The Satan Bug Part 11

They looked at each other, sick fear in their eyes and making no attempt to conceal it. When Chessingham managed to speak, on his second or third attempt, his voice was hoa.r.s.e and shaking.

"It's a frame-up! Someone is trying to frame me."

"Shut up and talk sense," I said wearily. "Where did the money come from, Chessingham?"

He paused for a moment before replying, then said miserably, "From Uncle George." His voice had dropped almost to a whisper and he was glancing apprehensively ceiling-wards.

"Decent of Uncle George," I said heavily. "Who's he?"

"Mother's brother." His tone was still low. "The black sheep of the family, or so it seems. He said he was completely innocent of the crimes with which he had been charged but that the evidence against him had been so overwhelming that he'd fled the country."

I glared at him. Double-talk at 8 a.m. after a sleepless night wasn't much in my line. "What are you talking about? What crimes?"

"I don't know." Chessingham sounded desperate. "We've never seen him-he's phoned me twice at Mordon. Mother has never mentioned him-we didn't even know he existed until recently."

"You knew about this, too?" I asked Stella.

"Of course I did."

"Your mother?"

"Of course not," Chessingham said. "I told you she never even mentioned his existence. Whatever he was accused of, it must have been something pretty bad. He said that if Mother knew where the money came from she'd call it tainted and refuse it. We-Stella and I-want to send her abroad for her health and that money is going to help."

"It's going to help you up the steps of the Old Bailey," I said roughly. "Where was your mother born?"

"Alfringham." It was Stella who answered, Chessingham didn't seem capable of it.

"Maiden name?"

"Jane Barclay."

"Where's your phone? I'd like to use it."

She told me and I went out to the hall and put a call through to the General. Almost fifteen minutes elapsed before I returned to the breakfast-room. Neither of the two appeared to have moved from the positions in which I left them.

"My G.o.d, you're a bright pair," I said wonderingly. "It would never have occurred to you, of course, to pay a visit to Somerset House. What would be the point? You knew you would be wasting your time. Uncle George never existed. Your mother never had a brother. Not that that will be news to you. Come on now, Chessingham, you've had time to think up a better explanation than that one. You couldn't possibly think up a worse one to account for the 1,000."

He couldn't think one up at all. He stared at me, his face grimly hopeless, then at his sister, then at the ground. I said, encouragingly, "Well, there's no rush about it. You'll have a few weeks to think up a better story. Meantime, I want to see your mother."

"Leave my mother out of this, d.a.m.n you." Chessingham had risen to his feet with such violence that his chair had gone over backwards. "My mother's a sick woman and an old one. Leave her alone, you hear, Cavell?"

I said to Stella, "Please go and tell your mother I'm coming up in a minute."

Chessingham started towards me, but his sister got in the way. "Don't, Eric. Please." She gave me a look that should have pinned me to the wall and said bitterly, "Don't you see that Mr. Cavell is a man who always gets his own way?"

I got my own way. The interview with Mrs. Chessingham took no more than ten minutes. It wasn't just the most pleasant ten minutes of my life.

When I came downstairs both Chessingham and his sister were waiting in the hall. Stella came up to me, big brown eyes swimming in a pale and frightened face and said desperately, "You're making a fearful mistake, Mr. Cavell, a terrible mistake. Eric is my brother. I know him, I know know him. I swear to you that he is completely innocent in everything." him. I swear to you that he is completely innocent in everything."

"He'll have his chance to prove it." There were times when I didn't find any great difficulty in hating myself and this was one of those times. "Chessingham, you would be wise to pack a case. Enough stuff to last you for a few days at least."

"You're taking me with you?" He looked resigned, hopeless.

"I've neither the warrant or the authority for that. Somebody will come, never fear. Don't be silly as to try to run. A mouse couldn't get through the cordon round this house."

"A-a cordon?" He stared. "You mean there are policemen round--"

"Think we want you to take the first plane out of the country?" I asked. "Like dear old Uncle George?" It was a good enough exit line and I left it at that.

The Hartnells were to be my next-and last-call before breakfast that morning. Half-way there I pulled up at an A.A. box on a deserted wooded stretch of road, unlocked the booth and put a call through to the Waggoner's Rest. By and by Mary came on the phone and after she'd asked me how I felt and I'd said fine and she'd more or less called me a liar, I told her I would be back in the hotel shortly after nine o'clock, to have breakfast ready for me and to ask Hardanger to come round if he could.

I left the phone booth and although my car was only a few yards away I didn't dawdle any in reaching it-the cold grey rain was still sheeting down. For all my haste, though, I suddenly stopped with the door half-open and stared through the rain at a character coming down the road towards me. From a distance of less than a hundred yards he appeared to be a middle-aged well-dressed citizen wearing a raincoat and trilby, but there all resemblance to a normal human being ended. He was making his way down the rain-filled gutter by hopping around on his right foot, arms outstretched to balance himself, kicking a rusty tin can ahead of him. With every combined hop and kick a gout of water went spraying up in the air.

I watched this performance for some time until I became conscious of the rain drumming heavily on my back and soaking through to my shoulders. Besides, even if he had escaped over a high wall, it was still rude to stare. Maybe if I were buried long enough in the wilds of Wiltshire, I, too, would take to playing hopscotch in the rain. still with my eye on this apparition I eased quickly into the driving seat pulling the door to behind me and it was not until then that I discovered that the purpose of the hopscotch merchant was not to demonstrate the standard of loopiness in rural Wiltshire but to distract my attention from the back of my car where someone had been biding crouched down on the floor.

I heard a slight noise behind me and started to twist but I was far too late, the black-jack must have been chopping down even as I heard the sound. My left foot was still on the wrong side of the steering column and, anyway, he was on my left or blind side. The black-jack made contact just below and behind my left ear with what must have been considerable force or accuracy or both for the agony and the oblivion were separated by only a hairsbreadth in time.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

It wouldn't be accurate to say that I woke up. The term "waking up" implies a fairly rapid and one-way transition from a state of unconsciousness to that of consciousness and there was nothing either rapid or one-way about my progress through the twilight zone that separates those. One moment I was greyly aware that I was lying on something hard and wet, the next the awareness was gone. How long a time elapsed between the intervals of greyness I'd no means of knowing and even if I had my mind would have been too fuzzy to appreciate it. Gradually the spells of awareness became longer and longer until, eventually, there was no more darkness but I wasn't all that sure that this was in any way an improvement or a desirable state of affairs for with returning comprehension came an all but paralysing pain that seemed to hold my head, neck and right hand side of my chest in an immense vice, a vice with some burly character inexorably tightening the handle. I felt the way a grain of wheat must feel after it had pa.s.sed through a combine harvester.

Painfully I opened my good eye and swivelled it around until I located the source of the dim light. A grilled window high up on one wall, just below the roof. I was in a cellar of some kind, of the semi-sunk bas.e.m.e.nt type featured in Chessingham's house.

I'd made no mistake about the hardness of the floor. Or the wetness. Rough unfinished concrete with shallow pools of water on it and whoever had left me there had thoughtfully dumped me right in the centre of the largest puddle.

I was lying stretched out on the floor, partly on my back, partly on my right hand side with my arms behind my back in a ridiculously strained and uncomfortable position. I wondered vaguely why I chose to lie in this awkward position and found out when I tried to change it. Somebody had made a very efficient job of tying my hands behind my back and from the numbness in my forearms it was a fair guess that he'd used considerable weight in the tying of the knots.

I made to gather my legs under me to jerk myself up to a sitting position and discovered that they wouldn't gather. I just couldn't move them. I used their immobility to lever myself upwards to a sitting position, waited until the coruscating lights dancing before my eyes faded and vanished then peered forward and down. My legs were not only tied at the ankles, they were secured to a metal upright of a wine-bin which took up practically the entire length of the wall beneath the window. And not only was I tied, but I was tied with PVC plastic flex. If I'd needed any confirmation that a professional had been at work, I didn't any more. Even a gorilla couldn't snap PVC and nothing less than a pair of hefty pliers could possibly undo the knots: fingers were quite useless for the job.

Slowly, carefully-any rash movement and my head would have fallen off-I looked around the cellar. It was as featureless and just about as empty as any cellar could ever be- the window, the closed door, the wine-bin and me. It could have been worse. No one pouring in water to drown me, no one flooding the confined s.p.a.ce with a lethal gas, no snakes, no black widow spiders. Just the cellar and me. But bad enough.

I hitched myself forwards towards the wine-bin and tried to snap the wire securing me to it by jerking my legs back as violently as I could but all I did was to add another pain to the overfull quota I had already. I struggled to free my hands, knowing before I began that I was only wasting my time, and gave up almost as soon as I had started. I wondered how long it would be before I died of starvation or thirst.

Take it easy, I said to myself. Think your way out of this, Cavell. So I thought, as best I could without my head hurting the way it did, but it didn't seem to do much good, all I could think of was how sore and uncomfortable I was.

It was then that I saw the Hanyatti. I blinked, shook my head and cautiously looked again. No doubt about it, the Hanyatti, the top of the b.u.t.t just visible three or four inches below and to the side of the left-hand lapel of my coat. I stared at it and it still didn't go away. I wondered dimly how the man-men, certainly-who had dragged me there had missed it and it slowly came to me that they hadn't missed it because they hadn't looked for it in the first place. Policemen in Britain don't carry guns. I was-more or less-a policeman. Hence I didn't carry a gun.

I hunched up my left shoulder and reached my head as far down and to the left as possible, at the same time pushing the lapel away with the side of my face. On the third try got my teeth to the b.u.t.t but they just slipped off the rounded surface when I tried to get a purchase and lift the gun from its holster. Four times I repeated this manoeuvre and after the fourth attempt I gave up. Contorting my neck into that strained and unnatural position would have been uncomfortable enough in any event: added to the effects of the blackjack the only result this contortion was having was to make the cellar swim dizzily around me. At the same time the manoeuvre brought a sharply piercing pain to my right chest and I wondered drearily whether any of my ribs had been broken and were sticking into a lung. The way I felt I was prepared to believe anything.

A brief rest, then I had twisted up until I was in a kneeling position. I bent sharply from the waist, my head coming close to the concrete floor to give gravity an a.s.sist in freeing the Hanyatti from the holster. Nothing happened. I tried again, overdid the violence of the forward jerk and fell flat on my face. When my head finally cleared I repeated the process and this time the gun finally slid from the holster and clattered to the floor.

In the poor half-light of the cellar I knelt and peered anxiously at the gun. A character with a s.a.d.i.s.tic enough turn of mind might have considered it highly amusing to empty the gun and replace it in the holster. But I'd been spared the humorist. The loading indicator registered nine. The magazine was full.

I squirmed round on the floor, picked up the Hanyatti with my bound hands, slipped the safety catch and dragged the gun around to my right side as far as the unnaturally twisted position of my left shoulder would allow. The folds of my jacket kept getting in the way of the automatic but I strained and pushed until I could see about three inches of the barrel protruding beyond my side. I bent my knees and hitched myself forward until my feet were within fifteen inches of the muzzle.

For a brief moment I considered trying to shoot through the PVC that bound my ankles. But only for a brief moment. Buffalo Bill might have done it, but then Buffalo Bill had had binocular vision and I felt pretty certain he'd never performed any of his sharp-shooting feats in dim half-light with numbed hands bound behind his back. The chances were a thousand to one that the net result achieved would be the antic.i.p.ation of those two London surgeons who wanted to remove my left foot. I decided to concentrate instead on the eighteen inch length of four twisted strands of PVC that attached my legs to the wine-bin.

I sighted as best I could and squeezed the trigger. Three things happened, instantaneously and simultaneously. The recoil from the gun together with the unnatural position in which I was holding it, made me feel as if my right thumb had broken: the reverberation of the sound in that confined s.p.a.ce had the same effect on my eardrums: and I felt a wind ruffle my hair as the ricocheting bullet, soundless in flight in that echoing intensity of sound, came within half an inch of ending my problems for good and all. And a fourth thing happened. I missed.

Two seconds later I fired again. No hesitation. If there was a watchdog upstairs taking his ease he'd be charging down the cellar steps in a matter of moments to find out who was breaking up his happy home. Not only that, but I knew if I stopped to consider the chances of the ricochet being that half inch lower this time I never would get around to pulling that trigger.

Again the close thunder of the explosion and this time I was sure my right thumb had gone. But I hardly cared. The wire binding me to the wine-bin was neatly severed in half. Buffalo Bill couldn't have done it any better.

I twisted, grabbed one of the wine-bin supports with my all but useless hands, hoisted myself shakily to my feet, rested my left elbow on a convenient shelf and stood there waiting, staring at the door. Anyone coming to investigate would have to pa.s.s through that door and, as a target, a man at six feet was going to be a much simpler proposition altogether than a wire at eighteen inches.

For a whole minute I stood there motionless apart from the trembling of my legs, straining to the utmost what little the gunshots had left me of my hearing. Nothing. I risked a couple of quick hops out to the centre of the cellar and peered up through the high window in case my gaoler was playing it careful and smart. Again nothing. Another couple of hops and I was by the door testing the handle with my elbow. Locked.

I turned my back on the door, scrabbled around with the muzzle of the Hanyatti until I'd found the lock, and pulled the trigger. With the second shot the door gave abruptly beneath my weight-it says much for the state of mind that I'd never even checked the position of the hinges to see whether the door opened inwards or outwards-and I fell heavily through the doorway on to the concrete pa.s.sageway outside. If there was anyone waiting out there with the hopeful intention of clobbering me, he'd never have a better chance.

No one clobbered me because there was no one waiting there to clobber me. Dazed and sick I pushed myself wearily to my feet, located a light switch and clicked it with my shoulder. The naked bulb, hanging at the end of a short flex above my head, remained dead. It could be a dud lamp, it could be a blown fuse, but my guess was that it meant no power at all: the air in that cellar had the musty lifelessncss that bespoke long abandonment by whoever had once owned the house.

A flight of worn stone steps stretched up into the gloom. I hopped up the first two steps, teetered on the point of imbalance like a spinning top coming to rest but managed to twist round quickly and sit down before I toppled. Once down, it seemed the safe and prudent thing to do to keep my centre of gravity as low as possible by staying there, and I made it to the top of the stairs by jack-knifing upwards on the seat of my pants and the soles of my shoes.

The door at the head of the cellar stairs was also locked but it wasn't my door and I still had five shots left in the Hanyatti. The lock gave at the first shot and I stumbled out into the hallway beyond.

The hallway, high, wide, and narrow, featured what estate agents euphemistically call a wealth of exposed timbering- black, ugly, adze-cut oaken beams everywhere. Two doors on either side, both closed, a gla.s.s door at the far end, another beside me leading presumably to the rear of the house, a staircase above my head and an uneven parquet floor thickly covered with a dust streaked by the confused tracks of footprints leading from the gla.s.s door to the spot where I was standing. The finest feature of the hall was the fact that it was completely deserted. I knew now I was alone. But for how long I didn't know. It seemed a poor idea to waste even a second.

I didn't want to smear the tracks in the hall so I turned to the door beside me. For a change it was unlocked. I pa.s.sed into another pa.s.sage that gave on the domestic quarters-larder, pantry, kitchen, scullery. An old-fashioned house and a big one.

I went through those apartments, opening cupboards and pulling drawers out on to the floor, but I was wasting my time. No signs here of hasty abandonment like the keepers skipping out from the Flannan Isle lighthouse, the ex-owners had cleaned out the lot when they lit out. They hadn't left as much as a safety pin, not that a safety pin would have been found of much value in cutting the PVC that bound hands and ankles.

The outside kitchen door was unlocked. I opened it and hopped out into the still heavily falling rain. I looked around me, but I could have been anywhere. An acre of overgrown garden completely run to seed, ten foot high hedges that hadn't felt a clipper in years, and dripping pines and cypresses soughing under a dark and weeping sky. Wuthering Heights had nothing on it.

There were two wooden buildings not far away, one big enough to be a garage, the other less than half the size. I hopped my way towards the latter for the sound reason that it was the nearer of the two. The door hung crazily on twisted hinges and creaked dismally as I put my shoulder to the splintered wood.

It was a shed that had been obviously used as a workshop-to one side, below the filthy window, stood a ma.s.sive workbench with a rusty vice still bolted in position. If it wasn't too rusted to turn and if I could find some cutting tool to jam into it, that vice would be useful indeed. Only, as far as I could see, there were no cutting tools of any description, no tools of any kind: as in the house, so here-the departing owners had been nothing if not thorough when it had come to the removal of their goods and chattels. The walls were completely bare.

They had left only one thing, and that because it was quite useless-a square plywood box half full of rubbish and wood-shaving. With the aid of a piece of wood I managed to tilt the box and spill its contents on the floor. With the stick I stirred the jumble of odds and ends-pieces of wood, rusty screws, bent pieces of metal, twisted nails-and, at last, a very old and rusty hacksaw blade.

It took me ten minutes to jam the blade into the vice-my hands were numbed to the point of almost paralytic uselessness-and another ten minutes to saw my way through the PVC binding my wrists. I could have done it in far less time but as with my hands behind my back, I could'nt see what I was doing, I had to go easy: I could have sawn through an artery or a tendon just as easily as through a wire and I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. My hands were as lifeless as that.

They looked pretty lifeless too, when I'd severed the last PVC strand and brought them round to the front for examination, swollen to a size half as much again as normal with smooth, bluish-purple distended skin and the blood swelling slowly from torn skin on the inside of both wrists and most of my fingers. I hoped that the dark flaking rust on the blade of the hacksaw that had caused those cuts wasn't going to give me blood-poisoning.

I sat on the side of the box for five minutes, cursing savagely as the mottled purple of my hands slowly began to vanish and the circulation to come pounding back with the almost intolerably exquisite agony of a thousand barbed needles tearing at the flesh. When I could at last hold the hacksaw blade in my hands, I cut the PVC on my ankles and cursed some more, just as colourfully as before, till the blood supply in my feet came back to something like normal. I pulled up my shirt to have a look at the right-hand side of my chest and just as quickly and roughly stuffed the shirt back under the waistband of my trousers. A prolonged inspection would only have made me feel twice as ill as I was already: in the few clear patches in the thick crust of blood that covered almost all of the side of my body the grotesquely swelling bruises were already turning all the kaleidoscopic colours of the rainbow. I thought sourly that if the man who had used me for football practice had chosen the left instead of the right side of my chest he'd have broken all his toes on the Hanyatti. It was as well that he hadn't.

I had the Hanyatti in my hand as I left the tool-shed, but I didn't really expect to have to use it. I didn't go near the house-I knew I'd find nothing there except the footprints and that was a matter for Hardanger's experts. From the front of the house a driveway curved away between dripping pines and I limped off down the weed-grown gravel. It would have to lead to a road of sorts.

A few paces then I stopped and tried to think as best I could with my thinking equipment in the poor shape it was. Whoever had clobbered and tied me up might want it to be known that I had been temporarily removed from the scene: it was just as possible, for all I knew to the contrary, that he didn't. If he didn't then he couldn't have been able to afford to leave my car where it had been and would have removed it. Where? What simpler and more logical than to hide Caveil's car where he had hidden Cavell? I headed back to the garage.

The car was there. I got in, slumped wearily back on the cushions, sat there for a few minutes, then climbed as wearily out again. If someone thought it would be to his advantage not to have people know I was out of commission, then it might equally well be to my advantage not to have that someone know that I was back in commission again. How this would be to my advantage I couldn't even begin to guess at the moment, my mind was so gummed up by weakness and exhaustion and the beating I had taken that coherent thought was beyond me. All I knew was that I was dimly aware that it might might be to my advantage and with the shape I was in and considering the lack of progress I was making I needed every advantage I could get. The car would be a dead giveaway. I started walking. be to my advantage and with the shape I was in and considering the lack of progress I was making I needed every advantage I could get. The car would be a dead giveaway. I started walking.

The driveway led to a road that was no more than a rutted track deep in water and viscous mud. I turned right, for the good enough reason that there was a long steep hill to the left, and after perhaps twenty minutes I came to a secondary road with a signpost reading "Netley Common: 2 miles." Netley Common, I knew, was on the main London-Alfringham road, about ten miles from Alfringham, which meant I'd been taken at least six miles from the A.A. box where I had been laid out. I wondered why, maybe that had been the only deserted house with a cellar within six miles.

It took me over an hour to cover the two miles to Netley, partly because of the shape I was in anyway, partly because I kept hopping into bushes and behind the cover of trees whenever a car or a cyclist came along. Netley Common itself I bypa.s.sed by taking to the fields-empty of all signs of life on that teeming and bitter October morning-and finally reached the main road where I sank down, half-kneeling, half-lying, in a ditch behind the screen of some bushes. I felt like a water-logged doll coming apart at the seams. I was so exhausted that even my chest didn't seem to be hurting any more. I was bone-chilled as a mortuary slab and shaking like a marionette in the hands of a frenzied puppeteer, I was growing old.

Twenty minutes later I had grown a great deal older. Traffic in rural Wiltshire is never up to Piccadilly standards at the best of times, but even so it was having an off-day. In that time only three cars and a bus had pa.s.sed me and as they were all full or nearly so none of them was any use to me. What I wanted was a truck with only one man in it or, failing that, a car with just the driver, although how any man alone in a car would react when he saw the wild dishevelled figure of a lifer on the lam or a refugee from a canvas jacket was anybody's guess.

The next car that came along had two men in it but I didn't hesitate. I recognised the slow-moving, big, black Wolseley for what it was long before I could see the uniforms of the men inside. The car braked smoothly to a stop and a big burly sergeant, relief and concern in his face, was out and helping me to my feet as I stumbled up the bank. He had the arm and the build to carry weight and I let him take most of mine.

"Mr. Cavell?" He peered closely into my face. "It is is Mr. Cavell?" Mr. Cavell?"

I felt I'd changed a lot in the past few hours but not all that much so I admitted I was.

"Thank G.o.d for that. There's been half a dozen police cars and heaven only knows how many of the military out looking for you for the past two hours." He helped me solicitously into the back seat. "Now you just take it easy, sir."

"I'll do just that." I eased my squelching, sodden, mud-stained figure into a corner. "I'm afraid this seat will never be the same again, Sergeant."

"Don't you worry about that, sir-plenty more cars where this one came from," he said cheerfully. He climbed in beside the constable at the wheel and picked up the microphone as the car moved off. "Your wife is waiting at the police station with Inspector Wylie."

"Wait a minute," I said quickly. "No hullaballoo about Cavell returning from the dead, Sergeant. Keep it quiet. I don't want to be taken anywhere I can be recognised. Know of any quiet spot where I could be put up and stay without being seen?"

He twisted and stared at me. He said slowly, "I don't understand."

I made to say that it didn't matter a d.a.m.n whether he understood or not, but it wouldn't have been fair. Instead I said, "It is important, Sergeant. At least I think so. Any hideaway you know of?"

"Well." He hesitated. "It's difficult, Mr. Cavell--"

"There's my cottage, Sergeant," the driver volunteered.

"You know Jean's away with her mother. Mr. Cavell could have that."

"Is it quiet, has it a phone, and is it near Alfringham?" I asked.

"All three of them, sir."

"Fine. Many thanks. Sergeant, please speak to your inspector. Privately. Ask him to come to this cottage as soon as possible with my wife. With Superintendent Hardanger, if he's available. And have you-the Alfringham police, I mean-a doctor they can rely on? Who doesn't talk out of turn, I mean?"

"We do that." He peered at me. "A doctor?"

I nodded and pulled back my jacket. The rain of that morning had soaked me to the skin and the blood seeping through from the bruises, much diluted, had covered most of the shirt-front in a particularly unpleasant shade of brownish-red. The sergeant took a quick look, turned and said softly to the driver, "Come on, Rollie boy. You've always wanted to make like Moss and now's your chance. But keep your finger off that d.a.m.ned siren."

Then he reached for the microphone and started talking in a low urgent voice.

"I'm not going into any d.a.m.ned hospital and that's final," I said irritably. With a couple of ham sandwiches and half a tumbler of whisky inside me I was feeling much more my old nasty self again. "Sorry, Doc, but there it is."

"I'm sorry too." The doctor bending over me in the bed in that police bungalow was a neat, methodical and precise man with a neat, methodical and precise voice. "I can't make you go, more's the pity. I would if I could, for you're a pretty sick man in urgent need of radiological examination and hospital care. Two of your ribs seem cracked and a third is definitely fractured. How badly and how dangerously I can't say. I don't have X-ray eyes."

"Not to worry," I said rea.s.suringly. "With the way you've strapped me up I can't see any broken ribs sticking into a lung, or out through my skin for that matter of it."