Dead or Alive Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t moving, because he wasn’t letting himself move. He was holding his muscles from movement, and he was holding his voice from expression. Only when he had said, “I want to know,” there was a sudden heavy weight upon the word.
    Garratt stared at him and said, “Why?”
    â€œBecause I do.”
    There was a short pause. Then Garratt laughed.
    â€œAll right, you can have it! It’s damn little. You know what O’Hara was like. Brilliant in spots. Erratic all the time. Close as a clam.” He shrugged. “You can’t run intelligence work by rule of thumb, but O’Hara—” He shrugged again with that jerking movement of the shoulder. “I can do with a man being a law to himself, but O’Hara wasn’t that. He was a series of revolutionary outbreaks. Bound to come to grief sooner or later.”
    â€œWhat was he doing when he came to grief? How did he come to grief? And how do you know he came to grief?” There was a little break between each of the three questions, but there was no break in the pertinacity of Bill Coverdale’s manner.
    â€œI told you he was on a job,” growled Garratt. “And if you want to know what the job was, you’ll have to want, because I don’t know myself. Here’s the whole bag of tricks, and you can make what you like of it. The Foreign Office Intelligence don’t touch crime qua crime, but when crime slops over into politics, or politics slops over into crime, it’s our job. International crime is always on the look-out for a chance to exploit international politics. That was the Vulture’s * stunt. We got him, but we didn’t get the people who worked the show under him. One of them’s a damned clever woman, and she slipped through our hands. We got one of the men the other day, but the show’s still running. O’Hara picked up the trail of the people who are running it in this country. At least that’s what I think. Officially he was doing something else, but last time I saw him he dropped a hint and then shut up. Noting more out of him but ‘Wait and see.’ But he was on to something. Something big. Bit too big. It smashed him. If he’d had the sense to tell me what he’d got on to, we might have made a haul. As it was, they got him, and they got away with it.”
    â€œMrs O’Hara doesn’t think he’s dead.”
    Garratt kicked the leg of his chair.
    â€œShe doesn’t, doesn’t she?”
    â€œShe came to see you?”
    â€œShe came to see me,” said Garratt. “And she told me a cock and bull story about someone having put a marked newspaper in at her letter-box—letters with ink circles round them, spelling ‘I am alive’ or some flapdoodle of that sort!”
    â€œWhy should it be flapdoodle?”
    â€œThe answer to why is because,” said Garratt. He laughed rudely. “My good Bill, what would be the point of O’Hara sending his wife that sort of tripe?”
    Bill kept his temper. Garratt was an offensive brute, but he was used to him. He was a cousin in some seventeenth or eighteenth degree. He was an old friend and a good friend, but he had never had any manners.
    â€œShe says that herself,” he remarked.
    â€œThen it’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever heard her say. There couldn’t possibly be any point about it. It was either a hoax, or she’d had a go of hysterics and done it herself.”
    Bill shook his head.
    â€œI don’t think so. I’ve known Meg a long time—she’s not like that. Now look here, Garratt, you won’t believe what I’m going to tell you, but I’m going to say it all the same. You shan’t say afterwards that you were kept in the dark.”
    â€œAll right, go ahead.” Colonel Garratt’s little eyes were intent.
    Bill told him about the letters on Meg’s hearth-rug—chopped up pieces of