‘It’s me,’ said Conrad. He pulled the gag down over Rollo’s chin. ‘You okay?’
Rollo nodded. Conrad bounded over to his clothes, recovered the gutting knife and cut the ropes binding Rollo’s arms and ankles to the chair.
‘Conrad…’
‘Shhhh, it’s okay, it’s over.’ Rollo was shaking as Conrad helped him to his feet, and Conrad held him tight in case his legs buckled beneath him. They stared at the man lying skewered on the floor.
‘Here.’ He led Rollo to the workbench and leaned him against it for support. ‘I have to do this now.’
He checked the man’s heartbeat, the entry wound, the exit wound. There was bleeding, but no pulse of imminent death. The lance would have to stay put though. He dragged the man over to the upright and sat him against it. Then he ran a length of rope beneath his arms and lashed him in place.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rollo. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry—’
‘Hey,’ said Conrad.
‘He promised, he said he wouldn’t say nothin’. But he did, he lied to me.’
It took Conrad a moment to figure that Rollo was talking about his father. Ned had extracted the information about Lillian from Rollo, then used it when he said he wouldn’t, banning Rollo from seeing Conrad.
‘He did it for you, Rollo, to protect you. And he was right. Look—’ He turned to the man.
‘He still lied to me.’
That Rollo placed his father’s betrayal above his own brush with death came as little surprise to Conrad. It was the way Rollo’s mind worked. It also offered an opportunity. Conrad tried not to think too hard about what he was about to do.
‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘he lied to you.’
‘He did.’
‘And now I need you to do the same for me, Rollo. I need you to lie for me—to your father.’
Rollo frowned.
‘It’s not for ever, just till I can work this all out.’
‘Lie?’
A cardinal sin in Rollo’s book, one for which he’d have to account to God himself.
‘It’s not even a lie,’ said Conrad. ‘I just need you to keep quiet about this for a couple of days. Can you do that for me?’
‘I…’
‘They killed my friend, Rollo. I think that man there killed her. But I need to know a bit more, I need a bit more time. Only you can give that to me.’
Rollo nodded gravely. ‘I won’t tell no one,’ he said. ‘No one.’
‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’
Conrad led Rollo towards the doors, stopping to gather up his clothes and his boots as he went.
The man came round slowly to find the fisherman seated on the floor in front of him, dressed now and smoking a cigarette. A gun rested in his lap.
It felt like someone had cleaved away the right side of his body. Then he remembered and he looked down.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Christ.’
‘You’ll live,’ said the fisherman.
‘There’s a fucking pole in me!’
‘It’s a killing lance—for whales.’
‘Whales!?’
‘Shut up.’
‘I need a doctor.’
‘Shut up and listen. I’m going to say this once. I’ve got some questions. If you lie to me, I’ll kill you. There are no second chances. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Look at me. I said look at me.’
He looked up into the two pockets of shadow cast by the overhead light.
‘I want you to know that I hope you lie to me.’
‘I won’t.’
‘When did you first meet Manfred Wallace?’
‘Never heard of him. It’s the truth, I swear it.’
‘Who are you working for?’
‘I don’t know his name. He calls me with jobs, I don’t know who he is.’
‘What were you going to do, kill me after you’d got the document?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Make it look like a suicide.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then nothing. You’re dead, I get my money.’
‘How?’
‘How what?’
‘How do you get your money?’
‘He leaves it. In places. Hotels usually.’
‘How much did he pay you to kill Lillian Wallace?’
He was too slow. He’d hesitated just that little bit too long for it to be convincing.
‘I want to know,’ insisted the fisherman. ‘How much was her life worth to you?’
He realized then that he had the answer to his riddle, written in the fisherman’s face, buried in his voice. It was suddenly clear to him that he was sitting across from the dead girl’s lover. And for one of the few times in his life he felt the cold touch of fear on his heart.
‘Eight hundred dollars,’ he said.
It took a while for the fisherman to absorb the news. ‘The price of a second-hand car?’
‘That’s what I got. I don’t know what the guy who did it got.’
He congratulated himself. He’d slipped it in nicely, naturally.
‘There were two of you?’
‘I was only there to help move the body. I didn’t do it. He did. I swear to God, it’s the truth.’
‘He drowned her in the swimming pool?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you both put her in the ocean?’
‘Yes.’
How the hell did he know so much?
‘Where?’ asked the fisherman.
‘Wiborg’s Beach. It’s—’
‘I know where it is.’
The fisherman tossed his cigarette aside, then used the workbench to help himself to his feet, his left knee stiff and straightened out.
‘Where’s your car, the black sedan?’
‘Why?’
‘Where’s the car?’
‘Down the highway. There’s a track.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘The Sea Spray Inn.’
‘Room number?’
‘It’s a cottage—number four. Why?’
‘Is this the key?’
He recognized the signs; the fisherman was making plans for his disappearance.
‘Look, I’ve been straight with you, I can help you, I can finger the guy who did it.’
‘Is this the key?’
‘Yes, it’s the key.’
The fisherman took a couple of steps towards him. ‘I was at Wiborg’s Beach,’ he said. ‘You carried her through the bushes on the right and up the dune. You stopped for a rest then you dragged her backwards down on to the beach.’
How in the hell did he know so much? Flattery suddenly seemed like a good idea.
‘I’m impressed.’
‘I’m not,’ said the fisherman. ‘There was only one set of footprints in the sand.’
It took the man a moment to realize that he’d been led by the hand to his own doom, that there was never going to be any other outcome.
‘Fuck you and fuck your half-wit friend,’ he said.
The fisherman stepped on the end of the pole. The dull pain in the man’s side exploded into life and he screamed.
‘Go on, do it,’ he spat. ‘You’re no better than me, you just don’t know it.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said the fisherman as the gun came up. ‘I do know it.’
Thirty-Five
Gayle Wallace rose late. She pulled on her swimsuit and a pair of sandals, slipped a loose cotton gown around her shoulders and headed downstairs.
She could hear voices in the study, her father discussing the business of the past week with Manfred and Richard, bringing them up to speed. He was excited about a new idea, something to do with water; she hadn’t been paying too much attention during the drive up the previous evening.
Rosa had cleared the breakfast things away, but had left the coffee percolator primed beside the stove.
Gayle made her way across the lawn to the pool. Cup of coffee, cigarettes, lighter and a towel—the same trappings, the same routine every Saturday of the summer.
She was thinking about Justin, and about what dress to wear to dinner at the Maidstone Club that evening, when she reached the poolside.
She didn’t scream. But she did drop the cup. And she did run.
Manfred had to concede it; it was a damned good idea of his father’s. Two years of low rainfall had placed the city’s water supply under enormous strain. An obvious way to combat the shortage was by introducing water meters, which meant only one thing—someone had to manufacture them.
They were discussing the relative merits of taking a stake in the Buffalo Meter Company or the Pittsburgh Equitable Meter Company when Gayle burst in on them, dressed for a swim.
‘There’s a man in the pool,’ she gasped.
‘We can’t have that,’ said his father. ‘Go and deal with it, will you, Richard.’
‘He’s dead!’
Gayle pointed towards the garden, clamping a hand over her mouth, and for a moment Manfred thought she was going to empty her stomach all over the Aubusson rug. But she didn’t.
Richard led her over to a chair and sat her down. ‘Wait here,’ he said.
The man was wearing a dark suit and brown shoes. He lay face down in the deep end of the pool, and he appeared to be hovering just a few inches off the bottom.
Any doubts as to who he might be vanished when Manfred spotted something dangling from a length of string attached to a sun shade. It was the silver-and-jadeite hair clip he had given Lillian on her twenty-first birthday.
They all stared at the body in silence.
‘Richard, go call the police.’
Richard didn’t move. ‘I’m not sure I should do that, George.’
‘What?’
‘It could be a bad idea.’
Richard glanced in Manfred’s direction. His father picked up on the look and his eyes flicked between them.
‘What? What’s going on?’
‘Before we do anything,’ said Richard, ‘we have to move the body.’
‘Move the body!? You tell me just what in the hell is going on here.’
‘Rosa’s out shopping, but she’ll be back soon. She must not see this, George. We have to do this now.’
The following few hours were, by some considerable margin, the very worst of Manfred’s life to date. He was dispatched into the water to bring the body to the surface. There was a neat entry wound in the man’s forehead, a not so neat exit wound in the back of his skull. They used the wheelbarrow to deliver him to the garage, and threw a tarpaulin over the grim bundle.
Rosa was intercepted when she returned with the groceries and was told to take the rest of the day off. Gayle, still in a state of shock, was accompanied upstairs to her bedroom, where Richard spun some yarn about the dead man being a representative of theirs in Cuba, and that going to the police would only mean opening a far greater can of worms. She took his words in good faith, then took to her bed.
Manfred still had no idea how Richard intended to play it; there had been no opportunity to confer in private. But as they all entered the study, he muttered under his breath, ‘Just follow my lead.’
Manfred felt like an observer wandering among actors on a stage, present in the drama, yet not a part of it, a sensation reinforced by the fact that his father didn’t look at him once while Richard spoke.
He did a good job, casting Manfred as an unwitting victim of circumstance, playing up the details of the girl’s bid to kill herself. He added a fine touch, maintaining that Lillian had been at the wheel of the Chrysler when the accident occurred. He sketched the bare bones of the subsequent cover-up before tackling the matter of Labarde’s affair with Lillian, which had recently come to light, along with the existence of the incriminating document. The dead man in the pool was a hireling they had brought in to steal the document from Labarde, nothing more. But their plan had evidently backfired.
George Wallace seemed to visibly shrink before Manfred’s eyes as he listened, the chair swallowing him. When Richard was finished, he eased himself to his feet and walked uncertainly towards the door, leaving the room without uttering a word.
‘He’s going to call the police.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ said Richard. ‘He’d have done it right here, in front of us.’
‘It doesn’t mean he won’t though.’
‘No, it doesn’t mean he won’t.’
They watched him from the drawing room. He walked, he sat on a bench beneath a tree, then he walked some more, disappearing from view to the far end of the garden.
Manfred found himself staring into the void, facing oblivion yet again. He felt the hatred and rage build in his gut, spreading through the pathways of his body, tightening the sinews, constricting his chest.
‘I’ll kill him myself.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m trained, aren’t I?’
It sounded pathetic, even to his own ears, which only annoyed him more.
There might have been some truth in the words, but his training wasn’t a patch on Labarde’s. And as for his combat experience, the whole purpose of Fighter Direction was to guide others into warfare from the safety of the Combat Information Center. There had been hairy moments in the Solomon Islands, relentless night bombing raids by the Japanese, the odd barrage from an enemy battleship. He had even seen live rounds fired when the Marines flushed out a handful of enemy troops left behind on the island of Rendova. That ‘invasion’ had lasted no more than half an hour, and they’d quickly set up their big SCR-270 radars, feeding vectors to their own air crews to help them zero in on the Japanese planes.
This was how he’d spent a large part of the war, sitting in front of a cathode-ray tube, helping the Navy leapfrog its way towards the Philippines. As things went, it was about as good as it got. He was a lieutenant attached to the 1st Marine Air Wing; the radar technology over which he lorded was new, exciting, even glamorous; and there was the added cachet of always being on or about the front line. Okay, so it was the pilots of the old P-30s and P-40s who actually laid their lives on the line every day, but you were there with them, at their side, assisting, always in the thick of it, always safe back at base.
Maximum credibility, minimum risk. His father had judged it well, though they’d never discussed the details of the strings he had pulled.
It was a war record beyond reproach, an essential stepping stone toward the prize, playing the long game. The question was just how deep the dream ran in his father. After all his work—all the planning, the foresight—was he really going to throw it away now?
In his heart Manfred knew there was only one answer, though for a moment he doubted the assumption—the moment his father strode back into the drawing room from the garden. He walked straight up to Manfred, his eyes blazing, and slapped him hard across the face.
‘You stupid boy,’ he spat.
Manfred could only think how much worse his reaction would have been if he’d been told the whole truth.
His father walked to the sideboard, helped himself to a cigarette and lit it with a trembling hand.
‘This fisherman, Labarde, does he have a telephone?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes,’ said Richard.
His father made for the door.
Richard intercepted him. ‘What are you going to do, George?’
‘What you should have done in the first place—pay him off.’
‘I don’t know about this one.’
‘Name me one man who couldn’t be bought?’
‘Then let me handle it,’ said Richard. ‘For your own sake, you should stay out of it.’
