The Black Spiders Read online

  The stranger was short and very plump, with a big, full face, a nearly bald head which shimmered in the light of the room. He had big, heavy-lidded eyes, and a small mouth—an odd-looking individual, and yet the glitter in his eyes, the way he banged his fist into his palm, made him vitally, almost passionately alive. His beige-coloured suit was creased and crumpled, obviously made for hot weather, as obviously slept in.

  ‘Matt, this is Nigel Murray,’ Craigie said. ‘Nigel, this is Matt Rondo, who’s just come from the Island of Canna.’

  Murray said: ‘Oh,’ heavily.

  Rondo held out a plump hand; it was fleshy but it wasn’t soft or even slightly flabby, but he seemed hardly to have time for such formalities, for he dropped Murray’s hand after a quick clasp, and turned to Craigie; almost as if he turned on Craigie. The Chief of Department Z sat looking up at him, with that lined face and the wise eyes all very sombre then. Craigie moved his hand towards Murray, as if asking him to stand by and listen.

  ‘. . . . glad to meet you; anyone in this fight is a friend,’ Rondo said, in a kind of restrained boom, and then leaned heavily on Craigie’s desk and looked into Craigie’s eyes. ‘I tell you it’s hideous, Gordon; never seen anything like it in the whole of my life, and hope to God I never see anything like it again. Hideous!’

  Murray thought: ‘I wonder what he’s talking about.’

  Canna?

  In profile, Matthew Rondo’s face looked long and heavy, and his double chin quivered as he spoke, shaking his head in a kind of woeful emphasis.

  ‘And I’ve seen a hell of a lot in that lifetime,’ Rondo went on, still booming on a muted note, ‘I was in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, but this—this,’ he repeated, and then he was seized with a fit of coughing, and swung round and covered his mouth with his hand, placing his other hand on to his stomach as if the coughing hurt. When he recovered, his cheeks were flaming red and his eyes were watering, tears ran down his cheeks. ‘Hideous, I tell you,’ he went on, and Murray felt his own blood go chill. ‘Children—slaughtered.’

  Murray felt icy.

  ‘Slaughtered,’ repeated Rondo, in a voice now so hoarse that it seemed just a growl in his throat. ‘Four hand grenades in a classroom. Four. It was just plain bloody murder. If I could get my hands round the neck of the swine who’s behind it . . .’ He broke off, to start coughing again, but this time he was not so helpless, although he kept trying to talk through the coughing. ‘Nine dead. Three or four others so badly hurt they will probably come to wish they were dead. That’s how these devils are fighting, and I tell you that until we find Meya Kamil or send overwhelming forces to Canna and shoot some sense into the swine, we’ll have more and more trouble.’

  He stopped, dabbed at his forehead, then looked round as if he wanted somewhere to sit. He began to shake. Murray knew the symptoms of collapse, and could only stand and look on, feeling something of the horror which affected this strange man. Then he moved quickly, pushing a chair up to Rondo, who dropped into it and dabbed with his handkerchief again. He had lost his colour; and Murray realised that he looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days.

  ‘Brandy in that cupboard,’ Craigie said, with a glance at Murray.

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  ‘Don’t want brandy,’ muttered Rondo. ‘Don’t want to do anything but forget. Craigie, I tell you—if you’d been there. If you’d seen . . .’

  ‘How was it you were there?’ asked Craigie, in a quiet, steadying voice.

  ‘Heard that there had been some rabble rousing in the town,’ Rondo said, ‘Sifica, little town, up in the hills. Often been there. Your cable had asked for all possible details, and so I went to have a look. So did half-a-dozen newspaper correspondents, when this news breaks in the Press I wouldn’t like to say what would happen.’

  Murray opened the cupboard door. A heterogeneous mass of oddments faced him—bottles, some empty and some full, glasses, plates, oddments of packet food, a startling melangerie which would normally have made him gape. Now, he just looked for the brandy, and found a round, squat bottle of Courvoisier, and a small glass. He took them back to the desk, without missing a word of what Rondo said.

  ‘. . . wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t put on for our benefit,’ Rondo went on. ‘Why the devil else should they throw hand grenades at kidsl It was an open classroom, only three walls, little man of a teacher was making the kids laugh like one o’clock, never seen happier faces. And they are happy, these Cannans; left on their own they’re the happiest people I know. Don’t quote the Zulus and don’t quote the Samoans to me, either; the Cannans are as happy as any and a damned sight more intelligent than some. And then . . .’ He gulped, and dabbed his forehead again. ‘Youth on a motor-cycle. Heard the thing, but didn’t give it a thought. One of the newspapermen was actually taking a cine; when that’s thrown on the screen . . .’

  He broke off again.

  Murray had poured out brandy.

  ‘Take some of this,’ he said, and thrust the glass forward.

  Rondo looked at it as if he wondered what the interruption was all about, but he took the glass and swallowed as if he was drinking lemonade. ‘Er—well, that’s what they’re doing. Terrorism? It’s sheer, cold-blooded murder! They’ve learned everything from every other place where we’ve had trouble. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, Gordon—they had this campaign perfectly prepared, ready to blow up at the first touch of the fuse, and it’s blowing. I shouldn’t think we’ve more than three or four days to work in. If we don’t produce Meya Kamil and make sure the people understand that he’s still holding the reins, then— well, we won’t be able to put down this trouble without a civil war.’

  He gulped again, and then leaned back and closed his eyes, as if he could see a horror which he wanted to shut out.

  Murray asked, in a toneless voice:

  ‘Why should they massacre children?’

  Now, Rondo had the answer.

  ‘Why? To hurt us, of course. To force our hand, quick. To make the whole island start screaming the same thing— give us Meya Kamil or get out. The ordinary decent folk will join in just to save their children and themselves. That’s the theme song—Give us Meya Kamil or get out. I’d never heard it until two days ago—just two days. Now it’s being chanted everywhere. Schools, university, buses, in road gangs, in mines, wherever you find a crowd with a lot of young people in it, it’s the same. “Give us Meya Kamil or get out.” And there are parcels of arms all over the island, the police have turned up hundreds of hand grenades and hundreds of guns already, nearly all of British make.’

  Craigie echoed sharply: ‘British?’

  ‘That’s right—I’ve brought you samples, as you asked me to,’ Rondo went on, and he turned round towards the desk; close to it was a battered brown suitcase. He was so fat that he grunted as he bent down, and Murray said:

  ‘Let me.’

  ‘Eh? Oh, all right, thanks.’ Rondo sat back in his chair, and Murray went down on one knee and opened the case. Some soiled shirts and socks were on top, handkerchiefs, a towel and next a shaving kit in a battered leather case. Then wrapped in pyjamas, was a hand grenade, an automatic pistol, .32, several knives all stamped Made in Sheffield, England, and a few glass phials in a box and packed with cotton wool, as if to stop them from being shaken or knocking against each other. ‘Wouldn’t have got those through customs if you hadn’t phoned,’ Rondo said. ‘Well, there they are, if they’re any use; at least you’ll be able to find out where they’re made, and you might find who shipped them to Canna. The Island of Peace! The Good Man! I’d say that place is going to be Hell’s Island before you can turn round twice if we don’t do something drastic. It’s murder, and. . .’

  ‘All right, Matt,’ said Craigie, and when Rondo quietened, Craigie went on: ‘But you haven’t managed to get any line at all on the people behind it?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing at all,’ said Rondo bluntly. ‘Saw the other two agents before I left, too. Been working lik
e beavers. So’ve the correspondents, killing themselves on the job, but no—there isn’t a line. Meya Kamil’s vanished, and. . .’

  He broke off again, dabbed his forehead, and then unexpectedly, he stood up. He was enormous and untidy, and in desperate earnest.

  ‘That’s the only key to it all,’ he said in a thinner voice. ‘Meya Kamil’s vanished. Find him, put him back in command, and you will be all right. The people would calm down quickly enough then, everything depends on Meya Kamil. But if you ask me,’ went on Rondo with a glumness which was very near despair, ‘you won’t be able to find him—alive, that is. They must have killed him before they started all this business, they wouldn’t dare to stir it up unless they were sure he’d never come back.’

  Craigie asked sharply: ‘Have you any evidence that Meya Kamil’s dead?’

  ‘No, not evidence, but—well, I’m telling you what I think, Gordon. And I’m telling you what every newspaper correspondent, our two agents, and every British official on the island thinks. I haven’t met anyone who has any doubt at all.’

  Craigie said: ‘I see. Well, Matt, you need some rest, and you know where to go. We’ll do everything possible, and things might not be quite so black as they look. As soon as you’ve rested, put down everything you can in a written report, and I’ll have it collected and analysed.’

  ‘All right, Gordon,’ Rondo said dispiritedly, ‘I’ll do whatever I can, but—sorry I lost my head. Every time I think of those kids, I feel as if I could run amok, preferably with a knife in each hand.’

  ‘I know,’ Craigie said. He stood up, walked to the other end of the room, and pressed a button in the mantelpiece— one of several built into it so that unless one knew they were there, they wouldn’t be seen. ‘A car will be outside in five minutes,’ he went on, as he stopped ringing. ‘One question, Matt. Have you see any of the black Canna spiders lately?’

  Rondo said slowly: ‘Well, no, I haven’t seen any. Not alive, that is. I’ve seen a few dead ones, up near Siflca. Nasty brutes. And there’s some kind of advertising campaign going on, there are a lot of leaflets being distributed with a picture of the spider on, a lot of puff about the produce of the spider being the best thing Canna ever had. I...’

  He stopped abruptly.

  ‘You mean, that’s part of the campaign? Why, it’s been going on for weeks, months probably, had a lot of funny— funny ha-ha I mean—stuff, too. Up came the spider and sat down beside her kind of jingle. It’s printed verses and limericks—they love limericks on the island—that kind of thing. I thought—everyone thought—it was one of these build-up to a climax kind of advertisements for cigarettes or beer. Why, I kept several, they struck me as being worth showing!’ He bent down by the desk, where his case stood unlocked and with the key in it. He opened the case and began to rummage among the clothes, and the others glanced at each other, Murray with a deeper understanding of this tragedy than he had yet had.

  ‘How did you get on?’ Craigie asked Murray.

  ‘If you can call it getting on, all right,’ Murray said. ‘I should think you can count on Juanita’s help. I told her . . .’

  He broke off, in sudden, fierce alarm.

  He saw Matthew Rondo leap away from the case, as if he had been rocked back with a blow. And while he was still moving, Rondo gave a shrill, piercing cry of pain. He shook his right hand wildly, and staggered backwards, lost his balance and toppled, and the others were too late to save him. He crashed down, cracking his head on the floor, and as he lay quivering a little black shape scuttled out of the suitcase and then about Craigie’s desk, stopping at one edge, feeling about with its front legs, swinging round and rushing to another edge as if he couldn’t wait to bite again.

  And Rondo was groaning.

  16. The Bait

  It was half an hour before the office was back to normal; or nearly normal. There was still a bloodstain, turning brown now, where the blood had dropped from Rondo’s finger, after Craigie had cut open the spot where the spider had bitten the man, and squeezed the poison out. Rondo had lost consciousness within five minutes, and in spite of the speed with which Craigie and Murray had worked, his finger had swollen to twice its normal size before the doctor had arrived—a different man from the one whom Murray had seen the previous day.

  After first aid, Rondo had been carried out, to an ambulance. There was no certainty that he would ever regain consciousness. The spider, crushed with a heavy book, had been preserved so that it could be dissected, and any poison remaining extracted and analysed.

  Now, Craigie was standing with his back to the fireplace, looking only slightly harassed and careworn, but nowhere near panic.

  ‘You were saying that you told Juanita Lang . . .’ he reminded Murray.

  Murray was pulling hard at a cigarette.

  ‘I hope you’ll agree that it was the best thing to do,’ he said. ‘I told her that we could hide her away so that she couldn’t be found or put in danger, but that if she was attacked while at Hampstead—or anywhere else for that matter—we’d probably be able to catch her assailant, and we desperately needed a prisoner.’

  ‘How did she take it?’

  Murray drew harder at the cigarette. He couldn’t turn away from Craigie, whose grey eyes seemed to compel him to look into them; but he took his time answering, because he wanted to make sure that he said exactly the right thing.

  At last he tossed the cigarette into the fire, and said:

  ‘I think you would say that she took it well. She was frightened, badly frightened. She doesn’t relish the idea at all, and knows that it’s a big risk that might prove fatal. But I think she thought it out before promising that she’d help. Probably a sense of duty plus a kind of compulsion— in fact I should say that as Juanita Lang she rebelled against the very idea, she thought she’d had enough, but as the niece of Meya Kamil, she decided that she must go through with it. And I think she will,’ Murray added with quiet deliberation. ‘But she still maintains that she had no idea where her uncle is. She knew he was worried, she knew that he’d made secret plans for her to leave, but no one else knew, or so Meya Kamil thought. The rebels found out, of course. Then she says he went to his room one night, just to pray—and she didn’t see him again. He’d made her promise to go to the airport at a certain day and time, and she went.’

  Murray paused.

  ‘That squares with Rondo’s report,’ Craigie said. ‘Meya Kamil walked out of his home and vanished. Two of our men were watching, but he shook them off. The town near his home is a rabbit warren, and it was easy.’

  ‘You mean, he meant to go?’

  ‘Rondo thought so, but we don’t know,’ said Craigie. ‘Well now—you were quite right to say what you did to Juanita,’ he went on, as if that hardly needed saying. ‘What else?’

  Murray told him about the English twin cousins, and about Charles Lang. He spent much more time talking about Lang than about the twins or Juanita’s aunt. He could still picture the handsome, arrogant face of Meya Kamil’s nephew, in striking contrast to the gentle face of the man in the photograph on Craigie’s desk.

  ‘I think that’s the lot,’ he went on.

  ‘Is it?’ asked Craigie quietly.

  ‘Yes, I think so. The thing that shook me most, apart from what I had to say to the girl, was that spider. The thing came from the outside, almost as if it knew where to go.’

  ‘It probably did,’ said Craigie dryly, ‘there was honey on the carpet of the hall, or on the door where the creature stopped—I’ve had a report from Harrison, from the house. The spiders can smell honey a long way off. There was a little on the doorstep and more in the hall; there’s no doubt what drew it in.’

  ‘How did the honey get there?’ Murray asked abruptly.

  ‘It could have been in the garden for days,’ said Craigie, ‘or it could have dropped out of a passing car, and been carried in by someone who trod on it. The house and the grounds are being searched in case there are more spiders.’


  ‘Well, you certainly don’t miss much,’ Murray said, ‘but . . .’

  ‘Nigel,’ Craigie interrupted, ‘there’s something you haven’t told me.’

  Murray considered. Then: ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Sure?’ asked Craigie.

  His gaze was very direct, and more than ever Murray had a sense of being in the presence of greatness. He did not think that he would ever be able to understand it, but it was as if the Chief of Department Z was probing into his inner consciousness, willing him to speak of something which he could not even recall. Had he forgotten anything? He stood there, half frowning, and then Craigie went on with a twist of his full lips:

  ‘How do you feel about the girl?’

  Murray said heavily: ‘Oh. I see. I hadn’t realised . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Craigie. ‘Personal feelings wouldn’t normally be in a report, but they could make a vital difference.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Murray agreed, and found it surprisingly easy to talk; it was almost as if this had been on his mind, and he was anxious to talk about it, and so get it off. ‘I think I can say I’ve never felt quite the same about anyone, at any time. She—well, I suppose it’s a kind of infatuation. If she was anything other than a young girl, I’d say she was femme fatale, but with Juanita, that’s . . .’ He paused, seeking the right word.

  Craigie said: ‘Unthinkable?’

  Murray didn’t answer.

  He couldn’t explain the attraction which the girl had for him, simply had to accept the fact that it was there. It had been, almost from the beginning. He could not get her, or her danger, out of his mind. He was desperately anxious that she should not die, as anxious that she should not suffer, and as he tried to examine his thoughts and his feelings, he knew that she was in some ways more important than anything he had yet heard about.