The Tightrope Men / The Enemy (35 page)

Cregar actually smiled. ‘You know when to pass the buck. You’re quite right; it’s better if I speak to Ogilvie. I’ll use the study.’

‘Show his lordship where it is,’ I said to Gregory, and the three of them left the room.

Lillywhite said, ‘What was all that about?’

‘A bit of inter-departmental nonsense; nothing to do with humble servants like ourselves. You can carry on, Frank. That vault must be opened come what may.’

He went back to his job and I strolled over to the window and looked down at the drive. Presently Cregar and Martins came out of the house, got into a car, and drove away. Gregory came into the room. ‘Cregar was a bit sour when he came out of the study,’ he remarked. ‘Ogilvie wants to talk to you.’

I walked over and picked up the telephone next to Ashton’s bed. ‘Jaggard here.’

Ogilvie said quickly: ‘On no account must Cregar know what’s in that vault. Don’t let him pull rank on you—it’s got nothing to do with him.’

‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Good. When will you open it?’

‘Another five minutes.’

‘Keep me informed.’ He rang off.

Gregory held out a packet of cigarettes and we smoked while Lillywhite and his two assistants fiddled with the door. At last there was a sharp click and Lillywhite said, ‘That’s it.’

I stood up. ‘All right. Everybody out except me and Frank.’ I waited until they left then went to the vault. ‘Let’s get at it.’

‘Right.’ Lillywhite put his hand to a lever and pulled it down. Nothing happened. ‘There you are.’

‘You mean it’s open now?’

‘That’s right. Look.’ He pulled and the door began to open. It was nearly a foot thick.

‘Hold it,’ I said quickly. ‘Now, can it be locked again and opened easily?’

‘Sure. Nothing to it now.’

‘That’s all I need to know. Sorry, Frank, but I’ll have to ask you to leave now.’

He gave a crooked smile. ‘If what’s in here can’t even be seen by a member of the House of Lords it’s certainly not for Frank Lillywhite.’

He went out and closed the door emphatically.

I opened the vault.

Ogilvie gaped. ‘Empty!’

‘As bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.’ I considered that. ‘Except for a layer of fine dust on the floor.’

‘You checked all the shelves and cabinets?’

‘There were no cabinets. There were no shelves. It was just an empty cube. I didn’t even go inside; I just stuck my head in and looked around. Then I closed the door again and had it relocked. I thought I’d better leave it as it was in case you want the forensic chaps to have a look at it. My bet is that it’s never been used since it was built fifteen years ago.’

‘Well, my God!’ Ogilvie stopped then. He seemed at a total loss for words, but he was thinking furiously. I stepped over to the window and looked down into the empty street. It was late and the bowler-hatted tide had receded from the City leaving it deserted except for a few stragglers. There is no other urban area in the world that can look so empty as the City of London.

Ogilvie said thoughtfully, ‘So only you, the chief of the safe-opening team, and now me, know about this.’

I turned. ‘Even your Chief Burglar doesn’t know. I sent Lillywhite out of the room before I opened the vault.’

‘So it’s only you and me. Damn!’

He swore so explosively that I said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s backfired on me. Cregar will never believe me now when I tell him the truth about that damned vault. I wish now he’d been there.’

Personally I didn’t care what Cregar believed or didn’t believe. I took a sheet of paper from my wallet, unfolded it, and laid it on the desk. ‘This is the new combination for opening the vault. Lillywhite reset it.’

‘This is the only copy?’

‘Lillywhite must have a record of it.’

Ogilvie wagged his head. ‘This will bear a lot of thinking about. In the meantime you carry on looking for Ashton and Benson, and don’t forget they might have split up. Made any progress?’

‘Only by elimination, if you call that progress.’

‘All right,’ said Ogilvie tiredly. ‘Carry on.’ I had my hand on the doorknob when he said, ‘Malcolm.’

‘Yes.’

‘Watch out for Cregar. He makes a bad enemy.’

‘I’m not fighting Cregar,’ I said. ‘He’s nothing to do with me. What’s between you and him is way over my head.’

‘He didn’t like the way you stood up to him this afternoon.’

‘He didn’t show it—he was pleasant enough.’

‘That’s his way, but he’ll only pat you on the back to find a place to stick a knife. Watch him.’

‘He is nothing to do with me,’ I repeated.

‘Maybe,’ said Ogilvie. ‘But Cregar may not share your view.’

After that nothing happened for a while. The Special Branch investigation petered out with no result although their men at the exits were still keeping a sharp watch in case our pair made a late dash for it. Honnister had nothing to offer. On my third enquiry he said tartly, ‘Don’t ring us—we’ll ring you.’

I spent two and a half days reading every word of the bushel or so of miscellaneous papers Gregory had brought back from Ashton’s house—appointment books, financial records, business diaries, letters and so on. As a result of that many enquiries were made but nothing of interest turned up. Ashton’s companies were given a thorough going-over with like result.

A week after Ashton’s disappearance my team was cut in half. I kept Brent with Penny and Michaelis looked after Gillian, leaving two to do the legwork. I was doing a lot of legwork myself, going sixteen hours a day, running like hell like the Red Queen to stay in the same place. Larry Godwin was back at his desk reading the East European journals. His fling at freedom had been brutally brief.

The boffins had nothing much to report. The computer tapes showed nothing out of the ordinary except some very clever program designing, but what the programs did was nothing special. The prototype whatsit Ashton had been tinkering with caused a flood of speculation which left a thin sediment of hard fact. The consensus of opinion was that it was a pilot plant of a process designed to synthesize insulin; very ingenious and highly patentable but still in an early stage of design. It told me nothing to my purpose.

The day after we opened the empty vault I had telephoned Penny. ‘Is this to tell me you’ve found Daddy?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ve nothing to tell you about that. I’m sorry.’

‘Then I don’t think we’ve much to talk about, Malcolm,’ she said, and rang off before I could get in another word. Right at that moment I didn’t know whether we were still engaged or not.

After that I kept in touch with her movements through Brent. She went back to doing her work at University College, London, but tended to use her car more instead of the train. She didn’t seem to resent Brent; he was her
passenger in her daily journeys to and from London, and she always kept him informed of her proposed movements. He was enjoying his assignment and thought she was a very nice person. He didn’t think she knew he was armed. And, no, she never talked of me.

Gillian was moved to Moorfields Eye Hospital and I went to see her. After checking with Michaelis I had a few words with her doctor, a specialist called Jarvis. ‘She’s still heavily bandaged,’ he said. ‘And she’ll need cosmetic plastic surgery, but that will be later and in another place. Here we are concerned only with her eyes.’

‘What are the odds, Doctor?’

He said carefully, ‘There may be a chance of restoring some measure of sight to the left eye. There’s no hope for the right eye at all.’ He looked straight at me. ‘Miss Ashton doesn’t know that yet. Please don’t tell her.’

‘Of course not. Does she know that her father has—er—gone away?’

‘She does, and it’s not making my job any easier,’ said Jarvis waspishly. ‘She’s very depressed, and between us we have enough problems without having to cope with a psychologically depressed patient. It’s most insensitive of the man to go on a business trip at this time.’

So that’s what Penny had told Gillian. I suppose it was marginally better than telling her that Daddy had done a bolt. I said, ‘Perhaps I can cheer her up.’

‘I wish you would,’ Jarvis said warmly. ‘It would help her quite a lot.’

So I went to talk to Gillian and found her flat on her back on a bed with no pillow and totally faceless because she was bandaged up like Claude Rains in the film.
The Invisible Man
. The nursing sister gently told her I was there, and went away. I steered clear of the reasons she was there, and asked no questions about it. Honnister was probably a better interrogator than I and would have sucked her dry. Instead
I stuck to trivialities and told her a couple of funny items I had read in the papers that morning, and brought her up-to-date on the news of the day.

She was very grateful. ‘I miss reading the papers. Penny comes in every day and reads to me.’

Brent had told me of that. ‘I know.’

‘What’s gone wrong between you and Penny?’

‘Why, nothing,’ I said lightly. ‘Did she say there was anything wrong?’

‘No, but she stopped talking about you, and when I asked, she said she hadn’t seen you.’

‘We’ve both been busy,’ I said.

‘I suppose that’s it,’ said Gillian. ‘But it’s the way she said it.’

I changed the subject and we chatted some more and when I left I think she was a little better in outlook.

Michaelis found his job boring, which indeed it was. As far as the hospital staff were concerned, he was a policeman set to guard a girl who had been violently attacked once. He sat on a chair outside the ward and spent his time reading paperbacks and magazines.

‘I read to Miss Ashton for an hour every afternoon,’ he said.

‘That’s good of you.’

He shrugged. ‘Nothing much else to do. There’s plenty of time to think on this job, too. I’ve been thinking about that model railway in Ashton’s attic. I’ve never seen anything to beat it. He was a schedules man, of course.’

‘What’s that?’

‘There’s a lot of variety in the people who are interested in model railways. There are the scenic men who are bent on getting all the details right in miniature. I’m one of those. There are the engineering types who insist their stuff should be exact from the engineering aspect; that’s expensive. I know a chap who has modelled Paddington Station; and all
he’s interested in is getting the trains in and out according to the timetable. He’s a schedules man like Ashton. The only difference is that Ashton was doing it on a really big scale.’

Hobbies are something that people really do become fanatical about, but Ashton hadn’t struck me as the type. Still, I hadn’t known that Michaelis was a model railwayman, either. I said, ‘How big a scale?’

‘Bloody big. I found a stack of schedules up there which made me blink. He could duplicate damn nearly the whole of the British railway system—not all at once, but in sections. He seemed to be specializing in pre-war stuff; he had schedules for the old LMS system, for instance; and the Great Western and the LNER. Now that takes a hell of a lot of juggling, so you know what he’d done?’

Michaelis looked at me expectantly, so I said, ‘What?’

‘He’s installed a scad of microprocessors in that control board. You know—the things that have been called a computer on a chip. He could program his timetables into them.’

That sounded like Ashton, all right; very efficient. But it wasn’t helping me to find him. ‘Better keep your mind on the job,’ I advised. ‘We don’t want anything happening to the girl.’

Two weeks after Ashton bolted Honnister rang me. Without preamble he said, ‘We’ve got a line on our man.’

‘Good. When are you seeing him?’ I wanted to be there.

‘I’m not,’ said Honnister. ‘He’s not in my parish. He’s a London boy so he’s the Met’s meat. A chap from the Yard will be seeing him tonight; Inspector Crammond. He’s expecting you to ring him.’

‘I’ll do that. What’s this character’s name, and how did you get on to him?’

‘His name is Peter Mayberry, aged about forty-five to fifty, and he lives in Finsbury. Apart from that I know
damn-all. Crammond will pick it up from there. Mayberry hired the car for the weekend—not from one of the big hirecar firms, but from a garage in Slough. The bobbies over there came across it as a matter of routine and asked a few questions. The garage owner was bloody annoyed; he said someone had spilled battery acid on the back seat, so that made us perk up a bit.’

I thought about that. ‘But would Mayberry give his real name when he hired the car?’

‘The bloody fool did,’ said Honnister. ‘Anyway, he’d have to show his driving licence. This one strikes me as an amateur; I don’t think he’s a pro. Anyway, Crammond tells me there’s a Peter Mayberry living at that address.’

‘I’ll get on to Crammond immediately. Thanks, Charlie. You’ve done very well.’

He said earnestly, ‘You’ll thank me by leaning bloody hard on this bastard.’ I was about to ring off, but he chipped in again. ‘Seen anything of Ashton lately?’

It was the sort of innocuous question he might be expected to ask, but I thought I knew Honnister better than that by now; he wasn’t a man to waste his time on idle chitchat. ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘I thought he’d like to know. Every time I ring him he’s out, and the beat bobby tells me there’s been some funny things going on at the house. A lot of coming and going and to-ing and fro-ing.’

‘I believe he went away on a business trip. As for the house I wouldn’t know—I haven’t been there lately.’

‘I suppose that’s your story and you’re sticking to it,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to tell the Ashton sisters—you or me?’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘After I’ve made sure of Mayberry.’

‘All right. Any time you’re down this way pop in and see me. We can have another noggin at the Coach and Horses. I’ll be very interested in anything you can tell me.’ He rang off.

I smiled. I was sure Honnister would be interested. Something funny was going on in his parish which he didn’t know about, and it irked him.

I dialled Scotland Yard and got hold of Crammond. ‘Oh yes. Mr Jaggard: it’s about this acid-throwing attack. I’ll be seeing Mayberry tonight—he doesn’t get home until about six-thirty, so his landlady tells us. I suggest you meet me here at six and we’ll drive out.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘There’s just one thing,’ Crammond said. ‘Whose jurisdiction applies here—ours or yours?’

I said slowly, ‘That depends on what Mayberry says. The acid-throwing is straightforward criminal assault, so as far as that’s concerned he’s your man and you can have him and welcome. But there are other matters I’m not at liberty to go into, and we might like to question him further before you charge him. Informally, of course.’

‘I understand,’ said Crammond. ‘It’s just that it’s best to get these things straight first. See you at six, Mr Jaggard.’

Crammond was properly cautious. The police were not very comfortable when mixing with people like us. They knew that some of the things we did, if strictly interpreted, could be construed as law-breaking, and it went against the grain with them to turn a blind eye. Also they tended to think of themselves as the only professionals in the business and looked down on us as amateurs and, in their view, they were not there to help amateurs break the law of the land.

I phoned Ogilvie and told him. All he said was, ‘Ah well, we’ll see what comes of it.’

I met Crammond as arranged. He was a middling-sized thickset man of nondescript appearance, very useful in a plain clothes officer. We went out to Finsbury in his car, with a uniformed copper in the back seat, and he told me what he knew.

‘When Honnister passed the word to us I had Mayberry checked out. That was this morning so he wasn’t at home. He lives on the top floor of a house that’s been broken up into flats. At least, that’s what they call them: most of them are single rooms. His landlady described him as a quiet type—a bit bookish.’

‘Married?’

‘No. She thinks he never has been, either. He has a job as some kind of clerk working for a City firm. She wasn’t too clear about that.’

‘He doesn’t sound the type,’ I complained.

‘He does have a police record,’ said Crammond.

‘That’s better.’

‘Wait until you hear it. One charge of assaulting a police officer, that’s all. I went into it and the charge should never have been brought, even though he was found guilty. He got into a brawl during one of the Aldermaston marches a few years ago and was lugged in with a few others.’