A Season in Hell, page 24
Jago got in through Alan Crowther’s door with the assistance of a skeleton key and carefully locked it again. He didn’t turn on any lights, simply prowled around each room in turn with the assistance of a tiny pencil flash. He found the computer bank in the study particularly interesting.
“Well now,” he said softly, “that explains a great deal.”
He went back to the kitchen, opened the fridge and helped himself to a pint of milk, then returned to the sitting room and selected an easy chair. Samson, the Burmese cat, brushed his leg and leaped on his lap. Jago took out the Browning, screwed on the silencer and placed the weapon on a convenient coffee table. He drank his milk slowly as he stroked Samson and waited.
The train passed through Preston and Crowther said, “Lancaster next stop.” He checked his watch. “We’re ahead of schedule. Should be in by eleven-fifteen.”
There was a sudden shout, and they looked along the train to see the two youths on top of the boxcar clearly in the moonlight. The two started down the ladder, and a uniformed policeman clambered onto the roof and went after them.
“That’s torn it,” Crowther said. “Come on, get moving.”
He pushed Sarah forward; she climbed over the steel hawsers and knelt on the narrow strip, hanging on tightly. There hardly seemed room for her knees, and she turned slightly sideways, a bolt digging painfully into her hip as she became aware of Egan’s boots in front of her face.
Crowther made for the other side of the wagon and ducked out of sight as the two boys arrived, wailing like banshees. One of them was a punk, his hair cut in a Mohawk. Crowther, peering over the edge, saw that the policeman was almost on them.
The track was steep here, the train starting to slow, and as the youths hit the final wagon, the policeman called, “I’ve got you now, you bastards!”
“In a pig’s ear you have, darling,” the Mohawk called, and simply jumped from the moving train as his friend went after him, laughing hysterically. Crowther glanced back, saw one and then the other stand up at the side of the track. The policeman went back up the ladder. He walked across the swaying top of the boxcar and disappeared. Crowther scrambled up, clambered over the steel hawsers and reached for Sarah. He helped her up and back to their original position. They sat down.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“All right? Do you know something? Most of the time my nose seemed to be about six inches above the track. I know it wasn’t, but, Alan,” she hugged him tightly, “it was wonderful.”
Egan squatted beside them. “If you two have quite finished, you might be interested to know that we’re just entering Lancaster.”
Ten minutes later, the train slowed to a halt in a freight siding. “Easy one to get out of,” Crowther said. “Just follow close.”
He hurried across the tracks, ducked up a narrow alley between storage buildings, and came to a high wooden fence. He pulled on one of the planks and it swiveled to one side, leaving a narrow opening. He motioned Sarah through first, then Egan, and he followed, pulling the plank into place behind him. They were standing on the pavement of a main road, the occasional car swishing by.
“This way. Round to the front of the station, the way the people who buy tickets go.” They turned the corner, and there was the front of the station, three taxicabs standing at the rank. “There you are, Heysham next stop,” Crowther said.
Sarah put her arms around him and kissed him. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Alan.”
“Nonsense.” He turned to Egan. “You bring her back safe if you want to break bread with me again.”
Egan grinned. “What will you do now?”
“Don’t worry about me. Excellent freight train back to the smoke in twenty minutes. Mainly cars, I’m afraid, but it could be fun. Off you go.”
They crossed to the taxi rank, Sarah got in the first cab, and Egan gave the man the address of Webster’s boatyard. Before getting in, he looked back at the corner, but Alan Crowther had gone.
Webster’s boatyard was as run-down a place as Sarah had ever seen, rather like a junkyard with the rusting remains of a number of cars, and here and there the decaying hull of a boat. There was a creek below, which just now contained more black mud than water, a dilapidated jetty extending into it. A line ran out to a motor cruiser sitting on its bottom in a couple of feet of water. There were several smaller boats drawn up on the shoreline.
“You mean someone actually makes a living out of a place like this?” Sarah asked.
Egan nodded. “You’d be surprised. Besides, Webster could never starve. He has his Navy pension. He was Fleet Chief Petty Officer in his day.”
A light shone in the window of the old cottage on the side of the hill above the yard. They went up the path and Egan knocked. “Come in!” a voice shouted.
He opened the door and led the way into a long and incredibly cluttered room which took up most of the cottage’s ground area. There was a primitive kitchen with a pot sink and a single tap, then a section that was obviously used as an office, with a desk and an old Victorian table awash with files.
The living area was at the far end, a wood fire blazing on a flat stone hearth, an overstuffed sofa and two chairs in front of it. The man who sprawled in one of the chairs, a bottle of whiskey at his elbow, a glass in one hand, a book in the other, was small, with a fierce face, tangled gray hair and beard.
“There you are, you young rogue,” he said.
Egan leaned on the mantelpiece. “Sam Webster—Mrs. Sarah Talbot.”
Webster looked up at her. “And what’s a nice-looking woman like you doing in bad company?”
“Oh, I get by,” she said.
He tried to sit up and groaned. “Gout,” he said, and she noticed the walking stick on the floor. “The fruits of a misspent life. I hesitate to ask, you women having a great sense of your dignity these days, but would you like to make us all a cup of tea? You’ll find everything you need back there.”
“I think I can manage that.” She filled an old kettle at the single tap, found a match to light the stove and took down three chipped mugs from hooks above the sink.
Sean said, “What about the Jenny B? Everything shipshape?”
“Saw to it myself earlier this evening before the leg started playing me up. Everything in apple-pie order. Provisions in the galley, fuel in the tanks. All that’s missing is my seven hundred and fifty quid.”
“I’ve got that here.” Sarah opened her handbag and produced the money. He counted it carefully, note by note.
Egan lit a cigarette and glanced around with distaste. “Just look at this place. How can you live like this with all the money you’ve got tucked away?”
“But that’s the whole point,” Webster told him. “What the tax man can’t see won’t hurt him. What he sees here just makes him feel sorry for a poor old sailor living alone on his pension.”
Sarah brought the three mugs of tea and he poured whiskey into his and drank it noisily. “That’s grand.” He looked at his pocket watch. “Half-past midnight. You’ll not get away for another two hours. The tide’s still well out. Are you familiar with boats, Mrs. Talbot?”
“A little.”
“Ah, well, it’s tricky round here. Sandbanks, quicksand. You can walk two or three hundred yards out to sea in some parts of Morecambe Bay and still be only knee-deep in water.”
She idly picked up some of the books on the floor by the chair. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Plato’s The Republic, novels by Hemingway, Charles Dickens and many others.
“You’ll notice I’m a reader,” he said. “Forty-five years at sea, Mrs. Talbot, and I sometimes think it was the books that got me through. Education is a wonderful thing. Of course, when I was a lad you didn’t get the chances. Something I’ve never understood about this boy here.” He was a little drunk now. “A fine brain, real intellect, a philosopher by nature, and what does he do for a living? He kills people.”
“Here we go again.” Egan turned to Sarah. “We’ve had this argument so many times I’ve lost count.”
“Samuel Johnson said you couldn’t stand five minutes under a shed in the rain beside Edmund Burke without realizing you were in the company of a great man,” Webster said.
“And what in the hell is that pearl of wisdom supposed to mean?” Egan demanded.
“It means that in your company under the shed in the rain,” Webster said drunkenly, “five minutes, and I know I’m in the company of something special gone wrong.” He hauled himself to his feet, swayed there, supported by the stick, and reached for the whiskey bottle. “I’m for my bed. Put the light out when you go.”
He lurched up the stairs. They heard him lumbering about for a while and then there was silence.
“An unhappy man,” Sarah said.
“Not as long as there’s one last bottle of Scotch left in this world.”
“And hard on you,” she persisted.
“He means well,” Egan said. “A bit like the remark on those old school reports: he thinks I could do better.” He cut short the discussion by standing up. “Let’s see if there’s anything worth having in the fridge. We might as well eat something before we go.”
As the Jenny B nosed down the creek on half-engines at two-thirty, the tide was still running in. Visibility was excellent in the bright moonlight and Sarah could see mountains lifting into the night on the far side of the bay.
“That’s the Lake District,” Egan told her. “Wordsworth country.”
Standing there in the wheelhouse beside him with only the small light over the chart table was like being in some private world. She looked at the chart. “The Isle of Man?”
“That’s right. We pass the northern tip, the Point of Ayre, and from there it’s a clear run to Ballycubbin.”
“What time will we get in?”
“Probably about nine o’clock, maybe a little earlier. Depends how the weather works out. I’ve checked on the radio. It’s not too bad. Winds three to four, rain squalls later, and there could be some fog by morning on the Irish coast.”
As they moved out to sea, they started to roll, spray drifting against the windows, the masthead light swaying. Egan said, “Here, take the wheel.”
She accepted the challenge at once. “This is fun.”
“Just keep checking the compass,” he said. “Keep on that heading. You’ll get the knack.”
There were red and green navigation lights in the darkness on the horizon. “What’s that?” she asked.
“Probably a ferry. Liverpool to the Isle of Man or maybe a coaster on the run up to Glasgow.”
“That’s their world and this is ours,” she said.
“An interesting way of putting it.”
He lit a cigarette, coughing as usual, and opened the side window. She said, “Why don’t you care, Sean? You don’t, you know. About anything. Oh, you’ve helped me marvelously, but when it comes to the really important things in life, the things that affect you …”
Egan laughed. “Webster has a weakness for Plato. There’s a bit in The Republic where Plato speaks of a man who’s lived in a cave all his life. He’s never seen the outside world. The people and things of that world are only shadows on the wall of his cave.”
“I know the passage well,” she said.
“Yes, well, Webster thinks I’m the man in the cave, no links with the real world at all, people only insubstantial shadows to me.”
“Is he right?” she asked.
“God knows.” He left the wheelhouse and stood at the rail in the prow. She remained at the wheel, hands steady, watching him as they plowed into the night.
It was almost five when Alan Crowther went into the yard at the back of the house and unlocked the back door. He turned on the kitchen light and put his rucksack on the table. Then he switched on the electric kettle. He felt remarkably well. The run down from Lancaster had been excellent, fast and exciting. When it had started to rain, he’d taken his chances, riding right up front in a Ford car, king of the night.
He put a tea bag in a cup, unplugged the kettle and started to pour. There was a slight creak of a floorboard behind him. He put the kettle down slowly and turned to find Jago standing in the doorway, the Browning in his gloved hand, the silencer on the end.
“Do one for me, old boy, while you’re at it.”
Crowther knew who this must be, of course, but played for time. “Jago, I presume.”
“My goodness, we are well informed, but then, information is your business, isn’t it?” Jago took out a cigarette one-handed and lit it as Crowther got another cup and put a tea bag in it. He reached for the kettle, half-turning, easing the plastic lid, and Jago added, “And speaking of information, old boy, where are they, and don’t start giving me problems, otherwise I’ll have to be very unpleasant indeed and it is rather early in the morning.”
Crowther tossed the boiling water across the table and, as Jago dodged back into the hall to avoid it, turned and wrenched open the kitchen door. As he went through, a bullet burned its way across his left shoulder. In the darkness he presented a poor target. Jago fired again as he saw the back door into the lane open, and went after him.
Crowther turned into the street, rounded the corner on the other side of his house and started to run along the canal toward Camden Lock, alternately in darkness and light as he passed beneath the streetlamps. Jago, very fast, was not far behind him as Crowther, laboring for air now, reached a series of granite steps and lurched up them, hauling on the old Victorian iron rail at his side.
He reached the top, clear for a moment under a streetlamp, and Jago’s arm swung up. The silenced Browning coughed twice and Alan Crowther staggered sideways, pitched headfirst over the low wall and fell into the lock.
Jago went to the wall at the bottom of the steps, but there was no sound, only dark water. He hurried back the way he had come, turned into Water Lane and got into the Spyder. Damn that fool Crowther; the plucky bastard was no use to him dead. So, he was no further forward, would simply have to sweat it out in Lord North Street until she got back.
“That’s if you do get back at all from this one, Sarah, my love,” he said.
Sarah slept on one of the bench seats in the saloon that doubled as a bed. She came awake slowly and lay there in the darkness, aware of the rolling motion, but still unsure where she was. She went up the companionway. The deck was tilting slightly, there was only darkness all around, the rush of water. When she got the wheelhouse door open, Egan was standing there, his face floating in darkness in the light from the binnacle.
“How are we doing?” she said.
“Fine. The weather’s a little rough, but nothing we can’t handle. If you look back over your shoulder to port you’ll not see the Isle of Man, but it’s there.”
“What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Six o’clock.”
“I’ll make some tea.”
The wind slashed rain and spray in her face as she crossed the slippery deck and went down the companionway to the saloon and into the galley. She got the stove working and toweled her hair. Her parka was soaked through, but she noticed an old brass-buttoned navy reefer behind the door and tried it on. It was rather large, but warm and comfortable, and there was a blue knitted cap in one of the pockets which she pulled down over her hair. She made the tea, found a thermos jug and two mugs, and when she renegotiated the deck, the rain was driving in with even greater force. She got the door open, lurched inside and slammed it shut.
Egan smiled. “Hey, I like the outfit. The complete sailor.”
She put the mugs on the chart table and poured the tea. “Shall I take over?”
“No, I can put it on automatic pilot for a while.”
There was no hint of dawn yet, only a slight phosphorescence on the water. She said, “Strange, but I feel as if we’re somehow coming to the end of things.”
“Nothing ever ends,” he said, swinging slightly from side to side in the swivel seat, his hands wrapped around the mug. “Every damn thing you ever did, or was ever done to you, is still around in some form or another, working away.”
“But we can cut free from the past, Sean, you must see that. Cut free, start fresh.”
“It sounds like an advertising slogan,” he told her.
She laughed out loud. “You’re damn right, it does.”
“Anyway, it’s words, just words. Have you cut free from your past?” There was no answer to that and she made no attempt to give one. “Have you, hell. It rides you harder each day and it’s changing you. Changing you in every way. The Sarah Talbot who boarded that plane in New York was another person.”
My God, it seems a thousand years ago now, she thought, and he’s right. I’m not the person I used to be.
She said to Egan, “Suppose I accept what you say as true? What are you suggesting?”
“That you can never go back to anything. I tried it and it didn’t work. Home didn’t exist any more.”
“And you think that will happen to me?” Sarah asked him.
“Oh, yes. Action and passion, they’re like drugs that sharpen you up, give you a high. When you’re back at your desk in that tall building in Wall Street you’ll feel as if that’s the dream, and only this was the reality.”
She shivered, suddenly cold, reluctantly aware of the truth in his words. “I’m not too sure I want to accept that.”
“I can see how you wouldn’t, but it’s all part of the price you pay, and I did warn you, remember?”
He unlocked the steering wheel and increased speed, racing the heavy weather that threatened them from the northwest.
At the same time, in London at Curzon Street, Ferguson, still in bed, was being gently shaken into life by Kim. The brigadier groaned and came reluctantly awake. “What is it?”
“Colonel Villiers is here, sir.”
“What, already?” Ferguson groaned again, threw the bedclothes aside and reached for his dressing gown. When he went into the sitting room Villiers was standing at the window. “Really, Tony, this is outside of enough.”
