A Private View Read online

  Cadover took her hand and pressed it. It was one of his unexpected moments. ‘You’ll be better, Lady Appleby, keeping your mind on it and knowing what’s what. It seems there’s a lot of army stuff on the move tonight, and the contact near Maidenhead was a result of that. Our procession seems to have got mixed up with a line of tanks on carriers, and a military patrol on a motorcycle had the job of feeding it out. By that time the order had changed. First the van, then the Austin, then the Humber, and the motorcyclist last of all.’

  ‘You got all this over your radio?’

  ‘Certainly. Of course, we’ve had a bit of luck. It was only ten minutes ago that one of our men came up with the army fellow and made the contact. And the news from Twyford has been luck too. An RAC patrol getting home late after a breakdown. The procession had passed him, head on, not ten minutes before our people questioned him. By this time it was the van, the Humber, the motorcycle. Either he didn’t see the Austin, or it wasn’t there. So it does look as if we can count the Austin out. And now we should hear from Reading at any moment. I never expected to get a net round the thing as close in as that.’

  ‘Reading isn’t our last chance?’

  ‘You might call it our last chance of a quick, neat job. Steptoe spoke about a place on the Downs north of Fawley, but I haven’t great faith in the van’s really making for there once the folk in it are really alarmed. Too much chance of being met at their destination by something uncomfortable. After all, they must have known that old Moe was booked for gaol, and they’re not likely to have great faith in his keeping his mouth shut. So my reading of their minds is this: they’ll be arguing and wondering – and already they’ll be a good deal worried by that Humber. While that’s going on, they’ll stick rather half-heartedly to the route as planned, and to the idea of a rendezvous with the fellow who has a plane waiting. But eventually fright will gain the upper hand with them, and they’ll try simply going to earth in whatever rural seclusion they can find. I want to get them before that stage… Ah – that must be Reading.’

  Cadover bent down and flicked a switch. Judith’s ear, unaccustomed to short-wave transmission, caught only a word here and there. Again Cadover flicked the switch, and there was silence. ‘Not Reading, after all?’ she asked.

  ‘Not Reading. The Yard. The Austin is registered in the name of Hildebert Braunkopf or Brown.’

  This news was bewildering; the news that presently came in from Reading was bad. Its tenor was simple: the whole procession as it now was – van, Humber, and motorcycle – had got clean away and disappeared. Of how this came about, Judith formed no clear picture at the time. She was aware, indeed, of only one urgent and shattering fact. The news included news of John. And this she could only think of as bad news too.

  The van – she was later to understand – had been spotted as it approached the town, and the police were prepared for it. At the first point where the road ran between solid walls a simple roadblock had been got ready. A lorry was to be driven sharply out of a yard as the van approached. The whole procession would thus be obliged to draw up, and a strong force of police would immediately converge upon it from the surrounding buildings and from the rear. What was to make this plan unsuccessful was fright – that very fright which Cadover had predicted would at some point overtake the men in the van. Possibly they had become aware of the police. More probably, it was the pursuing Humber that had got them down. In the outskirts of the town they had suddenly crammed on speed. To get clear of the Humber in open country would of course have been impossible; it was by far the faster vehicle. The idea of the driver of the van, as he jammed his accelerator down, must have been to gain a momentary lead, and then to give his pursuer the slip by plunging into the side-streets of the town. But the result was unforeseen and dramatic. Suddenly confronted by an improvised cul-de-sac, the driver of the van had braked, skidded, lost all control of his vehicle, blindly accelerated again, and driven straight into a brick wall. Or rather he had driven straight through a brick wall, across a yard, and over a decayed wooden fence into a lane at the back. And what the van had achieved by chance the Humber immediately achieved by brilliant driving – so that both vehicles vanished, leaving the police standing. And meanwhile the motorcyclist, sufficiently far behind to avoid capture from the rear, had turned tail and himself achieved a successful getaway.

  But if the police had thus, for the time, failed in their design, there was one individual, it appeared, who was not inappreciative of their efforts. A single constable, pounding heroically on foot in pursuit of the disappearing vehicles, had come, far up the lane, upon a small bundle of flaming wood wool. Attached to this ingenious signal by the length of two shoelaces was a scrap of official paper. And on this there had been hastily scrawled:

  Well tried, Reading. Keep it up.

  J Appleby

  Asst. Commr.

  ‘So that’s all right.’ It was Cadover who was addressing her. The message lay between them on a bare scrubbed table. Cadover had all the appearance of a sudden access of well-founded confidence. Judith wondered if it could possibly be genuine. She had seen Cadover play-acting for the benefit of others; it seemed likely that he was only putting on an encouraging turn now.

  ‘All right?’ Judith looked about her. The pursuit had demonstrably come to a stop; the hurtling car had been exchanged for this bleak little police station she didn’t know where; through an open door she could see some sort of mobile radio in a huge van, and men standing by with motorcycles waiting for messages that didn’t come. ‘Really – all right?’ She looked at the message again. ‘He must be in the van – a prisoner.’

  ‘He may be the one without being the other.’ Cadover turned aside to give orders. He was as brisk as he had been hours before – Judith found she couldn’t reckon how many hours before. The map of southern England which had covered the wall of his room at Scotland Yard now appeared to be lodged firmly within his head. He rapped out road numbers, mileages, junctions to men who came and went unceasingly in the little room. Listening to him quartering the countryside, Judith knew very well that he would come out on top; that his quarry could not possibly escape him. His grasp was too sure, and the ultimate size of his battalions too big, for that. And perhaps he meant no more than this when he said that it was all right. Experimentally she said, ‘John will be all right?’

  ‘He’ll be all right now – and, mind you, I thought he might have had his throat cut.’ Cadover contrived a very good carefree chuckle.

  ‘But if he’s in the hands of those people–’

  ‘They know that, ten to one, their little game is up. That all their little games are up. And that’s likely to make them quite respectful. They’re not homicidal maniacs, you know.’

  ‘They killed–’ Judith checked herself. ‘I suppose it’s pretty well a matter of waiting for daylight?’

  Cadover nodded. ‘That’s likely enough. Only, I’ve some hopes of the telephone.’

  ‘The telephone – you’re expecting a message?’

  ‘Not exactly that. The point is that this pursuit must be mainly of subordinates. The van itself may have the boss of one lot – Steptoe’s lot. But the Humber seems to contain only henchmen of Zhitkov’s, and the man on the motorcycle is presumably just some one ordered about by Cherry. If the men in the van manage to give their pursuers the slip for a bit, they may very well try to contact Steptoe, by way of discovering whether we’ve picked him up or not. And the other fellows, if they get a bit foxed, are likely to ring up their respective bosses for instructions.’

  ‘Cherry and Zhitkov? They went off together.’

  ‘Quite so. And a call that gets the one may get the other – supposing, that is, they’re still as thick as thieves.’ Cadover found time to treat this sally as a joke of some magnitude. ‘Crooks often don’t realize how much one can do with the telephone people giving one a hand.’ Cadover went to the door, fired off a rapid round of instructions, and then came hack. ‘But we may have to wait for mor
ning, all the same… Ah – coffee.’

  A rural constable had come in with steaming enamel mugs. Judith accepted hers gratefully. Perhaps, after all, Mary Arrow had been serious when she commended the similar coffee served at Scotland Yard. The hot, sweet stuff quickened her blood as if it were a powerful drug. She looked at her watch. Four o’clock. It wasn’t much more than twelve hours since all this had begun – begun with a freakish visit to the gallery of the mysterious Hildebert Braunkopf. For mysterious he had now become. According to any feasible interpretation of the affair, he ought by now to have withdrawn unobtrusively into the wings, with no chance of a final bow before the curtain. Or he ought to be tucked up snugly in bed, with – or rather, like – Grace Brooks and Lady Clancarron. Instead of which, he was at large in a Baby Austin…

  Judith dozed uneasily. From a burning house – Shelley’s father-in-law had maintained – it would be incumbent upon one to drag the philosopher Fénelon before the philosopher Fénelon’s pretty maid-servant. Or – Godwin had added – before one’s own mother, either. But what if John and Vermeer’s Aquarium were in the same burning van? She would haul out John. But suppose the human being was old Moe? And suppose it wasn’t just one Vermeer but all the Vermeers – and all the El Grecos and all the Rembrandts too? Judith jerked herself awake and looked at her watch again. One minute past four. At this rate it would never be five o’clock; first there would be the end of the world. They used to call that the Great Combustion… Again she had a vivid mental picture of a blazing van. She heard the crackle of the flames, opened her eyes, and realized that she was listening to some operational noise from the radio. A car engine started up, then a motorcycle, then several more cars. Somebody was giving a quick succession of orders, she heard more engines far away, the whole place was in a bustle. And the light was different. She looked a third time at her watch. It was ten minutes to six. Cadover stood before her. She had the impression – but that, surely, must be a delusion – that he simply picked her up and threw her into a car.

  Certainly she was in a car, and it was moving. But this time the very pulse of the engine sounded different. It might have been some great hunting animal that had lain baffled all night in a thicket, and now knew itself to be moving in to kill.

  ‘I sent a message to Scamnum for the Duke.’ Cadover was now clearly visible beside Judith. ‘He must be a bit anxious about his property, poor old chap.’

  That, thought Judith, was one way of looking at it. Aloud, she said, ‘It was the telephone – that got us moving?’

  ‘Yes – a couple of hours ago, and from a call box pretty well where we expected it. Of course one can’t be sure. It’s a matter of interpreting a few sentences. But I’m pretty confident it was the man on the motorcycle – Cherry’s man – calling up reinforcements from some place near Uxbridge. It might be where Cherry and Zhitkov went off to, and now they may be making for the scene themselves. The place in Uxbridge is being investigated now… Pleasant open country here.’

  Judith looked about her in a grey dawn. The new journey seemed to be going on for a long time. She no longer had any clear idea about what part of England this was. They were moving through a broad prospect of bare fields which here and there sloped down into valleys still shrouded in mist – and over the brown fields themselves drifts of vapour were eddying and dissolving one by one, like the last belated dancers at a ball. The hedging and ditching was good, she thought inconsequently; it was well-cared-for country. A thick dark barrier of thorn whipped past almost under her nose, for they had left the main roads far behind them, and this was little more than a lane. But still the car was travelling very fast; she twisted her head and saw that it had outdistanced the line of four or five purposeful police vehicles in the rear. The scale of the affair had become fantastic – it was queer that all this commotion should be caused by a quiet Dutch painter who had died nearly three hundred years ago.

  Cadover talked over his radio. In daylight the process seemed altogether less mysterious. As the car swung round a corner he sat back with an air of finality. ‘Got them,’ he said.

  ‘You really know?’

  ‘Yes. The first report was from a local man, and I couldn’t be sure. But I have one fellow of my own out ahead, and there’s no doubt about it. Dark furniture van, green Humber, another big car.’ He pointed straight ahead, over the driver’s shoulder. ‘See that hill?’

  ‘Yes.’ The hill was quite a landmark – a first bold sweep of downland, announcing a change in the character of the terrain beyond. ‘They’re up there?’ There was mist on the summit still. But even as she looked, this began to lift like a slow curtain.

  Cadover had a map open on his knee. ‘Look near the brow, on our left,’ he said. ‘There – where the mist’s just rising. You see a scar?’

  ‘It looks like a stone quarry.’

  ‘That’s what it is – an abandoned one. The van has gone to earth there. And the other fellows have found it out.’

  Judith’s heart beat faster. ‘You mean there’s a sort of siege?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. In the middle of an English countryside. They must be crazy.’ Cadover sounded disgusted. ‘Haven’t stopped to consider that the police may be right on top of them. It’s sheer desperation.’

  ‘You think they might fight?’

  ‘Among themselves, Lady Appleby? It wouldn’t surprise me if they were occupied that way now.’

  ‘And fight the police as well?’

  ‘They won’t do that for long.’ Cadover’s voice was grim. ‘One doesn’t get worked up about thieves and burglars in a general way. But this sort of outrage–’ He checked himself. ‘Listen.’

  Judith found that she was trembling. ‘It wouldn’t just be quarrymen blasting – something like that?’

  Cadover made no reply to this futile question. He was talking into his machine. Then he leant forward and spoke to the driver. The car braked swiftly and came to a stop. Cadover opened a door. ‘Will you jump out?’ he said.

  Judith jumped out. ‘Are we–’

  Cadover had dexterously closed the door again. He spoke to her through the open window. ‘I’m sorry, Lady Appleby – but I’m going in first. And you’ll be better a bit behind. The last car will pick you up.’

  ‘You can’t possibly–’

  ‘I couldn’t take the responsibility, ma’am… Drive ahead.’

  And Cadover’s car leapt forward. She was left in a cloud of dust.

  It had happened so rapidly that for some seconds Judith was merely bewildered. Then she was furious – and not the less so because her fury had to be directed against the universe at large. It would be unfair to blame Cadover; she had no business being in this chase at all; not a plurality of husbands incarcerated by criminals in sinister vans would give her the faintest title to go charging about in cars from Scotland Yard. Cadover had no doubt been uneasy about her from the start; she was as anomalous to his purism – as ectopic, that was the word – as the blondes in the bomb-racks of an American war film… His car was now far ahead, sweeping round in a broad circle that climbed at an easy gradient up the hill. She could just hear another car approaching behind her. There would be several more behind that. And the very last and dustiest had been instructed to pick her up. It was probably a mobile canteen, stuffed with the disgusting objects called hot dogs and spouting atrocious coffee at every chink. And Judith’s pride revolted. She would not be turned into a camp follower – a vivandière of the constabulary… She found herself staring at a small signpost, and felt like picking up a stone and having a shy at it. Then she saw that it said Public Footpath, and that it pointed straight up the hill.

  In an instant she was over the stile to which the signpost pointed, and as she dropped to the ground she heard the second car go past. Before her, the path skirted a couple of ploughed fields and then ran over turf directly to the summit. It looked as if it must pass close to the lip of the quarry. And Judith ran. She couldn’t beat Cadover to his goal, or an
ything like it. But if her breath held – and she was pretty fit, thank goodness – she could still be in at the death.

  At the death… She frowned as she ran. One was never out of the shadow of the lethal in this queer nightmare into which her descent upon the Da Vinci Gallery had caught her up. And had caught John up too… She increased her pace. A baby rabbit scurried ahead of her. And from in front she heard a rapid succession of sharp reports. It was the sound that she had been idiotic enough to suggest might be blasting.

  The ploughland was behind her and the gradient rose steeply beneath her feet. Something was badly wrong; her running was poor and she felt oddly unsteady on her legs. For a moment she supposed furiously that she was overwrought; that the blonde was going hysterical in the rack. Then she realized that it was her shoes. What one naturally puts on to be chummy with Mervyn Twist is quite unsuitable for cross-country running. She kicked them off and felt better; her turn of speed improved. A cow was staring at her over a fence. It wasn’t only a matter of shoes. She was wildly unsuitably dressed. Even a cow would laugh.

  But she had made it. The path was converging upon the lip of the quarry on her left; and on her right was the very brow of the hill, with beyond it a valley still obscured in mist. A moment later she realized that Cadover could not have done better than positively recommend to her the path she had taken. Of whatever was happening or about to happen, this eminence gave her a superb view. But the quarry dropped sheer at her feet, cutting her off from participation in the action as completely as the invisible screen between a cinema audience and the violent world of shadows before it. She must be a spectator merely.

  Almost immediately below her was the furniture van, like a black bug at bay during the close of an obscure insectile tragedy. Some confused conception of what constituted a position of strength appeared to have brought it there. It had its back to the wall – to the tremendous wall constituted by the perpendicular face of the quarry on the top of which Judith now stood. On either side of it was a litter of boulders, and among these there crouched the dark figures of three men. Occasionally a man moved an arm; there was a small spurt of fire, a drift of smoke, and a report that echoed sharply back from the great concave of living rock behind.