The Information Officer - By Mark Mills Page 0,105

and charged, a bull-necked battering ram, sending Max sprawling back onto the ground. Pawlu was on him in an instant, astride him, pummeling him with both fists, going for the head, working his little arms like windmills. It might have been comical if the fists hadn’t been granite-hard.

Pawlu should have pressed home his advantage; it was a mistake to go for the service revolver at Max’s hip. Max seized the moment, unleashing a scything right that caught Pawlu on the side of his head, knocking him clean off. The revolver skittered away into the darkness.

Max had never been a violent man by nature, but he knew how to box and he was fighting for a good cause. When Pawlu came at him again, he was ready, and he was angry, and he didn’t stop till Pawlu was on his knees, flailing blindly, weakly, like some automaton running down. Max finished him off with an uppercut that laid him out cold.

The dog was going wild inside the kitchen, scrabbling at the base of the door. Max recovered the revolver and stripped Pawlu of his belt, using it to lash Pawlu’s hands behind his back. The key to the barn was in his pocket.

Max lit the hurricane lamp before entering.

“Lilian …,” he called hopefully, working his way through the jumble of hoarded goods.

She wasn’t there.

Busuttil was.

He was laid out on the floor behind a heap of boxes. His hands and feet were bound, he was gagged, and dried blood masked one half of his face. He lay utterly still.

Max stared in abject horror at the spectacle, until he registered the slight rise and fall of the detective’s chest.

Dropping to his knees, Max untied Busuttil. Then he hurried outside and used the same ropes to truss up Pawlu good and proper before dragging him by the heels across the courtyard to the door of the barn. Busuttil was finally stirring, but was in no state to stand, so Max carried him to the entrance and sat him against a pile of boxes.

“Have you seen Lilian?” Max asked.

Busuttil shook his head groggily. He was fighting and failing to come to his senses, as if he’d been drugged.

The interrogation of Pawlu didn’t go much better, even after Max had emptied half a canister of gasoline over him to bring him round.

“Where is she?”

“Who?”

Max lit a match. “You think I care what happens to you? I don’t.”

Pawlu writhed like a maggot on the ground, trying to distance himself from the flame. He claimed to know nothing about a girl. All he knew was that Elliott had asked him to guard the barn, to let no one in there.

If it was a lie, it was a convincing one. Three more matches failed to shake the truth from him, and he was almost weeping when Max tossed the last one away.

“There were two men,” slurred Busuttil.

“You saw them?”

Busuttil shook his head.

“I have to go now,” said Max. “I’ll send help.” He pressed the revolver into Busuttil’s hand. “Try not to shoot them when they get here.”

Busuttil mumbled something that Max didn’t catch.

“What?”

“Ken …”

“What about him?”

“I think he has a mustache.”

Max lost most of the skin off his knees slogging back up the escarpment. It didn’t help, having a hurricane lamp in one hand and a gas canister in the other. He almost discarded the lamp once he was clear of the quarries, which would have been a mistake. He might have been able to find the motorcycle again without it, but he couldn’t have stripped the carburetor down by the light of the moon alone. It was clogged with rust, the tank having run dry. The gods, it seemed, were set on having a good laugh at his expense, and he cursed them at the top of his lungs.

It was a fiddly operation, time-consuming, and it gave him a chance to think things through. Busuttil had mentioned two men. One had to be Elliott, but who was the second? The mysterious Ken who now, it seemed, had a mustache? Max knew only one submariner with a mustache, and that was Lionel. But it was a preposterous notion: Elliott and Lionel in cahoots, a team, killing off girls together. He even laughed at the thought of it.

He strained to find another explanation, anything that would exonerate his friend, but there was no escaping the fact that Elliott had abducted Busuttil, thwarting the investigation, which meant that he sat at the heart of the affair, and had probably done so