The Labyrinth Makers

'My round, I think!'

Audley put the palm of his hand over Tierney's empty glass. Now was the precise time to demolish Tierney.

'Nobody's round. I see that I still haven't made myself plain.

Morrison's dead, Tierney. He stuck out his silly neck and it got broken. He was the victim of a tragic accident–I believe he fell down a flight of stairs. I wouldn't like to think that you were accident- prone too.'

Tierney sat very still, his slyness wiped from his face and his confidence draining away, leaving only a thick sediment of fear. If he knew anything about the jungle in which he was a petty scavenger, then he would also know thg,t there were fiercer predators in it, man-eaters some of them.

'Who was your contact over here–the man you were going to cheat?'

'My contact–our contact?' Tierney stared at him. 'I–I don't remember. And that was Johnnie's job.'

In Steerforth's place Audley would have used Tierney to make the contact, first to report that the cargo lift had been delayed and second to report that it had been lost at sea. Dirty work for Tierney.

'His name was Bloch, wasn't it?'

'It might have been. I don't remember–honestly. It was the hell of a long time ago.'

'It was Bloch, Tierney. And he was a poor swimmer.'

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Tierney frowned, uneasily perplexed.

'Which is a pity,' continued Audley, 'because he's been for a long swim. That was a little test for you–and you failed it miserably.

You ought to remember Morrison and Bloch. They were both stupid, and they're both dead.'

Two mini-skirted girls settled noisily at the table next to them, but Tierney was oblivious to the disturbance. Audley felt a warm sense of power; with Morrison he had been repelled by his own success, but with this hollow man it was different. He was almost enjoying himself. In fact he was enjoying himself.

'Let's try again. How did you unload it at Newton Chester?'

The ferrety man breathed out, as though relieved that he had a simple answer to give. 'We used the Hump.'

'Tell me about the Hump.'

'It's on the runway, when you're taxiing in. It isn't a hump really–

it's a sort of dip in the land. But it looks like a hump when you're taxiing in. You can't see the control tower when you're in it, it's down the far end, quite near the perimeter.'

He licked his lips anxiously.

'Johnnie spotted it. I mean, if you can't see the control tower from there, they can't see you. We used to just slow down an' drop things there, an' then go on in bold as brass.'

'And what happened to the things then?'

'One of the ground crew was there to pick 'em up. There's a little hut just not far from the runway. There's a firing range further on, just near the old castle–we didn't use it, but when it was a bomber dummy4

field they kept the range ammunition there I think.'

'In the hut?'

'Yes. It was empty and locked up. Johnnie broke the lock off an'

put one of his own on it just like it. He called it his safe deposit–no one worries about a hut if it's properly locked up. And then he came by and picked the things up later–he had some excuse for walking up that way.'

'And that's what you did the last time.'

Tierney nodded. 'We had to stop so Morrison an' me could lower the boxes out–Mac wouldn't help. He wouldn't have anything to do with it.'

Maclean was the odd man out in the crew, the honest one.

Morrison was probably basically honest too, but willing and scared–too scared to admit that he had even handled the cargo years afterwards.

'It was a two-man job?'

'It was a two-man job to lower the boxes out of the Dak–some of those boxes were bloody heavy. But Ellis'd got a little trolley from somewhere.'

Audley warmed to the memory of John Steerforth. The minor smuggling was nothing, the artificial crime created by avaricious governments and economics beyond the grasp of ordinary men.

The major crime was equally forgivable–a plundering of the plunderers doubly absolved by daring, ingenious last-minute improvisation and attention to detail. Faith's father had deserved his good luck, not his misfortune.

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And for him Ellis was a bonus: he was one of the accessible survivors of the ground crew whose address had been traced.

But Tierney was still talking.