The Satan Bug (17 page)

She looked at me with wide-open eyes, licked her lips nervously, nodded and turned to go. Chessingham said, " Stay here, Stella. I have nothing to hide from anybody. My sister knows everything about me, Mr. Cavell."

" I wouldn't be so sure about that." The voice to match the stare. " If you wish to stay, Miss Chessingham, you may.

Please remember afterwards that I asked you to go." Both were pale now and very apprehensive indeed. On the basis of my ability to terrify people I could have had a job with a Central European Secret Police at any time.

I said, "What were you doing last night, Chessingham? Round about ten o'clock, shall we say?"

"Last night?" He blinked. "Why do I have to account for my movements for last night?"

"The questions come from me. Please give an answer."

" I—well, I was at home. With Stella and Mother."

"All night?"

" Of course."

" There's no " of course'. No visitors, no outsiders to testify to your presence here?"

"Just Stella and Mother."

" Just Miss Chessingham. At ten o'clock your mother would be in bed."

" Yes, in bed. I'd forgotten."

"I'm not surprised. Forgetting is your strong line. You forgot to tell me last night that you had been in the R.A.S.C."

"The R.A.S.C.?" He sat down at the table again, not to eat, and from the slight movements of his arms I could tdl that one hand was gripping the other pretty strongly. " Yes, that's right. How did you know that?"

" A little bird told me. The same bird told me that he had seen you driving an army vehicle." I was sticking my neck out but I'd no option.

Time was not on our side. "You said you couldn't drive."

" I can't." His eyes flickered to his sister and then back to me. "There's a mistake. Someone is making a mistake."

" That's you, Chessingham—if you keep denying it. What if I can produce four independent witnesses by nightfall who will swear to it that they have seen you driving."

"I may have tried once or twice. I'm—I'm not sure. I haven't a driving licence."

" You make me sick," I said in disgust. " You're speaking and behaving like a moron. You're no moron, Chessingham. Stop beating about the bush and making a fool of yourself. You can drive. Admit it. Miss Chessingham, your brother can drive, can't he?"

"Leave Stella alone." Chessingham's voice was high, his face pale.

"You're right, damn you, I can drive—after a fashion."

"I suppose you thought it very clever to abandon that Bedford van outside your house two nights ago? On the assumption that the police would never believe anyone capable of doing anything so obvious?"

" I was never near that van." His voice was almost a shout. " I swear it! I swear I was never near that van. I got frightened when you came round last night and I said anything I could to—to strengthen my innocence."

"Innocence." I laughed my nasty policeman's laugh. " The photographs of Jupiter that you said you took. How did you take them? Or did someone else take them? Or did you rig up an apparatus to take the pictures automatically while you were away at Mordon?"

"What in the name of God are you talking about?" He was getting frantic. " Apparatus? What damned apparatus? Search the house from top to bottom and see if you can find------"

" Don't be so naive," I interrupted. " Probably buried deep in the woods anywhere within fifty square miles of here."

" Mr. Cavell!" Stella Chessingham stood in front of me, her hands so tight that they were shaking, her face mad. " You're making a terrible mistake. Eric has nothing to do with— with whatever it is. This murder.

Nothing, I tell you I know."

" Were you with him after half past ten the night before last? In his observatory? If you weren't, young lady, you don't know."

"I know Eric! I know he's completely incapable of-----"

" Character testimonials are no good to me," I said brusquely. " And if you know so much perhaps you can explain to me how £1,000 comes to have been deposited in your brother's bank account in the past four months? Five hundred pounds on July 3rd, the same on October 3rd. Can you explain?"

They looked at each other, sick fear in their eyes and making no attempt to conceal it. When Chessingham managed to speak, on his second or third attempt, his voice was hoarse and shaking.

" It's a frame-up! Someone is trying to frame me."

" Shut up and talk sense," I said wearily. " Where did the money come from, Chessingham?"

He paused for a moment before replying, then said miserably, "From Uncle George." His voice had dropped almost to a whisper and he was glancing apprehensively ceiling-wards.

" Decent of Uncle George," I said heavily. " Who's he?"

" Mother's brother." His tone was still low. " The black sheep of the family, or so it seems. He said he was completely innocent of the crimes with which he had been charged but that the evidence against him had been so overwhelming that he'd fled the country."

I glared at him. Double-talk at 8 a.m. after a sleepless night wasn't much in my line. " What are you talking about? What crimes?"

" I don't know." Chessingham sounded desperate. " We've never seen him—he's phoned me twice at Mordon. Mother has never mentioned him—we didn't even know he existed until recently."

" You knew about this, too?" I asked Stella.

" Of course I did."

"Your mother?"

" Of course not," Chessingham said. " I told you she never even mentioned his existence. Whatever he was accused of, it must have been something pretty bad. He said that if Mother knew where the money came from she'd call it tainted and refuse it. We—Stella and I—want to send her abroad for her health and that money is going to help."

" It's going to help you up the steps of the Old Bailey," I said roughly.

"Where was your mother born?"

" Alfringham." It was Stella who answered, Chessingham didn't seem capable of it.

" Maiden name?"

" Jane Barclay."

" Where's your phone? I'd like to use it."

She told me and I went out to the hall and put a call through to the General. Almost fifteen minutes elapsed before I returned to the breakfast-room. Neither of the two appeared to have moved from the positions in which I left them.

" My God, you're a bright pair," I said wonderingly. " It would never have occurred to you, of course, to pay a visit to Somerset House. What would be the point? You knew you would be wasting your time. Uncle George never existed. Your mother never had a brother. Not that that will be news to you. Come on now, Chessingham, you've had time to think up a better explanation than that one. You couldn't possibly think up a worse one to account for the £1,000."

He couldn't think one up at all. He stared at me, his face grimly hopeless, then at his sister, then at the ground. I said, encouragingly, "

Well, there's no rush about it. You'll have a few weeks to think up a better story. Meantime, I want to see your mother."

" Leave my mother out of this, damn you." Chessingham had risen to his feet with such violence that his chair had gone over backwards. " My mother's a sick woman and an old one. Leave her alone, you hear, Cavell?"

I said to Stella, " Please go and tell your mother I'm coming up in a minute."

Chessingham started towards me, but his sister got in the way. " Don't, Eric. Please." She gave me a look that should have pinned me to the wall and said bitterly, " Don't you see that Mr. Cavell is a man who always gets his own way?"

I got my own way. The interview with Mrs. Chessingham took no more than ten minutes. It wasn't just the most pleasant ten minutes of my life.

When I came downstairs both Chessingham and his sister were waiting in the hall. Stella came up to me, big brown eyes swimming in a pale and frightened face and said desperately, "You're making a fearful mistake, Mr. Cavell, a terrible mistake. Eric is my brother. I know him, I know him.

I swear to you that he is completely innocent in everything.'"

"He'll have his chance to prove it." There were times when I didn't find any great difficulty in hating myself and this was one of those times.

"Chessingham, you would be wise to pack a case. Enough stuff to last you for a few days at least."

"You're taking me with you?" He looked resigned, hopeless.

" I've neither the warrant or the authority for that. Somebody will come, never fear. Don't be silly as to try to run. A mouse couldn't get through the cordon round this house."

" A—a cordon?" He stared. " You mean there are policemen round-----"

"Think we want you to take the first plane out of the country?" I asked.

"Like dear old Uncle George?" It was a good enough exit line and I left it at that.

The Hartnells were to be my next—and last—call before breakfast that morning. Half-way there I pulled up at an A.A. box on a deserted wooded stretch of road, unlocked the booth and put a call through to the Waggoner's Rest. By and by Mary came on the phone and after she'd asked me how I felt and I'd said fine and she'd more or less called me a liar, I told her I would be back in the hotel shortly after nine o'clock, to have breakfast ready for me and to ask Hardanger to come round if he could.

I left the phone booth and although my car was only a few yards away I didn't dawdle any in reaching it—the cold grey rain was still sheeting down. For all my haste, though, I suddenly stopped with the door half-open and stared through the rain at a character coming down the road towards me. From a distance of less than a hundred yards he appeared to be a middle-aged well-dressed citizen wearing a raincoat and trilby, but there all resemblance to a normal human being ended. He was making his way down the rain-filled gutter by hopping around on his right foot, arms outstretched to balance himself, kicking a rusty tin can ahead of him.

With every combined hop and kick a gout of water went spraying up in the air.

I watched this performance for some time until I became conscious of the rain drumming heavily on my back and soaking through to my shoulders. Besides, even if he had escaped over a high wall, it was still rude to stare. Maybe if I were buried long enough in the wilds of Wiltshire, I, too, would take to playing hopscotch in the rain. Still with my eye on this apparition I eased quickly into the driving seat pulling the door to behind me and it was not until then that I discovered that the purpose of the hopscotch merchant was not to demonstrate the standard of loopiness in rural Wiltshire but to distract my attention from the back of my car where someone had been biding crouched down on the floor.

I heard a slight noise behind me and started to twist but I was far too late, the black-jack must have been chopping down even as I heard the sound. My left foot was still on the wrong side of the steering column and, anyway, he was on my left or blind side. The black-jack made contact just below and behind my left ear with what must have been considerable force or accuracy or both for the agony and the oblivion were separated by only a hairsbreadth in time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It wouldn't be accurate to say that I woke up. The term " waking up "

implies a fairly rapid and one-way transition from a state of unconsciousness to that of consciousness and there was nothing either rapid or one-way about my progress through the twilight zone that separates those. One moment I was greyly aware that I was lying on something hard and wet, the next the awareness was gone. How long a time elapsed between the intervals of greyness I'd no means of knowing and even if I had my mind would have been too fuzzy to appreciate it.

Gradually the spells of awareness became longer and longer until, eventually, there was no more darkness but I wasn't all that sure that this was in any way an improvement or a desirable state of affairs for with returning comprehension came an all but paralysing pain that seemed to hold my head, neck and right hand side of my chest in an immense vice, a vice with some burly character inexorably tightening the handle. I felt the way a grain of wheat must feel after it had passed through a combine harvester.

Painfully I opened my good eye and swivelled it around until I located the source of the dim light. A grilled window high up on one wall, just below the roof. I was in a cellar of some kind, of the semi-sunk basement type featured in Chessingham's house.

I'd made no mistake about the hardness of the floor. Or the wetness.

Rough unfinished concrete with shallow pools of water on it and whoever had left me there had thoughtfully dumped me right in the centre of the largest puddle.

I was lying stretched out on the floor, partly on my back, partly on my right hand side with my arms behind my back in a ridiculously strained and uncomfortable position. I wondered vaguely why I chose to lie in this awkward position and found out when I tried to change it. Somebody had made a very efficient job of tying my hands behind my back and from the numbness in my forearms it was a fair guess that he'd used considerable weight in the tying of the knots.

I made to gather my legs under me to jerk myself up to a sitting position and discovered that they wouldn't gather. I just couldn't move them. I used their immobility to lever myself upwards to a sitting position, waited until the coruscating lights dancing before my eyes faded and vanished then peered forward and down. My legs were not only tied at the ankles, they were secured to a metal upright of a wine-bin which took up practically the entire length of the wall beneath the window. And not only was I tied, but I was tied with PVC plastic flex. If I'd needed any confirmation that a professional had been at work, I didn't any more. Even a gorilla couldn't snap PVC and nothing less than a pair of hefty pliers could possibly undo the knots: fingers were quite useless for the job.

Slowly, carefully—any rash movement and my head would have fallen off—I looked around the cellar. It was as featureless and just about as empty as any cellar could ever be— the window, the closed door, the wine-bin and me. It could have been worse. No one pouring in water to drown me, no one flooding the confined space with a lethal gas, no snakes, no black widow spiders. Just the cellar and me. But bad enough.