Dark Side of the Street - Jack Higgins [39]
On the other side of Blackburn, he pulled in at a roadside cafe, found a telephone box and called World Wide Exports in London.
"Hello, sweetie, just thought I'd let you know I checked on our friend and he hadn't managed to come up to scratch. I'm afraid the two packages are on their way to Bampton."
"That's a great pity. What are you doing about it?"
"I closed our account with this branch--seemed no point in carrying on and I can be in Bampton before the merchandise. Thought I'd ensure it gets a suitable reception."
"I'm not certain that's such a good idea. I'd better check. Give me your number and I'll ring back in fifteen minutes."
Vaughan left the phone box, sat on the high stool at the counter and ordered coffee. The young waitress smiled when she gave it to him, impressed by the handsome stranger in the expensive clothes, but Vaughan seemed to look right through her and she moved away feeling rather disappointed.
He lit a cigarette and frowned at himself in the mirror at the back of the counter. It was not that he was remembering what had happened at the farm--he had already dismissed it from his mind as unimportant. He was only interested in what lay ahead, in whether the Baron would decide that he wanted him to dispose of Youngblood and Drummond personally.
Simon Vaughan was thirty-three years of age, the son of a regular army colonel whose wife had deserted him when the boy was eight months old. From then on life had been a long round of other people's houses, boarding schools and army stations abroad for short periods. He had developed into a handsome, smiling boy, strangely lacking in any kind of emotional response to life, but pleasant and popular with everyone.
After Sandhurst he was commissioned into the Parachute Regiment and the first rather unpleasant incident had occurred. Lieutenant Vaughan's fanatical insistence on discipline and hard training had included the use of pack drill to punish those who failed to meet his standards. In spite of the physical collapse of four men and a slashing report from the battalion medical officer, he had escaped with only a reprimand.
In Cyprus he had been awarded the Military Cross for personally killing two EOKA members who had holed up in a farmhouse in a village in the Troodos and had defied all attempts to get them out. He had gone in through the roof and had shot it out at close quarters in a manner which had certainly left no doubts about his personal courage, although the discovery that the two insurgents had only one gun between them had left uneasy doubts in some quarters.
These were finally confirmed when Vaughan, by then a captain, was once again in action, this time in the Radfan Mountains of Southern Arabia playing a savage game of hide-and-seek with dissident Yemeni tribesmen. In an effort to extract information from a Bedouin, Vaughan had pegged him out in the sun and employed methods more popular amongst the tribesmen themselves than the British. The man had died, Vaughan had been relieved of his command and quietly retired to avoid any scandal.
His father, acting on the advice of the army medical authorities, had persuaded him to enter a private institution for rest and treatment, but after two weeks Vaughan walked out, disappearing off the face of the earth as far as his family was concerned.
The psychiatrists had experienced little difficulty in making their diagnosis. Simon Vaughan was a psychopath--a mental cripple, a man who was incapable of any ordinary emotion, who lived outside any moral frame of reference whatsoever. The taking of human life affected him no more than would the crushing of an ant underfoot by any average human being. He was the perfect weapon--a blunt instrument with a brilliant and incisive mind and the work he engaged in for his present employer suited his talents admirably.
A middle-aged woman came into the cafe, ordered a coffee and made for the phone box. Vaughan beat her to it, removing his hat and giving her his most charming smile.
"Would you mind awfully if I asked you to hang on for