Horse Under Water

47 Relinquish

A dozen spent 7-mm. rimless cartridge shells on the cliff-top was the only trace of H.K. in the vicinity by the time we had anchored the power boat. The weather had dragged the cloud base and the barometer well down, the fishermen were working on nets scattered along the strand like huge discarded nylons.

I went up the beach to get Charly. Augusto needed a doctor quickly. When I reached the top of the steps I looked down from the high balcony. Augusto was still on the boat with eyes unseeing and his mind in neutral; he was holding Fernie Tomas’s hand very tightly. He wouldn’t let go.

Charly was at the café with two plain-clothes pidemen.[34] She took the death of Fernie Tomas in her stride and wrote it into the narcotics investigation smoothly enough to allow me to escape entanglement.

After what Fernie had told me, a lot of the unrelated ends began to tie themselves together. Not all of them did, of course, but that was too much to expect. There would always be unexplainable actions by unpredictable people, but the motives began to show. I knew, for instance, what we would find up at da Cunha’s house, but I went anyway.

The furniture was shrouded and my footfalls echoed and creaked round the bookless shelves. Some of the big chandeliers were burning bloodshot in the bright daylight. I went upstairs, searching for the sort of room that I knew must be there. I had to break the lock in order to open it. The heavy oak door moved grudgingly. It was a long room, painted white. Fluorescent lights hung over the benches and a lot of equipment remained, showing that it had been a well-equipped laboratory.

This wasn’t a hasty hole-in-a-corner pharmacy like the one H.K. had assembled in a spare corner of his factory. It was a large air-conditioned research lab. of the type that pharmaceutical companies build instead of paying income tax. I moved along the benches, looking at the meters, test-tubes, and electric vibrators. I examined the radiant-heat machinery and the complex array of thermometers for measuring conductivity of liquids. I didn’t find Senhor Manuel Gambeta do Rosario da Cunha, because he had been gone for a long time.

Clive Singleton had returned from Lisbon in time to be told to pack everything up and head right back again.

I told him that he had the most important task of all. He would be returning the underwater gear to London. It would cost me more than I cared to think about if anything happened to it. Charly was enjoying her performance as the narcotics investigator and Clive Singleton was more than ever her devoted slave.

I phoned London on the open line. I told them to have Ivor Butcher shadowed. Use Tinkle Bell, I told them. They said he wasn’t very good as a tail, but I told them that we all have to learn. ‘Suppose Butcher tries to leave the country?’ London said.

‘Take him in on a holding charge,’ I told them patiently.

‘What charge?’ they asked.

‘Try the Street Offences Act,’ I said, and hung up irritably.