Jack Higgins - A Fine Night for Dying

This time he went by the manual. His arm swung up in a straight line as he sighted along the barrel with his good eye. Chavasse went for him, shoulder down like a rugby forward, sending him staggering against the rail. The revolver discharged harmlessly, and as Gorman straightened, aiming again, Darcy lunged with the gaff, the point catching Gorman in the right armpit. He went over the rail backward with a cry. By the time Chavasse got there, the dark waters had closed over his head.

“Hold out your hands,” Darcy ordered, and sliced through Chavasse’s bonds with the edge of the razor-sharp gaff.

Chavasse turned, massaging his wrists to restore the circulation. “Now that’s what I call a timely intervention. Is it permissible to inquire where in the hell you sprang from?”

“Glad to oblige,” Darcy said. “After you’d left, I thought about things for at least five minutes, then went downstairs to the garage and helped myself to your car. I left it at Hurn Airport and came the rest of the way by taxi. I was actually in Fixby before you. They serve a very nice keg bitter in the local.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, I hung around the boatyard awaiting events, as they say. I heard most of your conversation with Gorman, waited till you’d gone into the office, then came onboard and hid in the chain locker.”

“You certainly took your own sweet time about showing up, or was that just your sense of the dramatic?”

“As a matter of fact, I fell asleep. Didn’t wake up till Gorman started thumping around and making all that noise.”

Chavasse sighed. “All right, what are you doing here?”

“It’s quite simple. My brother was a criminal by every possible standard. He was a thief and a gangster, but he was good to me. If I said that I loved such a man, could you accept that?”

“Perfectly,” Chavasse told him gravely.

“He didn’t deserve to die that way, Paul. He deserved many things in this life, but not that. When the time comes, I am going to kill Leonard Rossiter personally. We Jamaicans are a religious people, a proud people. An eye for an eye, the Book says, no more, no less. I will have Rossiter’s life then, for that is the just thing.”

Chavasse nodded soberly. “I respect your feelings, I understand them, but between the thought and the deed is often a very wide gap, especially for a man like you. I can kill when I have to, quickly, expertly and without a second thought, because I’m a professional. Can you be that certain?”

“We’ll have to see, won’t we?”

“Fair enough. I’ll get this thing moving; you dry yourself. We’ll talk things over later.”

The Jamaican nodded and disappeared into the companionway. Chavasse went along the deck to the wheelhouse and started the engines. They made a fine lovely sound, and he pushed up the throttle and took the Mary Grant into the night with a burst of power.

“I always wanted to be a boxer,” Darcy said.

He leaned against the closed door of the wheelhouse, a blanket around his shoulders, a mug of tea in one hand, almost invisible in the darkness.

“What did Harvey have to say to that?”

Darcy chuckled. “He argued in percentages and he certainly saw no percentage in that. He always said a good fighter was a hungry fighter and I was anything but hungry. Mind you, he indulged me up to a certain point. I had lessons from some of the best pro fighters in the game. He had an interest in a gym in Whitechapel.”

“What made you choose the law?”

“With my background? A hell of a lot of people found that one funny. On the other hand, I knew every crook in Soho, which came in useful when I started to practice.”

“You were constantly in demand?”

“Something like that. I cleared out after Harvey’s trial because I realized I simply couldn’t continue with the kind of double life I had been leading. Went out to Jamaica and started over. A good move. That’s where I met my wife.”

“Time and chance,” Chavasse said.

“As I told your Mr. Mallory, Harvey got a letter to me detailing what he intended to do. When he didn’t turn up, friends notified me and I decided to follow in his footsteps. It seemed the logical thing.”

“Does your wife know?”

Darcy grinned. “She thinks I’m in New York on legal business.” He emptied his mug and put it on the map table. “And what about you? How did you get into this kind of work?”

“Time and chance again.” Chavasse shrugged. “I have a language kink. Soak them up like water into a sponge-no work in it at all. I was lecturing in a provincial university and finding it pretty boring, when a friend asked me to help him get his sister out of Czechoslovakia. It had a ring of adventure to it, so I gave it a go.”

“And succeeded?”

“Only just. I was in an Austrian hospital with a bullet in my leg when Mallory came to see me and offered me a job. That was twelve years ago.”

“Any regrets?”

“It’s too late for regrets. Far too late. Now let’s come back to the present and discuss what we’re going to do when we arrive at Saint Denise.”

Brittany

They made such excellent time that it was only nine-thirty as they approached St. Denise. There was a small bay with a deep-water channel marked on the chart about a quarter of a mile to the east, and Chavasse decided to give it a try.

He couldn’t have made a better choice. The bay was almost a complete circle, no more than a hundred yards in diameter, and guarded by high cliffs that gave excellent cover from the sea. They dropped anchor and went below.

Chavasse put his leather business case on the table, opened it and tossed a couple of packets of francs across to Darcy. “Half for you, half for me. Just in case.”

“You mean I’m getting paid, too?”

Darcy stowed the money away in an inside pocket and Chavasse pressed a hidden catch and removed the false bottom of the case to reveal an interior compartment. Expertly packed away inside were a Smith amp; Wesson.38 magnum revolver, a Walther PPK and a machine pistol.

Darcy whistled softly. “What is this, Prohibition?”

“Nothing like being prepared.” Chavasse offered him the Smith amp; Wesson. “Guaranteed not to jam. About the best man-stopper I know.” He dropped the Walther into his pocket, replaced the false bottom in the case and stowed it away in a locker under the table. “And now for the most interesting act of the evening.”

They rowed ashore in the fiberglass dinghy, beached it and scaled the cliffs by means of a narrow path. The sky was blue-black, and every star gleamed like white fire. There was no moon, and yet a strange luminosity hung over everything, giving them a range of vision much greater than might have reasonably been expected under the circumstances. They made rapid progress through the scattered pines and soon came to a point from which they could look down into St. Denise.

There was a light here and there in the cottages and several in the downstairs windows of the Running Man.

“How do you intend to play this thing?” Darcy asked.

“By ear,” Chavasse told him. “Strictly by ear. Let’s see how many guests are at the party first.”

They went down the hill, scrambled across a fence and continued along a narrow country lane that soon brought them to the outskirts of the village. Here the cottages were spaced well apart, each with its own small patch of ground under cultivation.

They passed the first house, and as they approached the second, Darcy placed a hand on Chavasse’s sleeve. “This is Mercier’s place, or did you know?”

“Now that is interesting,” Chavasse said softly. “Let’s take a look.”

They moved across the cobbled yard and crouched by the window. Light reached out with golden fingers into the darkness, and through a gap in the curtain they could see Mercier sitting at the kitchen table, head bowed, a bottle of brandy and a tin mug in front of him.