The English Assassin (2 page)

The view on this particular day was not really up to much. The water in the bay was flat, sluggish and black. On its surface drifted grey scum and dark green weed. The sea resembled a worn-out blackboard upon which an inspired idiot had scrawled equations and then tried to erase them. The sky was clammy and the air was thick with too much brine. From the small patch of shingle on the beach below there came a strong and unpleasant odour of rotting seaweed. It was as if the whole place—castle, cliffs, sea and beach—were in a process of sudden decay. The butcher and the chemist were both old men, bearded and grey, but the butcher was tall and straight, while the chemist was small and bent. The wind tugged at their beards and hair as they huddled on the bench and massaged their legs and hands. Their skins were cracked, wrinkled, weather-beaten and, in colour and condition, very little different from the leather jerkins they wore to protect themselves against the weather. They chatted for about ten minutes and were ready to continue their walk when the tall butcher narrowed his eyes and pointed at the gap between the cliffs where the sea entered the bay.

“What d’you make of that, then?” he asked. He had one of those unfortunate voices which is naturally aggressive in tone and liable to misinterpretation by those who did not know him well.

The chemist frowned. He reached into his jerkin and found his spectacle case. He put the spectacles on and peered out over the water. A large, shapeless object floated in the bay. It was drifting with the tide towards the shore. It might have been the remains of a shark, covered in rotting algae; a tangle of dead eels, or just a mass of seaweed.

“It could be anything, really,” said the chemist mildly.

They watched as the bundle drifted closer. It came to rest on the shingle below. It was vaguely cylindrical in shape but just a little too small to be any kind of wrecked boat. The weed which wrapped it seemed to have decayed.

“Bloody unsanitary-looking, whatever it is,” said the chemist. “The council should do something about this beach.”

But the beach itself was unwilling to accept the bundle. The next wave that came in was forced to withdraw it. The bundle bobbed about twenty yards offshore: the sea wished to be rid of it, could think of nowhere else to deposit it, but refused to swallow it.

The chemist, a morbid man by nature, suggested that the object might be a corpse. It was the right size.

“What? You mean a drowned man?” The butcher smiled.

The chemist understood that his suggestion had been too sensational. “Or a seal, I thought,” he said. “You don’t know, do you? I’ve seen nothing like it before. Have you?”

The tall butcher hadn’t any inclination to follow this line of thought. He got up; he rubbed his beard. “Well, she’ll probably be gone by tomorrow. It’s getting a bit nippy. Shall we—?”

The chemist took one last, frowning look at the bundle before he nodded agreement. They walked slowly inland, towards the almost deserted village.

* * *

After they had vanished, the tide began to turn. It hissed. It whispered. It sighed. As it receded, a lip of a cave was revealed in the west headland, a black gap flaked with foam. The sea pushed the bundle towards the cave; it forced the thing into the mouth which gurgled reluctantly, but swallowed. The tide fled, leaving behind it the weed-smothered beach, the salty stink, the foam-flecked entrance to the cave. The wind blew stronger, whining and moaning about the castle ruins like a dog at its master’s grave, pawing a tuft of coarse grass here, sniffing a clump of shrubs there. And then the wind went away, too.

By now completely exposed to the air, the gloomy cavern contained a comprehensive collection of débris: rusty cans, pieces of drowned wood, glass shards worn smooth by the action of the ocean, plastic bottles, the torso of a child’s doll, and the twisted corpses of about twenty deformed, oversized crabs; the creations of an effluent only recently introduced to this coast. On a shelf of rock about halfway up the slimy far wall, well out of the faint light from the entrance, lay the bundle where the sea had lodged it.

A gull flew in from the grey outside and perched on the bundle before fluttering down to peck at the soft shells and the hard flesh of the mutant crabs.

* * *

When the texture of the day had grown a little less disgusting, a cumbersome skiff, powered by an outboard motor imperfectly mounted in the stern so that its screw often lifted completely clear of the water and caused it to progress in a series of spluttering jolts, rounded Tintagel Head and made for the small patch of shingle leading up to the cave. There was only one person in the skiff. She wore yellow PVC oilskins, a yellow sou’wester and white plastic trousers tucked into red rubber seaboots. The sou’wester shaded her face. The tiller was tucked firmly under one arm as she directed the skiff at the beach. The engine coughed, screeched and spat. The bottom of the skiff rasped on the pebbles and the motor cut out. Awkwardly, the girl clambered from the stationary boat and pulled it completely clear of the sea; she sniffed the wind, then she reached over the side to remove a big blue Eveready flashlight, an old-fashioned gasmask and a coil of white nylon rope. She sniffed again, by way of confirmation, and seemed satisfied. She looped the rope over her shoulder and trudged in the direction of the cave. When she reached the entrance she hesitated, switching on her electric torch before going in. Her clean, protective clothing gleamed in the reflected glare. Her booted feet crunched on the corpses of the crabs; a beam of light illuminated the awful walls, disturbed the carrion gulls. They squawked and flapped nervously past her head to the open air. She directed the beam over all the filthy flotsam before focusing on the shelf of rock from which came a smell partly of brine and partly like cat’s urine. She put the torch in her pocket and used both hands to ease the gasmask under her sou’wester and over her hair and face. Her breathing became a loud, rhythmic hiss. Adjusting the rope on her shoulder she again took out the flashlight and looked the bundle over. The thing was predominantly black and green and had resumed its earlier, roughly cylindrical, shape. There were small grey rocks embedded in it, some yellow grit, a few supine starfish, seahorses and shrimps, a fair number of mussels and limpets and pieces of what looked like tropical coral. The black and green areas were unidentifiable; they were possibly organic; they might have been made of mud which had started to solidify. It was as if the bundle had been rolled along the bottoms of the deepest oceans, gathering to it a detritus which was completely alien to the surface.

The girl bent down and wedged the flashlight between two large stones so that the beam stayed on the shelf. Then she crossed to the wall and began to climb skilfully and rapidly until she stood with her legs spread wide, balancing carefully on the ledge beside the bundle while she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. Steadying herself with her left hand against an outcrop of granite, she bent and felt over the bundle with her right hand. At last she found what she was looking for and withdrew it with a squelch from a tangle of weed.

It was a transparent polythene bag dripping with green algae. She wiped the plastic against her thigh until it was as clean as she could get it, then she held it in the torch’s beam so that she could see the contents. There was a single sheet of white paper inside, covered with doodles in black ink:

She was satisfied. She stuffed the message into an inside pocket and unslung the rope from her shoulder, winding it round and round the slippery bundle until it was thoroughly tied up. With considerable difficulty she managed to brace her back against the wall and with her booted feet shove the bundle to the edge of the shelf. Taking a coil or two of rope around her right arm she was able to lower the bundle to the cavern floor. Then she let the end of the rope drop and climbed down after it. She rested for a moment, retrieved her torch, switched it off and put it away. Working in the faint light from the entrance, she picked up the rope and wound it twice on each hand. She turned so that the rope was now braced on her shoulder. She strained forward, hauling the bundle after her. Broken corpses of crabs scattered in its path as the girl slowly pulled it from the cave and dragged it bumping down the beach to the waiting skiff. Panting painfully into her gasmask she heaved with the last of her strength and got the thing into the boat, putting her whole weight against the bow so that the skiff slid back into the sea. Standing knee-deep in the seedy water she pulled the painter until the bow was pointing away from the beach, then she carefully got in and resumed her place at the tiller, lowering the screw into the sea and tugging at the motor’s cord.

After a number of false starts she brought the outboard to life and the screw began to turn. The boat moved into deeper water, going back the way it had come. It still made jerky progress, so that at times the girl in the yellow sou’wester, gasmask and oilskins was lifted completely from her seat. At last she disappeared round Tintagel Head, bouncing out to sea.

As if commissioned to wash away from the bay all traces of these events, the sky let loose its rain.

“Another age will see all this in quite a different perspective.”

It was not certain what he meant as he stared about him at the little white laboratory, at the Formica-topped benches, the racks of test tubes, the specimen jars and the aquarium which occupied one whole wall.

“So you say, general.” The young Japanese marine biologist sounded sceptical as he held a bottle of sea water up to the light from the plate-glass window which offered a view of the Atlantic.

“M…” Major Nye put his hands in the pockets of his threadbare blazer and drew out a crushed wooden matchbox. He held it with the tips of his fingers, in both hands, as if afraid to damage it further. Part of the tray was still inside the box, but all the matches were gone. The label was predominantly blue, white and brown and the picture showed three dark-skinned men in blue loincloths and red caps trying to launch a sampan into the sea. Along the right edge the label was torn a little but most of the trademark was visible: a diamond with the word
WIMCO
printed inside it. In the top left quarter of the box was the slogan:
SEA-FISHER
. At the bottom centre: “SAFETY MATCHES Made in India”. On the reverse side of the box it said:
These matches are made in India by the celebrated WIMCO works at Bombay. They are specially imported by
THE CORNISH MATCH COMPANY
Av. contents 45
.

Major Nye was a stringy man in his late sixties with a scrubby grey moustache and pale, introspective blue eyes. He was just above average height. The veins in his hands and wrists were prominent and purple and matched the ink-stains on his fingertips. The badge of his old regiment was stitched onto the breast pocket of his blazer and the badge was as faded and frayed as the blazer itself. He put the matchbox carefully back in his pocket. He cleared his throat and went to his seat behind the green steel desk which had been erected for him at the far end of the lab. There was nothing on the desk. He opened a drawer and took out a Rizla tin. He began to roll himself a thin cigarette.

“I only agreed to do all this because my daughter was keen on it.” He seemed to be trying to explain his embarrassment and apologise for it. Not so long ago he had loved India and sworn loyalty to the Empire. Now he had only his children to love and only his wife demanded his loyalty. This was something of a comedown after a sub-continent.

He lit his cigarette with a Swan Vesta, cupping his hand against a non-existent wind. He puffed hard and began to hum a tune—always his unconscious response to small pleasures like smoking. Through the window of the little square marine biology lab Major Nye could see the rocks and the grey, roaring sea. He was puzzled by this coast. Cornwall was alien to him; it depressed him. He could not understand the Celtic point of view. These people seemed to enjoy burrowing into the ground for no particular reason. Why else had they built their fougous? He had noticed, too, how they had turned quite naturally from wrecking to tourism without, apparently, any change of spirit. His right hand went to his thinning grey hair and smoothed it, descended to the grey eyebrows and smoothed them, came finally to the grey moustache and smoothed that. With both hands he tightened the small knot of his regimental tie and tugged at the frayed collar of his shirt, which was white with thin blue and red stripes which had almost faded to invisibility. There was a khaki handkerchief protruding from his left sleeve. The cigarette was now unnoticed and unappreciated in the corner of his grey mouth.

A surly-looking laboratory technician, with long, black hair falling over the shoulders of his white coat, came in, hovered over a bench, picked up a rack of test tubes, nodded moodily at the Japanese and the Englishman. Then he left.

Major Nye got up and went to look at the bound and spreadeagled assassin who lay on the slab just under the window sill. The wrists and ankles were in steel clamps.

“How are you feeling, old son?”