Air Apparent Read online

  “Okay, but I’ll expect payment. In kind.”

  Hell’s teeth, not now, thought Boysie. The night had been exceptional and he was getting no younger. “It will be done,” he said, nodding.

  “Good.” She leaned forward and kissed him, hard and memorably sensuous on the mouth, her lips wide apart and tongue lashing around inside his stunned cheeks.

  The kiss ended as abruptly as it started and, with a little wiggle, Ada walked to the door.

  “Nice to know you’re wanted,” said Boysie.

  “Keep you to it.” She smiled.

  *

  It was comforting to have the Diamondback. Boysie carried it, loaded, safety catch on, in his hip pocket: not the best place for a small revolver, but without any kind of rig it was comfortable and handy.

  The next three days passed uneventfully. The girls were all consistent in flashing their smiles, figures and thighs at Boysie, treating him as their lord and master, giving him the warm, glowing feeling of being fancied.

  There were continual games. When Ada had to go out she always returned to a pile of frantic telephone messages from Steve McQueen. If Alma left the office she came back to cries of “Paul Newman called—FOUR TIMES.” As for Aida, it seemed that Bill Cosby was always trying to get her when she was out. It was a fun office and on more than one occasion Boysie complained that the switchboard was liable to break down under the combined weight of calls from Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Bill Cosby.

  On the fourth morning, Mostyn came into the office, bright as a fox, garbed in russet worsted, a white shirt, brown silk scarf and a pair of brown brogues with strap and buckles. His links were tiny engraved silver reproductions of Scottish flintlock pistols, and he looked as though he had indulged in the full male grooming treatment.

  “Well, well, Oakesie, that was an impressive performance. I have just been to the bank. Well done, lad, well done.”

  Boysie took a deep breath. “I want my bonus.”

  “You’ll get your bonus.” He smiled, sitting intimidatingly on the corner of the desk. “When’s your Uncle Mostyn ever let you down?”

  “You are not my uncle and I want my bonus now.”

  “What’s this all about?” Mostyn’s pleasant oil was cut off at source. In its place was the brusque, tough man of extremes.

  “I’ll tell you what it’s all about …” Boysie began.

  “You gone chicken again?”

  “You are a maggot, Mostyn.” Enunciating like Steiger. “You do not give me pleasure.”

  “Take care, Oakes, or I’ll have you, lad.”

  “You’ll have nothing. I want my bonus. After that I quit, resign, turn in my bloody hand. I have had enough.”

  “Enough.” It was a laugh.

  “Yes, enough. Enough of you: you and your dirty, smelly, rotting, corpse-strewn, putrified ways.”

  “Facts, Oakes. What’s been going on?”

  “Going on? I don’t mind making a public spectacle of myself by parading around Victoria Coach Station followed by a howling mob. I don’t even mind humping other people’s baggage. But when it comes to dark plots and threats and being almost murdered …”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “Almost murdered: and the girl with me. I will not do it. For years you’ve had me on that bit of string. Offer Boysie money and he’ll jump through any hoop. I’ve heard it, chum, and I’ve had it.”

  “Don’t call me chum, Oakes. Sit down and listen because I have things to tell you that will turn your hair white.”

  Boysie sat. It was Pavlovian after years of service to Mostyn.

  “You will stay,” said Mostyn standing very near and almost speaking through his teeth. “You will stay for several reasons. First, you cannot be legally replaced with speed. Second, I have already entered into agreements with Excelsior to run at least two more trips. Third, you are getting bloody well paid and money’s like a magnet to you, lad. Fourth, there are three young, pretty ladies out there just dying to drop their pants for you. You have that effect on some women, lord knows why but you do, and you love it. It is all milk and honey to you. You will stay because of these things.”

  Boysie slowly shook his head. “You can keep your money and your willing available flesh. It doesn’t matter any more.”

  “Wait.” Mostyn held up a finger. “The two most important reasons. In running this caper you assist in screwing the government and that is something you won’t resist.”

  “No dice.”

  “Lastly, Boysie, and most important of all: I thought you’d like to know about your father.”

  The unspoken; unthought. The small circle locked and kept at bay within. The hidden thing, hidden, for most of the time, even from himself.

  “My father?”

  There was the scent of salt spray and the wind dancing in across the Downs and the tall man with leathery skin. “Your father, Oaksie.”

  “What do you know?”

  Mostyn settled back on the desk. “All about him. I know what he did, where he went. I know who was responsible and I can lead you to that very man.”

  An irresistible bait. Feelings, emotions, welled up inside Boysie. He crushed them, holding on to the important ones, stifling sentiment and facing the hard realities.

  7

  Only Mostyn could have touched the old button, filled the mind with the thousand queries and wonderings.

  Instinct urged Boysie to leap across the desk and grab his small slippery boss by the lapels. The nose to nose bit you saw on television melodramas; lifting the little man off his feet.

  So you know huh?

  Put me down.

  Not until you tell me. Come on. Spill.

  That was ludicrous. His mind opened up. Pictures of the village where he had waffled through a country childhood; and the tall man, gentle, quiet. Walks, friendship, then, out of the blue, nothing.

  “You remember your father?” Mostyn was pushing it.

  “Of course I remember.” The tiny circle, closed by choice, now spinning wider. “But it’s over thirty years.” In a tiny rear mental partition, Boysie knew that the conjured picture was wrong. His father had been a short, rather thickset man who moved very quickly but did not smile all that often. Time warps. All childhood summers are recalled as sunlit and endless.

  “You go on wondering, though, Boysie. For peace of mind the whole truth would help.”

  The dreams, about one every six months, and the unbidden memories, when the mind was at rest: suddenly the past reappearing.

  “Thirty years is a long time.”

  “It’s thirty-five if we’re going to be accurate.” Mostyn’s voice grated like a rasp on metal.

  “What’s the difference?” In spite of the slight show of apathy, Boysie was hooked. He knew it. Worse, he was conscious that Mostyn knew. This was Mostyn’s Sunday Punch; the ace in the hole; the final thong, clamped around Boysie’s heart, to be tugged bringing him to heel.

  “How much do you know?” asked Mostyn.

  There was a pause during which the telephone rang in the outer office. “Not much. He was a naval officer in the First World War and for a few years after. The sea was his passion, but I was brought up in the country, in the village.”

  “And he was there?”

  “For most of the time. He was around. We were close. It was different though, he did not seem to do a job like other people; we weren’t well off, but there was always enough; comfortable.”

  “The cottage.”

  “Yes, we lived in a cottage.”

  “He used to go away?”

  The brown leather cases that seemed to fill that tiny room. His Ma upset. The tears in her big dark eyes and the old bone-shaker coming to take the man to the town and the railway station. Once Boysie begged to go with him. “Yes, he went away. It seemed for years, but he always came back.”

  “Didn’t he ever tell you where he’d been?”

  “No. Ma, my mother, said it was business and that we did not talk about
business.”

  “Then he went away and didn’t come back.”

  Boysie nodded. He felt nothing but the twinge of regret that he was sharing this with Mostyn. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it. I was only a kid.”

  “What happened to Commander Oakes, RN (Retired)?” Mostyn smoothed the end of his nose with the middle finger of his right hand.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Fighting away the desire to twist the key and have everything revealed.

  “No?”

  “Naturally one wonders.”

  “What happened, as you remember it?”

  “He was away. It was summer. Two men came: in the afternoon. Ma was crying when they left. She called me in.

  He had been in an accident, she said. The men had come to tell her.”

  “She ever tell you anything else?”

  “At the beginning of the war she said that he’d been on important government business when he was killed.”

  “And you’ve treasured his memory.” Mostyn made it sound like something you only did in secret.

  Boysie nodded. “Of course. I was a kid. He was my Dad. A nice bloke.”

  “And you’ve wondered?”

  “Of course. But I put it away. Stowed it. You can’t go on being sentimental about someone you only remember as a child. Thirty years ago.”

  “Thirty-five. Nineteen-hundred and thirty-five. July. Commander Robert Oakes. Naval Intelligence, Boysie. That’s what your old man was in. You followed in your father’s footsteps. Only he wasn’t a heavy. He did the sly, dark bits. Played the tourist in Europe. Took snaps. The only trouble was that his cover got severely blown in 1934. He should never have been sent out again. But his boss decided that he ought to have one more go. Churchill was yelling: telling the government that the Germans, now operating through Adolph Hitler Incorporated, were building an air armada. Your father’s boss knew there was also a move to increase naval power. You with me, lad?”

  Boysie, slumped in his chair, stared into space, locked into an afternoon yellow with corn and the green sensual sweep of the downlands. The two men were faceless. They had come late in the afternoon. He was home from school. Reading. A brown thick stiff-backed book with a picture on the front: horses and the clash of battle. Sabre and Spurs he thought it was called: about the Napoleonic wars. The car pulled up and his first reaction had been that it was Dad. But the men were short, in trilby hats.

  When they left he heard one of them say something about his Ma being all right: a pension. Then came the nightmare and disbelief: the yellow day turned to shock and horror.

  He looked up. “Yes, I’m with you.”

  “Under the Versailles Treaty, Germany was limited to warships of ten thousand tons. But even in thirty-five they were planning the pocket battleships and Donitz had his submarine force under way. Raeder had begun to work on Plan Z. Plan Z sounds just right for the thirties, eh lad?”

  “Just right.”

  “Your father was good, Boysie. But he should never have been sent. They knew the risk. He left on July fifth. On July twenty-seventh they found him in a hotel room at Wilhelmshaven. His throat cut.”

  Boysie rose. “Mostyn, I really don’t want to hear. I’ve got a picture of what he looked like to me. It doesn’t mean anything any more.” His voice belied the words.

  “Killed by a system. The finger put on him by the one man who sent him out knowing it was odds on he would never come back. A stupid decision.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? Track him down and reap revenge like an avenging angel? You’re sick, Mostyn.” Mostyn smiled. “My dear Oaksie. I only want to help.”

  “How do you know, anyway? How do you know about my father?”

  “I’ve known for some time. I used to have access, you recall; access to libraries full of classified stuff. When it was a slow news day during the once and frozen Cold War I would browse. To be honest I came across his file quite by chance. After you joined us. It wouldn’t have been of any interest to me otherwise. Now let’s have the truth, Boysie. Wouldn’t you like to come face to face with the man who sent your father on that mission?”

  You live with something from childhood, keeping it under wraps, hiding it away, even from yourself: yet the questions were constant within the mind. How? Why? Where? What was he really like? What actually happened?

  “Yes, I’d like to meet him,” said Boysie. “It’s not a question of revenge or anything like that.”

  Mostyn nodded. “It’s the knowing, isn’t it? I had an uncle disappeared in the thirties. No reason. No business worries. Nothing. There one day, gone the next. He was only an uncle, but I still wonder. So I know what it’s like.”

  “No.” Boysie rose. “No, Mostyn, you don’t. You harboured the piece of knowledge. You found it and cherished it because one day you knew you might be able to hold it over my head. May your dreams decompose, because you’ve done it. Yes, I’d like to meet the man. I’d like to meet him because he could tell me what my old man was really like. I knew one side. He gave me immense pleasure. I would just like to talk to someone else who knew him.”

  “You shall, Boysie boy, you shall.”

  “When?”

  “When we’ve completed this business.”

  “How many more trips?”

  “Two. One on the fourteenth of next month. The fourteenth of May. The last on the tenth of June. If they are full, the Chief will have made a nice profit on his original investment. I will have done well, and you will have enough to set yourself up in some business.”

  “All right.” Boysie sank back into his chair. He could not straighten his thoughts. “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he said. “We’re not having all that palaver at Victoria Coach Station again. I’m not going through that for an ornamental gold watch.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Mostyn.

  *

  Colonel Peter Suffix took a pull on his cigarette, removed the holder from his teeth and regarded the dribble of smoke filtering from its mouthpiece.

  “You say I can go on the fourteenth?”

  “Yes. The fourteenth,” replied his older companion raising a whisky glass and sipping. “Everything else will be delivered by the eleventh of June. Was the last consignment satisfactory?”

  “I believe it’s good. Tilitson and Knox report that training goes well. It should be a pushover.”

  “You really enjoy it, don’t you?”

  Suffix’s weatherbeaten face cracked into a rare grin. “I wouldn’t be in the trade if I didn’t. Don’t know any other way of life.”

  “What about morals?”

  “Morals? Nothing to do with morals.”

  “I would have thought it had the hell of a bloody lot to do with morals. Thank you.” The last to Suffix who had refilled the whisky glass. “I mean fighting other people’s wars for them. The cause?”

  “I’m not interested in the cause. I’m a professional soldier and when my own country gives me the old golden bowler then I’m for hire. Professionals are always for hire. Little dirty wars need big dirty people to fight them. To hell with the cause, if I didn’t do it someone else would.” He took another drag at his cigarette. “I’ve done a fair bit of it in my time. The last couple of decades have been good for mercenaries like me. Africa has bestowed riches on me.”

  “Ah well. I suppose it’s all right. Wouldn’t have been in my day. Loyalty, discipline, doin’ what you were bloody told. Doin’ your duty. King and country. Queen and country. Another spot of that Chivas Regal, if you don’t mind.”

  *

  After Mostyn left the office, Boysie telephoned Snowflake Brightwater and told her, cryptically, that he had a report to make. Would this evening be convenient?

  “All my evenings are convenient for you. They are as small vacuums until you fill them.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Not a murmur.”

  “I’ll call you this afternoon.”

  “I’d rather you called me darling.
”

  Boysie busied himself with the affairs of Air Apparent: matters of great moment like getting the advertising copy ready for the small ads of the evening papers. At least it kept him from thinking, and the evening with Snowflake Brightwater would help.

  The girls were in and out of his office all day and seemed to be vying for private moments with him. He was most conscious of Ada since the erotic kiss, and now Boysie wondered if they were playing some game. On one occasion Aida accidentally brushed his forearm with her breast as she passed and, whilst taking dictation, Alma had developed a tendency to sit in an attitude which exposed her all to Boysie’s gaze. It assisted in keeping his mind out of that emotionally sensitive area which Mostyn had revealed.

  He let the girls go earlier than usual, remarking that tomorrow they would be selling tickets again, which always meant staying late.

  The traffic was thick when Boysie got outside. He waited for a few moments in the hope of getting a cab to Eaton Place.

  He was conscious of the Vauxhall pulling up, fast, but it was not until the rear door swung open, and the young man in the white Burberry leaped out and came towards him, that Boysie realised he was a target.

  No time to take evasive action. The man from the car, big and extremely agile, loped up to him in a second. A hand clamping onto Boysie’s right arm, at his tricep, just above the elbow.

  “Come on, you’re wanted.” He was a man of around thirty and looked as though he meant business. For an instant, Boysie wondered if he should cause a scene—there were enough people about—but instinct rejected the thought. This one was playing cop.

  There was no chance now, the man’s hands were on Boysie’s wrist and he was applying the Twist-Lock, Koga Method: nasty, painful and, what was worse, undetectable by the general public.

  The Twist-Lock caused agony, particularly as the assailant was pushing Boysie’s little finger hard across the other fingers, reducing strength and causing strain on the tendons.

  “What the bloody hell’s all this about?” Boysie exploded, but by that time he was in the back of the car and they were moving, snaking, threading and weaving through the traffic.

  “Shut up and stay quiet,” said the hefty man. His twin was on Boysie’s other side and there was a similar specimen at the wheel. They could have been mistaken for cops. Or robbers.