Operation Pax by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

being brought here, and I don’t know that I like his going away from here either. I think he had better be killed at once and the body incinerated. See to it, Squire, will you?’
    It is difficult to hear something of this sort said about oneself and not suppose, for some moments at least, that one is simply listening to a rather tasteless joke. Had the full force of the words broken upon Routh at once he would undoubtedly have taken to his heels and run. As it was, he remained, misdoubting and stupefied, during the few seconds in which flight might have availed him. His eye was actually still at the keyhole when that orifice was obscured by what was patently the bulk of Squire advancing to open the door. And Squire, it seemed, was now to be simply his, Routh’s, executioner!
    That men so wicked as these could exist was at once incredible and most horribly plausible. And Routh realized that to be found crouching here would be fatal. It was not merely that the secrets he would be presumed to have overheard must absolutely seal his fate. It was also that in such a situation a passive role is fatal; that to turn the tables upon fortune at such a juncture only action will remotely serve… Routh opened the door before him and marched into the room.
    Squire fell back with an exclamation. Squire’s companion, seated still at his desk, quite feebly echoed it. Routh had undeniably caught his adversaries off balance. The sense of this enabled him to nod briskly at the seated man and to wave Squire casually back. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
    The words came out with nothing of the anxious calculation that had marked his attempt at a similar greeting in the bank that morning. Had he not always known he would carry the big moment when it came? Routh glanced round the room with the easy command of an important person; with the sort of glance that makes enormous leather armchairs propel themselves forward, corks pop, syphons spurt, cigar boxes fly open. ‘Director not here?’ he asked briskly. ‘It’s really with him that I’d better have a word.’
    Squire and his companion glanced at each other. At length the seated man spoke. ‘I don’t know you from Adam,’ he said. ‘And apparently you don’t know me. I am the Director.’
    Routh again gave an assured glance round him. The room went some way to substantiate this false claim. The furniture was handsome, and all round the walls were the sort of heavily tooled books you see in expensive shop windows in the West End. Over the fireplace was a high-class dirty picture: a lot of naked women lolloping around a pool. Underneath this a bright fire burned in an open grate. Routh walked across to it and warmed his hands. ‘Nice place you have here,’ he said. ‘Plenty of books. Nice picture.’
    ‘I fear I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance.’ Squire’s companion was a small man with a high domed forehead and almost no hair. His fine hands still lay passively before him. The rest of him was insignificant and even meagre, as if his body had no other function than that of providing a line of communication between that big brain and those long and powerful fingers. He had bleak grey eyes which he now turned from Routh to Squire. ‘Presumably this is the gentleman whom you supposed that you had – um – accommodated in number eight?’
    ‘Of course it is.’ Squire, who had still by no means recovered his self-possession, stared at his late prisoner with mingled bewilderment and malice. ‘But I can’t think how he managed–’
    ‘We learn that sort of thing very early in my crowd.’ Routh put both hands in his trouser pockets and chinked the few coins in the one without a hole in it. ‘But you had no idea of that, had you, Squire?’
    ‘Your crowd?’ The white-coated man spoke sharply, and as he did so swung round upon Squire. ‘Did I understand you to say that your encounter with this fellow was a perfectly casual one?’
    Before Squire could reply, Routh