Jacaud was already reducing speed as Rossiter appeared on deck. He ran to the rail and stood there, one hand shielding his eyes from the rain. A signal flashed through the gray morning and he turned, face grim.
“They’re saying: ‘Heave to, I wish to board you.’ It’s a Royal Navy MTB. Let’s get out of here.”
Mercier clutched at his sleeve, panic rising to choke him. “Those things can do thirty-five knots, monsieur. We don’t stand a chance.”
Rossiter grabbed him by the throat. “Seven years, that’s what you’ll get if they catch us with him onboard. Now get out of my way.”
He nodded to Jacaud, ran along the deck and disappeared below. The engines roared as Jacaud gave them full throttle, spinning the wheel at the same time, and the launch heeled over onto one side, almost coming to a dead stop, then surged forward into the fog.
The gray walls moved in, hiding them from sight, and the door to the companionway banged open and Rossiter appeared with the passenger. He was a black man of middle years, tall and handsome, and he wore a heavy overcoat with a fur collar. He looked around in bewilderment and Rossiter spoke to him in English. The man nodded and moved forward to the rail, and Rossiter pulled out an automatic and struck him a heavy blow at the base of the skull. The man lurched to one side and fell to the deck without a cry.
What happened next was like something out of a nightmare. The Englishman moved with incredible speed and energy. He grabbed a heavy chain from the stern deck and wound it around the man’s body several times. He gave it a final turn about the neck and hooked the two loose ends together with a spring link.
He turned and shouted to Mercier above the roaring of the engine, “Okay, grab his feet and over with him.”
Mercier stood there as if turned to stone. Without hesitation, Rossiter dropped to one knee and heaved the man into a sitting position. The man raised his head painfully, the eyelids flickered, then opened. He glared at Mercier, not in supplication, but in hate; his lips parted and he cried out in English. Rossiter stooped and had him across the shoulders. The Englishman straightened and the man went over the rail, headfirst into the sea, and disappeared instantly.
Rossiter turned and struck Mercier heavily in the face, sending him sprawling to the deck. “Now pick yourself up and get to work on those nets or I’ll send you after him.”
He went into the wheelhouse. Mercier lay there for a moment, then got to his feet and stumbled along to the stern. It couldn’t have happened. Oh, God, but it couldn’t have happened. The deck slanted suddenly as Jacaud spun the wheel again, and Mercier fell on his face in the pile of stinking nets and started to be sick.
IT was the fog that saved them, spreading out halfway across the Channel, shrouding them from view on the run back to the French coast.
In the wheelhouse, Jacaud swallowed rum from a bottle and chuckled harshly. “We’ve lost them.”
“Your luck is good,” Rossiter said. “You must live right.”
“Pity about the package.”
“That’s life.” Rossiter seemed completely unconcerned and nodded to where Mercier crouched by the nets, head in hands. “What about him?”
“A worm,” Jacaud said. “No backbone. Maybe he should go for a swim, too.”
“And what would you tell them in Saint Denise?” Rossiter shook his head. “Leave it to me.”
He went along the deck and stood over Mercier with the rum bottle. “You’d better have a drink.”
Mercier raised his head slowly. His skin was like the belly of a fish, the eyes full of pain. “He was still alive, monsieur. Still alive when you put him into the water.”
Rossiter’s pale flaxen hair glinted in the early morning sun, making him look strangely ageless. He stared down at Mercier, his gentle, aesthetic face full of concern. He sighed heavily, crouched and produced an exquisite Madonna from one of his pockets. It was perhaps eight inches long and obviously extremely old, carved by some master in ivory, the color of his hair chased with silver. When he pressed her feet with his thumb, six inches of blue steel appeared as if by magic, sharp as a razor on both edges, honed with loving care.
Rossiter kissed the Madonna reverently, and without even a trace of mockery, then stroked the blade against his right cheek.
“You have a wife, Mercier,” he said gently, and his face never lost its peculiarly saintly expression for a moment. “An invalid, I understand?”
“Monsieur?” Mercier said in a whisper, and the heart seemed to stop inside him.
“One word, Mercier, the slightest whisper and I cut her throat. You follow me?”
Mercier turned away, stomach heaving and started to be sick again. Rossiter stood up and walked along the deck and stood in the entrance of the wheelhouse.
“All right?” Jacaud demanded.
“Naturally.” Rossiter took a deep breath of fresh salt air and smiled. “A fine morning, Jacaud, a beautiful morning. And to think one could still be in bed and missing all this.”
Chapter 2
Fog rolled in across the city, and somewhere in the distance ships hooted mournfully to each other as they negotiated the lower reaches of the Thames on the way out to sea. Fog-real fog of the kind that you seemed to get in London and nowhere else on earth. Fog that killed off the aged, choked the streets and reduced one of the world’s great cities to chaos and confusion.
Paul Chavasse abandoned his taxi at Marble Arch and whistled softly to himself as he turned up the collar of his trench coat and passed through the gates of the park. Personally there was only one thing he liked better than fog and that was rain. An idiosyncrasy with its roots somewhere in youth, he supposed, or perhaps there was a simpler explanation. After all, both rain and fog enclosed one in a small private world, which could be very convenient at times.
He paused to light a cigarette, a tall, handsome man with a face as Gallic as the Pigalle on a Saturday night, and the heritage of his Breton father was plain to see in the Celtic cheekbones. A park keeper drifted out of the shadows and faded without a word, a thing that, considering the circumstances, could only have happened in England. Chavasse went on his way, unaccountably cheered.
St. Bede’s Hospital was on the far side of the park, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity in spite of its worldwide reputation. They were expecting him, and when he called at reception, a porter in a neat blue uniform escorted him along a series of green-tiled corridors, each one of which seemed to stretch into infinity.
He was handed over to a senior lab technician in a small glass office, who took him down to the mortuary in a surprisingly modern lift. Chavasse was conscious of two things the moment the lift doors opened: the all-pervading smell of antiseptic so peculiar to hospitals and the extreme cold. The vast echoing chamber was lined with steel drawers, each one presumably holding a cadaver, but the object of his visit waited for him on an operating trolley covered with a rubber sheet.
“We couldn’t get him into one of the boxes, worse luck,” the technician explained. “Too bloated. Stinking like last year’s fish and then some.”
At close quarters, the smell was quite overpowering, in spite of the preventive measures that had obviously been taken. Chavasse pulled out a handkerchief and held it to his mouth. “I see what you mean.”
He had looked on death many times in most of its variations, but this monstrosity was something new. He stared down, a slight frown on his face.
“How long was he in the water?”
“Six or seven weeks.”
“Can you be certain of that?”
“Oh, yes-urine tests, the rate of chemical breakdown and so on. He was Jamaican, by the way, or did you know that?”
“So they told me, but I’d never have guessed.”
The technician nodded. “Prolonged immersion in salt water does funny things to skin pigmentation.”
“So it would appear.” Chavasse stepped back and replaced the handkerchief in his breast pocket. “Thanks very much. I think I’ve seen all I need.”
