had the Golden Rickshaw's address written down, while opening a beer for me at the same time.

"Seven doors that way, other side," he announced. "But it's closed."