'Name of Bond, James Bond. Business address in London, Regent's Park somewhere. I gave 'em a ring on the off-chance and they said to hold him and not let anyone but a doctor see him and they'd send a man down right away. The Inspector should be here soon, too. Went off just about two minutes before this chap arrived. Pile-up on the M4. It's getting to be quite a night.'
'Indeed... Ah, I think we may get something now... Mr Bond? Mr Bond, you're quite safe and in a very few minutes you'll be completely yourself again. I'm Doctor Allison and these officers are Sergeant Hassett and Constable Wragg. They are only here for your protection. You're in a police station but you've done nothing wrong. All you need do is rest a little.'
James Bond looked up slowly. There was nothing left of the grey tangle that had obscured his vision and hearing. He saw a very English face with an inquisitive pointed nose and dependable dark eyes, eyes that at the moment were puzzled and concerned. In the background were two solid-looking men in dark-blue uniform, a battered desk with a telephone, filing cabinets, wall maps and charts, a poster announcing a Police Balclass="underline" recognizable, everyday, real.
Bond swallowed and cleared his throat. It was very important that he should get exactly right what he knew he had to say, the more so since he was not as yet quite sure what all of it meant or why he had to say it.
'Put your feet up for a bit, Mr Bond. Bring that chair over, Wragg, will you? Could you organize a cup of tea?'
Now take it slowly, word by word. 'I want,' said Bond in a thick voice, 'I want a car. And four men. Armed. To come with me. As quickly as possible.'
'Mind wandering, poor chap,' said the sergeant.
The doctor frowned. 'I doubt it. You'd get confusion all right, but not actual fantasy.' He leant down and put his hands firmly on Bond's shoulders. 'You must tell us more, Mr Bond. We're all listening. We're trying to understand.'
'Admiral Sir Miles Messervy,' said Bond distinctly, and saw the sergeant react. Bond's mind was clearing fast now. 'There's been some trouble along at his place. I'm afraid he's been kidnapped.'
'Go on, please, sir,' said the sergeant, who had picked up the telephone before Bond had finished speaking.
'There were four men. They'd given him a shot of the same stuff as me. I don't quite know how I got away.'
'You wouldn't,' said Dr Allison, offering Bond a cigarette and a light.
Bond drew the life-giving smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled luxuriously. He began quickly and coolly to consider, analyse, predict. The immediate conclusion he arrived at appalled him. He jumped to his feet. At the same moment the sergeant put down the telephone.
'Number unobtainable,' he said grimly.
'Naturally,' said Bond. 'Give me that thing.' When the police operator answered he said, unconsciously clenching his fist, 'London Airport. Priority. I'll hang on.'
The sergeant looked at him once and left the room at a run.
While Bond was rattling off descriptions of M and the four enemy agents to his friend Spence, the Security Officer at the airport, the Inspector arrived, followed a minute later by Bill Tanner. Bond finished talking, hung up, drew in his breath to start explaining the position to Tanner, but just then the sergeant returned. His round, good-natured face was pale. He addressed himself to Bond.
'I got a patrol car up to the house, sir,' he said, swallowing. 'They've just come through. I'm afraid it's too late for your armed men now. But we shall need you, Doctor. Not that you'll be able to do very much, either.'
Chapter 3
Aftermath
THE BODY of the thin-faced man lay on its back in the hall at Quarterdeck. There was not much left of the face. Parts of it and what had been situated behind it could be seen here and there on walls and floor. The Luger bullet was half an inch deep in one of the panels.
Ex-Chief Petty Officer Hammond had been shot twice, once in the chest and again, to take no chances, in the back of the neck. It was assumed that he had been disposed of immediately on answering the front door, and that the use of a small-calibre weapon in his case had been dictated by the necessity of not leaving any traces in the hall that would have alerted Bond on his arrival. The corpse had been dumped in a heap in the kitchen, where the third body was also found.
Mrs Hammond at least could have known nothing of what happened to her. The killer, using the same light gun, had got her with a single well-aimed shot through the back of the head as she stood at the stove or the sink. She was lying close to where her husband had been dropped, so close that the back of his outflung hand rested against her shoulder. It was as if he had tried to reassure her that he had not left her, that he was near by, as he had been for twenty years. Since Hammond had been demobilized just after the war and had come with his wife to serve M, the two of them had not spent a night apart.
Bond thought of this as he stood beside Tanner and the Inspector and looked down on what was left of the Hammonds. He found himself beset by the irrelevant wish that he had listened more appreciatively to Hammond's anecdotes about pre-war naval life at the Pacific Station, that he had had the time and the kindness to thank and encourage Mrs Hammond for her self-dedication to M during his illness. Bond made a muffled sound between a sob and a snarl. This act, this casual sweeping aside of two lives just to save trouble - there were half a dozen ways in which the Hammonds could have been neutralized with the minimum of violence and without risk to the enemy - was not to be endured. The men who had done it were going to die.
'It's a good job you didn't fall in with my suggestion about coming along here tonight, Bill,' said Bond.
Tanner nodded without speaking. Then the two turned away and left the bodies to the doctor and the police experts. Not that any of them was expected to add to what was already known or self-evident. The Hammonds' fate was an open book. There remained, of course, the question of the shooting of the thin-faced man.
In M's study a minute later, Bond and Tanner decided to start with that. Each tacitly avoiding the straight-backed Hepplewhite armchair where M habitually sat, they had settled themselves on either side of the low stone fireplace that was bare and swept clean at this time of the year.
'Perhaps his boss had him knocked off in a fit of rage,' suggested Tanner. 'By what you told me on the way here our dead friend didn't handle himself too cleverly in the scrap upstairs. Could be considered to have helped to let you escape, anyway. But then these people don't sound as if they're given to fits of rage. Of course, a man with a bloody nose is to a certain extent conspicuous. Would that have been enough to earn him a bullet? Rather frightening if it was.'
Before replying, Bond picked up his Scotch and soda from the silver tray that sat on a low table between the two men. He had had to harden his heart to bring in the tray from the kitchen, where Hammond, as on previous Tuesdays, had had it ready for his arrival.
'That would fit the airport theory.' Bond drank deeply and gratefully. 'It would be a big risk already to walk M through Immigration, passing him off if necessary as under the weather or whatever they had lined up. Presumably it would have been a still bigger risk if they'd managed to persuade me to join the party. Or would it? Anyway, we can leave that for now. The point is that, whatever the risk, it was one they'd been able to prepare for to the _n__th degree. But here was something they couldn't have taken into account. A man who'd clearly just been in some sort of serious fight would be just the thing to arouse that fatal flicker of official curiosity. Yes, it fits. And yet...'