Десмонд Бэгли - Running Blind

‘Then I’ll have to be satisfied with that,’ I said. ‘Providing you lend me your car. I left the Land-Rover in Laugarvatn.’

‘You’ve got a goddamn nerve.’ Nordlinger put his hand in his pocket and tossed the car key on the desk.

‘You’ll find it in the car park near the gate — the blue Chevrolet.’

‘I know it.’ I put on my jacket and went to the corner to pick up the rifles. ‘Lee, do you know a man called Fleet?’

He thought for a moment. ‘No.’

‘Or McCarthy?’

‘The CPO you met in the shop is McCarthy.’

‘Not the same one,’ I said. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Lee. We’ll go fishing sometime.’

‘Stay out of jail.’

I paused at the door. ‘What makes you say a thing like that?’

His hand closed over the gadget. ‘Anyone who walks around with a thing like this ought to be in jail,’ he said feelingly.

I laughed, and left him staring at it. Nordlinger’s sense of what was right had been offended. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and an engineer usually works to the rule book — that long list of verities tested through the centuries. He tends to forget that the rule book was originally compiled by scientists, men who see nothing strange in broken rules other than an opportunity to probe a little deeper into the inexplicable universe. Any man who can make the successful transition from Newtonian to quantum physics without breaking his stride can believe anything any day of the week and twice as much on Sundays. Lee Nordlinger was not one of these men, but I’d bet the man who designed the gadget was.

I found the car and put the rifles and the ammunition into the boot. I was still wearing Jack Case’s pistol in the shoulder holster and so now there was nothing to spoil the set of my coat. Not that I was any more presentable; there were scorch marks on the front from the burning peat of Kennikin’s fire, and a torn sleeve from where a bullet had come a shade too close at Geysir. It was stained with mud and so were my trousers, I was looking more and more like a tramp — but a clean-shaven tramp.

I climbed into the car and trickled in the direction of the International Airport, thinking of what Nordlinger hadn’t been able to tell me about the gadget. According to Lee it was an impossible object and that made it scientifically important — so important that men had died and had their legs blown off and had been cooked in boiling water because of it.

And one thing made me shiver. By Kennikin’s last words just before I escaped from the house at Thingvallavatn he had made it quite clear that I was now more important than the gadget. He had been prepared to kill me without first laying his hands on it and, for all he knew, once I was dead the gadget would have been gone forever with me.

I had Nordlinger’s evidence that the gadget was of outstanding scientific importance, so what was it about me that made me even more important than that? It’s not often in this drear, technological world that a single man becomes of more importance than a scientific breakthrough. Maybe we were returning to sanity at last, but I didn’t think so.

There was a side entrance to the Icelandair office which one could use without going through the public concourse, so I parked the car and went in. I bumped pleasantly into a hostess, and asked, ‘Is Elin Ragnarsdottir around?’

‘Elin? She’s in the waiting-room.’

I walked into the waiting-room and found her alone. She jumped up quickly. ‘Alan, you’ve been so long!’

‘It took longer than I expected.’ Her face was strained and there seemed to be a sense of urgency about her. ‘You didn’t have trouble?’

‘No trouble — not for me. Here’s the newspaper.’

I took it from her. ‘Then what’s the matter?’

‘I think you’d better... you’d better read the paper.’ She turned away.

I shook it open and saw a photograph on the front page, a life-size reproduction of my sgian dubh. Underneath, the black headline screamed: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS KNIFE?

The knife had been found embedded in the heart of a man sitting in a car parked in the driveway of a house in Laugarvatn. The man had been identified as a British tourist called John Case. The house and the Volkswagen in which Case had been found belonged to Gunnar Arnarsson who was absent, being in charge of a pony-trekking expedition. The house had been broken into and apparently searched. In the absence of Gunnar Arnarsson and his wife, Sigurlin Asgeirsdottir, it was impossible to tell if anything had been stolen. Both were expected to be contacted by the police.

The knife was so unusual in form that the police had requested the newspaper to publish a photograph of it. Anyone who had seen this knife or a similar knife was requested to call at his nearest police station. There was a boxed paragraph in which the knife was correctly identified as a Scottish sgian dubh, and after that the paragraph degenerated into pseudo-historical blather.

The police were also trying to find a grey Volvo registered in Reykjavik; anyone having seen it was requested to communicate with the police at once. The registration number was given.

I looked at Elin. ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ I said quietly.

‘It is the man you went to see at Geysir?’

‘Yes.’ I thought of how I had mistrusted Jack Case and left him unconscious near Kennikin’s house. Perhaps he had not been untrustworthy at all because I had no illusions about who had killed him. Kennikin had the sgian dubh and Kennikin had the Volkswagen — and probably Kennikin had stumbled across Case in his search for me.

But why had Case been killed?

‘This is dreadful,’ said Elin. ‘Another man killed.’ Her voice was filled with despair.

‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said baldly.

She picked up the paper. ‘How did the police know about the Volvo?’

‘Standard procedure,’ I said. ‘As soon as Case was identified the police would dig into whatever he’d been doing since he entered the country. They’d soon find he hired a car — and it wasn’t the Volkswagen he was found in.’

I was glad the Volvo was tucked away out of sight in Valtyýr’s garage in Vik. ‘When is Valtyýr going back to Vik?’ I asked.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Elin.

It seemed as though everything was closing in on me. Lee Nordlinger had given me a twenty-four hour ultimatum; it was too much to hope that Valtyýr wouldn’t check on the Volvo as soon as he got back to Vik — he might even go to the Reykjavik police if he felt certain it was the car they were searching for. And when the police laid hands on Sigurlin then the balloon would certainly go up — I couldn’t see her keeping silent in the face of a corpse parked in her home.

Elin touched my arm. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Right now I just want to sit and think.’

I began to piece the fragments together and gradually they made some kind of sense which hinged around Kennikin’s sudden switch of attitude after he had captured me. At first he had been all for extracting the gadget from me and he was looking forward with unwholesome delight to the operation. But then he lost interest in the gadget and announced that my death was the more important, and that was just after he had received a telephone call.

I ticked off the sequence of events. At Geysir I had told Case of my suspicions of Slade, and Case had agreed to pass them on to Taggart. No matter what happened Slade would then be thoroughly investigated. But I had seen Slade talking to Case just before Kennikin took me. Suppose that Case had aroused Slade’s suspicions in some way? Slade was a clever man — a handler of men — and maybe Case had shown his hand.