The Man With No Face Page 20

  He went around to the south side. Here the windows were set just above head height, and he saw that the shutters on the first of them were not properly closed. Where one half met the other the wood was splintered and broken. He reached up and pulled them open. The steel-framed windows behind them were opened inwards, the glass on one side broken, jagged shards still caught in the frame. Bannerman felt a rush of both excitement and disappointment. Someone had been here before him, though not within the last twelve hours. For there were no tracks in the snow, and it had stopped snowing the night before.

  He stepped back, and on the wall below the window he saw the marks left by the intruder’s boots where they had sought a grip to push him up and into the house. Again he turned and looked out across the fields. Still nothing stirred. He threw his holdall into the house, took another two or three steps back and then ran at the window, jumping to get his hands up over the sill. His soles scraped on the wall below him as he pulled himself up, first straddling the window ledge and then dropping down into the semi-darkness. He crouched for a while, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom.

  The room took shape around him. A small bedroom, sparsely furnished. A bed, a dresser and a short bedside table with a lamp. The sheets had been torn from the bed and discarded on the floor. The pillows and mattresses had been cut open and searched. Horsehair and down lay in clumps all around the bed. The drawers had been pulled from the dresser and piled untidily on top. Bannerman, still squatting on the floor below the window, accepted even then that his trip to Flanders had been a waste of time. Gryffe’s country house had been thoroughly searched. He would find nothing here. He could not even tell when this search had taken place. It might have been yesterday, a week ago, or even a month before Gryffe was murdered. But no! He revised that thought. The broken wood on the shutters was too fresh. Within the last couple of days perhaps.

  He stood up, laden with disappointment, and the glass from the broken pane crunched on the floor beneath his feet. He picked his way across the room and out into the darkness of a short hallway. He fumbled along the wall until he found a light switch. Nothing. The power must be off at the mains. He moved carefully across the hall and opened another door.

  Tiny chinks of sunlight leaked around the edges of the windows where the shutters fitted badly. But they shed enough light to see that this was a big room, windows on two walls. There was a sofa, a working desk, several wall cabinets, bookcases, a coffee table. Two large armchairs and an old wooden rocker stood arranged around a huge open fireplace. The debris of the search was here too. Papers and books, whole drawers and their contents cast carelessly across the floor. Bannerman opened one of the front windows, unhooked the shutters and pushed them out.

  Sunshine streamed in and a rush of fresh, cold air invaded the smell of dust and damp that pervaded the house. A few papers stirred in the breeze. Bannerman stared thoughtfully across the fields towards the road. What had they been after? Had they found it? Who were they? He turned and walked across the room to sit in the rocker. It creaked as he pushed it gently back and forth, and he let his head fall back on the wooden rest. This was a dead end. He could see no way past it. He would seek interviews with Jansen and Lapointe. But even if they would see him, what would they tell him? That they knew nothing, of course. He had given Tait the ammunition he needed to get rid of him, and without a story he had no bargaining power. The future lay ahead like a desert. The words of the drunken Palin came back to him like a bitter reproach. Someday even bastards like you get put out to grass.

  Bannerman sighed and leaned forward on his elbows. The contents of a wicker wastebasket were strewn across the stone slabs of the hearth. Even it had been searched. Bannerman bent down to pick up a crumpled envelope, smoothing it out to look inside. Empty. The stamp was Swiss, the postmark December. He was about to throw it away when he noticed the address. P.O. BOX 139, BUREAU DE POSTE, PLACE DE LA MONNAIE, BRUXELLES. Bannerman frowned. It had almost slipped his notice and its significance did not immediately dawn on him.

  He stared at it for some time before crouching down to search for more envelopes. He found several. All but two were addressed to Gryffe at his London home. The others were addressed to the same PO box number in Brussels. He got up and started looking around the room for more. Within a few minutes he had found seven. All empty. He clutched them in his hand and cursed softly. So Gryffe had been receiving letters which he picked up from a PO box in Brussels. Private correspondence that he didn’t want anyone to know about.

  Bannerman dropped the envelopes on the floor. Whoever had gone through the dead man’s papers had been careful to remove all his letters. But he had overlooked the tell-tale address on the envelopes. If Gryffe had kept a private PO box then he would almost certainly have had a poste restante card. It was just possible that the intruder might have overlooked that too, if it was here. But it had to be. For surely if it had been among his personal possessions in Brussels, du Maurier would have told him.

  It did not occur to him until after nearly an hour of fruitless searching among the chaos in the house that it might be among Gryffe’s things in London. The thought stopped him as suddenly and effectively as if he had walked into a stone wall. He righted the upturned desk chair and slumped into it, hot and frustrated. Through the open window he saw that the sun had become a big red globe hanging over the distant horizon. The room had sunk into a deep pink gloom. He felt drained and disappointed. The card would have given him access to the box. It was just possible that there would still be mail there for Gryffe that had never been collected.

  The drawers down either side of the desk had been pulled out and then not replaced. They lay about the floor where they had been dropped or thrown. Instinctively Bannerman felt under the leaf of the table and found the small round knob of the tray drawer that slides in and out above the top drawer of most office desks. He pulled it out. The card lay in the tray section among a scattering of paper clips and pins. Carefully, Bannerman lifted it out and examined it before slipping it into his jacket pocket and allowing himself a tiny smile. ‘Got you,’ he said softly, and the whisper seemed thunderous in the still of the room.

  He leaned back in the chair then and everything slowed. His thinking, his breathing, even time itself. It would have been impossible to say how long he sat there, allowing time to wash over him.

  He saw a face peering through a misted waiting-room window. A little girl was shouting, but there were no words. She ran towards him, arms outstretched, but she seemed to go through him and was gone. A hand wiped away the mist from the other side of the window and another face appeared. Bannerman tried to see it. There were features: eyes, a nose, a mouth. They were there, and yet he could not discern the face itself.

  He awoke with a start and blinked in the darkness, momentarily confused and a little frightened, until he remembered where he was. He was cold. The room was like ice. Moonlight slanted through the window he had opened. He stood up and found his legs and arms stiff with the cold. He picked up his holdall and stumbled across the room in the darkness to find the door. He crossed the hall and returned to the bedroom he had first entered through the window. Here the moon rising in the south flooded the room with a light that reflected no colour and threw deep shadows across the floor. The sky was a chaos of stars, and frost was already glistening on the snow.

  Bannerman threw his bag out of the window and then pulled himself up on to the sill. A small spot of red light fluttered momentarily on the wood of the architrave beside his head. As he saw it, the architrave split and threw jagged splinters into his face. The crack of a rifle shot echoed away into the night. An owl in a tree just outside the window screeched and flapped off into the dark. For just a moment Bannerman was confused. He drew his hand from his face and saw his fingers running with blood. He had no time to register that someone had just shot at him before he felt another bullet whistle past, no more than two inches from his left cheek, to
smash into the plaster of the wall at the far side of the room. The gap between the two shots might only have been seconds, but it felt like hours. It was the full realization that came with the second shot that brought the fear. He recoiled instinctively and fell backwards from the sill.

  He landed clumsily in the darkness and felt the broken glass from the window cut through his trousers and into his right knee. He rolled clear of it and lay on his back on the floor, listening to his breath coming hard and fast. And there, on the wall, was the same spot of red light, no bigger than a halfpenny. It moved slowly along the broken plaster then vanished. Some kind of infrared sighting device, reinforcing for Bannerman the intent of someone somewhere set on killing him.

  A jumble of thoughts tumbled through his mind. Those that stuck brought no comfort. They were miles from the nearest village. There was no one to hear the shots. He was on his own.

  He turned over and scrambled to his feet, keeping in the shaded part of the room. His hands were shaking, but he felt no pain from his injured face and leg. He searched about the room for something he could hold up at the window. A pillow lay at his feet. It had been cut open and some of its down scattered across the floor. The sniper must have chosen a position that gave him maximum coverage, the south, west and east sides of the house. The north side had to be blind.

  Bannerman thought it out carefully, but he could not bring himself to move. He remained crouched for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes until his teeth began chattering with cold and fear. The perspiration formed like ice on his face. Maybe he could sweat it out until daylight. What was the bastard waiting for? In the silence a twig snapped. It didn’t seem far off. Bannerman’s nerve broke. The yell ripped out from his throat as he threw the pillow up at the window. Almost immediately the rifle cracked in the moonlight beyond and the pillow was flung back in a cloud of feathers. The room seemed filled with them. Bannerman’s indecision was stultifying. Surely he would be safer to hold out. His chances of success in trying to escape across the snow seemed less than remote. And yet he was inexorably drawn to that alternative.

  But the luxury of choice was quickly gone. The first thing he heard was movement in the snow outside, and a small, dark object hurtled through the window and into the room. It clattered across the floor and immediately began issuing a thick vapour that spread quickly in the stillness. Bannerman coughed, tears springing to his eyes as the stink and acrid vapour stung his nostrils and burned his throat. He made a lunge for the door, pulled it open, and stumbled blindly across the hall and into the room opposite.

  There was still a little light here from the window he had left open and the air was fresh and cold. He tripped as he made for the other wall and struck his face on the edge of the desk. The pain filled his head, but the instinct to get out was stronger. He pulled himself up and reached the far wall. His fingers fumbled infuriatingly with the window catch. It seemed to him that he was taking hours to unsnib it and he felt dizziness overtake him. He took long deep breaths to clear his head.

  Finally the window pulled open and he unhooked the shutters to push them out. As he pulled himself up so that he filled the frame it struck him, with a kind of gripping horror that for a second almost paralysed him, that there might be more than one shooter out there. That any moment a man lying in wait to cover the north side of the house would gently squeeze a trigger and snuff him out with a single simple shot. He almost felt it. But it did not come, and he jumped down into the cold and was almost buried in the snow that had drifted against the wall.

  For several seconds he floundered in it before staggering clear of its burning cold and sprinting towards the fence that bounded the house. He felt the friction of icy air on his skin and was aware of fragments of snow flying from his coat as he ran, like sparks in the night. Most of all he felt the crushing vulnerability of being out in the open.

  The dizziness he had shaken off a few moments earlier was returning. He was over the fence now and running across the field as fast as the foot-and-a-half of snow would allow. All the time he was waiting for the bullet in his back. Surely he would fall into the sights of his assailant at any time. He glanced back. He had covered several hundred metres and there was no sign of movement behind him. Ahead, maybe a kilometre or more distant, lay the dark belt of trees he had seen earlier in the day. At least they would provide some kind of cover. And beyond the trees, he knew, there was a village. He had seen the spire.

  But already his strength was waning. The dizziness was intensifying. Perhaps from the gas he had inhaled. Was the snow getting deeper, or was it just that he found it harder to drag his feet through it? He was no longer cold, but burning hot, his face wet and glistening with sweat. And still he pushed on as hard as he could. He might have been running for ever. His lungs and throat on fire, tears streaming from his eyes.

  A drystone wall, three or four feet high, divided the fields ahead of him. Beyond that lay another three hundred metres before he would reach the comparative safety of the trees. The thought was fatal. He slowed to a stagger. About a metre in front of him, fractionally to his right, the red spot appeared as if by magic and began searching the ground. It was strangely elongated. A small plume of snow lifted up from the rest. The sound of the gun followed a fraction of a second after. The red spot zigzagged ahead of him and the second bullet struck the stone of the wall, throwing off splinters in the moonlight. Again the now familiar crack of the rifle.

  He almost fell into the wall, scraping knuckles and tearing fingernails in his eagerness to be over it. A crippling numbness overtook him as he sprawled in the snow on the far side. His heart hammered painfully against his ribs, each breath tearing at the next as his body fought to recover the oxygen it had burned in flight.

  He had no idea how long he lay like this, and he was not sure he cared any longer. He was not hot any more. The cold had crept back. It was wrapping itself around him in a welcome mist of growing unconsciousness. Somewhere in his head a voice was screaming its warning. Don’t let it take you! Keep going, keep going! Don’t succumb to it, it’ll kill you! It took a supreme effort of will for him to roll over and get up on to all fours. He blinked furiously to stop his eyes from closing on him. The lids felt heavy, as though weighted by lead. His fingers found the wall and he pulled himself up so that he was looking back the way he had come. He could see his tracks in the snow as clear as day. He followed their line back several hundred metres until his eyes fell on the dark shape of a man walking towards him. The silhouette stood out vividly against a rich red glow in the sky behind it.

  For some seconds Bannerman was confused. The sun had set some time ago. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes and saw that the house was ablaze. Flames licking fifty feet into the air. Through the glow he could see the black, crumbling frame of the building. Bannerman refocused on his assassin. He was tall and lean and wore a heavy jacket over jeans and thick boots. His rifle was held across his chest and he was moving relentlessly closer. But he was still just a shadow, a shape in the night. He had no face that Bannerman could see. And Bannerman felt hope and life slipping away.

  He slid back down behind the wall and knew that he could not last much longer in the open. He had expended all his reserves and now, if this man with the gun did not finish him off, the cold and the open would. ‘Fuck you!’ he shouted defiantly at the night. But his voice sounded feeble. Keep going, keep going, the other voice in his head was screaming. He heard himself sobbing, but he was on his feet again, though he was not sure how, and staggering towards the trees.

  Afterwards, there was no recollection of how he covered the ground between the wall and the trees. He was certain there’d been no further shots. All he knew was that overhead the protective boughs of many trees spread themselves between him and the stars. He threw his arms around a trunk, the bark scraping his cheek. His legs were liquid. Looking back he could see the man with the rifle no more than twenty metres away, coming through the line
of the trees. Bannerman pushed himself off and felt the ground falling away beneath him. He fell for what seemed like an age, down and down until suddenly all his senses became sharply focused by the ice-cold water that soaked his clothes and burned his flesh. He heard the sound of running water and felt it wash over him. Chunks of snow and stone were rattling down the bank after him. Oh, how easy now just to slip off into blessed unconsciousness. But the shock of the water had brought back some of his awareness, as well as his determination to keep going.

  His fingers scrabbled in the dirt until he found a hold, and he pulled himself clear of the water and clung to the bank. He had never realized how quickly the cold could steal away your will to live.

  A sudden roar filled Bannerman’s ears. For a second the night seemed alive with fire. Then almost as quickly it was over, a softness of earth showering down. The silence that followed was extraordinary. It was the last thing he would later recall with any great clarity. He had no memory at all of how he clawed his way to the top of the bank, and only a broken recollection of seeing the crater among the tree trunks. A whole tree half torn up by its roots. Scorch marks on the surrounding trunks. The remains of the man with the rifle, a white face, wide eyes, sandy hair matted with blood – the rest barely identifiable as human. And all he could remember of the next minutes was the urge to run, and keep running. He had not understood then, or now, what had happened. All he could hear was the voice in his head, glancing back at the trees behind him, the flames of the burned-out house dying in the distance, the sound of his feet dragging through the snow. The fence. The road. And then the lights that came out of a darkness that fell on him like a shroud, stealing him away, at last, into a black unconsciousness.