“So is Robin Styles,” I said. “He believes you, too.”
“Another of my assignments,” she said. “Robin. Keep Robin happy, I was told. I must say I tried.”
“Now you’ve got another assignment,” I said. “Me.”
She turned. “Neither Eddie nor I had anything to do with those men being killed.”
“And you don’t know who did.”
“We don’t know.”
“Crap,” I said. “Eddie had it all set. Curnutt would make the duplicate sword and Curnutt’s son would return it for the one-hundred-thousand-pound ransom. That was to be their cut and it would also take care of Tick-Tock, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, that was the way it was to have been, originally.”
“Then when I brought back the fake sword, Eddie had that old man all bribed up to swear that it was real. Everybody would be happy then, until your father and uncle tried to sell the sword and learned that it was fake. You and Eddie would express a lot of horror and commiseration. But Eddie would have the real sword stashed away someplace and then, maybe a year from now, maybe less, he would make his own deal for the entire amount and split with no one — not Robin Styles, not your uncle or father, no one. The French would never tell who they’d bought it from. That was the way it was supposed to work, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. That was the way it was supposed to work.”
“And I would even get paid in full for what I did. Your father and uncle would be satisfied that the real sword was delivered to them, the genuine article. They would have old Doc Christenberry’s sworn word for it. I would be back in New York spending my money before they ever found out that the sword was a fake. And if they started suspecting me, then that would be just too damned bad as far as you and Eddie were concerned.”
“You are rather clever, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not clever,” I said. “I just kept stumbling over dead bodies. They always make me think. Or worry. That’s what Eddie should have done. Worried a little. Thought a little. He should have thought that a three-million-pound sword might cause people to go around killing other people, especially the people he knows. Where is he now?”
“He’s out looking for Tick-Tock.”
“Does he know where to look?”
“He thinks so.”
“He also thinks that Tick-Tock has the real sword?”
“And that Tick-Tock killed Curnutt and his son?”
“Who else could have?”
“Robin Styles, for one,” I said.
Her face changed without her knowing it. Up until then, she had been making it do what she ordered it to: express quiet sorrow, faint irony, weary resignation. Now it expressed surprise and even shock and she almost had to struggle to get it back under control.
“He couldn’t have.”
I smiled at her. “You really were going to doublecross Eddie, weren’t you? You called Curnutt romantic, yet from what I’ve learned about him, he was about as romantic as a doorknob. But he was religious and I can imagine the cock-and-bull story you fed him about how he should pass the real sword over only to the upright Christian who would come calling for it with the other torn half of the jack of spades. Then what? Then you and Robin Styles were going to ride off into the sunset with a three-million-pound sword that you could peddle as well as your father and uncle could because you knew all their tricks. That was about it, wasn’t it?”
She put her glass down and turned back toward the window. “That was it,” she said, “but that’s not it now. I’m stuck with Eddie. I’m in as deep as he is now.”
“And Eddie still trusts you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. He trusts me.”
“That’s more than I do.”
She turned. “What about my proposal? Will you give us our twenty-four hours to patch things over?”
“No.”
She stood there looking at me. This time she had slipped on a thoughtful expression. “If you do find the sword, I know where and how we could sell it.”
“For three million pounds.”
“Yes,” she said. “For at least three million pounds.”
“Just you and I.”
“The two of us.”
“There’s only one thing wrong with that, honey.”
“What?”
“For some reason I don’t think I’d live long enough to spend mine.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hammersmith isn’t all that hard to find. You just start heading west and run right into it. But Robin Styles didn’t seem to be too sure where it was, so I had to get out a small map and start giving him rights and lefts.
“Don’t you ever get out of Mayfair?” I said.
“Certainly, but I don’t come here very often. No occasion to, really.”
He had picked me up in the Volkswagen promptly at midnight, but because of our wanderings through West Kensington, we didn’t pull up in the alley behind 14 Beauclerc Street until nearly one. We coasted up to the back door of the locksmith’s shop with our lights and engine off.
I reached into the back seat for my sack of impromptu burglar tools and suddenly remembered one I had forgotten. “Shit,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I forgot to buy a flashlight.”
“Here,” Styles said, “I have a pocket torch. One of these disposable things that you throw away when it burns out.”
“You always carry it?”
“No, I bought it late this afternoon. I noticed that you didn’t buy one at the ironmonger’s, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Thank you. I’m very sensitive.”
“Not at all.”
Holding my sack of tools in one hand and the small flashlight in the other, I got out of the Volkswagen and went around it to the back door of the locksmith’s shop. I was worrying about what tools I should use to pry open the door, especially since it was a locksmith’s door. I was also worrying about the murder squad from Scotland Yard and whether they had sealed the door. Homicide does that in New York sometimes. Seals the door. I ran the flashlight up and down the locksmith’s door. It wasn’t sealed. At least not from the outside.
“What’re you doing?” Styles whispered.
“Trying to decide what I should use.”
“Mind if I have a look?” he said. “I’ve locked myself out a few times.”
I could see that he was going to be a great help. He took the flashlight and ran it up and down the door, inspected the hinges, and then shined it on the locks. There were three of them. “Hmm,” he said and gave the doorknob a tentative sort of try. It turned easily and the door opened.
Robin Styles stood there as if expecting to be congratulated, or maybe even knighted, so I handed him his prize, the monkey wrench.
“I say,” he whispered, “what’s this?”
“A blunt instrument,” I whispered back. “The door’s open. That means somebody has gone inside and is, or is not, still there. If the somebody is still there, you may wish to bash him with a blunt instrument.”
“I’ve never done anything like this.”
“You virgins are all alike. Here. You can carry the tools, too.”
“What do you have?”
I showed him the huge screwdriver, the nearest thing to a legitimate jimmy that the ironmonger had.
“You seem to know the way,” he said. “I think you’d better go first.”
Well, why not, I thought. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test that I had once taken on a female psychologist’s dare showed that I had definite leadership potential. Most people who rate high on the schizophrenic scale do, and she’d said that I was right up there with the best of them, Huey Long, Pancho Villa, George Custer. People like that. The real crazies. But I’d rated very low on paranoia. “That’s your trouble,” she’d said. “You not only believe that there’s nobody out to get you, but you wouldn’t give much of a shit if they were.”