The Devastators (12 page)

I turned slightly away from Nancy and threw my head back as if I were taking a good-sized swallow. I started to set the glass down; then I let it fall with a crash to the floor. I made a thick, strangling noise in my throat, started to rise, and picking a spot uncluttered with broken glass, fell face down on the rug. I thought it was quite a good performance.

There was a brief silence; then I heard a kind of hasty rustling and rattling of papers. That would be my pretty, murderous relative clearing her lap for action.

“Mr. Helm?” she said in a tentative voice, and more sharply: “Mr. Helm!”

I heard her get up and come forward to bend over me. I felt her touch my arm cautiously.

“Mr. Helm. Matthew?” Her voice had turned a bit shrill. “Damn the man, he’s passed out! Oh, dear, what do I do now?”

She was obviously playing it safe; maybe she, too, had reason to beware of hidden microphones. She rose again without taking my pulse or testing my eyeball reactions, which was sloppy technique but understandable: she was, as I’d hoped she would, just taking for granted that her lethal stuff had done its work. Now, if I had a bit of luck, she would pick up the phone to report success. Even if she talked in code, it might give me a hint…

I heard a sudden, choked little cry of distress and fear. I opened my eyes. Nancy Glenmore was standing by the table with her own glass, partially empty now, in her hand. She was staring into it with a kind of paralyzed horror. Her mouth was open and she seemed to be trying to breathe, at the same time as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her. Then the glass slipped from her hand and hit the rug and spilled but did not break, and she crumpled to the floor beside it.

When I reached her, she was quite dead.

As I crouched by the motionless body, I couldn’t help thinking that it just wasn’t my day where women were concerned. In less than six hours I’d mislaid one carelessly, roughed one up uselessly—and now I’d lost one permanently by letting her drink poison right before my eyes. The fact that my eyes had been closed at the time didn’t really mitigate the error.

Well, with a dead girl before me, that was a hell of an egocentric way of looking at things. It wasn’t Nancy Glenmore’s day, either, and would never be again. She looked small and broken, lying there, with a wisp of dark hair trailing across her face and her Glenmore kilts kind of bunched about her thighs—that damned, muted, airy-fairy version of the brave old hunting tartan that had prejudiced me against her from the start. I wondered if I would have had sense enough to believe her if she’d had sense enough to dress in the true, old-fashioned plaid.

Because her death made it fairly obvious that her story had been straight from start to finish. Certainly, if she’d been what I’d thought, an enemy agent who’d lured me here to poison me, she’d have left the liquor strictly alone. There was still a remote possibility that she’d been an enemy agent who’d miscalculated in some way, or who’d been double-crossed, but that was straining pretty hard to account for what she’d done and what had been done to her.

The simplest explanation, and the most likely one, was that she’d been exactly what she’d claimed to be: a tourist kid from the States who’d thought it would be cute to devote her European vacation to family research, in the course of which she’d heard of a distant relative similarly engaged, and had quite naturally looked him up. Probably she’d been feeling adventurous and daring, so far from home, reckless enough to indicate—somewhat nervously and amateurishly, to be sure—that she was available for just about any interesting project, including sexual intercourse, that Cousin Matthew might have in mind.

I’d seen her willing attitude as part of a dark plot because I’d been looking for a dark plot, even hoping for one. But everything that had aroused my suspicion could be explained quite simply as the behavior of an inexperienced young girl, in a travel wardrobe bought new for the great occasion, blowing herself to what she’d hoped would be a giddy, uninhibited, memorable fling abroad, and let the stodgy old morals fall where they might. But she’d come to London at the wrong time, visited the wrong office, offered herself to the wrong man, and now she was dead.

I bent over to sniff at the wet spot on the rug where her drink had spilled, and caught the scent of violets, already fading. I got up and went over to check the bottle on the dresser. Trapped in the corked container, the odor was much stronger. Obviously somebody had slipped in here while she was out and doped her liquor, which brought up the question of why anybody would want her dead.

Well, she’d gone to Wilmot Square. She’d talked to the real, blue-eyed Walling. Almost certainly there was a connection between her death and her visit to this man, who’d subsequently, I remembered, been tortured for information. Apparently he’d told her something or given her something that was a threat to Basil and his cohorts, and after she’d left they’d grabbed him and forced him to reveal what it was.

But on second thought it couldn’t very well be anything he’d told her, I reflected. Basil had had that office wired, as indicated by the fact that he’d known enough about Walling’s business to impersonate the man very convincingly. Anything Walling had said to Nancy would have been overheard. It had to be something he’d given her, then, something that probably meant nothing to her, but might mean something to me. According to her own statement, she’d announced her intention of getting in touch with me, right there in the office. She’d asked Walling for my London address…

It was as easy as that, showing what a brain can do if you only take the trouble to use it. I found it in her purse: a folded piece of the kind of cheap white paper that comes made up in small pads for scribbling notes on. Judging by its appearance, she’d never even unfolded it. She hadn’t needed to refer to it, after all, to remember the name and address Walling had told her.

I opened it up. On it was written:
Matthew Helm, Claridge’s
. Below was a hastily scrawled three-word message:
Try Brossach, Sutherland
. I’d found a real clue at last.

I studied it thoughtfully, not to say suspiciously—I don’t have a great deal of faith in miracles—and got up and went to the table. The kid had come equipped. In addition to the family information she’d wanted to show me, she’d had maps galore. There were clan maps of Scotland, road maps of Scotland, and even a set of the half-inch-scale contoured Bartholomew maps that require over a dozen sheets to cover the Scottish mainland alone. It made me feel a sense of real loss. I mean, willing young girls aren’t too hard to come by, these days, but girls bright enough to know the value of good maps are pretty scarce.

I knew approximately where to look. Sutherland is a county in northwestern Scotland; in fact, it’s
the
county in northwestern Scotland. As I studied the map of the right area, somebody knocked on the door. It was a tentative, diplomatic little knock, the kind that might be used by a hotel employee with fresh towels, or by a friend who didn’t want to interrupt if anything interesting was going on inside—except that I didn’t have any friends in London with the possible exception of Crowe-Barham.

Hastily, I folded the map I’d been looking at and stuck it into my inside jacket pocket, and a couple of more besides, so as not to indicate too clearly, if I should be searched, the region in which I was interested. The slip of paper I tucked into the top of my sock, which was a little better than putting it into my wallet or wearing it in my hatband, but not much. I’d have preferred to destroy it, but I wasn’t quite through examining it yet. The discreet little knock came again. I made sure that all Nancy’s belongings were back in her purse, and that the purse was lying on the table in the proper, casual, tossed-aside way. Then I looked grimly at the dead girl on the floor.

Somehow it didn’t seem right to drag her into the bathroom or stuff her into the wardrobe. I mean, she was a relative of mine, after all, and she could damn well be allowed what little dignity she’d managed to retain in death. Besides, anybody who was really curious would search the bathroom and wardrobe, anyway. I just pulled out my gun and went to the door, as the knocking came a third time, more sharply and impatiently now.

“Matt,” a voice said. “Matthew, darling, let me in.”

Even if I hadn’t recognized the voice, there was only one woman I knew—in London, anyway—who’d deliberately address me as darling while I was engaged in another woman’s room. I sighed, and checked my gun, and put it into my pocket, leaving my hand on it. I opened the door just far enough to let me slip out into the hall.

“Hello, Vadya,” I said, pulling the door closed behind me.

She had made a quick recovery since I’d seen her last. Her hairdo had been reconstructed on a slightly less spectacular scale. Her rumpled suit and damaged blouse had been replaced by a straight black linen dress—well, as straight as her contours allowed—that covered her shoulders but left her arms bare. A diaphanous, multicolored chiffon scarf was strategically arranged to mask the bruises on her neck she hadn’t quite been able to cover with makeup. She was wearing the kind of boldly patterned black stockings that were currently making a great fashion hit—I guess every woman has a secret yearning to look like a tart—and high-heeled black pumps.

“It’s very thoughtful of you, Vadya,” I said. “I certainly appreciate it. But it wasn’t really necessary.”

She frowned. “What in the world are you talking about, darling?”

“Didn’t you come to give me back my coat? I thought you were afraid I might catch cold without it.”

“Ah, you are joking me, and your coat is in my room at Claridge’s,” she said with a laugh. She glanced down at my bulging jacket pocket. “Is that necessary? You should be careful, Matthew, or you will become like those of whom we know, those who cannot even shave without aiming a gun at the man in the mirror and ordering him to stand still.”

That took care of the polite preliminaries, and I asked bluntly, “Just what the hell are you doing here, doll?”

“Why, I am following you, of course.” Her expression was bland and innocent. “Shall we say that I am protecting my interests? We are working together, are we not? That was agreed. When I see you consulting with another woman, and visiting her room, I am disturbed. That was not agreed.”

I said, “Somehow I don’t seem to recall all these ironclad agreements.”

She smiled. “Perhaps I used the wrong word. Perhaps it was not agreed, merely understood. But we are working together in the matter of McRow, are we not? Despite your lousy behavior of this afternoon, which I magnanimously forgive.” She touched her neck lightly, and let her hand fall. “And if there is to be another woman involved, should I not meet her? Who is this girl, Matthew?”

I shrugged. “Just a kid who thinks she’s related to me in some way. She asked me up to see her family papers.”

Vadya looked at me for a moment, and threw back her head and laughed with real amusement. “You are very entertaining, darling. First it is a wife and then it is a distant cousin. You surely don’t expect me to believe—”

It was the reaction I had anticipated. Sometimes the truth can be more useful than a lie. I said, “Hell, believe what you like.”

“Matthew, please! I am still not convinced of this marriage and this bride of yours. Don’t try to sell me any more of your relations today.”

I shrugged. “Okay, so the girl is a desperate Mata Hari type packing a gun in her purse and a knife in her stocking. Have it your way.”

“And you will ask me in to meet her?”

I shrugged again. “Sure,” I said. “Go on in. Meet her.”

I stepped back and opened the door. Vadya rearranged the filmy scarf about her shoulders and walked in. She stopped short. I heard her breath catch. I made a note of the fact that her hand went, not to her purse, but to the top of her dress.

I said, “Be careful. This .38 Special makes an awful mess.” I reached back left-handed and closed the door and locked it.

After a moment of silence, Vadya chuckled softly. “We seem to have already played this scene once. Did you kill her, Matthew?”

I said, “Hadn’t you better make up your mind? A minute ago you were insisting she was my confederate; now you want to make her my victim. No, I didn’t kill her. Did you?” When Vadya didn’t answer at once, I said, “Somebody loaded that bottle on the dresser. The kid drank first. That’s how I come to be still alive,” Well, omitting some details, that was more or less true. I went on, “The poison seems to have been Petrozin K. I believe you’re acquainted with the stuff.”

“Of course, but it was unsatisfactory. It has not been issued to us for many months.”

“You might have had some left in the back of a drawer or the bottom of an old purse.”

“Why would I kill her, Matthew?”

I shrugged. “How should I know? But it’s kind of a coincidence. I come to London with a wife, and right away the wife disappears, and you’re sitting in the lounge downstairs. I meet another girl, never mind who, and immediately she’s poisoned, and you’re hanging around in the hall outside. And this time there aren’t even any extraneous Oriental ladies around to confuse the issue. Could it be that for some reason you want me all to yourself, Vadya? It’s a flattering thought. And what did you really come here for, to substitute a harmless bottle for the poisoned one to confuse the police, perhaps?”

Vadya gave the same soft, throaty chuckle. “Your ideas are very ingenious, but look at me, darling. Just look at me. I admit I am a fine womanly figure of a woman in this stupid Dumaire disguise, but surely I am not so well-developed that I can hide a whole fifth of Scotch under my dress. If I came to switch bottles, where is my bottle?” She turned to face me. “And you are being inconsistent, also. If I am getting rid of little girls so I can have you to myself, as you so modestly suggest, would I put poison where you might drink it? I am under orders to work with you, not kill you, Matthew. Until the work is done, you are safe from me.”

It wasn’t really a watertight argument, but I found myself inclined to believe her, just as a working hypothesis. I guess what I really believed was her involuntary start when she saw the dead girl: she hadn’t been expecting that. At least I didn’t think she had. I took my hand from my pocket and grinned.