Death and Other Lovers Page 20

  Donnelly regarded him for a moment without expression. Then he pushed the telephone across the desk towards him. “Know any good lawyers, Mr. Spalding?”

  The dog arrived home first. It scratched at the back door of the cottage and Flynn let it in. The police guard, who was a quiet-spoken, slightly stocky individual with a moustache, sighed as if life had succeeded in disappointing him yet again. His tone was as long-suffering as a missionary’s at a cannibal feast. “Mr. Flynn, I really wish you’d let me open any doors that need opening.”

  Flynn cocked an eyebrow at him. “You think she’s going to trick her way in here by scratching at the door and whimpering?” He looked at Flute with new respect. “Man, what a disguise!”

  Sergeant Ferris said patiently, “The whole point, Mr. Flynn, is that we don’t know what to expect of her. She’s a professional, and surprise is how she does her job. And my job is stopping her. If you’ll let me do it.”

  Flynn was magnanimous. “Sure I’ll let you do it. I just don’t propose being silly about it.”

  Ferris gave the patient little sigh another airing. “How about a deal? You don’t open doors and I won’t photograph nude women.”

  “I don’t photograph nude women.”

  Ferris clucked his tongue sadly. “Now I know you’re crazy.” Flynn grinned.

  The dog took a lap at its water, then pattered into the livingroom and inched into its favourite position under the couch. It gave one pant and laid its nose on its silky paws.

  The same thought occurred to both men simultaneously. Flynn voiced it. “Where is she?”

  Sergeant Ferris called Superintendent Donnelly and was told they were to do nothing—not go out looking for her, either together or separately, not try to leave the cottage, nothing—only stay out of sight behind locked doors until reinforcements arrived. Ferris agreed. Then he slammed the phone down and went racing after Flynn who was halfway down the garden path.

  He was a solider man than Flynn, and his training involved compelling people to do things they did not want to do, and he had Flynn back in the kitchen and the kitchen door locked before Flynn knew he had been spotted.

  Flynn stared at him as if he had gone mad. “What the holy hell do you think you’re doing?”

  The affectation of pedantry was gone as if it had never been. Ferris said briefly, “She’s out there.”

  “Of course she’s out there. The dog came back without her. Maybe she’s fallen, sprained her ankle—I don’t know. She can’t be far away. We can’t leave her lying there and do nothing.”

  “We’re not doing nothing. I’ve called for support: they’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Until then you do nothing, and I do my job.”

  “Support?” echoed Flynn. “Shimoni? I don’t need help picking her up if she’s broken both legs. I can tuck her under one arm. You could get three of her in a coal-sack.”

  Ferris said tersely, “I didn’t mean Shimoni.”

  Then Flynn understood. The blood drained from his face. “You think—Laura …?” The implications hit him like a train. “Dear God, you think she’s got Leah!”

  Ferris did not stand to talk about it. He was moving round, checking window catches and drawing curtains, locking doors and pocketing the keys. Mostly he used his left hand. This was not because he was left-handed: a . 38 revolver nestled in a shoulder-holster under his left arm. Under his jacket it would not have shown but he was in his shirtsleeves and it was as obvious as an extra limb. Even the way he moved, cat-footed and slightly sideways, was somehow dictated by the thing. It was impossible to ignore. Its presence filled the house.

  Flynn stood numb in the centre of the livingroom pivoting on his heel as he turned to watch Ferris working. His eyes were round and uncomprehending. “What are you doing? We have to find Leah.”

  “No,” said Ferris. His tone left no room for debate. “We stay here, and we stay down, until support arrives. Then we’ll find her. We will: not you. Your job is staying alive.”

  “You really think she’s here—out there? Laura?”

  “I don’t know. In fifteen minutes, once you’re safe, I’ll go and find out. If I find Miss Shimoni sat on the ground nursing a twisted ankle, so much the better—I don’t mind being wrong, believe me. But if your friend is out there, it’s for one reason only. Since before she can kill you she has to kill me, I have a vested interest in stopping her.”

  “But—how would she find me here?”

  Ferris looked sceptical. “Your old partner’s new partner’s house? Even Watson would have found that one elementary.”

  “So what’s she waiting for?”

  “She’s waiting,” the policeman explained patiently, “for one or both of us to go out looking for Shimoni.”

  Slowly Flynn’s stunned wits were beginning to function again. “You shouldn’t have pulled the curtains. Now she knows we’re onto her, and she’ll guess reinforcements are on the way.”

  “If I hadn’t drawn the curtains, sooner or later she’d have got a shot at you through the window.”

  “So what now?”

  “I told you, nothing. We wait.”

  “Not us, her. What will she do now?”

  Ferris looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do,” snarled Flynn, “because I do and it’s not even my frigging job. She’ll try to draw us out into the open. She’ll use Leah. She’ll hurt Leah.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Ferris said forcibly. “Nearer ten now. That’s all the time we have to stick it. Whatever she does, we only have to do nothing for ten minutes.”

  “You can do a lot of hurting in ten minutes,” said Flynn, who knew. “If Leah Shimoni starts screaming, I’m going out there if I have to go head-first through the kitchen window.”

  “You’d be dead before you hit the ground. She came here to kill you, to complete her contract, and if you give her even the shadow of a chance that’s what she’ll do.”

  “I don’t care,” shouted Flynn. It was not true so he said it again. “Don’t you understand? I don’t care any more. She’s going to get me sometime, it might as well be now. But nobody else is doing my hurting and dying for me. Not any more. Two hundred and twenty people are dead, and Gil Todd’s got a fractured skull, and now if Leah Shimoni’s going to be hurt too—” He let out a ragged breath. “They can have charmed lives as want them. Honest to Christ, I’d as soon take a bullet right now and goodnight.”

  “That’s not your choice,” Ferris insisted. “The people who did these things will get away with them if you don’t testify. And sooner or later they’re going to find themselves in another tight spot, and they’re going to take the same way out. It’s easier the second time round. People will be hurt then, people will die, and their deaths will be your fault in a way that nothing which has happened so far has been. Is that what you want?—to let men like rabid dogs go free? You think your conscience is going to be clearer for that?”

  Flynn did not believe in an after-life: hell held no fears for him. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve done all I can about that. There’s nothing more I can do to stop them, or make them pay. All the choice I have now is between trying to save Leah or letting her suffer for me as well. Let me tell you something about guilt: it stinks. I’m not carrying any more of it round with me.”

  “I’m sorry too,” said Ferris, and the gun was in his hand as if it had grown there, the muzzle levelled at Flynn’s chest. “This is my job. It is also, thank God, the right thing to do. Sit down, Flynn, you’re not going anywhere.”

  Flynn’s eyes recoiled from the gun. But he stayed where he was and kept looking at it, and after long seconds he slowly nodded. “That’ll do. If you do it or if she does, it’s no odds. As long as she knows. If you kill me, you’ll have to tell her. Show her.” All the courage in his heart would not have been enough without also the despair in his soul. He went to the kitchen window and opened the curtains, and stood long and still in the square of sunlight.

  Ferris co
uld no more shoot Flynn than he could have sawn his head off. He put his weapon aside and tackled him from behind, and the two men crashed to the kitchen floor as the centre of the window-pane sprang an unexpected leak. Fragments of glass showered them. Neither of them noticed.

  Ferris had learned the art of subduing a violent man at police college and subsequently on the streets of the capital. But Flynn had learned to street-fight on the New York waterfront, with the advantage that he was not called upon to explain over-enthusiasm. He had fought for fun, for fear and for his life. More than once he had kept fighting with his eyes full of his own blood because he knew if he went down he would be trampled to death. Flynn used his knees and elbows in ways not sanctioned by the police manual.

  All the same, the result was still at issue as they rolled, locked together, across Shimoni’s kitchen floor, panting hot breath in each other’s faces, raining hard blows on each other’s ribs, with no enmity between them only a quite different perception of social responsibility.

  The turning point came when Flynn, reeling from a telling assault on that side of his face which took all the punishment, remembered he was armed with a weapon Ferris could not take from him. He used it at the first opportunity. Ferris knocked him sprawling against the washing-machine, then yanked him up to hit him again. As they came together the heavy plaster at the end of Flynn’s long right arm swung in a powerful trajectory from an unexpected angle and struck Ferris in the temple like a brick.

  At once all the fight went out of him. His hands fell away from Flynn, his knees buckled and Flynn, moaning with the pain of his healing hand, caught him as he folded and lowered him carefully to the carpet. Ferris was unconscious before he got there.

  Flynn rolled him gently from side to side, emptying his pockets. When he found the key of the kitchen door he fumbled it into the lock and turned it. He paused then, long enough to take a deep breath—maybe deep enough to last him the rest of his life—and then he opened the door and stepped outside.

  Chapter Five

  Policemen had been in and out of Deering Pharmaceuticals all day. Detectives, photographers, forensic scientists: if they were not quizzing Mr. Spalding’s secretary they were browbeating Dr. Hehn’s assistants, and if they were doing neither they were going through the accounts with a magnifying glass or the stores with a fine-tooth comb.

  At first the occasional polite visits of Superintendent Donnelly and his sergeant had been accepted at face value, as routine police work aimed at eliminating lines of enquiry. As time went on, though, those with a finger on the pulse of Deerings—people like the commissionaire and the tea-ladies—reckoned that routine enquiry had turned to something more specific, and identified Dr. Hehn’s laboratory as the focus of interest. By now even the board of directors knew something was afoot, their senior research chemist was the butt of increasingly impertinent questioning by the police and now their PR executive was assisting with their enquiries instead of liaising with the Sondheim committee in order to get the best mileage out of the imminent prize-giving.

  The drama had divided opinion at Deerings. One camp held it a malicious campaign of lies and rumour against a prominent and highly respected scientist, almost certainly prompted by jealous rivals. The other considered it no more than a company might expect which allowed itself to become dominated by foreigners and ex-public school boys. Neither group enjoyed the disruption the police caused to the even tenor of the pharmaceutical season though the latter resented it less than the former.

  And neither saw any percentage in trying to obstruct the police. Indeed, the board had sent down an urgent circular that the enquiry was to receive full co-operation from every department; and that being done, retired behind closed doors to find out what had happened, what was happening now, what they should have known about it, what they actually knew about it and what they should admit to knowing about it.

  The result was that when another man in a raincoat walked past reception with a nod and the single word “Police,” no attempt was made to hinder him or to check the contents of his briefcase. When he asked directions to Dr. Hehn’s laboratory he received the fullest cooperation.

  Shimoni’s back garden was the size of a pocket-handkerchief and filled with lupins and foxgloves and other refugees from a Victorian sampler. A low stone wall surrounded it, broached by a narrow gate opening onto a footpath that ran towards a little spinney a hundred yards from the cottage. It was the obvious place to walk a dog, or set an ambush. Flynn closed the garden gate behind him and turned towards it.

  He found himself walking quietly, almost on tip-toe, which was absurd. She knew he was there, she was expecting him. If he was too long coming she might get impatient and take steps to hurry him. He did not want that. He forced a little extra length into his stride. He sucked in some air to whistle with but lacked the control necessary to produce a recognisable tune. All that emerged was the thin piping of a hungry fledgeling, so he stopped. If he could not face death with careless laughter on his lips, at least he need not go out sounding like the village idiot.

  He had no idea what to expect: Laura, or a bullet out of the blue that would take him before he knew it. He tried not to think: not about dying, not about the two hundred and twenty people who had already died and whose deaths would now go unavenged, not about the rightness or otherwise of the choice he had made. He made himself believe that Shimoni would be all right now, that Laura—Elizabeth Baron, rather—was too professional to kill someone she was not being paid for. Beyond that his only ambition was to somehow find the nerve, or the determination, or just the hopeless obstinacy to keep putting one foot in front of the other until something came to stop him.

  He came to the trees and stepped into their greenly dappled shade. The murmur of air moving gently through the leaves was a susurrus, like voices. It masked the sound of movement, even his own. He stayed on the path, worn by generations of yokel feet, because that would be what she expected, where she would look for him. Mostly he resisted the urge to look for her. If she wanted him to see her, she would ensure that he did; if not, she would blow his head apart before he knew she was there.

  He thought she would go for the head shot. It was the professional thing to do. Or she might fell him with a body shot and move in for the coup de grace. He hoped, he believed, that she would not make it longer or harder than it had to be. He just wished now that she would finish it, before his modest impression of a brave man came apart at the seams. If he had known a prayer he might have said it; but the only thing that came to mind was “For what we are about to receive” which did not seem altogether appropriate.

  One moment there was the dappled sunlight falling at his feet and the murmur of dryad voices above his head, and the next she was there, in front of him, almost close enough to touch, a long slender figure barring his way with a revolver cupped in her two hands.

  Flynn started visibly and had taken a step back before he could conquer the urge to run like hell He felt the sweat break over him like a fever. He looked at the gun. He was not a connoisseur, could not judge the calibre except that it might have been about the same size as Sergeant Ferris’s. She also held it the same way. The muzzle was pointing down but there was never the faintest hope in Flynn’s mind that he could do anything faster than she could take her aim and fire.

  Her face in the dim place was darkly luminous. Under the partly lowered lids her eyes shone—not with tears, but he thought not with gladness either. She said softly, “Hello, Mickey.”

  He found it hard to speak. The beauty of her filled him up as it always had. Even now he could not think of her as an evil woman. Amoral, perhaps. He found a voice no-one, except maybe Todd, would have recognised. “Shimoni?”

  “She’s all right. I had to tie her up. They’ll find her when—when they come looking.”

  “Let me see her.”

  “There isn’t time, Mickey,” she said gently. “The police will be here soon. I have to be away by then. She’s all right, I prom
ise you.”

  “You kill—” His voice broke. “You killed two hundred and twenty people. Why?”

  She shrugged fractionally, like a tiny shudder running along her shoulders. “It’s my job. It’s what I do.”

  “You killed a plane-load of people! I loved you, and you blew a plane out of the sky because you thought I was on it!”

  “Because your negatives were on it,” she corrected him patiently. “Mickey, I never wanted to hurt you. I was glad you weren’t on board. I’d have been happy to leave it like that. But when it turned out that sparing you was going to cost my clients their freedom—well, that didn’t leave me much choice, did it? In this line of work, either your first loyalty goes with the fee or the fees stop coming. I’m sorry it has to end like this.”

  “Sorry—?!!!” The word burst from him. She might have been apologising for some minor lapse of fealty, like going to a party with him and leaving with someone else. She was going to kill him, and like a nicely brought-up young woman she was expressing her regrets first. The breath panted in his throat. He felt an hysterical urge to laugh. His eyes on her glowing face were wild; the memory of her strongly yielding body swamped his mind.

  Under the lowered lids her eyes held a kindly curiosity. Her finely sculpted head tilted a little to one side. “Are you afraid?”

  More than ever he wanted to laugh, but could not or dared not. He had his nerve on the thinnest of leashes: any additional pressure would break it. “What do you think?”

  “I won’t hurt you,” she promised; she seemed quite serious. “It’ll be over so quickly you won’t know a thing.”

  She did not ask him to turn round: she moved round him where he stood. He waited. His nerves screamed in the mute stillness of his skin. He screwed his eyes tight and stopped breathing. He waited for his head to explode.