The Conduct of Major Maxim

Chapter 13

George had switched to drinking coffee laced with cognac – "The complete cycle, the disease and the cure in one simple package," and Agnes had muttered something about vitamin C and gone across the big room to play a Mozart piano concerto on the stereo. She felt drained. It had been a long day at the end of a busy week, but that wasn't all of it. At dinner in Littlehampton she had acted perfectly, had been friendly but not familiar, always cheerful, talking enough but not too much – but always acting. There were so few homes where she could relax and, without talking about the hidden things, not be consciously hiding them. It was that, the holding of your thoughts like holding your breath, that broke so many of them in their forties. She had seen it far too often: the self-inflicted divorces, the ones you had to talk to before lunch because the rest of their day was an alcoholic marsh, those shunted to a not-too-responsible job in the Registry or an early pension-Peace hath its victims no less renowned than war. I have perhaps ten more years. Will it all have been worth it?

Suddenly Mozart seemed too busy and clever, and she started sorting in the cupboard under the turntable until she found a record of Papillons, and lay back surrounded by Schumann's fluttering primary colours.

George looked around. "If I'm not to be allowed Mozart, why not somebody with an appropriate gloom quotient like Mahler? What are we doing back in the nursery?"

"I suppose it was that meeting. You remember Sladen talking about Wilhelmina Linnarz, the pianist defector? I'd been wondering what made me think of Schumann."

He grunted. "You're regressing, young Algar… There must be a file on that woman. "

"I'll dig it out tomorrow. Late tomorrow. "

"Why the hell hasn't Harry rung in?"

"He's probably been arrested."

George glared and said provocatively: "How did you get on with him today? He likes piano music too, I recall."

"Count Basic."

"Pure race prejudice."

Agnes closed her eyes. "George, you're not going to get me as bad-tempered as you are."

"Me? Balls!"

But I wonder if Harry has ever listened to Schumann? she thought. And maybe I should try that Basic trio he was going on about. Maybe we… Maybewe nothing, she told herself angrily. You stayaway from that man; he isbad news. Of all the people you do not want to get mixed up with he is the first and the last. Losing your temper with him wasunforgivable.

The phone rang and her heart gave a jerk. She got up quickly, since she was nearest.

"If it's Harry," George called, "and he's gotany good news, just throw a fit and I'll get the general idea. "

Agnes said: "Speaking," and listened for a minute, then put the phone down. "The one in hospital: dead."

The dock was fenced off, but not the way it had been as a real dock, with real cargoes to steal. This one was bodged together from old planks and doors from wrecked houses, intended as little more than a defence in court for the demolition company when some child got through and broke his neck amongst the rubble. There were several places kids obviously did get through; Maxim widened one by yanking loose another plank and ducked in. The other two followed, Dannreluctantly. He was wearing Maxim's car coat over his thin shirt, but his shoes were still canvas and the ground beyond the fence was a mudpond laced with sharp lumps of concrete and old ironwork. Maxim had a torch which he used very cautiously, but at least they didn't have to whisper in the steady drone of rain.

'"Ell," Tanner said, looking around. "It all looks sort of different, now."

Indeed it did, to anybody who remembered or could visualise it as a busy dock. Level, as all docks must be, it was a soggywasteland stretching to the edge of the river. Cranes, warehouses, offices-all had been stripped away, leaving just a small site office and an abandoned bulldozer outlined against the damp glow on the far bank.

"I think it was over here…" They followed him. He stooped a couple of times to shift a sheet of corrugated iron or warped plasterboard, but didn't find anything.

He straightened up, shaking his head and wiping rain out of his eyes. "I just dunno. I mean, they could've filled it in. I mean…"

Maxim looked around. There were no flashing blue lights -the police would have walked over this ground, but hours ago – and they were well away from any inhabited buildings.

"Blagg!" he shouted. "Corporal Blagg!"

They listened but heard only the steady rain.

"Blagg!"

He had just taken breath to shout again when there was a muffled bang.

"It came from there," Tanner said.

"Over there."Dannsuggested another direction.

Maxim wasn't sure himself, but he was sure he had a lot more experience than they in locating the origins of gunshots. He stumbled away in the direction of his own idea; they followed.

When they found him, the water had just reached his nostrils.

Maxim lifted him very gently to a sitting position. The dragging breath and the bullet holes at front and back gave him an easy diagnosis. Thank God there were two, and not too low down. Blagg had tried a brief smile when Maxim flashed the torch on himself for identification, but didn't speak. The Spanish pistol was still clutched in his right hand; Maxim took it away and dropped it in his own pocket.

It took all three of them to lift him out of the reeking waterlogged shelter through an opening just big enough for one of them at a time. It was easy to see why the police would have missed it: from outside, it was just a concrete hardstand, perhaps the foundation for an old shed, and the opening ledthrough a shallow pit that was usually jammed with rubbish and covered by a corrugated iron sheet. But at last, panting steam, they had Blagg propped almost upright in the rain.

"Fireman's chair," Maxim said. "Grip your own wrist, then mine, under his arse. " But Dannknew all about that. Tanner was half his age, but Maxim turned instinctively to the trainer for important work. "Dave, you support his back. Don't let his head fall forward. "

They staggered and slithered the hundred yards or miles to the fence, sweating into clothes already soaked, swearing breathlessly. So now Maxim had to bring the car up. It would have been suspiciously obvious parked near nothing but a gap in the fence, so he had left it by the nearest flats. The three of them stayed just inside the fence while he went for it. By now the rain was easing.

There was just a few yards walk to the main road, a careful look around, then across it, instinctively choosing the potential cover of a derelict warehouse on that side rather than the dockyard fence on this. Walk a hundred yards, then turn down a side street. He had almost reached that turn when a police car came around another corner three hundred yards ahead.

They had to have seen him. The road was empty and most of the street lamps still lit, outlining him against the shining pavement. And when they reached him, they would have to stop. A lone man at nearly midnight, wearing a thinjacket in a storm that had been blowing for over an hour… And when they stopped, they would see the mud on him…

He took four strides to the corner, turned it andran. Behind, he thought he heard the car surge forward. It hadn't been a little Panda, either, but a Rover 2600, an 'Area car'. A trouble-hunter.

There was still the warehouse on his left, and a derelict site beyond that, with occupied flats coming up on the right… He could dodge two coppers in a car easily. Probably he could dodge the twenty coppers in ten cars that would be there in five minutes, and get clear away. But he didn't want to get clear away. He had to spend those five minutes here.

His own car was a few yards ahead, and he could be in and started before they turned the corner – but not out of sight.

And once they saw him, they'd have him. Even if the cars were evenly matched, he knew he couldn't out-drive the police.

He unlocked the boot, scrambled in, and slammed the lid on himself.

Inside, it was utterly dark. Rain pattered gently on the unlined metal above, and he hoped it drowned his panting breath. He heard the Rover roar around the corner, accelerate past, then squeal to a stop and whine back in reverse. The motor noise dropped to a rumble and feet clattered around his car. He couldn't see the torch being flashed underneath and through the windows, but he felt the car sway as one of the coppers tugged at the driver's handle and the boot. Then more feet, the slam of a door, the surge of power as the Rover shot away to look at the next corner. He turned on his own torch and started wondering how he was going to get out.

One look at the inside of the lock put him off trying that. The bolt was a hook of thick metal that snapped shut around a U-shaped rod the thickness of a pen. He could never get the leverage to force that open, and there was no inside keyhole, of course. He struggled painfully around into a new foetal position and started work on the back of the back seat.

It wasn't, blast it, one of those back seats that turn into a double bed or a discothequejust by twiddling a few knobs and wrenching your spine out of joint. This was just a back seat and very determined to stay that way. He could get it loose in time, but he didn't have any time. If only he had sometools… Then he realised that all those knobbly things sticking into his kidneys and buttocks were tools. Thirty seconds later, he had the whole U-rod assembly unbolted from the car and stepped back out the way he'd come in.

"What took the time?"Danndemanded, his voice shivery with cold and anxiety.

"Dodging coppers. Get him in the back seat. You go with him. Dave in the front." He left them to it while he roughly bolted the U-rod back on again; driving with a flapping-open boot lid was asking for attention. He pressed it gently shut and it held; loosely and with a slight gap, but it held.

"What were you doing that for?"Dannasked as they pulled cautiously away.

"Long story. What happens if I go left?" Left was away from the place the Mobile had last seen him, away from Neptune Court.

"Sooner or later you hit the Lower Road. Where are we going to take him? He looks pretty bad. "

"I just want to get out of the area and reach a phone."

"You can't take him to my place," Dave Tanner said abruptly.

"I wasn't going to." Maxim's thinking had just begun to catch up with why two armed watchmen – the ones outside his own flat hadn't been armed – had suddenly turned up in the service road of Neptune Court. It would be no place to watch from. They must have been coming to collect Blagg, and very certain they would find him.

"D'you work, Dave?" he asked.

"Course I do. I'm a wood machinist, in't I?"

"And your wife?"

"No, not now. She had this job at the checkout in the Co-op, but… I mean, what's this all about?"

"Nothing."

"I mean if you think Ron and my wife, well, you can bleedin' well -"

"I^vasn't thinking – hold it."

Headlights blazed in his rear-view mirror, topped by a flashing blue light. The Rover closed right up, blatantly harassing him into making one mistake that would give them the excuse to stop him. Maxim began driving like a saint on the way to beatification, but with very sub-saintly feelings in his heart.

It couldn't be the same Rover, because they'd have recognised the car, although he hoped they hadn't stopped long enough to get the number. All he could do now was keep steady despite his growing anger.

"What do we do?" Tanner asked fearfully.

"Keep going. Thosebastards."

Hang on, Major,"Dannsaid from the back. "Weare carrying a deserter who's shot somebody."

"They don't know that! If they stop me now…" He took his own pistol from a pocket andjammed it down between his thighs.

Tanner's voice became a squeal. "Here, you can't start using that thing!"

"You can't, Major,"Dannchimed in. "You can't start any more shooting."

Maxim never knew what he might have done. The Rover abruptly swung out and roared past, the passenger cop giving them a suspicious but mostly supercilious glare. It turned right at the next street.

A few minutes later they came out onto the bright and still busy Lower Road. It was like sailing into Harwich harbour after a winter crossing on the ferry; you just didn't believe how smooth and easy life could be.

Maxim stopped at the first phone box; Tanner was out of the car well before him. "I'll get me own way home, thanks…" And he was gone.

"I know just how he feels,"Dannsaid.

Agnes covered the phone mouthpiece with her hand. "Harry's found him. He's wounded. Can we supply a doctor who knows about bullets an'd keeps his mouth shut?"

George rubbed his eyes. "Do we know such a person?"

She nodded.

"I was afraid we might…"

"George, he.'s got us over a barrel. If we let Blagg go to hospital the cops get him, and he could be up on a murder charge. There's no way he's going to keep his mouth shut throughout that. We just have to go along. " She thought for a moment. "The only realistic alternative is to let the boy die, and I can't see our Harry wearing that."

"Nor would I, " George said instinctively."All right. "

Agnes lifted the phone. "Go ahead."

Maxim said: "Tell the doc it's through the chest, in at the eighth rib, definite exit wound at the ninth. Small calibre. There must be bleeding and air in thepleuralcavity that's collapsing the other lung. He should be prepared to tap it. I don't think the bleeding's bad in itself. Okay?"

On the phone he sounded crisp and efficient. But if soldiers can't do that, what can they do?"

"Got it. Where are you?"

Inside four minutes she had a doctor, a plain van and a rendezvous. She could be crisp and efficient herself when the heat was on; it wasn't only soldiers who made the world go round.

It was barely dawn when Maxim reached Albany but it was Annette Harbinger who opened the door to him. She was shortish and had an attractive way of cocking her head on one side and looking up with big dark eyes and a wryly amused smile. "Come on in, Saturday seems to have started rather early this week." She wore a belted Japanese kimono that emphasised her cottage-loaf figure and had a warm, rumpled, half-awake look that made Maxim just want to curl up beside her and sleep for a week.

He sagged past into the smell of frying bacon, and she closed the door. "How d'you like your eggs, Harry?"

"Nothing but tea or juice, thanks." Mrs Caswell had fed them all poached eggs and toast once they had got Blagg bedded down. "D'you mind if I start with the cocktail hour? It rather got lost in the rush. "

Her head went even more on one side. "A whisky breakfast? Don't tell George: he'll be jealous he hadn't thought of it for himself. You know where it all is. "

George was asleep in a big leather chair, making wuffling noises through his open mouth. Carefully not clinking the bottles, Maxim mixed himself a whisky and water, drank it in three gulps, then poured another and began sipping. The lamps were out and the curtains open, letting in an aquarium light that showed up the room for what it really was: a cold, colourless tomb. Maxim shivered and took his drink away to the kitchen.

Agnes was sitting at the table munching bacon and eggs under a bright neon light."'Ello, ahr'Arry. Have you got planning permission to carry that much valuable agricultural land around on your person?" She giggled into her coffee.

Maxim's clothes were still sticky-wet, he was splashed tothe knees with mud, and as for his shoes… With his fair hair, the stubble on his chin showed only as a slight blurring of the normally sharp jawline, but the rest of his face was a bruise of tiredness and strain.

"Don't you taunt the poor man, Agnes," Annette said severely. "Now, would you like to borrow some stuff of George's?"

The idea was briefly attractive, but the difference between George's waistline and his own… "I'll manage, thanks. " He slumped down opposite Agnes, who herself had changed her delicate jacket for one of Annette's cardigans, and kicked off her shoes somewhere.

Annette put down a cup of tea and a glass of orangejuice. "It is lemon and sugar, isn't it? Now you two'll want to talk Top Secrets so I'll go and get dressed. " She bustled tactfully away.

"Went the night well?" Agnes asked.

"Pretty well, if he doesn't get pneumonia, but he's full of antibiotics just as a prophylactic… It was close. Lucky he was young and fit and all. " He took a sip of whisky, thenjuice, then tea.

"He wouldn't have got mixed up in all this if he wasn't young and fit. Is that your normal breakfast?"

"Not exactly. What happened on the home front?"

"You heard it could be murder?-yes, I told you on the phone. Nothing more from that angle except that the police have askedus to check him out, so they're pretty dubious about who he was."

"We know who he was working for, anyway."

"If you mean Six, it really isn't likely," Agnes said. "And I'm not saying that as any friend of theirs."

Unconvinced, Maxim gave a little shrug, then took Blagg's Spanish revolver from his pocket. It was still wet and choked with gritty mud. He emptied out the fired cartridge cases, went across to the sink and washed the gun under the hot tap.

"Where did you take him?" Agnes asked.

"The doc offered one of your safe houses, but I didn't think you'd want to be that much involved. In the end, we went down to a chum in the country. " At first, Mrs Caswell hadn't been all that keen, probably because she didn't want anybodydying on the premises. But Jim, bless him, had taken it with as little fuss as if he'd been asked to feed the cat for a couple of days. "The doc's going again today, and I'll get down this evening."

The door clattered open and George, barely awake, stumbled in. He edged Maxim away from the sink, ran the tap until it was really cold, and mixed a foaming cocktail of Alka-Seltzer and lemon-flavoured Redoxon tablets. Agnes watched, fascinated; George's stomach must be a constant series of coups and counter-coups.

Then he sat down with a cup of coffee. "How's Corporal Blagg?"

Maxim took a handful of kitchen paper and began to dismantle and dry the revolver. "Coming along. It must have been only a 7.65 that got him. It nicked a lung and probably cracked a rib, but it didn't open the abdomen. The doc drained air and blood from hispleuralcavity and…"

"Harry!" George held up a wavering hand. "For God's sake, I didn't ask for allthat. Pleuralcavities. At breakfast. Jesus. " He slopped coffee into his mouth.

"The important thing is, he didn't lose enough blood to need a transfusion, so no hospital."

"Good. I'm sure you'd have related it to me drop by drop. Did you get anything out of him about… about anything?"

"No. He was hardly conscious most of the time, and I didn't want to put any more strain on him. I'll try him this evening. "

George got up and put bits of breakfast onto a plate. "Is that his gun you're field-stripping? – and if so, hadn't it better really be thrown away now? They've already got at least one bullet from Rotherhithe they could match to it. "

Maxim looked at the clutter of parts in front of him and realised how right he'd been in saying soldiers hate to throw away guns, even cheap Spanish ones. "I suppose… but half that stuff about matching bullets to guns is scientific malarkey. Juries only believe it because it always happens in TV cop shows. Anyway, you could scratch up the rifling with a file and steel wool so that it would never give the same markings on a bullet again."

'It's still an unlicensed weapon," George said, sittingdown. "And while you're still working at Number 10, atouch of Caesar's wife might be appropriate."

Agnes gave a snort of laughter. "After all he's been up to? You have to be joking. "

"He could get stopped and searched for some quite other reason. It would still be a scandal even if it was quite a separate scandal."

Maxim had been reassembling the cleaned and dried gun. He stopped and thought for a moment. "Okay. Should I leave it here with you?"

"All right." George nodded amiably. "Nobody'll search this place."

"Get some sewing-machine oil off Annette to -"

"You're _both_ just little boys!" Agnes wailed.