Red Herring (22 page)
Authors: Jonothan Cullinane
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary Fiction
“Where did you get that?” said Caitlin.
“Italy.” Molloy pressed the catch, took out the magazine, and removed the cover plate with a screwdriver he kept in a toolbag in the bottom drawer. He blew dust from the workings and gave them a squirt from a tiny can of sewing-machine oil. He reassembled the pistol and pushed the magazine into the grip with the heel of his hand until it clicked into place. He slid the toggle back as far as it would go and let it snap forward, locking the breech-block into place, and turned the safety lever down and to the rear.
Gesichert.
Made safe. He put on his jacket and put the Luger in the right-hand pocket.
“I’m coming with you,” said Caitlin, standing.
“No. You could get in the way.” Before she could say anything he added, “It really is no place for a girl. I mean it.”
He gripped the pistol’s textured stock. He hadn’t thought about shooting anyone since 1945.
Molloy turned into Packenham Street. There was a row of army trucks parked in the darkness, khaki-coloured three-ton Bedford QLDs, with the dear old fern leaf on the front mudguard, motors idling, headlights covered, canopies snapping in the unseasonal wind. The glow of cigarettes came from darkened cabs, and soldiers double-timed between vehicles, boots thumping on the bitumen.
Molloy stopped as a rooster in uniform — three stripes, a clipboard under his arm — marched towards him, his hand up in a stop motion, very pukka, beret just so, insurance agent’s tiny moustache.
“Oi,” said the NCO, a Pom. “This is a restricted area. On yer bike.”
“What’s the story?” said Molloy.
“Fook off,” said the soldier, waving his arm. “That’s the story.”
Molloy almost saluted, knowing it would irritate the NCO, both for its sloppiness and its insolence, but even more so for its breach of etiquette. Only officers had the King’s Commission, so when you saluted an officer you were actually saluting the King. But the King couldn’t be a
non-commissioned
officer because, well, the very idea. Something along those ridiculous Pongo lines, anyway. Saluting Red Caps had been great fun in Cairo. The little bastards hated it. But Molloy controlled himself. This was not the time to have a bloke on, he thought to himself, not with a gun in my hand.
He turned and walked to Market Place and down an alley by the Municipal Baths. The fish market was closed, the timber yards and warehouses in darkness, the streets empty. Fishing boats were moored in the basin, bumping against the wharf piles, hawsers squeaking and groaning. Molloy could see the mechanical bridge in Halsey Street lifting for a late trawler and hear shouted instructions drifting faintly on the wind across the water.
No. 2 Shed was at the entrance to a boatyard. He took the Luger from his pocket and pushed the safety up and forward. Ready to fire. He went inside. He could make out the faint shape of a vessel on blocks. Other than that the space was pitch black.
He called out. “O’Flynn.”
There was no reply.
He called again.
The click of a torch and everything went white. “Stay where you are,” a voice said. “Keep your mitts where I can see them.”
Molloy raised his hands.
“This your idea of a wee chat, is it, Frank?” he said, his eyes closed tight against the blinding glare.
O’Flynn moved forward slowly, his boots crunching on sand and broken glass. The torch beam moved slightly to one side. Molloy could make out his shape and the faint, moonlit gleam of a pistol.
The Irishman was tall and well-built, wearing a pea coat with the collar turned up, his gun hand steady. “So it’s him himself,” he said. “The private detective, neither tarnished nor afraid.” He laughed. “You know how there’s always that moment in the fillums,” he said, “when the baddy’s holding a gun on the hero and saying he’s going to shoot him in a minute, right after he’s sorted out a couple of things? And you’re sitting there in the stalls with your ice and your sweeties and you’re thinking why doesn’t he just pull the trigger and
be done with it because the hero’s going to clobber him if he doesn’t? But the baddy just keeps talking and talking, revelling in it like, getting himself deeper and deeper into the shite?”
“I don’t go to the pictures much,” said Molloy.
“No? Well it happens,” said O’Flynn, thumbing the safety. “I suppose in the flicks it’s a way of tying up the loose ends. Still, it’s hard not to savour the moment. Right now, for example, there’s a part of me saying Jaysus, you’re courting fate with your delaying and your talking, just shoot the fucker and be done with it. But at the same time there’s another part saying hold yer horses there, big fella! Before you put one in his guts and two in his head, take a moment to rub it in, to
clarify
the situation, you know?” He paused, enjoying the role of the happy-go-lucky gunman. “So, I may be an eejit of the first order, but—”
Molloy dived to his left and rolled on the floor, then up on his feet, taking the Luger from his pocket, banging against
something
in the gloom, pain shooting up his legs like being whacked on the shin with an iron bar. The pistol dropped onto the floor and into the darkness. O’Flynn fired twice. Molloy ran towards the moonlit door, knowing it would make him an easier target but thinking, if he was thinking at all, easier than
what?
A woman’s voice. “Stop! Or I’ll shoot.” Caitlin, backlit in the doorway, holding — oh, hell — a
piece of wood!
Molloy shouted, “Get down.” O’Flynn fired once at her then back in the direction of where he thought Molloy might be —
bang, bang, bang —
Click.
“Out of ammo,” said Molloy. “I remember
that
from the pictures.”
A cylinder snapped open, the tinkle of spent cases hitting the floor.
“Keep talking there, boyo!” said O’Flynn, reloading. “I’m all fockin’ ears.”
“Caitlin!” yelled Molloy.
“Here.”
“Let’s go.”
They ran from the building. A car, its big six-cylinder engine roaring, turned into the alley from Fanshawe Street and caught them in its headlights.
“Is that the police?” said Caitlin.
“Not when you need them,” said Molloy.
They turned and began running in the other direction. O’Flynn came out of the building and fired twice, the shots going wild. The car skidded to a halt and doors opened.
“Watch out. He’s got a gun,” said Sunny.
“Stop them, damn youse,” said O’Flynn.
Molloy and Caitlin reached the edge of the wharf. They heard the sound of running feet.
Molloy looked at Caitlin and down at the dark, oily water.
He took her hand. “Hold your nose,” he said, and they jumped.
Mrs Philpott put a shovelful of coal into the range, closed the door, and opened the damper. Caitlin was sitting on a chair, wrapped in a blanket, her hair in a towel. Molloy was wearing an old jersey that smelt of mothballs, and a dressing gown, part of the Philpott estate. Mrs Philpott took a bottle of whisky from a high shelf in the pantry, standing on a stool to reach.
“Normally I disapprove of alcohol, as you know, Mr Molloy,” she said. “But under the circumstances.” She poured a splash into two glasses and gave one each to Caitlin and Molloy. “Pre-war,” she said. “A weakness of my late husband. One of a number.”
“Would you mind if Miss O’Carolan slept here tonight, Dorothy?” said Molloy, disregarding convention.
“Of course not.” Mrs Philpott squeezed Caitlin’s hand. “I’ve made up a bed on the couch in the living room.”
Caitlin smiled and put down her glass. “I may go there now. I’m feeling very tired all of a sudden.”
“Get Miss O’Carolan a clean towel from the hall cupboard, John,” said Mrs Philpott. “I’ll bring you a washing bowl in the morning, dear, and a cup of tea.”
Molloy led Caitlin from the kitchen. As they walked down the hallway the grandfather clock struck. Caitlin jumped. “Oh, gosh,” she said, taking his arm. “That gave me a fright.”
“It’s ten o’clock,” he said. “Been a big day.”
A door opened and Miss Perkins put her head out. She was wearing rollers in her hair and there was cream on her face. “Everything all right?”
“Good as gold,” said Molloy. “Oh. Miss Perkins, this is a friend of mine, Miss O’Carolan.”
“How do you do,” said Miss Perkins.
“Hello,” said Caitlin.
Miss Perkins looked impassively at Molloy. “Good night,” she said, closing her door.
Caitlin unwrapped the towel from her head and lay on the couch. She pulled up the blankets.
“Why did they want to shoot you?” she said, shivering.
“I don’t think they did. Sunny Day said, ‘Watch out, he’s got a gun.’ He was referring to O’Flynn, not me. I’m pretty sure shooting me was O’Flynn’s plan, not theirs.”
“What’s their plan?” she said.
“I’ll work it out.” He kissed her damp hair. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “It’ll be clearer in the morning.”
He returned to the kitchen.
“Everything all right?” said Mrs Philpott.
“Out like a light.”
“I heard someone talking in the hallway,” said Mrs Philpott.
“That was Miss Perkins.”
“Was she upset?”
“Why would she be?”
“At seeing you with Miss O’Carolan?”
Molloy looked at her.
“I know where babies come from, John,” said Mrs Philpott. She leaned forward and pushed the damper in an inch or so.
“Miss O’Carolan can look after herself, don’t worry.”
“It’s Miss Perkins I’m worried about, poor soul,” said Mrs Philpott.
They sat in silence. He picked up the whisky bottle. “May I?”
“Of course.”
Molloy splashed some into his glass.
“How’s your shin?” she said.
“It’ll be all right.”
“Are you in trouble, dear?”
He sipped. “Dorothy, if I told you someone tried to kill me tonight, what would you say?”
“Kill you?” She reached for the whisky bottle and poured some into her cocoa mug. “Oh, dear.”
The Prime Minister, Sid Holland, stood in front of the bathroom mirror in his room at the Grand Hotel, wearing baggy underpants, black socks and a white shirt, his suit on a hanger behind the door, a tiny nodule of dried blood beneath one nostril where he had nicked himself with his cutthroat.
“The Government is alive to the danger that besets us,” he said, shaking his finger at an imaginary audience on the edge of its seat. “And is determined to ensure that our enemy does not succeed.”
He ran a blue tie under the collar of his shirt.
“We . . .” he began, flipping the tie’s wide end over the narrow end and back underneath. “We, um . . .” He put on his reading glasses and looked at the sheet of paper balanced on the basin. “We are at war,” he said. “Of course.” He brought the wide end back over in front of the narrow end, making a loop. He cleared his throat. “We are at war. There is an enemy within which is just as unscrupulous, poisonous, treacherous and unyielding as the enemy without.”
He pulled the wide end up and through the loop and brought it down in front. “He works night and day,” he continued. “He never lets up.” Holland paused. He unscrewed a pen from the inside pocket of his suit coat, scratched out “lets” and replaced it with “gives”. He gently tugged on the narrow end of the tie. “He works night and
day. He never gives up.” He slid the knot up towards his throat. “Our enemy gnaws away at the very vitals of our economy, just as the codling moth enters and gnaws away at the innards of an apple while everything on the outside looks shiny and rosy.”
He looked at his reflection in the mirror and liked what he saw. Resolve. Determination. Leadership. Tie just so, a good, solid four-in-hand, unlike the Windsor favoured by some of the newer chaps in Cabinet, the Holyoakes and the Eyres. He didn’t much care for the Windsor. There was something of the motor trade about it, Sid thought.
“We should be under way in five minutes, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” said the bodyguard, from outside the door.
“Right you are,” said Holland, picking up a hairbrush.
Lofty turned off State Highway 1 and drove up Patutohe Road West for five miles. He’d had the Plymouth up to seventy on the Great South Road and hardly even noticed. Those Yanks sure knew about motorcars.
There was a map spread out on the passenger seat and he had a quick look. There should be a turn-off coming up on the left. There was. No name, just a milk-run number nailed to a power pole. The road became gravel. Cows watched him blankly from a paddock. Out to his right he caught a quick glimpse of railway tracks. He came up a rise. The road went down the hill and under a bridge, veered left and disappeared round a corner. He tapped the brake and pulled off to the side, gradually slowing to a halt, keeping an eye on a steep ditch. He hated to think what Sunny would do to him if he pranged the car. Let alone Mr Walsh.
He turned off the engine and got out. The only sounds were the ticking of the manifold, and from somewhere in the distance, a sheep. Or sheep. Lofty had grown up in Freemans Bay. He checked his watch. The Limited, the only scheduled train between ten o’clock and five, was not due for at least two hours. The Limited was occasionally on time, but never early. He closed the door, opened the boot and took out a wooden beer crate containing gelignite, detonators and a rope, and walked delicately down the road to the bridge, the crate held out in front of him.
He climbed up the bank and onto the tracks, being careful not to look down because he was afraid of heights. Halfway across he stopped and put the crate on the gravel next to the line. He took out the rope and wrapped it loosely round a section of track between two sleepers, then placed half a dozen sticks of gelignite under the coils. Holding the bundle in place with one hand, he gently tightened the rope until it was secure, and tied it off. There were two lengths of fuse in case one went out. He squeezed the ends of both into the detonator, as O’Flynn had shown him, and walking backwards, fed them out along the line. He studied the set-up, checking in particular that the fuses were still connected. Everything seemed in order.
