Touchfeather Read online

  ‘Where did you put the car?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Usual place,’ said Hank. Then he looked across at me. I had already got Jack tagged as a looker, but Hank didn’t seem that way at all. There was an animal quality about him that made me think he was going to need a lot more than a look to satisfy him. He turned back to Jack and I noticed that he was carrying a coil of thin rope.

  ‘Shall we start?’ he said.

  ‘Might as well,’ said Jack.

  He got to his feet and both men came across towards me.

  ‘On your feet, darling,’ said Jack. I stood up.

  ’Take off your dress.’ I hesitated a moment and Jack hit me again. The next time he asked me, I did as I was told. I stepped out of my dress and stood holding it, wondering what I could do with it. Hank took it from me and threw it across the room casually.

  ‘Sit down, darling.’ I sat down again and, as ordered, placed my arms along the arms of the chair. In forty-five seconds Hank had me tied securely, my arms to the chair arms, and my legs to the legs of the chair. For good measure, he passed a couple of loops round my waist and finally secured the rope at the back of the chair, which they had dragged away from the wall. Jack was reasonably happy; he could look to his heart’s content. My legs were spread to each chair leg, and my bra and pants were chic, but hardly conducive to concealment. Hank had started to colour up a bit and breathe harder than normal.

  ‘Take her brassière off,’ he said.

  Jack moved round to the back of the chair and started to grope for the hooks. I pressed my back against the chair, making it as difficult as possible for him without trying to look too uncooperative. And then Hank started talking obscenities, spewing them forth in an endless stream that made me feel cold and sick. He paused only long enough for Jack to explain what it was all about.

  ‘It’s like this, darling,’ he said from behind me. ‘You spent a couple of days with your boyfriend before we got hold of him. We want to know what went on between you.’

  ‘Bill?’ I’d almost forgotten Bill temporarily.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jack. ‘Bill. Now he must have given you something apart from a good time. Or told you something?’

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about, and I told them so.

  ‘He must have talked about his work. He must have given you something to look after for him. A little package perhaps?’

  ’Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, darling, don’t be difficult. We’ve got all the time in the world.’

  ‘I told you it was a waste of time,’ said Hank suddenly. ‘All he gave her was a roll in the hay. Pretty good roll, too, I’d reckon.’ He was looking at me like someone looks at a piece of meat on a slab.

  ‘Did he tell you he gave me anything?’ I asked, trying to get Hank’s mind off what it was dwelling on.

  ‘He didn’t tell us anything,’ said Jack. ‘Someone got clumsy.’

  I jerked my head round, trying to see him behind me. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The big fellow—you remember the big fellow. He lets his enthusiasm run away with him at times. He starts to enjoy himself too much, and before you can stop him he’s gone too far.’

  ‘Bill’s dead,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question. I think I’d known it all along.

  ‘He’s as dead as anyone I’ve ever seen,’ said Jack. ‘Ain’t that so, Hank?’

  Hank nodded and grinned. ‘Never seen anything like it before,’ he said. ‘And I’ve seen it all.’

  ‘So be a good darling,’ said Jack. ‘Tell us all about your boyfriend. What he told you, what he gave you, and who he told you to deliver it to.’

  I explained again that Bill had told me or given me nothing that could be of the slightest interest to either them or anyone else. Hank was inclined to believe me, but not Jack. But all Hank really wanted was his kicks, and he started on again about what he was going to do with me. Jack gave up trying to undo my bra from the back and, moving round to the front, he stuck his hand between the cups and jerked hard. It was a good bra, but it wasn’t designed to stand up to that sort of treatment.

  Jack sucked in his breath suddenly and even Hank shut up for a second. Then he got busy with his hands and I started to feel sick. I tried to separate the conscious from the subconscious and retreat into the latter. I tried to think about nice things, normal things like Hyde Park and the Albert Hall. I almost succeeded, too. Then Hank stopped using his hands and Jack lit a thin brown cigarette. He puffed at it a couple of times so that I would get the full message. What he did next sent me skidding off to hell and gone.

  When I came round I was alone. A squint down at my chest showed me that I had grown another nipple, an angry red mark an inch away from its more conventional partner.

  I tried not to, I really did, but when someone has hurt you and there is no one around to see your shame, you can’t help crying. At least, I can’t. The tears welled up and spilled over. But they were tears of anger as much as anything else, anger at myself for doing something that could go so far wrong as to put me where I was now. If it had been my own fault I wouldn’t have felt so bad, but it wasn’t, and the absolute bloody injustice of it all brought on a fresh onslaught of tears. But I’m a practical sort of girl, and while shedding tears can be a comfort at times, they don’t really serve any useful purpose. If I didn’t want a fourth nipple I was going to have to get out of there before my two chums returned.

  The rope was pretty well tied, but not so well that there wasn’t sufficient slack to allow me a fractional movement of my right arm. If I sucked in my tummy I loosened the turn that Hank had made round my middle, giving me enough extra slack that I was able to work along to the arm. Never tie anyone with one coil of rope, Bessie had always said. Divide the rope and use a separate piece for each limb. She was right, because after three minutes I had wriggled the looseness in the rope sufficiently far along the arm of the chair to try and slip my right arm out from under. It didn’t work for a couple more minutes as the rope kept snagging on the more intricate carvings in the wood. But finally I managed to pull a badly grazed arm from beneath the rope and, sixty seconds later, I was on my feet, climbing into my dress.

  My bra was useless, but I don’t think I could have managed to wear it with that burn. Anyway, this was Italy and, according to Sophia Loren movies, no one in Italy wears bras.

  There wasn’t a sound from upstairs, but that meant nothing. I looked around for some sort of weapon, but the best I could come up with was one of the chair arms, which I managed to detach with a couple of judicious kicks. I now had to make the decision whether to wait for them to come downstairs again or go up and find them. I chose the latter.

  The door at the bottom was open and I prided myself that a mouse couldn’t have moved up those stairs quieter than I did. As my head came level with the ground floor, I risked a peep over the top. The place seemed empty and it was dark outside. I came up the remainder of the stairs and moved quickly over to the window that looked out onto the street. I ducked back immediately as a swathe of light suddenly bathed the window and I heard the engine of a car. They’d come back for me.

  I moved behind the door and waited, praying that one of them would stay with the car. One of them did. The door opened, with me behind it. As it started to close again, I saw Hank at the same time that he saw me. I would have preferred Jack, because my breast still hurt like hell, but he would come later. To give him credit, Hank didn’t bat an eyelid when he saw me. The only part of him that moved was his right hand, streaking under his jacket. But he really didn’t stand a chance. Kicking the door completely shut, I hit him with the arm of the chair across the side of the head. I hit him so hard that the chair arm broke. His feet left the ground completely and he landed on his face six feet away.

  Without looking at the mess I had made of him, I fished out the gun from the waistband of his trousers and checked it over. It was a forty-five automatic, as large as a tank and about as pow
erful. I moved over to the window and peered out towards the car. Jack was behind the wheel, waiting. There was a sudden flare of light as he lit a cigarette, so there was no indication that he knew anything had gone wrong. I waited to allow the time that Hank would have needed to go downstairs and fetch me. Then, holding the gun in both hands behind my back, I moved over to the door and kicked it open. As I stepped out into the street I turned back towards the doorway.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to shove.’

  Apparently satisfied, Jack leaned across the back and opened the nearside rear door.

  ‘Come on, darling,’ he said.

  I put one foot inside the car and then showed him the gun, practically shoving it up his nose. I suppose he thought that, because I was a girl, I wouldn’t use it. That’s happened to me before. He took one second to make up his mind. Then he went for his own gun. There really was no alternative; there wasn’t sufficient room to swing back and hit him, and I could hardly have turned tail and run. So I shot him.

  SEVEN

  ‘You realise, Miss Touchfeather, that it was an extremely unwise thing to have done?’ said Mr. Blaser.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t have time to weigh the pros and cons.’

  He looked at me steadily for a moment. He was absolutely livid. That much I had learned from Miss Moody before coming into the office. And, when he was angry, Mr. Blaser could be a very unpleasant man indeed. He didn’t shout, or even raise his voice, but he could send you out on an assignment that could have easily been done by a disinterested girl guide and then proceed to forget you until he felt you had done sufficient penance.

  On one occasion, when I had displeased him, he assigned me to keep an eye on a pilot who flew for some outlandish airline, possessing two Dakotas and a war surplus Avro Anson. We flew between what used to be called the Gold Coast and one of the offshore islands. The temperature never dropped below 96 degrees and the passengers always brought their goats along with them. He kept me on that little job for eight straight weeks, during which time the man I was supposed to be watching chased me from dusk to dawn. Fortunately they’d never heard of an automatic pilot, or I’d have been running all day as well. But before Mr. Blaser consigned you to hell and beyond, he invariably dissected the operation that had displeased him, holding up for examination what he considered your errors, so that you could identify them and not make the same mistake next time.

  We had covered the whole thing once and we were halfway through the second time around. I had tipped the unfortunate Jack out of the car and driven back to Rome where I had contacted Signor Bertelli. I told him that he had better get busy disposing of one dead and one near-dead foreigner, whom I had left in some village I didn’t even know the name of. By the time he had finished his work, I was halfway back to London, and it wasn’t until I saw Mr. Blaser that I learned that Jack had been found per schedule, but that Hank had disappeared, leaving nothing behind him other than a couple of pints of blood. In spite of Bertelli’s connections, which were considerable, Jack was proving quite a problem to bury discreetly, and this was just one of the things that Mr. Blaser was miffed about. There were a lot more.

  ‘Am I actually to understand, Miss Touchfeather, that you became on intimate terms with Professor Partman?’

  ‘You are, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Completely intimate?’

  ‘As complete as possible.’

  ‘And am I to understand that this intimacy was not confined to the merely physical?’

  ‘If you mean did I fall in love with Professor Partman, yes, I did.’

  He shook his head. ‘I really don’t know what to make of you, Miss Touchfeather.’

  He was a loathesome old hypocrite. If I had gone to bed with Bill purely in the line of duty, he would have been happy. That was one of the reasons he employed good-looking birds. But because I’d committed the unpardonable sin of enjoying it, he was all set to roast me over a slow fire.

  ‘We will go into the deeper implications, insofar as they affect your status here, later,’ he went on pompously. ‘But more important at the moment is to try to judge how much they may have learned from Professor Partman.’

  ’Nothing,’ I said flatly.

  ‘You sound very sure.’

  ‘If Bill...if Professor Partman had told them what they wanted, there would have been no need for them to pick me up in Rome. My abduction was a last-ditch attempt to rectify an error.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Mr. Blaser.

  ‘Having killed Professor Partman through...’ I recalled Jack’s words. ‘...through over-enthusiasm, they staked everything on the fact that he might have talked to me about his work or, better still, given me something to look after for him.’

  ‘And had he?’

  ‘No, sir, because there was nothing to give. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Professor Partman went to Bombay solely to read his papers at the University. The fact a man was fished out of the sea there a couple of weeks ago is a complete coincidence. Fortunately for all concerned, Bill Partman died before they extracted from him the information they were after.’ I became a little wet eyed stating it so baldly, but it was something I was going to have to learn to live with.

  Mr. Blaser still wasn’t happy. ‘You didn’t actually see Professor Partman die, did you?’

  ‘No, sir. But I saw the Eunuch do something to him and I saw him covered in blood. Fortunately I had to get on the aircraft immediately after that, so I was spared the rest.’

  He looked at me as though he didn’t consider it fortunate at all. ‘This American you were misguided enough to shoot. Have you been able to pick him out of the files?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So the only identifiable person in the whole mess is the... er... Eunuch.’

  ‘Yes, sir, and it was Signor Bertelli who picked him out. I still don’t know who he is.’

  ’You haven’t been doing your homework, Miss Touchfeather,’ he said nastily. By homework, he was referring to the loads of bumph we were supposed to wade through in our spare time. It included, among other things, items from various intelligence units spread throughout the world and a rogues’ gallery of photographs of the most wanted and dangerous individuals. But spare time was something he hadn’t allowed me much of in the past few months and I’d let my reading slip behind.

  ‘I’ll rectify it, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Do, Miss Touchfeather. If you had known his identity from the outset we might have been saved considerable trouble.’

  I failed to see how. Even if I had known who the bald man was, I had hardly been in a position to do anything about it. But there didn’t seem to be any point in mentioning it, so I kept quiet.

  ‘You feel, then, that in the circumstances, we can mark the Partman file as closed?’ he asked. That was all it meant to him, a file to be marked closed and shoved away in a dusty cabinet.

  ‘Yes, sir, I do.’

  ‘Are you sure there is nothing you have forgotten?’ I shook my head. ‘You disappoint me, Miss Touchfeather.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, sir. May I ask why?’

  ‘Think back, Miss Touchfeather. Think back.’ I thought back and could only see Bill, not as I had last seen him, but as I had first seen him, getting on the aircraft, when I had tried to turn him out of his seat.

  ‘No, sir, there’s nothing... Wait a minute! Yes, there is.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Mr. Blaser, as though I had just discovered the Holy Grail.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You can’t mark the file closed.’

  ‘Why not?’ he prompted.

  ‘Because of the man you fished out of the sea. If Professor Partman wasn’t the leak from his unit, then the leak still exists.’

  ’Bravo, Miss Touchfeather. Bravo. And...?’

  ‘They’ve tried twice. It’s reasonable to assume that they will try a third time.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mr. Blaser. He nearly smiled, but only nearly. Still, it was his p
roblem, and I didn’t volunteer anything further. ‘Fortunately that problem now shifts out of our hands,’ he said. ‘I told you before that the Gerastan Corporation wanted Professor Partman’s unit to work in the United States. With Professor Partman no longer alive, there doesn’t seem to be any obstacle in the way of that any longer. I imagine the entire unit will be leaving the country within the next six or seven days.’

  ‘Is there any point? Professor Partman is dead.’

  He smiled nastily. ‘I’m aware that you are biased, Miss Touchfeather. But Professor Partman was not the be-all and end-all of the unit. Research is a joint effort and, while he may have been the guiding light, I imagine that his work will continue very well without him.’

  If someone had handed me a knife and told me I could stick it in either Mr. Blaser or the Eunuch, I think at that moment I’d have chosen Mr. Blaser. Then he shifted to the area I was dreading. It was no good my telling him that I wouldn’t have behaved the way I did if Bill had been guilty as suspected; he would never give me credit for being a sufficiently good judge of character. All he could see was that I had become emotionally involved with a man who could have turned out to be a traitor and worse.

  ‘What would you have done, Miss Touchfeather, had you subsequently discovered that what we believed of Professor Partman was true? For instance, what if I had asked you to kill him?’

  ‘I would have killed him,’ I said. ‘As long as I was sure that he was guilty.’

  ‘As long as you were sure?’ I nodded my head reluctantly. ‘Regardless of what I told you?’ Right again. ‘Well, at least you’re honest,’ he said, as though it were a dirty word. ‘I think it’s about time you took some leave.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. The thought of having to take leave right then made me go quite cold, but if that was what Mr. Blaser had in mind, there was nothing I could do about it. Then he pitched me a lifeline.

  ‘I can take you off all duties, or you can keep flying. Whichever you prefer.’

  I grabbed the line he was offering me. ‘I’ll keep flying,’ I said quickly.