Operation Nassau Read online

  He was waiting, therefore. For what? For us to begin noisily searching, there in the dark? For us to tire and walk off, leaving him to climb those steps unhindered? For the steps must be what he was making for. And he had had no time to climb them: of that I was quite sure.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Johnson, and put his hand in his pocket. ‘Here’s to my rust-proof drip-dry titanium vest, and all who sail in her.’ And the beam of a pocket torch sprang out and swept the cliffside.

  There was a bang, rocketing about between the cliff walls, and a tinkle of glass. The light went out, smashed by a bullet. ‘It’s all right,’ said Johnson’s voice peacefully from another direction. ‘I wasn’t holding it. But now we know where our fellow is . . .’

  ‘On the waterfall slope,’ Trotter said. Johnson who was running already towards the place of the gunflash, didn’t answer, and we both took to our heels in his wake. The gun fired again, and we could hear the howl of the shot, and the clatter of chippings from the rock face. Johnson said curtly, ‘Get behind those bushes, and down.”

  I saw him walk slowly forward. Ahead, the rising slopes of the dry waterfall gave nothing away. Even the sweeping light from the tower barely touched its dark corners and ledges, masked with ferns and boulders. Nothing moved. Johnson said, raising his voice, ‘We know you are here, and we have guns too. There is nothing at all to prevent one of us going back for the police while the others stay and keep you cornered till they come. Throw your gun down and climb out with your hands up. You know what you’re in for if you damage us with that thing.’

  The reply was a shot, aimed accurately at where Johnson had been standing: answered before the echoes had stopped by a thunderous shot from the gun in Johnson’s hand. I saw Trotter’s head tum towards me, his eyes glinting, and remembered the bulge in his pocket when I first met Johnson Johnson, in the Buick, outside my father’s that day. But I had assumed his threat just now to be bluff. Then Johnson fired again and I saw something move this time: a plant dimly shook and a figure, moving in and out of the dark, began quickly to scramble up the waterfall bed. ‘On the left.’ I said suddenly, to Johnson. ‘Can you pick a lock?’

  ‘My darling doctor,’ said Johnson distractedly. ‘It’s a palmetto Western.” But he’d got the point. He ran like a hound to the door in the cliff where I’d pointed, and in a trice had it open. In a moment more, he’d turned on the water.

  The man fell I should think about twelve feet when the sheet of spray hit him: the jets sprang from above and below, and interleaved in front of the gathering fall of straight water. From a fussing hiss, the falling gush began to set up a rumble. The man scrambled to his feet and, turning, began to climb on all fours.

  Stumbling, sliding; his clothes glossed like P.V.C. with the water, he scrambled across the smothering jets. The wall was high. We saw him drop back once; then he was over, and on to the staircase. He began to race up the dark steps.

  Johnson raised his gun steadily and took aim, and Trotter knocked it out of his hand. ‘If you murder without evidence, sir, you’re asking for trouble. He can’t fire his own gun. We can easily catch him.’

  It sounded simple. I saw the icy flash of bifocals, then Johnson without speaking flung himself at the steps, and we followed. Where his gun had rolled in the darkness was not immediately obvious but I took my time and found it before I followed, now far behind. Shadowed by the sheer wall of the gorge, the stairs were in complete blackness. It was only when I got to the top, not unpleased by the ease of my breathing, that I found Johnson and Trotter casting about helplessly in the roadway.

  The waiter had vanished.

  ‘He went that way,’ said Johnson. ‘Towards the fort, I think. Or what about that bloody great tower?’ For this tall white shaft with the cotton-reel top was now just beside us, its white and green light still sweeping the town. Behind it, lights showed from a row of low houses. On the other side of the road was the squat triangular shape of the old fort, its door closed. No one moved on its walls: the bare grass round the tower was empty of people. On the path in front of the tower lay a few spots of water.

  We stood and listened. There was no sound. ‘I wonder,’ said Johnson. ‘What sort of people live in those houses?’

  ‘Dahlia lives there,’ I said. ‘Dahlia is the little girl who works the lift in the water-tower.’ A thin child with two fuzzy pig-tails and a penchant for popcorn, who had already been through out-patients’ twice for the same thing. ‘She likes seamen and waiters,” I said. ‘But she has eleven brothers and sisters.’

  Johnson swerved from the houses and turned. ‘So she wouldn’t take him home. But she might hide him.’

  The beam swept round again, and I nodded. ‘The water-tower is closed to the public at 4.30,’ I said. ‘But she’d have a key. Shall I go and find her?’

  I had imagined he might want to question her. Instead, he took my remark as a further incentive to burglary.

  ‘No need,’ said Johnson. ‘I always carry a hairpin. It keeps my hairnet out of my eyes.’ And watched by Trotter and myself, he fiddled for a moment with the water-tower door. There was a click, and it swung slowly open.

  I think we all hesitated. Sergeant Trotter said, ‘It isn’t right, you know. We should call the police.’

  ‘We’ll call them when we find him,’ Johnson said. ‘As you pointed out, after the wet, his gun can’t likely be working. And hell, he did shoot at us. What’s more, he’s got my wallet, I think.’

  Trotter stared at him. ‘You mean he went to all that trouble to steal –‘

  ‘It had two thousand dollars in it,’ said Johnson simply. ‘So if you don’t mind, I mean to go in.’ And pushing wider the door, he entered the blackness within.

  The beams swept round as he did it, and a glow of reflected light lay on the paving just inside the door. The stone was spotted and blotched with dripped water, and the trail led round the turnstiles, past the elevator door and up the twisting stone steps which led to the top of the tower. For a moment there was silence. Then Johnson, stepping round the turnstile in his turn lifted a storm lantern off a hook at the side of the lift, and, switching it on, flashed it up the first turn of the stairs. He said, hardly raising his voice at all, ‘I think you’d better come down. We’re armed, and you are not. And there’s really no other way out, is there?’

  The answer was a shot which drilled straight through a carousel of transparencies by my right ear. Johnson’s gun in my hand, I jumped to one side and fired straight at the flash. There was a scream, and then utter silence.

  ‘Christ! Beltanno,’ said Johnson.

  ‘We have the best grouse moors in Scotland,’ I said. I felt cheerful. ‘But a flesh wound merely, I am afraid. Your gun.’

  Johnson took it. Trotter closed his mouth and then opened it to say. ‘He’s running upstairs. What’s at the top of this thing?’

  I said, ‘The stairs spiral round the elevator shaft and come out in the same chamber. It’s over 120 feet high. From there you climb a few steps to a circular walk round the tower, with a wall just chin- high around it. Above that is the revolving core of the tower with the searchlight fixed to it, inside a kind of coronet of fairy lights. They don’t work.’

  ‘I’ll take the lift,’ Trotter said.

  I said, ‘He’ll get there before you.’

  ‘Not if I’m on his heels,’ Johnson said. The running footsteps had stopped. He raised his voice. ‘Dr MacRannoch, go for the police. Quickly!’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I ran for the door, banged it, and silently returned.

  Sergeant Trotter, in the distant light of Johnson’s storm lantern, found the switch for the elevator and, stepping inside, closed the doors. Johnson, the light at arm’s length, began climbing the stairs. There was a rattle, and the silence was split by the whine of the lift. There was no sound from above.

  I tried to remember the inside of the tower. Mostly visitors go up in the lift with Dahlia, who switches off her normal loud slur as soon as she gets them insi
de and begins to emit information in short high bursts like a soprano computer: The water is 18 feet deep . . . rises 216 feet above sea level . . view of 18 miles all around, ending as the lift stops with Mind the step in the same breath. Sergeant Trotter was doing that bit, without the benefit of Dahlia.

  Johnson was climbing the stairs which curled left round the torn wire mesh of the lift shaft. The steps came in groups of five, joined by a short two-pace landing. At every landing the white outer wall of the staircase stopped, and there was a gap, filled by shoulder-high railings. Beyond those railings was the outer shell of the tower, lit by arrow-slit windows, and between that outer shell and the gap at each landing was nothing but space: a sheer drop from top to bottom of the tower.

  The waiter knew that Trotter had gone to the top of the tower. He thought that I had left to summon the police. All he had to do, therefore, was to waylay Johnson as he crept up those stairs, torch and pistol in hand, and shoot his way downstairs to freedom.

  He could ambush Johnson from the torn wire of the lift shaft, once the lift had risen up to the top. Or he could move to the outside of the stairs, swing himself over the railings and crouch there. . . on what? I seemed to remember there would be no trouble there. Painters’ planks had been lying for weeks between the outer windows and the staircase railings at various levels. I wished I had pointed this out to Johnson Johnson.

  Then I saw how Johnson was climbing the stairs: silently, flattened against the outer wall of the staircase. And as he came to each gap he stopped, and listened, and slid across it with the nasty ease of an embolism. The whine of the lift stopped and distantly, we could hear the doors rattle open above: Trotter was rightly taking his time to emerge. Then Johnson put out the light.

  Silence. I corrected a full facial palsy and gripped a spanner I had found by the lift. It was difficult to know how I. B. Douglas MacRannoch, found myself here in the Bahamas, closeted in a water-tower with an army sergeant, a would-be murderer and an espionage agent. I broadened my diagnostic classification. With possibly two would-be murderers.

  That is, in the darkness, the waiter who had tried to kill Johnson might succeed in slipping past him unnoticed, and I might find myself grappling with him downstairs at the door.

  On the other hand, Sergeant Trotter had certainly helped us pursue the man out of the Club. But he was also, with Brady and Krishtof, one of our earliest suspects from Edgecombe’s collapse. He had yet to prove himself innocent. And he had knocked the gun out of Johnson’s hand, back at the staircase.

  If Trotter were on the wrong side, all he had to do was pin Johnson down for the waiter to shoot. And then let the waiter escape.

  There seemed one obvious way out of the dilemma. I banged the door again and called, ‘I’ve got the police, Mr Johnson. We’re just coming up,’ and ran across to the stairs. Above, a gun fired, and I could hear the bullet ricocheting: it was followed by another shot and a burst of running footsteps. Johnson’s voice said, ‘Trotter! He’s coming upl’ He added authoritatively, ‘Dr MacRannoch, stay down below and tell them to cordon the tower.’

  It was a fairly weak bluff, since anyone in their senses would have noticed the absence of car wheels and voices and general noise, but it was possible, I supposed, that a man in a panic might act on it. At any rate, I disobeyed orders and ran up the stairs, while Johnson and the waiter pounded ahead of me. There was another shot, and you could hear from the flat sound that it had been fired in the open. Then as I raced up the last of the stairs and burst into the lift room. I heard Trotter speak. ‘Careful. He’s above, on the struts.’

  I crept up the steps and into the open walk which ran round the roof of the tower.

  Beyond the retaining wall just beside me was the mounted telescope through which one could see the whole panoramic view of the town of Nassau: big blocks set among the green of firs and coconut palms, with the intersecting pink and white arms of the United Commonwealth there just below us. And in the distance, the blue of the sea, and the long furry spit of Paradise Island,joined far off oh the right by the long arch of Potter’s Cay bridge.

  Now it was all a bewildering dazzle of lights, with liners moving like nebulae across the black sea. And above, the green and white flash of the tower swung round and round, groaning, lighting up an irregular pattern of moisture - of blood, I saw, which made its way over the paving and halted, at the foot of a tall metal strut which gave access, with three or four others, to the light on the roof. Sergeant Trotter crouched at its bottom. And at the top I saw a sudden slight movement thrown in relief as the light swept round again under its broken garland of lamps. I jumped just as the gun barked, and got to the foot of the strut, beside Trotter.

  ‘Four,’ he whispered. ‘He had a police Colt waiting, here in the tower. . . You haven’t got the police, have you?’

  I shook my head. On the other side of the roof a gun fired. Johnson. It was followed immediately by two shots from above. The first did no damage that I could hear. The second, with a tinkling smash, put out the searchlight.

  Johnson said sharply, ‘That’s the last bullet. Give yourself up, you fool.’ There was a scrambling noise on the roof. I heard a sudden rushing of breath and realized that the waiter was above us, about to come down the ladder. Trotter said, ‘Get out of the way, lady!’ and left me abruptly, making for the head of the stairs. There was a thud, as the waiter jumped on to the roof walk, and another as Johnson followed, bowling him over. You could see them twisting and rolling, black against the white stone. They were both gasping and grunting.

  I took two strides and lifted the spanner just as Johnson, half rising, hit the other man a neat blow behind the ear with the butt of his revolver. The waiter flopped. ‘And about time too,’ said Johnson. ‘I feel like a dropped stitch in a circular knitting-machine. Have you got any string?’

  I always carry string, and a penknife. I had enough to tie the man’s legs with, aided by a jubilant Trotter.

  ‘That’ll do,’ Johnson said, and, kneeling, shouldered his burden. And then unshouldered it, swearing.

  ‘You got burned,’ I reminded him. His glasses flashed balefully in my direction and Trotter, grinning, bent and heaved the waiter on one capable shoulder. We started off down the stairs.

  We were a third of the way down when the waiter revived. We both saw him move. Johnson was already running to grip him when the man twisted off Trotter’s shoulder. He did it on a landing, opposite one of the gaps, and because his hands were free he was able to heel over the railing and grip it with one hand while he sought something I had noticed on the way up: a thick free-standing metal pole, running from top to bottom of the outer ring shaft of the tower. He got one hand on it, and then two: and with his feet still bound together below him. he slackened his hands and let himself slide down the pole.

  We watched him as he got faster and faster. I don’t think it even occurred to Johnson to shoot him. It was too swift for that, and it was too dreadfully obvious that the man hadn’t a chance. The skin must have burned off his hands in an instant. With his grasp flayed, and no foot-grip to brake him, in a matter of seconds he must lose all control.

  We didn’t see the moment when his body left the pole, but we heard his scream as he fell, and the flat sound as his weight hit the bottom. Trotter, straddling the rail, said, ‘I’ll go after, poor bugger.’ and laying hands on the same iron pole, vanished swiftly and quietly out of our sight.

  Johnson took his restraining hand off my arm. ‘Let him go. Haven’t you noticed what a circus turn that man is?’ he said.

  ‘Sergeant Trotter?’

  ‘Sergeant Trotter. His business is arranging international military tattoos. He’s a world tattoo expert. That means he knows about dancing and marching and riding and firing and band music and trick cycling and commando exhibitions —’

  ‘And sliding down pipes,’ I said. ‘And even poisoning, perhaps. But he had plenty of chances to kill you tonight, and he didn’t.’

  ‘I’m beginning
to doubt that,’ said Johnson giving a wriggle. ‘It’ll be a mess on the ground floor there, I’m afraid, poor fellow. Thank God I don’t have to programme you out of hysteria.’

  ‘I wish I could say the same of my forthcoming meeting with Dahlia,’ I said with some brusqueness. This type of examination is, after all, not a pleasant one to make. However, I dealt with the matter while Sergeant Trotter summoned the police, and, in due course, an ambulance arrived and all the explanations were formally made. Johnson’s wallet containing, as he had said, two thousand dollars was indeed found in the poor fellow’s pocket.

  Much later, I ran Johnson back to my house, having said goodbye to Trotter and paused at the hospital to throw one or two things into my bag. It was five in the morning, an hour at which James Ulric is normally in bed, but I looked into the study in case. On the desk were three new box files and a pile of papers covered with his strong, undisciplined writing. The box files were all marked The MacRannoch Gathering, Crab.

  Crab Island is where the Begum Akbar has her house. I thought of setting a match to the whole thing and then dismissed it as childish. I was, however, still out of temper when I marched Johnson to my own bathroom and stripping him to the waist, proceeded to deal with those blisters. They formed large patches on part of his upper arms, his shoulders and back, and must have been painful. He kept up a flow of irrelevant comment, stretched on a bamboo chaise-longue, while I prepared the solution of flavine and soaked and wrung dry my lint. I cleaned and dressed the burns, tidied up, and looked out my faithful syringe and a quarter of morphine. Second-degree burns, even mild ones, are the most painful there are.

  Johnson said, ‘Hold it. I don’t mind being micro-honed and then made into a full-width parcel shelf with lagged edges. But I must get back to Mother Spry before morning. They’ve found my clothes for one thing.’