“Wonder who that other fellow was?” he said.
I changed the subject with what I hoped was adroitness. In the afternoon, I said, I would finish the tour by going to Dalebrink Hall, calling on Mrs. Brende and combining business with duty. At once Harrison was off again.
“Benison actually accused Colonel Brende of organizing that factory gang, by the way.”
“Surely that was nonsense,” I said. “Brende’s on the Active List and he wouldn’t risk his career like that.”
“Benison’s usually sure of his facts,” Harrison insisted. “He has to be if you come to think of it. At any rate, as I said, he told Brende that he had his own way of putting an end to Brende’s activities, and Brende himself, if it became necessary.”
I didn’t want to hurt Harrison’s feelings by even the most modest show of incredulity, so once more I changed the subject. We had turned into the main road again, which gave me some sort of excuse for saying that I’d do two surprise visits per week to night guards. Harrison promptly said he’d like to do a third and we fixed details then and there. When we got back to Camp it was just a quarter of an hour before lunch.
I thought that an excellent opportunity for ringing up Mrs. Brende. A man’s voice, with a slightly Cockney accent, answered the phone at last. I could hear it buzzing for at least two minutes after Exchange had got me through.
“Who’s speaking?” I said.
“Corporal Ledd, sir.” I didn’t know till afterwards, when Harrison told me Ledd was on our strength and loaned to Brende as batman, that he spelt his name like that.
I said who I was and asked for Mrs. Brende. For some reason or other that knocked him off his perch.
“You want Mrs. Brende, sir?”
“Didn’t I just say so?”
“Yes, sir. And it’s Mrs. Brende you want.”
Before I could ask what the devil was the matter with him, he was asking me to hold on. Three good minutes went by and then came a feminine voice.
“Is that Mrs. Brende?” I said.
“No, sir. This is Mrs. Brende’s maid. What was it you wanted?”
“I want to speak to Mrs. Brende,” I said patiently.
“Oh, yes, sir; Mrs. Brende. Would you mind holding on?”
This time it was four minutes that I had to wait. I know, because my office clock was bang in the line of my eyes.
“Yes?” a gentle voice said, and there at last was Mrs. Brende.
I explained that I was Major Travers, Commandant of Camp 55, but known to her perhaps as Ludovic Travers, husband of Bernice Haire that was. At once she was asking if I would come to tea that afternoon. Not the main door but the one at the left-hand side by the stone pergola. Fourish was the time, and I said I’d be delighted.
When I hung up I was in a much better temper, even if the gong had gone long since for lunch. I forgot the wonder that had come to me of why Mrs. Brende was so hedged about with unapproachableness, for the simple reason that I liked her voice. Mrs. Brende, I somehow knew, would be someone nice to know.
After lunch Harrison gave me the necessary information about Dalebrink Hall and the hush-hush work that was going on there. The Park was about forty acres. A main drive led to the front door, and was some three hundred yards long. There was also a back tradesmen’s road of about five hundred yards, according to the large-scale map. Each entrance gate had a day and night guard furnished by us. Most of the park was enclosed by a wall, and it was very well wooded. In view of each of the three doors of the house—front, side and rear—we had a standing guard by day and at night the whole house was patrolled.
Thanks to the fact that every inmate of the house, and every caller, had to have a pass furnished by us, it was fairly easy to tell by our records something of what was going on. The important inmates were as follows:
Colonel Brende, R.A., D.S.O.
Francis Newton—Professor of Physics at the University of X.
George Riddle—research student at Y College, University of X, specially released by military authorities.
Heinrich Wissler—formerly Professor of Physics at the University of Prague; Nobel Prize-winner, etc.
Squadron-Leader Pattner, D.S.O., D.F.C.
There were also two maids and a cook; Lance-Corporal Ledd and two other men furnished by us, including a man cook.
Of Brende I had never heard, but Harrison told me he was brilliant but temperamental. He admired his brains but didn’t care a lot for the man himself, though he admitted he might be prejudiced. The other inmates were, of course, Mrs. Brende and the Hon. Penelope Craye. No stenographer, you will note, and so I could pat myself on the back for having wondered whom Penelope was finding to do the actual work.
As for the research that was going on, it undoubtedly had something to do with the location of night-flying aircraft, and Harrison believed it was the show that influenced all those optimistic remarks spoon-fed at intervals to the public, that night bombing would soon cease to be a menace, or the menace that it had been, which is a subtle difference.
When I had finished work in my office that afternoon and was waiting for the time to move off to Dalebrink Hall, I was in a mood both anticipatory and complacent. Life at Camp 55 had begun well, and it looked more than ever as if Wharton had wangled my appointment. I admit I’m always ready to scent a mystery, but think of the headlines if a go-ahead reporter could spread himself on the front page of a popular daily with the information I already had!
SCOTLAND YARD SUPER HOBNOBS WITH FIFTH COLUMN SUSPECTS.
WHY IS SOCIETY DAME IN HUSH-HUSH CAMP?
and, as I suddenly remembered—
WHO DOESN’T LIKE THE COLONEL’S WIFE TO PHONE?
CHAPTER III
I Begin to Wonder
MY wife is often telling me that I have the annoying habit of being flippant, and she should know. If I have been flippant about that hush-hush work that was going on at Dalebrink Hall, let me hasten to apologize for something unintended. Undoubtedly the work that was being done there was of supreme importance and in need of implicit secrecy, which was why our instructions were to maintain such a close guard. If the experts working on schemes for destroying night bombers could save the dropping of only a few hundred bombs a year, then I for one would not have grudged all night and every night on guard.
The drive to the Park took a very few minutes. I was glad the sentry at the main gate would not let me through till my pass had been inspected, and I was held up again fifty yards short of the front door, outside which I left the car. The house was early Georgian of the best type, and I guessed there would be three or four large downstair rooms and a dozen good bedrooms. The gardens were not extensive but of the first quality, and for the terraced lawns and rock gardens use had been made of the falling ground. I was particularly attracted by an early Georgian summer-house of local stone that overlooked two grass tennis courts about a hundred yards from the door whose bell I was ringing. The whole place had neatness and charm, and I don’t know when I have seen anything that had for me so immediate an appeal.
The door was opened by an elderly maid, whom her mistress was later to address as Annie. From her age, her self-possession and the smile she gave me, I judged her to be an old servant of the family, and as soon as she spoke I knew she was the one to whom I had talked over the phone. The hall I entered was small and rather bare, and facing it was the door of what was known as the morning-room, into which I was shown. I remembered Mrs. Brende as soon as I saw her again. She also claimed to remember me, and she had seen my wife again since our marriage.
As a young woman she must have been a noted beauty, and at sixty she was still remarkably handsome. The quality about her on which I would like to insist, and which made the charm of her gracious personality, was her utter sincerity. There were no aids to beauty, no apologies, no affectations, and none of those kittenish sallies which one often suffers from those who would proclaim that there is life in the old girl yet. Edwardian was her period as it was of the del
ightful room where we sat, and those of us whose memories run back to those years and whose young lives were moulded in them, find more than a gratifying of sentiment in such an hour as I spent that afternoon.
A faint scent of musk was in the room and the heavier smell of jonquils that still flowered beneath the spacious window. My collector’s eyes goggled at the Queen Anne silver and the Worcester china of apple-green, and I simply had to be roguish.
“It’s very wrong of you,” I said, “to use those lovely things. If they were mine they’d be popped into a cabinet, and I’d have the key.”
She smiled. “I don’t think your wife would be pleased with you then. These are really all I have now. Practically everything of value has been sent away for storage. After all, we must expect to be bombed here.”
There was a London house, it appeared, which was being used for the bombed homeless.
“Conscience disturbs me terribly sometimes,” she said. “If I am living here in comparative safety, I feel the house should be full of refugees.”
“Yes, but the work that’s being done here is just as important, surely.”
“I suppose it is,” she said. “But conscience is a queer thing. You never know where and when it’s going to attack you.”
Already I felt we had known each other for years. That was why I said she was being swindled. It wasn’t conscience that was at her but a highly bogus impersonator known as introspection.
“Well, hospitality’s in my blood,” she said, and laughed. “Who are we to know what’s bogus? There’s still such a thing as entertaining angels unawares.”
Then she was explaining what she had said about hospitality. The family fortunes had been ruined by it in the eighteenth century, and it was her grandfather who had restored them, and the Hall. At one time there had been fine goings on; the kind of thing one associates with Medmenham and the Hell-fire Club. Where the tennis courts now were there had been an artificial lake, and it and the large summer-house that overlooked it had added much to the hilarity of the night revels, in which I gathered that the nude had taken no small part.
We talked about heaps of other things, and I found her both witty and tolerant. I could have stayed on well past the courtesy hour, and then just as I caught the time by the French clock on the mantelpiece and was preparing to rise, she mentioned young Craye.
“My nephew is with you, I’m pleased to say. Perhaps you haven’t met him yet.”
“But I have,” I said, and at once began a gentle easing aside of the subject. “If you’ll pardon me, he hasn’t got your features.”
She seemed quite concerned. “You think not? And I’d always flattered myself we were so much alike.”
“It’s nice for you having him here.”
“I don’t see much of him,” she said regretfully. “He’s always claiming to be on duty. But he’s a dear boy, and my only nephew.”
I was rather at a loss at that, so I was suddenly horrified at the lateness of the hour, and began making apologies as I rose.
“Next time you must stay much longer,” she said. “But for the cold wind we’d have gone round the gardens. And now you’d like to see my husband.”
Does that strike you as a rather curious procedure? It did me, even at the time, in spite of the implied question. Before I could speak she was pushing the bell and Annie came in almost at once. The two smiled at each other.
“Annie,” she said, “will you take Major Travers to see Colonel Brende?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Annie said, and gave the beginnings of an old-fashioned curtsy.
“And, Annie, I’m always at home to Major Travers, whenever he’ll be good enough to call.”
“That’s uncommonly charming of you,” I said. “I hope I shan’t outwear my welcome.”
She merely smiled as we shook hands. Annie was smiling too as I followed her out through a side door to a corridor. It opened into a wider corridor, now absolutely bare, though the floor showed where furniture had stood and there were picture marks on the walls.
“The mistress is looking well, sir?” Annie suddenly said.
“Very well, Annie,” I told her.
She looked pleased at that.
“If you’ll wait here a moment, sir, I’ll find Ledd.”
So I waited, and in a minute I could just hear her speaking to Ledd in the main hall just off where I stood. It was Ledd who came, and I gave him my card. He was a stocky, snub-nosed fellow of about thirty, with the badges of a famous London regiment, and I guessed he’d been a footman in civil life. He looked intelligent and cheerful and I liked the cut of him.
“This way, sir,” he said. “I’ll see if the Colonel is free.”
Just off the main hall was a room empty of everything but two chairs and a trestle table. On the table was a pile of newspapers.
“Part of your salvage scheme?” I said, and pointed.
“That’s right, sir,” he said. “Once a week they call for them. Tomorrow’s the day. I’ll see if the Colonel’s at liberty sir.”
I’ve already told you of one bad habit I possess according to my wife, and there are doubtless others you have discerned. Here are some more. I have an insatiable curiosity. Even though I’m only in a minor way an antique collector, as soon as I enter a habited room my eyes are round it, and my mind is assessing the desirability and value of its contents. I talk to myself a good deal, though most decidedly not because I like to make a good speech or listen to a damn-fine speaker. I am also a restless individual who cannot sit still or slack except when there is need for concentrated thought. That was why I did not take one of the hard wooden chairs but began fingering and reading the newspapers instead.
The pile consisted of The Times and The Telegraph only; three copies of the former for each day and two of the latter. As I turned them idly over, reading a paragraph here and there, I suddenly saw a page of The Times from which a paragraph had been neatly cut. Something came back to my mind. I took from my notebook that paragraph I had cut out myself, and it was the same one. You remember it perhaps: that one about a Major Passenden who had arrived in Lisbon after what were hinted at as incredible adventures in France. Then I looked at the other two copies of the paper, and they had the paragraph intact.
Just then Ledd came back.
“This way if you please, sir.”
We went up a wide staircase, along another corridor, and then I was being shown into what had been a bedroom, but was now Colonel Brende’s private office. He rose from the chair where he had been reading and came to meet me, hand outstretched.
“How are you, Major Travers? You’ve taken over from Splint, I believe?”
I would like to say here that I hate to be prejudiced. Proof lies in the fact that I refused to believe the warnings of my friends about Penelope Craye. According to them she was a heartless, self-seeking, over-sexed menace. Metaphors about her were always feline, how she could purr till she had the particular milk she was after, and how she could spit and scratch. To my mind all that was very overdrawn, and when she wrote to the London Hospital Committee of which I happened to be chairman, about the organization of a big charity concert, I took her at her face value. Till that concert was over we were pretty close friends. Then I began to discover that artists had been shabbily swindled and the private expense account nicely swelled; that Penelope, in fact, had dipped her fingers in the till. There could be no public scandal, but I took certain private steps to make her disgorge, and after she had tried the womanly helplessness defence and followed it up by a naive attempt to bribe, then she spat and scratched with a vengeance. After that we were deliciously polite, but I doubt if there was anything on two legs that Penelope hated half as much as my careful self.
My old father used to say that only a fool never makes mistakes, which in itself is a kind of argument against prejudice. Splint had spoken none too warmly of Colonel Brende, nor had Harrison been too enthusiastic when we had first discussed him. Later Harrison had told me some more. He had al
l sorts of sources of information and was usually extraordinarily well informed, but I still refused to take Brende on other than my own judgment. Harrison said that Brende was ambitious and that even before the outbreak of war he was spoken of as a certainty for a move up to Brigadier, and then on. But something had gone wrong, as it had done in the past with Brende, and in France he had been in charge of an Area Air Defence Group. Brende was a mystery, according to Harrison. There was a streak in him somewhere and the War Office had rumbled it, but it wasn’t his brains and it wasn’t his bravery. Harrison thought it was just a shade too much cunning, and a certain unscrupulousness, even amounting to ratting, when promotion was at stake.
I was conceited enough to have other ideas even before I had clapped eyes on Brende. If the man was a genius, then he was entitled to eccentricity. If his promotion had been blocked, then some gent at the War House had been at the old game of putting square pegs in round holes. Though I was not thinking about all that at the time, it does explain why I gave Brende an answering smile and took a pleasure in the handshake. In fact, as far as one can like at a second’s acquaintance, I liked the man.
He was in mufti, of course, or perhaps I should call it négligé. The old gold of the pullover and the warm tweed coat went superbly with the deep tan of his face, and even in that get-up you’d have spotted him for a soldier and very pukka at that. He looked somewhere about fifty, full of blood and life, and though he was on the thin side, it made him look the more alert and tough.
“Can I get you anything?” he said. “A cup of tea, or Sherry?”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, “but I’ve just had tea with your lady.”
He gave me the queerest look. It wasn’t, in fact, long enough to be a look, but I saw on his face a flash of wonder and even dismay, then it was gone, far more quickly than I can write, and he was smiling.
“You know my wife?”
I explained and he was nodding quite friendlily and with no special interest. Then he began asking me about my previous job, and then, with a really disconcerting suddenness he said: “By the way, I haven’t any real proof that you’re what you ought to be. I suppose I ought to have had a look at your Military Identity Card.”
The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 4
