Assassins for peace, p.10
Assassins For Peace, page 10
“I didn’t kill him,” Larren said flatly, and suddenly it was important that he convinced her. Not because his own life now hung in the balance, but because he could not bear the loathing accusation in her eyes. He went on desperately, “It’s true that I was following him. I was sent out from London to find him. But I had no idea of who you were when I spoke to you at Madrid. I didn’t use you — and I didn’t kill him.” He saw that at least she was listening, but her expression told him that mere denials were not enough and that he had to make some attempt to explain his own presence here.
He continued bluntly: “Your father was a member of an extremist organisation that calls itself the A.F.P. It was that organisation that planned the assassination of Sir Howard Davies, and your father had some small part in the P.M.’s death. That was why he had to leave England, and that was why I was sent after him. But his own people got to him first. They killed him.”
“I don’t believe you.” Her voice was harsh, almost a sob. “I know he was running away from something, and I know that he was afraid for his life. That’s why he made me have this gun, because when I came here he was afraid for me too. But it’s a foul lie to say he had anything to do with the death of the Prime Minister. Whatever he did, it couldn’t have been as bad as that — it couldn’t possibly have been.”
“But it was.” Larren was beginning to sweat. “Perhaps he didn’t realise what they intended to do, but it was your father who notified them that Sir Howard was almost certain to be at the Tempest Club that night.” He knew better than to believe the implication that Mallory might have been innocent, but this was no time for pure truth and blatantly he told another lie. “When he realised the truth he must have turned against them. That was why he was running. That was why he was killed.”
For a moment it looked as though she might be wavering, and Larren tried a fresh track. He said slowly, “Don’t be afraid now. I’m going to reach for my gun and push it across the floor towards you. If you pick it up and smell the barrel you’ll find that it hasn’t been fired.”
“No!”
Her arm thrust forward as she uttered the cry, and Larren froze again as he looked into the death’s eye of her automatic. She said hysterically, “If you reach for that gun you’ll try and shoot me. You’re nothing but a filthy murderer, and you’re not fit to live. You’ve just killed the most wonderful man in the world, and now I’m going to kill you.”
In another moment she would have pulled the trigger, and Larren honestly thought that he saw the shadow of death by her shoulder. But the shadow moved, and it was not the gleaming scythe of the grim reaper that cut through the air, but the sharp swish of a slender cane. The automatic was struck smartly from Barbara Mallory’s hand, and as it spun to the floor a stronger hand cut off her yelp of pain and she was seized from behind.
Chevalier held her firmly and remarked, “It is fortunate that I hurried back as I promised. It does not seem that you can manage without me.”
Larren exhaled slowly, and was ashamed of the weakness in his knees as he straightened up from his cramped crouching position. “Thanks, Jacques,” he said warmly. “Remind me to buy you a drink if we ever get the time.”
“It will be a large cognac,” Chevalier warned him. Barbara struggled in his arms, and he tightened his grip as he added, “But Mademoiselle Mallory is a complication. What shall we do with her?”
Larren hesitated. “We’ve lost enough time, perhaps too much. We’ll have to take her with us.”
Chevalier frowned. “It would be better to knock her on the head.”
Larren faltered again, then snapped, “No. She’ll only have the police baying on our heels the moment she wakes up, and that will be an even bigger complication. Besides —” he felt that his decision needed still more justification — “she might be able to help us. We can talk to her in the car.”
Chevalier regarded him dubiously, and Larren suddenly wondered whether he would have been more agreeable to rougher tactics if Barbara Mallory had not reminded him so strongly of Andrea. Then the Frenchman nodded.
“All right, you take her. I’ll tell Yacoub that Monsieur Mallory is feeling ill and is not to be disturbed until we return. With luck that will keep him away from this room for a few hours.”
Larren felt a sense of relief and smiled his approval, then he quickly collected up the two fallen guns and relieved Chevalier of the now badly frightened woman. She winced as he gripped her arm, but she made no attempt to cry out as the Frenchman tentatively removed his hand from her mouth.
Larren said firmly, “You’re not going to be hurt, but you can help us catch the men who killed your father. Please try and believe that.”
She said nothing, but the resistance had drained out of her and she allowed him to propel her out of the room.
Chevalier locked the door behind them and pocketed the key, then all three hurried down the stairs. Larren quickly hustled the woman across the bar and out into the street, giving her no chance to recover from her present state of mental confusion. Chevalier hung back and talked earnestly with the old man who had looked up from pottering behind his bar.
A few moments later Chevalier caught up with them as Larren steered the woman at a fast pace through the baffling maze of streets. The Frenchman immediately took the lead and followed the most direct route out of the medina. They reached the busy area around the Grand Socco, and practically ran into the square itself. The blue-grey Citroen was still waiting where they had left it, and Chevalier slid swiftly behind the wheel while Larren bundled the woman into the back.
Barbara pulled away from Larren the moment that he released her arm, flinching away into the far corner of the car. But she did not attempt to escape through the far door and simply stared with grief-dulled eyes as he pulled the homing receiver from his pocket. He switched it on and smiled as the bleeping signal sounded steadily and clearly. He waited for the dial pointer to settle in one direction and then said, “Approximately south-east, Jacques. They must be heading out of Tangier on the Rue de Fez.”
Chevalier started the engine and the Citroen pulled smoothly forward. He put his foot down and asked, “How long a start have they got?”
“No more than five minutes. I would have been right behind them if Miss Mallory had not interrupted me.”
Chevalier drove fast, handling the big Citroen with a skill born of long experience in the town he knew so well. He took advantage of every gap in the traffic stream, and narrowly avoided a head-on crash with a donkey cart that ambled unexpectedly from a side street. Then they were roaring down the wide, practically straight Rue de Fez.
“What bearing now?” he queried, carelessly throwing a scare into a wobbling cyclist balancing a block of ice upon his handlebars. “Is it south, or still moving south-east?”
Larren said quietly, “Still south-east.”
“Then it is not Rabat,” Chevalier observed. “They must be making for Tetouan. I had the feeling that our killers would come from outside Tangier. If it had not been so they would have found him much sooner.”
Larren remained silent, making no comment to distract Chevalier from his handling of the car. They turned left on to the Boulevard Moulay Youssef, then swung right again as they entered the wide Place d’Europe. Then they were leaving the town behind them and heading for open country on the main road to Tetouan. The homer signal was bleeping strongly, and the direction pointer was reading directly ahead.
Larren relaxed now that they were on the open road, and glanced briefly at the woman. She had recovered some of her composure, and although her feelings were still stunned by shock she was losing a little of her fear. He saw that within a few moments she would be asking questions, and forestalled them by speaking first.
“Did your father ever tell you anything about the men who were hunting for him?” he asked her quietly.
She looked at him, and for a moment he thought that she would turn away and refuse to answer, but then she breathed deeply and said, “He wouldn’t tell me very much. I tried to help him but he didn’t want me to know. He just said that he was in some kind of trouble in England, but I knew that because we had some detectives come to the house looking for him. His picture was in the papers too, but they just said that the police wanted to find him because he had gone missing.” She swallowed hard and then finished, “If — if it was something to do with the Prime Minister being killed, then — then it was all a mistake. Someone must have tricked him into helping them.”
Larren did not respond to that, for there was nothing to be gained in destroying the last of the dead man’s image. Instead he posed another question: “Did he tell you how he managed to get out of England and make his way here to Tangier?”
She nodded. “He said that some friends helped him to get across the Channel in a small boat. They gave him another passport in a different name, and after that he took a plane from Paris. But when he arrived in Tangier he felt that he couldn’t even trust his friends any more. He was frightened, so instead of going to the hotel address they had given him he found that dirty little room in the medina. He was hiding there. He didn’t know what to do next.”
She turned her face away suddenly, and although she was silent Larren knew that there were fresh tears staining her cheeks. He was stirred by compassion, and with it there was even a grain of pity for the trapped and desperate fugitive that had been her father. Henry Mallory’s web had been of his own making, but it had left him friendless and ensnared him cruelly.
Larren gave her time to recover herself, then asked, “How did you know where to find him?”
“He sent us a letter.” The answer came slowly but without hesitation. “Not directly of course, because he was afraid that it might have been intercepted by the police. He sent it to my cousin, and she passed it on to me. He only wanted to tell us that he was all right, and that we were not to worry about him. He didn’t say where he was, but the letter had a Moroccan stamp and a Tangier postmark, so it didn’t take much working out.”
“And the cousin who received the letter was the real Jenny Norwood,” Larren presumed. “And so you borrowed her passport and came to find your father.”
She nodded. “It wasn’t very hard. A few years back he made a short tour of Gibraltar with some other M.P.s, and afterwards he took a couple of days’ holiday and made a quick visit to Tangier. He found Yacoub’s bar then, when he got lost in the medina, and I’ve heard him mention it. I guessed that if he was afraid to use a hotel then he’d make for the only place he knew, and so I asked one of the guides in the Grand Socco to take me there.”
Larren glimpsed something of her inner courage and felt a new respect for the woman beside him. “What did you hope to do?”
“To help him somehow. I don’t know how. When I found that he was afraid of someone coming after him here I thought that he should move. I went to the railway station this morning to find out what times the trains left for Rabat and Casablanca. It wasn’t a final answer, but it seemed a start. I thought he might loosen up and explain more if we could get to somewhere where he would feel safe.”
She became silent again, and Larren felt that he had worried her with enough questions. He left her to grieve, and then Chevalier spoke abruptly from the driving seat. “There is a car ahead. I think this is it.”
Larren stared over the Frenchman’s shoulder at a wide, American convertible stirring up the dust ahead of them. It was still a long way in front, but he could make out the outlines of two passengers and a driver. He checked the homing signal and realised that the bleeping was now at full strength. He turned it down and said, “That’s the one all right.”
Chevalier nodded, and slowed the Citroen to stay well behind. Larren continued to watch over his shoulder, but became suddenly conscious of the fact that Barbara Mallory was staring at the receiver in his hand. “What is that thing?” she demanded. “How is it following those men in front?”
“It’s called a homer,” Larren explained. “It’s picking up a signal from a miniature transmitter that we concealed in a gold cigarette lighter. They helped themselves to the lighter after they’d killed your father and searched his body.”
Her eyes moved to Chevalier. “Then he was the man who left that cigarette lighter in the bar last night. It was left there deliberately.”
Larren saw the horror dawning in her eyes, but by then it was too late to rectify the blunder he had made. He cursed himself inwardly and was incapable of saying anything.
“You didn’t just find my father; you’ve been watching him.” Her voice shuddered and almost broke. “You’ve been watching him and waiting for this to happen. You even planted that homer thing on him so you could follow his killers. You wanted him to be killed. You could have stopped it, but you just stood by and let it happen.” She screamed suddenly, “Oh, God, you’re not even human!”
Larren struck her, hating himself for it, but knowing that within another moment she would have been hysterical. Her cheek flushed bright scarlet under the stinging blow and she fell back against the car’s upholstery. Her eyes still stared through the rush of tears, and he knew that only lies would control her.
“We didn’t want him killed,” he said fiercely, hating himself again for his own deceit. “We simply wanted to watch him and follow him when he went out. We thought he would lead us to his friends, but we didn’t expect them to kill him. It was just chance that they took over the transmitter we planted.”
She said nothing, but continued to stare at him. He wanted to turn away, anything but face her, but that would have been fatal and he held her gaze. Then slowly the panic faded from her petrified eyes, and he knew that she believed him. It made her calmer, but it also filled his own stomach with a wave of self-revulsion.
Then Chevalier said sharply, “The car is stopping. They are turning off the road.”
Larren turned his attention to the road ahead and saw that the open-topped convertible was indeed slowing and turning to the left. There was no track or road, and the big car bumped and rocked as it rolled over open country. It climbed the slope of a hill, balanced for a moment on the skyline, and then dipped out of sight.
Chevalier had automatically slowed the Citroen, and he continued to approach the spot where the other car had left the road at a slow crawl. He stopped where the indentations of the first car’s tyres cut deeply into the grass verge, then switched off the engine.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that we had better leave the car here until we find out what is happening. We will make ourselves too obvious if we drive straight over that rise in pursuit.”
Larren nodded, and together they got out of the car. He quietly warned Barbara to stay where she was as Chevalier came round the nose of the Citroen to join him, then they followed the tyre tracks across the rough ground. Chevalier had pocketed the keys so that Barbara could not drive off without them, and as there was nowhere for her to run to, Larren was confident that she would wait in the back seat.
It was now almost noon, and the blazing sun made them both sweat as they toiled up the slope. They went more warily as they neared the top, and finally wormed the last few yards on their stomachs. They lay side by side as they peered over the hill, and Larren felt a spasm of futile anger as he stared down the far side.
The terrain below them sloped down into a great natural bowl, and at the bottom of the bowl stood the American convertible. But, what was worse, beside it stood a smart four-seater aeroplane. The sun glinted on the sharp lines of the red-and-white-painted fuselage, and made brilliant mirrors of the pure white wings. She was one of the Piper range of light aircraft, and although Larren could not be positive he would have said a Piper Cherokee.
Four men stood between the car and the plane, holding a hurried conversation. One was obviously the pilot and the other three were the men from the convertible. It was obvious that the plane would at any moment whisk the two killers out of reach, while the car driver would run his vehicle back to Tangier, and Larren cursed savagely.
Chevalier glanced at him, then said softly, “All is not yet lost, my friend. I know of another plane within half an hour of here that might be available. If we move fast it is just possible that we can get in the air before they get out of signal range.”
Larren stared at him. “Do you mean that?”
“But of course. There is a young Englishman who owns an old Fairchild Argus. He makes his living flying pleasure flights over the bay. We have an understanding, and he has helped me before. Usually the Argus is kept fuelled, and if he is not flying then I am certain that for me he will oblige.”
Larren hesitated, and Chevalier continued: “It is your choice. We can charge down there in the Citroen and try to stop them, but we should probably fail. And in any case, what we really want is to track them back to their base. On the other hand, we do risk losing them altogether if they get beyond the range of our receiver before we ourselves can get airborne. It is a gamble.”
The alternatives flickered through Larren’s mind. It was unlikely that they could stop the Cherokee from taking off before they reached it, and although they probably would be able to grab the car driver who would be left behind, he doubted whether that individual would be of any help. Almost certainly the car driver had only been hired for the one job. He made his decision and wriggled backwards down the slope.
“Let’s gamble,” he said. “And I hope your friend doesn’t let us down.”
“My friends never let me down,” Chevalier retorted almost indignantly.
They retreated from the hilltop and raced swiftly back to the waiting Citroen.
CHAPTER 12: DESERT FLIGHT
