Dead Letter Drop

24

The newspaper headline was loud and clear: Embassy suicide mystery. It didn’t mean much to me. A couple of blocks further down the street another headline sold a copy of the Washington Post to me: British Diplomat in Death Plunge.

I read the entire article motionless by the news stand. Sir Maurice Unwin had jumped to his death from his fifteenth-floor office window. He was happily married, with three children, had no financial worries and was a popular figure in Washington. The Post hadn’t yet discovered that he happened to be the US head of MI6; but they would. In time.

The article stated that no one could give any immediate reason for his suicide. I wasn’t surprised. Suicide didn’t come into it.

It was Saturday morning and I was walking down Houston towards my new office. I let myself in and again made a careful search of the whole building. It was eerily dead, unwanted, unwelcoming. Nobody had been there since yesterday and it was unlikely that anyone would come uninvited.

When I reached my own office suite I pressed the button for the elevator. I listened to it whine and bump its way up and then come to a halt at my floor with a definite clunk. Its metal door slid open unsteadily and in short jerking movements. I pressed the stop-watch start button on my watch, and stepped in, pushing the button for the ground floor. I rode the thing up and down a couple of dozen times, carefully recording the timing for each stage. The variations were to within a second on each run, which was fine.

Next I set to work on the brains of the machine, if brains was the right description for the frayed and battered box of wiring that carried the instructions from the various buttons inside the elevator to the various electric circuits and motors and switches that made it go to the fifth floor when button 5 was depressed and to the first floor when button 1 was depressed, and the such like.

Because of having to run up and down to the basement power switch to test every stage of my tricky operation, it took me much longer than I had expected, and it was not until late into the afternoon that I finished.

I went and sent an overnight cable to Fifeshire. I sent it to his home address in the country, reckoning he’d be back there by now. The cable would reach him about 8.00 or 9.00 in the morning, English time — it would put him on alert and he would know the significance immediately the deed was done. I worded the cable simply: ‘Check the elevator operator’s private bank account. You’ll know what I mean. If I have been right, place advertisement in Times personal column, Tuesday or Wednesday, saying: All forgiven, Charlie. If I have been wrong, place ad saying: Goodbye.’ I signed it ‘Sam Spade’.

Saturday night passed slowly. I was worried about the following day, very worried. If I was wrong not even all the power Fifeshire might be able to muster was going to be able to get me out of it, but I had made no real contingency plan: I was gambling everything on being right. Whilst bits of evidence had gathered with each day, I knew that the horrific gamble I was about to make was still mainly on my hunch and the odds were not too attractive.

I went over and over everything late into the night, pacing the hotel room until the facts blurred into an unfathomable mess inside my mind and I slept a fitful sleep. Rain lashed through the night and a howling wind shook the windows, and I had repeatedly to get out of bed and ram wedges of paper down the sides of the frames in an attempt to stop the rattling. I awoke finally at 7.00 feeling in need of a good night’s sleep.

I checked the room thoroughly to ensure there was nothing through which I could be traced. At least there were no fingerprints to worry about: I had worn either my fabric gloves or my surgical gloves all the time I had been in the room. I left the various wash things, and everything except what I needed today, in the room, although it was unlikely that I would be coming back.

It was bitterly cold outside; the rain had gone but the wind remained, gusting in great sweeps down the corridors formed by the skyscraper buildings. I had breakfast in a cafe then walked to the office. I unlocked the front door and left it unlocked. I switched on the power for the elevator then again made a thorough search of the building. Each time I walked through the rooms of that building they looked worse.

I sat down in my own suite; it was eleven o’clock. I took from my pocket the calculator I had been given by Trout and Trumbull: it was an innocuous-looking thing and had emblazoned in gold lettering on the outside the model-name: Vatiplier. I also took from my pocket a large pink envelope, a black marker pen and a strip of blue ribbon. On the outside of the envelope I wrote with the pen the word Goodbye.

I was craving for a cigarette and realised I had forgotten to buy a new packet. I went over to the window and looked out. Bits of paper and other garbage swirled down the street. There was nothing else in sight, not a person nor a car; it was desolate.

Twelve o’clock finally came. I lifted the receiver and dialled the number of the call box: I hoped to hell it hadn’t been vandalised during the night. The number was answered before it even had a chance to ring.

‘Good morning, Digger,’ said a heavily disguised voice. There was no mistaking whose voice it was: Scatliffe’s. I gave him the directions, repeated them once, then hung up.

Then I clapped my hands together; I’d done it, I knew I’d bloody done it! He’d taken the bait, hook, line and sinker, and now I was reeling him in. I looked at my watch. I reckoned it should take him about twelve minutes by taxi; allow him a couple of minutes on top to hail one. Fourteen minutes.

The taxi arrived in thirteen minutes and pulled up outside. I didn’t stretch over too much as I didn’t want to risk being seen, but I could see only one person emerge, a figure in a trilby hat and blue Crombie coat. I pulled on my coat, turned up the collar, put my dark glasses on, pulled my hat down over my forehead; my own mother wouldn’t have recognised me. A sharp buzz from the alarm system I had rigged up told me he’d pushed the button for the elevator.

At the top of the calculator was a plastic lid, which I slid aside, revealing a small pin-shaped object. I pulled the pin out and pocketed it. In exactly ninety seconds the calculator would explode with, Trout and Trumbull had assured me, considerably more force than a conventional hand grenade.

I stepped inside the elevator, pushed the down button, and we started our descent. I sealed the calculator inside the pink envelope, tied the ribbon in a neat bow around it, and then taped it to the inside panel of the sliding door. When the door was open it would be invisible and it would only appear as the door slid shut again. By then it would be too late because the next time the door shut it would stay shut and the elevator would automatically rise to between the second and third floor; there it would stop, and there it would stay.

Thirty of the ninety seconds had ticked away by the time we reached the bottom. As the door slid open I bowed my head slightly to sink further into the upturned collar, watching out of the corner of my eye the envelope neatly disappear from view.

From the way I had arranged the lighting panel on the ground floor it would have appeared to Scatliffe that I was coming from the third floor, not the eighth floor where I had actually come from, so he would not have any reason to connect me with the purpose of his visit. I swept out of the elevator as the figure in the trilby hat and the blue Crombie coat entered. He gave me only a cursory glance, his mind evidently preoccupied with other matters, but there was nonetheless the vaguest hint of recognition in his glance, a moment of uncertainty, as if he knew that he had once somewhere met me before but he couldn’t think where.

As the door shut, gratingly, unremittingly, upon him I knew that if he was thinking he had seen me once before he was right. He’d bowled me out. The man in the trilby hat and blue Crombie coat who had just entered that elevator wasn’t Scatliffe at all. He was Anthony Lines, the Home Secretary.

I walked swiftly down the road. Ninety seconds came up on my watch when I was about a hundred yards down. I was in a state of shock. I heard a faint muffled noise through the wind, very faint. A moment later there was the sound of crashing glass; it was followed by more crashing glass: it was a huge noise. I turned and looked back at the office building. In a random succession, one after another, windows dropped out and crashed down to the ground. I stared in amazement, watching the frames twist, then buckle, flinging great chunks of glass out, away and down.

Suddenly one entire side of the building sagged; bricks, plaster, wood, glass rained down, then the entire building leaned over and collapsed like a pack of cards into a vast irregular pyramid of rubble that spewed right out into the street.

This time, I thought, Trout and Trumbull had really gone over the top.