The Thousand Faces of Night - Jack Higgins [55]
Marlowe moistened his lips. 'Get to the point, Faulkner. What do you want?'
'Oh, come now, old man. Don't let's be naive.'
'I found some blood on the kitchen floor,' Marlowe said. 'Who got hurt. It wasn't the girl, was it?'
Faulkner made an expression of distaste. 'No, it was your Jamaican pal. I'm afraid he didn't quite see eye to eye with us. Butcher had to persuade him a little. But don't worry. He's doing nicely.'
'And the girl?' Marlowe said.
'Oh, she's all right,' Faulkner assured him. 'At the moment, anyway. I'm given to understand you have quite an interest there, old man.'
'Who told you that?' Marlowe croaked.
'Never mind for the moment,' Faulkner said. 'For the young lady's sake I sincerely hope it's true. You'll find us at a place called Garvald Mill about four miles out of Litton. It's just off the Birmingham road. If you're not here within an hour with the twenty thousand, I'll turn the girl over to Harris. You know what he's like where young women are concerned.'
'Faulkner, wait a minute. Listen to me,' Marlowe shouted.
He was wasting his time. There was a slight click and the line went dead.
11
For several moments Marlowe stood holding the receiver to his ear and then he slowly replaced it in its cradle. He went out of the front door and ran across the farmyard, splashing through the heavy rain and not caring.
The ladder was still in position against the loft. For a moment he looked up at it and then he started to climb. The Gladstone bag was exactly where he had left it, and he pulled it from under the old cricket net and climbed quickly down to the ground.
He walked back to the house through the rain, the bag swinging in his right hand, and tried to work out his next move. When he went into the sitting-room he emptied the bag on the table and sat down in a chair and lit a cigarette.
The bundles of notes almost covered the table-top, and one or two had fallen down on to the floor. He stared at them, his heart thudding, and after a while an ironic laugh escaped from his lips. It was really very funny when you considered it. All the years, the long, hard years in the place with the high walls. The grey morning filtering in through the tiny window on to his face, the hopeless queues of men slopping out, the bad food, the squalor, the vice, the rottenness. All these things he had endured and one thing had kept him going. The knowledge that some day he would be free and with enough money to keep him comfortably for the rest of his life.
A man could live very well in a country like Ireland with twenty thousand pounds behind him. He sighed and laughed again. Yes, it was really rather ironic that in the end he should sacrifice all that for a young girl he'd known for a few days only.
He stood up and began to put the money back into the bag. He had tried to pretend to himself for a while that he had a choice, but deep inside he had known that there was only one choice for him. The veneer of toughness, the brutality he had raised like a fence around him during the years against life, could not help him now. He was faced with a simple human problem. It could be solved in one way only. By a sacrifice on his part.
He snapped the bag shut and pushed it on one side. He remembered having seen a map of the district in the sideboard, and he went and got it and spread it out on the table. As he pored over it he felt curiously light-hearted. It was a sensation he found impossible to analyse, even to himself.
Garvald Mill was clearly marked on a side road about a quarter of a mile off the main Birmingham road just outside Litton. He found an old stub of blue pencil in the table drawer, and he drew a circle around the mill and considered the situation.
It was situated on the bank of a stream and the area was heavily wooded. He frowned and went to the sideboard and poured himself a brandy. If it had been a simple matter of going and handing over the money it would have been all right, but Butcher and Harris were there as well. Faulkner was all right in his own twisted way. He did have some