The Titanic Secret (3 page)

At the other side of the copse, another hedgerow ran at right angles to the first, and passed within about fifty yards of the house. More importantly, the side of the farmhouse which faced the hedgerow had neither windows nor doors, so that when he approached the building, Tremayne knew that unless one of the occupants was outside the property and looking in the right direction, he would not be seen.

The nearer he got to the house, the slower and more carefully Tremayne moved, and it took him almost five minutes to cover the last fifty yards. When he reached the closest point to the house, he stopped moving and for several seconds just stared across at the property. There was still no sign of movement, and none of the occupants was outside. The hedgerow was thick, but not impenetrable, and Tremayne was able to pick a spot where the undergrowth was reasonably sparse and where he was able to slide through with the minimum amount of noise and effort.

When he’d done so, he remained in a crouch for a few moments before he moved off. He checked all around him, then strode swiftly across to the side wall of the property. Again he waited, using his ears as much as his eyes to ensure that nobody was anywhere near him. Then he walked around to the front of the farmhouse, stepped across to the door and rapped on it sharply three times with his left hand.

For several seconds, nothing happened. Then Tremayne heard the sound of cautious movement inside the house, footsteps moving slowly along a corridor towards the door. Then silence for another brief period, before the man inside the house spoke.

‘Who is it?’ His voice was harsh and guttural.

‘I’m from the post office,’ Tremayne said, sounding bright and cheerful. ‘I have a package for you and I need you to sign for it.’

There was a grunt from the other side of the door, then the sound of heavy bolts being withdrawn.

The door opened a cautious six inches, and Tremayne found himself staring at an unshaven face. But that wasn’t what seized his attention. It was the object the man was holding across his chest. The blue steel barrels of the twelve-bore shotgun gleamed in the light from the hall, and he could see that the man’s right hand was wrapped around the stock, his finger resting on the trigger.

Tremayne took a deliberate half-step backwards, and allowed an expression of apprehension to cross his face.

The man opened the door slightly wider so that the whole of his weapon was visible. He’d obviously noted his visitor’s look of fear, and smiled slightly as he moved the twin barrels of the shotgun downwards, making the silent threat more obvious.

‘Where’s the package?’ he demanded.

‘Here.’

Tremayne had been standing in a casual pose, his right arm tucked behind his back. As he spoke, he swung his arm around his body, his elbow locked as he brought the heavy calibre revolver up to the aim.

The expression on the man’s face changed the instant he saw the pistol, and he reacted immediately, swinging the shotgun around to point it at Tremayne. But he was too late. For him, he was a whole lifetime too late.

Tremayne’s finger was already resting on the trigger of his weapon, and the moment the sights settled on the centre of the man’s chest, he squeezed the trigger. The Webley Model WG – a popular personal defence weapon among army officers – kicked in his hand, and the .455 bullet smashed straight into his target.

The man’s grubby shirt blossomed crimson and he staggered backwards a couple of steps before crashing heavily onto the wooden floorboards of the hall, the shotgun tumbling from his lifeless hands, his face still wearing an expression of shocked surprise.

Tremayne reached down and seized the weapon by the end of the barrel, and tossed it behind him outside the door. He guessed the other man was probably still upstairs with the girl, but just in case he was somewhere on the ground floor, Tremayne didn’t want to leave a loaded weapon lying around where he could grab it.

His ears were ringing from the noise of the shot, but the sound of movement somewhere upstairs was quite unmistakable. Above him, heavy boots moved quickly across wooden floorboards.

Then the creaking of a hinge told Tremayne that a door had opened on the first floor. He had to assume that the other man would be armed as well, and the landing above him was so wide that he couldn’t cover all of it properly. He’d have to wait until the second man showed himself.

Tremayne pushed open the door on his right and stepped inside, his pistol held out in front of him, just in case. The room was a parlour, worn wooden chairs, a rough table and a battered old dresser the only furniture. He flattened himself against the inside wall and looked up, waiting for the second man to appear.

He almost missed it. He was looking at the wrong end of the landing when the barrel of the shotgun appeared. Tremayne glanced to his left as his peripheral vision detected the slight movement. Then he flung himself backwards into the old parlour. There was a thunderous roar, and the expanding blast of shot from the twelve-bore blew a ragged hole through the bottom section of the parlour door and part of the wall. If Tremayne had still been standing by the door, he would at best have lost a leg.

He stepped forward cautiously, and risked a quick glance upwards. He couldn’t see the other man, but he could hear him stepping across the landing.

Tremayne could also hear the unmistakable metallic snicking sound as he closed the breech of the shotgun, which meant he knew what he was doing. Instead of firing both barrels one after the other, after which he would have disarmed himself, the man had clearly ejected the spent cartridge case and loaded another shell, so now he again had two rounds in the weapon. And Tremayne knew that at close quarters, a shotgun was just as lethal – in fact, arguably even more lethal because of the way the shot spread – than a pistol. The only advantage he had was that the shotgun was a full-length weapon, and so it would be more difficult to handle within the confines of the house.

His problem was that the man upstairs would have a clear shot at him from the landing as soon as Tremayne stepped out of the parlour. What he had to do was get on the other side of the hallway, underneath the landing. And he knew he’d have to do that quickly, before it dawned on the man upstairs that he could use the girl as a shield.

Tremayne pulled the parlour door open all the way, took another look up the stairs and then immediately stepped back from the doorway. In that split second, he’d seen a bulky figure at the far end of the landing, peering over the banister rail, the shotgun pointing down the stairs.

To step outside the parlour would be suicidal, but Tremayne had no option but to try. He’d just have to hope his reactions were faster than the other man’s. He took a deep breath, checked that the Webley was ready to fire, then moved forward, stopping just inside the room.

Then he thrust his right arm outside the parlour, aimed the pistol up the staircase, and pulled the trigger. The instant the weapon fired, he ran forward, taking giant strides across the hall. And at the same moment, the man above him pulled the trigger of the shotgun, the bellow of the twelve-bore much louder than the pistol shot.

Tremayne felt a sudden stabbing pain in the back of his right leg as he leapt forward, but he ignored it. He slammed into the opposite wall of the hallway, already raising the Webley revolver and looking for a target. But the man had ducked back out of sight.

Then Tremayne heard the shotgun being reloaded and knew he had only seconds before the man would probably start firing blind down the staircase. He needed to get out of range, fast.

Opposite the parlour door was a second door leading off from the hall. Tremayne took two steps over to it and kicked it open. The man would have no doubt about what he’d just done, and hopefully would assume he now knew where the intruder was.

Tremayne stopped and moved silently back to the centre of the hall. He knew that now he held a very slight advantage. He still couldn’t see the other man, but he could hear him.

Seconds later, the shotgun barrels reappeared, aiming towards the second doorway, and almost immediately the man fired the weapon.

The blast of pellets slammed into the floor just a few feet from where Tremayne was standing, and immediately he returned fire, pointing the Webley at the underside of the wooden floorboards of the landing.

The pistol roared and bucked in his hand, the heavy bullet smashing straight through the wood. He heard a curse from above him, an expression of fear, and knew that his shot had missed the target. Then the man moved quickly. And just as suddenly he stopped.

Tremayne stilled his breathing, concentrating as hard as he could on just listening, waiting for the first creak on the wooden floorboards of the landing that would indicate precisely where the man above him was.

For a few seconds, he heard nothing at all – the man must have been standing as still as Tremayne – but then he started to move. And he shouted down at Tremayne, yelled his defiance and made the threat that Tremayne had been fearing ever since he’d stepped inside the building.

‘You’re dead, you interfering bastard. And I’ve got the girl. She’s my ticket out of here.’

Tremayne heard the man’s footsteps quickly crossing the landing, heading for one of the bedrooms, presumably where he’d locked the girl, and knew he had just seconds to act.

He estimated where the man had to be, aimed his pistol at the floorboards again and fired. Once, twice.

This time he was rewarded by a scream of agony. Maybe one of the bullets had found its mark. There was a clattering sound from above him – perhaps the shotgun falling – then a heavy thud and a bubbling wail of pain.

Tremayne knew he had just one round left in the pistol, and it was possible that the man above him was trying to trick him, pretending to be hit so that Tremayne would walk boldly up the stairs, thinking the danger was passed.

It was worth taking a few seconds to reload. He pressed the catch beside the hammer on the pistol to open the weapon and reveal the rear of the cylinder, shook out all six cartridges – five of them fired, one not – into the palm of his left hand and dropped them into his jacket pocket. Then he quickly slid six more bullets into the cylinder and closed the weapon again.

Only then did he step forward, the pistol pointing upwards, and begin a slow and cautious ascent of the staircase.

The man was still moaning, and as Tremayne climbed upwards he discovered that his quarry was certainly injured. The sudden dripping of blood through a gap in the floorboards, the drops splashing fatly onto the floor of the hall below, told its own story.

But still he was cautious. And as he climbed high enough to see onto the landing, his caution was justified. The shotgun barrel moved slightly towards him.

Tremayne instantly ducked down, and the blast roared over his head, blowing open a six-inch wide hole in the opposite wall.

He hadn’t heard the man reload the weapon, but he took no chances. He jumped down a couple of steps, pointed the pistol at the floorboards where he now knew the man was lying, and pulled the trigger twice.

Only then did he turn round and resume his ascent of the staircase.

This time, when he reached the landing, the man’s hands were nowhere near the shotgun. Instead, he was still moaning and clutching his stomach and left leg. The dark upwelling of arterial blood from between his fingers was proof enough of his injuries.

‘Doctor,’ he said hoarsely, his voice racked with pain. ‘You’ve gotta get me a doctor. I’m hurt bad.’

Tremayne nodded at him. ‘I hope you are,’ he said. ‘But you forfeited your right to civilized treatment the moment you and your partner snatched that girl off the street. She’s only twelve years old.’

‘We ain’t laid a finger on her.’

‘That doesn’t matter. You kidnapped her, and then you demanded a ransom. But you made a mistake. In fact, you made two mistakes. You obviously knew the identity of the girl’s aunt – Leslie Marian Valiant, better known as “May” – and you knew she would pay almost anything to get Claire released from your clutches. But what you failed to realize was that your ransom demand wouldn’t be opened by the aunt, but by her husband, because he lives in Whitehall and she doesn’t. Your second mistake was not knowing who her husband is, and what he would be likely to do.’

Despite the agony of the gunshot wounds, and his steadily weakening condition, the man lying on the floor looked puzzled.

‘So who is he?’ he demanded.

‘Leslie Valiant’s husband is a man named George Mansfield Cumming. You’ve probably never heard of him, because he likes it that way. He keeps a low profile, but he’s one of the most powerful men in Britain. And he employs people like me, and I’m your worst nightmare.’

‘Who are you?’

Tremayne smiled slightly. ‘I’m the man who’s been following your trail for the last week. I’m the man who’s here to take Claire back to her family. And I’m the man who’s going to kill you.’

‘No, please, no. I can—’

But whatever offer or plea the man was going to make was lost in the crash of another shot from Tremayne’s Webley. The man quivered once, and then lay still.

‘You can’t, actually,’ Tremayne murmured, tucked the pistol into his jacket pocket and turned away without a second glance.

There were three doors leading off the landing, and he walked straight across to the one which had a key sticking out of the lock. He turned it, and pushed the door wide open. At first, he didn’t see her, and wondered for a moment if he’d got the right room. Then he heard a faint whimpering sound from the opposite corner, and stepped further into the room.

The girl was crouched down on the floor beside a small single bed, her eyes squeezed tightly shut and her hands clamped over her ears. She was rocking slightly backwards and forward, clearly traumatized by her experience.

Tremayne walked across to her and bent down. He rested his hand lightly on her shoulder and she shuddered.

‘It’s all right, Claire,’ he said soothingly. ‘It’s all over now. I’ve come to take you home.’

He didn’t know if it was the tone of his voice, or what he was telling her, but her eyes suddenly opened and she stared at him. And then, with the kind of strength that spoke of her terror and desperation, she grabbed hold of him around the shoulders as if she would never let go, sobbing her heart out.