Gavin Lyall - Midnight Plus One

He stared at me. 'You mean – it is a fake?'

'Why would you fake one with thewrong number of shares on it? No, it's genuine – but it isn't Heiliger's. That burned up when he crashed. No, it's yours. Right now, you don't own a centime of Caspar. How does it feel being poor?'

There was a long hush.

I said quietly: 'I suppose when you got hit with that rape charge you couldn't get around so easily, so you increased Merlin's power of attorney. I'd guess you even lodged a lot of important papers with him, or maybe gave him power to get them out of a safe deposit for you. I'd even guess one of them was the Caspar certificate.'

I grinned at Merlin. He went on watching the Mauser which was watching his stomach. 'Any Frenchman could do that heavy Belgian accent, Henri – hell, I could do it myself. Well enough to fool a Liechtensteiner like Fiez, anyway. Now give kind Mr Maganhard back his ten million quid – Galleron.'

He looked up slowly, and after a tune he smiled a little sadly. 'Legally, of course, a bearer certificate belongs to whoever bears it. But possibly we are not being strictly legal.' He sighed and reached inside his coat. A gun blasted three times beside my elbow. Merlin's face was lit by the flashes, his expression frozen in the moment of changing. Then he was pitched away into the swirling snow.

I whipped round and clouted the big Webley out of Maganhard's hand.

Harvey came cat-footed out of the curtain of snow, gun in hand. 'What in hell happened?'

'We met Monsieur Galleron.' I nodded at Merlin. 'Meet Monsieur Galleron.'

Harvey looked at me, then walked across and peered carefully down at him and shook his head.

Maganhard was standing with his eyes clenched shut, melted snow streaming down his face and glasses and glinting in the backlash of light from the headlamps.

I said: 'Welcome to the Murderers' Club.'

He opened his eyes slowly. 'Is he dead?'

I nodded. 'It's not so difficult really, is it? ' But I wished I had remembered he still had that damn revolver.

Harvey came back. 'Was he really Galleron?'

'Yes. D'you want to stand around talking about it in a snowstorm, or can it wait?'

'Can wait. But what about him?'

'Strip his pockets and stick him in the Rolls. We're going to have to dump that car before morning, so he may as well go with it '

Merlin's car had a Liechtenstein registration, so it must have been hired. So perhaps he'd hired it in the name of Galleron. But it didn't much matter. Harvey said doubtfully: 'He'll get found.'

'Christ, we've left dead men spread from here to the Atlantic,' I snarled. 'One more'll just screw things up so the cops never work it all out.'

And that was just about true. Beyond a certain point, a crime can get so complicated that the cops know no jury or judge will ever understand it – even if they do themselves. On top of everything else, finding a Paris lawyer who'd been posing as a Belgian businessman dead in Liechtenstein in the car of the distinguished British resident of Switzerland would just be a ten-aspirin headache.

Harvey grinned sourly and bent over Merlin and came up with a handful of papers and a small automatic. I took the biggest of the papers: a stiff, folded document that opened out into a spread of fancy lettering and a big seal like a 'wanted' notice for Robin Hood. The Caspar certificate. For a few seconds I was a very rich man. The snow went on falling on me.

I gave it to Maganhard. 'Yours, I think. Let's get up the hill for that meeting.'

'But Herr Fiez is dead,' he said faintly.

'Don't be silly. Saying that was just Merlin's last chance to stop you coming; he could have killed you off later, before you caught on. But using your certificate, he always needed you dead and Fiez alive. It makes sense now.'

Harvey dragged Merlin's body into the back of the Rolls. Maganhard kept his eyes front and walked carefully in after it. I picked up the Webley, rubbed it clear of fingerprints, and threw it into a field.

And now perhaps we could go up and have a quiet company meeting.

'So you were all really working for the same person,' Miss. Jarman said. 'Harvey and you, and those – Bernard and Alain and the others. All working for Henri Merlin.' I nodded. 'Just like the Christians and the lions down in the arena. All really working for old Emperor Nero.'

'I don't imagine,' she said sharply, 'that the Christians thought of it that way.'

'I don't suppose the lions did, either.'

We were sitting drinking whisky around a big log fire in Flez's living-room. It was a long, wide wood-panelled place that would have looked expensive if it hadn't looked like a Swiss souvenir shop. Every time Fiez had made another million, he'd celebrated by buying another dozen cuckoo clocks and carved brackets full of china and painted-wood figures.

Fiez himself was a fussy little man who'd nearly gone catatonic when we'd marched in bristling with pistols and started bleeding on his rugs. Miss Jarman had done the real work of fetching hot water and antiseptic and starting temporary repairs on me, while Maganhard had taken Fiez into a corner to explain the True Life Story. But I don't think it had registered, even in Schwytzer-Deutsch. Fiez just couldn't believe there was that much wickedness. in this big, beautiful, coloured postcard of a world.

Maganhard came out of his corner and planted himself in front of the fire. 'Do you say, Mr Cane, that Monsieur Merlin planned this whole thing from the beginning?'

'No, he can't have done. He must have set up the phoney rape charge in the hope that you'd give him more power of attorney. After all, he'd know how you'd react: that you'd prefer to stay away than fight the charge. Then all he had to do was wait for a chance to turn his power into cash. When Heiliger flew into a mountain and you were stuck out in the Atlantic, that was his chance. The rest of it all came from that.

'What I don't understand,' I added, 'is why you lodged a bearer certificate worth ten million quid with him.'

His voice got a touch of the old stiffness. 'Since I was liable to arrest it would have been foolish to carry a document like that on me. And of course I made arrangements that if anybody appeared at a Caspar meeting with my certificate, certain precautions had to be taken to ensure that he truly owned it.'

I nodded. 'But as he was pretending it was Heiliger's certificate, none of the precautions applied. I get it.'

Miss Jarman asked: 'But if Merlin was going to kill us, anyway, why did he send you and Harvey? Or why didn't he send those two – Bernard and Alain – and let them pretend to guard us, then kill us?'

'The risk – to his Merlin personality. Remember, everybody knew Merlin was Maganhard's lawyer and that he'd be arranging this trip. So when you ended up dead, Merlin would get some blame anyway. If it then came out that he hadn't arranged an escort, or had sent one that somehow stayed alive while you got killed, it would have looked suspicious. Since he was guilty, he couldn't riskany suspicion.

'That's why he rammed Harvey down your throat: made you take him along even when Maganhard didn't think there'd be any shooting. That way, when it was all over, it'd look as if Merlin had done his best – and all the blame was on Calieron. He didn't mind that: Galleron hadn't got a traceable past and was going to vanish, anyway, once Caspar was cashed in. Probably he hired Alain and Bernard in the name of Galleron, so they never knew who they were working for and couldn't give him away.' I looked up at the girl. 'I told you the lions might not know they were working for Nero, either.'

She raised her eyebrows. 'And that makes us the Christians, does it? I hadn't known Christians ate lions.'

I gave her an insincere smile and said quickly: 'So all in all, Merlin could go back to being Merlin with just an extra ten million in an anonymous account in Switzerland. No need to run off and be Joe Smith in Brazil.' Then I thought of something and turned to Maganhard. 'Aren't you supposed to be having a company meeting, after all this?'