The Devil in Amber Page 7

  My tongue felt like a stick in my mouth. I blinked a couple of times and focused on a tobacco-soiled ceiling and bare bulb hanging from wire that looked like a string of liver. Turning my head slightly, I found that I was resting on a rough candy-striped pillow that had seen infinitely better days. I turned my head the other way and sat up with a yell.

  Sal Volatile lay naked in bed next to me, three holes in his chest leaking unhealthy gouts of blood onto the stained mattress.

  I blinked and stared at the body, my bare back hitting the cold plaster of the wall behind the bed. The Webley lay on the carpetless floor, and as I moved to get out of bed, I noticed that a man was sitting on a nearby stool, arms folded, smiling over at me with an infuriating insouciance. It was Percy Flarge.

  ‘Oh, Lor,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘Got ourselves into a bit of a pickle this time, eh, old fruit?’

  I didn’t move but glanced quickly around the grim, bare room. ‘What…what the hell’s going on, Flarge? Where am I?’

  ‘You tell me. Favourite haunt of yours, by all accounts. We got a tip-off from the owner. You and the stiff came in some time ago, high as kites by his account.’

  ‘He’s lying—’

  ‘Checked into your usual room. Started getting up to…whatever it is you chaps get up to,’ continued Flarge, hatefully. ‘Lovers’ tiff ensues and…well…’

  He gestured towards the corpse. ‘Funny thing,’ he grinned suddenly. ‘My Pa always said he supposed men like you shot themselves. Turns out, you shoot each other!’

  I tried to keep my temper and got to my feet, glancing down at Volatile’s stiffening form. ‘What the hell are you on about? Listen, Flarge. Percy. I was approached by this chap in connection with an assignment for the RA. We arranged to meet earlier this evening. Well, someone must’ve been onto him, because it was a trap. He was shot–but only wounded–and I was drugged…’

  Flarge took out a pipe and began to fill it. He looked thoroughly sceptical.

  I felt suddenly hot with rage. ‘Look here. We can sort all this out. Would you mind awfully if we get out of here and leave the Domestics to clear things up?’

  Flarge shook his head. ‘No can do.’

  The door to the squalid room suddenly flew open and a skinny man in the uniform of a police captain emerged. He looked at my pendulous, swinging tackle, swore under his breath and then, turning back to the open door, beckoned. A chattering flurry of people suddenly piled inside, two of them photographers. Flash bulbs zinged and whined in my face. I threw up my hands to shield myself.

  ‘I suggest we make a move, sir,’ said the captain.

  ‘I was just making the same suggestion,’ I said, looking about for my clothes. ‘Move where?’

  ‘To the station house, sir. Where you’ll be charged with murder.’

  8

  The Buttons Come Off the Foils

  This was a new and peculiarly horrid sensation. As long-term readers may recall, I’ve been in at more kills than the average Scotland Yarder has had bully beef, the victim usually having been knocked off by yours truly. And always–barring the odd assignment well away from civilized society–things have been hushed up nicely by the Royal Academy. True, I had once spent a night in the cells of a filthy Chinese nick when some overzealous Cantonese mandarin (or a Mandarin Cantonese) threatened me with seven kinds of hell for despatching his Warlord chum with an ornamental tooth-pick. On that occasion, though, the Domestics simply missed their train and glided in smoothly the very next morning, apologizing profusely and leaving the mandarin red-faced and cursing over his stringy moustaches. I was on a fast boat out of there before the sun was over the old clay tiles of the cop-shop.

  Now dressed and sitting in the police car this time, I knew I was in real trouble.

  Percy Flarge slipped onto the seat next to me, his long blond fringe bouncing into his eyes, a delighted smile on his lips. Both doors of the motor remained open and bitter night air bled over us from the white street.

  The police captain–inevitably Irish–was squawking orders to his subordinates, who were pushing back the eager crowd of ghouls that’d appeared around the entrance to the flophouse.

  ‘Look here, Flarge!’ I hissed. ‘This is insane! What the hell are you up to?’

  I flashed a look through the back window of the motor. The captain would return any moment. I didn’t have long. ‘Come on, man! This isn’t how we do things! We look out for each other in the RA. There’s a system! Why haven’t you called the Domestics? Or Reynolds?’

  ‘I’m merely helping the police arrest the guilty party.’

  ‘There’s more to this. You know there is. I’ve been–what do they say here?–framed up!’

  A thought suddenly struck me. Hubbard had said the same thing. That he was a patsy. I decided to risk showing my meagre hand. I was pretty much out of options. ‘Listen,’ I whispered urgently, ‘I’ve got what you’re looking for.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That “lamb” or whatever the hell it is. I found it on Hubbard’s body.’

  ‘You found a lamb on Hubbard’s body? Taking it home for Sunday lunch, was he? Hmmph. Nice try, old thing.’ Fraid I searched him thoroughly. No livestock to be seen.’

  ‘You weren’t told, were you?’ I persisted. ‘You weren’t told exactly what you were looking for?’

  Flarge looked momentarily nonplussed. ‘My orders were to bring back everything he had on him—’

  ‘You missed his top pocket, old boy,’ I mocked. ‘A small square of silk like a handkerchief. I know it’s important.’

  ‘You’re running away with yourself, old sport,’ said Flarge smoothly.

  I looked wildly about, anticipating with dread the approach of the police captain and the disappearance of all my long-held privileges. I’d be down in the cells with a copper’s boot in my guts and that’d be the end of old Lucifer.

  ‘I’ll tell you where it is,’ I said at last. ‘Then you can claim all the credit. Just get me out of this hell.’

  Flarge glanced over his shoulder. The captain was still talking, his flashlight bobbing in the darkness.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise anything, but…Tell me. Quickly.’

  He leant forward.

  I moved like a panther, jerking back my neck and then ramming my forehead into his nose. There was an awful crack and I felt warm blood jet onto my face. Flarge shrieked in agony but I was already smothering him, muffling his cries with my body as my hands moved expertly over his chest to where I knew he kept his pistol. It was out of its holster and in my hands before Flarge could get his bearings. I swung the butt up against his chin and he grunted into rapid unconsciousness.

  Letting him slide sideways onto the sweaty upholstery, I melted out of the motor and onto the road, flattening myself against the freezing tarmacadam and risking a look under the vehicle. I could see the captain’s steel-toed boots crunching their way towards me. Scuttling like a cripple, I moved across the roadway and within seconds made the safety of a pitch-dark alley.

  Huge black apartment blocks reared up on either side. It was nigh on impossible to make out anything in the darkness but I caught a suggestion of spindly fire escape and reeking bins as I pelted on.

  And suddenly there were yells and whistles and I knew they’d found friend Flarge. I ran on–and came crashing to the ground as I smacked headlong into a mildewed wall. The alley was a dead end!

  There wasn’t a moment to be lost so I sprang onto the nearest of the metal bins and used it as a vault, finding purchase on the bottom rung of the fire-escape ladder and swinging myself up and onto it.

  The metal was wet and cold and smelled rusty. I managed to get some little way up it and onto a kind of gantry before the alley was lit up like a talkie premiere, police flashlights swooping over the black bricks.

  The gantry ringed the building, acting as some kind of balcony for the apartment block’s residents, and upon it squatted big, ugly plant pots full of withered shrubs.<
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  I looked down at my pursuers. Perished though I was, I knew I had to take a chance, so, shrugging out of my overcoat, I wrapped it around the nearest of the plant pots and hung my trilby onto the drooping remains of a neglected olive tree. I peered at my little decoy, pleased by its resemblance to a crouched man trying to hide himself. Then I jumped back onto the ladder and positively swarmed up it to the roof.

  It was flat and asphalt-covered. I heard clanging footsteps, harsh voices challenging the olive tree then I turned on my heel and skittered across the roof towards the far edge of the block.

  Glancing across at the neighbouring building gave me pause. My decoy would be discovered at any moment and my only chance lay in a jump across the giddying void.

  Queasy street light from far below silhouetted strings of washing that hung between the windows, shirts and trousers made stiff by the frost looking, rather disquietingly, like strung-up felons.

  As must now be clear, I was no longer in the first flush of youth but needs must when, appropriately enough, the Devil drives. I shot a last look over my shoulder–flashlights were already bobbing over the edge as the police clambered upwards–then took a running jump and launched myself into space.

  I make no claims as to my dignity, scrambling through the smoky night air like a novice swimmer, limbs paddling frantically until, with a winded grunt, I hit solid brick. With one elbow firmly over the lip of the roof, my other hand splayed out in a desperate effort to find purchase, I hauled myself up and heaved my aching chest over the edge, legs dangling below, shoes scraping off the upper edge of a bricked-up window.

  My jacket ripped as I kicked upwards and fell, breathless and bruised, onto the roof. I’d made it.

  There was little time for celebration, as one look back the way I’d come showed that the roof of the first block was now dotted with pursuing rozzers. If they were bright enough, it would only take one shouted command and they’d have the neighbouring building–upon which I now stood–surrounded and I’d be back in the police motor double-quick.

  I could taste iron in my spit and a crippling stitch was already making merry in my gut but I ran on, reached the edge of this new roof, judged the distance–slightly less this time–and once more flung myself across.

  This time I only just made it, my chest slamming into the edge of the neighbouring roof. I hooked my hands over the lip and somehow found the strength to haul my exhausted frame to safety, curling into a ball as I struggled to get my breath back.

  A huge rectangular area with canvas stretched over it occupied most of the space. The tarpaulin was knotted around a series of stanchions and I realized absently that it must be a swimming pool wearing its winter finery.

  I know what you’re thinking. Why’s old Boxy staying skywards? There’s only one way down from there, chum, we’ve seen it at the pictures. Spreadeagled and strawberry jam-like on the damned pavement. Well, I was thinking along just those lines.

  My injured hand was bleeding again–I could feel the bandage growing heavy and wet–but I stumbled forward towards a nondescript hut-like structure. Yanking open the door, I looked down into a cold, dark stairwell. My ears pricked up at once at the muffled yells from below. They were on to me!

  Slamming the door shut, I looked wildly around the roof for some hiding place but it was bare and totally exposed. Except for the pool!

  Skulking low in the darkness, I raced to the perimeter and searched for an opening in the stretched covering. The tarpaulin, tied off with great knots of nautical rope, was rigid with ice. My hands were already numb and I clawed uselessly at the nearest, mind flashing back briefly to games lessons at school and the almost impossible job of rebuttoning one’s shirt after a wretched cross-country run. Still I persevered, fingernails splintering as I worried and tore at the looped rope.

  I brought down my shoe onto the stretched canvas, hoping that it might slacken the knot, but the material hardly gave, as unyielding as the dirigible skin I’d seen arching over the dance floor of the “99”.

  Finally, desperately, I dropped onto my chest and began to pull at the knot with my teeth. And suddenly it began to give!

  A rush of hope flooded through me, followed almost immediately by a hollow dread as I heard the sound of footsteps pounding on the stairwell. Grabbing at the rope with useless fingers, I managed to prise the knot apart. The covering slackened, the tarpaulin crumpled and a narrow space opened up, showing up black above the empty pool.

  Thanking the stars for my lithe frame, I slid through just as the door to the stairs flew open with a crack like a thunderbolt.

  Keeping hold of the loosened rope, I tumbled down the rough render of the wall. I scraped my backside painfully, and was immediately assailed by the foetid atmosphere, somewhere between the grassy pong of a tent and the sickening odour one sometimes finds at the bottom of one’s toothbrush mug.

  But this was no time to spare my finer feelings. I held onto the rope for grim death, my already-bleeding nails flaking hideously on the frayed end as I tried to make the tarpaulin tauter lest my hiding place be discovered.

  From my vantage point beneath the canvas, all I could see were the haloes of my pursuers’ flashlights. I held my breath. Through the gap, I saw a familiar pair of two-tone brogues the colour of café-au-lait. Percy Flarge had joined the hunt, no doubt in a perfectly foul mood after my distinctly un-Queensberry dodge.

  Flarge’s shoes came closer, crunching on the asphalt chippings that covered the roof. I could see tiny droplets of blood from his smashed hooter hitting his creamy leather uppers. He didn’t move. A flashlight flared in my eyeline and I looked down at the bottom of the pool. Something I saw there gave me crazy hope.

  There was a shout from close by and finally Flarge was on the move. I waited until his shoes were well out of sight and then let myself tumble down the wall, splashing into the inevitable puddle on the pool floor.

  What I’d noticed in the momentary gleam of the flashlight was a huge monogram made out in coloured tiles. Some cod coat-of-arms cobbled together by Yanks desperate for historical roots, of course, but, more importantly, the emblem of my own hotel! Somehow or other, after all the shenanigans of the evening, I’d managed to vault onto the roof of my own residence. This had both advantages and disadvantages. In a hotel I could certainly move about less conspicuously, but at the same time they’d be bound to have my room–and probably the whole place–under observation in case I came back.

  I scolded myself. It was imperative to keep focused! All that depended upon whether I could get off this damned roof alive. Had Flarge really assumed I’d already made my escape? Or was he lying in wait?

  The crunching of boots on the asphalt had died away but there’d been no corresponding sound to indicate the door to the stairwell had been closed behind my pursuers.

  I waited a further five minutes and then decided to risk it. Leaping for the trailing end of the rope once more, I hauled myself up and poked my head through the gap in the tarpaulin. Not a soul in sight. With one last effortful grunt, I pulled myself out from under the canvas and lay panting on the poolside, my hand hurting like blazes.

  Then, with a great sigh, I jumped up and sprinted back towards the entrance to the stairwell, giving not one thought to the notion that the roof might have been left guarded.

  I was down the concrete steps in moments and emerged into the beautifully carpeted uppermost floor of the hotel, a cocoon of mint-green and black elegance after the freezing outdoors. There was no one about so I made straight for the next stairwell, clattering down five floors until I reached my own. Emerging into an almost identical corridor, my heart leapt as I spotted the door to Room fifteen-o-eight. The unguarded door.

  It could be a ruse of course but there was also the possibility, the wonderful possibility, that Flarge hadn’t thought to put a man outside my room. Furthermore, to employ one of the hoariest clichés of cheap thrillers, it might well be the last place they’d think to look for me!

  Giving u
p a silent prayer of thanks to hoary clichés, I padded down the corridor towards my room. My bandaged hand, with newly bloodied fingernails, was almost upon the shiny brass knob when the door began to open.

  I spun on my heel, tottering like Chaplin in one of his sentimental two-reelers, and immediately bent low, retrieving the keys from my trouser pocket and scrabbling at the lock of the room opposite.

  Now Dame Cecily Midwinter (under whom I’d trained more years ago than I cared to remember) had always advocated hiding in plain sight. Thus, rather than trying to blend into the wallpaper, I began to sing at the top of my voice, feigning a look of pie-eyed incoherence which I hoped might explain away my tattered appearance.

  ‘Come on and hear!’ I belted out. ‘Come on and hear Alexander’s Ragtime Band!’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the blue of a policeman’s uniform as he emerged from my room.

  ‘Come on and hear! Come and…hear! It’s the best band in the land…’

  I fumbled with my key and turned to face the copper with a stupid grin on my face. ‘Dashed thing won’t fit,’ I slurred. ‘Must’ve…must’ve picked up the wrong one at recep—reception.’

  I threw in a hiccup and a modest belch. The policeman looked mildly disgusted at the sight of this idiotic Britisher three sheets to the wind. He narrowed his eyes and I suddenly remembered that it probably wasn’t terribly wise to pretend drunkenness in a city where Prohibition still reigned. ‘Sorry,’ I stage-whispered. ‘I’ll get out of your way.’

  ‘I’d advise that, sir,’ he said darkly.

  I nodded at his sagacity and shuffled towards the elevator. ‘Just pop downstairs and get the proper key.’

  Jabbing at the brass button I prayed the lift would come with all due dispatch before my law-enforcing friend decided to take a closer look.

  The arrow on its luminous dial crawled round to fifteen with wretched tardiness. I gave the officer one last dim grin and then turned back as the lift doors sprang open.