Mistress Murder Read online

  He had just made it – the swirling water took him round the nose on the side farthest from the searching beams of the launches.

  His lungs bursting with effort, Paul stopped swimming and lifted his head out of the icy water to take stock of his position.

  It was the last voluntary thing he was ever to do.

  In the last second of his life, with the calmness of inevitable death on him, he stared along the side of the barge into a steel funnel which meant oblivion for him.

  There were two barges, side by side, and he was between them.

  Their steel flanks met where the taper of the bows ended but, with the choppy water and the speed of the tug, they were moving apart and crashing together rhythmically as they bore down on him.

  Paul Jacobs was carried on the bow wave into the gap. Like a giant nutcracker, with eighty tons on either jaw, the sides of the two barges slammed together, again and again as his body was washed along between them.

  What came out at the other end was recovered the next day. It caused a wrinkle of disgust to appear even on the face of the hardened pathologist who examined it at Deptford Mortuary.

  The loose ends of the case were stretched over half of Europe.

  ‘More bleeding work than a dozen straight murders,’ growled Benbow, a few days later. ‘And not even the satisfaction of a pinch at the end of it.’

  A contended Bray looked up from an avalanche of statements on his table.

  ‘I don’t know, we’ve got a few characters in the can … Silver, Irish, Gigal … the skipper of that ship. And that poor flaming radio operator has got a load off his mind.’

  Benbow masticated a green pencil as he thought of the complications with the Federal German Republic. Their ship had been arrested, moored in the river and the captain charged with being an accessory to murder. He stoutly denied everything but, even if the Germans succeeded in getting him back for trial at home, he was unlikely to be seen on the high seas for a few years.

  Benbow stared out of the window at his blank wall opposite and absently champed on some splinters.

  ‘Amazing bloke, that Jacobs or Golding or what the hell you like to call him,’ he reflected. ‘He’d have got off under our damn noses again if that Busch fellow hadn’t spotted him. I wonder how his wife will get on. I feel sorry for her.’

  Bray stared at the water polo team.

  ‘Parry said on the phone that she thought it was for the best … but I don’t know. It was a hell of a way to go, between those barges.’

  Benbow picked timber from his tongue. ‘Thank God that most of the villains around here haven’t got his brains. If they were all like Golding, I’d give up the force tomorrow and go and raise chickens.’

  Bray muttered inaudibly to his blotter, ‘And the eggs wouldn’t have the little lion – they’d have the Red Star!’

  The Sixties Mysteries

  by

  Bernard Knight

  The Lately Deceased

  The Thread of Evidence

  Mistress Murder

  Russian Roulette

  Policeman’s Progress

  Tiger at Bay

  The Expert

  For more information about Bernard Knight

  and other Accent Press titles

  please visit

  www.accentpress.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Robert Hale Ltd 1966

  This edition published by Accent Press 2015

  ISBN 9781910939963

  Copyright © Bernard Knight 1966, 2015

  The right of Bernard Knight to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN