Читать книгу The Golden Horns - John Burke - Страница 5

CHAPTER THREE

Berkley Square was flooded with sunlight. The bodywork of cars parked against the kerb were hot to the touch, and office windows around the square stood gaspingly open.

Martin Slade glanced up at the first floor windows of the building he was approaching, as though hoping they might reveal something about the identity of the occupant of the rooms behind.

But they remained impassive and non-committal.

He went in and prodded the button for the lift. First floor, they had told him on the telephone. It was not far to walk, but this was not the sort of day when anyone walked more than he had to.

The lift purred up; the doors opened; across a richly carpeted passage another door faced him.

He went in.

The brunette behind the desk just inside the door looked up and smiled. Then she blinked at Martin, and smiled even more.

Fifteen years ago he would have been wild with delight at knowing he could make women look at him like that. Now it didn’t matter—not as much as it had done, anyway.

“Yes, sir?” Zoe Peters said in a breathless voice that sounded as though it might rush up an octave if not kept strictly under control.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Logan. Martin Slade.”

“Mr. Slade,” she repeated. “Yes. Oh, absolutely, Mr. Slade.”

A moment later he was being shown into a spacious, well-appointed room overlooking the Square. A man rose from behind the desk to meet him.

Martin, who had had doubts on his way here, was suddenly sure that he had done right in coming. He knew that he had come to the right man

David Logan said: “Sit down. Mr. Slade.”

Martin had met men like this during the war—not many, for there were not many of this calibre. When you met them, you knew them right away. Apparently dispassionate, saturnine men whose rare smiles were sardonic and disillusioned, they were capable of endurance to a degree beyond that of most mortals.

Martin had seen such a man smoke his last cigarette, tell a joke, break into an unexpectedly charming grin, and then go out towards death with steely determination in his eyes and all the tense magnificence of a fearless tiger.

He said: “I’d like you to help me. Mr. Slade, but I’m not sure if the job is up your street.”

“Just give me a few details, and we’ll see. I get a lot of varying traffic up my street, you know!”

“Actually,” said Martin slowly, trying to work out what he must say and how best to start, “I think it concerns a murder.”

“You think it concerns a murder?” One satanic eyebrow lifted querulously.

“The Clifford murder,” said Martin. “You’ve read about it this morning?”

David Logan nodded. “But if you know anything about that—anything at all—you ought to be telling the police. I’m not the man for you. It’s your duty—”

“I know all that,” interrupted Martin. “But I can’t talk to the police. There are reasons.”

“Then why come to me? If you want to pass on information anonymously to the police, I can arrange that for you, but frankly I’ve got more important things to do.”

“Nothing like that,” said Martin. “I want you to work for me. I’ll tell you the whole story, and then—”

“Just a moment.”

Logan leaned forward and flicked a switch. The breathless voice of Zoe Peters crackled with a hollow note in the speaker.

“Yes, Mr. Logan?”

“Is Miss Dane in?”

“She’s just brought those slides in for Mr. Marston. They’re going over them together.”

“Ask her to come in, will you?”

David Logan sat back in his chair the shape of his head making a lean, devilish silhouette against the brightness outside the window.

There was a brief silence. It was broken by the slight click of the door

Martin looked round; and got up.

“This is my secretary, Miss Dane,” Logan was saying. “Carol, this is Mr. Slade, who promises some startling revelations about the Clifford murder. Have you got a note pad for the salient points?”

Carol Dane shook hands with Martin, flipped open a small pad, and slid gracefully into a chair in the corner of the room. One slim, nylon-sleek leg was crossed over the other. Her honey-blonde head bowed over the pad, and then lifted as she glanced inquiringly at Martin.

David Logan said: “Well, Mr. Slade? Let’s have it from the beginning. The whole thing. Then tell me what you want me to do…and I’ll tell you if I’m prepared to do it.”

Martin told him. He started with the call from Henning Holtesen, and reached the incident of the blow he had received on the head. Then he paused for a moment, sorting out details in his mind.

“You’ve no idea who attacked you?” Logan prompted.

“None at all. When I came round, I felt so sick that it took me quite a time to get myself straightened out. Then I checked up on the flat. Nothing had been stolen, but the whole place had been turned upside down. No….” He frowned, anxious to be exact. “That’s not quite true. My cases—the cases I’d just brought back from Denmark—had been literally torn apart. Everything had been taken out, and the hinges were wrenched off. It looked as though it had been done in a fit of fury. But someone might have been looking for a false side to the case or something of that sort.”

“And the rest of the flat? That had been treated in the same way?”

Martin shook his head. “Not quite the same. It had been turned out but rather hastily—as though that were a last resort.”

“You mean that whatever the intruder was looking for must have been, according to his reckoning, in the cases you had just brought back with you? Searching the rest of the flat was just a last despairing effort.”

“Something on those lines,” Martin agreed.

Logan’s lips were pursed.

“And when the search proved fruitless—”

“He moved on to Sean Clifford.”

“The connection being your friend Birgitte,” said Logan. “Mrs. Holtesen asks you to smuggle something out of Denmark for her. You refuse. She picks up this young impressionable Clifford chap and, a few days after his return from Copenhagen, he’s murdered. By whom?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Martin.

“It’s what the police would like to know,” observed Logan grimly. He stared penetratingly at Martin. “Have you any ideas at all on the subject?”

“I might have some ideas,” said Martin, “if I had any idea of what it was I was supposed to smuggle. Maybe this business has nothing whatever to do with that—but I shall be surprised if that’s the case.”

“It would be quite a coincidence. Hm.” Logan pushed a cigarette box across the desk, and leaned forward with a lighter. Smoke swirled about his head, blurring its sun-sharp outline, “Yes, it’s a great pity you didn’t find out what the package was that you would have transported.”

“If I’d found out, maybe I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. Maybe, having used Clifford, they killed him the moment he had done the job for them.”

“They?” queried Logan.

“Birgitte and Eiler are in this together. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“But why should they, or their agents over here, knock you out and go through your cases? They would know you hadn’t got the…well, whatever it was. No, there must be someone else in this affair—someone who was either waiting here for you to arrive, or who flew over from Copenhagen in order to get to London before you. Someone else. Any ideas?”

Martin had no ideas. He was groping in a fog. None of this added up to anything.

Logan went on: “Your host, perhaps—Henning Holtesen? Could he be involved?”

“I don’t see how.” said Martin. “I suppose he can’t be ruled out, but I wouldn’t have said he was a criminal type. Certainly not a murderer.”

“There are no certainties when it comes to murderers,” Logan swiftly assured him. “But if Holtesen is not mixed up in this, what else is there? Somebody quite unknown—and we can’t cook up any theories on those lines. Or else there was a quarrel between your girl friend and her brother Eiler, and one of them is double-crossing the other. Or maybe their liaison with their people at this end—assuming they’ve got people over here—broke down. Or they were both double-crossed.” Logan sighed. “There are far too many imponderables.”

“Far too many,” Martin agreed. “But there must be a solution somewhere—and you’re the man to find it.”

David Logan emitted a thin jet of smoke between his lips. He said: “I still don’t know why you won’t see the police. I’m not touching any work for you until I know that. Perhaps you’ll explain.”

Martin was aware of Carol Dane studying him intently. He knew that they were both sizing him up—and that the woman’s assessment would be as shrewd and thorough in its own way as Logan’s would be.

He explained.

He told them, tersely and without heroics, about his work during the war.

Son of a Danish mother and an Englishman who had worked in Copenhagen for years before the war, he spoke fluent Danish, and knew the country inside out. Dropped by parachute, he worked on behalf of British Special Operations Executive in organising sabotage of industries that worked for the Germans. Railway lines were blown up, factories wrecked, and propaganda distributed through illegal presses. It was a nerve-racking life, and yet a ceaselessly stimulating one.

When the war ended, everything became suddenly flat. Life was intolerably dull.

Martin Slade went back to Denmark. He organised complicated currency deals, and smuggled everything from gold to cigarettes across the troubled frontiers of postwar Europe.

“Everything,” he said bluntly, “except drugs. I never went in for that dirty traffic.”

Excitement was what he needed. He could not relax. He found excitement in this illicit trading, founding his small organisation on Copenhagen, in its key position dominating Scandinavia and the Baltic.

And he found excitement in Birgitte Nielsen. It was an excitement that flamed high and then died suddenly—died away into petty quarrels and savage bitterness

At last self-disgust and weariness drove him back to England permanently. Music, his first love, reasserted its sway. The madness of war and the postwar turmoil faded, and he put his own madness behind him.

“But there are still a lot of police forces in Europe who would like to grab me,” he said, while Logan nodded understandingly. “I could still be dragged in by our own police. Once put them on the trail, and they’ll ferret out too many things. It would be too unhealthy for me.”

Logan stubbed his cigarette out.

“You’re quite right. They’d be bound to ask why you had been approached by Birgitte in the first place. And then they’d start asking more questions. You might make a deal with them—an exchange of your information, such as it is, for the promise of immunity—but even so, it’s a risky business. They’d keep a sharp eye on you from then on. Might even pick you up on some technicality, long afterwards.”

“That’s why,” said Martin decisively, “I want you to take this case up independently.”

There was a long pause. Logan tilted back again in his chair, teetering lazily to and fro.

“What makes you so interested in it?” he demanded. “What makes you willing to spend money—perhaps a lot of money—on something that doesn’t really concern you.”

Martin had been afraid of this question. He knew the answer would sound absurd. It sounded absurd to himself. But it was the only answer; the only true answer.

He said: “It’s all due to the torment m a girl’s eyes. Don’t think I’m crazy. It’s just the way it is. I’m haunted by Inge Nielsen’s face. I wish I weren’t—I wish I could forget it. But I won’t have any peace until that ghost is exorcised.”