Gavin Lyall - The Crocus List

Maxim plugged the wound with lumps of torn handkerchief and began binding it up. "Nobody? Not even a fat friend of mine?-George Harbinger? In his forties?"

"Yes… he's all right…"

"That is nice. I'll ask you where, in a minute-but what were you going to do with him?"

"Nothing… Let him loose…"

"Really? Why snatch him in the first place, then?"

The man closed his eyes, looking very pale. Maxim finished rough-patching the wounds, then reached into the Land-Roverand found a coat. He spread it over the man; no point in him dying of shock just yet.

"All right, you'll live if you stay still. Now, where is he?"

The man told him. Maxim searched him as he did so, indiscriminately, turning everything out of the man's pockets and not caring too much about gulps of pain. Among the odd things were a wristwatch and a handcuff key.

Then he took the keys from the Land-Rover, just in case, and also had a quick rummage through the back. It was hastily piled with suitcases, a box of groceries, a typewriter case, some other, larger sort of plastic case, a workchest of heavy-duty electric tools and a small box holding two old-style Russian grenades.

He took the grenades. "I'm glad you forgot to pocket one of these. Soon you must tell me who the gentleman at the Abbey was."

The french windows at the back were unlocked; in fact, one was open, so the man hadn't been pulling out. Perhaps he'd just been going to position the Land-Roverfor a getaway. It would have been quite possible to drive down the lawn and then away over the fields while the police came charging up the main track. In ordinary cars, they wouldn't have been able to follow.

Nobody had shot at him, but he wasn't taking anybody's word for it. He scoured the ground floor, kicking open doors and waving the pistol in one direction, the submachine-gun in another, ready to use a grenade if anything seemed too suspicious. Then he reached the bedroom floor. One room was clear, and then he was in a big bedroom overlooking the terrace and lawn-and the moving Land-Rover.

The man was gone: just a dark patch on the lawn beside the coat and wheel ruts showed where he'd lain. Maxim felt in his pockets for the keys, but he still had them. A spare key hidden in some corner of the vehicle? He raised the submachine-gun, but the Land-Rover wasalready dipping off the edge of the lawn, jolting over the pasture land-and Maxim realised it was unpowered, just rolling downhill. The man had used the slope of the lawn to roll it back until it had speed to swing into a three-point turn and now… now it was downhill all the way.

It took one wire fence without check or swerve, and there may have been a second, but it was a long way away and the Land-Roverwas just a bobbling black shape. It must have worked up to quite a speed, because it didn't collapse suddenly offthe cliff, but vanished smoothly. He didn't hear a thing. But he did wish he'd remembered that Land-Rovershad been invented before steering-column locks.

George ducked his head against the light, blinking helplessly at the dark figure in the doorway. "Get me some water," he croaked. "Before anything else, just get some water."

"No whisky?" Maxim asked.

"Harry! My God, you're back!" He was still helplessly blind before the neon strips that ran down the long cellar.

"If you will go hiding in dark corners, you miss all sorts of news." He undid the handcuffs.

George stayed on his rickety wooden chair, rubbing his left wrist. "They left me some biscuits and water, but I knocked the water over in the dark. What's the time?"

"Oh… coming up to three."

"What? I thought it was midnight. They took my watch."

Maximgave it him back. "How many did you see?"

"One, but he had a ski-mask on. And I think there was another somewhere. How many did you meet?"

"One. He's just driven himself over the cliff ina Land-Rover, but I… no, it can wait."

"I didn't hear anything."

"Down here, you wouldn't." The door to the second cellar was remarkably thick, but not heavy. The soundproofing could hardly be to keep noiseout, Maxim thought, and he wandered the length of the room. The end wall was just limestone, left as it had been cut, without any facing and now pocked with holes.

"Shooting gallery," he said admiringly. "Neat: no ricochets off limestone, they just go in and stay in. Same thing as Gibraltar: they do all their live firing in the tunnels there."

He helped George, still stiff and cold and perhaps beginning to tremble, through the original cellar-the door had been not exactly secret, but behind a panel that Maxim had found already lifted down-and up the steps to the kitchen. He gave him a mug of water. "You'd better ring Annette."

There was a telephone in the drawing-room, but it was dead. When Maxim traced the Uneto a junction box, it was smashed. He fancied he'd heard that happening. George came in and collapsed on to a sheet-covered chair. "Is my car still here?"

"I doubt it, but I'll check." The only place was the garage. He found the door unlocked and the place empty except for the usual clutter, and a cardboard box in the middle of the floor, as if ready to be taken away. It held a couple of jaggededged bits of metal that might have been cut from a car body, some old rags stained with dark green paint and there was a general dusting of the same colour on the dusty concrete; somebody had been using a spray gun.

He went back. "You're short one car. It looks as if one of them took it away and dumped it somewhere while the other loaded up the Land-Rover. Then he was going to release you and give himself time to get out of the area while you wandered around trying to find a phone. I think we should start doing that."

"D'you really think they were going to let me go?"

"I think the smashed phone proves it; not much point, otherwise. And once you'd got here, this place was blown as a base. They'd have to expect a follow-up. " He looked around longingly in the low, opaque light from the terrace windows. "I'd like to do a proper search, but it would take days. Leave it to Special Branch: we can tip them off from London."

"We can walk into the police station at Eastbourne. Damn it, / haven't done anything wrong. I've beenkidnapped."

"And because you were kidnapped / shot somebody who went over the cliff in that Land-Rover. I'mnot walking into any police station. Now, let's move. "

They walked back roughly the way Maxim had come, across the pasture to where he had left his car in a lay-by on the main road. Maxim did his best to demilitarise himself by letting his camouflaged jacket hang open to show the civilian sweater and shirt, but the only pace George could make across that ground didn't look suspicious anyway.

"Do you know," George said thoughtfully, "what was the worst thing about being down there in the dark?"

"Lack of whisky, I should think," Maxim said lightly.

George was silent for a time. Then he said: "Yes. But not just wanting it: feeling how much I needed it. It worried me."

Realising George was serious, Maxim tried to think of something helpful. "You were under a lot of stress. I've never been a prisoner, unarmed, helpless-except in exercise situations. And you can't really fake the real thing."

"Thank you, Harry. But it wasn't that…"

"Did they try interrogating you?"

"The one did. He asked how I'd found the house, who else knew, he said nobody would find me there in that place… I don't think he was very serious, though. And he didn't stay very long."

"Probably wanted to nip upstairs and check the place wasn't full of coppers, if he was on his own by then."

"Yes… it all seems a bit unreal and tame, now. Isuppose they really weren't going to kill me. I mean, that isn't the way they seem to work. I told myself that, in the dark, but I wasn't very convincing." He looked around at the wide green downs, the tattered grey sky and out to the Channel, where a broad blade of sunlight broke through to glitter the surface: " 'Set in the silver sea"… he must have been looking south when he wrote that. There's a helicopter."