James Benn - The Rest Is Silence

“All right,” Quick said. Then to David, “Spitfire pilot, I’d guess.”

“Hurricanes first, then Spits in North Africa. How did you know?” David asked.

“Your attitude says you’re a fighter pilot. Your burns say Spitfire. I was on a Lancaster until we got shot up. One of the gunners had his legs badly burned. They sent him to a special hospital up in Sussex.”

“That’s where I was,” David said, and they fell to talking about flying, aircraft, friends alive and dead, as easily as if they were old pals. David was a different man away from Ashcroft. And Tom Quick had forgotten about his limp; I’d noticed when we picked him up.

Tom’s directions got us to Newton Abbot in half an hour. We passed a medieval tower stuck in the middle of the road at the town center, then crossed the River Teign and drove to the racecourse. The place was deserted except for a few automobiles, the stands empty, and the track itself quiet. A solitary horse was being taken through his paces, kicking up clods of mud as he passed.

David and I walked ahead, looking for some sign of life. Kaz and the constable trailed behind, keeping tabs on us from a distance. Stables and outbuildings stretched on beyond the track, the faint whinny of a horse echoing between them. The ground was muddy and wet, and the lingering rain fell lightly on our shoulders.

“Where is everyone?” I said, whispering in spite of myself.

“Look,” David said, pointing to an open door at one end of a row of stables. A sign above it read SABINI ENTERPRISES. A line of footprints in the mud led inside. None came out. I held David back with one arm and motioned the others forward with my other.

“This doesn’t look right,” I whispered. “Kaz, you stay here with David.” David was the only one of us who wasn’t armed. Quick had traded his rifle for a revolver which he un-holstered as I drew my.38 Police Special. While Kaz is deadly with his Webley, I wanted a cop at my back. An open door in a rainstorm and one-way footprints are not a good combination. And if whoever left the door wide open had gone out the back, Kaz would be ready.

We went in.

I smelled it before I saw it. The metallic scent of blood and death.

Pools of congealed red gore.

Two men sprawled on the floor, gunshot wounds to the chest. More than enough.

One man seated at his desk, his head hanging backward, a gaping slash at his neck. Spurts of blood decorated the wall, where it had gushed from the carotid artery before the heart stopped pumping. Flies buzzed around all the men’s wounds. A feast.

I pointed to another open door, leading into the stables.

“I’ll check,” Quick said. “But these men have been dead for some time. The blood’s coagulated, and the flies didn’t just show up.”

“Yeah,” I said. I went to the doorway and told Kaz and David what we’d found, retracing my steps and being careful not to step in the blood. A quick glance told me the killers had been pros. Two of them, I figured, imagining how it could have been done quickly. They walk in, shoot the bodyguards, and the first guy holds a gun on Sabini. The second guy walks behind Sabini and lifts his chin. Sabini sees the first guy step aside, perhaps understanding it’s to avoid the spray of blood. Then lights out.

Revenge.

“It looks like someone succeeded this time,” Kaz said.

“Yeah, they smartened up and sent at least two guys,” I said, watching for Quick to reappear.

“Could this have anything to do with the man you saw yesterday?” Kaz asked, still keeping Fraser’s name mum.

“No. They’ve been dead since yesterday, I’d guess. Somebody planned this in revenge for Sabini slitting his competitor’s throat.”

“Which tells us that the theory of the hit man being our corpse on the beach holds water,” Kaz said.

“Like a cast-iron pot,” I said. “Where’s Quick?”

“I thought he was with you,” David said.

“He went through the stables,” I said. “You two go around front. I’ll circle around back, and we’ll meet up.” I wasn’t worried about the killers still being there, but Tom should have been back by now. I moved around the building, keeping close to the wall, my revolver held by my side. I got to the corner and took a quick peek. The rear of the stables faced a road with a row of houses on the far side-or what had once been homes. Piles of brick lined the street, and except for a few soot-covered walls, everything else had been cleared away. Two craters stood between the remaining buildings, marking the spot where German bombs had hit and taken out six brick row houses.

Tom Quick stood at the lip of one crater, his revolver limp in his hand. I went up to him and looked in the crater, wondering if he’d found something. A body or a clue to the killing. But it was filled with rainwater, and the edges of the blackened soil crumbled beneath our feet.

“Tom?” I said, as Kaz and David came up behind me. “Tom, is there something here?”

“No, there’s nothing,” he said. “You drop a five-hundred-pound bomb on a house, and there’s nothing left. As you can see.”

“It looks like this happened a while ago,” I said, trying to edge around him and see his face. His eyes were unfocused, seeing nothing, remembering everything.

“A lifetime ago,” Tom answered. “So many lives ago.”

I slowly curled my fingers around his revolver and took it from him. He didn’t notice.

“We usually dropped thousand-pound bombs, fourteen at a time,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

“No,” I said, trying to comprehend the devastation the moment these bombs hit.

“Blockbuster bombs too,” Tom said, his voice rising in pitch. “A four-thousand-pound bomb. Do you know why they call them blockbusters? Do you?”

“No.”

“Because they destroy an entire city block. And blow off roof tiles from the surrounding buildings. That’s why we drop incendiary bombs, small ones, at the same time. They start fires better that way, you see? They have professors who figure all that out, but they stay at home. Wouldn’t it be funny if one of them lived here?” He laughed, a short, harsh spit of derision.

“Okay, Tom,” I said. “We need to go to the local police station and report this. Can you show us where it is?”

“Of course I can,” Tom said, turning on me as if I was an idiot. “If you’ll tell me why the death of three vile criminals means anything. Who will answer for this? Who will hang for this ?” He pointed at the blasted houses; the stacks of brick awaiting rebuilding; the wet, muddy holes in the ground; as if the bombers were still circling overhead, high in the same sky where, hundreds of miles away, his Lancaster loaded with fourteen thousand pounds of high explosives had once flown over cities and towns, cratering neighborhoods and ending lives, bringing retribution to the nation that had started this terrible war.

“He’s no danger to anyone,” Inspector Grange said. “There are simply times when he stops. Becomes lost in himself, so to speak.”

“He seemed fine when we found the bodies,” I said. We’d spent most of the morning with a detective sergeant from Newton Abbot, giving our statements and having our stories checked. It helped that he knew Tom Quick and had settled him at a desk with a cup of hot tea, the English cure-all. “It was a charnel house, but he held up fine in there.”

“As he would have done had the perpetrators been there to be apprehended,” Grange said. “My guess is that he saw the area was clear, but before he could return to you, the bomb damage drew him in.”

“How do you know he wouldn’t have frozen if we had been confronted by armed killers?” I asked.