Horse Under Water

the sea bed. To service the buoy one needed to have a radio recall unit which “called” the buoy to the surface by transmitting a radio signal to it.’

‘And that’s what you were trying to do just now.’

‘No,’ said Fernie, ‘that unit that da Cunha gave me was only a listening unit. We heard the buoy on the surface just as Senhor da Cunha heard it and gloated over it every evening. He had given me the listening unit.’ Tomas’s voice went very quiet. ‘He’d tricked me again.’ He looked up at me sharply. ‘It’s back on the bottom of the ocean now!’

I nodded. Tell me about Smith,’ I said.

‘Smith was only one,’ Tomas went on, ‘da Cunha forced a lot of people on the “Weiss List” to send him money or gifts.’

‘But you soon got the idea,’ I supplemented, ‘you told Smith to arrange supplies of morphine so that your little partnership with Kondit would flourish.’

‘It wasn’t hard to guess, I suppose.’ Tomas nodded.

I said, ‘What did da Cunha do with the money?’ There was no reply. I said, ‘Did he finance the Young Europe Movement? Did it all go to present-day Fascist groups?’

Tomas closed his eyes, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m still a believer.’

‘And to finance his ice-melting laboratory experiments?’

‘Like many great men,’ said Tomas, ‘Senhor da Cunha has some childish weaknesses. His ice-melting machine is one of them.’ His eyes were still closed.

Augusto’s voice from the wheelhouse sounded above the beat of the sea. We were nearing the coast.

‘I’ll come up,’ said Tomas. As he said it there was a thump like a heavy hammer being swung against the hull. ‘A piece of flotsam,’ said Tomas. Augusto had brought the throttles back to half-speed. Again there was a thump and a third immediately after. Augusto coughed and then fell down the ladder into the cabin. I caught him. Augusto was limp as he slid to the floor. The front of my suit was soaked in blood. Augusto’s blood.

Tomas and I stood motionless as we processed the possibilities through our brains. I was thinking of nautical mishaps, but Tomas had a more practical bent. He knew the person concerned.

‘It’s Harry Kondit,’ he said. The boat purred gently towards the shore.

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Firing his target rifle from the cliff-top,’ said Tomas. There were two more thumps and now, listening for it, I heard the gun crack a long way away. The floor was slippery with blood.

Tomas was as calm as a Camembert. He said, ‘If we go up to the wheelhouse we get shot. If we stay here the boat heaves itself on to the cliff at Tristos and we drown.’ The boat lurched against the swell.

‘Can we get to the rudder control without going across the deck?’

‘Too slow, in this sort of sea we have to do something quick.’

Without Augusto at the helm the boat was slopping and slipping beam-on to the sea. It was a plywood boat. I imagined it hitting the rocks and changing to firewood at one swipe. Augusto had stuffed a signal flag into his mouth. He bit on it hard instead of screaming through his punctured lung.

Tomas was carrying the little refrigerator across the cabin, and up the four steps. How he lifted it I have no idea. It thumped into the wheelhouse and then Tomas climbed to the bridge, using it as a shield. He pushed it forward and I heard a great echoing clang as one of Harry Kondit’s bullets glanced off the metal. Tomas was lying full-length on the deck by now, with the lowest part of the control wheel in his hand. He pulled it and the boat began to answer. Through the port-hole I could see the rocks. They were very close, and after each great wave the water ran off the jagged fangs like a drooling monster awaiting its prey.

The boat was well into the turn now. I shouted to Tomas to come back in; he yelled, ‘Do you want to go round and round in a bloody circle?’ He stayed where he was. Again there was a slam of metal hitting metal. The door of the refrigerator fell open and coke bottles, ice and smoked salmon came sliding down into the cabin.

As soon as we were round far enough Tomas jammed a footstool into the wheel. He began to crawl back, but he had left it too late. The change of course that had reprieved the boat sentenced Tomas to death. The refrigerator was no longer a shield. H.K. pumped bullet after bullet into him; but with those Zeiss ? 4 telescopic sights, one would have been enough.

47 Relinquish

A dozen spent 7-mm. rimless cartridge shells on the cliff-top was the only trace of H.K. in the vicinity by the time we had anchored the power boat. The weather had dragged the cloud base and the barometer well down, the fishermen were working on nets scattered along the strand like huge discarded nylons.

I went up the beach to get Charly. Augusto needed a doctor quickly. When I reached the top of the steps I looked down from the high balcony. Augusto was still on the boat with eyes unseeing and his mind in neutral; he was holding Fernie Tomas’s hand very tightly. He wouldn’t let go.

Charly was at the cafe with two plain-clothes pidemen.[34] She took the death of Fernie Tomas in her stride and wrote it into the narcotics investigation smoothly enough to allow me to escape entanglement.

After what Fernie had told me, a lot of the unrelated ends began to tie themselves together. Not all of them did, of course, but that was too much to expect. There would always be unexplainable actions by unpredictable people, but the motives began to show. I knew, for instance, what we would find up at da Cunha’s house, but I went anyway.

The furniture was shrouded and my footfalls echoed and creaked round the bookless shelves. Some of the big chandeliers were burning bloodshot in the bright daylight. I went upstairs, searching for the sort of room that I knew must be there. I had to break the lock in order to open it. The heavy oak door moved grudgingly. It was a long room, painted white. Fluorescent lights hung over the benches and a lot of equipment remained, showing that it had been a well-equipped laboratory.

This wasn’t a hasty hole-in-a-corner pharmacy like the one H.K. had assembled in a spare corner of his factory. It was a large air-conditioned research lab. of the type that pharmaceutical companies build instead of paying income tax. I moved along the benches, looking at the meters, test-tubes, and electric vibrators. I examined the radiant-heat machinery and the complex array of thermometers for measuring conductivity of liquids. I didn’t find Senhor Manuel Gambeta do Rosario da Cunha, because he had been gone for a long time.

Clive Singleton had returned from Lisbon in time to be told to pack everything up and head right back again.

I told him that he had the most important task of all. He would be returning the underwater gear to London. It would cost me more than I cared to think about if anything happened to it. Charly was enjoying her performance as the narcotics investigator and Clive Singleton was more than ever her devoted slave.

I phoned London on the open line. I told them to have Ivor Butcher shadowed. Use Tinkle Bell, I told them. They said he wasn’t very good as a tail, but I told them that we all have to learn. ‘Suppose Butcher tries to leave the country?’ London said.

‘Take him in on a holding charge,’ I told them patiently.

‘What charge?’ they asked.

‘Try the Street Offences Act,’ I said, and hung up irritably.

48 Ivor Butcher entertains

I stepped through the aeroplane door at London Airport and watched the rain swirling across the shiny apron. The mainplanes shed little niagaras, and the ground hostess clamped her collar in her fist and screwed up her face in the teeth of the rainstorm. Jean was waiting for me in the lounge with a heavy briefcase.

It was the beginning of a week of hard work; we had the first meeting of the Strutton Committee. It went as all first meetings go; people requiring definitions, and asking for copies of memos that had long since been lost.