Gavin Lyall - The Secret Servant

The man let go a snarling gasp, and jerked away.

Maxim flicked on his pinhole torch. Sitting in the carnage but six feet away – a surprising distance – was a square-shaped man with a square face blinking in the feeble light. He was holding a hand to the outside of his left thigh, where the knife had gone in.

"Stay just where you are," Maxini said. And he stayed where he was himself, playing the thin beam over the man. He was probably a few years younger than Maxim, with a rather blobby nose, wide mouth and coarse grainy skin, a face that made you think the sculptor had meant to spend another day on it. He was wearing a dark muddy anorak, with the zip now torn loose.

"The police are up on the road," the man said. He had a very slight accent.

"I know. Any good reason why I shouldn't scream for them?"

"I perhaps could think of one or two. And so could you." Maxim let the torch beam droop, but he wasn't going to get any closer. If they tangled again, one of them was going to get killed and he wasn't too confident about which one.

"If you can walk away from this," he said, "you can walk away."

The man considered it. When the Gardai came down the field, there would be a lot of explaining to do, and a lot of time in which to do it. Neither of them wanted that.

"Okay." He levered himself to his feet. By now the wound must be stiffening the leg, something else that Maxim had been counting on. The gangplank creaked again, the boat swayed and steadied, and Maxim lifted the curtain of one window to watch the figure hobble quickly away.

Now he was really hurrying. Allowing himself little squirts of light from the torch, he kicked the papers and clothing into a heap, added some of the lighter furniture and soaked it all with paraffin from the stove and a two-gallon can he found in a cupboard in the bows. Then he cut three two-foot lengths from a handful of thick white string and left them to soak in the paraffin.

On deck, he undid the anchor and the stern line, and loosened the one at the bows. Then down into the rancid fumes of the cabin, where he laid the three fuses on a dry patch of floor and lit them. They began to burn steadily, like wicks, creeping towards the heap. At least one should stay alight, giving him, he reckoned, a two-minute start. He ran up into the fresh cold night air, threw off the bow rope and pushed the houseboat out with the gangplank. It moved very slowly and ponderously, but it moved, the bows swinging as the rain-fed current in the Lough caught hold. Already it was too far out for anybody to reach. He started running.

He passed one wall and nobody had shouted, then another. There was no sound, but a ripple of light on the water made him stop and look back. The houseboat was about fifteen yards out, still swinging downstream, the curtained windows glowing. Then one of the curtains vanished in a flare of pink-white light and the window cracked like a shot…

Watching fires, especially those you've started yourself, is as basic a human instinct as throwing stones at water. He forced himself to run on. Up at the lane, somebody called out and a car engine started.

An hour later, after the hotel had locked up for the night, Maxim climbed off the furnace room roof and into his bedroom window, jammed slightly open by a wedge of folded paper.

At Shannon airport they had set up a trestle table even before the check-in desks so that they could search all your luggage. And it was nothing to do with terrorism or hijacking: the searchers even looked at the soles of Maxim's shoes. But the slippers were in the Lough, along with the stolen raincoat and the flick-knife. He would miss that.

Standing beside the table there were two professionally hard-eyed men, and a third who was elderly and had a plump ugly face and a sad expression. One of the plain-clothes men stepped forward. "Excuse me, but would you mind showing me some identification? It's just security."

Don't be too co-operative. Maxim frowned, looked puzzled, and said: "Yes. All right." He gave them his driving licence.

"Would you have anything else?"

"Why?"

"Just security." He was thin, with a long sour face.

Maxim shrugged. "Here, take the bloody lot." There was nothing in his wallet to let him down: no ID card or calling cards or Mo D pass. He could even have brought his passport, since like most officers he had put his occupation as 'Government official', but the pattern of visas in it would be a giveaway to anybody who knew those places where the sun still hadn't set on the British Army.

The older man was staring at him with a sorrowful anger.

"You'll have been staying here how long, sorr?" the second detective asked in a soft apologetic voice. He was larger, a comfortable man in a short tweed coat.

"Just a couple of nights?"

"Was it a business trip, sorr?"

"Not really. I was looking at a property a friend and I were thinking of buying into. Up in the Silvermine Mountains. What's this about?"

"Did you ever hear of the name Jackaman?" the first one asked.

"I don't think so." You bloody fool: if they ask what you do, you'll have to say you work in Whitehall. Of course you know the name Jackaman. "Yes. There was a civil servant. He committed suicide. Is that the one?"

"Sort of. You didn't know Mrs Jackaman?"

"Didn't know either of them."

"So it's just a coincidence, you being here?" They were playing it sweet and sour: the first one asking the tough tactless questions, the second being gentle and sympathetic. Damn the flight for being so empty that they had time for that charade. Maxim would have liked a queue of impatient passengers behind him. He'd even have bought them their tickets.

"What the hell do you mean by coincidence?"

The old man burst out: "My sister was burnt to death last night!"

That was where he'd seen the fat piggy face before.

"I'm very sorry. But… do you mean she was murdered?"

"There are some unexplained aspects, as you might say, sorr," the second policeman said quickly.

"Well, I'm sorry. But I don't go around burning people."

Only houseboats.

He was wearing his 'civil servant' blue suit, striped shirt and a tie that would have looked dull on an undertaker. Of course, if that was the way arsonists and murderers were dressing this season… Then, thank God, there were a couple of more roughly dressed characters getting their luggage searched behind him.

The first detective gave an impatient snort. "Can I have the address of the house you were looking at?" He played his part well, unless he was just anti-English anyway.

Maxim gave them Rafford's address and phone number. They already had his own address, from the driving licence.

"Will you be buying it?"

"It needs more work than we'd realised. We'll see."

"Thank you for your help, sorr."

Maxim said to the old man: "I hope they…" The old man ignored him, and Maxim walked past.

Jonathan St. John Rafford would be climbing the wall if they mentioned booby-trapped cars and burned-out houseboats. Maxim decided to ring him, but not hastily. The police wouldn't have time to check for a while.

The flight was delayed. He drank a cup of coffee, then walked around the windowless, timeless hangar of a departure lounge that was far too big for the number of passengers at that time of year. The duty-free display was a supermarket in itself, and he was startled by the prices until he realised they were in dollars. Then he was only half-startled. But he ought to get something for Chris and his parents… why did you feel compelled to buy something in an airport? Pilots obviously didn't.

"Did you hear about the terrible fire?" a slightly accented voice said.

Maxim turned slowly. "What fire?"

"Two of them, in fact." On the far side-of a rack of candles shaped like Guinness bottles and flowers and apples, there was a square coarse-grained face with rather unfinished features.