The Mind Readers (26 page)

Mr Campion had few illusions about himself. He had never carried much weight physically and was unarmed. He was reasonably skilled in those forms of Judo which the West has adopted but he was not particularly young. He was also tired from his all-night session with Thos and, worst of all, extremely irritated. He felt unlucky and the stab of regret at his own idiocy in coming to the island without a weapon pierced him with a sudden sharp intensity.

He wound down the window and waited. Arnold came over, buttoning his jacket, and bent down, his right hand on the top of the door. The face he thrust in was ingratiating: ‘Could you possibly get by, sir? I daren't take her any further over.'

The request was so natural that the thin man, who was expecting almost anything else, was taken off guard for the tenth of a second. He did not make the mistake of glancing at the road but kept his gaze on the powerful and very clean hand on the ledge. Even so, the respite was sufficient. Arnold dropped his left hand over the handle of the rear door and was inside the back of the car before the man in the driving seat could turn. It was a beautiful movement, so swift and smooth. It displayed his physical and mental dexterity as nothing else could have done.

When the thin man turned towards him he was already tucked into the left-hand corner of the back seat, smiling apologetically and making himself small. ‘Perishing, isn't it?' he said conversationally. ‘You don't believe how cold it can be in this country until you get out on these mud flats.' The remark was not quite as casual as the speaker could have wished. He heard the tremor of nervousness in his own voice and was put out by it. He laughed to cover it. ‘So you found the old hot-wire merchants, did you, sir? They're a crummy covey and no error!'

‘They seem to be well equipped.' Mr Campion looked even more blank than usual. ‘I've been hearing news from all over the world.'

‘. . .
and
sending it!' Arnold was still rattled and the words came out by pure accident. Immediately, the dusky colour spread over his waxen face, altering it unbelievably. Having given himself away he resorted to truculence. ‘I had to listen in to you,' he said abruptly. ‘You asked for it. I showed you the way to get a line and you bit it, so naturally I thought I'd check. I've had my little extension for some time, as a matter of fact. Old Knapp comes out of the Ark with his field equipment. His own boys put me on his wire; he doesn't know and wouldn't care if he did. The whole thing only cost me five hundred Virginians and those came out of the canteen stock.'

Mr Campion did not smile. He had added a trace of pomposity to his usual character study.

‘There was no need to do more than you were asked,' he said stiffly. ‘You had only to present your credentials to me in the normal way and I should have been glad to pass on anything I felt you should know.' The instant the words were out of his mouth he realised that he too had made a most unfortunate miscalculation. Arnold had not understood that they were colleagues. Although he had listened to the conversation with Dearest and appeared to have followed at least some of it, he had clearly not known until now that it was in any way an official exchange. He seemed thunderstruck by the discovery. His blush had gone but he was showing the whites of his eyes and was emerging as a most uncertain animal, but a fighter rather than a runner.

‘I'm sorry I'm sure, sir,' he said at last. ‘I wasn't told who you were, see? In fact there's a lot I wasn't told.' He hesitated and then the grievance which had almost demoralised him came out abruptly. ‘The Saltbridge police . . . I heard you say Saltbridge, didn't I? . . . were very sharp on the cause of old Mayo's death, weren't they?'

‘Very. The Inspector up there was once an instructor in Unarmed Combat. It was just very good luck.'

‘Perhaps so. But that blow is undetectable, let me tell you. It
can't
be traced. It's the one it's too dangerous to tell the public about.' He was actually arguing and as Campion began to recognise the type became more and more his Smart Alick self. ‘It fractures the hyoid bone,' he persisted. ‘There's nothing to see on the skin and it's
never
suspected.'

‘How right you were! Ten years ago.' Campion lobbed his little bomb in carefully. ‘The case of the army sergeant stationed in Germany rather altered all that. Don't you remember?'

‘Of course I do. It's the classic instance. He did it from the back of a car and he hanged the body up afterwards and passed it off as suicide.' The hideous tell-tale colour had returned to Arnold's face and he sounded sulky. ‘What you seem to be forgetting is that he got away with it. It wasn't spotted, even by the Army who'd trained him! It was only the gossip after he married the dead chap's wife that shopped him.'

‘That made the police think of it.' Mr Campion was mild but insistent. ‘They've thought of it in every case since, and of course they'd think of it again.'

‘How do you mean?'

Mr Campion looked foolish. ‘If it should happen here,' he said, adding briefly, ‘and now.'

Arnold was silent. He was still alarmingly sure of himself. He was a natural improviser, the thin man suspected, stimulated rather than daunted by an unexpected difficulty. At last he relaxed.

‘Mrs Melisande was dead right about Mayo,' he said suddenly. ‘You knew that, I suppose? That's where he
was
going. Exactly where she said.'

‘I find that very difficult to credit.'

‘You're telling me! I couldn't credit it nor pay it neither!' A great change had taken place in his manner and Mr Campion learned a little more about him. Ever since Arnold had realised that they were in the same service he had been behaving as if they were in a war together, moving in the same no-man's-land but not on the same job. Mr Campion had met that attitude of mind before and realised with a jolt that nothing now would prevent the barman from talking with the utmost frankness in front of him, nor from killing him without a thought if it suited his book, just as he must have killed Mayo. His bright familiarity and tendency to sidle up close mentally were recognisable characteristics and the thin man, who had hitherto supposed him to be a much smaller and less venomous example of his species, became very wary.

‘Have you any evidence at all of that accusation against Mr Mayo?' he enquired, adopting an old school, senior officer approach which he felt might best keep the man contemptuous and enjoying himself. It was an abominably tricky situation and, as he kept reflecting most uncharacteristically, a damn silly way to die.

‘He told me to drive to the airport.' Arnold told the story as if he were chatting behind his bar. ‘You remember he left you all and followed me out on to the steps?'

‘This was at the Rectory?'

‘That's right. He told me then. “I'll meet you at the Donkey and Boot, Covent Garden, in an hour and a half”, he said. “Wait for me and for God's sake keep your mouth shut.”'

‘And you did?'

‘Why not? I'd got time. The Market doesn't open until five anyway. He didn't even know that. Only the loaders come in earlier. He was the boss of the trip. I shouldn't have been there at all if it hadn't been for him forcing my hand.'

‘I don't see how he did force it.' Deliberately Mr Campion sounded sulky and looked marvellously ineffectual.

‘Don't you?' It was Arnold's mouth which fascinated the thin man. Every tooth seemed to show and to be small and to turn inwards; he seemed very pleased with himself. ‘You chaps aren't at all what you're cracked up to be,' he went on, his blunt but thrusting mind nuzzling in. ‘The whole service is a great surprise to me, let me tell you. It's not in the class you all imagine. I mean to say, fancy trusting
Ludor
?
He
told Mayo you'd recruited me. I couldn't believe it. When Mayo came out with it to back his own authority I nearly fainted. We'd just got young Martin Ferris on the grass outside the hut when he spilt the lot. My God! I thought, what sort of outfit have I got tied up with!'

‘Are you saying he threatened to expose you?' Official obtuseness sat oddly on Mr Campion's affable face. ‘Who to?'

‘Look. You're not “with me”.' Arnold said. ‘Give it something; use your machine. He'd got me to leave the canteen and go down to the Ferris hut with him because he knew I'd got a key . . . I have to most of them. The Boss likes me to be able to nip in anywhere if we need to.'

‘How did Mayo know that?'

‘Because I told him. He once brought me a key of the Ferris hut which he said he'd borrowed. He wanted me to get him a spare cut. I wasn't wearing that! So I told him there was no need as we kept duplicates in the office for emergencies and I sent him off with a flea in his ear. He reminded me of that on Friday night and asked me to go down to the hut with him. He wanted a witness, of course. Well, we got Ferris out and I was dead innocent over that at first. I believed the silly tick
had
gassed himself. Then I spotted what Mayo was up to, making a show of it to discredit the bloke, and I stuck my toes in. I told him I wasn't playing. “Oh, come on,” he said. “I know who you're attached to. You were signed on this morning, weren't you? Lord Ludor told me. He's so dissatisfied with Security he's making them use his own people. It's your job to help,” he said. “You go and fetch the van and I'll sign the ticket.” So of course I had no choice.'

‘Why?' Mr Campion suppressed the query just in time. In the back of his mind a warning light had come on.
“The most dangerous of them all are not very bright
.” That aphorism filtered up out of his war-time past and he wondered if the sweat was showing on his forehead.

‘I made the story as clear to you and your friends as I could . . . I thought you were police then,' Arnold was saying, his wide mouth putting Mr Campion in mind somehow of a couple of saucers clacking together. ‘Then, when he told me to meet him I felt I was covered. If there was trouble you both understood I was just a poor little bloke obeying orders and not too happy about them. So, as I didn't want to upset him, I imagined he was simply going to ditch his missus and let her find her own way home, I picked him up.' He paused and sighed at his own gullibility. ‘Then I found myself being told to drive to the airport, or as near as damn it.'

‘Did he actually mention the airport?'

‘No. He was too clever for that or thought he was. These brilliant scientific types haven't anything real upstairs. No “common”. They try things on that a child wouldn't attempt. He told me a long rigmarole about some big institution he'd got to visit out on the Aronbridge Road, I was to drop him outside it and then slip quietly home and not say a word to anyone, no matter what I might hear. I ask you, what could be more naïve? You'd think we were both little girls!'

Mr Campion was frowning. ‘There
is
a collection of buildings out there,' he murmured. ‘They belong to the Post Office. It's their London experimental headquarters.'

‘Is it? Then that was how he was trying to fool me, see? He really thought I could take him there and never think of the airport, so he could be into a plane and out of the country with the gear in his breast pocket before anyone knew.'

The soft voice with the smooth, nondescript accent paused for a moment. ‘There you are,' he said at last, as of a job which, although satisfactory, had yet not gone quite as well as it might have done. ‘He'd discovered who I was working for and he was going where he
was
going, so I had no choice but to do him in and precious little time.'

‘But why?' For the second time Mr Campion checked the word. Even though the man had made the tragic mistake of assuming that Mayo was seeking an airport and not a friend's laboratory, why should he feel that he needed to eliminate the scientist simply because Mayo knew that Arnold was spying for Lord Ludor and, absurdly recently, had been entrusted with a very small job for British Security? The only possible answer hit Mr Campion between the eyes with the force of revelation and a large section of the puzzle slid into place.

If Arnold's main allegiance was to yet a third party, a larger and even more jealous Authority, then his attitude took on an utterly different colour altogether.

Meanwhile the man was talking again.

‘That telephone chat you had just now ought to have told me you weren't just a common dick. I heard you give that bird on the line a message to pass on. You told her to tell someone that the “sack”, as you called the body, had left London in the back of a car and not a truck. How did you know that?'

‘You told me so when you came up with the message from my wife. What sort of car did you leave in? Something parked?'

‘It must have been, mustn't it? I thought it was laid up!' He laughed at his own mistake. ‘It was standing out in a line of stuff in a dark, tree-lined street somewhere round there beyond Earl's Court. People keep their vehicles in front of their houses for the whole winter in those areas. I chose one with one of these ex-army silver painted dust-sheet jobs over it. I could see by the shape that it was an open sports and I guessed it was old. I just pulled up beside it and nipped round between the two vehicles. I didn't disturb the sheet. I lifted the side, opened the rear door and shoved him from one bus to the other. He wasn't a heavy man. I thought he'd be there till Christmas at least. I'd only just got back in my seat when a couple of blue-bottles came round the corner, laughing their heads off . . . some private joke, I suppose.'

‘It was a risk,' said the thin man, adding a touch of admiration to keep him talking.

‘Not really,' Arnold spoke happily. ‘The dodgy moment was getting him done. It was late but I was right in London, don't forget. A van isn't like a car either. I was driving and he was in a hurry and kept fidgetting. There's a lot of light about in the old S.W. district even after midnight. I took a side turn at last into an alley near Harrods, pretending it was a shoit cut. When I found I couldn't get through I switched off my lights by-mistake-on-purpose while I was swearing and trying to reverse. He started to try to see where we were, as if he was in a car, and as his head went back I got him. I only took one cut. I've never needed more since the first time. After that, of course, I couldn't lose him soon enough.'