The Conduct of Major Maxim

Chapter 26

On the straight stretches the wide road was a two-tone river of twinkling red and white lights, soothing and even hypnotic if you forgot it was two counter-flowing streams of metal at closing speeds of up to 140 mph. Or faster, for a brief period around Nottingham, when it was time for the local Jaguar owners to hurry home from an evening of scampi and Scotch.

Maxim was dozing, or pretending to doze, beside Agnes; in the back Blagg had gone fast asleep with his head on Caswell'sshoulder, which at least stopped him leaning forward every few minutes to breathe tobacco into her ear while he checked the dashboard instruments. But the car ran very smoothly, apart from a rhythmic rise and fall in the engine temperature: probably a sticky thermostat.

They had been on the motorway just two hours when Maxim woke up and called for a stop at the Woodhallservice area. That was still fifty miles short of Goole, but he didn't want to show their faces any closer; in a couple of hours their descriptions might be chart-toppers on police and all-night radio wavebands. Agnes made a phone call, Maxim paid for the petrol, everybody used the lavatories and they tested the radios across the width of the car park. In ten minutes they were on their way again, the sleepiness gone.

"His sister had been living in the Dales, you said?" Maxim asked.

"She's got a cottage there. It was her husband's."

"I don't think I knew she'd married."

"Out in Africa, twenty years ago. He was working in South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to have been one of the few who didn't make money at it, or else they spent it all. He got leukaemia and came home to die in his family village. She still lives there. She gives piano lessons."

She gives piano lessons. It was nothing to be despised, but what a leaden phrase it was for somebody who had toured the world.

"One of her hands is a bit of a mess, arthritis I think, " Agnes said.

"That can't help," Maxim said uselessly.

Caswell leaned forward again. "D'you mean, Miss, that somebody can just marry a Brit and walk in without your people knowing?"

"Just about, unless we were asking for tabs to be kept on her. She'd pick up her passport from a consul out there, and that's all there is. Six thousand people do it every year, we can't check on every one, and we never thought we'd be interested in Mina Linnarzagain until last week. "

"And we grab her back," Blagg said. "I mean, that's the idea, and that's all, is it?"

"More or less." It was a tricky question for Maxim. They were used – indeed, entitled – to clear orders. "I'll try and tell youjust what the score is at each step, but you're going to have to go by Sass rules. " The SAStraining at least meant that they were accustomed to making decisions for themselves.

"This Sims," Caswell said. "Is he good?"

Maxim hesitated, and Agnes chipped in: "You were with him in Germany; how did he come across?"

"He's a hard case. In his way, he's got a real grievance; everybody's been saying how important this Plainsong operation was, but leaving him to do all the work and take all the blame."

"That's our Guy Husband," Agnes said. "And swinging S-S besides. At our meeting they were using him like a glove puppet."

"Atmy meeting, Husband pissed all over him in front of me and he just had to take it. I think he's got a lot of loyalty to his people and he knows that if this caper doesn't come off, they're dead."

"Do you want them dead?" Caswell asked bluntly.

"It wouldn't hurt," Maxim said reluctantly. "I wouldn't give them the first shot." It was an important point, perhaps one that Agnes didn't quite notice being made, and it marked awhole world of difference between civil and military thinking. "One of those buggers can shoot," Blagg said. It made Maxim feel a little better to remember why Blagg knew, and that he owed him the same order Sims must have given his people: shoot first.

They slid off the motorway and down into the bright silent streets of Goole just after midnight. It gave no immediate impression of being a port: it was just a collection of low, mismatched shopfronts and then a level crossing in the middle of town. Agnes pulled into the station carpark, and a man got out of a dark car and walked over.

They never got his name, he was just Our Man, stocky, old enough to be retired, wearing a cloth cap, blazer and a silk scarf against the evening chill. He spoke in a clipped telegraphic voice that suggested a service background – presumably Navy.

"She's in the Ocean Lock now. Things running a bit late. Be berthing in the Aldam Dock. West side – there." He held a street map of Goole out under the Renault's inside light, a single sheet where the complicated dock area was no more than a few inches square. But Blagg seemed interested, tracing a stubby finger around and saying: "Seems to be all corners."

Our Man grunted agreement. "A boatman's harbour, is Goole. If you're any tonnage at all, you need boatmen to haul you round all those right angles. Ship you're looking for is the Seesperling,fo'c'sleand poop job, grey hull, blue and white funnel, 650 ton. " Seeing Maxim's blank look, he added: "That means small, about 180 feet end to end."

"Fine, but I hope we can stay away from the ship. How would somebody get up to where you said, with a van? How'd they get into the yard?"

"In Goole, if you want to walk in, walk in a thousand different places. To take a van, to that berth, you'd go in the gate by the church."

"Is it open?"

"Never closed as far as I know."

"So if we cover that gate, we'd catch anybody going in for the ship?"

"Should do. Mind, they could be there already. Some people are." They looked at him. "Dockers, somebody from the harbourmaster's office, pilot vans, Customs went on board at the lock most likely, somebody from the owners. Rush hour in Piccadilly every time a ship comes in."

"They won't try and push an old lady on board through that, not yet," Caswell said.

Blagg coughed politely and asked: "What about the dock police, sir?"

"Prowl around from time to time. Want to know who you are if you're off the beaten track. Nothing much to pinch except Renault cars and you've got one of those already." He gave an elderly cackle. "They deliver 'em here, a compound over beside the Ocean Lock. They say they've got guard dogs loose in there, but some kids got in the other night and scratched up a whole lot of cars and I never heard of anybody getting bitten."

There was a moment of silence, then Our Man said to Agnes: "Is that it, then? Where d'you want me?"

"Back by the phone. Just -" she said something quickly and quietly to him; Maxim realised there must be some fallback plan, to try and muffle any scandal he might stir up. Our Man grunted a good-night and drove away.

"All right, " Maxim said. "Time to hand over all identifiable possessions."

Agnes watched, wondering, as Blagg and Caswell started turning out their pockets, putting wallets, keyholders, Cas-well's cheque book and Blagg's necklet ID disc into the holdall. Maxim put in his own share; they all kept some money.

"You're sure your clothes aren't marked?" he asked, handing out packets of field dressings. "Not even laundry marks?"

They stood confidently silent, and with a shudder in her stomach Agnes realised they were trying to make their corpses unidentifiable. Maxim gave her the holdall and she said: "I'm glad you didn't ask me. I'd bestarkersbefore I was sure I wasn't wearing anything marked."

They grinned with a wolfish politeness, then started distributing and loading weapons. The grenades, ten of them, were American M26A1's,probably smuggled in by Caswell from Germany stowed somewhere in a military vehicle. The Customs would be looking for booze and drugs, not weaponry. They screwed the fuses into six of them, and were as ready as they could be.

Maxim said: "You mentioned a flask of Scotch… Anybody in the market?"

Blagg wasn't interested, but Caswell said casually: "I'll take a dram," and Agnes poured him a stiff one. Maxim took a taste, more to keep Caswell company than anything. Perhaps Jim had become more adjusted to civilian life than he cared to believe. They got back into the Renault, Maxim driving.

Goole was built entirely on one side of the river; there wasn't even a bridge in the town itself. The dock area beganjust south of the centre, where the streets suddenly became rows of boarded-up broken-roofed houses and shops, an abrupt reminder in space of how fast the British ports had collapsed in time. The Army could have moved in tomorrow to use those streets for training and hardly disturbed a private citizen.

At least it meant there was no-one to see the creeping Renault as Maxim fixed the pattern of the area in their minds. The docks themselves were surprisingly bright, given an almost carnival air by tall street lamps throwing patches of blue-white, orange and yellowish light. The occasional ships – the berths were far from full – were also well lit, with floodlights boasting their funnel markings and harsh work-lights glaring down from the masts. Each ship hummed to itself, living off its generators, so that when they stopped the car the dock was a basket of purring metal creatures, and very far from the stark silence and darkness Maxim had expected. He had been through ports at night before, but only as a passenger smugly assuming the place was staying alive for himself alone.

There was some distant shouting from the lock gates, and from where they had parked on a disused railway line sunk into the road, they could see a small bunch of figures on the far side of the dock waiting for the Seesperling. The ship itself came gliding in with the dignity that even the smallest vesselhas when moving slowly through dead calm water, also bright and purring. The Goole boatmen were out of luck that night, since she was taking the simplest route in the harbour, with nothing more than a thirty degree turn out of the lock. Their turn would come when she had to back out again.

Maxim drove slowly back to the huge nineteenth-century church that stood right up against the low dock wall – or perhaps it was the churchyard wall; in any event it was no more than four feet high – and the ever-open gate down past the warehouses to the Aldam Dock.

"I don't know where we're going to set up here," Caswell said, and Maxim didn't know either. The lowness of the wall and the fact that the gate was on a corner of two streets, each quite wide, made it near impossible for an ambush.

"Somebody had better go in for a shufti," Maxim decided. "You, Jim. With a radio. "

It had to be that way: if you split your force, you had to split your commanders. Caswell took Blagg's pistol; they set the radios at channel 3 and agreed to change to 5, 7, 9 and11in that order if they had to shift. Caswell walked quickly through the gate and was lost behind a stack of forklift truck pallets. He had about three hundred yards to go to the Seesperling's berth.

On the other side of the church, the town centre side, therewas a small car park. Maxim backed the Renault in there, behind a truck loaded with what looked like sections of oil pipeline, and they waited. The walkie-talkie was jammed inthe driver's window so that its telescopic aerial stuck upoutside, and it murmured to itself. Agnes doubled herself over to light a cigarette near the floor of the car, trying to hide theflare of her lighter. They went on waiting. There was no wayto call Caswell: his own radio would be turned off, that close to theenemy.

He came in surprisingly strongly. "Jim. "

"Go."

"Pilot van's just leaving. White job."

"Roj."

They got just a glimpse of the van beyond the church, thirty seconds later. They waited. "Jim."

"Go."

"Customs just leaving. Blue Allegro. And two men on bikes."

They saw that, too, again just about on thirty seconds later. The bikes – probably dockers – came up Church Road past them, much more dangerous than a car driver surrounded by his own noise and light. Maxim snapped off the radio until they were gone.

Caswell was calling.

"Sorry. Go."

"One car left, a green Metro. I can't see anybody around."

"Roj."

The night went silent again. Blagg whispered: "Would they be using radio themselves, sir?"

"Likely enough." Now that CB radio was legal, they wouldn't even have had to pinch sets from the Intelligence Service's quartermasters. But there was nothing he could do about it.

The walkie-talkie suddenly squawked: "Hey, did I hear a good buddy out there ready to shoot the bull? This is the Dog in the Smog tooling down the rip strip and feeling kinda lonesome. Do you copy?" It was an adenoidal Birmingham voice trying to sound like a Tennessee truck driver.

Maxim glared at the radio as if it had bitten him, but the voice came back, jamming the waveband with more verbose CB garbage. Given a pause, Maxim snapped: "You fucking moron," which wasn't military radio procedure either, and switched to channel 5. It stayed silent.

Then at last: "Jim."

"Go."

"I've got Sims and 83 out on the deck. Two others with them. Nobody who looks like Eismark."

"Roj."

"Well, I'm damned," Agnes said. "We're in the right place."

"D'you think the old lady's there already?" Blagg asked.

Maxim and Agnes glanced at each other, then she said: "No. Sims and his bloke will have gone aboard to set up a deal. She's stored away somewhere."

Caswell's voice crackled: "Sims is using a walkie-talkie. sb's getting off the boat. Going for the Metro."

"Roj." Maxim started the engine. "We're going to have to stop him."

"He's most likely going for the old lady," Agnes said. "He could lead us there. "

"He'll talk once I get at him."

"You and your trusty ammonia? It could take hours. "

Caswell reported: "Metro's on its way."

Maxim pulled the radio back into the car. "Wehave to stop him. I can't tail him, not through an empty town, this time of night."

"Of course you can't, but I can. Shift your arse."

Maxim scrambled around to the passenger side as she slid across under the wheel. The green Metro slipped out of the gates and up past them; there was one person in it. Without turning on the lights, Agnes jumped the Renault forward to the edge of the park just as the Metro turned left at the end of the road.

"Stanhope Street," Maxim said, juggling the map, a torch and the radio. "He has to go either left or right in three hundred yards."

Still lightless, the Renault bounded forward and slewed into Stanhope Street; the Metro's tail-lights swung left.

"Bridge Street. Long and looks dead straight. Leads out of town southwards."

It was indeed dead straight – it was the main road feeding the west side of the docks – but became a series of humped-backed bridges over offshoots of those docks. Agnes let the Metro go over the first, out of sight, and then hurled the Renault down to it, jammed to a stop and crept up for a look. And so she went on, driving like a rifleman moving forward under fire, using the car with a skilled savagery that made Maxim and Blagg, men who lived with machinery, wince as they would have done had she used the walkie-talkie to hammer in a nail. But she kept a quarter of a mile back from the Metro yet out of its sight until it crossed the last bridge and turned down the Swinefleet Road along the south bank of the Humber. The soft-sprung Renault screamed around after it.

The radio said: "Jim," already noticeably fainter.

"Harry. We're behind him, going south out of town, by the river. Shin"

The street lights had suddenly ended and they plunged into a moonless darkness and Agnes braked heavily to let the Metro's lights vanish beyond the next corner. Then she snapped on the headlights and tore forward.

"Jim – check in every ten minutes if you can."

"Roj."

One side of the road was a walled dike holding in the river; if the Metro turned, it could only be to the right. That was some consolation for moving in briefly lit rushes and suddenly dark stops as they rounded a bend. But at least the road would be dead flat as long as it clung to the river, and there were occasional tiny villages with lamps up on telephone poles to give them some respite.

Then, inevitably, came the bend which had no tail-lights showing beyond it. Agnes must have been prepared because the lights came on and she changed to an easy cruising drive. "Get your heads down. He may just be checking his back. "

They kept going for another thirty seconds or so, and Agnes said: "He turned off. I've gone past, it should be far enough for him not to hear. D'you want to wait, or walk it?"

The car coasted to a stop and Maxim lifted his head off his knees. "I'll walk it. You follow up in a couple of minutes."

He ran – which he hadn't wanted Blagg to try and do -back the quarter mile to the corner, where a wooded lane led off beside a disused-looking wooden barn. The Metro, unlit, was parked just on the verge; the van, if it was there, would be up the track beside the barn. He waited a few seconds, recovering his breath. As a hiding place it made good sense, since they could have sat on top of the dike a few yards away and watched the Seesperling come chugging upstream and timed their trip into Goole itself precisely.

Gun in hand, and using the Metro as cover, he reached the corner of the barn and paused to listen. There was a mutter, a pause, another mutter. Of course: somebody was speaking German on a radio. He eased an eyebrow around the barn and there was the van, a windowless Bedford of some dark colourhe couldn't make out, with a man perched half on the driving seat under an interior light and using a long-lead microphone. There was no sign of any second man.

Behind, he heard the drone of the Renault heading back. The man with the microphone put it down and shut the door, putting out the light, and the second man came around the back of the van zipping up his trousers. Maxim leaned out around the corner pointing the little revolver and said: "If you move I'll Jh7/you."

He was fairly sure he was starting a gunfight, although he wasn't worried about the outcome. They would be tensed up, almost certainly armed, reckoning on the darkness and a two-to-one superiority… But then the vital first milliseconds flowed away, they felt the surge in their bowels and ideas of pain and death welled up inside them. Then he was herding them against the side of the van, spread your hands and feet, more, more I said, but staying back and waiting for Blagg and the shotgun. A part of his easy victory was explained already: one man had his right wrist wrapped in a rigid plaster bandage right up to the palm.

Blagg noticed that, too. "It looks just like somebody shot you there, don't it? And on account of I'm a great detective, I'd say it happened in Rotherhithe, know where I mean? I'd even say it happened in back of Neptune Court, while you was trying to blow me away. Would you remember that?" He was rubbing the shotgun mu/zle up the man's spine.

"Leave it, Ron," Maxim ordered. The man – 82 – hadn't even been armed.83 had had a Czech VZ5O automatic in his pocket.

Agnes came from the back doors of the van, "She's in there; all right, I think, but…"

"Ron, you're in charge."

"Could I have your.38, Major? The noise of this thing…"

"You're in poaching country here; Lincolnshire starts about ten metres down that road. Nobody'll lose a drop of sleep over a shotgun going off; just stay well back so you don't get splattered." He wasn't talking to Blagg and nobody thought he was.

There was a dim interior light in the van, which was fittedwith a bunk bed on either side. Mina lay on the right one, her head on a grubby flower-pattern cushion and her left hand loosely shading her face. She wore a jumble of old clothes including a stretched woollen cardigan. The van smelt of habitation.

"She's pretty much sedated," Agnes said. She nodded at a box of Valium phials and disposable hypodermics on the other bed. Maxim sat beside them rather than stand in an awkward stoop.

"So here's the last chorus of Plainsong," he said, feeling a sudden weariness. "Did they try to get her to talk?" He picked up the drugs box and shook it. "There's no sign of sodium pentathol or anything like that."

"You don't need that, "Agnes said, a little angry. "She'sjust an arthritic old lady with no training in how to resist. Fear's the best truth drug for people like her, and itcornescheap."

Maxim just nodded, reached across and lifted Mina 's hand gently away from her face. Her eyes opened with drugged slowness, then a sudden spasm of revulsion.

"It's all right, " he said soothingly. "We've come to take you back home. It's all over." He eased the other hand out from under her neck, so that he held each of them, stroking her knuckles reassuringly with his thumbs. "We'll get you back to the Dales. What was the name of the village?"

"Ramsley," Agnes said softly.

"Back to Ramsley. Just one thing: did they ask you questions?"

Mina moved her head fractionally.

"Did you tell them? Did you say you'd helped kill Brigitte Krone?"

"Harry," Agnes said warningly.

"We have to know what they know. Did you tell them?" He reached around and stroked the back of Mina 's neck, as if to soothe a knot of muscles under her back hair. Her eyes widened and she said faintly: "Yes. I did tell them."

"Fine. You told them you and Gustavhad killed Brigitte."

"Yes."

He put her hands back, but she took a moment to discover them, and rearrange herself in slow motion. Her eyes closed.

"I told you it was cheaper than drugs, " Agnes said in a bitter voice.

"She's lucky: I saw the last person Sims started questioning. I want to say something. "

But when they stepped down from the van, all he said was: "Did you bring out the radio?" and she showed it him, propped by the aerial against the barn. He put it on top of the van, for maximum range, then got a pair of handcuffs from the holdall and locked the two men together, wrist to wrist but around the front bumper of the Bedford so that they sprawled awkwardly on the grassy track ahead of it. But they said nothing, and neither did he or the watchful Blagg; it could have been standard moves in a game of chess where, Agnes recalled, you also stay silent and only win by the other side's mistake.

Blagg sat down against the barn, husbanding his strength. Maxim came back to Agnes.

"You were going to say something," she reminded him. "Or was that it?" (Why does this man always get me angry?)

"Yes. Mina – that isn't arthritis she's got. Not in her hands, anyway. The muscles in her left hand are flat, wasted, compared with the right."

"Arthritis was just what I heard. I'm not a doctor."

"No, you drive a car pretty well -" (now I remember why I get angry with this man, she thought) " – but you haven't spent six months in hospital or ten years married to an Army nurse. We got a lot of these cases, people applying for a disability award years after the event. A wound sort of hardens up and it can squeeze the nerves controlling a limb. They call it fibrositis when they can't think of a fancier name."

"So she's been wounded now, has she?"

Maxim glanced back, but Blagg was interested only in the two men and the radio. "Yes, high up in the neck, where the nerves for the hands come out. You can feel the scar. I think somebody tried operating there, too, probably when her hand started to go numb and seize up."

"All right, but what's this got to do with anything?"

"That was the wound the wife,Brigitte, wassupposed to have got in Dornhausen, back in '45."

"D'you mean this isn't his sister but hiswife?'

"Same person. He got his sister pregnant and married her to make it look better. There wouldn't be any problem – they were both using roadnames at the time. If that's the little secret he's been keeping all the time I'm not surprised how hard he's been working at it. "

"God Almighty."

"He's seen worse in His time. "