Free Redcap by Philip McCutchan

along the wide, deserted thoroughfare past Buckingham Palace bound for Heathrow, Shaw found himself thinking back and wishing Latymer hadn’t said what he had about relying on him. For some reason or other, that kind of remark always made him so terribly aware of his own shortcomings, his inadequacies. Reluctantly almost, in the back of that comfortable car, he felt for the hard reassurance of his Service revolver, handy in the shoulder-holster beneath his plain grey worsted jacket.
    He felt he’d be needing that again before long. . . .
    The car swept up to the airport. Shaw got out and said good-bye to Thompson, who drove off. As Shaw walked quickly into the building, a man with a bowler hat and a brief case who had been sitting in a chair reading the Evening Standard folded up his newspaper and got to his feet. Taking a cigarette from a silver case, he watched unobtrusively as the baggage for the Naples flight was collected together. Then he strolled about aimlessly and when Shaw had disappeared he went away towards a telephone kiosk. Four pennies dropped into the box metallically . . . clang, clang, clang, clang.
    The man thought, and he smiled faintly as he thought it, that they sounded like four separate knells of doom—if doom could be said to come four times. Maybe one of them would be for the man he’d just seen joining the Naples plane . . . himself, he was only one of many minor operatives, so he couldn’t make any guesses as to who the other three might be for.

    Within a few hours a carefully worded cable was received in the radio office of the New South Wales and was sent down to the heavily built man who had embarked at Tilbury.

CHAPTER FIVE
    At eight o’clock in the morning Shaw was looking down through the cabin windows as the airliner began to lose height, circling to touch down at Capodichino. He saw the fabulous city and environs of Naples rushing up below him, the city fringing the deep blue water of the bay; beyond, Vesuvius reared into the sky, its summit issuing faint trails of smoke as Shaw watched, trails which lost themselves in a clear sky. It was a wonderful morning; Shaw had managed to snatch an hour or two of much-needed sleep during the flight, and he felt refreshed and invigorated as, shortly after, he bent his tall frame through the doorway and stepped out of the airliner, stepped into brilliant sunshine which was as yet not so strong that it took away the clear freshness of the morning.
    Some eighty minutes after completing the entry formalities, Shaw was at the Naples air terminal. From there he walked along to the Australia and Pacific Line’s agents in the Via Roma, where he was told that the New South Wales would enter the bay at 8 a.m. next day, land her transit passengers at the Maritima Stazione for a day’s sight-seeing, and then embark the Naples contingent at 3 p.m. After that he collected his gear from the air terminal, left some of it at the Maritima Stazione, and then walked along the waterfront to his hotel.
    Shaw spent that day looking around the city, strolling along the hot, busy, opulent streets interspersed with depressing slum alleys, going casually into bars and eating-places, keeping his senses well on the alert. And, as he had suspected, this was in vain.
    As Latymer had said, it was just a vague chance that he might pick up something in Naples and it was no good getting worried because he’d failed to do so. Nevertheless, as he walked back to his hotel, Shaw began to feel the utter hopelessness of his job. To look for one man who might in point of fact be anywhere in the triangle China-England-Australia was a pretty large assignment.
    Next day at 3 p.m. Shaw was at the Maritima Stazione and going aboard the ship. The liner’s deck seemed to loft over the embarking passengers like a skyscraper as they crossed the telescopic gangway from the jetty into the great side with its rows of ports. Shaw, as he went through the gunport door into the foyer, felt himself