The Red Herring (2 page)

The atmosphere in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey was even more subdued that night than it had been when the English football team had been beaten by the Argentines or the cricket team thrashed by the Australians. And there was good reason for it. After defeats, there was always the chance of a comeback, but if either Mr Khrushchev or President Kennedy once pressed down a finger on the nuclear button, there would
be
no next football season, and instead of playing for the Ashes, the cricket team stood a fair chance of becoming – literally – ashes themselves.

The general gloom seemed to be shared by the man and woman occupying the corner table. The man was big, in every sense of the word – large head, broad shoulders, hands the size of shovels – yet there was a gentleness about his eyes which somehow served to soften what would have otherwise been a blunt face. The woman was blonde, younger than her companion and had a prettiness which was not quite English.

Anyone watching them would have known immediately that they were not married, but might have suspected, from the intimacy they seemed to share, that they were having an affair. And in a way, they were, though their mutual affection stemmed from the fact that they were both in love with the same job.

‘Are you thinking about the missile crisis, sir?' the woman asked.

The man, Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend, nodded. ‘I went through six years of war so that when I had kids, they could be sure of a decent future, Monika. Well, I've got a kid now – my Annie – an' it doesn't seem right that somethin' happenin' the other side of the ocean could snatch that future away from her.'

‘If there
is
a war, we'll be a prime target in this area, won't we?' Detective Sergeant Monika Paniatowski asked.

‘Aye, thanks to the aircraft factory an' Blackhill air-force base, we certainly will,' Woodend agreed. ‘It's a real bloody mess, isn't it?'

‘Whose fault do you think it is?'

Woodend shrugged. ‘Nobody's. An' everybody's. Khrushchev didn't put them missiles on Cuba because he actually wants to fire them at America. They're only there as a bargainin' chip – somethin' he's prepared to give up if Kennedy will promise never to invade Cuba. But if Kennedy does make that promise, it'll look as if he's only backin' down because he's weak.' The chief inspector stopped to light up a Capstan Full Strength. ‘Have you ever played poker, Monika?'

Paniatowski grinned. ‘Yes, I've played it. How else do you think I could afford to run a car like mine on my salary?'

Woodend returned her grin, though he did not really feel very cheerful. ‘Then if you're a player yourself, you'll know what I mean when I say it's mainly a game of nerve and bluff.'

‘Of course.'

‘The cards you hold in your hand are important, but often they're not
as
important as how far you're prepared to go with them. Your aim is make your opponent drop out as early as possible. But sometimes that doesn't happen. And sometimes the stakes get so high that none of the players feel they can back out – whatever it costs them.'

‘And you think that's what's happening over Cuba?'

‘That's right,' Woodend replied solemnly.

Paniatowski took a sip of her vodka. ‘Look on the bright side, sir,' she said.

‘An' what might that be?'

‘You always fret when we've not got much work on, but by tomorrow morning we might have a nice gruesome murder to distract us from any thoughts of the end of the world.'

‘Aye,' Woodend agreed, perking up a little. ‘Aye, I suppose there's always a chance of that.'

N
obody now remembered why, when the Second World War broke out, it was decided to construct the air base close to the edge of an aspiring forest known locally – whatever it said on the Ordnance Survey maps – as Dirty Bill's Woods. But someone, somewhere, obviously
had
taken the decision, and so, though the runway was some distance from Dirty Bill's, the main entrance to the residential section of the camp was less than a hundred yards away from the first line of trees.

The guard on duty at the main gate that night liked the fact that the wood was there, since it provided a distraction from what was otherwise a very boring duty. Sometimes he would imagine that Jane Mansfield, wearing an impossibly skin-tight dress, was lurking behind one of the oaks, waiting to ambush him and demand that he give her what no other man in the world could supply. On other, less fanciful, occasions, he contented himself with merely watching the cars containing courting couples turn off the road which ran through the wood and carefully negotiate their way between the gaps in the trees until the occupants were far enough away from the road to get down to serious business.

There was a car there that night. He'd seen its headlights just after he had lifted the barrier to allow the good-looking dame with the flaming red hair into the camp. Which meant, he calculated, that the couple in the car had been humping for nearly an hour now. He envied them. Or, at least, he envied the man – as he envied any man getting his rocks off while he himself was forced to stand by the guardhouse, defending Western civilisation.

The sentry turned to face into the camp, and saw a number of men emerging from the lecture hall. So the redhead had finished talking about English dukes and princes – or whatever the cockamamie subject had been that night – and now the aviators were heading for the luxury of their club. It usually irritated the guard that they led such a pampered existence, while a p.f.c. like himself was not even allowed through the door, but tonight he was not so sure that they had got the best deal. Come the morning, and those guys could find themselves flying over enemy territory under hostile fire, and by one of those reversals of fate would find themselves shifting abruptly from a situation in which they didn't know they were born to one in which they wished they never had been!

One of those pissant Brit automobiles – the redhead's black Mini – was approaching the gate. The guard stepped forward to raise the barrier. Instead of saluting, he gave the driver a wide grin, and felt a slight thrill run through him as she grinned back.

The Mini roared off into the night, but instead of lowering the barrier again, the guard began to slowly count to ten. He had reached seven when the Chevrolet Invicta appeared. Now there was an automobile, he thought to himself. Its engine was seven times the power of the vehicle it was following, and the Mini would have fitted into its trunk.

As the Chevrolet drew level with him, he came to attention and snapped off a tight military salute. The driver returned the salute. The Mini had already reached the woods, turned a bend in the road, and disappeared from sight. The Invicta followed it and a few seconds later, the car which had driven off the road earlier reappeared and set off in the same direction. It seemed as if everybody was getting their rations that night – except for the poor sap who'd been ordered to man the main gate.

The sentry gazed into the darkness for a moment, then wondered if he dared risk lighting a Camel.

‘You lucky bastards,' he said softly to the three now-departed vehicles. ‘You lucky, lucky bastards.'

Most of the other kids in her class would be watching television by now, Helen Dunn thought. But then most of the kids didn't have a father like hers. There was no point in telling Squadron Leader Reginald Dunn that she had finished her homework, even if she had, because he had got it fixed in his mind that his daughter needed to study for two and a half hours every night – including the weekends. And even though Miss Beale had told him she looked tired in class and probably needed to get to bed earlier, he had remained inflexible in his belief.

‘You get nowhere in this life without discipline and determination,' he had told her often enough.

He had a way of making her feel a failure even when she
did
manage to do well.

‘There are no prizes for coming second in anything,' he'd say. ‘And no excuses, either. If you push yourself harder than anybody else, you'll do better than anyone else.'

‘But what if I don't care about doing better than everyone else?' she'd once dared to ask him.

And he had glared at her hard enough to melt her slim body down, and said, ‘After all the sacrifices your mother and I have made for you, you owe it to us to be the best. But more importantly, you owe it to yourself.'

He had said the same to her sister, Janice. But he couldn't say it any more, could he? Not now Janice was dead.

Helen grieved for her sister a great deal, but there were times when she thought that of the two of them, Janice was the luckier. Through death, Janice had found a way to escape from their father's incessant demands. Through her death, she had achieved some kind of victory.

Keeping one ear open for the sound of her father's footsteps on the stairs, Helen made her way stealthily over to her chest of drawers. The squadron leader inspected her room regularly – almost every nook and cranny of it – yet she had still managed to achieve two small victories of her own in spite of that. The first victory had been constructing a hiding place at all. The second had been what she kept hidden in it.

She opened the top drawer as quietly as she could, and slid the neatly folded underwear to the front of it. Then, with infinite care, she removed the false back to the drawer and took out her prizes – a costume-jewellery bracelet, a Collins pocket English-Spanish dictionary and a cigarette lighter. None of them were of any use to her: she would never wear anything so obviously trashy as the bracelet (even if she dared), she did not speak Spanish and she felt no desire to smoke.

That didn't matter. What
did
matter was how she'd acquired them. She had stolen them all from shops in Whitebridge. She, the younger (and only surviving) daughter of Squadron Leader Dunn, was a thief. And though she knew now that she would never be brave enough to tell him – though she was aware that her other thefts, the ones which
had
been discovered, had put her in another's power – she could not bring herself to regret it.

Her revolt over, Helen sighed, returned the treasures to their hiding place, and looked down at her history book again. Miss Beale was giving them a test the following morning, and she knew it was not enough to get the top mark – she would have to score a mark which was
easily
the top.

The Spinner Inn stood on the edge of a small village several miles from Whitebridge. In the past, it had served as a post house for mail coaches and as a watering hole for drovers and shepherds on their way to the big markets in Manchester. But those days were long gone, and now it relied for its trade on after-hours drinkers and couples who would prefer to have their rendezvous far away from the prying eyes of their friends, neighbours and – most especially – their husbands or wives.

It was the pub's isolation which had recommended it to the two men sitting at the furthest table from the bar. But even so, it did not seem to be quite isolated
enough
for the one in the green corduroy jacket, and as his companion – a man with thinning brown hair and heavy schoolteacher glasses – outlined the final arrangements, he let his eyes dart nervously round the room.

The other man broke off his exposition, and sighed. ‘For God's sake, Roger, pull yourself together!' he said.

‘It's easy for you to say that,' Roger Cray replied. ‘You don't have anything like as much to lose as I do. You're not a married man. You don't have any of my responsibilities.'

‘And it's precisely
because
I'm not married that I'll be running the bigger risk,' Martin Dove argued.

‘How do you work that out?'

‘Because after it's happened, suspicion will be bound to fall on people like me first. Whereas nobody will ever suspect that you––'

‘I don't want to do it,' Roger Cray said, trying to sound firm and failing miserably.

‘You're lying,' Dove told him. ‘You want to do it just as much as I do. You're
burning
to do it. Do you realise how long we've been planning this – how long we've been relishing the thought of it?'

‘I––'

‘Months, Roger! Bloody months! And now, just as we're on the point of achieving everything we wanted, you're starting to get cold feet.'

‘Can you blame me?'

Martin Dove frowned. The man was coming to pieces, he thought. He needed to say something quickly to distract him – something to temporarily turn his mind to pleasanter, safer subjects.

‘How's the car?' he asked. ‘Still having that trouble with your cylinders?'

The change in Cray was almost immediate. The tension drained from his face, and a blissful smile replaced it. ‘I had two valves replaced, and now she's running like a bird,' he said. ‘I told you she was one of the first few ever produced, didn't I?'

‘Yes, you did.'

There was very little that Cray hadn't told him about his 1953 Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, Dove thought sourly. Ever since he'd inherited it from his uncle, it had been one his main subjects of conversation.

‘Like a bird,' Cray repeated. ‘You know what they say – “It's the car that's built to standards of a plane”.' He laughed. ‘If only some planes were built to the standards of that car.'

He had mellowed enough to be brought back to the main purpose of the meeting, Dove decided. ‘So we're all right for tomorrow, are we?' he asked.

Cray looked worried again. ‘It's a big risk,' he said.

‘Of course it's a big risk,' Dove replied. ‘But think of the
rewards
. Think of the
satisfaction
.'

‘Think of the fact that we could spend the rest of our lives in prison,' Cray said heavily.

‘And wouldn't it be worth it, if we did?' Martin Dove countered.