The League of Dark Men Read online

  Tim was waiting in the hall. He was much taller than Hammond, a fluffy-haired beanstalk of a man with a cheerful smile and, judging from his appearance, no great strength of character. He was reading the Evening Cry. He glanced up at Hammond, and tapped the arm of an empty chair next to him, but did not put his paper down. Hammond walked to the door and looked out, then went to the desk and bought some cigarettes.

  ‘I see it’s beginning to snow again,’ he said.

  ‘It’s wicked cold weather, sir, isn’t it?’ remarked the faded woman at the desk.

  Hammond sauntered to the vacant chair, and sat down. Tim continued to read the newspaper, and spoke with hardly any movement of his lips. ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘Nicely.’ Hammond was still smoking the cigar which Parmitter had given him. ‘Keep at the girl. Try to find out for certain where P. was on Wednesday evening.’

  ‘Was he in London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So my porter wasn’t wrong. Anything else?’

  ‘Not of importance.’

  ‘Oke,’ said Tim. He tapped the front of the paper, as if to straighten it out. ‘Seen that?’

  ‘Dirty work.’

  ‘I’ll say!’

  Hammond waited long enough to finish his cigar. He looked up as the little dark man who was a delegate from San Patino came in at the revolving doors. He was dressed in an astrakhan coat, which dwarfed him, but in spite of that he looked frozen. A powdering of snow covered him, and his absurdly large Homburg hat. He hurried to the stairs and went up quickly.

  Tim got up and followed him.

  Hammond left the hotel.

  Tim sauntered up the stairs, yet moved much more quickly than he appeared to. He was on the landing when the man from San Patino entered Parmitter’s room, not his own. He did not tap, but opened the door with a key. Tim’s eyes widened as he strolled a little way along another passage, knowing that it would be difficult to overhear what was said, for Parmitter and the delegate would talk in the inner room.

  Clarissa Kaye might hear what passed between them.

  Tim, who was of a romantic turn of mind, had already decided that whatever tricks Parmitter got up to, Clarissa Kaye was innocent of them.

  He heard her cry out.

  The cry came so unexpectedly through the quiet of the hotel that he stood still, the noise startling him. He listened for a repetition. He did not hear one, but he heard the bark of a shot.

  He turned and raced towards Room 21.

  6

  Bullets for Parmitter

  The door was wide open.

  Keeping his right hand in his pocket, about the handle of an automatic, Tim crept along by the wall and peered inside, thus, he was safe if anyone took a potshot at the doorway. There had only been that single shot and then silence. No one else seemed disturbed.

  The inner door was wide open.

  Tim saw a pair of slender nylon-clad legs on the floor and neatly-shod feet at an odd angle. He could just see Clarissa’s knees, the skirt inches above them.

  He went into the room. Clarissa was lying flat on her back, her head towards the wall. He could not see any sign of blood.

  Parmitter was saying in a voice shrill with fear:

  ‘Nothing, I tell you, nothing, I...’

  There were three shots; three bullets for Parmitter.

  Tim leapt towards the door as he heard the first. In one swift glance he took in the whole scene. Parmitter was leaning against the desk, his hands clutching his chest. There was a trickle of blood through his widespread fingers, and his mouth sagged open. The delegate from San Patino was on his knees behind the desk; a third man was standing just behind the door, with a smoking automatic in his hand. It seemed to Tim that Kolsti had cropped up again. The gunman had dark, close-cropped hair, and very thin features. He seemed unaware of danger from outside. He was pointing the gun towards the San Patino delegate, without speaking.

  ‘Why, hallo,’ said Tim, brightly. ‘This won’t do.’

  The man spun round, and Tim shot the gun from his hand. It fell to the floor and slithered towards the desk. The man seemed petrified. He stared at Tim, as the little delegate from San Patino jumped to his feet.

  ‘That iss a murderer!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tim. ‘Telephone for a doctor.’

  ‘He iss a murderer! He...’

  ‘Telephone!’ snapped Tim.

  The little delegate gulped, then plucked up the telephone. As he did so someone came hurrying into the outer room. Tim caught a glimpse of a plump man who stopped in his tracks at sight of Clarissa. Perhaps that was because he also saw a gun in Tim’s hand.

  Tim said: ‘Danger all over. Come in.’

  The man came forward hesitatingly. ‘What...’ he began.

  The delegate from San Patino was speaking into the telephone.

  ‘A doctor iss wanted, pliss, quickly, pliss.’ He kept repeating the words over and over again, while Tim took a good look at the man who had entered, and recognised him as one of the hotel staff. Tim held the gun towards him, but still pointed it towards the assailant.

  ‘Cover him,’ he said.

  The man took the gun without protesting. Two or three other people had entered the outer room, a waiter, a maid and a portly old man in pepper-and-salt plus-fours. The maid looked at Clarissa and exclaimed: ‘She’s dead!’

  ‘Now, don’t be silly, don’t be silly,’ said the old man. ‘She isn’t dead. Come and help her to sit up. Look, she’s opening her eyes!’

  Something seemed to click in Tim’s mind: or, he asked himself absurdly as he went towards Parmitter, was it in his heart? In any event, his relief at the words: ‘Look, she’s opening her eyes,’ was real indeed. He reached Parmitter, who was slumped down against the desk. He did not think that he or anyone could do anything for the man. He kept a wary eye on the assassin, who still seemed petrified, as if he could not realise that such a thing as this could have happened.

  Tim and the delegate from San Patino straightened Parmitter up, and put him in a large armchair. Tim felt for his pulse. It was a futile thing to do, for Parmitter’s lips had dropped open and his eyes were closed; there was no sign of life. One hand was still pressed against his chest, and the blood seeped through.

  The man holding the gun glanced at Tim.

  ‘This is shocking,’ he said, absurdly.

  ‘You’ll get a shock if you don’t watch that customer,’ said Tim. As there was nothing he could do for Parmitter, and as Clarissa was presumably in good hands, he went forward and held out his hand for the gun. The man moved away from him, and Tim widened his eyes.

  ‘I’ll keep this, thank you.’

  Tim looked at the man who was so much like Kolsti at first sight. The resemblance was largely superficial, and was chiefly due to the dark, cropped hair—cropped in monkish fashion. It made his round head look like a ball which was spouting hairs. His eyes had the same wild gleam as Kolsti’s.

  The man jumped forward.

  One move, one sweeping blow with his arm, sent the gun and the man holding it away from him, and he leapt for the door. Tim was a couple of yards away from him. He dived forward and shot out his foot, but failed to trip the man up. He shouted a warning and raced after him. The maid was still in the doorway. The man with the cropped hair swept her aside with a violent blow, and she thudded against the door.

  The man turned right, towards the end of the passage and the windows, not towards the stairs.

  Tim went after him.

  The man was running so fast that if he went on at that pace he would crash into the window at the far end of the passage. There seemed no way for him to avoid it. Tim slowed down, so that the impetus of his rush should not bring him up against the window with a crash; probably the man would twist round at the last moment, and make for the stairs.

  Two yards from the window, the man jumped.

  Tim stopped in his tracks.

  It was happening in front of his eyes, and yet he could not believe
it. A running jump, at the window. The man made no attempt to protect his head. His shoulders were hunched, and he went through the window head first. The crash of glass and the sickening crunching sound seemed to come at the same time; and then the man disappeared.

  He had uttered no sound.

  Slowly, his lips stiff with tension, Tim went to the window. His feet crunched on the broken glass, but he did not notice it. He put out a hand, held the broken pane to steady himself, and looked outside. It was a sheer but not a long drop, into a narrow side street. There, spread-eagled on the ground cleared of snow, was the little man with the cropped hair. He had met the ground head first.

  • • • • •

  Tim turned slowly from the window as he saw a policeman and several passers-by hurrying towards the broken body on the pavement. Because he had been out of touch with the office, he did not know that Kolsti had killed himself, throwing himself in front of the bus with the same suicidal compulsion as this man had flung himself out of the window. Tim felt sick. He looked into the outer room of Parmitter’s suite, which was now crowded with people, including a policeman. Clarissa was sitting in an easy chair and someone was holding smelling salts to her nose. She strained her head away from them, and he heard her say that she was all right. He walked down the stairs.

  People were gossiping in the halls. ‘But I heard shooting, my dear.’ ‘It couldn’t have been.’ ‘Well, a policeman has just gone upstairs.’ ‘And I think the doctor has, too.’

  Tim walked past them, and only the white-haired porter took any notice of his strained face or his narrowed eyes.

  ‘Aren’t you well, sir?’

  ‘Er—yes, I’m all right,’ said Tim, and forced a smile. ‘Quite all right,’ he said. There was a flurry of footsteps on the stairs, and the man to whom he had entrusted the gun came rushing down, with the policeman in his wake.

  ‘Stop that man!’ he cried. ‘Stop that man!’

  The porter, so frail and old, laid a hand on Tim’s arm.

  ‘I think he means you, sir.’

  Tim’s smile was more natural.

  ‘Probably,’ he said.

  The man with the gun came up to him breathlessly, with the constable in close support.

  ‘This is the man who had the gun!’ he cried, and everyone in the hall turned and stared. Tim could see their startled faces turned towards him in accusation. He felt suddenly angry with them all, but more angry with the man in front of him than anyone.

  He said: ‘I told you to watch that man.’

  ‘You—you told...’

  ‘And he has committed suicide,’ Tim said. ‘May it forever bedevil your conscience.’ He turned to the policeman, and said: ‘You’ll find that the shots were fired from the gun on the floor near the radiator, not from mine.’ As he spoke, he took out his wallet and extracted a card; it was one similar to the type which Hammond had shown Parmitter. The policeman glanced at it and raised a hand in surprise.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, sir.’

  The pompous man snapped: ‘What do you mean, that’s all right?’

  Tim said: ‘It means that I am his superior officer. I’ll send for your statement soon, constable.’ He nodded, the porter released his arm, and he went out into the icy streets.

  The snow was falling heavily, now; a fresh white coating had spread over the cleared patches of the road, and a little way along a bus was stuck in a great mass of slush and ice and snow near the kerb. A little crowd had gathered about it.

  Tim shivered.

  He heard a call from behind him, and turned, prepared to deal ruthlessly with the pompous man, but instead he saw the porter, holding his coat.

  ‘You mustn’t go out without this today, sir.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tim. ‘No. Quite right. Thank you.’

  The porter himself was shivering as he helped Tim into the coat. Tim slipped a coin into his hand and hurried towards the side-street. There was a little crowd, shocked by what they had seen, and a woman was leaning against the wall, retching. Two policemen were in the middle of the crowd, and a third was shifting the stragglers along. From somewhere not far off there came the ting-a-ling of an ambulance bell.

  Tim forced his way through the crowd, and showed his card again. The two policemen saluted, and Tim looked down at the man.

  He had known from his glance out of the window that the man was dead, but at close quarters the sight of his head, cracked like an egg-shell with the yolk oozing out and coagulating in the bitter air, made him understand why the woman was sick. He steeled himself, and went down on one knee. The snow bit through the cloth, but he ran his hands through the man’s pockets. He found only one thing that might be useful, and that was in a waistcoat pocket, a red, diamond-shaped card with the figure 9 printed on it. The card was rubbed and soiled at the edges.

  A policeman was collecting all the other oddments, and the ambulance turned into the street, slowly because of the treacherous road.

  ‘I’ll take these, thanks,’ said Tim, and thrust the cheap wallet and other oddments into his pocket. The ambulance men forced their way through the crowd with a stretcher. A doctor appeared. The body was loaded into the ambulance, and Tim watched it out of sight. His right knee was frozen; he forgot that it was because he had been kneeling in the snow.

  He fingered the card. Number 9.

  Now that he was beginning to think clearly, he stopped blaming himself. He had done all that could be reasonably expected of him. He had asked Craigie to send several men to the hotel; they should have been watching Parmitter, too. The Department had slipped up, but he did not see how anyone could properly blame him. He felt resentful towards Craigie. That was a novel feeling which sprang from the fact that Tim, a comparatively new agent, had come to expect Craigie to be infallible.

  It was Tim Kemble’s first big ‘show’.

  He had served in the Intelligence Branch (Active) during the war, and his record was good. Craigie had marked him down as a recruit, and he was one of the few really new agents. All who knew him liked him. He was particularly suitable, in Craigie’s opinion, because he had no close relatives living, and was fancy-free.

  He walked to a telephone kiosk, and dialled Craigie’s number. There was a long pause before the call was answered, and then he heard Loftus’s voice, not Craigie’s.

  Kemble began to spell his name backwards, a simple code which had served the Department for many years, and had never been misused. By that system it was possible for Craigie or whoever answered the telephone to know at once that he was talking to a bona fide agent.

  ‘All right, Tim,’ said Loftus.

  ‘It isn’t all right,’ said Tim. ‘It’s very much all wrong. I asked Craigie to send some men. Hammond came and went, I haven’t seen any others.’

  ‘They were there,’ said Loftus.

  ‘Then they were work-shy!’

  There was a slight pause, followed by a sound very much like a chuckle, which momentarily incensed him.

  ‘You sound a bit low, Tim,’ Loftus remarked. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Near the Haymart. I can’t leave because Parmitter’s been shot, and...’

  ‘Come straight round,’ said Loftus. ‘I’ll send someone over to relieve you.’

  It was not more than a ten minutes’ walk to the office, and there was no hope of getting a cab. The roads were chaotic; Tim saw several cars and two taxis caught in heaps of snow at the side of the road, and two drivers were saying that they had never known such weather.

  It was unusual for him to be invited to the office. He had been there no more than half a dozen times, and it was a general practice for agents to stay away from headquarters during spells of duty. He walked past the entrance to the side-street where Department Z was housed, then turned and looked behind him. That had become almost second nature. No one had followed him from the Haymart, and there was no one on the other side of the road. He passed through the doorway and hurried upstairs, then went through exactly the same process
as George had done. The result was the same.

  The warm air of the office struck at him as he stepped across the threshold on to the mat.

  Craigie was at his desk, Hammond in front of him; Loftus was standing with his back to the fire, smoking a pipe. The scene was quiet and peaceful; and Tim gave a snort of a laugh.

  ‘That sounds better,’ said Loftus.

  ‘Does it?’ asked Tim. ‘Now I’ll really cheer you up.’ He told them what had happened in brusque, clipped phrases, while watching Craigie, whose face held no expression, and Hammond, whose only reaction was to push a writing-pad away from him and stare at him intently. Once, Loftus took his pipe from his lips, shook it, and put it back. That was all.

  Tim felt better when he had finished, and a little rueful when Loftus said:

  ‘Not so good. Let’s have your coat, Tim, or we’ll be flooded out.’ He took Tim’s coat and hat into the cloakroom.

  Craigie pushed a telephone away from him, and stood up.

  ‘I still think that the others should have been around,’ Tim said.

  Hammond smiled grimly. ‘They were there, at first. Other things happened, and they couldn’t be in two places at once. Pirani of Shovia arrived at the hotel, and went up to the fifth floor. Mark Errol followed him, and Graham waited outside, to follow any one of our possible suspects. He followed Nassi.’

  Tim raised his eyebrows. ‘Who is Nassi?’

  ‘A San Patino delegate,’ said Hammond. ‘Nassi went out for twenty minutes, and came rushing back—you know about that. He’d been to the telephone, and apparently preferred to use a street kiosk. Graham was busy telling us to get the call checked, because any man who preferred to telephone from outside on a day like this wanted watching.’

  Tim was thawing, in more ways than one.

  ‘I see. Sorry. But when I saw that little fellow...’

  ‘You did everything possible,’ said Craigie, and glanced at Loftus. ‘Bill will tell you that someone else committed suicide on him this morning.’

  Loftus said: ‘Make a job of it, Gordon. I had much less excuse than Tim. But we’ll know in future that hari-kari is a favourite practice among these people.’