The Golden Horns. John Burke
leaned forward and flicked a switch. The breathless voice of Zoe Peters crackled with a hollow note in the speaker.
“Yes, Mr. Logan?”
“Is Miss Dane in?”
“She’s just brought those slides in for Mr. Marston. They’re going over them together.”
“Ask her to come in, will you?”
David Logan sat back in his chair the shape of his head making a lean, devilish silhouette against the brightness outside the window.
There was a brief silence. It was broken by the slight click of the door
Martin looked round; and got up.
“This is my secretary, Miss Dane,” Logan was saying. “Carol, this is Mr. Slade, who promises some startling revelations about the Clifford murder. Have you got a note pad for the salient points?”
Carol Dane shook hands with Martin, flipped open a small pad, and slid gracefully into a chair in the corner of the room. One slim, nylon-sleek leg was crossed over the other. Her honey-blonde head bowed over the pad, and then lifted as she glanced inquiringly at Martin.
David Logan said: “Well, Mr. Slade? Let’s have it from the beginning. The whole thing. Then tell me what you want me to do…and I’ll tell you if I’m prepared to do it.”
Martin told him. He started with the call from Henning Holtesen, and reached the incident of the blow he had received on the head. Then he paused for a moment, sorting out details in his mind.
“You’ve no idea who attacked you?” Logan prompted.
“None at all. When I came round, I felt so sick that it took me quite a time to get myself straightened out. Then I checked up on the flat. Nothing had been stolen, but the whole place had been turned upside down. No….” He frowned, anxious to be exact. “That’s not quite true. My cases—the cases I’d just brought back from Denmark—had been literally torn apart. Everything had been taken out, and the hinges were wrenched off. It looked as though it had been done in a fit of fury. But someone might have been looking for a false side to the case or something of that sort.”
“And the rest of the flat? That had been treated in the same way?”
Martin shook his head. “Not quite the same. It had been turned out but rather hastily—as though that were a last resort.”
“You mean that whatever the intruder was looking for must have been, according to his reckoning, in the cases you had just brought back with you? Searching the rest of the flat was just a last despairing effort.”
“Something on those lines,” Martin agreed.
Logan’s lips were pursed.
“And when the search proved fruitless—”
“He moved on to Sean Clifford.”
“The connection being your friend Birgitte,” said Logan. “Mrs. Holtesen asks you to smuggle something out of Denmark for her. You refuse. She picks up this young impressionable Clifford chap and, a few days after his return from Copenhagen, he’s murdered. By whom?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Martin.
“It’s what the police would like to know,” observed Logan grimly. He stared penetratingly at Martin. “Have you any ideas at all on the subject?”
“I might have some ideas,” said Martin, “if I had any idea of what it was I was supposed to smuggle. Maybe this business has nothing whatever to do with that—but I shall be surprised if that’s the case.”
“It would be quite a coincidence. Hm.” Logan pushed a cigarette box across the desk, and leaned forward with a lighter. Smoke swirled about his head, blurring its sun-sharp outline, “Yes, it’s a great pity you didn’t find out what the package was that you would have transported.”
“If I’d found out, maybe I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. Maybe, having used Clifford, they killed him the moment he had done the job for them.”
“They?” queried Logan.
“Birgitte and Eiler are in this together. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“But why should they, or their agents over here, knock you out and go through your cases? They would know you hadn’t got the…well, whatever it was. No, there must be someone else in this affair—someone who was either waiting here for you to arrive, or who flew over from Copenhagen in order to get to London before you. Someone else. Any ideas?”
Martin had no ideas. He was groping in a fog. None of this added up to anything.
Logan went on: “Your host, perhaps—Henning Holtesen? Could he be involved?”
“I don’t see how.” said Martin. “I suppose he can’t be ruled out, but I wouldn’t have said he was a criminal type. Certainly not a murderer.”
“There are no certainties when it comes to murderers,” Logan swiftly assured him. “But if Holtesen is not mixed up in this, what else is there? Somebody quite unknown—and we can’t cook up any theories on those lines. Or else there was a quarrel between your girl friend and her brother Eiler, and one of them is double-crossing the other. Or maybe their liaison with their people at this end—assuming they’ve got people over here—broke down. Or they were both double-crossed.” Logan sighed. “There are far too many imponderables.”
“Far too many,” Martin agreed. “But there must be a solution somewhere—and you’re the man to find it.”
David Logan emitted a thin jet of smoke between his lips. He said: “I still don’t know why you won’t see the police. I’m not touching any work for you until I know that. Perhaps you’ll explain.”
Martin was aware of Carol Dane studying him intently. He knew that they were both sizing him up—and that the woman’s assessment would be as shrewd and thorough in its own way as Logan’s would be.
He explained.
He told them, tersely and without heroics, about his work during the war.
Son of a Danish mother and an Englishman who had worked in Copenhagen for years before the war, he spoke fluent Danish, and knew the country inside out. Dropped by parachute, he worked on behalf of British Special Operations Executive in organising sabotage of industries that worked for the Germans. Railway lines were blown up, factories wrecked, and propaganda distributed through illegal presses. It was a nerve-racking life, and yet a ceaselessly stimulating one.
When the war ended, everything became suddenly flat. Life was intolerably dull.
Martin Slade went back to Denmark. He organised complicated currency deals, and smuggled everything from gold to cigarettes across the troubled frontiers of postwar Europe.
“Everything,” he said bluntly, “except drugs. I never went in for that dirty traffic.”
Excitement was what he needed. He could not relax. He found excitement in this illicit trading, founding his small organisation on Copenhagen, in its key position dominating Scandinavia and the Baltic.
And he found excitement in Birgitte Nielsen. It was an excitement that flamed high and then died suddenly—died away into petty quarrels and savage bitterness
At last self-disgust and weariness drove him back to England permanently. Music, his first love, reasserted its sway. The madness of war and the postwar turmoil faded, and he put his own madness behind him.
“But there are still a lot of police forces in Europe who would like to grab me,” he said, while Logan nodded understandingly. “I could still be dragged in by our own police. Once put them on the trail, and they’ll ferret out too many things. It would be too unhealthy for me.”
Logan stubbed his cigarette out.
“You’re