The Crocus List

36

Maxim came to Oxendown House in his own way. If they were expecting more visitors-and he had to assume they were-they probably expected the police, charging up the track in cars. Once a policeman gets his aching feet into a car, he is loath to take them out again. So Maxim came from the cliff side.

He wore his 'Cammie' jacket of broken browns and greens (many civilians now wore those, in the country) with gloves to hide his hands and a net scarf stuffed with tufts of grass that he draped over his face as he raised his head, very slowly, into a gorse bush atop the last crest before the valley-a 'combe', as it was known locally -that became a lawn at the top.

The house was about two hundred metres away, its wide front and terrace nicely framed by the spreading cedars. What interested him more was the sprawl of bushes that ran out from the trees on either side of the lawn. If he could reach the nearest of those bushes unseen, he had cover right up to the terrace.

He watched for several minutes but saw no movement; he was in a hurry, but not that much of one, and not now that he had the house almost in his grasp. He lowered his head as slowly as he had raised it and wriggled back down the slope, then took out the Walther and jacked a round into the chamber.

Keeping the chimney-pots of the house in view over the crest, he jogged along the reverse slope, and when another patch of gorse on the crest offered, slid up for another look. The trouble was the bare slope on the far side that led down to the shrubbery. But already he was out of sight from anybody at the dormer windows looking out to the sea, unless a watcher was right up against the glass. He hoped these people were trained to stand well back in theshadow. There was a gable window overlooking his side, but if he moved just a few metres on, there would be the broad trunk of a cedar in line with it.

He crawled along to position the tree carefully, then, keeping his body dead in line with it, wriggled slowly over the top and down the slope, in plain view should anybody walk out on to the terrace.

Then he was among the bushes, picking broken sticks out of his way as he worked towards the corner of the house, watching both front and side. When he touched brickwork he felt, almost as tangibly, the advantage pass to himself. To somebody like Maxim, close was safe.

The front of the house had too many windows, the terrace was too wide, and there he would have the south light behind him. So he moved towards the darker side, keeping right up against the wall, with the pistol and his head twitching in every direction. As he ducked to pass a ground-floor window he heard the muffled buzz-buzz of the telephone, and waited to see if it got answered. It stopped after three rings, and now he had one person at least pinned down somewhere in the middle of the house; he could risk making the next mcve quickly.

A single-storey outhouse had been bu Ut on at that corner, forcing him away from the main house and into the view from the gable window. He slipped around it with the pistol watching the window. Ahead was a newish garage, separated from the outhouse by a shoulder-wide alley floored with rotting leaves.

Distantly, there was a moment of hammering and he paused, puzzled. At the end of the alley, he could see the rear corner ofa Land-Roverstanding on a courtyard of smeary green stone.

They were going to need that. He crept forward until he could see the whole vehicle: an old hard-topped model with windows all round, and nobody sitting in it. Maxim slid clear of the alley and crouched back against the house wall, covered by a small bush in a rotting tub, and wondered if he could reach the Land-Roverunseen. Ten metres, no more, but ten metres out in the open, under the windows of the house…

Somebody walked out of the glass doors a few metres tohis left, heading for the vehicle. Maxim froze: the man was carrying a Russian submachine-gun.

But he wasn't hunting, just carrying the gun one-handed by its pistol grip, perhaps one second away from firing if trouble came his way. He didn't even have that second, with Maxim's pistol pointed at the middle of his back, but this wasn't war. Not quite.

The man walked round the back of the Land-Roverand opened the driver's door. If he were just getting something out of it, then on his return he would be facing the ludicrously small bush in its tub… The engine whined and blared, and Maxim ran.

The vehicle had just begun to move when he banged the gun against the window. "Stop right there!"

The gaping face stared back down the pistol barrel, then the Land-Roverjumped off, and in that moment Maxim could have blown the face away. But that was too small a satisfaction for the long road he had travelled. He fired twice through the driver's door, low and forward, and then was knocked aside as the rear end slewed on the mossy stone.

He rolled further and came up aiming, but the Land-Roverwasn't going for the driveway; it swung left and smashed into the bushes flanking the terrace where it stretched round that side of the house.

Maxim reached the corner of the terrace overlooking the lawn just as the Land-Roverbroke free of the bushes, and shot twice more, plunging fire through the passenger window towards the driver's legs. He saw glass star and crumble.

The Land-Roverslowed, turned a crawling half-circle across the lawn, and rammed the terrace wall at the far end. Maxim vaulted the balustrade, ran up to the passenger side, yanked open the door and snatched the submachine-gun from the floor. The driver was folded over the wheel. Maxim ducked round the vehicle, so its bulk would shield him from the house windows, and dragged the man out. He gasped as he hit the grass.

There were two bullet wounds: one through the muscles of the right thigh that didn't seem too dangerous, and one in the left knee that was pumping blood steadily.

"Keep your hands spread and still," Maxim ordered, starting on a tourniquet. "Is there anybody else around?"

The man stared blankly, gasping.

"I want to know," Maxim went on, "because if somebody else starts shooting, I shall lose interest in keeping you alive."

"Nobody," the man whispered.

Maxim plugged the wound with lumps of torn handkerchief and began binding it up. "Nobody? Not even a fat friend of mine?-George Harbinger? In his forties?"

"Yes… he's all right…"

"That is nice. I'll ask you where, in a minute-but what were you going to do with him?"

"Nothing… Let him loose…"

"Really? Why snatch him in the first place, then?"

The man closed his eyes, looking very pale. Maxim finished rough-patching the wounds, then reached into the Land-Roverand found a coat. He spread it over the man; no point in him dying of shock just yet.

"All right, you'll live if you stay still. Now, where is he?"

The man told him. Maxim searched him as he did so, indiscriminately, turning everything out of the man's pockets and not caring too much about gulps of pain. Among the odd things were a wristwatch and a handcuff key.

Then he took the keys from the Land-Rover, just in case, and also had a quick rummage through the back. It was hastily piled with suitcases, a box of groceries, a typewriter case, some other, larger sort of plastic case, a workchest of heavy-duty electric tools and a small box holding two old-style Russian grenades.

He took the grenades. "I'm glad you forgot to pocket one of these. Soon you must tell me who the gentleman at the Abbey was."

The french windows at the back were unlocked; in fact, one was open, so the man hadn't been pulling out. Perhaps he'd just been going to position the Land-Roverfor a getaway. It would have been quite possible to drive down the lawn and then away over the fields while the police came charging up the main track. In ordinary cars, they wouldn't have been able to follow.

Nobody had shot at him, but he wasn't taking anybody's word for it. He scoured the ground floor, kicking open doors and waving the pistol in one direction, the submachine-gun in another, ready to use a grenade if anything seemed too suspicious. Then he reached the bedroom floor. One room was clear, and then he was in a big bedroom overlooking the terrace and lawn-and the moving Land-Rover.

The man was gone: just a dark patch on the lawn beside the coat and wheel ruts showed where he'd lain. Maxim felt in his pockets for the keys, but he still had them. A spare key hidden in some corner of the vehicle? He raised the submachine-gun, but the Land-Rover wasalready dipping off the edge of the lawn, jolting over the pasture land-and Maxim realised it was unpowered, just rolling downhill. The man had used the slope of the lawn to roll it back until it had speed to swing into a three-point turn and now… now it was downhill all the way.

It took one wire fence without check or swerve, and there may have been a second, but it was a long way away and the Land-Roverwas just a bobbling black shape. It must have worked up to quite a speed, because it didn't collapse suddenly offthe cliff, but vanished smoothly. He didn't hear a thing. But he did wish he'd remembered that Land-Rovershad been invented before steering-column locks.

George ducked his head against the light, blinking helplessly at the dark figure in the doorway. "Get me some water," he croaked. "Before anything else, just get some water."

"No whisky?" Maxim asked.

"Harry! My God, you're back!" He was still helplessly blind before the neon strips that ran down the long cellar.

"If you will go hiding in dark corners, you miss all sorts of news." He undid the handcuffs.

George stayed on his rickety wooden chair, rubbing his left wrist. "They left me some biscuits and water, but I knocked the water over in the dark. What's the time?"

"Oh… coming up to three."

"What? I thought it was midnight. They took my watch."

Maximgave it him back. "How many did you see?"

"One, but he had a ski-mask on. And I think there was another somewhere. How many did you meet?"

"One. He's just driven himself over the cliff ina Land-Rover, but I… no, it can wait."

"I didn't hear anything."

"Down here, you wouldn't." The door to the second cellar was remarkably thick, but not heavy. The soundproofing could hardly be to keep noiseout, Maxim thought, and he wandered the length of the room. The end wall was just limestone, left as it had been cut, without any facing and now pocked with holes.

"Shooting gallery," he said admiringly. "Neat: no ricochets off limestone, they just go in and stay in. Same thing as Gibraltar: they do all their live firing in the tunnels there."

He helped George, still stiff and cold and perhaps beginning to tremble, through the original cellar-the door had been not exactly secret, but behind a panel that Maxim had found already lifted down-and up the steps to the kitchen. He gave him a mug of water. "You'd better ring Annette."

There was a telephone in the drawing-room, but it was dead. When Maxim traced the Uneto a junction box, it was smashed. He fancied he'd heard that happening. George came in and collapsed on to a sheet-covered chair. "Is my car still here?"

"I doubt it, but I'll check." The only place was the garage. He found the door unlocked and the place empty except for the usual clutter, and a cardboard box in the middle of the floor, as if ready to be taken away. It held a couple of jaggededged bits of metal that might have been cut from a car body, some old rags stained with dark green paint and there was a general dusting of the same colour on the dusty concrete; somebody had been using a spray gun.

He went back. "You're short one car. It looks as if one of them took it away and dumped it somewhere while the other loaded up the Land-Rover. Then he was going to release you and give himself time to get out of the area while you wandered around trying to find a phone. I think we should start doing that."

"D'you really think they were going to let me go?"

"I think the smashed phone proves it; not much point, otherwise. And once you'd got here, this place was blown as a base. They'd have to expect a follow-up. " He looked around longingly in the low, opaque light from the terrace windows. "I'd like to do a proper search, but it would take days. Leave it to Special Branch: we can tip them off from London."

"We can walk into the police station at Eastbourne. Damn it, / haven't done anything wrong. I've beenkidnapped."

"And because you were kidnapped / shot somebody who went over the cliff in that Land-Rover. I'mnot walking into any police station. Now, let's move. "

They walked back roughly the way Maxim had come, across the pasture to where he had left his car in a lay-by on the main road. Maxim did his best to demilitarise himself by letting his camouflaged jacket hang open to show the civilian sweater and shirt, but the only pace George could make across that ground didn't look suspicious anyway.

"Do you know," George said thoughtfully, "what was the worst thing about being down there in the dark?"

"Lack of whisky, I should think," Maxim said lightly.

George was silent for a time. Then he said: "Yes. But not just wanting it: feeling how much I needed it. It worried me."

Realising George was serious, Maxim tried to think of something helpful. "You were under a lot of stress. I've never been a prisoner, unarmed, helpless-except in exercise situations. And you can't really fake the real thing."

"Thank you, Harry. But it wasn't that…"

"Did they try interrogating you?"

"The one did. He asked how I'd found the house, who else knew, he said nobody would find me there in that place… I don't think he was very serious, though. And he didn't stay very long."

"Probably wanted to nip upstairs and check the place wasn't full of coppers, if he was on his own by then."

"Yes… it all seems a bit unreal and tame, now. Isuppose they really weren't going to kill me. I mean, that isn't the way they seem to work. I told myself that, in the dark, but I wasn't very convincing." He looked around at the wide green downs, the tattered grey sky and out to the Channel, where a broad blade of sunlight broke through to glitter the surface: " 'Set in the silver sea"… he must have been looking south when he wrote that. There's a helicopter."

Maxim had heard it already, its pulsing carried on the wind as it tracked the line of the cliff edge. "Somebody's reported the Land-Rover."

"We'd better keep moving."

"Better if we watched. We're just taking a stroll. You'd stop and watch a helicopter rescue act, wouldn't you?"

They stood there-luckily too far from the cliff for it to be natural for them to hurry down and peer over-as the helicopter swung into the wind and began hovering.

"I didn't know you were coming back," George remembered suddenly.

"It was a bit hurried. Things happened out in Illinois…" He told George briefly. The helicopter wavered itself into position, the winchman standing in the open doorway, then sank gradually below the cliff edge.

They walked on towards the road. "So it's finally got into the open," George said. "Well, not the open, with the broad bottoms of the Security Service planted on it, but the whole thing, back to the Abbey and the Reznichenko Memorandum and Tatham himself in 1968… Harry, when we add our experience here today, you know I think we've won? There isn't a committee in Whitehall that can whitewash this lot away. "

"If that matters any longer."

"What do you mean by that?"

"They could have done more to cover themselves. Pushed you over a cliff in your own car, driven you away somewhere, anything to give themselves more time… I don't think they want much more time. They think they've got enough."

"They can't do anything now without it being obvious it's part of the pattern."

"But do they know that?"