D-Notice by Bill Walker (big ebook reader txt) 📗

old man leaped to his feet with surprising agility, raised the umbrella and aimed the tip square in Sir William’s face.

Sir William saw it all in the microsecond it took for the old man to push the hidden button on the umbrella’s hand-carved handle.

Oh God, not now, not no—

Atomized to a fine mist by the spray mechanism hidden inside the umbrella, the poison rushed up Sir William’s nose and entered his system through the mucous membranes. In a fraction of a moment, his brain lost the ability to breath and his vital organs began shutting down. Sir William tried reaching out to the man who’d killed him, but his arms would not respond. They spasmed like someone with palsy, and he could no longer feel his feet. With a sigh that sounded like a pig whose throat had been cut, Sir William Atwater, late of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, pitched over dead.

Watson began barking frantically, and the old man looked quickly about him. The punks, more interested in playing games of macho one-upsmanship, hadn’t noticed a thing, and neither had the nannies, still cooing over their slobbering brats. And the best thing of all, that decadent music still blasted at ear-shattering volume, neatly covering any undue noise. And that included this insufferable little mutt.

Bending down to the dead body, the old man sat him up and leaned him against the back of the bench, arranging him so it would appear he’d fallen asleep. Then he reached into the pocket of his own suit and brought something out, which he placed into the pocket of Sir William’s jacket.

Satisfied, he stood up, making sure his false beard was still in place, and gazed upon his adversary one last time. In perfect accentless German he said, “The Eagle Flies.”

Then he turned and walked out of the park, whistling “The British Grenadiers,” leaving the corpse alone with its tiny mourner.

Chapter Twelve

The Number 11 Routemaster bus heaved to the curb, its brakes hissing. Michael exited, along with three of his fellow passengers, and the bus moved on, its diesel engine chugging with effort. Sunlight dappled the sidewalk, shining through the lime trees lining the pavement, and the air smelled of curried rice and lemon grass from the Indian and Thai restaurants that abutted each other on the corner. Moving to the newsagent’s kiosk, Michael nodded to an acquaintance, threw down his pound coin, and accepted his change and a copy of the Evening News from the grizzled agent. “Don’t read it all in one place,” the old agent joked with a toothless grin. Michael returned the grin, tucked the paper under his arm, and began the short walk home. He passed a Wimpy’s and debated stopping in for a hamburger, but changed his mind. He’d been having far too much of that, lately, and he knew it would do him no good. He caught himself, as he thought of his mother’s chiding him over his solitary eating.

“At least go out with your friends,” she’d say. “It does a body good. Helps the digestion.”

He hadn’t called the old girl in a while, and he missed her gentle, if incongruous, words of admonishment. Then again, aside from being old enough and having a job, those very words were the reason he’d moved out of the house and came to London. Lillian Thorley could be a formidable woman. It came with having raised a son all by herself at a time when women were expected to cleave to a man, an accomplishment not to be lightly dismissed. That he’d turned out all right was further testament to her skills and raw determination, for life had been hard in war-torn London when he was a baby, and improved only marginally when they moved to Sussex after the destruction of their Brixton terraced house by a German bomb. Now, if he could only keep her from badgering him about getting married.

Michael passed Mrs. Herrick’s house and held his breath, hoping the old dear wouldn’t spot him and insist he come in for tea, as she had on so many previous occasions. Besides, he was afraid she might actually have her niece there one day, the one with the purple hair.

Rounding the corner of the house, he walked the half block to the alley and turned. His mews flat lay twenty paces in front of him. Once the carriage house and stables to Mrs. Herrick’s house, it had been converted to living space in the fifties, when housing in London became a premium. With a kitchen and sitting room on the ground floor, a modest bedroom and bath overhead, and its own entrance, it offered a measure of privacy no regular flat could provide. And to top it off, the rent Mrs. Herrick charged was well below market rates.

Pulling out his keys, Michael unlocked the front door, flipped on the lights and the television, and made his way into the kitchen, where he turned on the gas oven to preheat. The kitchen was separated from the main sitting room by a length of countertop covered in a Flower Power motif; it was the only garish element in an otherwise understated decor.

The sitting room had polished wooden floors covered with a faux Persian throw rug. Furnishings were minimal: a leather-covered couch and two easy chairs arranged around a glass-topped coffee table. A gas fireplace stood at one end of the room and his teakwood “entertainment center” at the other.

Pulling open the door of the tiny refrigerator, he reached into the freezer section, pulled out a TV dinner and popped it into the oven. Something on the television caught his eye, and he went out into the sitting room and turned up the volume. The program was BBC 2’s evening news. The reader, Gordon Honeycombe, was in the middle