Bluebolt One (2 page)

He looked at the guard in the light of the torch, saw the nervous way in which the young fellow fingered his upper lip. The coloured man said, “You mean until the police come?”

Shaw nodded, looked with concern at the almost grey face. “I’m sorry. Now listen—do you feel all right?”

“Right enough, sir.”

“Do you feel up to walking back to Gloucester Road, tell them what’s happened?”

“I can do that, sure. Don’t want to—to stay here.” The guard was shaking badly. “I’ll go right along now.”

“Good man. I’ll stay here, then.”

The guard glanced at the pathetic remains hanging on the rail and shuddered. Then he turned away. Shaw, watching the departing flicker of the torch, wondered briefly if he couldn’t have contacted Earls Court or Gloucester Road by phone from the train rather than walk back as he himself had suggested... but the guard must know his own job . . . he heard the footsteps clumping and echoing into the distance, and then there was silence and he was alone with the body in the total, subterranean dark. He shivered a little. The faint plopping noise as a drip of water fell from the invisible roof into a puddle on the track seemed like an explosion. Shaw fumbled in his pockets for a box of matches, lit one. Almost at once it blew out on the draught. He brought out his folded evening paper, twisted a half page into a spill and lit that, shielding the flame with his coat. He bent towards the still form on the track. In that uncertain, flickering light he examined the body again. Medium height, stoutish build, brown-haired, clean-shaven, an indentation on the bridge of the nose where spectacles had rested. Probably aged anywhere between thirty-five and forty. Fresh complexion, well-fed body. Somehow he didn’t look like a drinker, at any rate not an habitual one. He was quietly and fairly expensively dressed—his suit looked as if it had come from a Savile Row tailor, the shirt was of nylon. If it was suicide rather than drink, it was a funny way to do it. . . unless of course he’d gone berserk suddenly, felt, say, that he couldn’t face home any more—something like that? These things did happen, and he could have come to the end of his particular tether between Gloucester Road and Earls Court as well as anywhere else ... but the police would go into his background, of course, and it would all come out in time.

The spill, the third spill by now, burnt out.

Shaw waited on, his nerve-endings jumping and tingling, the potted air close and clammy on his skin. He waited longer than he’d thought he would have to, for Gloucester Road couldn’t be so very far back.

Some ten minutes later he saw the lights—coming from the direction of Earls Court. Soon he heard tramping feet, and faint voices echoed, coming nearer. Then, in the loom of big lamps, he saw a line of uniform caps and a bowler hat.

He got up and walked along the track. A beam caught him and an edgy voice called truclently, “What’s going on here, eh?”

Shaw didn’t like the tone. He called back, “A man’s been killed—or didn’t you know?”

“What!” Another beam joined the first, flickered into Shaw’s eyes, then swept him from head to foot. The light turned away and there was a shocked ejaculation as the man bent and looked at the body. Behind the light Shaw made out a heavily built man with a big grey moustache and an air of authority.

Shaw said, “You’ve heard the guard’s report, surely?”

“No, I haven’t.” The man straightened. “Who’re you?”

“The name’s Shaw, Commander Shaw.” He explained in detail what had happened. The man tilted his bowler to the back of his head, rubbed his forehead which was streaked with sweat and dirt.

He said gruffly, “Well, this is a right lark, this is. No one reported anything, far as I know. Driver contacted Earls Court, said the guard had stopped the train and he didn’t know why... the guard, ’e said, didn’t answer on the intercom, all ’e said was to get the current off, like, and then ’e went off the line. Driver asked us if ’e should leave the train and take a look. We said no, to stay where ’e was. Then we came along—” He broke off. “How long ago did the guard leave you?”

“Twenty minutes, roughly.”

“That’d give ’im plenty of time to get to Gloucester Road and report.” The man brushed a hand along his cheek. “Funny . . . wouldn’t ’ave ’opped it, not Jackson.”

Shaw said, “I wonder if he’s passed out on the line. If he’d hopped it, as you say. . . well, he’d have been seen coming off the line at Gloucester Road, surely?”

The man with the bowler hat shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not. If ’e wasn’t actually seen leaving the tunnel, no questions would have bin asked, not necessarily. Nothing unusual in staff going off duty, you know, leaving by the proper exit.” He scratched his head.

Shaw suggested, “He could have panicked. He was very upset. That’s why I thought he may have passed out, and I think—”

“I doubt ’e’d panic—or pass out. Wouldn’t be like Jackson, that wouldn’t. Jackson was on this train, see... that’s what makes it so queer. Solid as they come, Jacko is. Known him for years. One of the old sort.”

“Old sort?” Shaw looked sharply at the official. “How many years had you known him? He didn’t look to me much more than twenty-five or thereabouts, and not long in this country, either, I’d say.”

“Eh?” The man peered suspiciously at Shaw. “Jackson’s never been out of this country. Been a Londoner all ’is life—born and bred.”

“You’ve got it wrong, then. This man was a coloured immigrant.”

The man’s mouth opened. “Blimey. You sure of that?”

“I couldn’t very well make that kind of mistake.”

The official said grimly, his moustache seeming to bristle at Shaw, “Something does begin to smell a bit fishy, then. Jackson’s as white as your ’and—and I happen to know he was due for this train.”

“Couldn’t there have been a last-minute substitution?”

The man rubbed his jaw and tilted his head sideways to scratch below his chin. “I s’pose there must ’ave bin, but there’d ’ave to be a really good reason, if there was. . . look, sir, I reckon you’d best come on back with us and make a statement to the police, when we’ve picked up what’s left of that bloke. I’ll send one of my men along the other way in case the guard is still on the line.”

Shaw made a long statement, was himself cleared by the word of the elderly man who had been in his compartment; but it was a couple of hours before he could get away from the station and make his way home to the Gliddon Road flat in West Kensington. Dead tired and with a splitting head, he let himself in with his latchkey, walked into his sitting-room, and poured himself a stiff whisky. After that, he undressed and got into bed, but he didn’t sleep very well. He kept seeing that broken body on the track. He was beginning to think that perhaps it wasn’t so clear-cut after all, that the coloured guard, who had certainly ‘hopped it’ all right, hadn’t panicked in quite the way he’d thought at the time. And yet he would have sworn that lad was genuine. He’d been an educated man, far from being a mobster, in fact he’d seemed rather above the job he was doing really. And he hadn’t looked the sort to murder anyone.

Anyway, that was for the police to worry about now.

It seemed to Shaw that he’d been asleep no time at all when the telephone bell jangled out into the quiet flat. It made Shaw’s heart leap and he was wide awake on the instant. He reached out for the handset of the closed line to the Admiralty. As he did so, he glanced at his watch and saw that he’d overslept and it was ten o’clock already.

Since he’d joined the Outfit Shaw had developed some instinct which, deep inside him, always told him unmistakably when the ring of a telephone meant trouble; and this time he knew right away that there was something new lined up for him.

The closed circuit from Room 12 brought the prim, precise tones of Miss Larkin, Latymer’s confidential secretary.

“Good morning, Commander Shaw. Mr Latymer wishes to see you.” She gave a genteel cough. “May we expect you here as soon as possible, Commander?”

“Yes, Clarice, you may.”

There was a slight click of disapproval and Miss Larkin said, “Thank you very much, Commander Shaw.” Then the line went dead. Shaw grinned to himself as he swung his long legs out of bed and stood up in carpet-slippers. Clarice Larkin, in early middle age, had just one driving passion in her asexual life and that was her devotion to Latymer. All other men were treated exactly alike—with dampening coldness. The devotion was in a sense misplaced for Latymer was something of a misogynist, as well as being a diehard bachelor; but he completely filled a void in Miss Larkin’s otherwise meagre life—and when she said ‘we’ in her royal way she spoke for Latymer just as much as if the Old Man had been on the line personally, talking himself in that quiet, authoritative voice of his, the voice in which the quality of steel was never very far away. Shaw stopped grinning when he thought of Latymer.

He shaved and dressed quickly and had a scratch breakfast. He’d certainly overslept more than somewhat... and he decided that the juxtaposition of an urgent summons to the Chief, and the events of last night, was just a little too much to be due to coincidence.

It wouldn’t be long before he found out.

Slowly Shaw climbed the broad staircase of the old Admiralty building on the Horse Guards, feeling, as he always felt just before an assignment got under way properly, that cold nagging pain at the pit of his stomach, the legacy of the ulcer which had cut short his seagoing career as a very junior officer years before and had projected him into the atmosphere of intrigue and danger that surrounded the big jobs carried out by the Special Services agents of the Naval Intelligence Division.

Walking into the secretary’s room he met the impersonal stare of Miss Larkin.

She said, “Oh—Commander Shaw. Mr Latymer wanted to see you the moment you arrived. He’s been here for some hours himself.” There was a slight stress on the word “moment,” and she glanced at the green Connemara marble clock, her expression and the very way she held her stiff figure as she twisted round to look at it managing somehow to convey disapproval. She pressed a switch on the intercom box, spoke briefly and crisply, and then Latymer’s voice said; “Send him in, Miss Larkin.”

Shaw moved over to the door.

That door was marked simply:
Mr G. E. D. Latymer
. Shaw, who had been a party to the close secrets of state after a certain bomb had gone off years ago in Eaton Square and left ‘Mr Latymer’ scarred for life, often thought that a lesser man than the Chief would never have for so long survived the gall of having to pretend to civilian status in the Admiralty. The night of the bomb, a high-ranking officer of the Admiralty Staff had been blown up and left for dead by agents of the other side to whom he had become too dangerous to live. He had, in fact, been within a fraction of an inch of death when Shaw had found him; and it had been thought expedient, prudent in the circumstances of the time, to allow these men to believe that they had in fact made the kill. This had been done with the aid of sheer cunning and the Official Secrets Act under which, when the officer was out of danger, a certain plastic surgeon had worked his miracles of physical transformation... and Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Charteris, K.C.B., D.S.O. and two bars, D.S.C., youngest officer ever to attain that rank, had become ‘Mr Latymer.’ The fact that he had no family whatever living had made the thing, to that extent, easy. Only a handful of men apart from Shaw—men who had since all retired from the Service or politics—knew that Sir Henry Charteris lived on and had, under his pseudonym, returned, after months of illness and recuperation, to the Naval Intelligence Division, taking over again in due course his old job as Chief of Special Services—a job which few people even knew still existed at all.

Shaw knocked, and entered the sumptuous room, his feet sinking deeply into the thick pile of a fitted carpet. A bar of sunlight came through the big window, turned the old shagreen surface of Latymer’s vast, beautifully polished desk to green-gold. Latymer was sitting there squarely, hands flat on the desk before his thick, powerful body, arms straight as though he was thrusting himself backward. The pugnacious face was stormy, thunderous. That face seemed, and not for the first time, almost Churchillian—and the steely green eyes, so clear and direct, bespoke the seaman still. Or perhaps that was only because Shaw
knew
. The disguise, in fact, held good, would go on holding good to those who hadn’t known Sir Henry intimately in the old days.

Latymer’s deep voice rumbled out. “Well, Shaw. A very good morning to you—and sit down.”

Shaw took the chair opposite the desk. Latymer reached out for a big round ebony ruler, which he picked up and held like a sceptre pointed at the agent. He said abruptly, “I dare say you’ve guessed what this is all about.”

Hard eyes stared right into Shaw.

“Something that happened last night, sir?”

“Exactly.” There was a snap in Latymer’s tone. “I know all about it, so you needn’t explain. Scotland Yard’s been in touch and so has the Foreign Office—simply because you got yourself involved. It didn’t occur to you to make a report yourself, evidendy.” Thick white brows came down in a line over the scarred pink face, and the chin jutted, rock-like. “Why?”

Shaw flushed, recognizing the danger signals, but he met the Chiefs eye. He said evenly, “It didn’t occur to me because there was nothing whatever to suggest the department might be implicated, sir. As far as I was concerned it was either a suicide or an accident, and as such it was purely a police matter.”

“H’m. I see.” Latymer was still frowning; outwardly—and only outwardly, for it was all part of the act as a fussy senior Civil Servant—a little pompous. “And that’s all you have to say?”

“That’s all, sir.” It was always best to stand up to the Old Man.

“I see.” Latymer’s face relaxed into pink folds and he gave a very faint grin. “All right, my boy. Daresay I’m just being wise after the event, as a result of being contacted by the Foreign Office.” Slowly, he rolled the heavy ruler in his stubby-fingered hands, stared across the room towards the tall windows looking down on to Horse Guards Parade, where ordinary men and women went about their normal daily business, quite unmindful of the life-and-death decisions so often taking in this quiet, opulent room above their careless heads, decisions which had their effect throughout the world, spreading like a big ship’s wash from Latymer’s desk. There was, Shaw fancied, something strange in the Old Man’s eyes this morning, a kind of far-off look, and more than a hint of puzzlement. After a few moments Latymer turned towards