By Stealth (25 page)

Illuminated by lanterns, spaced out at intervals, the estate was laid out like a miniature Versailles. A vast lawn, heavily coated with glistening frost, was criss-crossed with paved walks. Beautiful stone urns were perched on shapely plinths. In the shadows decorative conifers — expensive specimen trees — rose up like small exclamation marks. In the distance a coloured fountain spurted vertically, falling back into a round walled lake.

`I used to love this,' Delvaux commented as he stood on a terrace running the length of the back of the château. `Why have you come, Tweed?'

Newman, standing with the gun by his side hidden from Delvaux, was staring at the shadow of a man. He stood quite motionless, in the darkness close to the wall of tall evergreens shielding the estate.

`There's someone hiding over there,' he interjected. `Do not worry,' Delvaux assured him. 'He is a friend.

Why have you come, Tweed?' he repeated.

`Because I've found out what happened to Sir Gerald Andover.'

There was silence for several long minutes. Delvaux's hands began to tremble. He hastily shoved them inside his jacket pockets. Before he could answer Paula walked on to the terrace. She looked at Tweed, jerked her head towards the château.

`The same situation as at
Prevent
,' she whispered as she stood closer to him. She extended her left hand, made a chopping motion with her right on her other wrist. 'The freezer again.'

`What have you been doing inside my house?' Delvaux demanded in a high-pitched voice. He had moved near enough to catch her last three words. 'What have you found?' he screeched, his facial muscles working.

Over Paula's arm were folded some clothes she had found inside a cupboard in the hall. She turned to face the Belgian. Just before she turned round Tweed nodded to her and she knew he wanted her to talk.

`Your coat and a scarf, Mr Delvaux,' she replied. She helped him on with the coat, wrapped his scarf round his neck. 'You'll catch your death out here in this temperature.'

`Thank you, my dear. Most considerate. It is chilly.'

`It is even more chilly inside the freezer,' she told him. Only shock tactics would make this man talk. 'And I found a woman's severed left hand. Lucie is supposed to have run off with a millionaire. Would he send that to you?'

Delvaux crumbled. He shook like a leaf in a breeze. He was shuddering all over. He came to Paula and she put her arms round him as he hugged her close for comfort. Then he stiffened, let go of her, stood back, stood upright.

`I'm sorry. I'm making a fool of myself. Yes, that is Lucie's hand. She's been kidnapped. Over three months ago.' He had spoken calmly. Now he became agitated, speaking in an anguished manner to Tweed. 'You must
not
tell the police. Please!
Not
the police! They will kill her.'

`Which is why I came alone,' Tweed said in a matter-of- fact tone. 'What are their demands? How much?'

`No ransom has been demanded. I was given precise instructions. I must go into retirement, resign from all public bodies — including INCOMSIN. They emphasized INCOMSIN. Otherwise Lucie's body would be delivered to me in a casket. I did everything they told me. I fended off Chief Inspector Benoit, who was suspicious.'

`And the listening devices all over the château?' Tweed probed.

`One day when I was at the factory they broke in and placed the listening devices. As soon as I returned I had a phone call from a woman. She told me what they had done. She warned me they would know if I interfered with — removed — any of the devices. She said I knew what the ultimate consequences would be. Ultimate. That is why we are talking out here...'

He stopped talking. Newman had raised his gun, holding it with both hands. The man in the shadows was walking towards them. Newman's voice rang out clear in the crisp silent night.

`Raise both hands above your head or get a bullet in the guts.'

Put the gun away,' Tweed ordered. He had recognized the way the approaching man walked. 'It's all right,' he called out.

Sir Gerald Andover, clad in a heavy overcoat, lowered his hands. He walked towards them as though his shoes were made of lead. God! Tweed thought. Shall I tell him now about Irene — that she is dead, dragged out of the Solent?

`I recognized you, Tweed,' Andover began. 'And Paula.' He turned to her, gave a formal bow. She realized he was making a tremendous effort to appear to be in control of himself. Delvaux spoke.

`Gerald sailed to Antwerp in his motor yacht to come and see how I was getting on, to ask my advice about a certain matter.'

`Instead,' Andover said with a note of irony, 'I found myself advising Gaston. You might say we're in the same boat. You've told him, Gaston?'

`Some of it,' Delvaux replied cautiously.

`I don't understand the severed hand, Gaston,' Tweed remarked in as casual a tone as he could muster. He looked at Andover. 'Just as I didn't understand the severed arm of Irene.•

`We think - we know,' Delvaux intervened, 'that these barbaric acts were to encourage us not to inform anyone in the outside world of what was happening. Including the police. The woman phoned me again, said so after I found that horrible carton in the freezer. It happened last night after I'd returned from a discreet visit to the factory. She told me to look in the freezer, was still on the phone when I got back. I swore at her, called her a sadistic fiend. She said it was a reminder - not to go to the police - and rang off.'

`Tweed,' Andover said grimly, 'that's what we are up against - sadistic fiends. And we don't know why.'

`What I would like to know,' Tweed remarked, turning to Delvaux, 'is why your plant is working full blast - also why you are making discreet visits, as you phrased it.'

`I have nothing more to say,' the Belgian said. 'But I ask you as a friend - do not inform the police. For the sake of Lucie. Now, you had better go.' He turned to Paula. 'Please do not think me discourteous, but I find myself in an impossible position.'

`Then we will leave,' Tweed decided.

`May I come with you?' Andover asked. 'I came by taxi — and left it outside the factory, then walked the rest of the way.'

`By all means, Gerald. We have a car — concealed, by the way, Gaston. We have been very discreet..

Delvaux had started to walk away. He nodded to show he had heard, and shuffled out of sight. Tweed shook his head, looked at Andover, and then all four of them walked towards the drive. Tweed was silent: he had still not been able to bring himself to tell Andover about Irene. Best to wait until they were in some comfortable hotel suite.

Newman had slipped his Smith & Wesson back into its holster. Paula felt tense, full of foreboding. Again the claustrophobic drive felt creepy. Lifting the flap of her shoulder-bag, she gripped the butt of her Browning.

Near the entrance gates Paula quickened her pace. Ahead of the others, she reached the road, glanced to right and left, ran across it, and waited on the track in the shadows.

Andover was walking on Tweed's right. He began talking as they approached the deserted road. He still moved with a dragging step, but his voice was brisk and vigorous.

`Gaston is a broken man. Can you wonder at it? It's a bloody waste — a genius like that subjected to such a frightful ordeal.'

`You've had a pretty bad time of it yourself,' Tweed remarked. 'You sound better now. Ready to face anything, however grim.'

`Oh, I have braced myself for whatever the future may hold. I've still got a lot of fight left in me...'

Newman was walking a few yards behind them. Like Paula, he was tense. And very alert. The two men ahead of him reached the road. They began to cross it. Newman heard the sudden thunderous roar of the car coming as it accelerated round the bend higher up the hill to his right. Both men in front of him were crossing the road when the black Mercedes descended on them like a tornado. Andover threw up a hand to shield his eyes from the ferocious glare of the headlights.

Newman knew he could only try to save one man. Rushing forward he charged into Tweed's back, hurtling him forward to sprawl on the grass verge by the track. Newman's impetus was so great he was carried across by his own momentum, falling beside Tweed.

Paula alone saw what happened in fractions of a second. The black Mercedes smashed into Andover, lifted him high into the air, sped on as Andover crashed with a terrible thud on to the tarred surface of the road. Paula had whipped up her Browning. She fired off one shot which penetrated the rear window. Then the car was gone, skidding madly round a lower bend.

Winded, Tweed took a deep breath, clambered to his feet with surprising agility, ran to the crumpled form lying in the road. He bent down, felt Andover's neck pulse, and straightened up slowly as Newman reached him.

`Christ!' Tweed hardly ever swore. 'He's dead. At least the poor devil never knew about his daughter.'

`I'm sure the driver was a woman.' It was Paula, holding her Browning. 'The murdering bitch. I put a bullet into her rear window but I'm sure it did no damage.'

`What makes you think it was a woman?' Tweed asked quietly.

`She wore a crash helmet, goggles. It was the way she turned her head. I swear it was a woman,' she repeated.

`Help me carry the body back to the château, Bob,' Tweed suggested. 'I want Gaston to see it. He's got to start talking now.'

19

Inside the château kitchen there was furious, urgent activity. Paula was perched on a pair of steps taken from a cupboard. In her hand she carried a new instrument like a small torch with a grille over the front — what was known in the surveillance trade as a 'flasher'.

It detected the presence of listening devices and she had been taught how to use it by Butler on a refresher training course at a large isolated house in Sussex surrounded with extensive grounds. She had also learned certain physical skills which had tested her powers of endurance.

Newman stood on a working surface close to her, removing the bugs as she detected them. One was hidden in a corner on top of a tall cupboard; another behind the tall refrigerator. She even detected one concealed on top of a fluorescent tube.

Earlier they had witnessed a tragic scene on the terrace outside the front entrance when Delvaux had opened the door in response to Tweed's insistent ringing. The Belgian stared at Andover's body which Newman was holding. He came forward, his face tortured with anguish.

`They have killed my old friend, Gerald...'

Tweed had briefly told him what had happened beyond the entrance gates. Anguish was replaced by fury as Delvaux had stroked the back of his neck, a mannerism Tweed recalled when the Belgian was worked up.

`Now you have to tell me everything,' Tweed had lashed out in a cold voice. 'But first we must find a room inside where we can talk — after the listening devices have been removed.'

`I agree,' Delvaux had responded. 'They will know the devices have been tampered with — but I am now resigned to the fact that my wife Lucie is dead. I am going to hit back...'

They had laid Andover's body on a couch in the hall — after Paula had insisted on fetching a cushion for the head. The back of the skull was crushed in and bloody. She didn't want a blood-stained couch left to remind Delvaux of the murder on his doorstep every time he was crossing the hall.

Thirty minutes later Paula was satisfied they had traced every bug. Tweed said something about making assurance doubly sure. He switched on a radio which was playing a programme of classical music, then he turned on a tap.

`Even if you've missed one,' he told Paula, 'they will never be able to filter our conversation out of both the music and running water..'

Paula found that no one had eaten for hours. While Tweed talked with Delvaux and Newman perched on stools round the island unit she prepared food and drink. In a larder she found crusty rolls in a crock. Butter and ham were in the fridge. The larder had also contained coffee.

She made coffee in a cafetiere while slicing ham, cutting the rolls, buttering them, slapping ham inside. She passed round a large plate of the rolls, poured coffee into large mugs. Her customers began devouring the rolls and drinking large quantities of coffee. Tweed noticed the nourishment was stimulating Delvaux. He began probing.

`Gaston, your wife had been kidnapped. No ransom was demanded. You were forced to go into retirement. The same thing happened with Andover — but it was his daughter who was kidnapped.' He paused. It might help prepare Delvaux for the worst. 'They sent him her severed arm...'