Hell bay, p.26
Hell Bay, page 26
Had there been two of them out there in the woods all along, or had this been the work of the men or women in the house? Such powerful engines of destruction mankind has made and anyone can pull a trigger or light a fuse with a match. A sword at least required skill in order to survive. It has become too easy to kill these days.
I stepped over the sill and looked down at the debris. The rain receded as I stepped into the house and began to drip and dribble on the marble floor. My arm was throbbing and for the first time I noticed my sleeve was soaked red. It was more than some flesh wound I had sustained. I tried to retrieve my pistol, but it seemed as if it weighed five stone. Switching to my left hand I opened the breech and found the cartridges all spent. My precious bullets I had discharged into the air over Olivia Burrell’s death. Had that really been no more than thirty minutes ago? I carried the pistol with me. Perhaps I could distract the killer with it. I was certain Barker still had plenty of ammunition.
I heard voices from somewhere deep within the house. I could not make out what was being said so close to the gale. I stepped forward and followed the voice, my pistol hanging awkwardly in my right hand. I knew if I survived this ordeal I would start target practice with my left hand at once.
Coming closer, I could hear the voice now, but I didn’t recognize it. A well-educated voice, English. Polite, even.
“Do set your gun gently on the rug, Mr. Barker. We don’t want it to accidentally go off, now do we? If it did, I promise you, this lovely woman’s brains will go all over the room.”
No, no! I thought, willing Barker to read my mind. Don’t put down the gun! You have the only bullets!
“I declare, Mr. Barker, sir, you are even wetter than I, if such a thing is possible,” the man continued. “You shouldn’t gad about in weather like this. You’ll catch your death. Or someone else’s.”
I crept forward. The voices were coming from the library. Raising my pistol, I prepared to spring in with a yell. I’d be shot dead in all probability, but it might give the Guv time to dive for his Colt and avenge my death. Did I really think I was going to marry someone and live happily ever after? Had I not paid attention at all these last five years?
“Mr. Llewelyn! Is that you in the hall? Come in and put down that silly pistol. I watched you empty it not half an hour ago. I took the liberty of borrowing the other one from your luggage. There is no need to lurk in the shadows.”
Crestfallen, I stepped into the room. I couldn’t do anything. I was a liability. Who knows what Barker was thinking when he hired me. I’d been nothing but a misery to him since then. As I stepped forward, my eye swept the room. Lady Celia and Philippa were both being menaced by a man with a pistol. Barker stood in the middle of the room, his arms raised and his hands resting on top of his head. Also in the room were Dr. Anstruther and his daughters, Lady Alicia, Mrs. Fraser, Partridge, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Tregowith. All of them were seated in chairs, even the servants. They must have been ordered to do so.
Cautiously, I looked about for some sign of the ambassador. I expected to see a boot sticking out from behind a chair, or splash of crimson on the wall. Dared I hope he had not proven the newest victim?
I stared hard at the killer, who leaned an elbow impudently against Mrs. Ashleigh’s chair, dangling a pistol in his hand.
“Cesar, no,” I said.
“Sorry, old man,” he said. “Cesar Rojas was just an entry in the door.”
He pointed the pistol at Barker, nearly upside down, as if he were enjoying using it for emphasis.
“Jack Hillary,” Barker supplied. “You were named in the will, which is no doubt false.”
“Not false, precisely. It merely had a sheet or two added, both here and in London. Not that I needed the money. My rubber plantation has done very well. No, I wanted this estate. Mr. Barker, keep your hands away from your pockets! I’m aware of your penchant for sharpened coins.”
Barker raised his hands in the air again. “What do you intend to do with it, once you possess it?” he asked.
“I’ll complete the work I have begun. Burn the buildings, tear them down, return this island to the bare rock it once was.”
“A testament to your vengeance.”
“I prefer to think of it as righteous wrath. It is her fault, you know.”
He indicated Lady Hargrave by pointing my pistol at her, menacing her with it.
“How so?”
“We could have built a life together. This island could been my idyll, but no, she was too weak. She married that monster. Lovely little featherbrained mother who couldn’t possibly make decisions for herself. I’m sure he was very accommodating. ‘Let me take your son off your hands. I’ll educate him, and send him to the finest places!’”
He was so angry, the gun quivered in his hand. I feared he could do anything. He could kill most of us, unless we got to him first.
“Mrs. Tisher’s baby farm,” Barker said, studying him.
“It had a reputation, you know,” Jack replied. “Leave your child there and within a year he or she will be gone. Children get sick. Typhoid. Dysentery, whooping cough, measles. Actually they are all euphemisms for the true culprits: starvation and neglect. Mrs. Tisher spent all the money she brought in on herself and her family. We shivered in the winters without coal or wood and roasted in the summer. I tried to escape several times, but her sons always caught me and brought me back. I’d have been happier as a street urchin, begging or stealing, but no. They feared I might talk to someone about the conditions we were living under.”
“Richard didn’t know!” Lady Hargrave cried.
“Of course he knew! He is meticulous in his research. He wanted to get rid of his wife’s illegitimate child before anyone found out. But I refused to die! I lived on potato peelings and gruel. I endured beatings and humiliation. Someday, I told myself, Mummy would come and rescue me and we would be a family again. I didn’t know until years later that she had a new family to care for. There was no real communication from them from one year to the next.”
He turned, focusing his attention on his mother.
“What is wrong with you, woman?” he screamed at her so that she cowered in her chair. “Have you no heart? Your child was starving, with rickets and scurvy! Did you forget you had a son? Did you think I was safe somewhere with another family? Did you even bother to find out?”
Lady Hargrave collapsed in tears. From the corner of my eye I saw Barker’s arms go down but so did Jack Hillary. He trained the gun on Philippa.
“Stop right there, Mr. Barker. Pray, do not believe that I left Nigel Pelham to do all of the killing. I had the greatest pleasure from wringing Mrs. Tisher’s scrawny neck while she spat out curses in my ear. The sound of the bones breaking in her neck was the most satisfying sound in the world.”
There were gasps from around the room.
“You were there,” I spoke up, trying to buy time. “Every murder. Nearby, I mean. You were serving a drink to Lord Hargrave when he was shot. You caught Percy when the arrow hit him. You were nearby when Olivia was shot. And Paul—”
“Oh, Paul, I killed myself. I brought him some tea and stabbed him through the heart. It was a technique I learned in the jungles of Venezuela. Oh, I wasn’t as successful a killer as Nigel, perhaps, but I’ve had my times.”
“But why kill Algernon Kerry, then? He worked for you.”
“His usefulness was over once we were set up here.”
“You’ve spoken of Mrs. Tisher,” my employer said. “What of the Bromley Boarding School and Mr. Throgmorton?”
“Oh, that? Well, when His Lordship was unsuccessful in starving me to death and I reached the age of twelve, he sent me along to Bromley. Mr. Throgmorton had a reputation for extreme discipline and not asking questions. If Lord Hargrave said I was a nuisance and a rotter, then that was what I must be. He caned me constantly. He tested new devices for punishment on me. He practiced each new caning paddle on my body. When Nigel informed me that the only way to kill him was with a high-powered rifle from a distance, I purchased bullets altered to become expanding ones. The sight of his brains spraying all over the window frame was the sweetest imaginable.”
“What are you going to do?” his mother asked in a low voice.
He gave a wicked smile, and spoke as an adult to a child. “I’m going to kill you, Mother. If you didn’t care the least about me, why should I care about you?”
Barker tried to keep the case on track.
“How came you to leave the Bromley School?”
“I escaped,” he said. “I was fourteen. I’d been freshly assaulted, so his guard was down. I skipped over the roofs and made my way to the coast, stowing away on a vessel. It ended up in—”
“South America!” I interrupted.
“Yes. The vessel went to São Paolo. I lived on the streets. It was actually easier than my time at the baby farm.”
Mrs. Fraser nodded. “I told you he wasn’t Brazilian.”
“Eventually, I heard of a war up north and enlisted. I was eighteen by then. I met two English adventurers down on their luck, Algie and Nigel. The war itself was brutal, and we developed a reputation for being brutal ourselves. At the end of it the war was lost, but we were considered heroes.”
“What happened then?” Philippa asked.
I noticed that Barker, with his hands on his head, had stepped sideways at least a foot. There was a small circular table nearby, containing a box of cigars and a heavy glass ashtray full of cigars. If he could get his foot under it and kick it, we might both be able to jump on him. Of course, I had no idea how much good I would do with one arm. The other was throbbing from the wound and little circulation.
Jack Hillary hadn’t noticed, and continued his story.
“After the war, we headed south. Algernon heard there was money to be made by desperate men in rubber. We made our way to Manaus. In the beginning, we tapped the gum ourselves, but Nigel found a way to exploit the local labor by raiding local tribes. One does what needs most. The venture succeeded beyond our wildest expectation. Bicycle tires. Who knew how profitable they would become? I have become what they call in America a ‘millionaire.’ I could have anything I wanted. Such as revenge on what had been stolen from me.”
He suddenly turned and regarded my employer.
“Tell me, Mr. Barker, what has become of my associate?”
“I shot him,” Barker rumbled. “He fell over the cliff.”
“Poor Nigel,” he said. “He was always good in battle, but not so much in peacetime. I suppose I should thank you. He was going to be a problem. Didn’t expect him to go native on me. ‘Just hide in the woods and shoot at various people now and then,’ I said, but no. He had to be Chief Tecumseh and make spears and arrows. Mad as a March hare. A lunatic and a drug addict; that was what I had to work with.”
“‘A plague upon it when thieves cannot be true to one another,’ as Falstaff said,” I quoted.
“Spare me your university wit, Mr. Llewelyn. While you were at Oxford reading Horace, I was sweating in the Amazon, gutting natives with a machete.”
“What do you intend to do with us, sir?” Barker asked. He had put his arms down again.
“Step away from the table, Mr. Barker. I’m not a child. What do I intend to do? That should be obvious. I cannot have any witnesses alive who have seen me here. I’m supposed to be in Manaus right now. Were I there, I could even produce witnesses. Paid ones, of course. Hands on top of your head, Mr. Barker! I’m not going to warn you a final time.”
“And how do you plan to get off the island?”
“I’ve got some boys waiting for me on the other side of Hell Bay. All I have to do is light a signal fire.”
“Not tonight,” Barker said.
“That’s very clever, Mr. Barker. No, I’ll have to wait for the gale to stop. But by then all of you will be past caring.”
“You horrid man,” Philippa said.
He looked down at her, and put the muzzle of his pistol against her cheek.
“I assure you, madam, I don’t give a damn about your opinion. I’d blow your brains out all over that pretty dress as easily as I’d swat a fly. I’ve never developed a taste for these pale, spotty, anemic English types. To me you’re merely the waste of a bullet.”
Barker suddenly kicked the table at him. Its trajectory had been perfect, and the ashtray holding cigars provided a diversion. All the same, Jack Hillary had ducked both the table and the ashtray and the cigars bounced harmlessly off him.
Jack Hillary lifted an arm and fired. The Guv had indeed lowered his arms in front of his chest, in the act of doing something. Perhaps he was about to draw his pistol from inside his jacket, or a handful of the sharpened coins he kept. The sound of the gun going off was especially loud in the quiet of the library. I heard and even fancied I felt the impact of the bullet.
Philippa screamed. The sounds traveled up and down my spine as if it were a xylophone. I saw blood spatter across his white shirt. Across from me, Lady Alicia burst into hysterics. Her English reserve had finally been shattered.
The Guv teetered for a moment, then fell back full length on the carpet and stopped moving.
“Your Webley draws to the left, old man,” Jack complained.
“Mine doesn’t,” said a voice behind me.
I turned. A man was standing in the doorway, rain and blood dripping off him. There was a gash in his head and his nose was broken. One arm hung unnaturally at his side. His face was covered with scratches and grime. But one doesn’t forget the face of the man who shot at you.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Nigel Pelham stood in the doorway at the entrance to the library, freshly drenched in rain and blood. His head had been gashed open, then coated in sand. He was muddy from the knees down. His knuckles were burst from dragging himself up the side of the cliff in the middle of a rainstorm with an injured shoulder. He held a pistol in his hand.
“Hello, Jack,” he said. “Remember me?”
“Of course I remember you, Nigel,” Jack said, sounding irritated.
“Really?” he asked. “It doesn’t quite look like it. Looks to me as if you were carrying on with your plan without me. Your precious plan. All this would be yours and you would finally get your revenge. As if you were the only bastard that ever lived.”
“Not now, Nigel!”
“I’ve had my fill of this whole bloody mess, Jack. I’ve been living on seagulls and fish. I want a plate of beefsteaks and a pint of porter and a soft chair. I’ve been sitting on rocks for too long.”
Perhaps he expected Jack Hillary to say something, but there was no reply. Nigel Pelham looked about as if realizing for the first time he and his partner were not alone. He grinned. His teeth were bloodied.
“So many pretty ladies. I’m sorry, I must look a sight. I’m Captain Pelham of the Venezuelan army. It’s been some time since I’ve been in such genteel surroundings.”
He looked up and glanced about the room with its cozy chairs and Oriental carpets, its rows and rows of books and its grand fireplace.
“Nice digs,” he said. “It seems a shame to burn it. You do still plan to burn it, don’t you?”
“To the ground,” Hillary said with an edge to his voice.
“Heh, heh,” the man from the woods said. “You never did do things by halves, Jack.”
He was breathing shallowly. I could hear the wheeze in his throat. The man was practically dead. The only thing that was keeping him alive was hate.
“Sit down, Nige, before you fall down.”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
His pistol bucked in his hand. The bullet tore straight through Jack’s vitals. There were no screams now. Everyone was deathly quiet. Jack’s eyes started in his skull. Gut shot. It was the worst way to die. Stomach acid seeps into the wound, which festers quickly. He hunched over, literally holding himself together. He wobbled, then fell to his knees, and finally rolled over to the floor. It was a fatal wound, but not merciful. He would not die soon. And he would be in agony the entire time.
“Lad!” Barker growled. “Get Pelham! He’s going after the ambassador!”
I turned again. Pelham was no longer in the doorway. I saw him climbing the stair, as dangerous as a wounded panther. I took a moment to pick up the loaded Webley and ran after him.
In the hall, rain and wind howled through the obliterated front door. I slipped momentarily, then forced myself to run after the captain. I stopped and fired at him, but my shot went wide. The pistol did pull to the left. Rounding the first floor, I was not more than a dozen feet behind him, but he burst into Gascoigne’s room and locked the door behind him.
“No!” I cried, kicking the door and jiggling the handle frantically. It was a stout door, however, the kind one would expect on a near castle, such as Godolphin House. No amount of kicking would allow me entrance to that chamber. Then I heard it, that terrible pop that said someone’s life had just ended.
Sometimes it seems to me that history should be divided, not into B.C. and A.D. but into before the gun was invented and after. It was the greatest change in history. The sword, the dagger, one has a fighting chance, and skill came into the equation. Now anyone, man, woman, or even child, can walk into a room with a loaded gun, tug on a little twist of metal, and open a giant hole in another human being. Whether it is for good or evil depends on a number of factors, the kind that cause a magistrate to stay up late at night and contemplate. But it is a change, a profound one, and there was no going back. The genie was out of the bottle and heaven help us all.
