Mistress Murder (24 page)

His eye caught a movement from the deck outside his porthole. The cabin was in darkness and the boat deck was lit quite well at that point by a bulkhead lantern. The movement crystallised into a group of men passing the porthole. As they moved through the yellow cone of light, Jacobs was horrified to see the wide stripes of a police sergeant's uniform on the nearest man.

Even worse, he recognised the fair young fellow in plain clothes as the man who had brought him the teapot in the Cardiff shop. These and several other purposeful-looking figures passed across his field of vision as they headed for the bridge.

The significance of the stopping of the engines now dawned on him, as he realised that the
Rudolf Haider
must have stopped to take the police aboard from a launch.

Blind panic possessed him for the first time in his life. The pressure of events had been too rapid and too harsh over the last few minutes. He tore open the cabin door and began to race up the companionway, intending to use the other side of the cross-passage and get onto the starboard side of the boat deck.

As he neared the junction, the sound of voices pulled him up short and shocked some sort of sense back into his brain. The words came all too clearly down the empty companionway … indignant German mixed with the calm demands of the British police.

‘… reason to believe that … Paul Schrempp … radio officer … which cabin?'

The snatches of words wrought desperation in Paul Jacobs. He was cornered and knew that he was within seconds of arrest, with imprisonment and perhaps execution to follow. He twisted back down the central corridor to the extreme after end, where the narrow door lead onto the strip of deck looking over Number Three hatch.

As he fumbled with the handle, there was a bellow from behind. The Thames sergeant came around the comer and saw him from the far end of the passage. With the terror of pounding feet spurring him on, Jacobs got the door open and raced round to the starboard side beneath the boats.

He had no clear idea of what he was trying to achieve, but this was soon decided for him. From the cross-passage ahead of him erupted the figures of Benbow, Bray, and a river policeman. They headed for him and simultaneously he heard the approach of the sergeant from behind.

With the police only a few feet in front and behind he did the only possible thing. Running to the rail between the nearest lifeboat davits, he leapt up onto the wooden top and plunged feet first into the blackness of the Thames.

The iciness of the water was like an electric shock and Jacobs almost died there and then. But the wave of coldness passed into a numbing ache as the water closed over his head. With a suddenly clear and almost jubilant mind, he kicked himself back to the surface and began to swim.

For a moment he was too confused by the lights to know which way he was headed, but the steady gleam of the shore soon became clear and he struck out towards it in a powerful crawl. The cold passed off as his muscles drove his body into a fever of effort, but within a minute he had fresh troubles.

There was a double roar of engines as two police boats tore back around the stem of the
Rudolf Haider
. Directed by shouts from the ship's rail, they sped in a tight circle over her wake to the starboard side, combing the dark water with their searchlights.

One beam passed right over Jacobs in the first sweep, wavered and came back to fix in a glaring brilliancy. He dived and spluttered to the surface a few yards away. The light found him again and once more he had to go under. When he surfaced, the beam missed him but he saw that it would be only seconds before the two lights caught him again.

Desperate now, he struck out for the bank, still a hundred yards away. It was then that he saw the tug bearing down on him, towing a string of barges which shone dully in the wildly swinging searchlight beams.

The little vessel was almost level with him, going at a good speed down river with her long tow-rope just visible. She was very close and getting closer. As Paul swam towards shore the tug churned past, the wash from her propeller splashing over him as he thrashed through the cold water.

Already he had grasped the slight chance that the new arrival had offered. Putting on a spurt he lashed past her stern, right into the froth of the wake, trying to get between the tug and the first barge. Once on the other side, he would have a couple of minutes grace from the police launches, which were still in midstream.

Summoning up every last bit of strength, he tore in an Olympic-standard crawl to beat the approaching barge. The blunt nose loomed enormously over him in a matter of seconds and the bow wave actually caught him and threw him away from the rusty plates of the ugly vessel.

He had just made it – the swirling water took him round the nose on the side farthest from the searching beams of the launches.

His lungs bursting with effort, Paul stopped swimming and lifted his head out of the icy water to take stock of his position.

It was the last voluntary thing he was ever to do.

In the last second of his life, with the calmness of inevitable death on him, he stared along the side of the barge into a steel funnel which meant oblivion for him.

There were two barges, side by side, and he was between them.

Their steel flanks met where the taper of the bows ended but, with the choppy water and the speed of the tug, they were moving apart and crashing together rhythmically as they bore down on him.

Paul Jacobs was carried on the bow wave into the gap. Like a giant nutcracker, with eighty tons on either jaw, the sides of the two barges slammed together, again and again as his body was washed along between them.

What came out at the other end was recovered the next day. It caused a wrinkle of disgust to appear even on the face of the hardened pathologist who examined it at Deptford Mortuary.

The loose ends of the case were stretched over half of Europe.

‘More bleeding work than a dozen straight murders,' growled Benbow, a few days later. ‘And not even the satisfaction of a pinch at the end of it.'

A contended Bray looked up from an avalanche of statements on his table.

‘I don't know, we've got a few characters in the can … Silver, Irish, Gigal … the skipper of that ship. And that poor flaming radio operator has got a load off his mind.'

Benbow masticated a green pencil as he thought of the complications with the Federal German Republic. Their ship had been arrested, moored in the river and the captain charged with being an accessory to murder. He stoutly denied everything but, even if the Germans succeeded in getting him back for trial at home, he was unlikely to be seen on the high seas for a few years.

Benbow stared out of the window at his blank wall opposite and absently champed on some splinters.

‘Amazing bloke, that Jacobs or Golding or what the hell you like to call him,' he reflected. ‘He'd have got off under our damn noses again if that Busch fellow hadn't spotted him. I wonder how his wife will get on. I feel sorry for her.'

Bray stared at the water polo team.

‘Parry said on the phone that she thought it was for the best … but I don't know. It was a hell of a way to go, between those barges.'

Benbow picked timber from his tongue. ‘Thank God that most of the villains around here haven't got his brains. If they were all like Golding, I'd give up the force tomorrow and go and raise chickens.'

Bray muttered inaudibly to his blotter, ‘And the eggs wouldn't have the little lion – they'd have the Red Star!'

The Sixties Mysteries

by

Bernard Knight

The Lately Deceased

The Thread of Evidence

Mistress Murder

Russian Roulette

Policeman's Progress

Tiger at Bay

The Expert

For more information about
Bernard Knight

and other
Accent Press
titles

please visit

www.accentpress.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Robert Hale Ltd 1966
This edition published by Accent Press 2015

ISBN 9781910939963

Copyright © Bernard Knight 1966, 2015

The right of Bernard Knight to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN