Death of a Raven Read online

  For a moment disappointment and anger almost took hold of me. Instead of a few weeks cover job spent in socialising and unhurried preparation of Two for Joy, I was now landed with twenty-four-hour days of concentration when one slip of the tongue might ruin everything.

  Robin was smiling at me, obviously aware of everything that was going on inside my head.

  “Are you obeying orders and taking the rest of the week off?” I enquired.

  “No. There’s no need. I’m fine now.”

  My resentment and anger began to turn into panic. Robin and I were part of a team and the teamwork depended heavily on close communication. How, if any real communication was barred, were we going to do the job? And first and foremost I am a writer by profession. My training for Department 12, mostly of the self-defence variety, had not turned me into a super-spy.

  Robin, damn him, was smiling at me again. “Headache?” he asked.

  I sank into a chair. “It was a very early start,” I replied, taking the cue. “The Gas Board started digging up the road outside at four am.”

  Robin sat down too. “Great here, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Bright as ninepence houses surrounded by a muddle of pickups and Skiddoos … all mixed up with garden gnomes, plastic Snow Whites and hand-painted statues of the Virgin Mary.”

  “Fibre glass garden wells,” I added. “And wooden butterflies on the outside walls like those flights of plaster ducks you used to see at home. What on earth are super mufflers?”

  “Silencers,” he told me. “Cars, exhaust pipes for the use of.”

  We were both laughing when Emma returned. She asked Robin to put some more wood on the stove and the conversation turned to general matters until the tea arrived. Then, when a tray had been set before her on a low table by a middle-aged woman who was introduced to us as Dot, short for Doris, Emma commenced gently to question me.

  “This Colonel … Daws, is it? He’s not really MI6 at all, is he?”

  “Search me,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned he’s just a rather charming army officer who asked me if I fancied working on my novel in Canada to keep a few British engineers company.”

  “Surely he didn’t just phone you up out of the blue.”

  “No, I met him at a Mess dinner.”

  “Daws only surfaces at occasions like Mess dinners,” Robin said. “The rest of the time he can be run to earth pruning his roses and writing irate letters to The Times.”

  But Emma seemed to think there had been a breach of security. “Didn’t you find it a rather strange request?”

  I sipped my tea, taking my time. “No, why should I? Patrick probably mentioned to him that I was looking for a bolt hole.”

  She gave me a cool look, then an enigmatic smile. “I’d forgotten about the Major for a moment. David told me that he packed a lot of hardware and could be found close to the Prime Minister when she was being shown around sewage farms.”

  I filed away this small insight into David Hartland, raising my eyebrows at Robin and making sure that she saw me. “And other such establishments,” I murmured. “He does love places where he can take his green wellies.” I buried my nose in my cup, hearing Robin’s soft chuckle. The green wellies were an in-joke between us.

  “I’ll carry on riding shotgun tomorrow,” Robin said to Emma.

  “Only if you’re sure you’re fit,” she replied. Then, turning to me she said, “The DARE team have all been travelling to work together under police escort while Robin was ill. As you can imagine this tends to draw attention to them even more.”

  As she was speaking cars were scrunching to a standstill on the gravelled drive outside the window, one a taxi, the other a vehicle I knew to be a Plymouth Caravelle, a large American saloon car seating six. Down the drive, a police car tooted a horn in farewell and reversed out of sight.

  “It’s David!” exclaimed Emma. “Oh, God — and his assistants.” With that she fled from the room, presumably to warn Dot about extra mouths to feed.

  Robin drew me to the window. “That’s Hartland,” he told me, indicating the man paying off the taxi “The guy driving the Plymouth is Drew McAlister — he’s the senior consultant heading the DARE bunch out here. The woman’s Margaret Howard, his personal assistant. The tall untidy-looking bloke is Paul Rogers, he’s the same rank as Quade was. The other two standing together like Tweedledum and Tweedledee are Nelson Redding and Earl Lawrence. As Emma said, they’re Hartland’s boys from Nasonworth.”

  “Redding is the senior man,” I guessed.

  “That’s right — he’s project leader.”

  “Do any of them know who you really are?” I knew that the question was quite safe, Hartland had been informed that I was aware there was a security situation.

  “They know I’m a minder but not my real name. Not even Hartland knows that. It was his own request so he doesn’t have to worry about having a lapse of memory and ruining everything.”

  “How does it feel to be a Robin?”

  “Haven’t you seen a North American robin?”

  I reminded him that I had only arrived an hour previously. “Well, they’re big, bolshie and aggressive.”

  “Just like you,” I sighed despairingly.

  Chapter 3

  A few minutes later I came to the conclusion that this was a description that could equally apply to David Hartland. He was certainly big, both tall and broad-shouldered, a man who would dominate both at work and in his own home. Entering his domain he was full of bonhomie, the perfect host, seeking me out as he came through the door while explaining to his wife that he had brought work to last him the week home to Port Charles as the threats to those now under his care worried him and he wanted to be on the spot. I noticed that neither Redding nor Lawrence appeared entranced at the prospect of him breathing down their necks for four days.

  Wincing, I retrieved my hand from Hartland’s grasp and wondered why he had not phoned to let Emma know he was bringing extra people home for dinner. Perhaps, like his son, he enjoyed surprising her.

  “Good flight?”

  I made a suitable reply and then he took me by the arm and introduced me to the rest of the company, beginning with McAlister. Drew was warmly polite but obviously under stress, his assistant merely polite, pricing my clothes. Redding and Lawrence were still sulking. The untidy and youthful Paul Rogers proved to be the most interesting, shy and impatient to tell me about a book he was writing, the authentic author’s gleam in his eyes promising well.

  Just then Emma took me upstairs to show me my room or rather boudoir, the only word that could justly describe a creation of palest pink filmy draped nets and, encircled by Chinese rugs, a vast four poster waterbed. But it seemed unlikely, due to the listening devices, that I would be making waves on it with my working partner. Still, Patrick is prone to seasickness.

  “Lovely flowers,” I commented upon noticing an arrangement of cream carnations.

  “Home grown,” Emma said. “They were old Bill’s pride and joy.”

  “Your gardener?” I enquired, picturing a sudden demise and schooling my expression accordingly.

  Emma pulled a face. “Retired to his daughter’s home in Vancouver. It was all rather sudden, and as far as I’m concerned his successor can go right back where he found him.”

  I showered and changed, selecting after some hesitation a Laura Ashley pink and black cotton skirt with black blouse and matching padded waistcoat, an outfit on a similar level of formality as the one Emma was wearing and assuming, wrongly as it happened, that the men would remain in their dark suits. When I went downstairs everyone, Emma included, was sporting denim in various shades.

  Robin, now openly armed but with a tin of Moosehead beer in one hand, said, “It’s nearly midnight by your body clock.”

  “Just watch out I don’t turn into a pumpkin,” I retorted, and then smiled in superior fashion when he slopped his beer from laughing.

  Paul’s book, I discovered when I spoke to him, was not
a treatise on marine controls systems, a discipline upon which he was an expert, but a who-dunn-it set on a passenger liner, with a body in every locker. I braced myself for him to ask me to have a quiet word in the ear of my publisher but the request did not materialise.

  “I’m not expecting miracles,” he concluded with a shy smile. “Writing’s really relaxation for me. It’s also taught me to look at people and places in an entirely different way. I find myself filing away people’s mannerisms to use at a later date.”

  “Sometimes they recognise themselves if you’re not careful,” I remarked dryly, recollecting losing a few friends when my first novel was published. “You have to mix them up a bit.”

  “Really strong characters have to be used just as they are though, don’t they?” he demurred. “I made Andy the detective in my story, but I hardly feel that I can carry on using him now.”

  “You must,” I said. “He’d have wanted you to. People like Andy deserve to live on in other ways besides their friends’ memories.” Then I added, “Tell me about him.”

  Paul understood that I was unable to mention the word death. He shrugged sadly. “What is there to tell? We said cheerio to him at work because he was going out to Quispamsis for the evening and an hour later he was dead.”

  “D’you think … ?” I began.

  “No one knows,” he said gently. “I don’t think that he was the sort of guy to drive stupidly and lose control of a car. But you have to remember that we hadn’t been out here long, and it was a strange car, and driving on the other side of the road …” Paul shrugged again.

  At this moment Robin presented himself and offered to escort me into dinner.

  “I’m sure they don’t go in for all that formal codswallop out here,” I told him but the fool stood there fluttering his eyelashes, an arm crooked for me to take.

  “Talking of interesting characters …” Paul said musingly to no one in particular. “Have you met Freddie, the new gardener?”

  “Sort of,” said Robin.

  “How can you sort of meet someone?” I asked scathingly.

  “You can with this bloke. He came at me a bit on the fast side with a pair of sheers and then laughed like hell when I decided to go in the opposite direction.”

  “Unique sense of humour,” I agreed. “Emma said she couldn’t wait to get rid of him.”

  Paul said, “Bill told me that he came from a hostel for destitute men.”

  “Poor chap.”

  “And is rather strange.”

  “Sounds as if he has every right to be.”

  “Don’t go too close to him,” Robin warned. Then, in response to my glare, continued. “He chews whole cloves of garlic like peanuts and avidly reads filthy magazines. I’m not sure which represents the more serious threat to you.”

  From the way his eyes glittered, I knew I was being well and truly teased.

  After dinner, a delicious meal that reflected none of the headlong panic I was convinced had arisen in the kitchen after the sudden influx of extra people, I sat talking for a long time to Drew McAlister. Drew was as much a Scot as his name suggested, as was his assistant, Margaret Howard. I forced myself to keep an open mind concerning their exact relationship for in truth they were a very attractive couple; he in his late forties, grey-haired and slim, and she a real red head, the sort that must have caused battle royal in the glens as men fought for possession of her ancestors. My caution paid off for later in the evening Drew mentioned with the smile of a man in love that his wife would soon be joining him for a short holiday.

  According to McAlister, Paul was the real brains behind the project. He himself was only present to make sure that the young man got up in the mornings and didn’t write too much of his beloved novel during working hours. I asked him, all innocence, if the Royal Navy also enjoyed the benefits of DARE’s control system but he merely smiled and changed the subject. In other words, don’t ask that kind of question. I could hardly tell him that I had signed the Official Secrets Act.

  I went back to talk to Paul who was on his own having failed to draw the Nasonworth trio — Hartland, and his two assistants — away from their obsession with anti-icing supply reduction valves. Chatting to him I couldn’t help but wonder why Emma had apparently deserted the gathering, and also why her husband seemed totally to have ignored her since his explanatory statement upon entering the house. And, glancing at him surreptitiously now and again, it seemed to me that he had quite the wrong kind of aura for a man who had been described as a big softie.

  Robin joined us shortly afterwards, bringing me a cup of coffee, having complied with Hartland’s request to provide everyone with the drink of their choice.

  “He hauled me over the coals about the non-appearance of the second minder,” he said, obviously, and cleverly I thought, working on the precept that we ought to say some of the things our host would expect of us otherwise he would begin to be suspicious.

  “I thought the idea was that he would live rough,” I said.

  “That’s what I told Hartland but he seems to think that the Mounties would have detected him by now. He thinks Daws has sold him short.”

  “Perhaps Freddie’s a Mountie,” I suggested and for the second time in one evening was the cause of spilled beer, by Paul this time.

  “Blasphemy,” Robin hissed with a worried look at the two Canadians, thus making Paul laugh even louder. “No, Mounties are only allowed to disguise themselves as trees and moose and things like that. Not as more than slightly disgusting gardeners. Dot reckons he stole a pair of her knickers off the washing line.”

  “Woolly ones,” said Paul succinctly. “I’m not surprised — there’s not much in the way of heating in his room. You can sometimes see him in the greenhouse after dark. I reckon he goes in there to get warm.”

  “Are you having me on?” I demanded to know.

  “Scout’s honour,” Paul insisted.

  “Do they feed him?”

  “Well, Dot doesn’t — not after he stole her knickers.”

  I thought of the lobster we had eaten for dinner, and the filet de boeuf en croûte that had been left over, and then of the conservatory on the south side of the house filled with a stupendous collection of cymbidium orchids positively glowing with health in eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

  “He’s OK,” said Robin, knowing all about my agonising over lost kittens and worms drowning in puddles.

  “I know you better than you think,” I said, not caring if Hartland heard me now, never mind played his tapes back before he went to bed. “And when you’re lying through your teeth.”

  Robin looked startled. “That imagination of yours.”

  “What’s imagination to do with it?” I stormed. “You both think it’s funny don’t you? Someone who’s not quite all there sitting in the greenhouse trying to keep warm and going hungry”

  “Honestly —” Robin started to say but I cut him dead.

  “No one’s going to starve while I’m around.”

  I stood up and everyone looked at me. “Goodnight,” I said brightly.

  “Goodnight,” they all chorused and went on with their conversations.

  A small pang of alarm made me hesitate. “Is it safe?”

  “It?”

  “He, then,” I said heavily. Why are men so damned difficult sometimes?

  “Perfectly.”

  “Surely …” Paul began.

  “Perfectly safe,” Robin assured him. “That’s if she doesn’t get frostbite — it’s colder out there than she’d ever imagine.”

  I heard this remark as I left the room. And also his soft laugh.

  *

  He was right of course. Even though the first of May was only three days hence I could see that the whole garden was sparkling with frost when I peeped around the curtains of a window in the hall.

  I went out through the kitchen door, purloining the cold remains of the beef and some cheese on the way but forgetting a coat. By the time I had gone ten ya
rds my teeth were chattering.

  From the hall window I had seen that the greenhouse lights were switched on but they were not bright enough to guide me across the garden. I had to rely on an almost full moon for that and only had one bad moment when I tripped over a rock lying in the middle of the path, stubbing my toe. It seemed a strange time of the year to rebuild a rockery.

  It was paralysingly cold.

  I couldn’t see anyone in the greenhouse but snicked up the latch of the door and slid it open, desperately in need of heat myself by now. A wonderful scent of warm, damp earth and growing things wafted into my nostrils and I took several deep appreciative breaths. There were ferns and yet more orchids, gloxinias in pots, Bill’s carnations growing in the borders and rows and rows of baby polyanthus in pots on the slatted wooden staging.

  I sniffed the air again, detecting a hint of garlic. Then I saw the source of it, sitting on the staging looking at me through a fern, knees under his chin, grinning like an oversized goblin. It was enough to make anyone’s hair stand on end and, such was the shock, I think mine did.

  “Sugar for the horse, sugar for the horse,” cackled Freddie.

  I dumped down the food and bolted. No, Freddie wasn’t safe. One hand had moved in the most lewd gesture I had ever seen.

  Chapter 4

  On the Wednesday of that week, after Robin had convinced me that driving on the right side of the road and staying alive could be achieved by the majority of British drivers, I hired a car. Or rather I rented one, as the man in the garage described the transaction. With difficulty I persuaded him that the vehicle I required did not necessarily have to be large enough to play a game of baseball in, and emerged cautiously from the forecourt with a product of the land of the rising sun.

  Emma had offered to lend me the family pick-up that was used to take gear to their boat but I declined without offending her. Never borrow cars, Daws always stressed. Now, with Andy’s death still haunting me I was going to do as I was told.