Honourable Intentions (26 page)

“The only stable explosive is one that’s exploded already,” Ranklin suddenly remembered.

“Hey?”

“It was something I said to Gorkin. Actually we were talking about a post-revolutionary society, but I suppose it applies to a good scandal as well.”

“Like don’t trust a volcano until after it’s erupted? Yes, I guess that’s about it.”

But Ranklin was thinking of the obvious snag: that journalists, like intelligence officers, must surely ask first: Who says so? “But if I tell the Press all this, it’s just gossip. And if I tell them I’m working for our government, then I’m obviously partisan.”

She looked at him critically but sympathetically. “Yes, it’s a great play, but you’re not the right leading man . . . Couldn’t you blackmail Gorkin to confess?”

“To perverting the course of justice, accessory to murder and kidnapping? What’s left to blackmail him with?”

“Ah,” she said thoughtfully, “we do have a bit of a problem there.”

“And even then, we’d still need Mrs Langhorn to take a vow of silence.” He sighed. “Well, it’s no worse than I’d expected, but thanks for spelling it out.”

“Are you going to be blamed for it all?”

“I’m not big enough to carry that much blame: they’ll crucify the whole Bureau. Get invited to the Foreign Office that night: it’ll be quite a party.”

*           *           *

The engine was under a hatch behind and to the left of the steering shelter. A short wooden ladder led down into the glitter of thick, oil-black bilge water and an overpowering smell of petrol, oil and hot metal. O’Gilroy went down very carefully, found a place to stand clear of the water, and Kaminsky handed down the torch. O’Gilroy shone it around.

Perhaps the little windowless space had originally been a locker for ropes, paint and so forth. Recently someone with too little time, money or engineering skill had made it the engine room. The engine itself – it looked like a Ford Model T – was bolted to a slightly sloping wooden platform with an extended drive shaft running out through a dripping gland to the canal beyond. A flat metal bar stretched the gear lever through a slot in the roof above, and the cooling water pipe looked like a length of old garden hose. The rest was a child’s scribble of pipes and wires, with items mounted anywhere: the coil box next to the gravity-feed petrol tank on the bulkhead, for instance, which made it a near-evens bet that everything would blow up before it shook itself apart.

There were a dozen things O’Gilroy wanted to check or improve, and he forced himself to remember he only wanted this boat to go less than two more miles. He sighed, tested the heat of the number 1 cylinder – that was the first to give trouble on Model Ts – and began unscrewing the sparking-plugs.

Two minutes later he climbed the ladder with two plugs in his pocket and began rummaging in an oil-soaked hessian bag of tools, bits of wire, nuts and bolts and anything else vaguely mechanical that was the engineering stores.

Kaminsky watched gravely. “Do you know what is wrong?”

O’Gilroy held up a sparking-plug in the lamplight to show the business end oily and crusted black. “That hasn’t sparked for miles. The problem is, the engine’s running too slow. You need a smaller gear-wheel in there.”

“Will it make the boat go faster?”

“A little, perhaps. But more important, it’ll let the engine run at a proper speed.”

As he expected, there were no new sparking-plugs among the tools. He opened his penknife and began delicately scraping the crusted plug clean.

Jay pushed his bicycle up the bank to the bridge parapet, propped it up and reached down to pull off his cycle clips with delicate distaste.

“Well?” Ranklin demanded. “Did you find the barge? And where’s O’Gilroy?”

“We found it, and he’s stayed there to help them repair the engine.”

“Bloody hell!”

“It does make a sort of sense. It’s stopped on an open reach where we couldn’t surprise it.”

When Ranklin thought about it, that did add up.

Jay added: “If he can repair the engine, that is.”

“Oh, he’ll fix it.” Ranklin’s technical training had come just too early to involve petrol engines, so he believed that, for him, they ran or stopped according to how they felt. But O’Gilroy understood such things, so this one would work for him. “But will we know when it’s coming?”

“You can hear it miles off on a night like this and across water. How do you plan to stop it?”

Ranklin told him, and Jay smiled admiringly at Corinna. “Brilliant, if I may say so.”

She curtsied. Ranklin went on: “Did you see Mrs Langhorn – any woman – there?”

“I only saw two men. But I got the impression there’s others
on board. I was keeping my distance: they might have recognised me from this morning.”

Corinna asked: “What happened this morning?”

But before Jay could admit to yet another shooting incident, Ranklin started giving orders.

19

The first instinct of any self-respecting Ford T engine is to break the elbow of the man cranking it, but O’Gilroy knew all about that and caught it in the aftermath when it was so surprised that it fired up. It didn’t run exactly smoothly: its condition and the sort of petrol sold in La Villette saw to that, but it ran. After a few moments, O’Gilroy climbed the ladder and, leaving the hatch open, adjusted the timing and throttle levers to the best sound he could find.

“
Il marche,”
he announced to Kaminsky.

“You are very kind,
M’sieu
. Would you like us to carry you – and your bicycle – to Trilbardou?”

Probably Kaminsky wanted him to stay until the engine had proved itself more than he wanted to be rid of a stranger, but anyway, O’Gilroy accepted. He lifted his bicycle on to the foredeck, the second man untied the mooring-ropes and Kaminsky rammed home the gear-lever without the engine stalling. It did indeed run far too slow under load, and O’Gilroy juggled the levers again to make it sound as happy as it could. Then he asked: “Do you have soap and water for my hands?”

Kaminsky hesitated about that, but had to see the obvious need. “Leon will show you where in the cabin. One of the ladies there is a bit sick in the head. Don’t mind her.”

There was a sliding hatch just ahead of the steering shelter and a companion-way – really a ladder, but wider and less steep than the one to the engine – down into a warm yellow fog. Gradually O’Gilroy’s senses subdivided this into lamplight, tobacco smoke, cooking smells and a coke stove. And four people, two men and two women.

One man was the cheap swell who had been tailing the fake Mrs Langhorn that morning; seen front on, he had a thin, mournful face with big eyes. The other might have been one of the toughs he’d brought from the café, but O’Gilroy hadn’t been watching them closely. The fake Mrs Langhorn herself was sitting by the stove watching a small saucepan of something. That meant the other woman, lying on a bunk against the hull, had to be the real article.

She was staring at the underside of the bunk above her and took no notice of O’Gilroy, so all he got was a glance of a perky young face, younger than he’d expected, above a full figure wrapped in a blanket. He made it a slightly frightened but intrigued glance, such as people give to the head-sick.

Was she really the cause of all this? A part of him said Of course she must be: the discarded mistress of a prince, now wrapped in a tattered, dirty blanket and staring meaninglessly at rough boards a few inches above. While all Paris decorates itself to welcome her one-time lover, now King, in the spring sunshine . . .

Then his sense of romantic injustice was quelled by the voice of experience reminding him that life was a damn sight more complicated than that, and he looked around for soap and water.

Jay had been sent along the far bank with the rope to find a suitable tree nearly opposite the little lane up from the village. At this point, the motor-car could be brought up – really up: the canal was higher than the village – to the towpath itself. They didn’t do that, partly because the sight of a big motor sitting on the canal bank would be very suspicious, and partly because of a cottage beside the towpath.

This was probably where goods were landed for the village, though it didn’t look much used now, and the cottage had probably been built for the village harbour-master or whatever. It was silent and unlit, but that didn’t have to mean much: countryfolk were more likely to save lamp-oil than read. Anyway, they weren’t going to bang on the door and ask.
They just left the motor-car fifty yards down the lane, facing the village, then whispered and tiptoed their way back along the towpath. As Corinna had pointed out, the barge wouldn’t stop immediately even if the engine did: momentum would drift it on for several yards. During which time (they hoped) the steersman would bring it alongside the landing-place to find out what was wrong.

It was all a bit chancy, but at least it meant they wouldn’t be climbing the bank at the bridge, perhaps dragging a reluctant Mrs Langhorn under fire.

Surprisingly, Jay hadn’t got any cowboy skills when it came to hurling the free end of the rope across the canal, but he finally got it over tied to a piece of branch. By the time Ranklin pulled it in, the rope was soaked, cold and heavy. He tied it loosely to a bush and called in a hoarse whisper: “You get back to the bridge and wait for O’Gilroy, then join us here.”

The dark figure waved and vanished.

“And when O’Gilroy gets here,” Ranklin told Corinna, “you get back to the motor-car and be ready for a quick getaway.”

The engine, or rather the sparking-plugs, held up for most of the two kilometres to Trilbardou bridge, but by then there was an occasional missed beat that O’Gilroy hoped only he himself noticed. The penknife scraping hadn’t made the plugs like new, and Kaminsky would be stranded in the agricultural wilds well before Meaux. But his ears, luckily, were tuned to other troubles.

“What will you and your friend do in Trilbardou?” he asked.

“Have a drink, something to eat, and find a bed for the night. There’s always somewhere.”

“On holiday?”

“Just a few days.”

“Where do you work?”

“In the export department of Renault. It’s big business and could be bigger if we could get places like London to take up our taxis. Ask yourself this: how much does the average taxi-driver know about his vehicle? How much does he want to
know? Now think of how many problems you get with a chain drive and remember that we’ve been using Cardan shafts since before . . .”

The innocent may not need to explain themselves, but this has never stopped them boring their listeners to death.

On Trilbardou bridge, Jay heard the barge long before it came into sight as a dark shape moving, very slowly, on to a patch of sky-reflecting water. So why the devil hadn’t O’Gilroy got here already? He could pedal three or four times faster than that tub. Oh God! – had they identified him? and killed him? or made him prisoner?

He moved into the shadow of a bush at the edge of the bridge, laying the damned bicycle on the verge beside him. He had half hoped that some enterprising villager would have stolen it when he got back from tramping across farmland to rig the rope, but no such luck. And he still needed it to circle back through the village and come up to where the barge would be ambushed; he and O’Gilroy daren’t be seen overtaking it along the tow-path.

Then he just waited impatiently as the barge puttered nearer at a pace that would have sent a snail to sleep. Unconsciously, his more mechanically sensitive ear picked up the occasional hiccups in the engine note, showing that O’Gilroy had fixed but not cured it. Then, consciously, he chided himself for being pleased about that; he might be thinking of a man already dead.

Or one who had simply accepted a ride on the barge, he thought. That sounded more like O’Gilroy’s opportunism: get to know the barge and its inhabitants better. In which case his bicycle should be on the deck somewhere, so Jay peered for it. And saw it glitter among the dull, matt tones of the barge and its rusted gear. That was better; if they’d killed him, they’d surely have thrown the bicycle into the canal after him.

Then he realised the barge wasn’t stopping. It crept up to and then under the bridge, staying several feet out in the channel, its slogging engine note unchanged. Stooping, Jay hurried to the other side of the bridge and thought he saw O’Gilroy’s tweed
suit and flat cap standing beside a wider figure in the faint lamplight of the steering shelter, but couldn’t be sure. He thought for a moment, then grabbed up the hated bicycle and charged downhill into Trilbardou village.

The simple fact was that O’Gilroy didn’t know Trilbardou bridge from any other bridge they had passed under. It didn’t obviously belong to a village, which was to one side and downhill, behind a high bank. Kaminsky had mentioned – once O’Gilroy had stopped extolling the position of Renault’s radiators – putting him off at the village’s landing-place. Which sounded reasonable: such a place must be obvious to Jay and Ranklin as well.

So they passed beneath the bridge and Jay, with Kaminsky explaining that he did indeed come of a canal-barge family, but had worked ashore for the past twenty years. Handling canal-borne goods to start with, expanding to other items . . . a “man of affairs”, as he called himself. Lies, but Kaminsky seemed to enjoy lying. Most crooks did; some wrecked themselves by enjoying it too much and lying about unnecessary and easily checked things.

The canal curved gently to the right and then ran straight past the landing-place and the dim blur of the tow-path cottage.

“That’s the place,” Kaminsky said. “Where that house is. Leon!” And after a moment Leon climbed the ladder from the cabin to take the bow mooring rope.

From the undergrowth beside the tow-path Jay and Ranklin saw him walk forward along the barge in the faint starlight.

“They’re stopping,” Jay panted. “Two of them have to come ashore to moor the thing. Then . . . then what do we do?” He had arrived just two minutes before, throwing the bicycle into the undergrowth and gasping out his tale.

“We wait,” Ranklin said firmly. “We wait until O’Gilroy’s ashore and clear before we do anything.” Certain that the barge was stopping, he let the now-pointless clothes line slip into the water and took out his revolver. “Then we tell those ashore to surrender, and threaten to . . . to throw burning petrol down over those left inside if they don’t give up, too. We don’t mean
it, but we threaten it. Unless O’Gilroy’s got any better ideas,” he added.