Cross of Fire (28 page)

'My research showed up that Dawlish is heavily involved
in the armaments trade.'

'You mentioned that to him?' Rosewater asked casually.

'Yes I did. And he got very uptight.'

'Probably because he's running down that side of his
business. End of the Cold War, and all that. He's still got plenty of other golden eggs in his basket.'

'Like his underwater exploration of the sunken village up
at Dunwich?' Paula suggested.

Rosewater sipped at his champagne, took his time over reacting to her sudden change of subject. He put down his
glass, fingered the stem. Then he shook his head and smiled as he looked at her, his eyes moving up from her slim waist
to her eyes.

'He's losing money on that, I'm sure. It helps his image
as a man mad keen on
conservation. Who knows, perhaps he is just that. Must make a change from business and the wheeling and dealing he's devoted his career to.'

'I suppose you're right.' Paula checked her watch. 'After
a quick lunch I have to get back to town. Are you staying
on - still trying to find out who murdered poor Karin?'

'I'll be corning to London myself in a few days. Tell
Tweed he can get me at Brown's Hotel if he needs me.
Prior to that, here at the Brudenell. Now, before you go and
leave me all alone maybe we could have a quick lunch
together.'

'There's a very good pub up the High Street called the Cross Keys.'

'Let's eat here. I need something substantial to keep me
going. Must be the cold weather ...'

As he escorted her to the dining room Paula had the odd feeling Rosewater had given her a clue. She was damned if she could recall at the moment what it had been.

Newman and Marler had a ploughman's lunch at the Cross
Keys when they drove back
from the forest where the
chopper had attacked them. Butler and Nield followed them
in, took another table as though they were on their own.
Their normal procedure when they were guarding someone.

'We have company.' Newman whispered after he'd
ordered. 'Large table on our right. Five of them. The ugly-
looking customer who seems to be the boss is Brand. I heard
Dawlish call him that after he left us.'

'Oh, I've made the acquaintance of Mr Brand already,'
Marler replied, talking in a normal tone. 'He's the chappie
who bet me I couldn't shoot clay pigeons out of the sky.'

The burly man who sat with his back to them, his shaggy
hair touching his collar, turned slowly round, his chair
scraping the floor. Under thick eyebrows he stared at Marler
and grinned unpleasantly.

'And took five hundred nicker off you, you lousy shot.'

'Didn't quite score a hundred per cent, did I?' Marler
agreed, quite unruffled by Brand's aggressive manner.

'A hundred per cent?' Brand swept a large hand to draw his four rough-looking companions into the argument. 'This ponce couldn't hit a barn door from six feet away.'

Newman caught on to the situation. Marler had first
encountered this tribe of thugs at the Cross Keys. They had undoubtedly heard of the fiasco with the chopper, had come
here on the off-chance they'd see Marler again. They wanted
revenge. Time to intervene.

'One thing, Brand, I could hit you from a distance of six feet, which is about the distance between us now.'

'Is that so, creep?'

Brand shoved his chair back, stood up slowly. There was movement among his companions who started to get out of
their chairs. Butler stood up, hoisted the rubber cosh he kept
in a special pocket in his raincoat. Walking to the table, he
tapped one thug on the shoulder with the cosh.

'Anyone here who wants his skull cracked? All he has to
do is try and stand up. Better stay sat down, gentlemen.

Leave it between the two of them. Fair's fair. Don't you
agree?'

There was something menacing in the way Butler stood,
six feet tall, well built, slapping the cosh into the palm of his
left hand. He was smiling as he kept looking round the
table. Movement ceased. Brand edged towards Newman.

Newman remained seated, elbows on the table, hands clasped under his chin. Brand's right hand whipped forward, grabbed his plate of half-eaten food, tipped it on to
the floor. He grinned unpleasantly again.

'Now you'll have to eat off the floor. Expect you're used to it. Most dogs are.'

'That remark is a trifle provocative,' Marler commented.

Brand's right hand clenched, he aimed a piledriver blow at Newman's jaw. There was a blur of movement. Newman
was standing, his chair thrown back on the floor. Brand's
fist had missed its target. Newman's stiffened left hand hammered down on the bridge of Brand's prominent nose.
He staggered back, eyes filled with tears of pain.

Newman followed him, slammed his right fist into the exposed jaw. Brand hurtled backwards, hit the counter,
collapsed in a heap below it, motionless. The man sitting to
the right of Brand's empty chair started to get up. New
man's hand pressed his shoulder, forced him back into his
seat.

'If you want trouble you can have it. But I'm ex-SAS. I'll
try not to kill you, but accidents happen...'

Which was true, Marler thought. Newman had survived an SAS course when writing an article on the unit. The thug
subsided, muttered something but remained seated. At the
far side of Brand's table another man started to get up.
Nield shoved him down, hauled the chair from under him.
As the thug toppled backwards Butler's right forearm struck him in the face, increasing the momentum. The back of the
man's head hit the floor and he lay still. Nield checked his
neck pulse.

'Still breathing. He may have a headache when he wakes
up...'

A waitress came rushing out, horrified. Newman took a banknote from his wallet, handed it to her.

'As you saw, they started it. Here's something to cover
any damage. Sorry about the food on the floor. A decent tip out of that should make you feel a bit better.'

'Thank you.' the waitress said, glancing at the size of the
banknote. 'They're regular. I'd never have believed it.'

'I should ban them in future.' Newman advised. 'Their table manners leave something to be desired ...'

Accompanied by Marler, he walked out of the rear door
across a small garden to where they had parked his car. Beyond the promenade a nor'easter was blowing up. The
grey sea heaved and rolled with huge waves working
themselves up into turbulence. Butler and Nield had melted out of sight through the front door.

Newman pulled up the collar of his trenchcoat, stared
along the deserted front. Aldeburgh was strange and quaint.
To his right old houses joined together lined the front,
rooftops stepping up and down. At the crest of the shingle
beach were several winches - used to haul in the few fishing
boats which still operated out of Aldeburgh. No harbour.

'You chose the Cross Keys hoping for a roughhouse?' Marler suggested.

'Not really.' Newman replied as they settled themselves
in the front of the Mercedes. 'But I was curious to see
whether Brand and his henchmen did turn up - since you'd
told me that was where you first met the ugly ape.'

'They did turn up.'

'Which is significant. Dawlish has just made his second blunder. First, when he sent the chopper to attack us in the
forest. Second when he sent them to beat the hell out of us back there - to discourage us from coming back.'

'I think I can guess the significance.'

'The fact that we were seen outside that armaments factory hidden away in the forest. Something secret and weird is going on there. Dawlish has shown his hand.'

'So I check out the place again - at closer quarters - on
another occasion.'

'We
check out the place later.' Newman was driving away
from the front, turning into the High Street, heading out of town. 'Right now we're returning to London.'

'I prefer operating on my own.' Marler insisted.

'We'll let Tweed decide. The next priority is to talk to
him, report in detail what has happened. He might fit some of it into other data he's keeping inside that brainbox head.
And don't forget the fox we have in the boot. It won't last for ever and I want an expert analysis of what killed it...'

Isabelle Thomas was thinking of Newman as she drove her Deux Chevaux through Bordeaux in the early afternoon of
the same day. She slowed down as she approached the apartment of her mother, looking everywhere at all the
parked cars. She was looking for a vehicle with a man - or
men - sitting in it.

Now she had disobeyed Newman's firm warning to keep
out of Bordeaux she kept seeing the Englishman in her mind. She thought he'd be furious at what would seem a
trivial reason for taking this risk. But she'd remembered the
brooch she had left behind in
the apartment, the precious
brooch given to her by Joseph, her dead fiance.

Poor Joseph. He had committed suicide, jumping into the
river Gironde with weights attached to his ankles, and all because he thought he was deformed, a cripple with horri
bly stretched thumbs after hanging in de Forge's punish
ment well.

I'd like to kill de Forge, she thought. Slowly ...
agonizingly.

She knew Joseph had saved up about half a year's pay to
buy her that brooch. Her only memory of the man she had
expected to spend the rest of her life with. Taking one last look round, she swung into the alley and parked her car out
of sight round the corner at the end in the small yard. Just
as Bob Newman had done. He'd give her hell if he knew
about her trip back into the city.

She unlocked the back door, slipped quietly inside, shut
and locked it. The building seemed horribly quiet as she
slipped up the stairs, paused outside the apartment door. Before inserting the key she pressed her ear to the solid
panel, listening. Could they be waiting for her inside?

Taking out a pencil flash from her handbag, she shielded
it with the palm of her other hand, switched it on and
examined the lock. No sign that anyone had tampered with
the
lock. I'm paranoid, she thought. Inserting the key she
opened the well-oiled door silently, closed it with care,
slipped on the security chain. Now she was safe.

To ease the tension she leaned against the door, pushed her mane of titian hair back over the knee-length green coat she was wearing against the bitter cold. The apartment felt like a morgue. Not a happy analogy, she told herself. Show
some guts.

Without switching on any lights she moved across the
gloomy room to the tall windows overlooking the street one
floor down. Mid-afternoon and it was almost dark outside. The sky was a sheet of lead pressing down on the shabby
city. Bloody November.