"I'll dig it out tomorrow. Late tomorrow. "
"Why the hell hasn't Harry rung in?"
"He's probably been arrested."
George glared and said provocatively: "How did you get on with him today? He likes piano music too, I recall."
"Count Basic."
"Pure race prejudice."
Agnes closed her eyes. "George, you're not going to get me as bad-tempered as you are."
"Me? Balls!"
But I wonder if Harry has ever listened to Schumann? she thought. And maybe I should try that Basic trio he was going on about. Maybe we… Maybewe nothing, she told herself angrily. You stayaway from that man; he isbad news. Of all the people you do not want to get mixed up with he is the first and the last. Losing your temper with him wasunforgivable.
The phone rang and her heart gave a jerk. She got up quickly, since she was nearest.
"If it's Harry," George called, "and he's gotany good news, just throw a fit and I'll get the general idea. "
Agnes said: "Speaking," and listened for a minute, then put the phone down. "The one in hospitaclass="underline" dead."
The dock was fenced off, but not the way it had been as a real dock, with real cargoes to steal. This one was bodged together from old planks and doors from wrecked houses, intended as little more than a defence in court for the demolition company when some child got through and broke his neck amongst the rubble. There were several places kids obviously did get through; Maxim widened one by yanking loose another plank and ducked in. The other two followed, Dannreluctantly. He was wearing Maxim's car coat over his thin shirt, but his shoes were still canvas and the ground beyond the fence was a mudpond laced with sharp lumps of concrete and old ironwork. Maxim had a torch which he used very cautiously, but at least they didn't have to whisper in the steady drone of rain.
'"Ell," Tanner said, looking around. "It all looks sort of different, now."
Indeed it did, to anybody who remembered or could visualise it as a busy dock. Level, as all docks must be, it was a soggywasteland stretching to the edge of the river. Cranes, warehouses, offices-all had been stripped away, leaving just a small site office and an abandoned bulldozer outlined against the damp glow on the far bank.
"I think it was over here…" They followed him. He stooped a couple of times to shift a sheet of corrugated iron or warped plasterboard, but didn't find anything.
He straightened up, shaking his head and wiping rain out of his eyes. "I just dunno. I mean, they could've filled it in. I mean…"
Maxim looked around. There were no flashing blue lights -the police would have walked over this ground, but hours ago – and they were well away from any inhabited buildings.
"Blagg!" he shouted. "Corporal Blagg!"
They listened but heard only the steady rain.
"Blagg!"
He had just taken breath to shout again when there was a muffled bang.
"It came from there," Tanner said.
"Over there."Dannsuggested another direction.
Maxim wasn't sure himself, but he was sure he had a lot more experience than they in locating the origins of gunshots. He stumbled away in the direction of his own idea; they followed.
When they found him, the water had just reached his nostrils.
Maxim lifted him very gently to a sitting position. The dragging breath and the bullet holes at front and back gave him an easy diagnosis. Thank God there were two, and not too low down. Blagg had tried a brief smile when Maxim flashed the torch on himself for identification, but didn't speak. The Spanish pistol was still clutched in his right hand; Maxim took it away and dropped it in his own pocket.
It took all three of them to lift him out of the reeking waterlogged shelter through an opening just big enough for one of them at a time. It was easy to see why the police would have missed it: from outside, it was just a concrete hardstand, perhaps the foundation for an old shed, and the opening ledthrough a shallow pit that was usually jammed with rubbish and covered by a corrugated iron sheet. But at last, panting steam, they had Blagg propped almost upright in the rain.
"Fireman's chair," Maxim said. "Grip your own wrist, then mine, under his arse. " But Dannknew all about that. Tanner was half his age, but Maxim turned instinctively to the trainer for important work. "Dave, you support his back. Don't let his head fall forward. "
They staggered and slithered the hundred yards or miles to the fence, sweating into clothes already soaked, swearing breathlessly. So now Maxim had to bring the car up. It would have been suspiciously obvious parked near nothing but a gap in the fence, so he had left it by the nearest flats. The three of them stayed just inside the fence while he went for it. By now the rain was easing.
There was just a few yards walk to the main road, a careful look around, then across it, instinctively choosing the potential cover of a derelict warehouse on that side rather than the dockyard fence on this. Walk a hundred yards, then turn down a side street. He had almost reached that turn when a police car came around another corner three hundred yards ahead.
They had to have seen him. The road was empty and most of the street lamps still lit, outlining him against the shining pavement. And when they reached him, they would have to stop. A lone man at nearly midnight, wearing a thinjacket in a storm that had been blowing for over an hour… And when they stopped, they would see the mud on him…
He took four strides to the corner, turned it andran. Behind, he thought he heard the car surge forward. It hadn't been a little Panda, either, but a Rover 2600, an 'Area car'. A trouble-hunter.
There was still the warehouse on his left, and a derelict site beyond that, with occupied flats coming up on the right… He could dodge two coppers in a car easily. Probably he could dodge the twenty coppers in ten cars that would be there in five minutes, and get clear away. But he didn't want to get clear away. He had to spend those five minutes here.
His own car was a few yards ahead, and he could be in and started before they turned the corner – but not out of sight.
And once they saw him, they'd have him. Even if the cars were evenly matched, he knew he couldn't out-drive the police.
He unlocked the boot, scrambled in, and slammed the lid on himself.
Inside, it was utterly dark. Rain pattered gently on the unlined metal above, and he hoped it drowned his panting breath. He heard the Rover roar around the corner, accelerate past, then squeal to a stop and whine back in reverse. The motor noise dropped to a rumble and feet clattered around his car. He couldn't see the torch being flashed underneath and through the windows, but he felt the car sway as one of the coppers tugged at the driver's handle and the boot. Then more feet, the slam of a door, the surge of power as the Rover shot away to look at the next corner. He turned on his own torch and started wondering how he was going to get out.
One look at the inside of the lock put him off trying that. The bolt was a hook of thick metal that snapped shut around a U-shaped rod the thickness of a pen. He could never get the leverage to force that open, and there was no inside keyhole, of course. He struggled painfully around into a new foetal position and started work on the back of the back seat.
It wasn't, blast it, one of those back seats that turn into a double bed or a discothequejust by twiddling a few knobs and wrenching your spine out of joint. This was just a back seat and very determined to stay that way. He could get it loose in time, but he didn't have any time. If only he had sometools… Then he realised that all those knobbly things sticking into his kidneys and buttocks were tools. Thirty seconds later, he had the whole U-rod assembly unbolted from the car and stepped back out the way he'd come in.
"What took the time?"Danndemanded, his voice shivery with cold and anxiety.
"Dodging coppers. Get him in the back seat. You go with him. Dave in the front." He left them to it while he roughly bolted the U-rod back on again; driving with a flapping-open boot lid was asking for attention. He pressed it gently shut and it held; loosely and with a slight gap, but it held.