Dick Francis - The Danger

'Fine, then,' he said. 'Bring the bag.'

I took the canvas bag out of the boot and quietly shut and locked the door. Then without any fuss we walked in our black clothes as far as the corner, where Tony seemed to melt suddenly into shadow and disappear. I counted ten as agreed, slid to my knees, and with caution and thumping heart took my first dim view of the target.

'Always kneel,' Tony had said. 'Look-outs look at head height, not near the ground.'

The house's paved garden, weed-grown, was in front of me, but dimly perceived, even with night-accustomed eyes. 'Move to the house wall, on the right-hand side,' Tony had said. 'Bend double, head down. When you get there, stand up, face the wall, stay in any deep shadow you can find.'

'Right.'

I followed his instructions, and no one shouted, no one set up a clamour in the house.

Above me on the wall I could see, looking up, a dark irregular shadow where no one would expect a man to be. No one except people like Tony, who was climbing the bare walls with sucker clamps fastened on by a battery-powered vacuum pump. Tony - who could go up a tower block, for whom two storeys were a doddle.

I seemed all the same to wait for several centuries, my heart thudding in my chest. No one walked along the road; no insomniacs, no people humouring importunate dogs. Sussex-by-the-sea was fast asleep and dreaming, with only policemen, Liberty Market and perhaps kidnappers wide awake.

Something hit me gently in the face. I put my hand up to catch it and fastened my fingers round the dangling length of black nylon rope.

Tie the bag on, give the rope two tugs, I'll pull it up,' Tony had said.

I obeyed his instructions, and the canvas hold-all disappeared into the darkness above.

I waited, heart racing worse than ever. Then suddenly the bag was down with me again, but heavy, not empty. I took it into my arms and gave two more tugs on the rope. The rope itself dropped down into the shadows round my feet, and I began to pull it in awkwardly, my arms full of bag.

I didn't hear Tony come down. His skill was truly amazing. One second he wasn't there, the next moment he was, stowing the last of the released damps into voluminous pockets. He felt for the rope I was trying to wind in and had it collected into the holdall in a flash. Then he touched me on the arm, and we both left the scrubby garden, me hunched double over my burden and Tony already sliding out of his harness. Once in the road and out of any possible sight of the house I stood upright and grasped the bag by both handles, carrying it in one hand as one normally would.

'Here,' Tony said quietly, 'rub this over your face.' He gave me something moist and cold, a sort of sponge, with which I wiped away a good deal of the blacking, and I could see that he too was doing the same.

We reached the car on silent feet.

'Don't slam the doors,' Tony said, dumping his harness onto the front passenger seat. 'We'll close them properly later.'

'OK.'

I took the bag with me into the rear seats and removed its precious contents: one very small boy, knees bent to his chest, lying on his back, with coils of black nylon rope falling over his legs. He was more than normally asleep but not totally unconscious: unwakeably drowsy. Uncombed blond-brown curls outlined his head, and across his mouth there was a wide band of medicated sticky tape. I wrapped him in the rug I always kept in the car, and laid him along the back seat.

'Here,' Tony said, passing me a bottle and a tiny cloth over from the front seats. 'This'll clean the adhesive off.'

'Did they do this?" I said.

'No, I did. Couldn't risk the kid waking up and bawling.' He started the car and drove off in one fluid movement, and I pulled the plaster off gently and cleaned the stickiness away.

'He was asleep,' Tony said. 'But I gave him a whiff of ether. Not enough to put him right out. How does he look?'

'Dopey.'

'Fair enough.'

He drove quietly to where I'd told Eagler to take his men, which was to another of the eleven houses on his list; to the one which had had the electronic anti-burglar device, a good half-mile away.

Tony stopped the car short of the place, then got out and walked off, and presently returned with Eagler himself, alone. When I saw them coming I got out of the car myself, and for a moment in the dim light Eagler looked bitterly disappointed.

'Don't worry, I said. 'He's here, in the car.'

Eagler bent to look as I opened a rear door gently, and then, relieved, straightened up. "We're taking him straight to his mother,' I said. 'She can get her own doctor. One the boy knows.'

'But…'

'No buts,' I said. "What he absolutely doesn't want is a police station full of bright lights, loud voices and assorted officials. Fair's fair, we got the boy, you get the kidnappers. You also get the media coverage, if you don't mind. We want our two selves and Liberty Market left out of it completely. We're useful only as long as we're unknown, both to the general public and especially to all prospective kidnappers.

'All right, laddie,' he said, listening and capitulating paternally. 'I'll stick to the bargain. Where do we go?'

Tony gave him directions.

'I left a canister of tear-gas there,' he said cheerfully. 'I took it as a precaution, but I didn't need it myself. It had a timer on it.' He looked at his watch. 'I set it to go off seven minutes from now. There's enough in it to fill the house, more or less, so if you wait another five to ten minutes you should have a nice easy task. The air will be OK to breathe about then, but their eyes will be streaming… that is, if they haven't already come out.'

Eagler listened enigmatically, neither objecting nor commending.

'The kid was on the top floor,' Tony said. 'He was wearing one of those harness things they put in prams. He was tied to the bed with it. I cut it off him, it's still there. Also there's some floorboards up. Mind your PCs don't fall down the hole. God knows where they'd get to.' He fished into the car and brought five cassette tapes out of the glove compartment. 'These make good listening. You play them to your friends when you have them in the nick. No one's going to confess where they came from. Bugging other people's conversations ain't gentlemanly. Andrew and I never saw these recordings before.'

Eagler took the tapes, looking faintly bemused.

'That's about all then,' Tony said. 'Happy hunting.'

He slid into the car behind the steering wheel, and before I followed him, I said to Eagler, 'The kidnappers' leader is due to join them tomorrow or the day after. I don't suppose he'll come, now, but he might telephone… if the news doesn't break too soon.'

Eagler bent down as I manoeuvred myself into the rear seat. 'Thanks, laddie,' he said.

'And to you,' I answered. 'You're the best.'

Tony started the car, waved to Eagler as he closed the rear door, and without more fuss we were away and on the road, taking a direction opposite to the kidnappers' house, set fair for safety.

'Wow,' Tony said, relaxing five miles on. 'Not a bad bit of liberating, though I say it myself.'

'Fantastic,' I said, 'and if you go round any more corners at that speed Dominic will fall off the seat.'

Tony glanced back to where I was awkwardly jammed sideways to let Dominic lie stretched out, and decided to stop the car for rearrangements, which included removing more thoroughly the black from our faces and stowing Tony's gear tidily in the boot. When we set off again I had Dominic on my lap with his head cradled against my shoulder, and he was half grasping the cuddly teddy which I'd taken from his suitcase.

His eyes opened and fell shut occasionally, but even when it was clear the ether had worn off, he didn't wake. I wondered for a while if he'd been given sleeping pills like Alessia, but later concluded it was only the middle-of-the-night effect on the extremely young, because towards the end of the journey I suddenly found his eyes wide open, staring up at my face.