Dying to Tell (37 page)

"Because Townley's not the only one who could use a clean slate. I hadn't a clue what Ledgister was getting me into when he hired me. I have now. You know what I mean. The stuff of legends. People in legends tend to be dead, though, so I'm happy to miss out on a mention. But to do that I need to close down the whole Townley connection. And I reckon that's best done at the other end."

"What ... do you mean?"

"I mean to take Townley out. And you can help me. In return for which you and your hillbilly friends ... get extended leases on life." A glimmer of lamplight told me he was smiling. "Tell you what. My car's stowed further along the lane. Why don't we go over the details there? I think it could be starting to rain again." He moved on and I fell in beside him, my thoughts struggling to keep pace.

"Hold on," I said, a point suddenly striking me. "I thought you said you followed me here. You can't have done that in a car."

"An exaggeration, I admit. As soon as you got on the train it was obvious where you were headed. Hertz beats public transport any day. I was here way ahead of you." (In more ways than one, I was rapidly coming to understand.) "Townley gave me a heap of background on the Alders and where you fit in. I was wondering how to get you down here if you didn't come of your own accord, because I reckoned from the first I'd need you as a go-between. I mean, hell, the Alders would be spooked by me, wouldn't they, without you to hold their hands? So, thanks for making it easy. It's appreciated. There's the car."

A small, dark-painted hatchback was parked on the verge ahead, overhung by trees. Ventress opened the passenger door for me. Resisting the fleeting thought that maybe I should just make a run for it, I got in. I was aware, when all was said and done, that if a man like him wanted me dead, that's what I'd already be.

He went round to the driver's side and got in beside me. "Hell of a damp climate you got here, Lance. I'm surprised you don't have gills. Hey, maybe the Alders do, being ancient stock and all." He looked round at me. "I don't mind if you laugh at my joke."

"Is it compulsory?"

He laughed for me a deep, rumbling sound of apparently genuine amusement. "OK. Let's quit horsing around. This is no bedtime story I have to tell you. This is reality. Which sure can be a hostile environment. You saw the letter Townley and Ledgister so badly wanted?"

"Yes and no. I saw the envelope."

"Catch the postmark?"

"Yeh."

"Dallas, Texas, on the most famous date in its history, right?"

"Right."

"I made my own enquiries. Well, you have to in my line of business. It pays to watch your back. You have to think about your future as well as your fee. Hashimoto was a standard hit. No frills, no corners cut my specialty. Eric Townley was a bolt-on I should have thought twice about. But what the hell? Ledgister was paying a fat bonus. Sloppy reasoning, I've got to admit. Must be getting old. Well, I'd like to get a good bit older. But when Stephen Townley contacted me, I realized that particular ambition was under threat. I asked around and got some disturbing answers. Townley was one of the Dallas boys the Kennedy hit team, back in 'sixty-three. I mean, that is hall-of-fame stuff in my profession. But it's not what you'd call enviable status. Was there was or was there wasn't a conspiracy? People have been debating that all your life and two-thirds of mine. Well, you need to be a simpleton to much doubt there was one, but there seem to be a lot of those around. Or maybe just a lot of people who study the mortality statistics for witnesses to the assassination and reckon they're kind of hard to argue with. Either way, the big problem for conspiracy theorists is that no one's ever held their hand up and said, hey, yeh, I was part of it and this is what it was and how it went down. Surely to God and J. Edgar Hoover one of them should have been desperate enough by now to have spilled the beans. But no. They never have. Now, why do you suppose that might be, Lance?"

"Too frightened."

"For themselves or their families? It would account for a good few, for sure. But a loner, as most people in my line of work are, grown old, terminally ill, short of cash for a hip replacement, whatever. Why wouldn't he go public for the fame, the money, the hell of it?"

"Well? Why wouldn't he?"

"Because he's already dead. Dead and buried. They all got taken out. Like so many of the witnesses. Culled, to save the herd. The hit men were hit."

"Except Townley."

"He saw it coming and had an escape route ready and waiting. We have to figure he was more than a foot soldier. He was on the recruitment side of things in Japan. Hell, he may even have recruited Oswald while the guy was serving there with the Marines. Maybe that's when Oswald was first tied into the deniable fringes of the intelligence world. But he and Townley knew each other. That's clear. They understood each other. So, when Oswald saw Townley in Dallas the day before Kennedy's visit I'm guessing, but it's as good a guess as we'll get now he finally realized what was going on. Or maybe he already knew, but not that Townley was involved. Either way, he decided to warn Mayumi Hashimoto of the danger she might be in after the event, as a mutual acquaintance or a mutual whatever she was to them. So, he wrote her a letter and mailed it on his way into work on the morning of November twenty-second. Or he could have delayed mailing it until straight after the assassination. It doesn't matter. It got mailed. And, because of it, here we are."

"You believe Townley's escape route involved Train Robbery money?"

"It involved money big time. Disappearing's an expensive business, especially when you have to give up your profession into the bargain. But he'd already set aside his disappearance fund. Dalton was a friend of his from West Berlin days, who'd got into trading information in the British underworld. I think he may have had Mafia even Yakuza connections." (Which suggested his visit to Townley in Japan had yielded more than a lucky china cat, I couldn't help but reflect.) "Anyhow, Townley was sent over here in the spring of 'sixty-three, apparently to sever any embarrassing links between the brewing Profumo scandal and the sensitive parts of US Intelligence Townley's group had dealings with. Funny how all these things get kind of interconnected. Doesn't pay to dwell on the point, though. So, let's concentrate on this point. Townley was already looking for vanish money because he'd got wind of what was planned for the fall. Dalton had just picked up some choice dope about trainloads of used banknotes snaking down the country with zero security. Put the two together and what have you got? Motive and means. They set the heist up or they set up the people who set it up. But they were behind it. That's what counts. Dalton had recently inherited Wilderness Farm a handily out-of-the-way place for Townley and him to do the planning and co-ordinating. Just a pity some interbred local youth developed an unhealthy interest in their activities. But that didn't matter too much to Townley, because he meant to draw a line under the whole deal as soon as he had the money. Dalton probably trusted him. They were old friends. Big mistake. Townley killed him, set it up to look like suicide, saddle bagged the loot and rode off into the sunset. Three months later, straight after the Kennedy hit, he black-holed his entire life to date."

"Why not do that right away in August?"

"Pertinent question, Lance. Distinctly pertinent. That had occurred to me. The answer's conjectural, but it feels like the truth. He believed in the cause. I think that was it. He wanted the conspiracy to succeed and stayed on to do his bit towards ensuring it did. It was an article of faith for him an expression, maybe the crowning expression, of his twisted brand of patriotism. There were plenty who thought like him in 'sixty-three. But not many with the balls to play a full part and the brains to figure out the fate pencilled in for him as well as the best way to avoid it. I take my hat off to the guy. He pulled some very smart moves. Getting back in touch with his family years later wasn't so smart, though. Understandable, of course, but risky. Not that it would have mattered he'd been written off as dead a long time ago but for your friend Rupe Alder. There's just no factoring-in a guy like that."

"Peter Dalton was his father."

Ventress gave a ghostly little whistle. "Was he, now? Well, doesn't that stand the dominoes all in a line? Rupe was out to nail his daddy's killer. Who exactly was Rupe's mother, then?"

"The younger of the two sisters. Mil."

Another whistle. "Bebop-a-lula. It just gets worse and worse."

"Yeh."

"Could be I have good news for Mil, though a commodity I'd guess her life's not been overburdened with."

"What sort of good news?"

"Well, she might appreciate having a ringside seat at the demise of her old lover's murderer."

"How's she going to get that?"

"Easy. I called Townley while I was waiting for you to show up earlier. I told him things went wrong after the car-bombing. I had the cops on my tail. Accordingly, I had to let him down where you and the Alders were concerned and get out of the country in double-quick time. He wasn't happy. He was seriously w happy. But he believed it. My panic turn's surprisingly convincing. So, he thinks I've run out on him. Something I'm sure he's already planning to make me suffer for. First, though, he'll decide to do the job himself."

"You mean .. ."

"He'll come after the Alders. And you. My last service to him was to report you were headed this way."

"You told him that?"

"Sure. It puts you all together, neatly packaged. Now, what's he going to do? Fly back to San Francisco leaving unfinished business behind him? I don't think so. No, he'll come here. That's as close to a certainty as you'll get in this chance-driven world. He'll come. And I'll be waiting."

"When?" I scrambled round in my seat to face Ventress, the realization suddenly hitting me that his plan was something he'd already set in motion something that could no longer be stopped. "How soon?"

"Tomorrow night, I'd guess. At latest, the night after. Not tonight. He'll want to do a daytime reconnaissance first. Hope to get a fix on your whereabouts. The Alders' whereabouts are a given, of course, but then he doesn't know the ground. I'm assuming he never came to Penfrith in 'sixty-three. A fair assumption, do you reckon?"

"What?" Tardily, I registered the fact that Ventress was genuinely interested in my opinion. "No. I'm sure he's never been to Penfrith."

"Right. So, he'll probably leave London first thing tomorrow and make his way here, stake out the Alder joint during the afternoon and make his move some time after nightfall."

"His .. . mo veT

"The triple hit, Lance. Quadruple, counting you. Get with it, will you? We're in real time now. We don't have infinite amounts of it. But we do have enough."

"Enough for what .. . exactly?"

"For you to persuade the Alders to take in a couple of house guests. For the very short duration."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Why me? It was a question that crept in whenever more urgent ones subsided, as they fleetingly did. I mean, seriously, why did it have to be me who was landed with all this? What had I done to deserve it? I certainly hadn't sought it. Trying to lead an obscure and feckless life isn't normally considered a way of volunteering to tackle the consequences of the highest of high crimes and misdemeanours. Talk about the wrong place at the wrong time (not to mention the wrong choice -the disastrous choice of friend). I don't normally tend to self-pity. But I was embracing it now in a big way. As Les had once said to me when I'd failed yet again to draw a placed horse in the Wheatsheaf Grand National sweepstake, "Some people get all the luck, Lance. Which means some people never get any."

Swapping bar-rail wisdom with Les would have suited me rather well that night. Instead, I spent it closeted in damp and chilly Penfrith, trying to hold the nerves of Win, Mil and Howard together (as well as mine) while we waited for what I was only marginally better equipped than they were to anticipate.

Win alone of the three had a clear grasp of the situation we were in. She listened in silence as I explained why putting our trust in Ventress made sense why, in fact, there was nothing else we could do. "The police can't protect you from a man like Townley, Win. Only a man like Ventress can. He knows what he's doing. He really is our best hope."

"We can't leave here," she said when I'd finished, as if proclaiming an axiom of their existence. "If trouble must come in Rupert's wake, then we must meet it, though I can hardly believe Townley means to kill us all."

"I can hardly believe otherwise."

"You know the man. You must be right."

"I'm sorry, Win. I really am."

"You've no need to be. It's our wrongs you're caught up in, not us in yours. Townley killed Rupert, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Then why wouldn't I harbour the man who promises to kill Townley? The Old Testament records the ways of our hearts in this, Lancelot. An eye for an eye is a fine balance. I shall speak to Mil and make Howard understand that he's to keep to his room. Then you can bring Mr. Ventress in."

Howard, then, was despatched to his bedroom and told to stay upstairs. Mil consented to whatever Win thought best, as was her habit, even when as now she probably didn't really understand what her consent encompassed. She was still numb with the shock of learning that Rupe, her secret son, was dead. These new events scarcely registered. She looked at me, blinking rapidly, and muttered, "These are dark days, Lance." (Which was as acute an assessment as any.) She didn't speak to Ventress when he came in, acknowledging his courteous "Evening, ma'am," with a nod. Then, after fetching some blankets for the pair of us we were destined to sleep as best we could in the sitting room she took herself off to bed.

"You'll not have to mind her, Mr. Ventress," said Win. "We're unused to visitors."

"Especially visitors of my colour and calling, ma'am, hey? Don't worry. I'll cause you no more bother than I have to."

"You have a gun?" The directness of the question took me for one aback.

"I do."