There May Be Danger (28 page)

“It was Ellida's mother-complex stopped you,” said Kate in a dry, daring voice.

For the first time an angry and dangerous look came over the man's smooth broad face.

“What?”

“It's no use your talking like Dr. Barnardo to
me
, Mr. Morrison. I heard all you said when you came into the house just now. And I haven't any intention of telling you where the boys are!” Kate felt cold, but her cheeks were burning. As she spoke she thought she heard a cautious footstep below in the courtyard. Colin! Would he look up? Would he see the light in the attic, if he did? Or did the scaffolding and chimney hide the opening in the wall-frame?

“Now see here,” said Morrison, approaching slowly closer to her, and as he slowly approached, his eyes seemed to become slowly narrower, his lips thinner, his nostrils turned into white slits, and curious lines to develop at each side of the bridge of his broad jutting nose, so that his face seemed simplified into a stage mask. Kate drew back, flattened herself against the wall. Would she have spoken so bravely, had she foreseen the result of her speech? She was, for a moment, terror-stricken at the change in the man's face, and could have screamed for help, had her voice remained with her. With parted lips and constricted chest-wall, like one in a dreadful dream whose effortful cries emerge as faint, stifled moans, she stared at him.

“Now see here. You waste my time.”

He was so close to her now that the scents that hung about him were as real to her as the sight of him and terrifying, at such a moment, in their commonplaceness, the scents of strong tobacco, soap, menthol, and warm human breath. He made a sudden quick movement and she felt the hard barrel of the pistol against her ribs.

“You take me to where those kids are. Make a move! Or I shoot you dead before you can count twenty. I'm not bluffing lady, don't you bank on it. I'm at that crisis in my history where it'd mean nothing to me to stretch out a dozen like you. Now!”

Oddly enough, the feeling of the hard pistol against her side braced Kate. This was reality, no kind of nightmare, and terrifying as was Morrison's hate-filled aspect, she knew that he was more terrified than she.

“All right,” said Kate. “I'll show you.”

“Ah!”

“No need to go down, though. I can show you from here, if you'll let me use my torch.”

She saw a look, first doubtful, as though he perceived a trap, then thoughtful, cross Morrison's face.

“It'd be quicker,” said Kate, with false carelessness. To flash a light from the open panel was her one hope of attracting Colin's attention. “I don't suppose the A.R.P. wardens will notice it, at this hour.”

“Okay,” said Morrison slowly.

“And then you'll let me go?”

“Sure, I'll let you go—when I've got the kids,” said Morrison at her shoulder. Kate already had her torch on and directed over the cross-beam into the night and was moving it about as though to find her bearings, praying that Colin was within sight.

“And you'd better not try to fool me.”

“I shouldn't be so silly,” said Kate lightly, with a hammering heart.

“No? I reckon I won't risk much on your sagacity, just the same, Where are they?”

“You see that gate in the field?”

“Well alongside it, just up the slope behind the barns, there's a kind of dingle,” said Kate, who had noticed this as she drove away yesterday in Major Humphries's car. “They're there...” She spoke slowly, drawing time out. Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you see anyone coming? No one coming, nothing coming, not even the morning.

The light of Kate's torch did not really reach to the dingle she was romancing about. She wondered that Morrison did not draw his own conclusion from this, and ask why she needed a torch to tell him the children were in the dingle, but he did not. He leant by her shoulder and let her move the feeble yellow light here and there, now illuminating sharply a patch of lichen on the stone chimney-stack so close to the wall and the pale coarse rope that fastened together an angle of the scaffolding around it, now flitting ineffectually across the weather-boarded barns beyond the farmyard, now vanishing to a little haze in the far field, now flashing past a farm cart loaded with bracken that stood with supine shafts resting on the ground, while Kate listened with all her ears for even the tiniest sound in the house to show that Colin was on his way to her: but nothing came, not even the creak of a stair under a stealing foot.

“Half-a-minute!” said Morrison at her ear. “This bird's-eye view of the premises you're giving me has put an idea into my head, young lady. What's in that demure-looking bracken cart out there—besides bracken?”

He had turned his own torch on as he spoke, but used it not to augment the light of Kate's but to study at close hand the change in her face. Her face did change—she knew it, she could not help it. A sort of stony indifferent look fell upon it which was not the true look of surprise. But something seemed to have hit her hard in the centre of her being, and she was not an experienced enough actress to show no sign of it.

“Aha!” said Morrison softly, switching off his torch and turning from the window. “I thought if I let you have your way, your torch would show me what you wanted to hide. It was as good as a lie-detector, lady, the way it jumped away whenever it got near that bracken cart. Thought you'd send me off on a chase down the dingle, didn't you? It was a good idea, but not such a good one.”

He stood and faced her with a tight and narrowed smile of triumph on his face. Kate brought her torch in and turned it on him. Had she really ever thought that face a friendly and a pleasant one? She looked at it with a thoughtful and solemn air, but she was not really thinking now. There was nothing left for her to think about. Was this then really the end of the adventure upon which she had so recklessly set out? And nothing she could do to avert the end? Nothing, except say brokenly and uselessly:

“Don't hurt the kids. What harm can they do you?”

The man's grin tightened. His nostrils went white as if he were angry.

“Think again, girl! They got tongues, haven't they? What would
you
do, if I let you go?”

What was the good of trying to placate this devil?

“Go to the police.”

“Or the Home Guard, eh? Wouldn't our friend Humphries just sparkle in the part of the man who puts his country before his love. Well, I'm not going to let you go, sweetheart! So what?”

“I might try to de-materialise.” Why reply at all to words which were only taunts? Well, because time, such little poor trickle of time as there was, was on Kate's side, not Morrison's.

“You might, indeed, but it would be a long study, and I ain't going to allow time for it,” said Morrison. “Good-bye, Donna Quixote de la Mancha! You haven't made such a great success of your own plans. But you've sure thrown the whole tool-box into the works of mine, so let that be your comfort—”

Kate tried not to shut her eyes. But the explosion banged them shut. Had he missed? Surely one does not hear and have time to speculate about, the explosion from the pistol which is aimed at one's own heart? Thought flies quickly, but not so quickly as this. There was a small crash on the floor.

Morrison's pistol was on the floor. Morrison's torch was on the floor, directing a bright beam at the toe of his brown canvas shoe, which was twisting slowly round, as though for some reason he had risen on his toes and were performing a right-about turn on them. Morrison himself, with an expression of strange, remote and glassy surprise upon his face, his hands clutched at his chest, was falling forwards, was on the floor. The posts and tie-beams, in the light of Kate's limply-swinging torch, seemed to sway and dip crazily, then, as her fingers tightened, righted themselves. A little darker piece of darkness detached itself from the rafters and went looping and swooping over the floor, appearing and disappearing. Dust rose slowly around the figure of Morrison extended quite still upon the dusty boards.

A smell like fireworks was in Kate's nose and throat. Colin, behind her at the open frame, said close to her ear:

“That was a near thing!”

At his voice, breathless and shaken, but so fresh and light in quality after the grating nasal tones of the man Morrison, the scene lost its nightmare quality for Kate. That was only a frightened bat, poor creature, not a swooping emanation of evil and the darkness. The queen-posts stood as rigid and upright as they had stood for centuries. She gave a little relieving sob.

“Poor Kate, I oughtn't to have left you alone, said Colin, climbing in. “It was all for nothing, too. The car's gone.”

“Oh Colin, the doors were all locked! And I left the pistol behind!”

“Take this one,” said Colin, nodding towards the weapon that lay on the floor out of reach of Morrison's outstretched, unmoving hand. Kate picked it up.

“Colin, he's not dead?”

“Indeed, he is,” said Colin gravely. “And we won't waste tears on him.”

“It seems so sudden and so ordinary. He was there, he was terrifying and now—”

“People of Baum's kind don't often die to slow music in their beds, I fancy.”

“Baum?”

“That was the name he went by in Rio. And it was his real name, I believe. He was a dealer in works of art, then, or posing as one. His real activities were those of a Nazi agent.”

“A German?”

“Yes, mostly. American-born.”

“Did you know him, Colin?”

“No, but I saw him several times in Rio, when I was there eighteen months ago.”

Colin, to Kate's impatience, went on his knees beside the dead man and started turning out his pockets.

“Oh,
must
you do that now, Colin?”

“Yes, I must. It's what I'm here for, apart from looking after you... In Rio, I thought spies and all that sort of thing were a great joke. But when I came across this chap in London almost as soon as I got home, calling himself Morrison and playing the philanthropist, he didn't seem a joke at all. I was almost sure it was Baum, but I wasn't quite sure until I tracked him up here and saw his wife. If I'd been sure, I'd've put the police on his track, of course. But he'd worked up a good disguise as the humorous American family-man, and I couldn't be sure enough.”

Colin examined the contents of an envelope he had taken from the dead man's pocket, and slipped it into his own.

“I've got something here he didn't intend to part with... I'm sorry if I've seemed a bit secretive, Kate. But I'd only just arrived here when you came on the scene, and I didn't want to drag you into danger, if there was going to be any. I didn't know you were going to dive straight in on your own account.”

“I didn't dive in, I crawled. Looking for Sidney. And what's going on here I still don't know, and don't care much. All I care about is getting those two kids safely out of this... Oh, listen, Colin! Isn't that a car?”

She looked out. The dimmed-down headlights of a motor car, like luminous antennae, were feeling their way down over the field.

‘Oh Colin! And those children! We're too late!”

‘We'll stay here for the moment,” said Colin softly, putting out the light. “Leave the first move to them. We've got them covered.”

Kate gripped Morrison's pistol, getting used to the cold, lifeless feeling of the thing in her hand. The car drew up outside the courtyard gate, not three yards from the bracken cart. The door slammed, and Rosaleen, an overcoat slung over her shoulders, got out and came into the cobbled court. A man of medium height followed her, a man in light trousers and dark jacket, wearing a dark felt hat at a rakish angle.

“I suppose that's the man I saw at Hymn's Bank,” breathed Kate.

The two stood a moment at the gate, then quietly crossed the yard.

“No light in the house,” said the man softly at the back door. “Can't see a crack of it. We'd better go carefully, Rosa, till we're sure things are O.K. There may be a frame-up.”

“Frame-up!” said Rosaleen scornfully. “The girl hadn't a gun, and she was alone! She came prancing in like a kitten asking for milk! If Doug and Ellida haven't managed to settle her, well—”

“All the same, go easy, Rosa. Subdue that temperament of yours. Let's go in quiet, and see what's going on.”

His voice died away as the two came into the house.

“Yes, that's the voice I heard at Hymns Bank,” whispered Kate. “Only—why do I think it sounds like a woman's voice, now? At Hymns Bank, I didn't think that. Oh! Colin! Is that—is he—?”

“The children's nurse,” murmured Colin. “She was a tall, deep-voiced sort of girl, wasn't she? Not a difficult make-up for a man, with that stiff collar and white muslin thing to hide his neck and ears.”

“A more difficult part to play than Major Humphries,” murmured Kate.

“Major Humphries? What's he got to do with it?”

“Nothing at all. I miscast this man, that's all,” whispered Kate, talking for the comfort it gave her, a little feverishly, and shivering, feeling both hot and cold with apprehension.

“Be ready,” whispered Colin. “I think they're coming upstairs.”

“Who the
hades
locked all these doors?” they heard Rosaleen's muffled voice cry excitably below. “Joe!”

A door was violently opened, and the voices rang clearer and hollow up the stairs.

“Shut up, Rosa,” said the man calmly. “We're searching the house, not playing question-and-answer. Up the next flight. Keep with me. There's something wrong here.”

Footsteps echoed woodenly in the unfurnished rooms below. “Come,” whispered Colin, his knee upon the frame of the open panel. “Follow me. Put the safety catch on your pistol.”

Kate's hands trembled.