Читать книгу Dead or Alive - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 5

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Bill Coverdale stretched his long legs and laid his head back against the shabby back of a large and shapeless chair. A spring bulged under the splayed seat and the stuffing was coming through on the arms. There was a loose spiral of horsehair quite close to the large left hand which lay spread out, mahogany brown, on what had once been crimson leather. Bill had rather an out-size in hands, not a bad shape, but large and decidedly battered. He looked at the window and saw a narrow strip of blue sky—a good colour English blue sky—and then all the rest of the pane a glare of new concrete patched with innumerable blank even windows, all very modern, light, and airy, and a great improvement on the low dingy houses which this great block of flats had replaced since last Bill Coverdale had stretched himself out in Colonel Garratt’s shabby chair and stared out of that window.

Garratt jerked into the picture with an arm thrust between him and the concrete.

“Admiring my view?” he said, and laughed his short barking laugh.

“Very soothing,” said Mr William Coverdale. “You can put yourself to sleep counting windows instead of sheep.”

Garratt walked to the window and stood looking out. His little steely eyes dwelt upon the block of flats with malignant dislike. His short grizzled hair stood up all over his head like a ten days’ beard. He wore, as usual, the sort of clothes that make you wonder why any tailor capable of perpetrating them should have escaped being lynched. No one knew the man’s name. He remained anonymous, and under the shelter of this anonymity he had for twenty-five years abetted Garratt in every kind of sartorial outrage. A mustard tweed and a pink-checked suiting are still remembered at the Foreign Office. This afternoon the crime was a purplish West of England tweed with a green line in it. The pockets bulged—Garratt’s pockets always bulged. The invariable red bandanna trailed a flaming four inches or so from the most crowded pocket of all, which had to accommodate, beside the handkerchief, matches and a pipe, a tobacco-pouch, and a bunch of keys. The colour scheme thus brightening the view was completed by a school or club tie of unknown origin combining a cheerful royal blue with orange zigzags and a device suggestive of squashed earwigs.

Bill Coverdale looked, wondered, and averted his eyes.

Garratt turned back to the room with a jerk.

“First you pull everything down. Then you build it up. Then you pull it down again.” He grimaced. “Makes a bit of mess. Dangerous when the bricks begin to fall.”

Bill did not say anything for about half a minute. What he said then might or might not have been irrelevant. He was twisting the spiral of horsehair between the finger with the white slashed scar across the knuckle and the thumb which still wore a strip of sticking-plaster. He said, looking at the black stubborn twist of the horsehair,

“What about O’Hara? Did you ever find out what happened?”

Garratt frowned. When he frowned, he was quite hideous.

“O’Hara? They got him. Dead. A year ago.”

Bill wound the horsehair slowly round the finger with the scar. When the black had crossed the white three times, he said,

“Is he dead? Are you sure?”

“Sure? Of course I’m sure! Why? What’s eating you?”

“Mrs O’Hara doesn’t seem sure,” said Bill slowly.

Garratt’s voice became furious.

“You been seeing her? What does she say?”

Bill pulled the horsehair tight over the scar. By pulling it very tight he could make it go round a fourth time. He said,

“Yes, I’ve seen her. We’ve known each other a long time. She isn’t sure.” The horsehair broke and he shook it off on to the floor. “Look here, Garratt—what happened?”

Garratt shrugged—not the neat French lift of the shoulders, but a sideways jerk which was all his own.

“Knife in the back. Sandbag.” He shrugged again. “I wasn’t there. They got him somehow.”

“He was on a job?”

Garratt nodded.

“What job? Where?”

“What’s the good of digging it up?”

“I want to know. I want to know, Garratt.”

Garratt sat down on the arm of a chair, thrust his hands into his pockets, and swung a restless leg.

“Some people want to know everything!”

Bill nodded. Except for the play of finger and thumb he had not moved till now. His attitude was one of repose, but to those steel-pointed eyes of Garratt’s the stillness of the long frame was the immobility of control and not of relaxation. He wasn’t moving, because he wasn’t letting himself move. He was holding his muscles from movement, and he was holding his voice from expression. Only when he had said, “I want to know,” there was a sudden heavy weight upon the word.

Garratt stared at him and said, “Why?”

“Because I do.”

There was a short pause. Then Garratt laughed.

“All right, you can have it! It’s damn little. You know what O’Hara was like. Brilliant in spots. Erratic all the time. Close as a clam.” He shrugged. “You can’t run intelligence work by rule of thumb, but O’Hara—” He shrugged again with that jerking movement of the shoulder. “I can do with a man being a law to himself, but O’Hara wasn’t that. He was a series of revolutionary outbreaks. Bound to come to grief sooner or later.”

“What was he doing when he came to grief? How did he come to grief? And how do you know he came to grief?” There was a little break between each of the three questions, but there was no break in the pertinacity of Bill Coverdale’s manner.

“I told you he was on a job,” growled Garratt. “And if you want to know what the job was, you’ll have to want, because I don’t know myself. Here’s the whole bag of tricks, and you can make what you like of it. The Foreign Office Intelligence don’t touch crime qua crime, but when crime slops over into politics, or politics slops over into crime, it’s our job. International crime is always on the look-out for a chance to exploit international politics. That was the Vulture’s^[1] stunt. We got him, but we didn’t get the people who worked the show under him. One of them’s a damned clever woman, and she slipped through our hands. We got one of the men the other day, but the show’s still running. O’Hara picked up the trail of the people who are running it in this country. At least that’s what I think. Officially he was doing something else, but last time I saw him he dropped a hint and then shut up. Nothing more out of him but ‘Wait and see.’ But he was on to something. Something big. Bit too big. It smashed him. If he’d had the sense to tell me what he’d got on to, we might have made a haul. As it was, they got him, and they got away with it.”

“Mrs O’Hara doesn’t think he’s dead.”

Garratt kicked the leg of his chair.

“She doesn’t, doesn’t she?”

“She came to see you?”

“She came to see me,” said Garratt. “And she told me a cock and bull story about someone having put a marked newspaper in at her letter-box—letters with ink circles round them, spelling ‘I am alive’ or some flapdoodle of that sort!”

“Why should it be flapdoodle?”

“The answer to why is because,” said Garratt. He laughed rudely. “My good Bill, what would be the point of O’Hara sending his wife that sort of tripe?”

Bill kept his temper. Garratt was an offensive brute, but he was used to him. He was a cousin in some seventeenth or eighteenth degree. He was an old friend and a good friend, but he had never had any manners.

“She says that herself,” he remarked.

“Then it’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever heard her say. There couldn’t possibly be any point about it. It was either a hoax, or she’d had a go of hysterics and done it herself.”

Bill shook his head.

“I don’t think so. I’ve known Meg a long time—she’s not like that. Now look here, Garratt, you won’t believe what I’m going to tell you, but I’m going to say it all the same. You shan’t say afterwards that you were kept in the dark.”

“All right, go ahead.” Colonel Garratt’s little eyes were intent.

Bill told him about the letters on Meg’s hearth-rug—chopped up pieces of writing-paper to make the word “Alive.”

Garratt said nothing. He jingled the contents of his pocket and lifted his eyebrows, but he said nothing.

Bill told him about the blank envelope which had contained a maple leaf with the word “Alive” pricked out on it.

Garratt’s eyebrows came down and he stopped jingling. He said,

“The girl’s batty!”

Bill wasn’t angry. It wasn’t any good being angry with Garratt. He said,

“No, she isn’t,” and left it at that.

“All right,” said Garratt, “trot out the exhibits—Daily Sketch, bits of notepaper, blank envelope, dead leaf. I suppose the leaf’s dead if O’Hara isn’t.”

Bill smiled quite cheerfully. There had been a certain amount of thin ice about. Now that Garratt had smashed it, things felt more comfortable.

“There aren’t any exhibits. Meg put the Daily Sketch in a drawer—her writing-table drawer—but it went missing the day she found the letters on the hearth-rug. The paper that had been used for them was in the same drawer.”

“And someone broke in and burgled the leaf, I suppose!” Garratt made a face. “This what you call evidence? It’s sheer lunacy!”

“O’Hara was an odd chap,” said Bill slowly.

Garratt got there in a flash.

“You mean he might be playing cat-and-mouse with her. What terms were they on?”

Bill didn’t answer that at once. Then he said,

“You’d better know just where we are. I’ve cared for Meg for ten years. She’s never cared for me. She married O’Hara. He made her damned unhappy. Now she doesn’t know whether she’s free or not. He was a cruel devil—it would be like him to keep her like that, not knowing.”

Garratt jingled his keys. “It might be.... O’Hara was like that.”

Bill went on speaking.

“It’s an abominable position. She can’t even get probate.”

There was something sticking in his mind about those papers in the bank. No, it was a packet of some sort. Meg didn’t know if there were papers in it, she only thought there might be. He didn’t know why they stuck in his mind, but they did.

Garratt grinned.

“Do you expect me to believe that O’Hara had anything to leave? I suppose she wants to be sure she’s a widow. She was a fool to marry him—but women are fools, especially girls. Now look here, Bill—O’Hara’s dead. I told her so when she came to see me. He’s dead, and he’ll stay dead. The body they got out of the river in December was his all right. Stripped—and ordinary identification impossible, but there had been an old break of the right leg. I happen to know O’Hara broke that leg about five years ago. We didn’t identify him at the inquest because it didn’t suit our book. We were still hoping to pick up the trail he was on. We most particularly didn’t want any headlines in the papers. What Mrs O’Hara wants to do is to go and see her lawyer and get leave to presume death. We’ll back her up—now. There needn’t be any publicity. Tell her to see her lawyer at once. All this about letters, and leaves, and snips of paper is either a hoax, or it’s hysterics. O’Hara’s as dead as Julius Caesar—she needn’t worry.”

He got up, went over to the other side of the room, clattered at a drawer, and came back with an untidy note-book in his hand. He sat down again on the arm of the chair and flicked at the crumpled pages.

“Here you are—October ’33. First entry about O’Hara on the 3rd. He was due to report, and he didn’t report.... October 4th—rang up Mrs O’Hara. O’Hara missing. She wanted to know where he was. So did we. We gave it another forty-eight hours, and then we began to make enquiries. Nobody had seen O’Hara since eight o’clock on the evening of the 1st, when he walked out of his flat. Nobody’d seen him. Nobody’d heard from him. He never turned up, and he never will.” He shut the note-book with a snap. “You tell Mrs O’Hara to see her lawyer and get on with it!”

Bill Coverdale was sitting up.

“You say nobody saw O’Hara after the first of October?”

“One Oct: thirty-three,” said Garratt laconically.

“Well—I saw him.”

“You?”

“I. And I can fix the date, because I sailed for South America next day, and I sailed on the fifth.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Dead sure. But you can verify it if you want to.”

Garratt fished a pencil out of his pocket and sucked the end of it.

“All right, if you’re sure. You saw O’Hara on the fourth. That’s four days after anyone else did. Where did you see him? What was he doing? Who was he with?”

“He was in a taxi,” said Bill Coverdale. “It was somewhere short of midnight, because my train was a bit late, and it was due at eleven.”

“Where were you coming from?”

“King’s Cross. I’d been up north, and I’d run it fine, so I was in a hurry. I was sailing the next day. I was held up at a crossing, and I saw O’Hara go by in a taxi. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, and barring that it was somewhere between King’s Cross and Piccadilly Circus I can’t say where the hold-up was. I just didn’t think anything about it.”

Garratt scribbled in his note-book.

“You’re sure it was O’Hara?”

Bill nodded.

“Oh, yes, it was O’Hara.”

“And it was a taxi, not a private car?”

Bill shut his eyes for a moment.

“Yes, it was a taxi—one of those green ones.”

Garratt scribbled again.

“You’re twelve months after the fair. We might have got on to the taxi if we’d known at the time. Was he alone?”

Bill Coverdale got up and walked to the window. Like Garratt he frowned at the hygienic flats, but unlike Garratt he did not see the bright blank windows or the staring concrete. He saw O’Hara in a taxi at midnight—O’Hara with every feature clear and distinct, and beyond him, close at his shoulder, a woman. The anger which he had felt then swept over him again. To have Meg for his wife, and to go chasing off with that sort of girl! He tried to visualize her and failed.... Yet he had had the impression that she was that sort of girl. There must have been something to give him that impression.

Garratt repeated his question impatiently.

“Was he alone?”

And with that Bill turned back to the room again.

“No, he wasn’t. There was a girl with him.”

“See her face?”

“I suppose I did. I can’t describe her.”

“You’re being damn useful!” said Garratt with a growl in his voice. “All this is about as much use as a sick headache. You’re sure there was a girl?”

“Yes, I’m sure of that.”

“You wouldn’t know her again, or anything like that?”

Bill was half turned away. He was frowning deeply. Behind that impression of his there must be something if he could only get hold of it. He said without knowing what he was going to say,

“I never said I wouldn’t know her again.”

[1]	See Danger Calling.