A Rough Shoot (14 page)

Lex had done very well. He had a fine Central European obstinacy. The butler tried to put him off. He kept on ringing, and attracted the private secretary. At last he got on to the great leader himself. Heyne-Hassingham had been very cagey and incredulous, but Lex started to give him the exact details of when he had been sent and by whom. Then Heyne-Hassingham exploded:

“Good God, Riemann!”

Roland looked at us for an explanation, but both Sandorski and I were blank–I fear, suspiciously blank. Of course Heyne-Hassingham had believed the corpse in the car to be Lex, and he now saw that it must be the vanished Riemann.

After that he wanted Lex to come down to his house in Dorset, but Lex wasn’t having any. He thought London-was much safer–and I’m not surprised. So, on second thoughts, did Heyne-Hassingham. He had promised to drive up to town immediately.

Roland packed us into the back of his car, with a very formidable character sitting between us. A former commando sergeant-major, I should think. He looked too lawless for any policeman. It was clear that we were by no means trusted yet.

“Does Heyne-Hassingham know whose body that was in the car?” asked Roland, as soon as he had cleared Trafalgar Square and was driving evenly westwards along the Mall.

“He does,” the general answered. “What was the name he exclaimed when Lex called him up? Something like Riemann, wasn’t it?”

“He knows who killed him, too?”

“No. Thinks I did. He’ll tell you so.”

“How good is your alibi really?” Roland asked, staring straight ahead of him into the traffic.

“Perfect. I was in Vienna up to last week.”

“Day and night, Peter?”

“Nearly. I’d have needed a damn fast plane if I did it– and you ought to know my funds don’t run to that.”

Before we turned into Fulham Park Avenue we were stopped by one of Haldon’s men, who told us that half an hour after the conversation between Lex and Heyne-Hassingham two chaps had turned up in the street and were hanging about; one of them was known to be the Fulham secretary of the People’s Union. It was a sure bet that they were going to report to the revered leader, when his car stopped at the corner, whether anyone suspicious had gone into No. 26.

That didn’t bother Roland. I gathered that the Metropolitan Police by no means always used the front door of a house that interested them. At No. 38 there was a friendly porter, bursting with importance and carefully looking the other way when we passed him. From a skylight in his building we gained access to the roofs of the long, narrow block, and walked along the leads, between the sloping slates and the parapet, to No. 26. We had to climb the party walls, with their projecting chimney stacks, but were hidden from Fulham Park Avenue itself by the gables. We were, of course, in full view of windows of the opposite block, beyond the yards and gardens. Londoners, however, have a remarkable lack of curiosity.

Haldon and a police stenographer were squatting in the shelter of a water tank. We waited with them for some ninety minutes of cold politeness. Then the front-door bell of Flat 9 spat a startling ring at us from the receiver, and we settled down to listen.

The door opened and shut. Lex took control of the interview from the start, for he insisted solidly upon Heyne-Hassingham proving his identity. When his legal mind was satisfied, and Heyne-Hassingham–to judge by his voice-dancing with impatience, Lex said:

“Here is vot I bring for you! I push–so!–and we may open. If I not push, all burn!”

“Very ingenious,” agreed Heyne-Hassingham coldly and hurriedly.

He was a frightened man. His hoarse tone was enough for Haldon to give me a confident wink. It was the first friendly gesture that the inspector had permitted himself.

They must have been very close to the microphone, for we actually heard the key turn in the lock of the briefcase, and then a rustle of papers, overwhelmingly loud, as Heyne-Hassingham withdrew the roll of documents and glanced at the contents.

He pulled himself together and thanked Lex for his devoted services in words that would better have fitted the Archbishop of Canterbury than a damned idealistic crook of a politician.

“I did little,” Lex answered. “But soch gallantry, soch bravery I have seen! I vant you now to hear–”

“I will, my dear chap, I will indeed,” Heyne-Hassingham interrupted. “But later, if you don’t mind. I must get you out of England at once. You’ll have your orders in an hour or two. Understood?”

Haldon jumped for the skylight of No. 26, intending to pick up Heyne-Hassingham outside the door of the flat before he could get rid of his papers.

“Don’t touch Lex!” Sandorski shouted. “And don’t take Heyne-Hassingham past the windows. It’s a gift!”

Roland saw what he meant at once. If Lex stayed in the flat and knew nothing of Heyne-Hassingham’s arrest, and if Sandorski then smuggled him abroad, it would be proved up to the hilt that the general was indeed Heyne-Hassingham’s trusted agent, and, for a few days at any rate, all Lex’s contacts would be wide-open to inspection.

Heyne-Hassingham’s head and shoulders appeared at the skylight, with Haldon a close two rungs of the ladder below him. For a moment the great leader looked his part. Worry and terror and self-control had given him the ascetic face of a saint.

He took two fairly confident steps towards the water tank. Then he saw me, knew that he was trapped, and had, I suppose, no thought but how to get rid of his papers. He lost his nerve, jumped the low party wall onto the leads of the next house and bolted. It wasn’t as crazy an act as it seemed. If he could get a lead of a few seconds and drop that roll of documents down a smoking chimney pot, he could afford to stand on his dignity afterwards.

Sandorski went away after him well ahead of the rest of us. His featherweight build was just right for this gymnasium stuff; he could hop over the slates like a London sparrow. Heyne-Hassingham managed to keep away from him for the length of half a dozen houses, and then, when the general was nearly on him, jumped onto the parapet overlooking Fulham Park Avenue. I don’t know what he meant to do. His position was by no means desperate enough for suicide. But he was unbalanced in more senses than one, and it was Sandorski’s grab for him that was decisive. I was the only person who saw what happened. Sandorski was, perhaps, a little clumsy. It was as well, for I doubt if Haldon could ever have got a conviction for high treason against a competent defense.

The punishment, however, was correct. Heyne-Hassingham fell on the area railings beneath, and a spike took him under the chin. When we got down to the street, we couldn’t see much of his sprawling body, but his head looked at us as if from the top of Temple Bar. A mean and surburban Temple Bar–that was about what Heyne-Hassingham was worth.

At Scotland Yard Haldon took me first, and alone. I didn’t have any difficulty. I told the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but I started it with the appearance of Sandorski on my shoot. I had merely to appear a bit of a romantic fool, showing myself far too easily convinced by Sandorski’s story.

“Somewhat irresponsible for a married man with children, isn’t it?” asked Haldon.

“Oh, well,” I replied weakly, “one wants to escape from time to time, you know.”

“You’d better tell that to Mrs. Taine,” he said, with a dryness that suggested he wasn’t wholly satisfied.

He pressed a bell on his desk. There was a moment of awkward silence. Then the door opened, and in came Cecily.

Damn Haldon! I couldn’t help it. I seemed to have been away from her for a year.

“Who’s looking after the children?” I asked.

“I told the police they had to come with me,” she said “There’s a sergeant out there, playing with them. They wanted to see how handcuffs worked.”

She stifled a sob and looked at us both, very still but not white. She forced herself to appear natural and proud. I don’t know how she did it.

“Mrs. Taine,” said Haldon. “There is just one point I want cleared up. You stated to the Dorset police that you were absolutely certain that no one had ever hidden in your house. Would you care to amend that?”

“No,” she answered. “No one was ever hidden in my house.”

I could have believed her myself. I said:

“It’s all right, darling. Tell him the truth.”

“That’s very wrong of you, Inspector,” she complained hotly. “How was I to know? Of course there were two of them in the roof, General Sandorski and a man they called Lex.”

“I see,” he answered with a heavy neutrality. “Mrs. Taine, when did you first know that your husband was engaged in these activities?”

That was a vilely clever question. I stayed frozen, for Haldon was watching both our faces. If she answered that she had known for three weeks, I was done.

“What activities?” she asked.

“Assisting the police.”

“Oh, when he brought General Sandorski home the first time,” she replied, straight off the bat.

“Thank you, Mrs. Taine. I should say perhaps that my report from the Dorset police”–was there a shade of irony in his voice?–”states that you gave an impression of absolute honesty and innocence.”

“Didn’t I?” I asked.

“You were rather too pleased with your acting, Mr. Taine,” he replied, and added mysteriously: “It’s a fault that Mr. Roland will doubtless take in hand. We don’t want to lose people like you, you know.”

He let Cecily go, telling her that he would only detain me another minute. Then he joined me on the public side of his desk, and produced a decanter of whisky.

“We’re allowed a good deal of liberty at the Special Branch,” he said.

I answered that I had noticed it. He had tidied up Fulham Park Avenue with remarkable speed.

“Heyne-Hassingham was a prominent man,” he went on, “and I think I shall be permitted to make the inquest as uncomplicated as possible. No Lex. No Sandorski. Just a combination of a routine police inquiry and overwork. That will give us time to throw the net a little wider. But there is just one thing bothering me, and I daren’t leave it hanging about unsolved in the background. That corpse in the car. If you can, let me have a statement for the files– completely off the record, as a little bit of fiction, perhaps-just so that I know what happened.”