"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 16 - Quiller Solitaire 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

Tilney broke his step and looked at me directly and said, 'You can, eventually, but first I'm going to debrief you on McCane's death.' He opened his door and waited for me to go through. Tilney has been known to put you in your place less gently than that, but he wanted to humour me, I think. He didn't know what was on my mind, why my control was so thin; I'd seen people killed before, and he knew that. 'Take a pew,' he said, and got behind his desk, pushing some stuff to one side. 'Spot of tea?'

'No.'

He got a tape-recorder from a drawer and set it going. 'So what happened?'

I still felt cold, though the radiators were on: you could hear the water gurgling in the pipes. 'He phoned me in my car. He said he was going to Reigate, and asked me if I wanted to follow him up.'

Tilney watched me, not looking away much, a thin man with glasses and ginger hair and pale freckled hands, straight out of some redbrick university, you would have said, the science department We'd been in this bloody place for years, he and I, and we got on well enough, even when the Signals room was running hot.

'He asked you to follow him up. Had he tried to phone you before, at your flat or anywhere?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'I mean, how important was it to him? Did he sound worried?'

'He just said it off-hand.'

'But he must have been expecting some sort of attack? To have asked you to follow him up?'

I didn't want to talk about it, but it was no use telling him that. 'Not necessarily attack. Perhaps surveillance. Wanted to know if there were any ticks on his tail.'

Tilney looked at me. 'McCane was a top shadow. He didn't need anyone to help him find out if he was being surveilled. If he -'

'All right, then he was expecting someone to try killing him, if you like, I don't know, how can I?'

Tilney looked away. He knew the score now: McCane had thought someone was liable to have a go at him and he'd asked me to cover his rear and I'd done that but I hadn't done it well enough and he'd ended up in a burning car and I was trying to think of some way of ever getting any sleep again.

'What actually happened?' Tilney asked quietly.

'He was about a hundred yards in front of me, most of the time, and just this side of Redhill when we were on a straight stretch another car came up from behind me and went past like a bat out of hell and cut across McCane's bows and he swerved and went into the trees and the tank burst and the whole thing went up.'

Tilney's eyes were wandering around the cluttered room. 'He would have been wearing a seat-belt, and therefore wasn't thrown clear, and the fire started so fast that you didn't have a chance of reaching him in time. Wasn't that it?'

'I should have -'

There was nothing you could have done, obviously.' He was watching me again now.

'I should have been ready for it.'

Tilney looked down, folding his pale hands on the desk beside the tape-recorder. 'It's going on record that in my opinion and from what you've described, there was quite clearly nothing you could have done to help McCane last night.'

I left it. The other car,' I said, 'kept on going. They hit the brakes once - I was waiting for them to turn and come back and make sure they'd done the job, but when they saw the tank go up they must have known he hadn't got a chance.'

'What kind of car did they have?'

'A dark Mercedes. I didn't see much of it - I was watching McCane's.'

'Of course. Then you phoned Signals?'