Killer in the Shade Read online

  She hesitated, listening to the strident sound of the telephone.

  ‘Well, go on,’ he said. ‘Or do you want me to talk to him?’

  She walked into the hall, where the phone was on a narrow table with a couple of local phone directories. He heard her say, ‘Who?’ and some seconds later, ‘Oh, my God!’ and he stood frowning, his back to the French windows, his thoughts milling in his head. He wanted to go into the hall and snatch the receiver from her, but he knew that wouldn’t change bad news, if that’s what she was being told.

  He heard the phone click as the connection was broken after some muttering that he could not translate into words. She came into the room and almost collapsed into a chair. She looked shaken.

  He stood looking at her, not saying anything because he had no wish to learn whatever she had been told a second earlier than necessary.

  It was bad.

  That much was imprinted on her face. She had been shocked and she looked like a woman suffering mentally and physically, which was not a pleasant sight.

  When she spoke her voice was low-pitched and came to him like a husky whisper that belonged to a stranger.

  ‘That was Brian’s solicitor. He’s been arrested and is likely to be charged with being an accessory to attempted murder.’

  He stared down at her, his face muscles stiff and a chill crawling down between his shoulder-blades.

  ‘In what name?’

  ‘His own. They had his damned fingerprints on file, and there was no sense in lying. They’ve got him. All he could do was ask for a call to this lawyer, and tell him to let me know at once. Brian’s saying nothing. Sitting pat.’

  ‘Rennie will be grabbed when he comes calling.’

  She shook her head. ‘Our coloured friend is also in custody. Apparently both Brian and Rennie were caught red-handed.’

  ‘How the hell do you mean, Beryl?’

  ‘In our place. They’d climbed over the garden fence and were grabbed. You know what this means?’

  ‘Oh, I know. Peel’s out on his own. He’ll ring our place, then next door, and he’ll try to contact Jackson Rennie and will get nothing from all three. He probably did early this morning or even late last night. Checking. He’s mad on checking — thank God! So he’ll put the other plan in operation because I made it possible by telling him how. Then he’ll come down here and we’ll take off. That’ll be tonight.’

  ‘Tonight!’

  She was out of the chair and on her feet. The colour had not returned to her face and she was still twisting her hands together as though she could not keep them still. But she was recovering. It was demanding a great effort, but it was one not beyond her powers. There was a great deal of resilience in his wife. She was as pliant as whipcord.

  ‘Of course. The only thing I don’t understand is accessory to attempted murder. You understand what that implies?’

  ‘Hackley’ — she started violently as realization came to her suddenly — ‘isn’t dead.’

  ‘So he can talk.’

  ‘About us, Cecil.’

  ‘And plenty more besides.’

  ‘But what about Brian?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘What about him?’ It was a cold and callous refusal to acknowledge there was anything to be discussed.

  ‘You can’t leave him — just do nothing.’ The protest faded before it was spoken. The look on Cecil Weddon’s face had nothing ambiguous about it.

  ‘I’m going to do plenty. I’m getting the hell out of this place as soon as Peel gets here. And you’re going to do something too.’

  He saw that she understood, but he went on to spell out his meaning with brutal simplicity.

  ‘I’ll be heading for mid-Channel. Peel may try to be clever and keep me at the end of a gun. But when I cut the engine you’ll be ready.’

  She still said nothing.

  ‘You’ll shoot him in the head and you’ll do it with your eyes open, Beryl, to make sure you don’t miss. Then we’ll tie an anchor to his feet and give the mackerel a treat.’

  All she said was, ‘I asked that solicitor if bail could be put up for Brian, and he said there wasn’t a chance if they go ahead with the charge, and he thought the odds were that they would.’

  ‘Of course they will. This is what Drury has been waiting for, and that damned fool of a brother of yours has to give him a chance. I can’t think why the hell Rennie agreed to be so bloody stupid as to attempt to break into our place.’

  ‘Can’t you?’ she said calmly. ‘I can. Those three LP records with calypsos and bongo music that Brian loaned me belong to Rennie. They’ll be smeared with his fingerprints.’

  She expected he would strike her.

  Instead he sat down and laughed.

  ‘So three LP records save us a hundred thousand pounds — Brian’s share, and give us a chance to collect Peel’s leaving us to get away with all the boodle.’

  His laughter became shriller.

  ‘Very, very sweet,’ he said, the words bubbling obscenely in his mouth.

  She listened and tried to make up her mind if she hated him enough to shoot him and let him share the anchor waiting for Humphrey Peel.

  While Beryl Weddon stood irresolutely toying with the idea of ridding herself of a man who had grown stale in interest and threatened to usurp the role of dictator in their curious marriage, a nondescript green van with scarred black wings passed Basingstoke on the by-pass at a steady forty miles an hour, allowing all other traffic heading towards London to pass it. The green van drew level with the Hook turn-off and another vehicle turned on to the London road and began to overtake it. The car behind was a grey Jaguar with a number-plate suggesting it had a fair mileage chalked up on the dash-board.

  As it overtook the green van with the Devon number-plates the Jaguar seemed to lose speed, but picked up again when the road was clear. It was passing the green van when the driver spun the wheel to the near side. The man behind the wheel of the green van turned his head in jerked surprise, saw a face concealed behind a stocking mask and another with whiskers and a large pair of dark-lensed spectacles, and started to yell, but the sound did not clear his throat. The van was smacked hard and turned off the road and into a long row of bushes. The engine stalled, and the van’s driver shouted, ‘Bert — look out!’ to the man sitting with the sacks behind him.

  What happened next was speedy, dramatic, and executed with a professional attention to detail.

  The man with the stocking mask coshed the van driver, ran to the rear doors as Bert opened them, and beat him over the head. As Bert collapsed the man in the large dark spectacles and wearing a Cossack-type blouse with a swinging metal chain drooping from around his neck started hauling at the sacks. Inside three minutes the sacks were in the Jaguar, which was backing towards the road. The gears meshed grindingly and then the grey car was headed back for the Hook turn-off.

  It ran into a side lane and halted behind a black family saloon. Forty seconds later the sacks were in the saloon’s boot, the stocking mask had been removed, the cosh had been tossed in a ditch, and the driver had changed his jacket simply by turning it inside out. The other man, the one keen to handle the sacks, had removed his dark glasses, donned an overcoat, and drawn a cap down over his face after peeling off his moustache and sideboards.

  ‘Okay, Micky?’ he asked.

  Micky Hanlon, a man born with a love of violence for its own sake, laughed in the back of his throat. He hadn’t been so happy since he had broken out of Walton Jail and cast the dust of Liverpool streets from his shoes.

  ‘Okay, Humph.’ He almost sang his assurance.

  The saloon cleared the lane and headed for Farnham and the Portsmouth Road. Before long it was south of Godalming and making another steady forty miles an hour. This time in the direction of Chichester. Micky Hanlon turned into a car-park at Midhurst and produced cigarettes while they both studied the immediate scenery. It was a free car-park, with no attendant, and at a suitable moment Micky leisurely climbed
from the saloon, approached a beige two-door Viva, and with a quick jab of his elbow broke the window on the driver’s side, opened the door, rolled down the broken window, climbed in, and unfastened the door on the other side and rolled the seat forward.

  By this time his companion was passing in the first sack. It took Micky and his sheath-knife a full seventy-five seconds to cut the ignition leads and connect them free of the ignition lock. He got out unhurriedly, lifted the bonnet, and tugged the starter lead. The warm engine purred dutifully. Micky slammed the bonnet down, got in again behind the Viva’s wheel, and backed the beige car from its slot.

  ‘Looks a nice place, Midhurst,’ Micky said condescendingly as he drove carefully through the small country town.

  His companion grunted. His eyes were closed.

  ‘You got one of your headaches, Humph?’ he inquired with excessive casualness.

  ‘Yeah. It’s bad. If it doesn’t go I’ll have to take another couple of pills.’

  The words had a short, chewed-up sound in the mouth that was almost as shut as the eyes above it.

  ‘Do that, Humph. Yes, do that. Or better still, try to get some sleep. Do you good.’

  Micky took his eyes from the rear-view mirror and glanced down and back across his left shoulder to the bags pushed down on the Viva’s floor. He allowed his glance to linger on the brown-paper carrier bag on the back seat. He knew what was wrapped in newspaper in the carrier. He should. He had removed the jewels from three places that had been chosen by the man who was suffering an acute headache.

  Micky Hanlon brought his gaze back to the road in front of the Viva. He too was indulging in very personal thoughts that centred on the possibility of murder making him a man who didn’t have to worry about the future.

  Not if he could make that redhead see things his way, and he thought he could. He knew for a fact that she didn’t give a damn about her husband, not the way a dutiful wife should.

  Or even a dutiful woman who wasn’t a wife but liked a man’s company at night.

  Micky smiled at that thought. It was even more pleasing than thoughts about violent persuasion and big wads of currency to stuff in his pockets. He had only seen her once. That was when she was with her husband and that Vic Clayson character Humph was determined to chill because he had a grudge against the bastard. Jackson Rennie said it was something about Clayson shopping him.

  Well, that could make a man want to kill. He could understand that. Though it was a waste of time being too damned clever about it, like getting into that place Holly Lawn and unlocking a cabinet of fancy knives, sticking one in Clayson’s back, and then putting the key of the locked cabinet in a dead man’s pocket, just so the police could find the fingerprint of another dead man.

  Micky Hanlon was a realist. To him a man had to be sick in the head to pull a caper like that. Either that or damned sure of himself.

  He cast a side-glance at the man with eyes closed under the down-drawn peak of his cap, to avoid the sunlight hitting them through the windscreen.

  Maybe a man could be both sick in the head and sure of himself. That was something to think about, something that created a real problem for a man who had to solve it if he wanted to get anywhere far enough away to feel comfortable at having made the effort. Thought of the redhead came back to him.

  Humph had pointed out Clayson and told him that he planned to repay a long-owing debt and at the same time make monkeys out of the police, but he hadn’t really been listening. He had been staring at the redhead, and then she had looked up over Clayson’s shoulder and their eyes had met and held. Not for long, but then time didn’t matter. What they had said to each other had been instantaneous. Her husband had looked up and she had tried to act resentful of a man staring across the floor of a lounge bar at her, but he knew that was only for the husband’s benefit.

  What he had said to her in that swift silent glance was precisely what she had said to him. Moreover, it hadn’t been said in words. Words couldn’t express what both had known. It was like seeing death and realizing in that instant that a whole life had ended with that moment, which was fixed in time before the person who had died was born.

  Micky Hanlon dragged his left wrist across his mouth after running his tongue over dry lips. He didn’t want to think this kind of thoughts. They didn’t make a man comfortable. But then he had to think them because that was what thinking about the redhead did to him, started his mind wandering in directions where she was an influence.

  Like killing Humph when the time came. That meant Cecil Weddon had to go, but then he knew she wouldn’t worry about that. She would be an accommodating woman when she was on the receiving end of what she desired. He knew that about her although he had not spoken a word to her.

  What puzzled him and created an unease he refused to admit could grow to acute discomfort was his ignorance of what had put that sheen in her eyes that was more eloquent than spoken words. It amounted to unqualified invitation.

  He knew damned well what had made him look at her the way he had. That was simple enough to understand. So simple it made laughter in the deeper silences of his being, so that he felt keyed up as though a drug had been pumped into his veins.

  ‘I’ll take a couple of my pills, Micky.’

  The quiet words spoken by the man he had thought asleep were so totally unexpected, dragging his mind back to the immediate present, that he gasped, aware that he had been holding his breath for no good reason except that he was excited.

  ‘Sure, Humph. Want me to pull up?’

  ‘Off the road, Micky. I’d best not be seen swallowing them.’

  He wanted to ask who the hell would see him tossing a couple of white pellets in the back of his mouth, but he kept silent and nodded. Peel didn’t look like boss man, but then it wasn’t his looks that gave him his real inches, but his head and the way he used it.

  He was the one man who thought of everything. Micky Hanlon was happy to go along with that. For the first time in his short life as a thoroughgoing thug and criminal he had teamed up with someone who had all the answers because he took the trouble to think everything right through. So Humphrey Peel planned and other men put those plans into execution under his supervision. That was fine by Micky Hanlon. He was no big brain and knew it. The only thing he wanted to plan was when to get rid of Peel.

  That would be when he had his hands on the boodle.

  Peel was already running out on a string of others who had been recruited to operate with him, then disperse until the next call came.

  Decentralization, he had called it. Sometimes he talked like a bloody shop steward. But that was all right, too, as long as his brain went on with its constructive planning. Like now, with a boat that the redhead’s brother had stashed away somewhere on Selsey’s eastern shore of Chichester Harbour. Peel hadn’t thrown a panic when the news of the power workers’ strike ending had come over the radio.

  He already knew of the car, the stolen Jag, kept in a lock-up, of the green van with the Devon number-plates, and how he would grab the old notes being returned to London from West Country bank branches. He could switch plans like a computer operator pressing a button.

  That’s what made him a man to be kept alive until it was all over.

  ‘This do you?’ Micky’s foot was on the brake pedal, his left hand was pointing to a grass verge.

  ‘Better farther up, where the trees are.’

  Perfection, rumbled Micky complainingly to himself. Always wanting perfection. And then deep in those silent areas of his Celtic darkness there was again laughter, because that was what he admired in the man, and depended on to the limit — his insistence on perfection. Leaving nothing to chance unless he had calculated that chance as totally in his own favour.

  It was a system that couldn’t be beaten.

  Who the hell else would leave a supposedly dead man’s fingerprints for the police to find, so they wouldn’t know what the hell they were up against?

  He had mistrusted t
hat joke, but now he was finding in it a perverted pleasure. After all, he was going to do some turning of the tables himself.

  When it suited him, of course.

  Only then.

  Micky felt suddenly very good. The sun had an extra brightness. He was on his way out from cop trouble for ever, and it was a pleasant feeling, like going on a new sort of holiday, and that was what it was — a new kind of holiday. One that would last the rest of his life.

  The bubbling laughter came back, surging through his deep silences until he felt awakened in a way he never had before. It was a wonderful feeling. It made him want to sing.

  Instead, he whistled.

  ‘Shut up,’ said the man beside him. ‘Keep your mind on your driving. No time to relax now, Micky. Just do what I say. Under those trees, and nose in. You can never be too careful. Never.’

  Micky Hanlon stopped whistling, concentrated on a neat turn into the trees, flasher winking like mad although the road was clear of traffic in either direction.

  ‘I’ll take a leak first,’ Peel said. ‘You coming?’

  Micky nodded. ‘Might as well,’ he said, as though he had a mind to do the other a favour.

  And so he was, but he didn’t know it. Nor was there any expression on Peel’s face to suggest he was aware of the fact. But then it was almost the face of a stranger without the dark whiskers that had been removed from it.

  They went into the trees, and Micky unzipped his flies. He turned to say something because he always felt constrained to talk when relieving himself in company. It was something the other man had noted and remembered.

  But he didn’t say it. He didn’t have time. In the split second awareness raged over and through him, helping to paralyse his nerve centres, the gun in Peel’s hand coughed lethally through its six inches of metal silencer. The bullet tore into Micky Hanlon’s brain through a suddenly red ragged hole over his right eye.

  Peel left him where he fell, with his flies unzipped, looking like a new-style obscene clown in a very modern version of the commedia dell’arte.