The Gigantic Shadow (16 page)

Upstairs the roar of the party was subdued again, as it had been from outside. Hassan led the way to the back of the house, tapped gently on a white door, and opened it.

They entered a sitting room with sofa and armchairs, shabby but comfortable. There was a door leading out of it, presumably to a bedroom. The room was dimly lighted by a standard lamp, but Hunter saw the range of gleaming silver cups on the mantelpiece. Beneath the lamp Pine sat in an armchair, his head back and his eyes closed.

Hassan closed the door softly behind him. When he spoke he was restraining a giggle. ‘I have brought up a friend of mine, Arthur. He wanted to see Anthea, but I told him you would do just as well.’

Pine opened his eyes. He seemed to have difficulty in focusing them, and his voice was thick. ‘What?’

‘A very good friend of mine, Mr Bill Hunter,’ Hassan said.

Now Pine’s eyes focused. He looked at Hunter with a stare which, for a moment, held pure terror. He said to Hassan, ‘You brought this man up here?’

Hassan looked from one to the other of them. ‘Was it wrong? He is not –’

‘You’ve done nothing wrong,’ Hunter said. ‘I’d have got to see him, with your help or without it. We’ve got a little business to settle.’

Hassan ignored him. ‘Arthur,’ he said questioningly, and moved lightly across the room to the chair. ‘Arthur.’

Pine struggled up, like a man swimming upwards through water. ‘It’s done now. You’d better leave us alone.’

‘But is he –’ Hassan left the sentence uncompleted.

‘I’m not from the police, if that’s what’s worrying you,’ Hunter said. ‘Now get out.’

‘Arthur, please tell me that I have not done wrong.’ Hassan’s voice was pleading.

‘You couldn’t help it. And now, you heard what he said. Leave us alone.’

Hassan went out and closed the door. Before closing it he spoke two monosyllables to Hunter.

Pine got out of the chair now, stood up, walked over to the mantelpiece. He gestured at the cups behind him. ‘Looking at these? Sporting trophies. Used to be a sprinter five years ago. Just a little out of condition.’

Now Hunter saw photographs on the walls too, Pine breasting the tape, receiving cups from vaguely-recognisable dignitaries. He said nothing.

‘Didn’t understand that remark of yours about the police,’ Pine said. ‘What the devil did it mean?’

‘It’s simple enough. If I hadn’t been stupid I’d have understood it long ago. You’re part of a drug ring. You distribute drugs with that crackpot PFC as a cover. Anthea’s an addict and she helps with the distribution, which is always the difficult part for people running drugs. She acts as distributor by a simple but ingenious method. Rawlinson pretty well told me what it was when I came to see you in the office.

‘The PFC has a list of people who make regular contributions to its funds, and they make these contributions when Anthea calls on them. At the same time she delivers their supplies. For doing this Anthea gets her own drugs for nothing, and you also give her money. No doubt you’ve got other agents doing the same thing, as well as boys like Hassan. The drill is that the agents call at the office to collect supplies. They have a key to one side of the desk. There they find packets sealed up ready for delivery. They look like little wage packets, and I suppose in a way that’s just what they are.’

Pine’s face was pale. The tic worked in his cheek. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Hunter took the two health salts bottles out of his pocket. Pine sucked in his breath, held out a hand and drew it back. In a voice that, absurdly, sounded indignant, he said, ‘You’ve burgled the office.’

‘Let me make this clear. I’m not interested in these bottles. I’m not interested in you. I want to find Anthea.’

The shot Pine had taken before Hunter’s arrival was taking effect. Standing with his back to those brightly-shining cups he said almost gaily, ‘I only know what I read in the evening papers. Anthea appears to have been kidnapped. Hadn’t you seen? But perhaps you’ve stopped reading the papers since that business about Bond. Reading the papers can get you into trouble.’

‘Where is she?’

‘I really have no idea.’

Hunter felt the initiative slipping away from him. ‘She came into the PFC office and saw you on that Monday morning. I know that.’

‘Why shouldn’t you know it? The police do, too. Anthea came in, asked about doing some more canvassing, and left. That’s what I told the police, and as far as I’m concerned anybody else is welcome to know it too.’ Now Pine was mocking him openly. ‘You forget, Hunter, that I’m a respectable man. I used to run for England. People forget athletes quickly, but they haven’t forgotten me yet. I’m not a convicted criminal.’

‘You know who I am,’ Hunter said slowly. ‘You knew me when I came into the office that day. What else do you know about Anthea and me?’

Pine shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘When Anthea’s a little high she’ll tell anybody anything. Or when she’s low and in need of a shot. She isn’t a girl to keep secrets. And perhaps I ought to say, so that you and I know where we are, that she isn’t a one-man girl either.’

Behind Pine’s mockery Hunter detected some sort of insecurity. What was its cause? ‘Did she tell you what she was going to do?’

‘She told me that she was coming into money, a lot of it. Would that be news to you, now? I doubt it. And where would Anthea get a lot of money. Could it be from her stepfather?’ Pine seemed to cut himself off in mid-speech, as though conscious of having said too much. From somewhere, perhaps from outside, came a noise closer than the hum below. It might have been the sound of a foot scraping on the floor.

But had Pine said too much by revealing that he knew something about the kidnap plot? What did it matter, after all, when he could not find Anthea? Wearily, he got up to go. Pine faced him with a smile that was belied by the tic working in his cheek.

‘Monday morning at your office was the last time you saw Anthea, then?’

‘Of course.’ Pine put up his hand to hide the tic.

It was as he turned away from Pine that he saw, placed carelessly between two of the cups, the spectacles, the blue-rimmed spectacles with ornamental edges that Anthea had worn for the passport photograph.

He turned back to Pine, and there must have been something frightening in his look as he said, ‘Where is she?’

The thin man backed away from the mantelpiece, across the room. ‘I told you, I don’t know.’

‘Those are her spectacles. She has been here since Monday morning. She’s here now.’

‘No.’

‘You’ve got her in there.’ Hunter pointed to the inner door. ‘I heard a noise.’

‘No.’ Pine was cringing now. Hunter went over, took him by the neck, twisted his arm. The arm was thin and brittle, like a stick.

‘Oh, please,’ Pine said, and said it again. ‘Oh, please. You’re hurting me.’

‘Go and open that door.’

‘It’s no use. Don’t be so beastly. Anthea’s not in there.’

Hunter flung Pine aside hard, so that he knocked over a chair and lay on the floor, whimpering a little. He walked over to the inner door and opened it. A man was standing there waiting for him, a man who held a gun in his right hand. He looked hard and long at the man’s face and felt the dark gigantic shadow of the past, a shadow stretching farther back than he would have believed possible, spread over him like a shroud.

The name, on his lips, was like the answer to a riddle. ‘Brannigan.’

The square face, strong and vicious, the cropped light hair above it, had not changed very much. Experience had put some lines into a face that had been smooth. The face was fatter, the mouth thinner. In the grey eyes there had been, twenty years ago, some glimmer of light – the light of idealism, of belief in something. Or was that merely a sentimental invention about the past? Certainly there was no such light in the eyes that looked steadily at him now.

‘Bill O’Brien,’ Brannigan said. He had always been proud of the fact that his voice showed little emotion, Hunter remembered. Now it lacked any kind of emphasis or colour. It was the voice one would expect to hear from a robot.

‘Get back into the room, Bill.’ Before the gun, Hunter moved backwards. ‘Sit down,’ Brannigan said, and he sat in one of the armchairs. Pine scrambled up, picked up the blue-rimmed spectacles and dropped them in his pocket. Then he stood again with his back to the mantelpiece.

‘I told you to be careful,’ Brannigan said to Pine. Although the words were colourless Pine flinched as though he had been burned. Brannigan spoke to Hunter with the same mildness. ‘You’ve caused a lot of trouble, Bill.’

Looking at him Hunter did not see the present Brannigan, a puffy snake in a well-cut dark suit. Twenty years had, after all, made some differences. He remembered the hard young IRA captain of long ago giving orders to the three of them, and giving the orders in a way that showed clearly enough his contempt for the human material he was using. He had known long ago, listening to Brannigan in a little candle-lit room, that the man giving them orders did not care whether they lived or died so long as they carried out the job. He relived the moment in which the smoke rose from his revolver and the night watchman, that old man with the ridiculous name, half turned round slowly and then fell down, crumpling from the knees like a doll.

‘You work for Mekles,’ he said. ‘You told him about my record, and my real name.’

‘That’s right, Bill.’ The gun in Brannigan’s hand did not waver. ‘The governor had the idea that he wanted to appear on this programme. I thought it was a bad idea, but it was what he wanted. I was able to give him a little information about you. He always likes to have a little information about the people he’s working with. Not that he uses it unless he has to. You made him use it.’

‘It was an accident.’

‘That was unlucky. For you, I mean. If what you’re saying is true.’

‘It is true.’

Brannigan shrugged. ‘Not that it matters either way, though it was a nuisance at the time. Bond was one of our boys and he’d begun to fiddle, trying to keep a percentage for himself over and above the cut we gave him. I told him he was finished, his supplies would be cut off. He wouldn’t believe it, got on the line to the governor, talked to him. When he learned it was so he jumped out of the window.’

‘I didn’t know anything about that. I was just firing a shot in the dark.’

‘That was your bad luck,’ Brannigan said again. He did not trouble to imply belief or disbelief.

‘But he didn’t jump. He was pushed. You pushed him.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘You planted a witness in the block of flats opposite, and she said what you told her to say. You talked to her on the telephone when I was in her flat. Tanya Broderick.’

‘Did I talk to her? Tanya’s a respectable girl. For that matter I’m respectable too. I don’t think you’re saying anything, Bill.’

‘I should have paid more attention when I was told that you worked for Mekles. At the time it didn’t seem important.’ Brannigan nodded in acknowledgement of this remark. ‘Have you been working for him long?’

‘Long enough to get used to it.’

‘You’ve come a long way from Dublin, Paddy.’

‘It’s not only a long way. It’s a long time.’ Brannigan seemed to be waiting for an answer, or perhaps another question. When Hunter said nothing he went on talking in his soft, cold voice. ‘You won’t find Anthea here. Only her spectacles.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s dead, Bill. She’s been dead since Monday. Strangled. Down in the cellar.’

Although Hunter knew that Brannigan would not hesitate to lie, he felt no doubt that this was the truth. If he had had any doubt it would have been cancelled by Pine’s gasp of terror.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Brannigan said contemptuously to Pine. ‘You’ve nothing to worry about. He killed her.’

‘I don’t see –’ Pine said, and broke down in a stutter.

‘It’s obvious enough. Anthea had a key to this house, isn’t that right? Sometimes she used to meet Bill O’Brien, or Hunter, or whatever he calls himself here. They arranged this crazy kidnap idea together, but Hunter was double-crossing her, planning to kill her when they had the money. He wouldn’t go shares, you see. He was greedy.’

‘You can never make it stick,’ Hunter said.

‘Why not? Anthea took drugs. She kept a stock of them here. Pine trusted her too much. He’s a bit of a fool, not too strong in the head, all his sense used to be in his feet when he was a runner. But then, why shouldn’t he trust her? After all, she was the chairman’s stepdaughter. And then there’s the money. You’ve got the money, haven’t you, Bill?’

‘Why did I come back here?’

‘You were afraid that Pine had found out something that would betray you.’

‘It will be my word against his.’

‘And which do you think will be believed?’ Pine had recovered his spirits, he was almost jaunty. ‘I don’t think there’s any question about
that.’

‘It won’t be your word against anybody’s, Bill.’ Brannigan’s voice was flat, disinterested. ‘You’ve come to the end of the line.’

His mouth was dry. He could see no purpose in talk, yet he felt it necessary to go on talking. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Pine found Anthea’s body. You wore gloves when you strangled her by the way. He accused you when you came here, you attacked him, he had to shoot you. Self-defence.’

‘You bloody murderer,’ Hunter said. He thought not of himself but of Anthea, the beautiful face blackened in death, the tongue lolling, bitten.

‘I had nothing to do with it.’ Pine cried the words as though they were some sort of invocation. Hunter took a step forward.

‘Don’t do it,’ Brannigan said. ‘I don’t want to shoot now, but if you make me I will.’

‘You say you’re going to shoot anyway. Supposing I take the chance?’

‘You know me too well to take that sort of chance,’ Brannigan said in his flat voice. He spoke to Pine. ‘How soon can you get that rabble out of here?’

‘In half an hour they’ll be gone. Perhaps less.’

‘You’ve got that long, Bill. Something may happen in the next half hour, that’s what you’ll think. It won’t, but you’ll still hope. I know you, Bill.’

You know me too well, Hunter thought, feeling the gun in his hip pocket, so well that you don’t even bother to search me. If he could distract Brannigan’s attention, get him to turn round, he would have time to profit by this over-confidence. Meanwhile he had to go on talking.

‘Supposing I hadn’t come here. What would you have done then?’

‘I wish you hadn’t come. There’s always a risk in gunplay. I don’t like it. You’d have been picked up sooner or later, identified as the man mixed up in this plot of Anthea’s, and we’d have taken it from there. That would have been better. But we can’t leave it at that now, you know too much. You were a dead duck, though, as soon as you got mixed up with that crazy plot of Anthea’s.’ With mild reproof Brannigan said, ‘That was a silly thing to do.’

Hunter said, genuinely puzzled, ‘You knew about the idea from the beginning, then?’

‘A girl like Anthea, how could you expect her to keep anything to herself?’

‘I didn’t know she was an addict.’

‘You didn’t know much.’ Brannigan threw his revolver up in the air, caught it as it came down, laughed at Hunter’s involuntary movement. He’s too quick for me, Hunter thought despairingly, he’s a gunman and I shall need seconds to get my revolver out. ‘You knew she had Pine as her second string boyfriend? No? As I say, you didn’t know much. She told him the idea six months ago, get money from the old man and live happily ever after somewhere out of this world. Pine’s a fool, but he wasn’t stupid enough to buy that one. You were. Even if you’d got away with the money, how long do you suppose she’d have stayed with you?’

‘She loved me.’ Even as Hunter spoke the words he knew that they were meaningless to Brannigan. And sure enough he ignored them. ‘Go down and send them home,’ he said to Pine. ‘We can’t wait all night.’

‘Rawlinson’s really in charge. It won’t be long now before they’ve gone. I don’t think I’d better –’ His voice died away.

‘Rawlinson’s honest, I suppose,’ Hunter said.

Brannigan laughed contemptuously. ‘He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.’

‘You’ve no right to talk like that about Rawlinson,’ Pine said hotly. ‘He believes in the Circle. He thinks it’s doing good.’

‘You give him a helping hand, I must say.’ The words were ironical, but there was no irony in Brannigan’s way of delivering them. It was as though he were beyond irony, as he was beyond hope, pleasure, sorrow, or anything except the mechanical actions that made up his life. ‘But to hell with Rawlinson. It’s your house, isn’t it? Get them out.’

The tic in Pine’s face had come back. ‘You’re not going to –’

‘Don’t worry. I shan’t do anything until they’ve gone, unless Bill here makes me, and he won’t do that. Afterwards you can stuff cotton wool in your ears.’ Pine went out. Watching Hunter, Brannigan said, ‘You couldn’t get away with the money, because they sprayed some sort of chemical on it.’

Hunter had thought himself beyond surprise. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Here’s the way it went. First, Pine sees that Anthea’s very excited about something or other. She’s bursting to tell him about it, finally can’t stop herself, says she’s found somebody else with more guts than Pine, who’s going to carry out her wonderful kidnap plan.

‘Now, Pine’s fond of Anthea, fonder than he is of anything except coke. Doesn’t want to lose her. He tries to talk her out of it. Doesn’t have any luck. Anthea finally gets angry, tells him she’s sick of the PFC racket anyway, and when this plan goes through she’s going to have enough money to get her own supplies. All right. If she’s that crazy, let her try it. But Pine’s jealous, threatens to cut off her supplies here and now, unless she gives up the plan and stops seeing you. Then Anthea says something else. She says she doesn’t like the way we’ve been fooling her old man – her old man, mark you, who isn’t really her old man at all, and who’s kept her without money ever since she came out of the bin – and she may decide to sing about the whole PFC racket. When she says that, Pine comes to me.’

Hunter felt a rush of pity for Anthea, a full realisation of how she had been trapped by her own temperament. In his mind there was an image of a bird with limed wings, struggling to fly. ‘Why to you?’ he said to Anthea’s murderer. ‘Why should Pine come to you?’

‘The governor – Mekles – put me in charge of things over here when we found out that there was trouble with Bond. He doesn’t like people who cause trouble. He doesn’t like them in or near the organisation. He was really upset about that television business. So Pine came to me because it was trouble. And I decided that we couldn’t afford that sort of trouble. Anthea had to go.’

Anthea had to go. It was as simple as that. For Brannigan it had always been as simple as that.

‘Anthea had told Pine what she was planning. That meant she was already working with somebody, so I put a tail on her to find out who it was. And what did we turn up but you. That really was a joke.’ Brannigan did not laugh. Downstairs voices could be heard in the street. People were saying good-bye. There was not much time left. ‘The perfect setup. A previous murder conviction, not much money. You must have been crazy.’

Brannigan strolled across the room to a table on which a record player stood. He lifted the lid, put it on, listened for a moment to a recording of ‘The Double You Blues’:

‘I’ve got those double you blues.

One of you is kind and one of you is not.

One of you’s cold and one of you’s hot.

Those double you blues–’

He nodded, took it off again.

‘You killed her.’

‘That’s right. She went to the office to get some stuff from Pine. She was on tea, and wanted to stock up before starting out on her little adventure with you. Pine said he hadn’t got any stuff at the office, and told her to come here. She had a key to the place already, of course.’

‘And when she got here she found you.’

‘That’s right.’ Brannigan took out a packet of cigarettes, put one between his lips, lighted it, all with one hand. The other hand still held the revolver. He threw the packet over to Hunter. ‘Smoke?’

‘Pine can’t like the idea of her being found here.’

‘No.’ Brannigan blew a smoke ring. ‘But he has to take it. He’s too frightened to do anything else. And anyway, the PFC is expendable. It’s clumsy. We’ve got to reorganise, as I told the governor. Hairdressers, manicurists, that’s the thing.’

The voices downstairs had died away. Hunter moved in the chair so that he could more readily reach the revolver at his hip, but he knew that it was hopeless, that Brannigan would be too fast for him. ‘How did you know about the money?’

‘You were going abroad, it was a cinch you’d try to get rid of it. I got in touch with the two or three boys who run currency fiddles, Morgan, Westmark, Dawes. I told them to let me know as soon as anything came through, and to make it good when they dealt with you. They know Mekles, they like to oblige him.’ Brannigan looked at Hunter as if he were an insect. ‘You never had a chance. You must see it.’

From below Rawlinson’s voice could be heard faintly, saying goodbye. Brannigan stubbed out his cigarette. The door opened and Pine stood there, his face the colour of cream cheese.

‘They’ve gone.’ His voice was high.

Brannigan lifted the lid of the record player, then closed it again.