The Savage Day - Jack Higgins [34]
It was unexpectedly large but quite dilapidated, and the paved section at the foot of the verandah steps was badly overgrown with grass and weeds of every description.
As I got out of the van, thunder rumbled overhead, a strange, menacing sound and the sky went very dark, so that standing there in the clearing amongst the trees, it seemed as if the day was drawing to a close and darkness was about to fall.
I went up the steps and knocked on the front door which stood slightly ajar. 'Heh, Meyer, are you there?' I called cheerfully.
There was no reply, but when I pushed the door wide, Al Bowlly sounded faintly and rather eerily from somewhere at the rear of the house.
The song he was singing was When that man is dead and gone, a number he's reputed to have dedicated to Adolf Hitler. It was the last thing he ever recorded, because a couple of weeks later he was killed by a bomb during the London Blitz.
None of which was calculated to make me feel any happier as I moved in and advanced along a dark, musty corridor, following the sound of the music.
The door at the far end stood wide and I paused on the threshold. There were french windows on the far side, curtains partially drawn so that the room was half in darkness. Meyer sat in a chair beside a table on which the cassette tape-recorder was playing.
'Heh, Meyer,' I said. 'What in the hell are you up to?'
And then I moved close enough to see that he was tied to the chair. I tilted his chin and his eyes stared up at me blankly, fixed in death. His cheeks were badly blistered, probably from repeated application of a cigarette-lighter flame. There was froth on his lips. He'd had a bad heart for some time now. It seemed pretty obvious what had happened.
Poor old Meyer. To escape the Gestapo by the skin of his teeth so young and all these years later to end in roughly the same way. And yet I was not particularly angry, not filled with any killing rage, for anger stems from frustration and I knew, with complete certainty, that Meyer would not go unavenged for long.
The door slammed behind me as I had expected and when I turned, Tim Pat Keogh was standing there, flanked by two hard-looking men in reefer coats who both held revolvers in their hands.
'Surprise, surprise,' Tim Pat said and he laughed. 'This just isn't your day, Major.'
'Did you have to do that to him?' I asked.
'A tough old bastard, I'll give him that, but then I wanted him to tell me where those firing pins were and he was stubborn as Kelly's mule.'
One of his friends came forward and ran his hands over me so inexpertly that I could have taken him and the gun in his hand in any number of ways, but there was no need.
He moved back, slipping his gun in his pocket, and the three of them faced me. 'Where's Binnie, then, Major?' Tim Pat demanded. 'Did you lose him on the way?'
The french windows swung in with a splintering crash, the curtains were torn aside and Binnie stood there, crouching, the Browning ready in his left hand.
There was a sudden silence, the one curtain remaining fluttered in the wind, rain pattered into the room. Thunder rumbled on the horizon of things.
Binnie said coldly, 'Here I am, you bastard.'
Tim Pat's breath went out of him in a dying fall. 'Well, would you look at that now?'
One of the other two men was still holding his gun. Binnie extended the Browning suddenly, the revolver dropped to the floor, the hands went up.
'What about Mr Meyer?'
'Look for yourself.' I pulled Meyer's head back.
A glance was enough. The boy's eyes became empty, devoid of all feeling for a moment, the same look as on that first night in Belfast, and then something moved there, some cold spark, and the look on his face was terrible to see.
'You did this?' he said in a strange dead voice. 'In the name of Ireland?'
'For God's sake, Binnie,' Tim Pat protested. 'The ould bugger wouldn't open his mouth. Now what in the hell could I do?'
Binnie's glance flickered once again to Meyer, the man with his hands raised dropped to one knee