The Labyrinth Makers

tiny pilots in the cockpits.

Did Morrison spend his free evenings crouched over a desk with glue and tweezers and fine paint brushes? Or did the manufacturers have a staff of middle-aged women who spent their lives endlessly assembling their products to catch the imaginations of small boys?

It seemed an age before the door rattled as Roskill unlocked it to let him in. He felt absurdly like a thief being admitted by his confederate–the more so because Roskill dropped the latch as soon as he was inside.

'Has he gone?'

Roskill shook his head and beckoned him.

'No, he hasn't gone anywhere.'

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Audley followed him through the shop into an untidy stockroom. A dingy office ahead was littered with invoices and printed lists which had overflowed an old roll-top desk: Morrison was an untidy businessman. But Roskill pointed to an open door on the left, leading to what was obviously a cellar beneath the shop.

'He's down there. And he's dead.'

Audley squeezed past a packing case and stared down the worn wooden staircase. A single naked bulb hung from a flex at the foot of the stairs, and Morrison lay in a heap directly beneath it. One of his legs rested awkwardly on the stairway, the trouser leg rucked up to reveal a pathetic expanse of white flesh. There was a hole in the sole of his shoe. Halfway up the stairs his glasses lay, unbroken. He had been a small man in life. Now he seemed even smaller.

Audley felt a mixture of revulsion and relief. He had feared, or half-feared, a pointless suicide, for which he might have had to take some of the blame. This ridiculous accident would be less embarrassing, however inconvenient.

'He fell down these stairs?'

'Maybe.' Roskill looked at him coldly. 'And then again maybe not.'

The hair on the back of Audley's neck prickled: that 'maybe not'

was like a death sentence.

'I took a very quick look at him. Just on the off-chance that he wasn't as dead as he looked,' said Roskill. 'He had a nosebleed before he ... fell down the stairs.'

'Before?'

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'He bled down his shirt. But you don't bleed down your shirt when you're falling downstairs. And you don't go to the cellar when your nose is bleeding — not when the washroom's out in the yard.'

'Are you saying that someone killed him?'

He stared down the staircase again, taking in the ancient, flaking whitewash on the walls and the dust-laden cobwebs hanging from rusty nails. It didn't make sense. Violence was rare because it almost always stirred up more trouble than it stifled. Nor was it the present Russian style, certainly not in England, where it was capable of launching a major scandal.

But reason and instinct wouldn't raise Morrison from the dead. And there was no sweeping him under the carpet either.

'All right, Hugh. We'll go by the book. I'll phone the police first.

Then you phone the department. Tell the duty officer to warn Stocker. And when Butler phones in tell them to warn him too–if someone followed us down here they could be following him over there.'

It was like a nightmare; bad enough to be pitched into the field, out of his depth–but worse to be involved in incomprehensible violence.

'How much do you want the police to know?'

'We've got to know how he died. But either way we shall have to get them to go easy on it — you better get Stocker on that. No doubt he'll know how to do it. And go through Morrison's pockets while I'm phoning–there might be something there.'

He turned back to the faded black telephone in the untidy little dummy4

office. The important thing now was to keep the initiative, to emulate Fred, whose dealings with the Special Branch were always conducted in a manner which left no doubt as to who was calling the tune.

'. . . This is Dr D. L. Audley of the Ministry of Defence.' L'Etat, c'est moi. 'I am speaking from the Modeller's Shop in—' he stumbled for want of the address. But there it was on an old-fashioned letterhead. 'There seems to have been a fatal accident, but I'm not altogether satisfied with the circumstances.'

That was the authentic Fred note: not so much an investigation as a consultation required. Just in time he remembered the final refinement: 'Kindly send a senior officer with your squad.'

When Roskill took over the phone he went back into the shop, which was clean and cheerful compared with the stockroom. Just behind the counter was a low stool, with a small, smooth-edged hole in the linoleum below it–the hole Morrison had worn over hundreds of uneventful days, sitting waiting to sell models to small boys.

Audley's brief flicker of self-satisfaction faded. No more pocket-warmed coins would cross this counter; the supermarket next door would inevitably take over.

He'd met Morrison for five minutes and bullied the life out of him.

Whatever the cause of death was, the guilt was his, and he'd compounded his crime by feeling nothing but distaste and annoyance for the inconvenient thing in the cellar.

He looked down at the cutting Roskill had taken from the man's a dummy4

wallet: ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS FOUND. No one deserved to have his minor crimes come looking for him