Ник Картер - Assault on England

I climbed the stairs to the next floor and headed toward the Foreign Secretary’s offices. There were a lot of people in the corridor here, including a small contingent of uniformed soldiers at the wide doors leading to the main work areas.

Across the corridor was a smaller unguarded door to a suite of lesser offices of the Ministry. As I moved past this, a man came out. He was wearing a janitor’s uniform and carrying a mop and bucket, and he seemed to be in a great hurry — he almost knocked me down.

He gave me a quick, hard look and then he was moving quickly down the corridor, almost running. He was a tall man with dark hair and a mustache. I was trying to decide whether or not the mustache was phony, about to take off after him, when I heard the scream.

It came from the offices the janitor had just left. A man in a dark suit and tie got in my way. I shoved him aside and opened the door.

As I moved into the office, leaving the door wide open behind me, a girl standing near the doorway leading to the next room looked at me wide-eyed and screamed. Papers she must have been holding lay scattered at her feet. I moved past her into a small private office as footsteps pounded down the corridor behind me. Inside the inner office, a dark-haired woman stood over the body of the Foreign Secretary, her mouth opening and closing in shock.

I saw the horror in her face and looked at the reason for it. The Secretary had been killed with a garrotte, the kind used by the commandos in the war. He had been almost decapitated and blood was spattered everywhere.

The woman looked at me and tried to speak but I moved her to a chair and sat her in it, then I looked around the room. There was a note propped on a desk nearby, but I ignored it for the moment.

I thought about looking for that janitor but decided against it. He’d be long gone by now. I tried to fix in my mind how he’d looked, what had made me think the mustache might be phony, and that’s when I remembered something. Not just the mustache but the hair must have been phony — a wig — because I was sure I’d seen a fringe of blond hair at the back of the neck.

Two men stormed into the office now.

“Here, what’s going on here?” one asked.

“Bloody hell!” the other said, spotting the dead man.

“And who are you?” The first man looked at me suspiciously.

I flashed my I.D. card as more people came running into the room. “I think I got a look at the killer,” I said, “He’s dressed like a janitor. Ran that way down the corridor.”

One of the men hurried from the room. The others eyed me warily, as the room filled with horrified Ministry personnel. I went to the desk and looked at the note. It read:

“Better late than never. The amount owed and payable has now risen to fourteen million pounds. Put it aboard a private plane and fly it to Geneva. You will receive further instructions as to what bank to contact for deposit, Don’t fail — you’re running out of time.”

“Here, what have you got there?” a plainclothes policeman said beside me. “I’ll just take that” He reached for the note stiffly and I let him have it. It had looked like the same handwriting to me but of course the handwriting expert would have to confirm it.

I moved from the desk to get another look at the body. There were reporters in the outer room now, trying unsuccessfully to get past the military guards there.

As I walked around the desk closer to the body, I spotted a scrap of paper on the floor just about where the killer might have been standing when he took the note out of his pocket and placed it on the desk. I picked it up; it appeared to be torn from a piece of stationery, just a corner of the sheet. There was a phone number written on it, in pencil. A part of a printed emblem remained on the tear-line.

Studying the scrawled digits, it seemed to me that they might have been written by the same hand that wrote the assassination notes. It was a long shot, certainly, but we needed one right now.

A burly man moved toward me and I slipped the paper into my pocket.

“You there — who are you?”

“SOE,” I said, showing the I.D. again. He hadn’t seen me hide the paper.

“Oh. Right. Just keep out of the way, my lad.”

“I’ll make every effort to.” I said, straight-faced. I moved over to the body for a last look at the mess that had been the Secretary.

It was another unnecessarily bloody killing. The garrotte, composed in this case of two metal handles with a length of piano wire running between them, was a familiar weapon to military men. The attacker merely looped the wire over the victim’s head and pulled. The wire cut through flesh, muscle, tendon and bone until it separated head from body. At least it was a fast way to go. I remembered, suddenly, that Augie Fergus had served in the commandos. Was that how he came to know the assassin? If, in fact, he had known him. Now I was playing a guessing game and there was no time for that, I turned and quickly left the room.

I found Heather at the Home Secretary’s office nearby; she hadn’t heard about the latest slaying. “I just ran into Elmo Jupiter,” she said lightly. “He insisted that I call him. Are you jealous, love?”

“I wish I had the time,” I said. “The Foreign Secretary has just been assassinated.”

Her lovely blue eyes widened in shock.

“Does Brutus know?” she asked.

“I called him on the way here. He was in quite a state.”

“It’s bloody awful, isn’t it?” she said.

“If we don’t improve on our batting average soon,” I told her, “the British government will cease to exist as a viable institution. There was total panic at the Ministry.”

“Does Brutus have any ideas?” she asked.

“Not really. We’re pretty much on our own now. The Prime Minister has already been notified, I hear, and wants to deliver the ransom immediately.”

“He is probably afraid he may be next.”

“He’s a logical target,” I said. “The killer left another note, demanding payment. And I found this at the scene.” I handed her the scrap of paper.

“It’s the telephone number of the Ministry,” she said, puzzled. “Do you think the assassin wrote it?”

“It seems unlikely that an employee at the Ministry would need to write the number down,” I said. “And the scrawl seems similar to the handwriting in the assassination notes. What do you make of the emblem?”

“There isn’t quite enough of it showing,” she said. “But somehow I think I’ve seen it before. Let’s go up to my flat and have a closer look.”

Heather leased a small apartment on London’s West End. It was a three-flight walk up but once inside it was quite a charming place. She made us a cup of English tea and we sat at a small table by the window sipping it. I pulled the scrap of paper from my pocket again.

“Whoever this fellow is, he likes to play rough,” I said, turning the paper over in my hand. I had given Heather the details of the killing. “Rougher than Novosty. And he’s probably more dangerous because he enjoys killing and because he’s probably not rational.”

I held the paper to the light from the window. “Hey, what’s this? There’s the impression of some writing on here, under the digits.”

Heather got up and looked over my shoulder. “What does it say, Nick?”

“I can’t make it out. It looks like a capital ‘R’ to start, and then...”

“An ‘O’ and a ‘Y’,” Heather said excitedly.

“And then — ‘A’ and maybe ‘L’. Royal. And there’s something else.”

“It might be ‘Ho’,” she said, “and part of a TV There is a Royal Hotel, you know, at Russell Square.”

“Of course,” I said. “Royal Hotel. But is this hotel stationery?”