The Danger Read online

  I waited while he stepped into the shower and sluiced lavishly about. “There’s two of those places,” he said, reappearing eventually and toweling his sandy-brown hair, “that gave me bad vibes. One of them’s got some sort of electronic gadget guarding the door: it sent my detection gear into a tizzy. I’d guess it’s one of those do-it-yourself alarms you can buy anywhere to stop hotel creepers fitting you up while you’re sleeping off the mickey the barman slipped you.” He dried his neck. “So I left a couple of bugs on that one, and we’ll go back soon and listen in.”

  He wrapped the towel round his body like a sarong and sat on Miranda’s bed. “The other one’s got no electronic gadgets that I could see, but it’s three stories high. Boat shed on the ground floor. Empty. Just water and effing fish. Above that, rooms overlooking the creek. Above that, more rooms. There’s a sort of scrubby paved garden on two sides. Not much cover. I didn’t fancy going in. Anyway I stuck two bugs on it, one on each of the two upper floors. So we’ll listen to them as well.”

  “Cars?” I said.

  “Can’t tell.” He shook his head. “Neither place has a garage. There were cars along the streets.” He stood up and began to dress. “Come on then,” he said. “Get out of the effing pit, and let’s go fishing.”

  He meant it literally, it seemed. By eight-thirty we were out on Itchenor Creek in the chilly morning in his rented rowing boat, throwing lines with maggots on hooks over the side.

  “Are you sure this is the right bait?” I said.

  “Who cares? Bass swallow bare hooks sometimes, silly buggers.”

  He paddled the boat along like a born waterman with one oar in a loop of rope over the stern. No creaking rowlocks, he explained. Ultra-silent travel: high on the S.A.S. curriculum.

  “The tide was low at five this morning,” he said. “You can’t get a boat ashore at low tide in a lot of places, so if they landed the kid from that motorboat it was probably somewhere where there’s water at half tide. Both our possibles qualify, just.”

  Our rowing boat drifted along on slowly flooding water. The fish disdained the maggots and there was a salty smell of seaweed.

  “We’re just coming to the place with the electronic bulldog,” Tony said. “Hold this aerial so it looks like a fishing rod.” He untelescoped about six feet of thin silvery rod and handed it over, and I found there was a line tied to the end of it with a small weight. “Chuck the weight in the water,” he said, bending down to fiddle with the radio receiver in what looked like a fishing-gear box. “Keep your eyes on the briny and pin back the lugs.”

  I did all of those things but nothing much happened. Tony grunted and did some fine tuning, but in the end he said, “The lazy so-and-so’s aren’t awake. The bugs are working. We’ll come back when we’ve checked the other house.”

  I nodded and he paddled a good way northwards before stopping again to deploy the lines. Again we drifted on the tide, apparently intent on catching our breakfast, and Tony bent to his knobs.

  The voice when it came nearly tipped me out of the boat.

  “Give the little bleeder his breakfast and tape off his noise if he starts whining.”

  The voice—unmistakably the voice—which we had heard on the tape in John Nerrity’s house. Not overloud, but crystal clear.

  “My God,” I said numbly, not believing it.

  “Bingo,” Tony said with awe. “Holy effing hell.”

  A different voice on the tape said, “He won’t eat it. What’s the point of taking it up there?”

  “Son,” said the first voice with exaggerated patience, “do we want our little gold mine to starve to death? No we don’t. Take him his bread and jam, and shut up.”

  “I don’t like this job,” the second voice complained. “Straight up, I don’t.”

  “You were keen enough when I put you up for it. Good work, you said; those were your words.”

  “I didn’t reckon on the kid being so . . .”

  “So what?”

  “So stubborn.”

  “He’s not that bad. Pining, most like. You concentrate on the payola and get up the bleeding stairs.”

  Tony flipped a couple of switches and for a while we sat in silence listening to the faint slap of the water against our own drifting boat; and then the second voice, sounding much more distant, said, “Here you are kid, eat this.”

  There was no audible reply.

  “Eat it,” the voice said with irritation, and then, after a pause, “I’d stuff it down your throat if you were mine, you snotty little sod.”

  Tony said “Charming” under his breath and began to pull in the lines. “Heard enough, haven’t we? That second bug is on the top floor, facing the street.”

  I nodded. Tony reversed his switches and the second voice, downstairs again, said, “He’s just lying there staring, same as usual. Gives me the willies. Sooner we’re shot of him, the better.”

  “Patience,” the first voice said, as if humoring an idiot. “You got to let the man sell his horse. Stands to reason. One week we gave him. One week is what he’ll get.”

  “We’re not collecting the five million, though, are we?” He sounded aggrieved. “Not a chance.”

  “We were never going to get five million, stupid. Like Peter said, you demand five to frighten the dads and take half a million nice and easy, no bones broken.”

  “What if Nerrity calls in the Force, and they jump us?”

  “No sign of them, is there? Be your age. Terry and Kevin, they’d spot the law the minute it put its size twelves over the doorstep. Those two, they got antennae where you’ve got eyes. No one at the hotel. No one at the house in Sutton. Right?”

  The second voice gave an indistinguishable grumble, and the first voice answered, “Peter knows what he’s doing. He’s done it before. He’s an expert. You just do what you’re bleeding told and we’ll all get rich, and I’ve had a bellyful of your grousing, I have, straight up.”

  Tony put the single oar over the stern of the boat and without fuss or hurry paddled us off towards where we’d set out, against the swirling incoming tide. I rolled up the fishing lines and unbaited the hooks, my fingers absentminded while my thoughts positively galloped.

  “Don’t let’s tell Eagler until . . .” I said.

  “No,” Tony answered.

  He looked across at me, half smiling. “And let’s not tell the chairman either,” I said. “Or Gerry Clayton.”

  Tony’s smile came out like the sun. “I was afraid you’d insist.”

  “No.” I paused. “You watch from the water and I’ll watch from the land. O.K.? And this evening we’ll tell Eagler. On our terms.”

  “And the low profile can rest in effing peace.”

  “You just get that vacuum pump purring like a cat and don’t fall off any high walls.”

  “In our report,” Tony said, “we will write that the police found the hideout.”

  “Which they did,” I said reasonably.

  “Which they did,” he repeated with satisfaction.

  Neither Tony nor I were totally committed to the advice-only policy of the firm, though we both adhered to it more or less and agreed that in most circumstances it was prudent. Tony with his exceptional skills tended always to be more actively involved than I, and his reports were peppered with phrases like “it was discovered” and “as it happened” and never with the more truthful “I planted a dozen illegal bugs and heard . . .” or “I let off a smoke canister and under its cover . . .”

  Tony steered the boat back to where we’d left the car and rapidly set up a duplicate receiver to work through the car’s aerial.

  “There you are,” he said, pointing. “Left switch for the lower floor bug, middle switch for the top floor. Don’t touch the dials. Right switch, up for me to talk to you, down for you to talk to me. O.K.?”

  He dug around in the amazing stores he called his gear and with a nod of pleasure took out a plastic lunch box. “Longterm subsistence supplies,” he said, showing m
e the contents. “Nut bars, beef jerky, vitamin pills . . . keep you fighting fit for weeks.”

  “This isn’t the South American outback,” I said mildly.

  “Saves a lot of shopping, though.” He grinned and stowed the lunch box in the rowing boat along with a plastic bottle of water. “If the worst should happen and they decide to move the kid, we’re in dead trouble.”

  I nodded. Trouble with the law, with Liberty Market and with our own inescapable guilt.

  “And let’s not forget,” he added slowly, “that somewhere around we have Terry and Kevin and Peter, all with their antennae quivering like effing mad, and you never know whether that crass bastard Rightsworth won’t drive up to Nerrity’s house with his blue light flashing.”

  “He’s not that crazy.”

  “He’s smug. Self-satisfied. Just as dangerous.”

  He put his head on one side, considering. “Anything else?”

  “I’ll go back to the hotel, pay the bill, collect the cases.”

  “Right. Give me a buzz when you’re on station.” He stepped into the boat and untied its painter. “And, by the way, do you have a dark sweater? Black, high neck?”

  “Yes, I brought one.”

  “Good. See you tonight.”

  I watched him paddle away, a shortish figure of great physical economy, every movement deft and sure. He waved goodbye briefly, and I turned the car and got on with the day.

  13

  The hours passed slowly with the mixture of tension and boredom that I imagined soldiers felt when waiting before battle. Half of the time my pulse rate was up in the stratosphere, half the time I felt like sleep. At only one point did the watch jerk from standby to nerve-racking, and that was at midday.

  For most of the morning I had been listening to the bug on the lower of the two floors, not parking the whole time in one place but moving about and stopping for a while in any of the streets within range. The two kidnappers had repeated a good deal of what we’d already heard; grouse, grouse, shut up.

  Dominic at one point had been crying.

  “The kid’s whining,” the first voice said.

  I switched to the top floor bug and heard the lonely heartbreaking grizzle, the keening of a child who’d lost hope of being given what he wanted. No one came to talk to him, but presently his voice was obliterated by pop music.

  I switched to the lower bug again and felt my muscles go into knots.

  A new voice was speaking, “. . . a bloke sitting in a car a couple of streets away, just sitting there. I don’t like it. And he’s a bit like one of the people staying in the hotel.”

  The first-voice kidnapper said decisively, “You go and check him out, Kev. If he’s still there, come right back. We’re taking no bleeding risks. The kid goes down the chute.”

  The second-voice kidnapper said, “I’ve been sitting at this ruddy window all morning. There’s been no one in sight here, sussing us out. Just people walking, not looking.”

  “Where did you leave the car?” Kevin demanded. “You’ve moved it.”

  “It’s in Turtle Street.”

  “That’s where this bloke is sitting.”

  There was silence among the kidnappers. The bloke sitting in the car in Turtle Street, his heart lurching, started his engine and removed himself fast.

  A red light on Tony’s radio equipment began flashing, and I pressed the switch to talk to him. “I heard,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m on my way. Talk to you when I can.”

  I drove a mile and pulled up in the car park of a busy pub, and beat my ears to catch the much fainter transmissions.

  “The bloke’s gone,” a voice eventually said.

  “What do you reckon, Kev?”

  The reply was indistinguishable.

  “There hasn’t been a smell of the Force. Not a flicker.” The first-voice kidnapper sounded as if he were trying to reassure himself as much as anyone else. “Like Peter said, they can’t surround this place without us seeing, and it takes eight seconds, that’s all, to put the kid down the chute. You know it, I know it, we practiced. There’s no way the police would find anything here but three blokes having a bleeding holiday and a little gamble on the cards.”

  There were some more indecipherable words, then the same voice. “We’ll both watch, then. I’ll go upstairs, ready. You, Kev, you walk round the bleeding town and see if you can spot that bloke hanging about. If you see him, give us a bell, then we’ll decide. Peter won’t thank us if we panic. We got to give the goods back breathing, that’s what he said. Otherwise we get nothing, savvy, and I don’t want to have gone through all this aggravation for a hole in the bleeding pocket.”

  I couldn’t hear the replies, but first-voice seemed to have prevailed. “Right then. Off you go, Kev. See you later.”

  I went inside the pub where I was parked and ate a sandwich with fingers not far from trembling. The low profile, I judged, had never been more justified or more essential, and I’d risked Dominic’s life by not sticking to the rules.

  THE PROBLEM WITH dodging Kevin was that I didn’t know what he looked like while he could spot me easily, and probably he knew the color, make, and number of my car. Itchenor was too small for handy hiding places like multi-story parks. I concluded that as I couldn’t risk being seen I would have to give the place a miss altogether, and drove by a roundabout route to reach Itchenor Creek at a much higher point, nearer Chichester. I could no longer hear the bugs, but hoped to reach Tony down the water; and he responded to my first inquiry with a faint voice full of relief.

  “Where are you?” he demanded.

  “Up the creek.”

  “You’ve said it.”

  “What’s happened in the house?”

  “Nothing. Whatever that chute is, the goods have not yet gone down it. But they’re still quivering like effing jellyfish.” He paused. “Effing bad luck, them having their car in that street.”

  He was excusing me. I was grateful. I said, “I’d been there only ten minutes.”

  “Way it goes. Kev is back with them, incidentally.”

  “I’ll be here, if you need me.”

  “O.K.,” he said. “And by the way, it was the one called Peter who picked the goods up. Sweet as a daisy, they said. Peter phones them every day and apparently might go there himself tomorrow or the day after. Pity we can’t wait.”

  “Too risky.”

  “Yeah.”

  We agreed on a time and place for me to meet him, and switched off to conserve the power packs he had with him in the boat. Listening to the bugs was far more important, and, besides, drained the batteries less.

  There was always the slight chance with radio that someone somewhere would be casually listening on the same channel, but I reviewed what we’d said and thought it wouldn’t have enlightened or alarmed anyone except the kidnappers themselves, even if we had, on the whole, sounded like a couple of thieves.

  I stayed by the water all afternoon, in or near the car, but heard no more from Tony, which was in itself a sign that the status was still quo. At a few minutes to five I drove inland to the nearest telephone box and put a call through to Eagler.

  He was off duty, the station said. What was my name?

  Andrew Douglas.

  In that case, would I ring the following number?

  I would, and did, and he answered immediately. What a terrific change, I thought fleetingly, from my disaster with Pucinelli’s second-in-command.

  “Can your men work at night?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Tony found the kidnappers,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “It should be possible for you to arrest them.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Er,” I said. “They are extremely alert, watching for any sign of police activity. If you turn up there too soon it would be curtains for the boy. So would you . . . um . . . act on our suggestions, without questioning them, and positively, absolutely not altering the plan
in any way?”

  There was a fair pause, then he said, “Am I allowed to approve this plan, or not?”

  “Er . . . not.”

  Another pause. “Take it or leave it?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Hm.” He deliberated. “The kidnappers on your terms, or not at all?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, laddie.”

  “Mm,” I said.

  A final pause, then he said, “You’re on. All right. What’s the plan?”

  “You need enough men to arrest at least three people,” I said. “Can you get them to your Chichester main police station by one in the morning?”

  “Certainly.” He sounded almost affronted. “Plainclothes or in uniform?”

  “I don’t think it will matter.”

  “Armed or not?”

  “It’s up to you. We don’t know if the kidnappers have guns.”

  “Right. And where are my men to go?”

  “I’ll call you with directions after one o’clock.”

  He snorted. “Not very trusting, are you?”

  “I do trust you,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be setting this up for you at all.”

  “Well, well,” he said. “The iron man in the kid glove, just as I rather suspected. All right, laddie, your trust won’t be misplaced, and I’ll play fair with you. And I’ll tear the both of you to shreds if you bungle it.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said thankfully. “I’ll call you at the station.”

  I went back to the water to wait but heard no squeak from Tony; and long after it had grown dark I drove to where we’d agreed to meet, and transferred him and his equipment from boat to car.

  “They simmered down a bit in the house,” he said. “They had a phone call from Peter, whoever he is, and that seemed to steady them a bit. Pity I couldn’t have fixed a tap on the telephone. Anyway, Peter apparently told them to carry on with the lookout and not dump the boy unless they could see the police outside.” He grinned. “Which I hope they won’t effing do.”