The Long Kill Read online

  ‘After over twenty perfect hits, you deserve a miss, don’t you?’ suggested Jacob. ‘You’re overreacting a bit, aren’t you, Jay?’

  ‘It wasn’t the first time. I missed the Chinaman as well,’ said Jaysmith.

  ‘Did you? That was a strange miss, wasn’t it? Straight through the head.’

  ‘He moved. It was his bad luck, my good. I’d noticed some blurring before, on the Austrian job for instance. I’ve been to an optician. He gave it a name, says it’s unimportant, won’t affect any normal use of the eyes. He doesn’t know what I do for a living, of course.’

  ‘I’m pleased about that,’ said Jacob mildly. ‘But if it’s so minor, can’t it be cured? Or corrected? Or perhaps you should change your style, Jay. Get in closer.’

  ‘Closeness kills,’ said Jaysmith coldly. ‘Both ways. You want close work, you’ll have to get yourself someone else. I’m finished, Jacob. That’s my last word.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ said Jacob. ‘I’m sorry, Jay. You were the best I’ve known. The very best. I’m sorry to lose you.’

  ‘And I’m sorry I didn’t say something after the Chinaman. But this job seemed very urgent. More whisky?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jacob. ‘Yes, it was urgent, wasn’t it? But never mind. Win some, lose some, don’t we?’

  His easy tone was a light year away from the barely controlled anger of the voice on the telephone.

  Jaysmith poured the whisky and said casually, ‘I wish I could have left you more time.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Before the deadline was up. Did you manage to arrange anything else?’

  The little monkey face was gloomy.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘And the deadline was firm, was it? Or can it be resited?’

  Jacob shrugged indifferently.

  ‘We’ll have to see, shan’t we?’ he said.

  It was not a satisfactory answer. Pushing harder could be dangerous. Jacob was no fool and very hard to read. Jaysmith wasn’t deceived by the other’s apparent ready acceptance of his reason for quitting. There were plenty of other better reasons, principal among them that he had been bought off, and the first hint of a direct link between himself and Naddle Foot would confirm their worst suspicions.

  But he had to push.

  ‘What is he anyway?’ he asked idly. ‘Political?’

  Jacob put down his glass very gently.

  ‘How strange that you should ask,’ he murmured.

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘Yes. Your first miss in twenty years, and now your first question, Jay.’

  ‘The one triggers off the other perhaps,’ said Jaysmith. ‘I’ve nearly always been able to read in the papers about the targets I’ve hit. It’s not so strange I should feel curious about the one who got away.’

  ‘No? Perhaps not. But I hope retirement isn’t going to make you forget our agreement, Jay. You do remember our agreement, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Jaysmith softly. ‘Like it was yesterday.’ He wasn’t lying. What was vague in his memory was the period immediately after his return to England from Vietnam. Friendless, jobless and in a near-catatonic state, he had lived in a bedsit in Notting Hill, his days spent aimlessly wandering the streets of London and his nights spent roaming the streets of Saigon. His physical injuries had quickly healed, only the long scar on his left cheek remaining as a permanent memento. But his mind bore wounds which refused even to heal into scars. Day or night, the same images flashed in psychedelic competition across his mind – Nguyet’s naked body lying with bloody legs splayed, and Colonel Tai’s head jerking back as the bullet struck. Finally his landlady had called in a doctor, and the doctor had called in a psychiatrist, and Harry Collins had found himself sitting in a quiet, dimly lit room, describing all that had happened, all that he felt.

  He remembered little of this in detail, except the last few questions.

  ‘Do you regret shooting Colonel Tai?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yet you shot him to avenge the girl’s death, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you believe that revenge might bring you peace?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it hasn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So hitting Colonel Tai was pointless.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘What then?’

  And now he had stood up and spoken with a quiet intensity more powerful far than any shouting.

  ‘It wasn’t enough, that’s all. He should have died harder. Or there should have been more. The world is full of them, full of Colonel Tais, murdering, torturing, corrupting, betraying. There are too many, too many, too many!’

  The man had given him a tablet. After he took it, he fell asleep. When he awoke he was lying on a bed and once more Jacob was at the bedside.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was worried about you, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Because I didn’t get killed, as you expected! Because I might start talking?’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Jacob. ‘I did expect you to get killed. But you were cleverer than I realized, weren’t you? That was a fine shot, by the way. One of the finest I’ve known, in the circumstances. You did extremely well.’

  ‘Did I? I survived, that’s true. Though I don’t know why. And I’ve talked!’

  His voice rose triumphantly.

  ‘Yes, I know. We had to keep an eye on you, of course. Guilt feelings can lead to very embarrassing behaviour, can’t they? But there was nothing of guilt in your outpourings, I gather. Just a desire to carry on the good work. Would you like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘To carry on the good work, of course,’ murmured Jacob.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.

  And Jacob told him.

  ‘One step at a time, at first,’ he concluded. ‘You’d never be under pressure from me. We’d supply all necessary equipment, of course. And money.’

  ‘I don’t want money.’

  ‘You’d have to live,’ insisted Jacob. ‘You’d have to be comfortable, you’d have to be fit. Think about it.’

  He’d thought about it. The idea had occupied his mind to the exclusion of all else, including the streets of Saigon.

  Jacob came back.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’d need to be sure of this. I’d need to be sure that these – what do you call them? – targets deserve to die as Colonel Tai deserved it. I’d need to know all about them …’

  ‘No,’ said Jacob simply.

  ‘No?’

  ‘You mustn’t know anything more than is necessary to target them,’ said Jacob. ‘Believe me, that is best. But I’ll make an agreement with you. I won’t give you any sermon about patriotism or the national interest, but I’ll guarantee this. I’ll never give you a target who is not as guilty as Tai. And your part of the bargain is that you never ask questions. And never talk, of course. Are we agreed?’

  He had nodded and Jacob had shaken his hand.

  ‘One more thing. Harry Collins is dead. We need to start you again from scratch. Think of a name.’

  He had replied impatiently. ‘Smith. John Smith.’

  ‘It’s a little nondescript.’

  ‘All right. Winston Churchill.’

  Jacob sighed.

  ‘I prefer John Smith. J. Smith. No, I have it. Jaysmith. One word. An English compromise. From now on you may be many people, but to me you are Jaysmith. Jacob and Jaysmith. They march well together, don’t you think?’

  And so he had been rechristened.

  And three months after the christening, from the top of a tall building in Istanbul he had fired the shot which had been his confirmation.

  And now it was over.

  Or would have been if he hadn’t met a slim, dark woman with more sorrow in her eyes than her heart deserved to know.

  ‘No, retirement doesn’t end our agreement, Jay,’ repeated Jacob. ‘But I will tell you
this, as a retirement gift. This man that you missed, I would say that he deserved to die more than any other target I’ve ever given you.’

  He spoke with surprising vehemence.

  ‘That sounds more like a reproach than a gift,’ said Jaysmith.

  ‘It was not intended to,’ said Jacob, rising.

  He held out his hand. It felt dry and cold.

  ‘Good luck, Jay,’ he said. ‘Take care, won’t you?’

  ‘I will.’

  One last glance around the room, and Jacob was gone. He had shown no curiosity about Jaysmith’s plans. More curiously, he had made no real attempt to probe into his reasons for retiring. At the very least, Jaysmith had expected that his visit to the optician and the man’s diagnosis would be carefully checked. Perhaps it had been already, but he doubted it. He’d picked the man at random and made the appointment in person. This could mean that Jacob was certain he had been turned, which was not a healthy state to be in.

  There was a tap at the door and he started like a nervous schoolgirl in an empty house.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called.

  ‘It’s Adam.’

  Carefully he opened the door.

  The orange-haired glue-sniffer stood there. He wore an earring and light-grey eye make-up. He was probably in his twenties but could have passed for seventeen. His voice was soft and well-educated.

  ‘Jacob sent me back,’ he said. ‘He forgot to ask the address of your optician.’

  Jaysmith took the notepad from the telephone table and scribbled the address. When he handed it over, the youth didn’t move but said shyly, ‘Davey didn’t want me to come back, Mr Jaysmith. He knows how much I’ve always admired you.’

  Jaysmith was taken aback.

  ‘Admired me? You don’t know me!’

  Adam flushed rather becomingly and said, ‘I’m sorry; I meant your record, you know. The way you do things. Always so smooth. Always such long shots. I know how difficult that is. I shoot a bit myself.’

  Is this my successor? wondered Jaysmith.

  ‘Save it for the fairground,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘It’s been a real pleasure meeting you,’ said the youth, discomfited.

  Jaysmith glowered at him till he closed the door. The young man’s apparent adulation had been very disturbing, not so much for its undoubted homosexual dimension (which was no doubt why the bearded Davey objected) but in terms of simple hero-worship. To be a hero because he could, or once could, blow a man’s brains out from a mile away was not something he felt proud of.

  He went to bed that night wrestling with the problem of how to interpret what Jacob had said about Bryant. Did his vehemence about the solicitor’s deserving to die spring from frustration that the deadline was past and he would now be allowed to live? Or was it a hint that the target-order would be re-activated?

  He fell into an uneasy sleep in which inevitably he squatted high on the fellside overlooking Naddle Foot and when he raised the A.R.T. to his eye, the face that sprang towards him was once again Anya’s.

  He woke up. It was four AM. He got up and began packing. He didn’t want to be here and there was nothing more to keep him.

  He left by a rear entrance which took him over a couple of walls and down a narrow passage into Greek Street. He saw no sign of Adam with the coxcomb or Davey with the beard; but Jacob would not be short of well-trained watchers if he felt that his lost protégé was still worth watching. When he got to the BMW, he took it on a serpentine route to the south and west out of Central London.

  It wasn’t till he was completely satisfied there was no tail that he made for the M1 and headed north.

  It looked lighter up there already.

  Chapter 10

  At one o’clock on Saturday afternoon he was sitting in the bracken high above the road which ran past Naddle Foot, eating a cheese sandwich. He could see the main gate about five hundred yards away, and his binoculars hung ready round his neck.

  At one-thirty there was movement. A car came down the long curving drive. It wasn’t Anya’s little Fiat but the old Rover that Bryant drove. The gate was closed and the car stopped to let Jimmy out to open it. He was dressed in jeans and a lumberjack’s jacket with a blue and white scarf round his neck. Jaysmith moved his binoculars to focus on the car. Bryant was at the wheel with Anya beside him. She was watching her son and saying something to Bryant and laughing at his reply. Jaysmith’s throat constricted with pleasure at the sight of her, but another part of his mind was noting that this was the perfect ambusher’s situation – a car halted while an obstacle is removed, a stationary target strapped down with a seat belt – and his binocular’s focus went slithering wildly up the fellside even though his rationality assured him that Jacob could hardly have got another operative in the field since last night. In any case, the car was now moving. He watched it out of sight, gave it another half-hour to account for an unexpected return to pick up something forgotten, then began to descend.

  His first key fitted perfectly, but the second wouldn’t turn. He removed it, sprinkled some French chalk on it and inserted it again. A couple of minutes’ work with his file smoothed away the impediment and he was in. The third key was the crucial one. This was the one to turn off the burglar alarm during the short period of grace given to the householder after opening the front door. There would be no time for adjustment. If this didn’t work first time, there’d be bells clamouring up the valley and probably a demanding buzz sounding in Keswick police station.

  He opened the control box, inserted the key and turned it gently. There was some resistance. He increased the pressure. At last there was a satisfying click.

  He waited another whole minute to be quite sure, then he started his search. He had little hope of success for he had no idea what he was looking for, nor what he might do with it if he found it. But in the complete absence of any other plan, it seemed that the most productive thing he could do was to attempt to find out why it was that Bryant had been targeted.

  He started with Bryant’s study which was downstairs. It was at the same time an old-fashioned study with a leather-topped partner’s desk and shelves packed with books of all sizes and ages, and a modern office with an electric typewriter, aluminium filing cabinets and a small photocopier.

  He began to search thoroughly and professionally. At the end of an hour he knew that Bryant was writing a history of Poland from its revival as an independent republic under Pilsudski in 1918 to the present day, that he was a methodical and conscientious researcher who left no stone unturned, no fact uncross-indexed, and that his researches had taken him into most major British and European libraries, including those in Poland itself.

  But how any of this could have put him on Jacob’s target list was not apparent.

  He paused, discouraged. Then he recalled his imaginings as he watched Anya and Bryant sitting together in the car, laughing at Jimmy’s antics as he opened the gate. He thought of a bullet smashing the windscreen and driving splinters of glass deep into Anya’s face and eyes; perhaps even, if his successor was inefficient, or had failing eyesight, the bullet itself burning through her flesh and bone.

  He had to know what was going on. Only then could he decide how to handle it. At the moment the only other plan he could think of was to get Anya out of the way and let Jacob get on with having Bryant killed, if he so desired. But, practicalities apart, the implications revolted him.

  He returned to his search.

  The bedroom was even less helpful than the study, its one potential source of information being inaccessible. This was a wall safe behind a print of a horsemarket by someone called Michalowski. He spun the dial a couple of times, hoping to hit the combination by serendipity. He expected nothing, and was right. Then it occurred to him that a man like Bryant, sharp enough to retain a number in his mind, was probably also sharp enough to know that the passing years could imperceptibly blunt even the sharpest memory. Also modern life had multiplied the number of numbers a man needed to h
ave on instant recall.

  An aide-memoire was the answer. He tried to think as Bryant might think. Where better for numbers than among numbers?

  He went downstairs to the telephone in the hall. There was a book of addresses and numbers by it. He looked through it hopelessly. Any one of these names could be fictitious. At the back was a list of emergency and tradesmen numbers. Doctor, dentist, water, gas, electricity, police, garage …

  He paused and went through into the kitchen. He had only been in here once before but his memory had served him well. What was a house without gas doing with a gas board number?

  He noted it down and went upstairs. He tried it out in various ways. Backwards proved right. The door clicked open.

  His self-congratulation did not last long. The safe contained very little: a British passport and a small bundle of letters. He looked in the passport. Bryant was well travelled, presumably on his research trips. There were several entry stamps for Poland. But there was nothing at all for almost a year.

  The letters were in Polish with no address. They were signed Ota. Jaysmith’s smattering of Polish suggested they were letters from a close friend, perhaps even love letters, but he would need a lot more time and a Polish dictionary to make real sense out of them. They were in envelopes with a single ‘S’ scrawled on the outside. The only clue to their means of arrival was a larger envelope with Bryant’s name and address on it. This was postmarked Manchester. Inside he found a sheet of paper again without any address and a brief scrawl which read I’ll be going again in the autumn. I’ll get in touch. It was signed Anton.

  He took the letters downstairs and returned to the study. There was paper in the photocopier. He switched it on, then carefully copied the letters. After resetting the counter to zero, he returned to the address book by the telephone. Carefully he went through it. There was only one address in Manchester, and it belonged to someone called Anton Ford. He noted it down, went back upstairs, replaced the letters and shut the safe.

  Now he started on the rest of the house. It was distressing to go through Anya’s room, but his natural thoroughness demanded it. It surprised him. In design and decor it was very much the room of, say, an eighteen-year-old. Then it occurred to him that it must have been her room till she was married and had probably been left untouched till her return after her widowing.