Spy and the Thief (12 page)

He sipped a cup of tea and told them about it again. “There was this knock that awakened me—someone speaking softly through the door and saying it was you, Rand. I opened it, of course, and this bearded fellow jumped me with a knife. He was dressed in shabby clothes. I’m sure I never saw him before.”

“Did he stab you only once?” Rand asked.

“Just once.” Sir Kenneth fingered the bandage. “I think something must have scared him off, or he would have finished the job. After he ran out I managed to cry for help and luckily Amy heard me and came running.”

“Did you see anything of the bearded man?” Rand asked her. Suddenly it was twenty years ago and she was a clerk in the London office, just out of her teens.

“Not a thing. But I didn’t really look down the stairs. I was more interested in Sir Kenneth. When I saw all the blood I’m afraid I screamed.”

“It’s time we all got out of here,” Fowler said glumly. “Not one of us is safe.”

“But why should anyone want to kill us?” his wife asked.

No one answered her. Instead, Sir Kenneth interrupted. “I’m afraid we can’t leave quite yet. The police questioned me about the wound at the hospital. They’re coming here again this afternoon.”

Some press photographers arrived to get pictures of the dead whale, and Rand strolled down the beach with Amy to watch them. “This is such a desolate place, really,” she told him. “I don’t know what we would have done without the whale.”

“And the murder.”

“Yes, and the murder.”

“Fowler thinks it’s a beautiful beach.”

“Perhaps in summer it is, but not in May.”

Rand kicked at a little mound of wet sand. “I suppose in a way the Calendar Network is like that whale—on the beach, finished and done with after it’s served.”

“We’re all on the beach,” Amy said. “All but you, anyway.”

“Did you ever want to stay in intelligence work?”

“Yes, I suppose so. But I got married, and divorced, and then just sort of drifted.”

He chuckled at a memory. “I used to think it was fun that you were December. You were much too pretty to be December. You still are.”

“I’m thirty-nine years old,” she told him.

“You lied about your age back then. You said you were twenty.”

“Girls always lie about their age when they’re young,” she said. “And when they’re old.”

They stood in silence for a time, watching the photographers snap pictures and pose small boys on the whale’s upturned bottom. Human interest, after all. Otherwise it was just another dead whale.

“Did Maass have any close friends in the network?” Rand asked her on the way back to the hotel.

“I know as much as you do. I was in London too, remember?”

“But you must have heard something.”

“He teamed occasionally with Carruthers, our missing October, but of course they both reported to Fowler.”

“Why was the network disbanded? Sir Kenneth hinted there was a special reason.”

“I don’t know. The job was over, I suppose.”

“That’s what Bruno thought too.”

“Bruno.” She turned to face him, eyes squinting against the afternoon sun. “I suppose it narrows down to him now, doesn’t it? Karl’s dying message said
Taurus.
That meant either April or May—and Sir Kenneth was May and he too was attacked.”

“Sir Kenneth still is May.”

“Bruno with a beard could have stabbed him.”

Rand shook his head. “Bruno with a beard would still be Bruno. He couldn’t disguise that massive body.”

“Maybe Sir Kenneth knows it was Bruno and is just not admitting it.”

Rand remembered the old man’s mysterious hint about the network as a motive for Karl’s death. “It could be. I’m going to talk with him again.”

The police came soon after Rand and Amy returned from their walk. This time they had a Scotland Yard Inspector along, to whom Rand identified himself. The hotel’s other guests by now were in a panic and a few had packed their bags to leave. The elderly woman who ran the place was busy in the wickered lobby, imploring the guests to stay.

After an inconclusive session with the police Fowler spoke to the other five. “Well, we were going to leave tomorrow anyway, so we might as well stay the night now. It’s too late for Bruno to get back to Liverpool tonight anyway.”

“Why spoil a perfect reunion?” his wife remarked somewhat icily.

“It’s only one more night, Elizabeth,” Fowler told her. “And tonight I’m going to have my little pistol out, in the event our bearded friend makes a return visit.”

Rand excused himself and sought, out Sir Kenneth. “How’s the arm?”

“Still throbbing. This is a business for younger men.”

“What? Spying?”

“Whatever you call it these days.”

“You were good twenty years ago.”

Sir Kenneth snorted. “That was twenty years ago.”

“Why was the Calendar Network disbanded? Why didn’t any of you remain in intelligence work?”

“You did, didn’t you?”

“I was different. I was back in London with the Colonel. Did it have anything to do with Gregor’s death?”

“March? No, Gregor wasn’t killed till later and his death had nothing to do with the network. He had some black market activities on the side.

“What about the breaking up of the network?”

Sir Kenneth sighed. “Come to my room after dinner and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“You could be dead by then.”

“At least I’ll have died on a full stomach.”

Rand waited until after eight before he made his way to Sir Kenneth’s room. Dinner in the hotel’s main-floor dining room had been another dreary meal, with the women staring at their plates and not eating or talking. Everyone seemed anxious to get away, to be done at last with the pretense of the jolly reunion which had brought them together. They were different people from the ones they had been twenty years earlier.

Sir Kenneth was cautious about opening his door, even after Rand had identified himself. “All right,” he said at last. “Just wanted to make certain it wasn’t our bearded friend again.”

Rand sat down in a wicker chair near the drawn curtains. “This thing has gone on long enough,” he said. “You have to tell me what you know, before anyone else is killed. Why was the network disbanded?” Sir Kenneth seemed to hesitate and Rand added, “After all, I could phone London and put somebody to work going over the dusty files.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because it’ll be faster if you tell me. What was the secret of the Calendar Network?”

Sir Kenneth closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “The Calendar Network was highly successful in supplying London with information on the Russian chemical and biological work. It functioned for more than a year. When the end came I was perhaps closer to Colonel Brantly-Stowe than the others, and I learned the true story—as much of it as anyone ever knew.”

“Which is?” Rand prompted.

“Which is that almost all the information gathered by the Calendar Network was false. Faked! Counterfeit!”

Rand stood up suddenly. “Do you mean to tell me that—?”

“I mean to tell you that Karl Maass was supplying false information. It could only have been Maass, since he was the most successful.”

There was a sudden shout in the hallway, then the tramping of footsteps. Rand ran to the door and threw it open. Fowler was there on the landing, struggling with someone in the dim light. “Grab him, Rand!” he shouted. “It’s the bearded man!”

The man broke free at that instant, a look of startled uncertainty on his face. Rand recognized him at once. It was the bearded fisherman they had spoken to twice near the dead whale. The bearded man turned to run up the stairs.

By now Fowler had his pistol out. “Stop, damn it!” he shouted.

Rand made a grab for the gun, but was not quick enough. Fowler fired twice and caught the bearded man in the back and side, halfway up the flight of stairs. The fisherman stopped, twisted, and tumbled down.

“Good shooting,” Rand said sarcastically, straightening up from the body. “He’s dead.”

“That’s the man!” Sir Kenneth exclaimed. “That’s the man who stabbed me! Let’s get a look at him without his beard.” He tugged at the whiskers, but they did not come away.

“They’re real,” Fowler said, putting away his gun. “It took me a while to recognize him behind all the hair, but I know him now.”

“Know him? Who is he?”

“Our missing October friend—Carruthers.”

It had all begun with Rand and Fowler walking alone on the beach, and it ended the same way. It was early morning the following day when they went for another stroll. A large truck had been driven onto the damp sand, and some workmen in leather aprons were climbing over the whale’s body, starting the tedious job of cutting it up and carting it away.

“Like
Moby Dick,”
George, Fowler remarked. “I suppose whales are always symbolic.”

“What did the police say about Carruthers?”

“I’ll have to go down and make a full report. There’ll be an inquest, of course, but it’s only a formality. You know, Rand, I do think that once he recognized us he was intending to kill us all. Probably would have succeeded too, if we’d stayed here much longer. A madman, of course. Some grudge from twenty years ago.”

Rand said, “Twenty years is a long time for a grudge.”

“A long time. I guess the reunion wasn’t such a good idea.”

Rand bent to pick up some of the golden sand, feeling it run through his fingers. “It was absolutely the worst idea you ever had in your life, George.”

Fowler scowled a little. “Because two men died?”

“Because you killed two men, George. Because you killed Maass and Carruthers and wounded Sir Kenneth.”

George Fowler said nothing for a long while. Then, when he broke the silence, it was with a simple question. “How did you know?”

“I still don’t know everything. I don’t know what twisted thinking caused you to do it after all these years. I suppose you were down here at Cornwall with Elizabeth and you recognized Carruthers, even with the beard. That probably gave you the idea. A reunion of the old Calendar Network, and your chance to revenge yourself on Karl Maass after all these years. Because Maass was the one who ruined it for you, wasn’t he? Maass was the one who changed your whole life. He was faking information right from the beginning, sending it on to you in West Berlin for transmittal to London. It took Colonel Brantly-Stowe over a year to catch on, but when he did he disbanded the network and barred you all from future intelligence work.”

“I was the one who suffered most,” Fowler said. “My whole life was ruined, all because of Maass.”

“Of course they couldn’t arrest him or anything like that. A trial would have revealed too much about British Intelligence operations. So I suppose Maass thought he was perfectly safe when you invited him to the reunion. He thought so right up to the moment the other morning when he saw the knife in your hand. Somehow he had time to scrawl a single word before he died—
Taurus.
He remembered, you see, that the network was originally going to be named after the zodiac.”

“The zodiac names were never assigned, though.”

“No,” Rand agreed. “But you can see from a list of the Calendar Network what they would have been. The Colonel would have been first, and you would have been second, because you were the chief agent in the field. As clerks, Amy and I would have been the last two. But the signs of the zodiac don’t begin in January. Aries is the first sign, in March, and Taurus is the second sign. When Maass scrawled Taurus, he wasn’t trying to tell us his killer was April or May, as I originally thought. He was trying to say it was the second man in the network—you, Fowler.”

“I didn’t see the note.”

“He gambled that you wouldn’t understand it even if you did see it. But I didn’t really need the note to know the truth. Once you killed Carruthers, I saw the whole plan. It was too much of a coincidence to suppose that Carruthers just happened to be living here, of all the places in the world. No, the reunion was held here
because
Carruthers was living here, and since you were the one who organized the reunion and picked the place, that meant you knew he was here all the time.”

“Yes,” Fowler said.

“You killed Maass, then put on a beard and clothes like the ones Carruthers wore. You stabbed Sir Kenneth, but made certain it wasn’t serious—so he’d live to describe his assailant. Then you lured the real Carruthers here somehow. He must already have recognized some of us, of course. Perhaps you merely invited him for a drink, for old tunes’ sake. In any event, you met him on the stairs, started shouting, and killed him. You knew Sir Kenneth would identity him as his attacker—even though he only saw him in dim light for a few seconds. You didn’t mind killing Carruthers and framing him for the first murder. After all, he’d been a friend of Maass in the old days. Perhaps they were even in on the document raking together.”

“You do understand, Rand?”

“I understand.”

“I was on the beach for twenty years. The whole network was on the beach, like that whale—”

“I understand.”

“He took away my whole life’s work with his cheating and double dealing and there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing except spend twenty years selling life insurance.”

They had turned back toward the hotel, and now Fowler’s wife was waving to them.

“It’s time to go,” Fowler said. “The reunion’s over.”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready, dear?” Mrs. Fowler asked.

“I’ll be going to London with Mr. Rand, Elizabeth. Perhaps you could take the car home.”

“Nothing wrong, I hope.”

“No,” he said. “Nothing wrong. We just have to wind up some unfinished business about the old network.”

The whale was gone by nightfall, and there was no trace of it left on the beach. Nothing but the hint of an impression on the damp sand.

R
AND WAS AWAKENED AT
four in the morning by a disheveled Frank Malley, who stood above his cot like some dark angel of judgment. “Telephone, Rand. It’s Inspector Stephens of Scotland Yard. He says he has to talk with you and nobody else.”

Rand groaned and rolled over. “In the middle of the night?” He’d known Stephens casually for years, but the man had never phoned him in the dead of night.