From London Far (5 page)

‘Very obstinate, indeed, Mr Bubear; very, very obstinate, indeed.’ Meredith, thus ingeniously flooded with vital, if still bewildering, information, spoke the first appropriate words that came into his head. ‘And it appears that your situation is rather awkward. The Mykonos Marbles, above all things, should not have been let slip.’ He looked sombrely at Bubear, who first advanced upon the girl as if with some venomous intention and then, changing his mind, made a gesture of despair and sank down on a seat. And Meredith nodded. ‘That is right, Mr Bubear. Please take place. This had now better be left to me. For it does not seem that you have distinguished yourself my friend. I think you were warned not to underestimate Marsden’s men here. When I get to Moila all this will have to be discussed, you may be sure. And decisions will have to be taken – decisions, Mr Bubear.’

Meredith paused and reflected that intimidation had its insidious pleasures. That Bubear had been taking it out of the girl was a sort of justification for taking it out of Bubear – but the exercise was gratifying in itself, like twisting the arm of a smaller boy. But this reflection (a sure sign that he was being swiftly subdued to what he worked in) gave Meredith pause only for a moment. ‘I had been looking forward’, he pursued silkily, ‘to contacting the chief of your organization. It grieves me much that I should have to take forward with me so unsatisfactory a report. And it is not the Mykonos Marbles only, as I think you very well know. There are other matters, Mr Bubear.
Nicht wahr
?’ And Meredith gave his victim what he hoped would register as a penetrating glance. It had occurred to him that as the man was a scoundrel part of his scoundrelism was probably expended in double-crossing his employers, and that in Bubear’s present state of demoralization a little in the way of shock tactics might penetrate to this. Meanwhile, Meredith glanced fleetingly at the girl. And, ever so faintly, the girl nodded.

‘Nicht wahr?’
repeated Meredith softly, and much encouraged by this sign of what he thought of as professional approbation. ‘I think you know to what I refer, Herr Bubear? Allow me to make a memorandum.’ And Meredith fished ironically about the desk. ‘The matter will have to be discussed. I think it very likely that you will be removed and a reliable replacement made. There will be no difficulty. A suitable incident will be arranged.’

At this Bubear suddenly groaned, and then fell to gulpings much like those of the bank messenger outside. ‘The figurines!’ he cried out in despair. ‘I implore you to believe that they were a private transaction which I felt myself entitled to make. The funds and resources of the organization were in no way engaged–’

Meredith had opened his eyes wide. ‘The Tobermoray figurines!’ he exclaimed. For he very well knew to what Bubear referred. These priceless objects had disappeared from the Marquis of Tobermoray’s house some two years before, when a time-bomb had fallen nearby and a temporary evacuation had been enforced. ‘You have the hardihood to assert, Mr Bubear, that the organization would countenance your making the disposal of the Tobermoray figurines a matter for your own private profit?’

And here, thought Meredith, is the crest of the wave. Now or never he and the girl must take advantage of its impetus to get themselves safely ashore. To delay would be inevitably to overreach himself; he would be driven to some long shot which would be hopelessly astray and precipitate sudden and irretrievable disaster for them both. Which was a shocking confusion of images, Meredith thought – and he was about to go back in his mind to the
wave
and see if something better could not be done with an
undertug
, when he once more caught the girl’s eye. The eye held its unmistakable message:
we had better make a break for it if we can
.

But how could he propose with any plausibility to walk out with a prisoner for whom the gaining of the public street would mean security and escape? And yet plausible it must be made. Meredith stood up. ‘And here, too, my friend, you have failed.’ He pointed to the girl. ‘I know the sort. You will never get anywhere with her that way. You shout at her, you slap her face –
hein
? And the result? She is one of Marsden’s girls still. Now she will come with me and we shall talk. You are surprised? Pah! You are a fool.’ He turned to the girl. ‘Come, my dear. And where shall we dine? I think you will find that I know how to offer sensible terms.’

It was going to work. Bubear had betaken himself again to his bowing and bobbing; nothing was required but to get the girl on her feet and march out. And with luck they could be back with the whole of Scotland Yard within half an hour. The Titian, the Giotto, and whatever other monstrous thefts the recesses of the place concealed would be restored to their true homes, and all these deplorable people safely lodged in gaol.

With this pleasing issue of things before him Meredith stepped briskly from behind the desk. The girl rose to her feet and advanced towards him. At this moment there was a sound of confused voices outside; the door by which Meredith had entered was flung open; a tall figure, encased in a heavy greatcoat and carrying a dispatch-case, strode into the room. The newcomer took a rapid glance around him, stopped, clicked his heels and stiffly bowed. ‘Vogelsang,’ he said.

Had Vogelsang been feeling like Birdsong – Meredith reflected afterwards – he might not have chosen to announce himself in this bald but customary Germanic fashion. In which case Meredith would, during certain vital seconds, have had to give him the benefit of a doubt; for he might, after all, have been Scotland Yard’s own vanguard sweeping into action. As it was, the truth was instantaneously apparent. The real traveller to Moila had turned up. He was looking with swift suspicion at the bogus one now.

In this crisis –
tanto in discrimine
, thought Meredith as his hand went out towards Bubear’s revolver once more – there was only a single ticklish point to decide. The Titian, the Giotto, the Juvenal, and – no doubt – much else: the only faint chance of saving these lay in definite and instantaneous action. Unfortunately, that action would not be justifiable. Consider, thought Meredith, a burglar getting away with all your worldly goods; you might shoot at him if reasonably certain that the effect would not be mortal – but assuredly you would do wrong if you deliberately shot him dead. And so with Vogelsang – whom certainly it would be useless merely to wing. But if all this was clear something else was obscure. There was his own fate and – what he was bound to put first – the fate of the girl. If they were beaten in this desperate game they would infallibly be killed. In fact, he, Meredith, was the protector not merely of sundry masterpieces of art, but of at least one innocent human life besides his own. What then – and here lay the ticklish point – was the right ethical aspect of what might be termed
preventive homicide
?

Some fraction of a second before reaching this point in his speculations Meredith had raised Bubear’s revolver (an engine of which he had no understanding whatever), had aimed it, compressed the trigger, and shot Vogelsang dead. The body lay sprawled on the carpet and Meredith noticed that the effect was rather that of the sort of sensational dust-cover to be met with on railway bookstalls. There was blood, and what must be brains – and this on a carpet which, being genuine Aubusson, it was to be presumed Mr Bubear had detained by way of perquisite from his employers. Meredith felt sorry that he had spoilt this carpet. He also felt very sick. But neither of these things prevented his wheeling round upon Bubear and crying out harshly, ‘You fool, it’s the police!’

Bubear was puzzled. Probably he was terrified too. And, unfortunately, terror lent him wit. He ran to the body, stooped over it, and in a moment had straightened up with some weapon taken from the dead man in his hand. The tragi-comedy, Meredith saw, must at once reach a further pitch of bewilderment. ‘Clear out,’ he called. ‘Clear out with that damned girl!’ And, racing across the room, he pressed himself against the wall by the door through which Vogelsang had come, thrust his right arm through the aperture, and continued to discharge the firearm with which Fate had dowered him. As he was now facing the long subterraneous corridor which led to the tobacconist’s shop, the resulting echoes and reverberations were innumerable and yielded a most convincing impression of a large-scale gun-fight. He took a quick glance into the antechamber. The secretary was crouched under her ebony and chromium desk. The bank attendant was vindicating his character as a well-armed and resolute man by lying down behind the massive masonry of the Giotto. But from certain further passages over to the left the sound of advancing voices and running feet could be heard. Meredith slammed to the door, shot a bolt and raced back across the room. ‘Dozens of them!’ he panted. ‘Why haven’t you got away?’

Even as he spoke Bubear, who was fumbling at a farther wall, stepped back and revealed what appeared to be a small sliding panel masked by a system of pipes which ran down the brickwork. This he had pushed back, and he was now thrusting the girl through the narrow bolt-hole thus revealed. Bubear himself followed and Meredith tumbled through after him; the panel immediately closed and they were left all three standing in a narrow, whitewashed corridor, dimly lit by small electric lights, and virtually identical with that through which Meredith had first come.

And here Bubear paused. ‘But the police–’ he began. He looked full at Meredith and the arm with Vogelsang’s weapon stirred at his side. ‘Why, you–’

‘Look out!’ The girl, who had moved a few steps in advance down the corridor, shouted in sudden apparent terror; Bubear, momentarily distracted, swung round towards her; Meredith, as if the concerted action had been long practised for performance on a stage, brought the butt of his revolver hard down on Bubear’s head. Bubear made a nasty noise in his throat and fell on the ground. Meredith, not pausing to contemplate the issue of this second stroke of violence, took the girl by the hand and hurried forward. A distant hammering and thumping assured him that some assault had begun upon the room from which they had just fled.

The girl had taken the lead. She must, Meredith thought as he was swung down a side corridor and up a flight of stairs, be what is called an adventuress, and used to this sort of thing. Certainly for one who was to be presumed recently escaped from some species of third degree – But there again, surely, was an obsolete phrase. Perhaps
given the works
was correct, although it rather suggested being handed the complete plays of Shakespeare on a school speech day. For one so recently in a state of evident exhaustion, the girl was displaying a remarkable turn of speed. But then she looked a long way under thirty, and Meredith was forty-nine. Too old to take steep stone stairs three at a time – which was nevertheless what the present exigency required.

For now there were shouts not far behind them, and seconds after they had reached what must be the first floor of this mysterious building the zip of a bullet past their ears suggested that momentarily at least they had been within sight of their pursuers. They raced down yet another whitewashed corridor, swung round a corner, and found themselves in a dimly lit chamber of cathedral-like vastness, wholly void. The thud and echo of their footsteps as they crossed this was like the rout of an army through the colonnades of a deserted city.

Again there were shouts not far behind – and this time, it seemed to Meredith, less by way of mere hubbub and more by way of well-directed hue and cry. Moreover, there were answering calls from somewhere in front of them, a fact the sinister import of which even an amateur could appreciate at once.

But now they were once more in a whitewashed corridor – a short one, this time, and from which they emerged upon a further low-lit chamber of an amplitude answering to the first. But whereas the first had been empty this was everywhere filled with uncertainly discerned rectangular masses, in some places scattered singly upon the floor and in others piled in towers and pyramids disappearing into a dimness of rafters or girders overhead. It was like tumbling into a giants’ nursery at night and scurrying forward through a prodigal disorder of building bricks abandoned at the end of a day’s tremendous play. Meredith and the girl plunged into the recesses of this fantastic repository. But voices, purposeful and assured, were all around them. They were trapped. The girl, as if realizing that nothing remained but to fight it out, stopped short, gave a quick glance to see that Meredith still had Bubear’s gun, and drew him swiftly into the complete shadow of two impending cliffs of the giants’ play blocks. Actually, they were packing-cases, Meredith could now see. Was it possible – fantastic thought! – that they were all filled with masterpieces of the world’s art? He was about to whisper an urgent inquiry on this when a quick pressure of the girl’s hand restrained him. Somebody had run straight past their hiding-place, shouting an order as he went.

The girl was leaning forward, straining every sense. Meredith, acutely aware that his own respiratory and pulmonary systems were shockingly noisy contrivances, crouched motionless beside her. Fortunately, there was a great deal of noise round about. Meredith listened – and presently with something of an analytical ear. His conclusion was a curious one. He and the girl were doubtless the occasion of all this noise. But they were the object of only part of it. A hunt for them, that was to say, was going forward. But so was much else as well.

Hoists and derricks were in operation. Motor-trolleys of the kind which, in recent years, have come to add to the discomforts of a railway platform were clattering over the floor, some with trains of satellite trolleys behind them. Twice beneath their feet there was the roar and throb of a powerful petrol engine, and this was followed by the grinding of gears hastily thrown in and a rapidly diminishing rumble and rubbery shudder through the building. Heavy lorries, in fact, were pulling out into the safety of London. Meredith had a sudden intuition in the darkness of a multifarious and ordered activity all about him. A whole community had sprung to the performance of some complex evolution at a word.
Action stations
– but that was not quite it.
Abandon ship
– he had got it, now. Mr Bubear’s little branch of the mysterious Properjohn’s organization had concluded that it was indeed the police and was hastily closing down. But meantime a sizeable detachment were out for blood.