Rum Affair (20 page)

The Land Rover. And Kenneth.

There was time to see as much before the lighthouse revolved, and we were plunged into darkness again, except for the little, lit city below.

Then, with a silence and suddenness quite terrible, every other light we could see went instantly out, and the darkness was utter.

In the sodden, alien wilderness, the shouts of alarm and enquiry reached us quite distinctly from below. We waited, breathing lightly, trying to smell from which side the danger might come. Then Johnson spoke abruptly into my ear.

“Wait ten minutes, as near as you can judge, and then set off for Kenneth. I don’t think anyone is likely to be watching us, but Hennessy and I will go off now in the opposite direction, and that should draw them away . . . Have you the nerve to get to that Land Rover alone?”

I answered, trying to sound bravely uncertain. All I asked in the world was a chance to get to that Land Rover alone.

I felt Johnson rise; then Hennessy got to his feet with a grunt. He pulled his parka hood over his bandages, patted me briefly on one shoulder, and blended with Johnson into the dark.

It was hard to believe that, after all his arduous journey, both Johnson and Hennessy were content to forego a meeting with Kenneth. It struck me that one or the other was far less interested in Kenneth Holmes than in the tumult now going on at the base. And that, distrusting each other as they did, neither man would move without the other.

It suited me. Nothing could have suited me better. There was nothing now but this dark, rain-filled hillside between me and Kenneth. And this was what I had come a long, painful way to achieve.

The rain had stopped.

On the steep road where the Land Rover was parked, it was dark and quiet under the overhanging hill, which masked even the revolving blaze of the lighthouse. Below, where the road joined the other paths to the base and the pier it was dark, but by no means as quiet. Men’s voices, shouting, came clearly up from the waterfront, and the flash of numerous torches, borne at a run. As I watched, the disturbance swung away from me, and uphill. Up at the base, a big battery lamp suddenly switched on, then another.

But I was no longer looking or listening, for I had reached the Land Rover’s nose.

If anyone had seen me approach, there was no sign within. The windscreen stared back at me emptily, and when, stepping lightly, I moved round behind, there was no sound or movement from the dark interior which the half-unrolled canvas concealed.

There was no point in whispering names, or in thinking of personal safety now. I was committed. Placing my hands where, on shooting weekends, I had been taught, I pulled myself inside the hood and up to one of the two lining benches. I arrived there, and Kenneth’s voice, low and hoarse and quite unmistakable, said: “Valentina?” And Kenneth’s arms, like a bear’s in some huge, unyielding topcoat, closed hard around me. And we kissed.

It was the same. I don’t know why, but there has never been anyone like him. I said, when I could pull my mouth away: “You made me come a long way to find you.”

His lips in my hair, he didn’t want to speak. At length he said, in the same low voice: “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have come.”

“You need someone,” I said. He was shivering. “You forget, Kenneth. Almost nothing can hurt me. I’m armour plate all the way through. You shouldn’t have left me, in Rose Street, that night . . .”

His breathing quickened. As I spoke his hands tightened and my own pulses were a good deal less than stagnant: the kiss went on and on. To break it would be agony, but it had to be done. Now, of all times, I had to be clear-sighted. So I raised my two hands and said: “Kenneth!”

He did not obey me at once, and I said sharply: “Not now! Not now. The whole camp is awake.”

He drew a long breath, in the dark. “I know,” he said. “They’re probably looking for me. I’m under suspicion.”

It was no news. Why else was he stuck here? And Gold-tooth had been quite confident. Chigwell was a Government agent, he had said. And Dr Holmes had blown up the
Lysander.
Just like that I wasn’t taking the easy way. I said quietly: “Under suspicion of what? Causing the
Lysander
explosion?”

He was grateful, clearly, not to have to tell me himself. Even so, there was a pause before he said: “Yes. And not without cause. I probably did.”

This time I sat back, and no doubt my voice was impatient. “My dear Kenneth, you are neither an idiot nor a traitor. Also, you were in Rose Street, Edinburgh, so far as I know, when the damned boat set off on her trials. Do you want me to testify for you? I could swear to the messages you sent me. And other people apart from your friend Chigwell must have known you were there.”

“Of course they do.” Now
he
was impatient. “But I couldn’t jeopardise your good name like that. In any case, that wasn’t the point. The way it was worked, I could have been in a Gemini rocket and still set the thing off.” He stopped and said, in an irritable double take: “Was that damned fool Chigwell still there when you came? I’m sorry, darling. He swore blind he’d pack and get out.”

I said nothing. I was swallowing down my relief. Kenneth hadn’t killed Chigwell. I knew it now, for an absolute fact. I knew my Kenneth Holmes to the bone. He was the most transparently honest man I have ever encountered. He said now, spurred by my silence: “Don’t worry. Harry Chigwell won’t talk. He’s discretion itself.”

“He certainly is,” I said. “He’s dead.”

There was a silence. Then: “Oh, my God,” said Kenneth. “Tell me.” And I did. Or as much as I told Johnson, anyway. There was no word, for instance, of diamond bracelets buying off anyone. I had no desire to go into the matter of diamond bracelets, or indeed of Duke Buzzy. Instead I said: “Who
was
Chigwell?”

He didn’t even hear me at first: he was too shocked, and too busy exclaiming over my unorthodox behaviour with a corpse. Then it dawned on him that my conduct was not quite so irrational when one considered that he, Kenneth, was the number one suspect. “I didn’t kill him,” he said then, blankly. I tried again. “Who
was
he, Kenneth?”

It didn’t help. Chigwell had been nothing, it appeared, but an old school friend he had run into the previous year, who had offered the use of his flat should Kenneth ever require it. If Gold-tooth was right and Chigwell was a Government agent, then Kenneth clearly was ignorant of it. I said: “And why then did you leave?”

He didn’t want to answer that. After a moment he said: “Because of you, Tina. There were microphones in the flat. I found one under the table, and broke it. Someone was watching us: would have followed us, too. They wanted to hear what we said when we met. I thought I’d deprive them of that pleasure.”

“That sounds grim,” I said. I could hear my heart thudding. “But why, Kenneth? Blackmail? Or what? Why should anyone want to do that?”

“That,” said Kenneth heavily, “brings me back to the
Lysander.
The bloody sub. Tina.”

“Well?” I said. Sometimes he was so slow, one wanted to scream. But you forget that, most times, when you were with him. The wind, revived, sighed round the struts of the van and the canvas creaked and vibrated. The voices of men shouting could still be heard now and then, but comfortably in the distance. There was an immense sense of isolation, of space. Almost I had become reconciled to the darkness, to not being able to see more than the broad planes of his face. Kenneth’s hands over mine were warm and heavily-jointed, an artisan’s hands. The hands of a scientific engineer of superior calibre.

He said: “I didn’t want you to know this; but your name and mine are already linked over
Lysander.
The defence people are curious. And that’s why I didn’t want you to come.”

“You didn’t want me to come, and yet you told me where to find you?” I said and he must have heard the smile in my voice. But I wouldn’t let him kiss me again, not just then. “Tell me,” I said in my turn.

And that was how I heard from Kenneth that he and I between us had caused the destruction and worse than destruction on board the submarine
Lysander.

It was simple enough. It concerned a new form of explosive, allied to a small electronic device sensitive to control by single or multiple sounds. He had been tinkering with it in the States, when we had been so much together, and I had given him one of my albums of records –
Tina Rossi Sings,
it was called. Original stuff.

So, purely as an experiment and as an indication of his state at the time, Kenneth had keyed the bomb to a phrase sung by my voice.

It was an experiment he had never concluded; and since he left Nevada the prototype and its plans and formulae had been left in a safe vault, inviolate. He would not say to me then, even there on South Rona, what form the device took, or even describe its outward appearance. But the device which exploded the
Lysander
was an exact copy of that very prototype. By some freak, parts of the bomb casing had been found. It was tiny, said Kenneth. Small enough to plant in a pocket, but powerful enough to wreck the immediate area where it exploded; and maybe even to sink the sub. if it hit the right place. That was all. Except that the bomb that killed three men on the
Lysander
had been set in the same way as his –
for my voice.

I said nothing. After a moment, Kenneth went on. “It was pretty clever, you see. They had the same album of songs in the submarine mess . . . everyone has it, I suppose. When the sub. was in harbour they all used the record player in the shore mess. It was only when they were submerged, on long trials, that the one in the mess was turned on, and when it reached that one note in your voice, it triggered the bomb. You must admit,” he added with an effort at lightness, “being a fan of Valentina Rossi’s has its drawbacks.”

I wished he would keep to the point. I said: “So you’re under suspicion. Why? Do they think you copied the plans? Or showed them to someone in Nevada?”

“They’ve not so far been very explicit,” said Kenneth. “But they’re asking a lot of interesting questions. Such as who had access to the lab, besides me.”

“I did,” I said. “If you mean the lab in Nevada. And who else?”

“No one,” said Kenneth, quite baldly.

There was a long silence. Then I said: “If you are accusing me of stealing and selling your secrets, I can only deny it. I have no defence and no proof. Except that I’m here.”

“I’m not accusing you, my darling,” said Kenneth. “I’m not. I’m not.” His arms, flung round me, suddenly tightened. His cheek, pressed against mine, was suddenly damp. “I haven’t even told them you were there. How could I, and keep your good name? It’s just that they may find out anyway, if they trace the letters . . .”

“What letters?” This was what he had been longing to tell me, while the bloody rulebook told him he shouldn’t. “And
of course
you should have told them I had a key to that laboratory. Do you think I’d let you take all the blame?” I stopped. “No wonder your boys are bugging your dates. What letters? Let’s have it all.”

That was simple, too. He was being blackmailed: had been ever since his return from Nevada. Over his meetings in Nevada with me.

I heard that one out in silence, and the two dried-up steaks and the bottle of champagne in that damnable flat seemed a brave thing, when you knew. Someone had been bleeding him dry; someone with microfilm evidence of letters and notes I had written him, and of his letters back.

And to obtain that microfilm evidence, the blackmailer must have had access to that laboratory.

For that was where Kenneth kept my letters to him.

Kenneth had had no reason to think that anything else in his lab had been tampered with. His precious device hadn’t vanished, and the plans were intact. If he had not had my reputation to protect he would have reported the illegal entry, and asked the police to trace the blackmailer for him. It was not until the discoveries on
Lysander
that he realised that the blackmailer was probably also a spy. And then he had been torn two ways.

He could keep me away from it, so that I should never know I was involved. Or he could meet me somewhere, somehow, and ask me who else during that long, hot idyll in Nevada could have had the use of my key. For the lab he was lent in Nevada had a special lock. No one could have picked it. No one had forced their way in otherwise. And there were only two keys.

He was, I think, right to take the second course. However silent he kept, those blackmail letters would have brought me into the story eventually. I had come to him there on South Rona at some cost and I was glad . . . A man of Victorian principles. It was part of his fascination for me.

But there was no future for either of us unless I cut through this tangle. There were two keys to the laboratory where Kenneth’s papers and his sonic device were in storage. Two keys, he had said. His . . . and mine.

And I knew who could have had mine.

The shouting had stopped. Outside the Land Rover the rain had begun again, drumming on the canvas roof and reflecting, in half-tones and tones of differing texture, its descent on road, on grass, rock and bog. Dimly, through the van’s windows, the hills appeared, remained and disappeared to the turn of the lighthouse, like a badly-wired shop sign, telling me nothing. I said: “I know who could have taken my key – and who had access to my letter from you. I know who must have been blackmailing you. No wonder he didn’t want me to meet you . . . It’s Michael, of course. Michael Twiss.”

“I wondered,” was all Kenneth said. And then, in the same careful voice: “But it doesn’t help, does it? We can’t have him talk. And it only fouls up your relationship with him. I know what he does for your work.”

“We’ve parted already,” I said. I felt suddenly vicious. “Michael Twiss and I. Do you think I care? Or would you rather be shot as a spy than have it known that I was your mistress?”

“Yes,” he said with perfect simplicity. And I couldn’t shake him from that. So at length I said the only possible thing. “Then I’ll tell the police about Michael myself.”