Going It Alone (16 page)

‘Isn’t he here?’ Adrian looked round the room in bewilderment, and for a moment stared at Averell as if he might be the missing young man in disguise. ‘His car’s here. Parked outside in the street.’

Simultaneously, Averell and Tim hurried to a window. And there, directly below them, the Bentley was.

‘It’s empty,’ Tim said. ‘And Dave certainly hasn’t been here. Nobody has, except my uncle and myself. We’ll go down and have a look. But first, Adrian, say what you have to say.’

‘You remember what Twite said about the case?’

‘The case! What case?’

‘As big as a coffin. The case for the great big fiddle Twite said that man bought. I suddenly remembered I’d seen Dave with it. Or with its twin, of course. One couldn’t be sure.’

‘My dear Adrian,’ Averell said, ‘compose yourself.’ Averell on his part wasn’t feeling at all composed. ‘Where was this, and when? Was it when one of those bands or groups or orchestras arrived in Uffington Street?’

‘Not there at all. That would have been less queer, wouldn’t it? I’d been to our public library. It’s more than a mile off. And this van was outside some sort of empty shop next door to it.’

‘This van – what sort of van?’ Tim demanded. He had turned very pale.

‘The tip-up van, I suppose. They were loading it with this and that. And Dave was shoving in that great big fiddle in its case. I think I only paid attention because he was pretty well staggering under it. But it was Dave, all right. What do you think it means?’

‘It means that yesterday afternoon, when Twite was yattering, Dave remembered just what you’re remembering now, Adrian. It means just that and no more than that.’ Tim spoke grimly. ‘So take a grip of yourself, Adrian.’

‘But then Dave went off like that, and hasn’t been seen since! He must have –’

‘He must have taken it into his bloody thick skull to do another of his DIY acts.’

‘DIY?’ Averell said.

‘Do It Yourself. Or Go It Alone. Now we’ll go and look at the Bentley.’

Although without knowing precisely why, Averell had strongly disliked the look of the Bentley incongruously parked in this mean street. He was in considerable confusion of mind – so much so, indeed, that he forgot about the necessity of dressing himself and had to be packed off by Tim to huddle into his clothes. Adrian was now calmer; he had unburdened himself of his secret and had taken on the air of a hovering spectator, arrested by some inexplicable accident by the wayside but beginning to think of moving on and attending to his own affairs. He was a vague sort of man. Or he was this when not concentrating upon a Greek text.

There was a milk-float at the end of the street but otherwise it was deserted, and any stir within-doors was still masked behind closed curtains and lowered blinds. The car was drawn up neatly by the kerb; the doors were unlocked; the key was in the ignition. They looked at it silently and fearfully for some seconds. Then Averell spoke.

‘Tim, one simple explanation occurs to me. Dave may simply have left his car for you to pick up. Did he ever do that?’

‘Never.’

‘But perhaps,’ Adrian said, ‘he did it on this occasion, not wanting to disturb you in the small hours. There may be a message inside.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Tim paused; he seemed reluctant to put this sanguine suggestion to the test. ‘I think he discovered something – and it was important enough for him to drive here and tell my uncle and myself, bang in the small hours though it was. And then something happened. We don’t know what. I’m wondering about touching those door handles. Because of fingerprints.’

‘Very wise,’ Averell said. He felt that Tim’s mind had taken a propitious turn, since fingerprints were not of much use to a Robin Hood and his merry band. ‘But perhaps you could use a handkerchief.’ In periods of fatigue Averell occasionally read detective stories.

Tim used a handkerchief, and pulled open the front nearside door. It swung back silently. There was a faint smell of expensive leather upholstery mingled with a faint smell of tobacco smoke.

‘No message,’ Tim said. ‘Nothing here. Except that there’s something on the floor.’ He put down a hand, and then drew it back quickly. ‘Ugh!’ he exclaimed, ‘oil.’ He looked at his hand, and so did Adrian and Averell.

‘No,’ Tim said slowly. ‘Not oil. Blood.’

The shock of this discovery held them all silent for some moments. Then Tim spoke again in an unsteady voice.

‘He’d discovered something, and he came to tell us. But they got ahead of him. They’ve had better luck with him than they had with me.’

‘No, not that. Not if you mean they’ve killed him.’ Averell heard himself speak with more conviction than he’d have supposed he could summon up in such a crisis. ‘If they’d killed Dave they wouldn’t have left his car on the spot for almost immediate discovery, while at the same time burdening themselves with his body. They’d have driven away the one in the other. So there must be a different explanation.’

‘So there must.’ Tim was now in command of himself again in a way that his uncle could only wonder at. Averell himself had seen – had just seen – death in war; Tim had never been tried that way. To Averell Dave was the acquaintance of a day, but he was Tim’s oldest friend. If Tim could take this horror and remain instantly clearheaded Tim was a man, a grown man, one could rely on. ‘And I’ll tell you something,’ Tim said. ‘That fat woman and her clumsy threat. It was a stupid kind of temporizing. Behind it lay some sort of indecision. Dave was a potential threat. Just like me, he had only to remember something, to let something click in his head, and he’d become an actual one. But they’d come to see him as something else as well.’

‘Do you know, I believe I may have an idea what it might be?’ It was the learned Adrian who had said this, and still with the air of a detached spectator. He might have been a scholar who had just glimpsed some hope of resolving a minor but much debated textual crux in Sophocles or Aeschylus. ‘Haven’t I heard that Dave comes of rather wealthy people?’

‘He does, indeed,’ Tim said. ‘I’ve been telling my uncle so. Enormously wealthy, as a matter of fact.’

‘Then that’s it. Those deplorable people have carried him off – and with a nasty scalp wound, as likely as not. But not for subsequent slaughter.’

‘I believe you’re right,’ Averell said. Adrian too, he felt, had to be wondered at.

‘They’d have two motives,’ Adrian continued mildly. ‘The bank robbery would appear to have been on a large scale, and they must require time to tidy up on it. To get the stuff away, I mean, and probably themselves away too. So – knowing he now
knew
– they’d want to hold on to him until that was effected. But alive, fortunately. And there’s the second motive. Alive, Dave might be worth as much again. But it isn’t so easy to collect ransom-money on dead bodies. Or not in the western world. There are, I believe, primitive societies in which a different view is taken. Even, indeed, in the Greece of the heroic age. To your uncle and yourself, Tim, I need scarcely cite instances in Homer.’

‘No, you needn’t,’ Tim said grimly. ‘What’s important is to waste no time. And to keep this thing absolutely quiet for the moment.’

‘To keep it quiet?’ As Averell uttered these words he felt the return of a now familiar dismay.

‘Yes, of course. When somebody has been kidnapped in the hope of monetary gain the one fatal thing is to hasten off to the police. Task forces go scurrying around, there are headlines in the papers, and it’s even odds the criminals panic and chuck their victim into the sea or down a well. So we’re on our own still.’ Tim paused for a moment in which – momentously – Averell found nothing to say. This bee in his nephew’s bonnet he had come to know there was no ready coping with. ‘And listen!’ Tim went on. ‘There’s one vital thing they don’t know we know. They know what Dave remembered, and that it took him back yesterday evening to case their joint in that empty shop beside the public library. But they don’t know that Adrian happened to witness that most extraordinary and mysterious occasion when Dave actually lent them a hand in loading up their van. My guess is that Dave just happened to be passing by and put on a turn in the way of gratuitous obligingness – the silly ass! And perhaps that gives us a tiny edge on them. So in we get.’

‘But, Tim!’ Averell did now manage to exclaim. ‘We can’t possibly–’

‘Listen, Adrian.’ Tim had ignored his uncle’s expostulation. ‘We’ll run you back to Uffington Street and drop you there. You must cope with those two girls, but without giving them a clue about where my uncle and I are off to. We can’t possibly have them mucking in on this thing as it’s now developing. Lucky the bastards left the key in this bloody great car.’ Tim was already at the wheel. ‘Jump in,’ he said.

They dropped Adrian off as proposed. He had provided vital information, and now for good measure a rational hypothesis covering the state of the case. But Tim clearly had no opinion of him as a likely man in a rough house. Uncle Gilbert, on the other hand, had been recruited at once. Uncle Gilbert (whom a punch on the nose had virtually worsted in the garden at Boxes) felt a very reasonable doubt about himself as a swingeing Friar Tuck. But Robin Hood had flattered him, at least by implication, and he went along. At least there were to be no Maid Marians involved, and that was something.

Tim seemed to know the location of Adrian’s public library, and he parked circumspectly in a road behind it.

‘When we find that shop,’ he said, ‘the best thing will probably be simply to walk in.’

‘It may be locked up.’ This was the only rejoinder Averell could think of to what seemed to him a staggering proposal.

‘Then we bang on the door, and see what happens. If nothing does, we can bash our way through a window. It won’t be the sort of shop with effective shutters of any kind. And if we just confront them in a perfectly confident way, the chances are they’ll bolt in panic, leaving Dave behind them. It will be beyond their imagination that we haven’t got the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police himself outside. You’ll see.’

Averell judged it very improbable that he’d see – or hear or feel either, were this hair-raising psychological conjecture to be acted upon.

‘But of course we’ll be cautious,’ Tim added, a little unexpectedly. ‘We’ll take a prowl round first, and particularly take a look at the back. There may be a way in-and out – at the back as well. Perhaps one of us ought to go in at the back, and one at the front.’

At this point Averell, had he been his nephew’s contemporary, might have said something like ‘Don’t make me laugh’ or ‘You must be kidding’. As it was, he held his peace. And he wondered whether it wasn’t unfortunate that Tim hadn’t brought his shotgun, or that he himself hadn’t thought to possess himself of that knobkerrie from the elephant’s leg at Uffington Street.

They took the cautious prowl, starting by walking past the empty shop on the other side of the road. It was a dirty and neglected little property, which could just be distinguished as having once held itself out as the place of business of a family butcher. This was a little ominous in itself, but there was no other sinister appearance to be seen. They crossed the road to the public library, where Tim insisted on pausing to study some fading dust jackets displayed in a window. As a move to allay the suspicions of a possible observer this was unimpressive. It had, indeed, the appearance of being a joke – and a joke of an untimely sort, considering Dave’s possible situation at the moment. Averell had to tell himself, not for the first time, that his nephew wasn’t in the least mad; that the young in general weren’t mad, but merely variously inscrutable. Then they moved on, rounding a couple of corners in order to gain and identify the hypothetical back entrance to the failed butcher’s establishment. This, in fact, brought them almost back to their parked car, and they were just short of it when the situation developed in a dramatic manner.

More or less under their noses a large decayed door swung inwards, and from a covered yard beyond it a vehicle propelled itself rapidly into the road and turned away from them. It was a tip-up truck. Two men could just be glimpsed in its cab. It was piled high with a load covered with a tarpaulin. In tow was a trailer, entirely occupied by a large crate, covered in part by a tarpaulin too. It disappeared in the direction of the main road.

‘Quick!’ Tim yelled, and made a dash for the Bentley. Averell followed – as he appeared perpetually destined to do. They bundled in; the engine sprang to life; Averell was bumped in the small of his back as the car accelerated at a tempo astonishing in so ancient and so lumbering-seeming a conveyance. It was quite as alarming, Averell thought, as being suddenly hurtled in the direction of the moon.

‘It’s our only chance,’ Tim said as he slipped into top gear. ‘Just not to let them out of our sight. Once they give us the slip we’re done for. Not a hope.’

‘They’re bound to see we’re following them. And they know this car already. At least we must suppose they do, after last night.’

‘Well, yes – that’s so. Provided they get a clear view of us. But it’s quite possible they won’t. With that affair in tow behind them, their rear vision must be about nil. The truck hasn’t got one of those periscope things you use when hauling a caravan.’ Tim slowed sharply, and then rapidly accelerated again. ‘It’s London that’s going to be tricky. If we’re held up by traffic lights and their route happens to branch off not far in front of them, we’ve pretty well had it. But once out in the country – if they’re making that way – we needn’t ever lose sight of them. And it won’t much matter whether they tumble to us or not. We can hang on and be in at the kill, even if it’s at Land’s End or John o’ Groat’s.’

Averell was silent – partly because one ought not to talk to the driver, and partly because he had judged Tim’s figure of speech to be infelicitous. Of course if Dave were really where they both thought he was, his position, although it must be acutely uncomfortable, was far from being beyond hope of rescue. There need be no kill to be in at. His captors, if foiled in their ransom plot and virtually cornered, were unlikely to add gratuitous murder to their existing misdeeds. They’d simply try to bolt. Unless, of course, a live Dave knew far too much about them. And this – Averell realized with dismay – was about as big an ‘unless’ as one could conceive.