Текст книги "[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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The THRUSH man whirled, murder in his glaring eyes – and that was when Ernie Bosustow acted. Darting in under the gleaming blade, he dropped the shotgun, hacked viciously at Wright's shin, planted a useful left in the pit of the baronet's stomach as he jerked up a leg in involuntary agony, and then locked his fingers together and brought down his doubled hands on the man's neck as he doubled up, retching for breath. The next moment, Curnow and a tall constable were snapping the handcuffs on his wrists.

Jacko rose from the mêlée by the drawing room door like a balloon dragging at its moorings. With a roar of rage, he fought free of all his attackers. He picked up a beefy sergeant, lifted the heavy policeman above his head and pitched him bodily at the others. As they fell in a tangled heap to the ground, he shook his great head – and found himself face to face with April.

The girl didn't hesitate. Drawing back her right arm as far as it would go, she hit him – a long, looping, roundhouse blow that came up from the floor and buried itself with all her weight behind it in his solar plexus.

The giant stared at her unbelievingly, the breath whooping from his savaged diaphragm. Slowly he folded up – and then the police were on him again. And this time they had his hands behind his back and the handcuffs locked before he could draw one agonised breath.

"All right then," Curnow panted, straightening his tie and glaring at Wright. "Let's get the formalities over with, for a start. I must—"

"No, no." It was April who interrupted. "Mark – he's got Mark tied up in some cave with a booby trap bomb designed to blow up the station on the Tor. We must get him out first.. .

"Go ahead and get him out," Wright said venomously. "The door's not locked. Be my guest."

"Since we've got you anyway," Curnow began, "I'm in a position to say that, if you assist the forces of law and —"

"Law and poppycock! I'm saying nothing. You have..." he consulted his wrist watch "... exactly thirty-one minutes, Miss Dancer. And the best of luck to you."

The superintendent sighed heavily. "I think he means it, too," he said grimly. "Looks as though it may be up to you, young Bosustow, after all."

"I'll do what I can – but how did you get here anyway? What in the name of... How did you all get here? And why?" There was blank astonishment in the boy's voice.

"Have you forgotten already? You were carryin' on about it enough! You were being tailed, boy. We've had men on you for days. You know that."

"You mean... out in those seas... you followed in another boat? You sailed into the Keg-'ole? You found your way down those passages?" There was stark disbelief in Ernie's voice.

Curnow nodded. "When we follow someone, we follow. And there's others but you can handle a boat, others but you were in school at Porthallow and messed about down here as kids. Some of 'em maybe in the Force."

"So I did hear voices," April said. "But we're wasting time. Come on!"

As she seized the boy's arm and led him to the door, she heard the policeman say: "There's a boat out, down in the cove. Ready to launch. A nice freshly painted boat in a strange reddish-orange colour. Would it be yours?"

"Of course it's mine," Wright sneered. "I have a licence for it, too. I demand an explanation for this unwarrantable intrusion, this insufferable—"

"That's all I wanted to know... Gerald Everard Wright, I am a police officer engaged in enquiries into the deaths of Sheila Duncan and Harry Bosustow. I have reason to believe that you may be able to help the police in their enquiries and I must ask you…

But the girl was outside the front door, running, running for the stables and the thicket which concealed the entry to the passageway leading to the chamber where Mark Slate was held a prisoner.

Bosustow found the place immediately; he led her unerringly down a maze of tunnels and corridors in the rock, stumbling over stones, sliding on the damp patches, lurching against projections in the wan light of a torch whose battery was almost spent. But fourteen more minutes had passed before they stood before the oak door leading to the chamber, for it must have been all of half a mile in a straight line from Wright's house to the main mast of the secret station.

Sobbing for breath, April stood outside the door and stared at the thread of light outlining it. At least Mark wasn't in the dark, she thought.

"Mark," she croaked. "Mark? it's April – are you all right?"

"April! Don't for God's sake come in! Don't touch the door." The voice was tight with anxiety, the voice of a man dragged back from a journey from which there was no return.

"All right, Mark..."

"No, you don't understand. There's some kind of infernal machine wired to the door; it'll go up the moment you

"I know, Mark. I know, Listen, we've got to get you out... Tell me: can you see the door on your side?"

"Very nicely, thank you."

"How is the booby trap fixed? Is it a wire attached to the handle? Could we maybe saw through a different part of the door without tripping it? Is it a circuit that gets broken? Is it a contact? Can you see if —"

"It's none of those," Slate's voice cut across her, stronger now. "There's a trembler coil. The slightest move would You don't have to open the door. If you leaned hard on it, or rattled the handle…"

"What's in the chamber, Mark?"

"Me."

"Mark, this isn't the time... What else?"

"A great number of sticks of dynamite, a quantity of nitro glycerine in drums, a huge Victorian hour glass connected to an electrical complex that looks like the inside of a computer, a bulb hanging on its flex, and that's all!"

"There's no other entrance, no other door?" Her voice was taut with despair.

"You want jam on it, don't you, lovey?" Mark Slate said.

"How's the air in there, Mr. Slate?" Ernie Bosustow asked suddenly.

"Hallo! That sounds like our lighthouseman… Nice and fresh, thank you, if that helps... Oh. I see what you mean... Yes. There is a grating. Rather an old one set in distinctly ropey-looking cement, high up in the wall. You don't think...?" The voice was suddenly tinged with a trace of hope.

"We haven't time to think. We must go," Ernie yelled. "See you."

"I don't want to be a bore," the imprisoned man called, and there was a break in his voice, "but... the sand is pretty low. How much time is there left?"

The girl looked at her watch and caught her breath. "Eleven minutes."

"Eleven minutes. Oh... well, the best of Cornish luck to you."

But the man and the girl were already pelting down the tunnel, to leave the prisoner alone with his solitude and his despair.

"What is it?" April hissed when they were out of earshot. "How...?"

"Old air shaft I suddenly remembered," Ernie panted as he ran. "The smugglers had to put it in... otherwise things went bad... kept their food and provisions there."

"But, Ernie..." The girl dragged him to a halt. "If we have to go all the way back, and then return on the surface to find your shaft in the dark – we'll never make it. You know it took us fourteen minutes just to get here."

He was already running again. "'Course not... There's a way out just round the corner here... if I remember rightly..."

There were eight and a quarter minutes left when they burst out of a clump of bushes and felt the cool night wind on their cheeks. Stars pricked the sky overhead, but the moon had disappeared behind a bank of cloud to the west. Immediately above them, red Lamps glared fiercely two hundred feet from the ground. Farther down the slope of the moor, lighted windows marked the site of a clump of low buildings.

"Good heavens!" April breathed. "This is the main mast. Do the military people know there's a warren of passages with an exit inside their closely-guarded perimeter?"

"Reckon not," the boy chuckled. "But I guess that's how our friend reached a lot of his secrets. How much time now?"

"Seven and a half," she reminded him urgently.

"Should be in the middle of that patch of furze over there no, not this one: the one just beyond that boulder!

"Watch out!... Ah! Ernie was right!... Here we are, my beauty..."

He was holding aside a branch of gorse and staring with evident delight at what April at first thought was a large rabbit hole.

"There?" she asked incredulously. "Down there?"

He nodded. "Slants down at an angle of forty-five degrees. If we go feet first, and the grating's as insecure as I remember, I may be able to push it out into the room with my heels and then we can drop through. You'm best take off that sheep skin: the shaft's only eighteen inches square...

There were six minutes left before the hourglass was exhausted and Wright's contraption blew them all sky high when April lowered herself into the burrow after the boy and began wriggling downwards on her back. Of all the under ground journeys she had undergone that night, the twenty-odd feet of the slanting airshaft was immeasurably the worst. For the first few feet, dust, wet earth, pebbles and nameless things that moved were all about her face, threatening to suffocate her. After that, the conduit was carved in the solid rock and she was aware of nothing but coldness, damp, hardness, and the remorseless pressure of thousand of tons of earth, the thickness between her and the man-made steel structure which might at any minute, with her and the earth and the man bound in the cell somewhere below them, go howling skywards in a million fragments. At any minute? In four and a quarter minutes, to be precise.

The passage became so narrow that she could no longer raise her hands from her sides; they were pinioned as effectively as if she had been in a straightjacket. The darkness was total and absolute, the air stuffing, in the two inches of black space between her nose and the wet rock. And she couldn't take a deep breath because the rock pressed too closely upon her ribs for her to inflate her lungs. She couldn't move back upwards because she had no purchase; all she could do was to inch down into the after the scrabbling noises and gasping breaths that were Ernie.

Four minutes.

Suppose they got stuck? Suppose the shaft had become choked? She dared not speak to him: breath was too precious. But suppose – she put the thought from her. And then, lying on her back in this sightless and speechless black burrow, her feet struck something hard. She could go no farther. Her heels had come up against Ernie's shoulders. He was stuck.

The shaft was wide enough now for her to raise one hand up across her chest. Scraping the knuckles on the rook, she peered at the luminous dial of her wristwatch.

Three and a quarter minutes.

She bit back a sob of despair. What had happened? Why didn't he move? And then he did... There was a great bursting, clanging, ringing noise... and a rush of air and a flooding of light and the feel of his shoulders against her soles had gone. And then she was falling.

And suddenly she struck the flagged floor of a room with a jar, and a shower of dust and small stones followed her from the dark hole opening in the wall above and behind her.

Mark Slate was sitting in an iron chair cemented to the floor. His lips were swollen and cracked. He had a black eye. There were ugly bruises on his face. His jacket was torn and there were three thin streams of dried blood across his shirt front. The ankles and wrists wired to the chair were purple from loss of circulation.

"My God!" he croaked through puffy lips. "What happened to you?"

April looked at herself and laughed hysterically. Her knees showed through her trousers, her sweater was ripped, there was mud in her hair, and she was covered all over in green slime from the Keg-Hole. Apart from which her boots were rimed with salt and her face was bleeding from half a dozen small cuts. "Excuse me," she said. "I didn't bother to dress."

Ernie was staring at the complexity of wires and valves and detonators surrounding a huge hour glass in a wooden stand, from the top half of which the pepper-and-salt grains of sand were silkily pouring. On the dwindling remnant of sand spiral ling towards the hole, a tiny square of metal attached to a hair-thin wire was riding.

"Ernie!" she almost screamed. "I know a bit about explosives – but the complexity of that defeats me! I'd have to trace back... I couldn't... I mean we can't release him and go – and we've only got... we've only got a minute and a half..."

The boy looked up. He was smiling. "Not to worry," he said. "I'm not as young as I look, you know. I did my military service – in the Sappers, as a matter of fact. I was in a special unit... Bomb disposal!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A DEAD LIBERTY!

"The one thing I don't really get," Mark Slate said two days later, "is the bit about the burglaries. If Sheila Duncan was a double agent, knowingly passing on microfilm to THRUSH couriers who called for it at her booth, and if she was killed because they found out she also worked for us, then I still can't see why they had to break in. What were they after?"

"The last roll of film delivered to her," April said. "They wanted it back." They were in the Matra-Bonnet, speeding along the empty roads between Porthallow and Falmouth on their way back to London. It was warmer and the sun was shining.

"You mean it hadn't been collected? Nobody had asked for a pixie in Porphyry and been given a lighthouse instead?"

"No, that's just the point. When he killed her, Wright found nothing and assumed it had already been collected. But then when an agent came – and after him another – and neither burglaries nor enquiries did the trick, then they reported to their controls, and it filtered back to Wright. So he sent his wife to ask, and when she drew blank, burgled the place again to see if he could discover where she'd hidden the film."

"So it was Wright we chased that night?"

"Yes. He did the break-in while Mason and Jacko manoeuvred poor Harry Bosustow on to Wright's boat and murdered him."

"That Jacko!" Slate said ruminatively, massaging his chin and shaking his head. "No wonder he was able to uproot boulders and heave them at this car! I guess he and Wright will both get life, eh?"

April nodded. "They're lucky there's no more death penalty in Britain these days," she said.

"And the wife got clean away?"

"Yes, she must have seen the police when they arrived and decided that discretion was the better bet for THRUSH. They haven't seen a sign of her since."

"She wasn't on the sub?"

"No... the sub was boarded by a party from a naval frigate called urgently by the Admiralty from a courtesy visit to Falmouth... but there was no Lady Wright aboard. I guess she'll live to fight another day!"

Mark changed down to third and snarled through the twisting main street of a small village. "What about the mysterious Colonel Forsett – and of course his lady?" he asked.

"Forsett was the chief of the THRUSH Satrap at the Tor. He was called to the Wright home while I was a prisoner there so that he could be warned to keep away that night when the explosion was supposed to occur."

Slate's hands, still bandaged at the wrist after his ordeal being wired to the chair, moved easily and expertly on the wheel. They drifted round a hairpin at the head of a valley, streaked up a long, curving bill, and sped across a straight section traversing a tract of moorland beyond. The Matra-Bonnet's exhaust note settled down to a heady roar. "This has been my day for questions, hasn't it?" he said. "I have just two more, lovey."

"All right then," the girl replied, leaning back and closing her eyes to the sun. "Let's have them."

"One: who did make the Porphyry lighthouses with the secret hole?"

"Mason. They found a wheel in the boathouse at the cove."

"Two: you never did say – where was the missing roll of film? What had Sheila Duncan done with it?"

April Dancer sat up and stared ahead through the wind screen. She sighed. "Sheila Duncan was a very brave girl," she said soberly. "She wasn't a double agent at all, in fact. She only pretended to be so that she could get next the THRUSH Satrap at Trewinnock Tor. Ditto her affair with Wright. I heard from Waverly in New York this morning: the missing roll of microfilm, together with a report on Wright and his activities, arrived on his desk yesterday. Sheila had mailed it just before Wright caught up with her..."

There was a sudden alarming clangor from behind. A large black saloon, with bell trilling, swept past and edged Mark into the side of the road. An illuminated sign on the car's roof spelled out Police.

A big man in uniform got out of the police car and walked ponderously back. He leaned down to Mark's window. It was Superintendent Curnow.

"Well, well, well," he said. "If it isn't Mr. Slate... Good day, Miss. I'll have to trouble you for your driving licence, if you please, sir."

"Oh, good lord!" Slate groaned. "This is murder, Superintendent... and you know the death penalty has been abolished!"

"Just so, sir. But there is a seventy mile an hour speed limit has been imposed by the Minister of Transport. And you were doing a hundred and six."

"Now look," the agent said, "surely you're not going to book me, Superintendent? I mean, after all... after leading you to your murderers... why, it'd be a dead ruddy liberty, that's what it would be!"

The policeman smiled. "That's right, sir," he said, taking out his notebook. "Law... the enforcement of law and order for the public good... that's what liberty is all about, isn't it?"

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE: MURDERER'S SHY

CHAPTER TWO: MARK GETS SET

CHAPTER THREE: THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE NO BUSINESS

CHAPTER FOUR: AN OVERSEAS MISSION FOR APRIL

CHAPTER FIVE: IN THE STEPS OF THE DEPARTED

CHAPTER SIX: THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS WRONG

CHAPTER SEVEN: SOMETHING THE TIDE BROUGHT IN…

CHAPTER EIGHT: "ALL THE BEST LIGHTHOUSES ARE HOLLOW!"

CHAPTER NINE: OBSTRUCTIONS AND INTRUSIONS!

CHAPTER TEN: THE JEALOUS YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

CHAPTER ELEVEN: A WALK OVER THE CLIFFS

CHAPTER TWELVE: APRIL'S BAG OF TRICKS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MISS DANCER DOES THE TRICK!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A DEAD LIBERTY!