Game Without Rules (11 page)

“There’s a public telephone three hundred yards down the main road,” he said. “Get there as quick as you can – ask for this number – and just say the word ‘
Action.
’”

Leonard, who was the younger and more spirited of the two, said, “Couldn’t we get after those bastards first?”

“No,” said Mr. Calder. “You’d be in the way. Just do what I told you. And quick.”

As they lumbered off down the road, he got back into his van. He could be heard coming, but that couldn’t be helped. Speed was now more important than surprise. Anyway, he had no intention of driving up to the house. He had long ago located a field track, usable in dry weather, which led off the lane to a point behind the barn.

The farmhouse being old and its walls thick, Richard, who was writing in the drawing room, had heard nothing of the goings-on in the kitchen. He did, however, hear heavy foot-steps coming along the stone-floored passage, footsteps which could not belong to Mrs. Mason or Paula, He had time to get his gun out. It wasn’t a bad shot for a first attempt. He missed Cotter who led the rush through the door, but hit the man behind him in the knee.

Cotter, steadying himself, shot Richard through the right shoulder, knocking him off his chair onto the floor. Then he picked up his gun and took no further notice of him.

“We’ll look after Lawrie in a moment,” he said. “We’ve got to grab the girl before she runs for it.

It was unfortunate for them that, being in a hurry, they came out of the door and into the yard together. Cotter realised their mistake when he heard the girl’s voice from behind them. She said, “This gun’s loaded, both barrels. Even I couldn’t miss you from here.”

The two men turned. Cotter’s gun was back in its shoulder holster. The other man had not drawn his. And the girl was holding a twelve-bore, double-barrelled sporting rifle.

“Into the barn,” she said.

They moved slowly ahead of her. Cotter looked at the door as he went through to see if he could slam it, but it was too heavy and had been firmly wedged open with a stake.

“Down that end,” she said. “Now. Take your guns out slowly and drop them on the ground.”

The two men had spread themselves out. It was a deliberate movement. They knew very well that the odds were still on their side. As Cotter pulled his gun and dropped it onto the floor in front of him, he let it fall even farther to one side, and shuffled after it. The other man did the same. The gun barrel wavered. They were now so far apart that one shot could not hit both of them.

“What are you planning to do?” said Cotter, edging over a little farther. He was now almost up against the side wall of the barn. “Keep us here till it’s dark?”

He had seen the side door of the barn move and guessed that it was the fourth man, the driver of the van, coming to lend a hand. Keep her attention, and the driver could jump her from behind. No point in shooting her.

Paula saw the danger out of the corner of her eye. She swung round and fired both barrels. The first missed altogether. The second hit the driver full in the chest. As she fired, she dropped the gun, put out a hand without hurry, laid hold of the steam hosepipe and flicked open the tap.

A jet of scalding steam, thin and sharp as a needle, hissed from the nozzle and seemed to hang in the air for a moment, then hit Cotter full in the face as he stooped for his gun. He went forward onto his knees. The hose followed him down, searing and stripping.

The second man got hold of his gun. Mr. Calder, standing square in the doorway of the barn, shot his legs from under him with his tommy-gun.

When the carload of Special Branch men arrived, they found Mr. Calder in the barn. The officer in charge was the same dark-haired young man whom Mr. Behrens had encountered at the police station. He introduced himself to Mr. Calder as Superintendent Patrick Petrella.

“We got your message,” he said, “and passed it on to London. Behrens will have rounded up Smythe and the others by now. I don’t think they’re going to give us much trouble. Cotter was the mainspring of the whole thing.”

“He’s a busted mainspring now,” said Mr. Calder. “There’s going to be a lot of clearing up to do. I’ve got three wounded men for you. And two dead.”

“I’ve yet to learn,” said Petrella, “that it’s a crime to resist an armed attempt at kidnapping. She’ll get a vote of thanks.”

He moved across to the other end of the barn where two shapes lay, covered by sacks. “Which is Cotter?”

“This one,” said Mr. Calder. “He isn’t a very nice sight.”

“Good God,” said Petrella, shaken out of his phlegm, “What did she do that with?”

“She used a high-pressure steam hose,” said Mr. Calder. “Cotter made a mistake. He killed her dog and mutilated it. I know just how she felt. I’ve got a dog myself.”

Mr. Behrens adjusted his glasses, aligned his left foot against the telltale, raised the heavy brass dart until it was level with his eye and flipped it. As it left his hand the door of the public bar of the Lamb opened and a man came in.

Mr. Behrens’ opponents said, “Double four. Nice shot.”

The newcomer said, “Good God, if it isn’t Mr. Behrens.”

Mr. Behrens came out of the trance which affects a dart player trying for his final double, blinked and said, “I’ve got a feeling I ought to know your face.”

“No reason you should,” said the newcomer. He was a man in his early forties with hair already thinning and greying, a long thick nose and shrewd brown eyes. “When you last saw me I was fifteen and spotty.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Mr. Behrens. “Wait a minute. Talbot. No. Tabor.”

“Right, sir. Alan Tabor. And I hope I didn’t put you off your throw.”

“Not half you didn’t,” said his opponent. “If a bomb went off in the next room,
he
’
d
still get his double four.”

He put down the half pint of beer which was his tribute to Mr. Behrens’ skill. He didn’t really feel sour about it. But he was the local champion and for a week now he had been trying, with little success, to win a beer from Mr. Behrens. “I must be off. See you this evening, I hope.”

“You shall have your revenge this evening,” said Mr. Behrens. And then to Tabor, “Have you come in here for a drink, or to eat? If you’re going to have lunch, perhaps you’d care to join me? Or you may have people with you? I take it you’re motoring.”

“I’m alone,” said Tabor. “I’d love to have lunch with you. And I haven’t a car, I walked.”

“Then you must have walked a long way,” said Mr. Behrens. “Because there are few lonelier pubs in England than this one. That’s one of the things I like about it.”

“I come out here quite a lot from Ravenshoe,” said Tabor. “It’s a bit bleak now in winter. But you ought to see it in spring and summer.”

“I’ve seen it in spring
and
in summer,” said Mr. Behrens. “I’m one of Ruby’s most regular customers. Isn’t that right, Ruby?”

“That’s right,” said Ruby. “Spring and autumn. Like the rates. What’ll it be? There’s hot steak-and-kidney pie or cold beef.”

Resident guests were a rare occurrence at the Lamb, so Mr. Behrens and Mr. Tabor had the coffee room to themselves.

“You’re at the refinery, of course,” said Mr. Behrens. “When you mentioned Ravenshoe the penny ought to have dropped. After I had failed to teach you the rudiments of Latin, you went off and specialised in science, didn’t you? And got a science scholarship at Oxford?”

“They didn’t call it a scholarship,” said Tabor. There was an edge of bitterness in his voice, “Words like ‘scholarship’ are reserved for respectable subjects like Latin and Greek. But it came to the same thing – other people paid for my education. The odd thing was that the further I got, the more money people seemed willing to splash out.”

“Invest,” said Mr. Behrens with a crinkled smile. “Invest. Where did you go after Oxford?”

“Back to Leipzig. After that I
was
going to Moscow – but fate willed otherwise.”

“Of course. That would have been 1939. A pity.”

Mr. Behrens toyed with the idea of asking him what he had done during the war, but decided that it might be tactless. Instead he said, “I’ve always heard that Ravenshoe was an interesting place. You produce more than oil and petrol, don’t you?”

“Oil and petrol are almost a side line. We sell enough to pay our overhead. I suppose you wouldn’t care to look over it? You were always rather scornful of science, as I remember.”

“That was when I was twenty-five and you were seventeen,” said Mr. Behrens. “Our respective outlooks may have developed in the interim.”

“It really is rather a wonderful place,” said Tabor. “We can turn out end products which even five years ago no one would have associated with crude oil. Plastics, nylon stockings, paint, explosives.”

“I am prepared to admit,” said Mr. Behrens, “that modern science is capable of almost anything. But it has
not
turned out anything quite like Ruby’s, or her mother’s, steak-and-kidney pie.”

He regarded with a shade more than avuncular approval the trim but well-developed figure of the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house, who was approaching them with a loaded and steaming tray.

“That’s the Primary Distillation Unit,” said Tabor, pointing to something which looked like a church tower under repair. “We could climb the scaffolding if you want, but you won’t see any more from the top. The temperature’s kept constant at one thousand degrees – that’s nothing out of the way, of course, but it’s quite hot as refining processes go.”

He raked open one of the boiler-plate hatches and Mr. Behrens peered into an antechamber of the inferno. Gas, distilled from the oil, was carried around through pipes and ignited in a brick-kiln oven. The flames glowed white at the centre of the heat, tawny-red and orange around the outer edges. The roaring was still in his ears as he moved away.

“So you don’t call that hot?” he said.

“Chemically, no. We can produce ten times that heat. But, as a matter of fact, in a lot of ways it’s too hot. You see – look here, how much of this are you really understanding?”

“I’m with you so far, I think,” said Mr. Behrens. “You heat up the crude oil and distill off different products with different boiling points. Gas at the top, then petrol, after that paraffin and diesel – and asphalt at the bottom. And the whole process is commonly known as ‘cracking.’ Right?”

“Correct,” said Tabor. “But the trouble is that you can do a lot of harm to the crude oil if you have to heat it as high as one thousand degrees centigrade. On the other hand – it won’t crack at less.”

Mr. Behrens said, though whether jocularly or not it was hard to detect, “The Nazis had just the same problem, I believe. When interrogating prisoners, I mean. With some of them they had to use so much force to crack them that the prisoner disintegrated in the process.”

They were walking away from the distillation unit toward an affair shaped like a lopsided hourglass, with trimmings. Tabor checked for a moment in his stride, looked sideways at Mr. Behrens and said, with a shade of hesitancy in his voice, “That’s an odd analogy.”

They walked for a few steps in silence, and Tabor added, “Chemically, we overcome the difficulty in rather an ingenious way. We mix a catalyst with the fuel – usually china clay – then the mixture can be cracked at much lower temperatures. That’s the machine that does it”

Mr. Behrens stared at the squat apparatus. It had, he thought, an evil look. “I’ve heard oil-men talk about a ‘cat cracker,’” he said. “I’d no idea that was what it was.”

“There’s not a lot to see,” said Tabor. “No moving parts. No action. No excitement. It’s rather an efficient piece of apparatus, all the same.”

“It has a sort of feminine, yet feline, look about it, hasn’t it?” said Mr. Behrens. “I wasn’t only referring to its shape – although there’s something in that too. I meant its general appearance of dangerous docility. One has the feeling that inside those deceptive curves, processes of unsuspected ferocity are taking place.”

“You’re an odd chap,” said Tabor. But there was an undercurrent of affection in his voice.

“I should never have made a scientist,” agreed Mr. Behrens. “I am far too fanciful.”

A week later, Mr. Behrens and Mr. Tabor both happened to go up to London. Mr. Behrens went by train. He had an appointment with his bank manager. Tabor went by car. He also had an appointment.

Tabor parked his car in a side street near Paddington Station, walked back down the Harrow Road and turned into Saint Mary’s Terrace. This runs up to the canal, sometimes hopefully referred to as London’s Little Venice; on this bleak winter’s day, Saint Mary’s Terrace was an empty stretch of road beside a dirty reach of water.

There was only one human being in sight. He was a huge man, further enlarged by a tent-like overcoat, with a red face and a corona of white hair which ruffled in the breeze. Tabor hurried toward him, both hands outstretched. The big man awaited him impassively.

“Paulus!”

“My dear Alan.”

They shook hands warmly, Tabor looking into the older man’s eyes as if there was some reassurance he hoped to find there.

“I remember this place from my youth in London,” said Professor Paulus Mann, “When I suggested meeting you here, I visualised us sitting side by side on a bench watching the ducks in the canal, and the pretty barges going up and down. I had forgotten the time of year and the weather.”

“There’s a pub down there,” said Tabor. “Or there was ten years ago. They used to have an open fire in the saloon bar too.”

“Splendid,” said the professor. “We will sit all afternoon and talk.”

“Not in an English pub, you won’t,” said Tabor.

At about the same moment, Mr. Behrens was seated in the private office of Mr. Fortescue, the manager of the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank. The room was, in Mr. Behrens’ considered opinion, one of the most appalling in London. It seemed to have been designed by a sanitary engineer, being panelled – if such was the correct word – in three shades of brown porcelain. An elaborate chandelier sprouted from a coffee-coloured porcelain rosette; flowers in golden porcelain patterned the walls; and an enormous chocolate-coloured porcelain over-mantel lowered above a tiny fire.