Алистер Маклин - Borrowed Time

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Philpott said. ‘Give me a map, provide me with a car, and I’ll take care of the rest myself.’

Deerpaul looked shocked. ‘You would go there alone?’

‘Oh yes,’ Philpott said brightly. ‘I do find that I function better in the field if I don’t have to take anyone else’s presence into account.’

‘But I was thinking of the potential for danger.’

‘Oh, I’m still potentially dangerous, all right.’

Deerpaul laughed dutifully, but he still looked worried. ‘There is the most awful risk attached to visiting such a place as that farm on your own, Mr Philpott. I strongly advise you to wait until someone familiar with the territory can go with you.’

‘I simply don’t have the time.’

Deerpaul began to look very uneasy. ‘This is not right,’ he said. ‘Here you are, prepared to put yourself at hazard on behalf of this organization, and I can be of no help to you at all. Frankly, Mr Philpott, I feel terrible about this.’

‘Then try not to.’

‘Is there anything at all that I can do? After all, you have taken the trouble to come here–’

‘If you could let me have a summary of how much stuff, and what kind, goes through the farm in an average month…’

‘I have those figures to hand,’ Deerpaul beamed.

‘Then that would be a great help.’

‘Thank heavens.’

Deerpaul touched a button on an intercom and asked his secretary to bring in the latest estimates of black market dealing in the Vale of Kashmir.

‘Now you are sure this will help you, Mr Philpott? You are not simply humouring me in order to save my feelings?’

Philpott assured him the figures would be of great assistance. They would help, for a start, in putting Philpott to sleep later on. Nothing worked better on his insomnia than rows and columns of dry official figures.

The car supplied by Deerpaul’s office was mechanically sound and it handled very well on the rough half-formed roads between Jammu and the southern territory of the Vale of Kashmir. The suspension, on the other hand, was the hardest Philpott had ever withstood. At ten minutes to nine in the evening he drew up fifty metres from the perimeter fence of the farm, with an ache in his back that would take his New York chiropractor a month to put right.

He left the car locked up at the roadside and walked across wooded land in the direction of the farm. Deerpaul had provided a powerful MagLite torch but Philpott chose not to use it. Instead, he walked along in almost total darkness, making himself see. When he came out of the woods and was approaching the fence, he could make out the dull sheen of the wire against the surrounding blackness.

He stood by the fence for a while just listening. There were the sounds of animals, the rustle of leaves and grass in the soft breeze, an occasional small sound – bumps, the scraping of a chair on a stone floor – from the cottage at the centre of the farm. Nothing special, no indication of bustle or business. Everything he heard was consistent with a quiet, sleepy farm.

He walked along the fence, feeling for a gate, and eventually found one. It was a high double gate with two heavy padlocks. Philpott paused to consider if it would be worth his while to go over the fence. He decided to do it.

Back where he had first stood listening, there was a broken plastic bottle crate lying in the grass. He went back and found it and stood it on end close to the wire. When he climbed on it the crate dipped under his weight and creaked ominously, but it held.

He paused, licked the tip of his right forefinger and touched it to the top wire of the fence. The shock was severe enough to throw his hand away from the wire. He wet his finger again and touched the next wire. Nothing.

His leather gloves, as always, lay flat in his right inside jacket pocket. He put them on and gripped the top wire of the fence. The manoeuvre he was about to use was not one he would let any of his agents see him employ; it was ungainly and ergonomically unsound, and it would certainly make someone like Mike Graham laugh like a drain. It would make his doctor despair, because ever since Philpott’s heart attack a few years earlier, the old physician regularly complained that he didn’t take his health seriously enough. But the manoeuvre usually worked for Philpott, and for the moment that was all that counted.

He got up on his toes on the crate, then bent his knees sharply, keeping hold of the wire.

‘One.’

He breathed in, flexing his legs, pushing his shoulders as high as they would go.

‘Two.’

He repeated the move, stretching his back as far as he could, getting right up on his toes. He came down again and this time he crouched. He took a deep breath.

‘Three!’

He shot up, aiming himself into the air, pushing with his toes and pulling with his forearms. His body went up in an arc and sailed over the fence. He landed on his feet on the other side and sank to a squatting position.

When he was sure he had raised no alarms, he stood up. He brushed his jacket and began walking towards the dim lights of the cottage.

Halfway across the compound he heard a noise behind him. He turned and saw lights approaching. It was a truck, bumping over the stony ground between the perimeter fence and the road. Philpott dropped to the ground and flattened himself in the grass.

The truck stopped, someone got out to open the gates, then it rumbled through and stopped in front of the cottage. Philpott waited, listening for the sound of the gates being locked again. But no sound came from that direction. He noted that a clear escape route was now available should he need it.

As he lay there he saw someone being helped out of the back of the truck and led into the cottage. It looked as if there were two other people as well.

The cottage door opened, spilling out a fan of yellow light, then closed again. Philpott ran across the grass at a crouch.

He stood to one side of the largest of the three lit windows and peered in at the side. At a table, below an oil lamp dangling from the ceiling, a nervous-looking young man sat with a thick wad of money in front of him. On the other side of the table an old man stood, wagging a finger as he addressed the young man. Lurking back in the shadows were two men with the kind of faces Philpott generally described as being born for the gibbet. On a side table was a bulging sack and on another table beside it, a pile of unmistakable merchandise in telltale plastic bags: heroin, nearly fluorescent in its stark whiteness.

Philpott pulled back from the window. This was an odd happenstance. He had come looking for evidence of a black market in charity goods and stumbled on a drug-running operation.

He stood a moment longer, wondering about a course of action. Finally he decided the best thing was to leave and evaluate the evidence over a large brandy, preferably somewhere quiet and comfortable.

As Philpott made his way through the darkness towards his car, back in New York it was close to noon. C.W. Whitlock was in the Sculpture Garden on top of the twentieth-century wing of the Museum of Modern Art. It was a bright and reasonably warm day, but very few people had ventured out to the garden.

Whitlock pretended to give most of his attention to a bronze head of a girl, while his companion feigned interest in a pencil-slim Giacometti figure beside it.

‘Did it never occur to you, Bridget,’ Whitlock said quietly, ‘that you were bound to get caught in the end?’

The woman shrugged. She was approaching middle age, a small and tidy woman with attractive dark hair streaked with grey. She wore oval glasses with tortoise-shell frames which she kept pushing nervously along her nose.

‘The work, the cause, was everything, you know? Getting caught was a hazard but it was hardly worth considering, since the work had to be done anyway, risk or no risk.’