was Lucky Luciano in disguise. I was watching the scene like a small boy in a lollipop factory. Goodness knows how long I stood petrified with surprise. K.K.’s presence shattered me, but Jay’s made me forget K.K.! ‘We are moving in from opposite ends to the same conclusion,’ Dalby had once told me. How wrong can you get? I remembered the two men I had seen from the Terrazza Restaurant window. Undoubtedly they
Waterman had followed me up the path, and I reached out my hand to help him avoid the lily of the valley. After staring wide-eyed into the bright room, the darkness was a baffling blanket of void, out of which a hand smelling of toilet soap clamped across my mouth, and something very sharp penetrated the ‘one-piece back’ of my jacket. I stiffened and held very still.
‘It’s Murray, sir,’ a voice in my ear said, and I thought, ‘Sir? This is a nice time for formalities.’
I remembered Raven who we’d kidnapped near the Syrian border, and how puzzled I’d been to hear Dalby say, ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ when he injected him. Perhaps ‘Sir’ was something they always say when they — what were Dalby’s words—‘bumped you off’.
‘I’m taking my hand away now, sir. Don’t shout or we’ve both had it.’ I nodded my head but Murray mistook it for an attempt to escape, and he instinctively twisted my arm and held my mouth even tighter. Where the hell was Waterman? Come and earn your twelve guineas I kept thinking — but there was no sign of him. Murray eased me quietly away from the house, and finally let go of me altogether. He was the first to speak.
‘You were walking all over the infra-red alarms.’
‘I might have guessed it wasn’t as wide open as it looks,’ I said.
‘I’ve got to get back to the house now, but…’ he hesitated. There was plenty I wanted to know. I was in no position to extract a confession, but I leaned towards him and said, ‘Listen, Murray, whatever screwy damn’ thing is going on, you know that all the people in that house are actionable under the Treason Act. You will act on my orders and mine only as of this moment, or you will become an enemy of HMG.’ [28] Murray was silent. ‘Can’t you see, man? Dalby has sold out, or perhaps he’s been a double agent for years. My task was to verify that information. I have five provost platoons in Haslemere — whatever happens the whole show is over. I’m giving you a chance, Murray, because I know you are not in as deeply as the others. Come with me now and help me assemble my data. The whole crowd of them are done for.’ I stopped; my invention had flagged: I was on the verge of saying the game’s up.
‘My name’s Harriman,’ said Murray. ‘And I’m a lieutenant-colonel in Special Field Intelligence, and it’s
I looked down at Murray or Harriman or whoever he was and I knew quite clearly what I must do. I must get out of here. What Dalby & Co would do when they found their unconscious friend with his head in the petunias was anyone’s guess. Waterman, that soul of simplicity, was now bound to me by complicity in my actions. ‘Did I do right, Super?’ he said about three times. I told him that he was sensational, but it was difficult to sound enthusiastic. It was something though, that he was prepared to do as I told him. We dragged Murray’s body into the taller flowers.
I was prepared to have to sit in Waterman’s car for a couple of hours, but within ten minutes we saw the front door open and car headlights switched on. It was a large car, and as it came steadily down the drive the headlights skimmed across the prostrate Murray. We both held our breath, but I suppose we saw it only because we knew it was there. Dalby went inside, and the big Rolls turned on to the road and headed towards London.
‘Catch that up,’ I told Waterman. ‘I want to see the driver.’
At Milford the street lighting gave me a chance to take a look at the car. It was a black Rolls Phantom IV, a straight-eight that Messrs Rolls-Royce will only sell to Royalty and Heads of State. How typical that Jay should have one. Waterman flipped open the glove compartment and produced a pair of prismatics. With them I could see Jay as he leaned back on fine West of England upholstery and sipped a drink from the cocktail cabinet. Now and again I could glimpse the chauffeur’s face in the green-tinted mirrors. We had settled down to a steady forty-five now. Waterman was a driver in a million. He handled his car with a curious ‘finger-tip’ feeling that was alien to him, because out of the car he was a clumsy, heavyhanded clod of a fellow. It was important that the Rolls didn’t know it had a tail, and Waterman hit upon the rather subtle ruse of trying to race it, but always losing out. The Rolls didn’t take advantage of its superior power to race ahead as at first I feared it might. Not that it would have shaken us off. Waterman’s little modified doublecarburettor car was his pride and joy. It had dozens of instruments, temperature gauges, revolution counters, clocks and reading lights. But we kept going at forty-five all the way to London. Jay seemed to be in no sort of hurry.
Chapter 30
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Jay’s Rolls purred along the Cromwell Road until it turned off near the Brompton Oratory. Those gaunt Victorian houses, built at the time of the 1851 Exhibition, stared down at us. Cars were parked densely along the pavements, sports cars and snob cars and cars wrapped in silvery sheets of material. We turned off the road when Jay rolled to a standstill outside a big conversion. We closed the doors quietly and moved quickly enough to see the portly form of Jay entering the front door. It was a ‘tasteful’ piece of contemporary; natural wood-finish doors, stainless-steel windows and venetian blinds everywhere. Waterman and I peered at the list of names and bell pushes.
‘You may as well go in,’ said a tall, bespectacled city gent behind us, opening the door with a key. We went in, partly because it was convenient for us, partly because there were two more city gents behind us, and partly because they were all holding small 9mm Italian Mod 34 Beretta automatic pistols.
The man who had spoken pushed the top bell and spoke into the small metal microphone. ‘Yes. There’s two of them. One of them could be a policeman,’ he said. They had been tailing us, and to add insult to injury had been discussing us over car to car radio-phones.
I then heard Jay’s voice, ‘Put the gentlemen on the detector and bring them in, Maurice.’ I looked at Waterman — the edges of his stained moustache turned down: we’d been a couple of right ninnies. Followed all the way! I should have guessed that Jay meeting Dalby would take some ‘beef’ with him. I wondered if Dalby had phoned Jay about Murray: found unconscious in his flowers.
The entrance hall was all black mirrors, fresh flowers and genuine cut-glass chandeliers. We were stood up before the full-length mirror. There was a small buzzing noise and I was deprived of my gun by Maurice who stood well clear of his colleague’s line of fire. Maurice was very professional. If you could afford a Phantom IV you could afford the best in hoodlums. We were taken upstairs.
The forty-foot living-room was ankle deep in cream-coloured long-tufted carpeting. The white walls were punctuated with large abstract paintings: Rothko, Motherwell and Hitchens. At the far end of the room a circular black-marble table of knee height, surrounded by low black-leather armchairs with high wing backs, made a cosy corner round the gigantic hi-fi unit, and TV that was telling us that ‘Trill makes budgies bounce with health’ over and over again.
At ‘our’ end of the room Jay’s voice, a rather rich detergent-advertising voice, floated through the open doorway. ‘Won’t you sit down?’
The three city gents withdrew like the Beverley Sisters taking a curtain, but we all knew they were no farther than the thickness of the door away.
‘This is Mr Waterman,’ I said loudly to the invisible Jay, ‘of Waterman’s Detective Agency. I hired him this afternoon.’ There was only silence so I spoke again even more loudly, clearly enunciating my words as one would speak to a rich deaf uncle. ‘I don’t think there is anything further from Mr Waterman. He may as well go home
