Sandstorm Page 6

  Churchill groped for his compass.

  ‘You can find the way?’ Mafoudh yelled to him.

  ‘I suppose I could,’ Churchill said.

  ‘Come on then. Let’s go.’

  ‘No, wait!’ came a voice from the back of the caravan. It was the ex-Znaga, Jafar, and he was standing stock-still, staring into the tails of the storm. ‘I saw something!’ he bawled.

  ‘Nonsense!’ Mafoudh screamed back. ‘Just the wind.’

  ‘No!’ Jafar shouted back. ‘Something — there!’

  At that moment, Sterling’s camel emerged from the sand-mist like an apparition, with Hamdu still clinging on at the rear.

  Churchill’s eyes opened wide in amazement, and Mafoudh’s mouth fell. ‘God preserve us,’ he gasped. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  *

  The storm had blown itself out by sunset, when they reached the Hassi Messoud. The well was deep and the camel-men drew the buckets up in teams, watering the camels in a stone trough that looked as if it had been there since the beginning of time. Meanwhile, Mafoudh and the Englishmen made camp in the shelter of some tamarisk trees nearby. By nightfall, the camels had all drunk their fill, and the Arabs drove them back into the trees in a tight squad. The sheikh called to the men to come and sit by the fire. He made tea with the usual ceremony, offering Sterling the first glass — a singular honour. ‘I was wrong,’ the sheikh said graciously in Arabic. ‘You are neither a Znaga nor a slave. You may not carry a weapon, but you are a man of courage.’ He turned and glared scornfully at Hamdu, who sat in silence with his head on his chest. ‘And you risked your life for this worthless piece of camel’s turd,’ he said, poking at the black man with his stick. ‘For this slave, who fell asleep in a storm and put us all at risk.’

  Sterling was about to argue, but didn’t. Altogether, he thought, there had been too much dying in the world over the past fifteen years — 30 million dead in the war they now reckoned. He could never get his head around such a figure. He thought of Corrigan again, remembering how he had struggled with his alternatives: going to the police, as Arnold had insisted, or taking the American up on his offer. He had lain awake thinking about it all night, stroking Billy’s watch. In the morning he’d taken a bus to Rotherhithe.

  *

  Corrigan’s address turned out to be a Victorian tenement, standing precariously on walls whose foundations had been shaken by Luftwaffe bombs intended for the nearby docks. The tiny Presbyterian Seamen’s Church that stood next door had remained untouched, as if protected by an invisible aura of sanctity, but the block was like a mangled, rotten cake with bites taken out of it — each bite a ruined apartment, a burned-out home. The place should have been demolished long ago. By the entrance, in a small shelter of brickbats and debris, two men made obese by layers of sacks and newspapers huddled up to a fire lit in a rusty oilcan. They did not greet Sterling as he passed.

  He went through the big arched doorway, up a dark spiral of stairs whose ornate banister had been rubbed a slick grey from the grease of countless hands. He passed two landings before he found the number on the card, and halted outside a four-panelled wooden door, intact but colourless under generations of peeling paint.

  Sterling knocked. There was no answer, but the door gave slightly and he realized it wasn’t locked. He called Corrigan’s name, knocked again. Still no answer. He waited a moment, then pushed the door open with his fist. Inside, a short hallway stretched to the half-open door of a parlour. There was a smell of damp carpets and the reek of burned cooking. He closed the door gently and advanced into the hall. ‘Corrigan?’ he shouted. ‘You there?’

  He shoved open the second door. Corrigan was in front of him, naked from the waist up, sitting in a battered upright chair, his head lolling backwards at a curious angle, his bulging eyes staring at the ceiling. His arms were strapped to the chair with piano-wire, and a piece of the same wire was wrapped around his neck.

  For a second Sterling stood rooted, as the image gouged itself upon his retina — the ivory-coloured hands, the face that was almost the colour and texture of Wedgwood porcelain, the eyes wide open, the lips drawn back over the broken teeth in an agonizing rictus. The piano-wire had cut almost a quarter of an inch into the flesh of the neck, but the blood that had streamed down Corrigan’s naked torso had long since congealed. His wire-framed spectacles lay beside him on the floorboards.

  Sterling was shocked, but not panic-stricken. This was not his first experience of violent death. He squatted down, saw Corrigan’s mouth was blocked by a bloated tongue. The tongue was bloody where Corrigan’s teeth had clamped down on it. He cleared the obstruction expertly, straining for a whisper of breath. Nothing. The tongue felt as dry and rough as emery cloth. He probed the chest and finally the left wrist. There was no movement, no pulse; the body was cold and inert, the muscles already set hard in rigor mortis. As he stood up he noticed that Corrigan’s bare left arm was covered in what looked like cigarette-burns, and for the first time he shuddered. Someone had made the American suffer before he died.

  A fly settled on Corrigan’s tongue and Sterling brushed it off. He felt a pang of pity, but then he thought of Billy. Corrigan’s death might have robbed him of his last chance of finding the boy, just when he had finally set his mind to it. He had come here to find the map — the map that Corrigan had said could lead him back to Billy — and it occurred to him suddenly that whoever had tortured and murdered Corrigan might have been after the same thing.

  He stood up and made a quick inventory of the flat. It was a cramped and bleak place — no pictures, no ornaments, nothing of a personal nature. It carried the carrion smell of wet rugs and stale cigarettes. It was as cold as an icebox and the only light came from a great sash window, which was half open.

  Sterling knew he ought to call the police at once, but there was no phone and it would mean going out to find a Bobby on the beat, which might take some time. If he did that, he wouldn’t get the chance to look for the map that he so desperately needed. For a moment he struggled with himself. Corrigan was dead, and wouldn’t get any deader with half an hour’s delay. But it would take more than that to search the flat properly, and perhaps the map didn’t exist anyway.

  His internal debate was cut short abruptly by the sound of voices from outside. There was a rap on the front door, brusque, businesslike and brutal. Sterling’s first instinct was to open the door, but he held back. Finding a policeman in the street was one thing, but it now occurred to him that his situation might look very bad, standing over a murdered man in a flat he’d had no right to enter. He looked down and saw that there was blood on his hands where he had felt Corrigan’s chest. That would be hard to explain. A score of witnesses in the Marquis of Granby had seen him assault Corrigan the previous night and, after all, he was a jailbird with a record — who would take his word for anything?

  Sterling wavered. Then he heard the sound of the door being flung open and the growling of voices in the corridor, and he went instinctively for the sash window. It was open just wide enough for him to squirm through. The window ledge outside was slippery but wide, and he raised himself to his feet and inched into the cover of the torn, grimy curtain just as a group of men moved into the sitting room. He could see them clearly through the gap in the curtain. There were four of them. They were dressed in dark overcoats, and they had the unhurried, coolly professional air of policemen. They bent out of sight and he guessed they were searching Corrigan’s body. A moment later there was the sound of crashing and hammering as they began to take the flat apart.

  Sterling edged as far along the ledge as he could, not daring to look down. His hand came into contact with a piece of piping, so rusted that it had snapped in two, and for a perilous second he wobbled. He grabbed at the brickwork behind him to steady himself, and as he did so saw that something had been pushed into the jagged end of the broken pipe. It looked like an oilskin packet — the kind of thing commandos used to wrap their pistols in during the war. Bracing
his legs for balance, he reached out and pulled the packet out of the pipe, holding it for a moment between his thumb and forefinger. It was light — but it certainly might contain a map. He shoved it hastily into the pocket of his coat, then peered back through the slit between the curtain and the wall. One of the men — a gorilla with a pugilist’s broken nose — turned suddenly in his direction and pointed at the window. ‘Hey, Inspector!’ he grunted in a Cockney accent. ‘What about out there?’

  Inspector. So they were police. The thought turned Sterling’s blood cold. He should have stayed there and confronted them. Running away and hiding would only confirm his guilt, but it was too late to change his mind now. He could not see the other man from where he stood, but he heard a crisp order and suddenly the inspector came into view — an unusually tall man, ramrod straight, with a clean-shaven face, pale blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair. There was a V-shaped scar in the very centre of his right cheek, which might have been an old knife-wound. He was holding a revolver — the kind issued to officers in the war: a Webley .38.

  Sterling was already shaking. His foothold on the ledge was precarious and he was aware that he was unlikely to survive a fall, at least not in one piece. He could creep no further along the ledge. The pipe wouldn’t bear his weight, that was certain. Further to his right there was a rusted fire ladder, but it was five or six feet away, far beyond his reach. In any case, the ladder looked as if it hadn’t been used or serviced in years. The brackets that fixed it to the wall were set in mortar that had softened and crumbled. Any weight on it and it might go down like a ton of bricks.

  The blond man approached the window. In a moment he would thrust his head out and see Sterling on the ledge. It was flight or fight time. He turned himself towards the teetering fire escape and measured the distance frantically. A good leap would do it, but the chances of it holding were no more than fifty-fifty. There were no certainties whichever way you looked at it.

  He braced his calf muscles and flung himself off the ledge. One hand came into contact with a rusted rung and the second quickly followed, but as Sterling struggled to get a foothold there was an eerie scraping and he felt the ladder give as his weight wrenched it out of the wall. The breath rushed from his body. For a moment he hung in the balance, frigid inside. The iron bracket above him slid out six inches, then stopped abruptly. Sterling’s feet hit the rungs and he knew he was back from the jaws of death. He slithered, shimmied, scampered down, hardly touching the rungs at all, feeling the iron shivering under his weight. He heard someone bellow after him, and the sound of a sash window being wrenched up, but he did not pause to look. In only seconds he had dropped down among the garbage of an alley, and then he was on his feet and running for his life.

  *

  Sterling kept running until he came to a phone-box, standing outside a newsagent’s shop on the corner of a major intersection. He stopped and looked behind him, seeing only down-at-heel Londoners pacing the street. Sterling eased into the box, panting, and steadied himself against its solid iron frame. It suddenly began to dawn on him that he was in the worst mess of his life. It was worse than his conviction for refusing to serve in 1940. Much worse. He’d been spotted hiding from the police outside the room of a man who’d been tortured and brutally murdered, a man a couple of dozen eyewitnesses could testify he’d actually assaulted and threatened only the previous night. It was clear he needed help, and needed it fast.

  On impulse he drew the oilskin packet from his pocket. It was fastened with buckles and press-studs that he opened with frantic haste. An old lady in a woolly coat and a hat like a hayrick shuffled out of the newsagent’s, carrying a heavy basket. She plumped it down next to the box and glared at him through the glass.

  Sterling opened the packet. Inside was a neatly folded piece of thick yellow card, on which was drawn a map. The legend ‘ROC’ was spelt out almost in the exact centre, next to a tiny precision drawing of a Dakota aircraft. Relief, sand dunes and landmarks were all filled in with professional skill. A grid of latitude and longitude had been carefully drawn over the chart, and in the bottom right corner was a key, with a stylized compass and the words ‘Spanish Sahara’ at its head. There was even a scale marked along the base with distances in miles and kilometres. Sterling was amazed at its neatness.

  A rap on the glass made him jump. The old lady outside was peering at him with raised eyebrows. ‘You goin’ to be there all day?’ she mouthed.

  Sterling closed the packet and shoved the map back into his coat, shooting her a hot murderous glance until she turned and walked away. He lifted the receiver, fed his penny into slot ‘A’ and dialled Hobart’s number. As soon as the receiver was lifted at the other end, he pressed button ‘B’ and heard the coin drop.

  It was Hobart himself who answered. ‘George?’ he said. ‘Did you see him?’

  Sterling closed his eyes momentarily. Hobart’s confident no-nonsense voice, with centuries of his ancestors’ reasonableness behind it, was the lifeline he needed.

  ‘Corrigan’s dead, Arnold,’ Sterling said. ‘Someone got there first and ... garrotted him.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ he heard Hobart gasp. ‘Now you have to go to the police, George. Ring them straight away.’

  ‘I can’t. They’re after me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know if they were watching Corrigan’s place or if someone alerted them, but they arrived while I was in there with Corrigan’s dead body, and I had blood on my hands ... I ran for it.’

  ‘That was pretty silly, George.’

  ‘I know, but it looked bad. Anyway, I found the map.’

  There was silence again, and Sterling could hear his father-in-law taking a deep breath. ‘All right, George,’ he said at last. ‘You’d better come round here. I expect we can sort it out.’

  Suddenly, Sterling went rigid. From one side of the kiosk he had a view back down the street he’d just run up. Four men in dark coats were advancing up it now, two on each side of the road, spread out ten yards apart in military-style formation. They moved easily and purposefully, without attracting attention from the other passers-by. As they came nearer, Sterling recognized the pug-nosed gorilla and the blond-haired inspector among them.

  ‘George?’ Hobart’s voice said, sounding distant now. ‘George, are you there?’

  Sterling replaced the receiver carefully, wondering what to do. His immediate impulse was to give himself up, but something still held him back — perhaps the memory of those bitter eighteen months in Wormwood Scrubs, perhaps Hobart’s confidence that it could be sorted out, perhaps a lifetime of non-conformity. For a few seconds he stood there, drawing breath. The men were coming closer now, unmistakably menacing. Sterling glanced towards the street at right angles to the street along which the men were walking. He could see — as the advancing men could not — that a double-decker bus was heading in his direction. He checked the impulse to move. He measured the distance and speed of the bus against that of the approaching men. The bus was fifty yards away, then thirty. He could make out the face of the driver and the word ‘Waterloo’ on the signboard. The bus was twenty yards away; Sterling realized that the men were going to reach him first.

  They were almost on him. Sterling could see the distorted features of the gorilla clearly now, within only a couple of feet of the box. He turned to face the man through the glass, and saw sudden recognition on his features. The gorilla’s mouth formed fishlike into a call for help, but in that instant Sterling slammed the heavy door open, pressing all his weight against it. There was an audible crack as the steel door crashed against the gorilla’s head, then Sterling was out and running. The bus was just passing the end of the street, going no more than twenty m.p.h., and Sterling ran for it, ignoring the shouts behind him. In five seconds he was racing alongside the bus’s open rear entrance. He made a grab for the chrome bar and caught it, and at that moment a dark uniformed arm shot out from inside, caught hold of his belt and hauled him aboard. The bus accelera
ted. Sterling looked up to see a conductor in a tattered London Transport uniform, with a ticket-machine hung round his neck — a thickset man with a stubble of hair and an eye half closed by a purple bruise. ‘You don’t wanna try that too often, squire,’ the conductor said. For a second Sterling wondered if the man had seen the plain-clothes policemen chasing him.

  ‘Break your bloody neck,’ the conductor said, and winked at Sterling with his good eye. ‘Where to, squire?’ he enquired.

  *

  This time, Hobart’s door was locked, and when his father-in-law opened it, he gave Sterling a momentarily harassed look. A second later, though, the look was gone and replaced by one of concern. When Sterling was seated by the fire in the sitting room with a brandy in his shaky hand, Hobart sat down opposite. ‘Are you sure they were policemen?’ he asked.

  Sterling wiped his brow with his fingers, feeling its stickiness. ‘I’m not sure of anything,’ he said. ‘They looked like plain-clothes cops — CID or whatever. But one of them had a gun — CID don’t normally carry guns, do they?’

  ‘Special Branch do,’ Hobart said. ‘On occasions.’

  ‘I heard one of them call another “Inspector”. He had a Cockney accent. But they never shouted “Police”, or anything. Corrigan was tied to a chair with piano-wire, half naked, covered in blood, and had cigarette-burns on his arms. He had wire wrapped round his neck ... Jesus Christ, what the hell is this about, Arnold?’

  Hobart picked up his meerschaum pipe from the ashtray but didn’t light it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gravely, ‘but I still think you ought to turn yourself in. Nothing good can come of this.’ He played with the pipe, and Sterling’s gaze fell on the carved white face of the janissary. He felt very tired suddenly, and realized his mind was losing focus. He knew Hobart was right about turning himself in. ‘What I want to know,’ he said, ‘is who did that to Corrigan. When I met him last night, he was scared stiff of something. He even mumbled about werewolves.’