The Dark Crusader Read online

There was a brief silence. Then I pushed the paper back to him and said: ‘Haven’t you rather overlooked the fact that this advert is like the rest – it calls for a married man?’

  ‘I never overlook the obvious,’ he said flatly.

  I stared at him. ‘You never –’ I broke off, then continued: ‘I suppose you’ve got the banns already called and the bride waiting in the church.’

  I’ve done better than that.’ Again the faint tic in the cheek. He reached into a drawer, pulled out a nine by four buff envelope and tossed it across to me. ‘Take care of that, Bentall. Your marriage certificate. Caxton Hall, ten weeks ago. You may examine it if you wish but I think you’ll find everything perfectly in order.’

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ I muttered mechanically. ‘I should hate to be a party to anything illegal.’

  ‘And now,’ he said briskly, ‘you would, of course, like to meet your wife.’ He lifted the phone and said: ‘Ask Mrs Bentall to come here, please.’

  His pipe had gone out and he’d resumed the excavations with the pen-knife, examining the bowl with great care. There was nothing for me to examine so I let my eye wander until I saw again the light-coloured panel in the wood facing me. I knew the story behind that. Less than nine months ago, shortly after Colonel Raine’s predecessor had been killed in an air crash, another man had sat in the chair I was sitting in now. It had been one of Raine’s own men, but what Raine had not known was that that man had been subverted in Central Europe and persuaded to act as double agent. His first task – which would also probably have been his last – was simple and staggering in its audacity: nothing less than the murder of Raine himself. Had it been successful, the removal of Colonel Raine – I never knew his real name – chief of security and the receptacle of a thousand secrets would have been an irreparable loss. The colonel had suspected nothing of this until the agent had pulled out his gun. But what the agent did not know – what nobody had known before then – was that Colonel Raine kept a silenced Luger with the safety catch permanently off, fastened to the underside of his chair by a spring clip. I did think he might have had a better job made of repairing that splintered panel in the front of his desk.

  Colonel Raine had had no option, of course. But even had he had the chance of disarming or just wounding the man, he would probably still have killed him. He was, without exception, the most utterly ruthless man I had ever met. Not cruel, just ruthless. The end justified the means and if the end were important enough there were no sacrifices he would not make to achieve it. That was why he was sitting in that chair. But when ruthlessness became inhumanity, I felt it time to protest.

  I said: ‘Are you seriously considering sending this woman out with me, sir?’

  ‘I’m not considering it.’ He peered into the bowl of his pipe with all the absorbed concentration of a geologist scanning the depths of an extinct volcano. ‘The decision is made.’

  My blood pressure went up a couple of points.

  ‘Even though you must know that whatever happened to Dr Fairfield probably happened to his wife, too?’

  He laid pipe and knife on the desk and gave me what he probably imagined was a quizzical look: with those eyes of his it felt more as if a couple of stilettos were coming my way.

  ‘You question the wisdom of my decisions, Bentall?’

  ‘I question the justification for sending a woman on a job where the odds-on chances are that she’ll get herself killed.’ There was anger in my voice now and I wasn’t bothering very much about concealing it. ‘And I do question the wisdom of sending her with me. You know I’m a loner, Colonel Raine. I could go by myself, explain that my wife had taken ill. I don’t want any female hanging round my neck, sir.’

  ‘With this particular female’ Raine said dryly, ‘most men would consider that a privilege. I advise you to forget your concern. I consider it essential that she go. This young lady has volunteered for this assignment. She’s shrewd, very, very able and most experienced in this business – much more so than you are, Bentall. It may not be a case of you looking after her, but vice versa. She can take care of herself admirably. She has a gun and never moves without it. I think you’ll find –’

  He broke off as a side door opened and a girl walked into the room. I say ‘walked’ because it is the usual word to describe human locomotion, but this girl didn’t locomote, she seemed to glide with all the grace and more than the suggestion of something else of a Balinese dancing girl. She wore a light grey ribbed wool dress that clung to every inch of her hour-and-a-half-glass figure as if it fully appreciated its privilege, and round her waist she wore a narrow belt of darker grey to match her court shoes and lizard handbag. That would be where the gun was, in the bag, she couldn’t have concealed a pea-shooter under that dress. She had smooth fair gleaming hair parted far over on the left and brushed almost straight back, dark eyebrows and lashes, clear hazel eyes and a delicately tanned fair skin.

  I knew where the tan came from, I knew who she was. She’d worked on the same assignment as I had for the past six months but had been in Greece all the time and I’d only seen her twice, in Athens: in all, this was only the fourth time I’d ever met her. I knew her, but knew nothing of her, except for the fact that her name was Marie Hopeman, that she had been born in Belgium but hadn’t lived there since her father, a technician in the Fairey Aviation factory in that country, had brought herself and her Belgian mother out of the continent at the time of the fall of France. Both her parents had been lost in the Lancastria. An orphan child brought up in what was to her a foreign country, she must have learned fast how to look after herself. Or so I supposed.

  I pushed back my chair and rose. Colonel Raine waved a vaguely introductory hand and said: ‘Mr and – ah – Mrs Bentall. You have met before, have you not?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He knew damn’ well we’d met before. Marie Hopeman gave me a cool firm hand and a cool level look, maybe this chance to work so closely with me was the realization of a life’s ambition for her, but she was holding her enthusiasm pretty well in check. I’d noticed this in Athens, this remote and rather aloof self-sufficiency which I found vaguely irritating, but that wasn’t going to stop me from saying what I was going to say.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Miss Hopeman. Or it should be. But not here and not now. Don’t you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’

  She looked at me with big hazel eyes wide open under her raised dark brows, then the mouth curved slowly into an amused smile as she turned away.

  ‘Has Mr Bentall been coming all over chivalrous and noble on my account, Colonel Raine?’ she asked sweetly.

  ‘Well, yes, I’m afraid he has, rather,’ the colonel admitted. ‘And please, we must have none of this Mr Bentall – Miss Hopeman talk. Among young married couples, I mean.’ He poked a pipe-cleaner through the stem of his pipe, nodded in satisfaction as it emerged from the bowl black as a chimney sweep’s brush and went on almost dreamily. ‘John and Marie Bentall. I think the names go rather well together.’

  ‘Do you feel that, too?’ the girl said with interest. She turned to me again and smiled brightly. ’I do so appreciate your concern. It’s really most kind of you.’ A pause, then she added: ‘John.’

  I didn’t hit her because I hold the view that that sort of thing went out with the cavemen, but I could appreciate how the old boys felt. I gave her what I hoped was a cool and enigmatic smile and turned away.

  ‘Clothes, sir,’ I said to Raine. ‘I’ll need to buy some. It’s high summer out there now.’

  ‘You’ll find two new suitcases in your flat, Bentall, packed with everything you need.’

  ‘Tickets?’

  ‘Here.’ He slid a packet across. ‘They were mailed to you four days ago by Wagons/Lits Cook. Paid by cheque. Man called Tobias Smith. No one has ever heard of him, but his bank account is healthy enough. You don’t fly east, as you might expect, but west, via New York, San Francisco, Hawaii and Fiji. I suppose the man who pays the piper calls the tune.’

  ‘Passports?’

  ‘Both in your cases in your flat.’ The little tic touched the side of his face. ‘Yours, for a change, is in your own name. Had to be. They’d check on you, university, subsequent career and so forth. We fixed it so that no inquirer would know you left Hepworth a year ago. Also in your case you’ll find a thousand dollars in American Express cheques.’

  ‘I hope I live to spend it,’ I said. ‘Who’s travelling with us, sir?’

  There was a small silence, a brittle silence, and two pairs of eyes were on me, the narrow cold ice-green ones and the large warm hazel eyes. Marie Hopeman spoke first.

  ‘Perhaps you would explain –’

  ‘Hah!’ I interrupted. ‘Perhaps I would explain. And you’re the person – well, never mind. Sixteen people leave from here for Australia or New Zealand. Eight never arrive. Fifty per cent. Which means that there’s a fifty per cent chance that we don’t arrive. So there will be an observer in the plane so that Colonel Raine can erect a tombstone over the spot where we’re buried. Or more likely just a wreath flung in the Pacific.’

  ‘The possibility of a little trouble en route had occurred to me,’ the colonel said carefully. ‘There will be an observer with you – not the same one all the way, naturally. It is better that you do not know who those observers are.’ He rose to his feet and walked round the table. The briefing was over.

  ‘I am sincerely sorry,’ he finished. ‘I do not like any of this, but I am a blind man in a dark room and there is no other course open to me. I hope things go well.’ He offered his hand briefly to both of us, shook his head, murmured: ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye,’ and walked back to his desk.

  I opened the door for Marie Hopeman and glanced back over my shoulder to see how sorry he was. But he wasn’t looking sorry, he was just looking earnestly into the bowl of his pipe so I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him sitting there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

  CHAPTER 1

  Tuesday 3 a.m.–5.30 a.m.

  Fellow-passengers on the plane, the old hands on the America-Australia run, had spoken of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Viti Levu as the finest in the Western Pacific, and a very brief acquaintance with it had persuaded me that they were probably right. Old-fashioned but magnificent and shining like a newly-minted silver coin, it was run with a quiet and courteous efficiency that would have horrified the average English hotelier. The bedrooms were luxurious, the food superb – the memory of the seven-course dinner we’d had that night would linger for years – and the view from the veranda of the haze-softened mountains across the moonlit bay belonged to another world.

  But there’s no perfection in a very imperfect world: the locks on the bedroom doors of the Grand Pacific Hotel were just no good at all.

  My first intimation of this came when I woke up in the middle of the night in response to someone prodding my shoulder. But my first thought was not of the door-locks but of the finger prodding me. It was the hardest finger I’ve ever felt. It felt like a piece of steel. I struggled to open my eyes against weariness and the glare of the overhead light and finally managed to focus them on my left shoulder. It was a piece of steel. It was a dully-gleaming .38 Colt automatic and just in case I should have made any mistake in identification whoever was holding it shifted the gun as soon as he saw me stir so that my right eye could stare down the centre of the barrel. It was a gun all right. My gaze travelled up past the gun, the hairy brown wrist, the white-coated arm to the brown cold still face with battered yachting cap above, then back to the automatic again.

  ‘O.K., friend.’ I said. I meant it to sound cool and casual but it came out more like the raven – the hoarse one – croaking on the battlements of Macbeth’s castle. ‘I can see it’s a gun. Cleaned and oiled and everything. But take it away, please. Guns are dangerous things.’

  ‘A wise guy, eh?’ he said coldly. ‘Showing the little wife what a hero he is. But you wouldn’t really like to be a hero, would you, Bentall? You wouldn’t really like to start something?’

  I would have loved to start something. I would have loved to take his gun away and beat him over the head with it. Having guns pointed at my eye gives me a nasty dry mouth, makes my heart work overtime and uses up a great deal of adrenalin. I was just starting out to think what else I would like to do to him when he nodded across the bed.

  ‘Because if you are, you might have a look there first.’

  I turned slowly, so as not to excite anyone. Except only for the yellow of his eyes, the man on the other side of the bed was a symphony in black. Black suit, black sailor’s jersey under it, black hat and one of the blackest faces I had ever seen: a thin, taut, pinch-nosed face, the face of a pure Indian. He was very narrow and very short but he didn’t have to be big on account of what he held in his hands, a twelve-bore shotgun which had had almost two-thirds of its original length sawn off at stock and barrels. It was like looking down a couple of unlit railway tunnels. I turned away slowly and looked at the white man.

  ‘I see what you mean. Can I sit up?’

  He nodded and stepped back a couple of feet. I swung my legs over the bed and looked across to the other side of the room where Marie Hopeman, a third man, also black, standing beside her, was sitting in a rattan chair by her bed. She was dressed in a blue and white sleeveless silk dress and because it was sleeveless I could see the four bright marks on the upper arm where someone had grabbed her, not too gently.

  I was more or less dressed myself, all except coat and tie, although we had arrived there seven earlier after a long and bumpy road trip forced on lack of accommodation at the airfield at the other end of the island.

  With the unexpected influx of stranded aircraft passengers into the Grand Pacific Hotel the question of separate rooms for Mr and Mrs John Bentall had not ever arisen, but the fact that they were almost completely dressed had nothing to do with modesty, false or otherwise: it had to do with survival. The unexpected influx was due to an unscheduled stopover at the airfield: and what the unscheduled stopover was due to was something that exercised my mind very much indeed. Primarily, it was due to a medium-scale electrical fire that had broken out in our DC7 immediately after the fuelling hoses had been disconnected and although it had been extinguished inside a minute the plane captain had quite properly refused to continue until airline technicians had flown down from Hawaii to assess the extent of the damage: but what I would have dearly loved to know was what had caused the fire.

  I am a great believer in coincidences, but belief stops short just this side of idiocy. Four scientists and their wives had already disappeared en route to Australia: the chances were even that the fifth couple, ourselves, would do likewise, and the fuelling halt at the Suva airfield in Fiji was the last chance to make us vanish. So we’d left our clothes on, locked the doors and taken watches: I’d taken the first, sitting quietly in the darkness until three o’clock in the morning, when I’d given Marie Hopeman a shake and lain down on my own bed. I’d gone to sleep almost immediately and she must have done exactly the same for when I now glanced surreptitiously at my watch I saw it was only twenty minutes past three. Either I hadn’t shaken her hard enough or she still hadn’t recovered from the effects of the previous sleepless night, a San Francisco–Hawaii hop so violent that even the stewards had been sick. Not that the reasons mattered now.

  I pulled on my shoes and looked across at her. For the moment she no longer looked serene and remote and aloof, she just looked tired and pale and there were faint blue shadows under her eyes: she was a poor traveller and had suffered badly the previous night. She saw me looking at her and began to speak.

  ‘I – I’m afraid I –’

  ‘Be quiet!’ I said savagely.

  She blinked as if she had been struck across the face, then tightened her lips and stared down at her stockinged feet. The man with the yachting cap laughed with the musical sound of water escaping down a waste-pipe.

  ‘Pay no attention, Mrs Bentall. He doesn’t mean a thing. The world’s full of Bentalls, tough crusts and jelly inside, and when they’re nervous and scared they’ve just got to lash out at someone. Makes them feel better. But, of course, they only lash out in a safe direction.’ He looked at me consideringly and without much admiration. ’Isn’t that so, Bentall?’

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked stiffly. ‘What is the meaning of this – of this intrusion? You’re wasting your time. I have only a few dollars in currency, about forty. There are traveller’s cheques. Those are no good to you. My wife’s jewellery –’

  ‘Why are you both dressed?’ he interrupted suddenly.

  I frowned and stared at him. ‘I fail to see –’ Something pressed hard and cold and rough against the back of my neck; whoever had hacksawed off the barrels of that twelve-bore hadn’t been too particular about filing down the outside edges.

  ‘My wife and I are priority passengers,’ I said quickly. It is difficult to sound pompous and scared at the same time. ‘My business is of the greatest urgency. I – I have impressed that on the airport authorities. I understand that planes make occasional overnight refuelling stops in Suva and have asked that I should be notified immediately of any vacancies on a west-bound plane. The hotel staff have also been told, and we’re on a minute’s notice.’ It wasn’t true, but the hotel day staff were off duty and there would be no quick way of checking. But I could see he believed me.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ he murmured. ‘And very convenient. Mrs Bentall, you can come and sit by your husband here and hold his hand – it doesn’t look too steady to me.’ He waited till she had crossed the room and sat down on the bed, a good two feet from me and staring straight ahead, then said: ‘Krishna?’

  ‘Yes, Captain?’ This from the Indian who had been watching Marie.

  ‘Go outside. Put a call through to the desk. Say you’re speaking from the airport and that there’s an urgent call for Mr and Mrs Bentall, that there’s a K.L.M. plane with two vacant seats due in for refuelling in two or three hours. They’ve to go at once. Got it?’