Simon Green - The Dark Side of the Road

I just kept running, following the tracks and the trail of blood left by the horrible laughing thing ahead of me. The Colonel stuck close at my side, just about managing to keep up. I could hear his lungs labouring as he struggled. I couldn’t afford to slow down, for fear the Damned Thing would get away. And then, there was what was coming after us … Every now and again, the Colonel would turn and fire his machine pistol back down the tracks to slow our pursuers down. I never did learn the name of the local agent they’d already killed, drowning out his screams with their awful piping laughter.

The Colonel emptied his machine pistol and hurried after me, fumbling in his pockets for another magazine. And then he made a tutting sound, and shrugged easily, as he realized he’d run out of ammunition. He didn’t say anything, just ran along beside me, trusting me to catch the villain and find us a way out.

And then, there was the Appalling Affair of Roger Styles.

Just a small fishing village, tucked away in some forgotten part of the Cornish coastline, where the locals still took their boats out every day, whatever the weather. The Colonel told me to book into the village’s one and only hotel, and inquire about the fishing. I did sort of hope it might be my long-delayed vacation time. I should have known better.

The moment I started my innocent inquiries, the hotel owner couldn’t wait to bend my ear over all the troubles the village had been having. Fishing boats going out, and never coming back. Nothing left for Search and Rescue to find; not even bits of wreckage or a body floating in the water. Fishermen told of seeing things, shining white, down in the very depths of the sea. Things big as churches or cathedrals, or bigger still. Some of the fishermen were afraid to go out, and it takes a lot to scare a Cornish fisherman. And then there was Roger Styles. The man who was not a man, and never wanted to be.

The Colonel set himself up as bait. Sitting there on the old wooden bench, on top of the cliff, looking out to sea for hours on end, with only an improving book for company. Sitting there till the sun went down; waiting for Styles to come and get him. To shut him up, because of all the things the Colonel had been saying so loudly in the local tavern. I was there too; hidden and waiting. The Colonel sat at his ease, the bait in his own trap, trusting me to do whatever might be necessary. To take Styles down and save the Colonel’s life.

And, of course, there was the last case we worked together, in deepest, darkest Peru. In that horrible hidden city on the Plateau of Leng. A cruel place and a cruel people; if you could even call them people. The roots of their family tree didn’t lie in the earth, but in the stars. The buildings in that city were older than human civilization; huge and blocky, actually unnerving to look at for too long. Their aesthetics hadn’t been meant for human eyes. Everything seemed to lean at some unnatural angle, and their proportions didn’t add up to any whole my mind could accept.

There were windows that showed shifting views of other places, some of them beyond human comprehension. The Colonel vomited every time he looked into a window, so he stopped looking. I couldn’t bring myself to stop, because every now and again I thought I glimpsed something … familiar.

I remembered the Colonel kneeling in an open square, concentrating on the terrible thing he’d brought with him. I stood guard, while he programmed the nuclear device and set the timer. We weren’t taking any chances with the awful people of Leng.

I remembered them all. Old cases, old faces; moments from a past filled with thrilling incidents. I could have sworn we hadn’t left a single loose thread anywhere.

I felt suddenly tired and old. With the Colonel gone, there was a tremendous gap in my life. Every time I remembered I’d never speak to him again, it was like someone kicked me in the gut. I hadn’t realized how attached I’d become to the man, down the years. All the things we’d seen, and all the things we’d experienced, that we could never talk about to anyone else. I never told him my secret, but sometimes I thought he knew. He never brought it up, and I never volunteered. Probably each of us thought we were protecting the other. The Colonel had given my human life a sense of purpose, of direction. He made me believe that the work I was doing mattered. That I mattered.

What was I going to do now?

I made myself concentrate on the situation. If the killer really was one of the people here at Belcourt Manor, what motive could they have for killing the Colonel? Some things had become clear, even in the short time I’d been here. Khan and Melanie were either having an affair, or about to start one. Suppose Khan wanted Walter dead, so he could marry Melanie and take control of the company that apparently meant so much to him … Yes. I could see Khan doing that. He’d worked for Black Heir. You learned to do the cold, hard, necessary thing if you wanted to get on at Black Heir. It wasn’t a place for a man with a conscience.

And then there was Melanie herself. Did she want Walter dead, for her own reasons? Could she be playing Lady Macbeth to Khan, urging him on to remove the only obstacle in their way? If the Colonel had overheard something, noticed something he wasn’t meant to, tried to protect his father … Yes. I could see that happening.

Next, Diana. Who had already told me how much she missed living at the Manor and all that went with it. What would she do to get her old life back? Did she perhaps plot to kill Melanie, so she could remarry Walter? The girl I remembered from Paris would never have been capable of doing anything so cold-hearted, let alone kill her own son, but Paris was a long time ago. People change.

Roger wanted Penny; that was obvious to anyone with an eye or an ear. What would he be prepared to do to get her? And then, there was Sylvia. Could she have acquired a taste for the good life, travelling with Diana? Could she be running some scheme to grab some of that good life for herself?

Bringing up the rear, as the least likely suspect and therefore not to be ruled out: Walter himself. Besieged on so many sides. If he decided someone else’s death would make his little world safer and more secure … he was quite capable of ordering any number of things done. Especially if he thought Khan was after his wife … Or could it be that Walter had never really wanted his son to come home? Had there been some terrible, unspoken insult, never forgiven by either side? Could Walter have killed his own son for daring to come home again?

Was that why Jeeves was here? An ex-soldier, maybe even an assassin, posing as a butler; hiding in plain sight? No one else knew him from before … Could Walter have sent the death threats himself, to justify Jeeves’ presence?

Everyone at Belcourt Manor had motives for murder, but none for killing the Colonel. Unless he just … got in the way. No one had expected him to turn up here when they were making their plans. Perhaps someone just saw him as an obstacle to be removed. But the manner of the Colonel’s death still disturbed me. Why saw the man’s head off? There seemed every indication it had been done after he was murdered. There had to be a reason. Sawing a man’s head off is hard work. Takes a fair amount of time, too. The Colonel must have been drugged first, to keep him from fighting back. There was no other way an experienced man like the Colonel could have been taken down … There was no shortage of opportunities for someone to drop a little something into all the food and drink available. The Colonel couldn’t have refused any of the seasonable fair, for fear of raising suspicions.

There was a knock at the door. Solid, authoritative, even peremptory. So I just sat there on the end of my bed, letting them wait, until I finally said, ‘Come in.’ The door swung open immediately, and Alexander Khan strode in, acting like he owned the place and was already thinking of evicting me. I’d thought he’d be my first visitor, given that he was the most likely person to be on his own, because there was no way Melanie was going to leave Walter on his own. Khan closed the door carefully behind him, and then looked quickly round my room, as though he wanted to make sure I hadn’t been given a better room than him. He took his time before he looked at me, and when he did, it was almost defiantly.