Rum Affair (27 page)

“About that fo’c’sle,” Johnson said, undisturbed. “You were claiming a moment ago to be among the great underprivileged. We had a good look at
Seawolf,
and
Binkie
too, when you were all on shore at Barra. You’d need more than a few tins of Navy Brasso to pay for a shortwave transmission set like the one you’ve got concealed in the fo’c’sle, Ogden . . .”

Nancy Buchanan said slowly: “You were on
Binkie?
Then you saw . . .”

“The banner? Yes, of course; we knew all about it. I’m sorry, Nancy.” There was a thread of regret, ludicrously, in Johnson’s voice. “But lives were at stake. We had to find out where you and Bob fitted in. Then it was quite plain. On South Rona, you harmed no one and you made no move out of character. You even helped us, unwittingly, to explain the general alert and the multiplicity of security men, so that the real culprit didn’t take fright and run. The choice at that time,” said Johnson placidly, “lay between you and Hennessy, with the odds largely on you. There were various risks. One was that Michael Twiss, or even Dr Holmes himself, should have an accident or appear to commit suicide. Or even that Holmes and Tina should die, killed by Twiss. We took what precautions we could, but Hennessy didn’t help by knocking out Tom McIver after we had planned that he should take Tina safely across to South Rona and protect her until she and Holmes met.

“We had planned,” said Johnson, glancing at me, “for McIver to take you to the lighthouse harbour, where we would have arranged for you to meet Kenneth under safe supervision, so to speak. Instead, Hennessy took you to the far end, which meant a long and dangerous walk, and then insisted on coming with you. We had already sent Dr Holmes – sorry, Kenneth – a fake message from Tom McIver, altering the rendezvous to the Land Rover. We didn’t want him roving all over South Rona in the dark – it was like King’s Cross Station as it was. In fact, we had to take so many damned precautions that we almost inhibited anything from happening. Only Twiss, kindly transported by Ogden, took a pot shot at Tina and hit Hennessy – it was a difficult shot in the dark and he was basically a coward.

“He didn’t know that, far from being suspicious, Ogden back at the lighthouse was giving him all the rope he needed to hang himself. He didn’t know that Ogden left the lighthouse almost immediately after he did, but neither of them went back to
Seawolf.
Twiss took his little Spanish .45 automatic and fired at Tina, damaging Hennessy’s ear. In the furore that followed, with Hennessy and the Buchanans and the Navy all tumbling over each other, Twiss lost his nerve and ran, dropping the gun. Ogden picked it up, we assume, and followed us. Remember, he had expected Holmes to be with Madame Rossi: he didn’t know about the Land Rover scheme. I think in fact he lost her for a while. In any case the chap I had ready to follow her saw nothing of him. What seems likely is that he did eventually try the Land Rover either up on the road or after I had driven down to the jetty, and heard enough to realise that suspicion had indeed shifted now from Kenneth to Michael Twiss. If Kenneth wasn’t going to be his scapegoat, as he hoped, in order to keep Madame Rossi out of it, then Michael would make an excellent substitute. Except that we must never be able to question Michael and to discover that he was really only a dirty little blackmailer after all.

“Unfortunately for Michael,” continued Johnson, with no regret in his voice at all, “
chacun à son métier,
he sealed his own immediate fate with great dispatch by ferreting out all Ogden’s highly secret and highly expensive equipment in the fo’c’sle. Ogden, after all, had had to sail the yacht, with very little help, on that misty passage from Portree. He couldn’t be below all the time. And Twiss was emphatically not bound by any ties of loyalty as Victoria was. In fact, his business was to pry. So on arrival at Rum, I should judge, he was ready when Ogden interrupted him playing merry hell in the lab with an immediate counter proposal; pay me what I ask, or I tell the authorities there is something very funny going on in
Seawolf.
So that Ogden had, quite simply, to kill him – as soon as possible, and with his own gun. If he were lucky, we’d all think it suicide. If he were fearfully lucky, we should find it was murder and accuse Dr Holmes. In any case, everyone would assume Michael Twiss was the man who organised the accident in the
Lysander.
If he could steal letters from Holmes, he could microfilm blueprints.”

Suddenly Kenneth spoke. “What makes you all so sure that he didn’t? He had the opportunities, after all, and Ogden couldn’t have come within a thousand miles of seeing that device. He might have arranged for it to be planted on
Lysander –
what you’ve told us isn’t proof, but it adds up to a very strong possibility – but he couldn’t have stolen or filmed it. Someone else must have done that: Michael Twiss. Of course they were in cahoots. Why otherwise would Ogden have taken Michael to South Rona and back?”

The wind, blustering against the windows, drove another squall of rain over the art nouveau acorns: water hissed into the hearth. Slowly Johnson got up from the chair arm, bearing his pipe, and knocked it out into the fireside and pocketed it. “No. Ogden didn’t take it,” he said; and clasping soft hands stood surveying us. Bob and Nancy, drawn and big-eyed, followed every flash of his glasses; Hennessy beside me breathed slowly and deeply; Kenneth’s pale face was full of thin, frowning lines; Ogden, who had listened motionless, sulkily sprawling, to the last part of this recital, brought up his long fingers and tented them, pursing at Johnson his pale, fleshy lips. At length, reflectively, Johnson resumed.

“Michael Twiss might have pinched your little contraption and put it back later. Equally, Holmes, you might have staged the whole thing yourself.” And as Kenneth, flushing, grunted and sat up: “I want to go into that in a minute. But meanwhile,” added Johnson, “you’re wrong about one other thing. We
have
proof that Ogden is guilty . . . Glasscock?”

Rupert stepped into the firelight. Johnson took from him a small, heavy object and set it on the lionskin before us.

It was a tape recorder. “A small precaution,” Johnson was saying. “I radioed here just after we left Skye this morning, and had Dr Holmes’ room wired for sound. If I am right, you are about to hear the voices of Cecil Ogden and the late blackmailing Michael Twiss.” He pressed the button.

Ogden jumped. Ogden, the inefficient, the lethargic, his long face contorted, hurled himself on the lionskin and scrabbled at the circling tape. For a moment, his pixie cap bobbed below us; then he had the reel wrenched from its socket and was back on his feet.

Johnson spoke. “Stand still, Ogden,” he said. “Or I shoot.” And in his fist was the gun which was not a cigarette lighter.

His back to Kenneth, one hand with the tape in his pocket, the other on the Buchanan’s sofa, half thrusting past, Ogden stopped, and the fire gleamed on his eyeball as he turned.

“That’s a good chap,” said Johnson. “Handcuffs, Rupert.” And Rupert, fishing in his pocket, began to move forward. Without warning, every light in the house went out.

For an instant, there was perfect silence. Then, as the shouting began, the hall rang and resounded, unspeakably, with the deep voices of bronchial trolls, beating in despair against curtains and panelling: to be free, to reach Trallval and Hallival in the wind and the rainstorms outside. Induced by God knew what fiendish short circuit, the organ was playing
Cavalleria Rusticana
all over again.

Johnson fired.

I saw the stab of the flame. Then as my pupils widened, the familiar faces about me, dusky in the firelight, jerked apart by the shock. In the place where Ogden had stood, there was nothing. Then from beyond our chairs, the sound of feet running: Rupert, with Johnson vaulting, gun in hand, after him.

Beside me, Hennessy suddenly said: “You stay here. They’ve got guns. It’s dangerous,” and thrusting me to one side, followed, too. Bob and Nancy had both risen. Bob I saw made a movement to go, then stopped, Nancy’s arm in his own. Then her hoarse voice exhorted him. “We’ll need to give them a hand, Bob. Come on. Stay together.” And the darkness swallowed them up.

Then I shouted to Kenneth, above the clash of cymbals and the roll of the small wooden drumsticks and the stuttering roar of the music. “He’ll get out somehow. There’s no sense in following him. There’s only one place he can go, and that’s
Seawolf.”

For a moment, I sensed Kenneth’s pale face staring at me in the gloom. Then he, too, understood. “Quickly. The boats.”

The great front door was locked, and the key absent. In the end, it was the caretaker’s entrance which we used. As we stepped out and the wind caught our breath a torch blazed, blinding us both, and a man’s voice, interrupting Kenneth’s curse, said: “Sorry, sir. Orders. Mr Johnson said if he made a break for it, everyone else was to make for the boats. We’re not to let a rat through, tonight.”

There was a rifle, I saw, in his hands. In Scotland no one shoots on a Sunday. Kenneth took my hand, and leaving the arcades for the path, we ran round Kinloch Castle and over the grass to the woodland road to the shore.

The wind had risen, but not enough to vanquish the rain. Under the giddy, turbulent trees the road was full of pebbles and mud: the little river, as we rushed over it, was jumping in hummocks and craters and spread dimly with foam. Behind the tossing rhododendrons an army could be marching in safety. We had to shout to each other to be heard.

Once, veering off the path, we found ourselves in a clutter of poultry. A moment later, shockingly, we broke through the dark undergrowth and something flung itself screaming against the blowing coils of my hair. A light shone, and I saw Kenneth’s face, perfectly white, the eye sockets turned on me wild with shock and fatigue. There was another scream and I saw him fling up an arm as something frantically beating and dark began to thresh at his shoulders. The screeching, in odd, barking whoops, tore at the ear, mixed with a confused guttural muttering. Then I remembered the shearwaters, and lowering my head, I seized Kenneth’s hand and ran past the Warden’s back door. No one came out.

On the shore something moved: there was a deer in the water, its dark coat staring with damp underneath.

Here, in the last of the afterlight, the hills behind us were black on the sky, which was charcoal grey to the east, with slate storm clouds massing low over it. Behind us in the west all was dark except on the horizon. There the day had left a wash of green-blue, with a dash of storm-russet low in the saddle of hills, where the black castellated tower of Kinloch Castle rose like an obelisk above the terraced mass of the building. No lights showed. Kenneth slowed up, and I found we had come to the pier.

Sioras
was locked: no one could take her out that night. And
Seawolf’s
pram which had been there, had transported an upset Victoria back to her cabin and was neatly stowed now, where, dark on the light waters,
Seawolf
herself swung and jolted to her anchor. Down below, the portholes of the main saloon were lit.

From
Binkie,
moving uneasily close by, there were no lights; nor were there any but riding lights on the lovely
Symphonetta.
Hennessy’s boys, clearly, had dropped off to sleep. We looked in silence; then Kenneth said: “Right. The other jetty,” and running, led the way on. For with his own dinghy gone, Ogden had those of
Binkie, Symphonetta
and
Dolly
to choose from, all tied up at the small pier further round the shore of the loch. It was then, as we stumbled over the shale-layered stone slabs and lichenous boulders and sand patches pale among the black rocks of the shore, that we saw, far ahead against the dim, moving sea, a black figure running.

“Ogden,” said Kenneth shortly; and releasing my hand, began to run in real earnest, towards the boats and the sea.

Even a scientist can be illogical when wrought-up and tired. In the tape Ogden was carrying there was proof, I supposed, in the counter-accusations between Michael and Ogden, confronting each other in that wrecked laboratory, that Ogden and not Kenneth was responsible for what happened to the
Lysander.
That there was proof of anything more, in spite of all that Johnson had said, I tried not to believe. But to get that tape, Kenneth was there with me, unarmed, outdistancing all our supporters, without considering that, surely, Johnson by now would have radioed news of Ogden’s escape to his colleagues, and he would be intercepted long before he reached the mainland.

In so far as it was incriminating, of course, Ogden might well have thrown the tape away or concealed it already. But in so far as it was also an instrument of power he might be keeping it at all costs. With it, he could bargain. With it, perhaps, he could also blackmail. But I should not think of that. Kenneth had intelligence as well as principles: that kind of man does not change. He was by my side now. I wanted him to be at my side when this was all over.

There was a moment, as we approached the dark jetty and heard the slap of the waves, when behind us there broke out a faint outburst of what sounded like shouting, and I tried to look back. But the wind was blowing hard in our faces, and the noise, whatever it was, had been snatched clean away. Then suddenly, all other sound was lost in the roar of a motor launch engine.

As we ran down the jetty,
Symphonetta’
s speedboat cast off and, picking up revs, charged out into the loch. Ogden, black against the small running waves, was sitting crouched at the wheel.

We stopped. And there, in the blowing darkness, Kenneth confronted me. “I’m going after him. Tell Johnson I’m sorry I had to borrow his boat.”

“I’m coming with you.”

For a moment he stood, staring at me, and I wondered what he was thinking. He said: “It’ll be dangerous.”

“I know. I want to be with you, Kenneth.” For a second, his hands touched my shoulders and his cheek, wet with rain, was pressed hard against mine. Then he was in
Dolly’s
dory, handing me down, and the outboard was ripped on and the painter inboard and we were off, bouncing through disturbed sea, with the iron triangle of wake following rigid behind and the salt water clattering over us unheeded and soaking us through.