"I'm fine, thanks, Miss." Blagg was suddenly all big feet and hands and a bashful grin. He simply wasn't at ease with women.
"A good car. Inconspicuous," Agnes commented, and Caswell chuckled. "Who's driving?"
"You can if you want to. " Maxim didn't want either of the others tiring himself out. He slid into the passenger seat. "Where are we going?"
"Goole."
"Where's that?"
"Humberside. About forty miles upstream from Hull and Grimsby." She slid the car out into the Finchley Road again, heading north.
Maxim opened the AA Guide. " 180 miles. About three hours or a bit more; it's mostly motorway. How sure are you about this?"
"It's only about fifty miles from where Mina Linnarzwas living, up in the Dales beyond Harrogate. Andjust a few hours ago, Deutfrachtchanged the destination of a coaster they had coming in to Hull and booked a space in Goole instead."
"Is that so odd?"
"They haven't made a change like that for months; it means going another forty miles upstream, over some dicey sandbanks so you have to take on a pilot, and then pay God-knows-what to get the lock gates opened and watermen to push you into a berth. So you're losing time and money and all for slightly better road and rail links. Only for them there's another advantage: you know what most docks are like, all fences and high walls and gates with coppers on them? Well, Goole's wide open. You can walk in there day or night."
"That sounds bloody odd," Blagg said, remembering his own dockland childhood, then: "I'm sorry, Miss."
"It's bloody odd, all right: there's even a public right-of-way across the main lock gates. It could be that there isn't much worth pinching there; it started off as a coal port, now it's mostly importing wood."
"You've been swotting," Maxim said.
She grinned. "That's right. We aren't expected to know every British port by heart, though we do keep a fairly active eye on them."
"When does the ship get there?"
"Around midnight, it's the tide. They start unloading in the morning, so if they're going to push the old lady on board it has to be some time between them getting through the lock and tying up, and dawn. "
"You mean like they work at night?" Caswell asked, not believing it of civilians.
"They get paid for it. Ships have to come up just about at high tide – it's those sandbanks – so they lose twelve hours if they wait for the next one. "
"4.43,"Caswell said.
"What?" Maxim twisted round to look; Caswell was consulting a diary.
"Sunrise. Be a bit earlier up there. Call it first light around four."
"It'd take about three-quarters of an hour to berth her," Blagg said. "So whatever happens, it'll be between one and four – I mean if it's the right ship. Begging you pardon, Miss."
"And if it isn't," Agnes said cheerfully, "we'll all have had a nice drive in the country anyway. "
The abrupt silence startled her. Good God, theywant to go through with this charade! she realised. Even Harry… she snatched a glance at him; he was squinting ahead against the sunset with a fixed smile on his face and his shortish fair hair snapping in the breeze from the half-open window.
Harry is asilly name, she thought, and Harold is even worse. But I just don't want him getting hurt.
They came onto the start of the Mi at Brent Cross just on sundown. Agnes kept the speed down to let the traffic sort itself out, then moved up smoothly to seventy in the middlelane. The traffic was light, most of the London-loaded trucks had left hours before.
"I did get some of the stuff you wanted," she said. It was the first thing anybody had said for twenty minutes or forty miles and she had beenso determined that it wouldn't be she who spoke first. But they had retreated into a dreadful male/ military communion of silence where a fart would be criticised only for its length.
"Like what?"
Oh, theeloquence of the man, she thought, and pushed her airline bag towards him with her left foot. Inside were a folder of photographs of Sims and his two colleagues, and two Citizen's Band walkie-talkies.
Maxim passed the photographs to the back seat and fiddled with the radios. They weren't in a class with the Army's Clansman sets, with 840 channels to pick from, but they were handier in size and when switched on close together they produced nerve-scraping howls. He turned them off, satisfied.
"Good. We're in communication, then."
"Are we?" Agnes asked.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Skip it. Oh – and somebody at The Firm had another word with the one who dropped out of Sims's scheme. He said they've got hand-guns, and he believes there's a silenced submachine gun."
"What sort?" All three spoke together.
"He didn't know."
"It could be just a Patchett/Sterling. "
"I bet they've got hold of an Ingrams."
"Make a difference if it's a.32 or.45."
"You won't hear it any way…"
At least they're talking, she thought. Maxim took a packet of sandwiches from his own bag and passed them around. They were strictly non-drip, cheese, ham or corned beef without mayonnaise or pickles. He gave out individual cartons of orange juice.
"I've got a hip flask of Scotch," she offered.
"Thanks. We'll have an issue later."
The car thrummed on the stretch of concrete that begins atthe Bedfordshire border, the northern sky turned gold and dark blue and Maxim collected up the photographs, then said: "Ron, give me Sims himself."
"Five-ten, well-built, about forty, dark brown hair neatly cut, clean-shaven, smokes heavily, usually well-dressed…"
"That's him. Jim, give me one of the others. Don't bother with the name: they're all phonies. Call the older one 82, the younger 83. I want 83."
"Five-eight, late twenties, fair-haired with moustache…"
This game was part of Agnes's profession and she had routinely memorised the photographs and descriptions when she first got them. Now she could catch them out on an occasional detail and felt they respected rather than resented it. As the night closed around them they were becoming more of a unit, as she knew Maxim intended. She had never thought to see the day – or night – when Harry Maxim would be giving her orders and she'd be taking them.
Chapter 26
On the straight stretches the wide road was a two-tone river of twinkling red and white lights, soothing and even hypnotic if you forgot it was two counter-flowing streams of metal at closing speeds of up to 140 mph. Or faster, for a brief period around Nottingham, when it was time for the local Jaguar owners to hurry home from an evening of scampi and Scotch.
Maxim was dozing, or pretending to doze, beside Agnes; in the back Blagg had gone fast asleep with his head on Caswell'sshoulder, which at least stopped him leaning forward every few minutes to breathe tobacco into her ear while he checked the dashboard instruments. But the car ran very smoothly, apart from a rhythmic rise and fall in the engine temperature: probably a sticky thermostat.
They had been on the motorway just two hours when Maxim woke up and called for a stop at the Woodhallservice area. That was still fifty miles short of Goole, but he didn't want to show their faces any closer; in a couple of hours their descriptions might be chart-toppers on police and all-night radio wavebands. Agnes made a phone call, Maxim paid for the petrol, everybody used the lavatories and they tested the radios across the width of the car park. In ten minutes they were on their way again, the sleepiness gone.
"His sister had been living in the Dales, you said?" Maxim asked.
"She's got a cottage there. It was her husband's."
"I don't think I knew she'd married."
"Out in Africa, twenty years ago. He was working in South Africa and Rhodesia and seems to have been one of the few who didn't make money at it, or else they spent it all. He got leukaemia and came home to die in his family village. She still lives there. She gives piano lessons."