Traitor's Purse (15 page)

‘We’re in the cart,’ he said. ‘In the cart good and proper.’ Campion groaned. ‘Who are we, anyway?’ he demanded. ‘Who are you?’

The fat man did not reply for a minute. There was a. curious half-smile which had nothing to do with amusement on his face. It was some little time before Campion recognized it for what it was. This odd stranger was deeply and sentimentally hurt.

‘My name is Lugg,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve been a perishing servant of yours for seventeen years.’ There was an awkward pause and then he rose and stretched himself. ‘That’s all right,’ he said magnificently, ‘you’re not to blame. I’d ’ave told you at once only I was hoping it’d come back to you. ’Ullo, ’ullo, what’s that?’

The lights flickered and a deep full-throated rumbling echoed through the house. Both men started.

‘Thunder,’ Lugg pronounced as a whirlwind of heavy drops pattered against the glass behind the thick curtains. ‘It got me wondering. It always does nowadays. Oh well, let it snow if it feels like it. We’ve got more than we can carry anyway, so what does it matter what else piles up?’

‘How late is it? I can’t waste time.’ Campion was struggling
to
his feet as he spoke. ‘Tomorrow’s the fifteenth. Must get on. God knows how.’

‘You stay where you are.’ Lugg had picked up his revolver and was playing with it carelessly. ‘Your head seems to ’ave gone so we’ll ’ave to use mine for a ruddy change. Now look ’ere, we’re in a very nasty position. I’m an accessory after the fact, don’t forget that, so I’m going to tell you all you saw fit to let me know about the lark you’re on before you lost your senses. You’re going to listen, and we’re both going to hope it’s going to bring something back to you because if it don’t we’re both up the creek.’

He was right, of course. Campion had the wits left to realize it even while every instinct warned him frantically against delay. The thing he had to avert was enormous and catastrophic.

‘Avert.’ Once again it was a single word which arrested him. That was right. There was something he had to avert. Something tremendous.

Meanwhile Lugg was talking and his thick voice sounded comforting and sensible against the rumbling of the storm outside.

‘I’ve only been by your side day and night for seventeen years and you couldn’t trust me with the whole packet. Said you was under oath,’ he was observing. ‘If you hadda done, we shouldn’t be in this mess, but I’m not reproaching you. That’s not my way. Never ’as been. I’ve been here for five days and this is it, I should suppose. My instructions from you in London was that I should keep myself under cover ’ere and take all messages. Old Happy in the shop was to do all the front of the ’ouse stuff and I wasn’t to show my face until I was told. Happy is quite okay, by the way. I picked this place of ’is myself. I used to know ’im years ago when ’e was one of the old Forty Angels gang up at Hoxton. ’E’s straight as a die to ’is own sort. ’E’s keeping the look-out now. There’s been no one particular about since you came. You must have given them the slip completely, punch-drunk or not. Now listen. Since I’ve been ’ere you’ve only showed up twice. The first time was the day before yesterday.
You
came in with a portmanteau and that time you were wearing your ordinary clothes. You changed here into some duds that even my old dad wouldn’t ’ave worn and went off with a little fish-basket under yer arm, looking as if you’d been on the tramp from one sick ward to the next for the last live years. Don’t you remember?’

‘No, I don’t. I’m sorry, it’s gone completely.’

‘Never mind. Never mind, Don’t strain it or you’ll never get it. Just listen. I may say something that’ll bring the ’ole thing back.’ Lugg was very earnest and the suppressed anxiety in his matt black eyes belied his words. ‘The second time I saw you you came sneaking in by these french doors ’ere, about three yesterday morning. I was sleeping where you’re sitting now and I got up and fetched you a bit of food. I asked ’ow things were going, but you didn’t open out at all. You seemed worried and distant-like, as though you was puzzled by the way things was running.’

‘Was I – was I all right then?’ Campion stirred as he spoke. This was one of the most unnerving experiences of all.

‘Oh yes. You’d got yer ’ead screwed on then. You was as bright as I am. You just seemed sort of mystified, as though things weren’t running the way you’d thought. About eleven in the morning you slipped out again, still in yer old clothes, and that was the last time I saw you right in the head.’

It was an unfortunate way of putting it, but evidently Lugg was one of those Britons without the celebrated national gift for euphemy.

‘You left your little old basket,’ he said, ‘You locked it in the table drawer, but you took one or two things out of it and put them in your pockets. About tea-time yesterday Happy came in with a tale that ’e’d picked up in the shop about you being mixed up in a row down at the waterside. A rozzer had been killed and two or three men took to horspital.’

He paused hopefully, but Campion shook his head. In spite of the sudden chill which this confirmation of his worst fears produced in him, he still could not remember. Lugg breathed gustily.

‘Never mind,’ he said again but without any sort of conviction. ‘Never mind. It’ll come back sudden. Then young Amanda called for your suitcase with your good clothes in it,’ he went on, ‘and Happy told her some of what he’d heard – ’

‘Yes, I know. She came to the hospital.’ Campion spoke absently and did not see the small black eyes flicker.

‘Oh, you’ve seen ’er, ’ave you? Did you recognize ’er?’ The jealousy was very faint, but it was there and Campion noticed it.

‘Not for a long time,’ he said. ‘I – er – like a fool I thought she must be my wife.’

‘So she will be in a week or two, if you’re not strung up.’ Lugg’s dreadful directness was irrepressible. The words came into his head and he said them.

A shadow passed over Campion’s lean wooden face.

‘I rather think that’s off,’ he said shortly. ‘She – she didn’t realize what had happened, you see. She doesn’t know now and I don’t particularly want her to, so, should you see her, for God’s sake don’t refer to it. She broke the engagement.’

‘
She
did?’ Lugg was clearly incredulous. ‘Why? ‘As she seen someone else?’

Campion writhed. The discussion was distasteful and also, he discovered, quite unbearable. (Ah, Amanda! Oh, my blessed smiling sweet! Oh, sensible, clear-eyed, unembarrassed beloved! Oh, dear God Almighty, what is to happen to me without you?)

Lugg took his silence for consent, apparently, for he pursed his mouth and jerked his head with resigned regret.

‘I see that coming,’ he remarked brutally. ‘It was your fault for mucking about. Courting a woman’s like cooking something. There comes a time when it’s done. After that you had ought to eat it. If you don’t, and keep it simmering on the side so to speak, you’re apt to forget it and when you do come to look for it all the goodness is gorn away and you’re left with nothing but a bit o’ skin. And it annoys the young woman too. It doesn’t do her any good.’

He paused and glanced at the other man’s face.

‘Sorry, cock,’ he said abruptly.

Campion said nothing. Outside the storm was working itself up to fury and the rain hissed and spat against the windows like a host of serpents.

‘Avert something tremendous.’ The command blazed at him suddenly, wrenching him out of his small private hell. ‘Hurry, hurry. Think, think. Pull yourself together. Get on with it.’

‘Where’s the basket?’ he said. ‘The whole story sounds nuts, but let’s see it anyway. There may be something in it.’

Lugg looked at him curiously. ‘Don’t you know what’s in it?’

‘No, of course I don’t. Do you?’

‘I ’ad a look, naturally. I’m ’uman. The lock on the drawer could be turned with a bent pin.’

‘Oh, all right. What’s in it?’

‘I didn’t touch anything, of course,’ he said, taking up a piece of wire which he kept conveniently on the mantelshelf. ‘It got me wondering, though.’

He squatted down and poked at the lock. It was child’s-play to open, as he had said, and he pulled out a wide drawer, revealing a fair-sized rush bag lying inside. Campion thrust his hand in the basket. An expression of blank amazement spread over his face and he shook the whole contents out on the table. A slippery, feathery heap of old one-pound and ten-shilling notes appeared before him.

‘Six ’undred and eighty-four pounds exactly,’ said Lugg. ‘I counted it after you left.’

Campion took up a bank note and rubbed it between his fingers. Then he held it up to the light. Britannia’s head and trident shone out of the watermark at him. None of the notes appeared to be new. Their uniform shabbiness suggested months of circulation.

‘Extraordinary,’ he said, looking blankly at the fish-basket. ‘I took some more out with me, you say?’

‘Yes. About seventy quid. You didn’t trouble to count it – what was that?’

Both men stood listening. At first they thought there was
no
sound but the storm, but an instant later there was a gentle thud outside the inner door and the shopkeeper put his head in.

‘Take sights,’ he whispered. ‘They’re all round the house. Plain-clothes. I’ll watch the front.’

Lugg swept the notes into the basket, thrust it into the drawer, and pulled back the tablecloth. The whole movement was as smooth as if it had been done by a conjuror. He thrust a gun into Campion’s hand and produced another from his hip. He touched the sick man’s arm and nodded towards the french doors, laying his finger on his lips. Campion nodded obediently and moved silently into the darkness at the back of the room.

The gentle knocking on the glass sounded like the Last Trump when it did come.

XII

IT WAS QUIET,
insistent tapping on the french windows. The gentle summons was very near and very intimate. It sped through the weeping of the storm and stood close to them.

They waited in silence and let it come again, still discreet but a fraction sharper, determined, inexorable.

Lugg glanced over his shoulder. Campion was well in the shadow, so he picked up his gun and advanced towards the window with all the easy confidence of an innocent householder expecting a visit from the police.

He drew back the curtains cautiously, as a good citizen should, allowing only the minimum of light to escape. For some seconds he stood peering into the darkness, alert as a dog at a rat-hole. Finally he unlatched the doors and pushed one of them open a few inches.

‘’Ullo?’ he demanded suspiciously.

There was no direct reply but there was a new movement
out
in the storm and Lugg became tense, his bald head with its fringe of greyish hair held oddly on one side.

Standing just below him in the driving rain was the figure he expected. The drab mackintosh and slouch hat of the plain-clothes man were there, but the stranger was not looking at him squarely. He peered up slyly out of the dark and from his white hand hung a large white handkerchief which fluttered significantly in the downpour. It was impossible to mistake its meaning.

Lugg backed slowly into the room and the newcomer came in after, holding the white rag ostentatiously before him.

He took up a position some little distance from the table and the heavy shade over the lights cut him off from the breast upwards as far as Campion was concerned. As soon as the window was closed behind him he held up his hands.

‘You can take my gun,’ he said distinctly.

Lugg searched him promptly and efficiently, setting down the man’s heavy Webley on the table well within the circle of light. Then with a glance at his visitor he produced his own gun and put it down beside the first. There was a long pause and then Campion also stretched out a hand in the darkness and added his weapon to the other two. He kept his face out of the light, however, as did the newcomer.

They made a curious headless group standing round the three guns, since all the light in the room focused on the weapons and on their three pairs of hands. Lugg and Campion maintained their advantage and waited for the visitor to make the first move.

‘I’ve got a message for the man calling himself Campion,’ he announced at last. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’

‘Never mind which of us it is,’ corrected Lugg sharply. ‘What’s the dope?’

‘
He
knows.’ The stranger spoke meaningly, jerking a hand towards Campion. ‘It’s up to him, that’s all.’

This was an unforeseen impasse. Campion’s thin hands remained expressionless and Lugg’s great ham-fists did not
stir.
The silence persisted. The room was hot and its very quiet was ominous and uncomfortable amid the bellowing of the storm which raged round the house. Lugg found it unbearable.

‘The boys outside’ll get wet,’ he observed pleasantly.

‘I’m waiting.’

‘What do you think we’re doing?’

‘He’s only got to make up his mind. He knows.’ The visitor had begun to reveal a personality. He was not a big man and his raincoat hung on him in concealing folds, yet he managed to convey an impression of wiry strength curiously and rather horribly allied to ill-health. His voice was not without culture of a sort, either, but it had a thin tinny ring to it and when he coughed, as he did frequently, his lungs wheezed and groaned dangerously. Yet he was a force in the room. There was no question but that he knew what he was doing and was determined to waste no time.

Since his head and shoulders were hidden, his hands were his only distinguishing feature and these were frankly repulsive, being womanish, degenerate, and quite abominably dirty.

A sixth sense warned Campion to hold his tongue. It was not that the half seen, headless figure was actually familiar, but the atmosphere of rank evil he brought with him was. Campion left the talking to Lugg, who seemed quite prepared to deal with it.

‘Knowing’s not always saying,’ the fat man remarked, managing to infuse a wealth of craft into the observation. ‘Your call, mate.’

‘
He
knows,’ the newcomer repeated and one of his repellent hands slid inside his raincoat.

The two others had their guns up off the table like one man. They waited, the two weapons levelled and the two-barrels gleaming dully in the circle of light.