by Tony Medawar
The burly man nearest to him wiped his forehead again. ‘Well, sir, even ’itler must know we’re making guns in England by this time.’
To Roger this seemed a very reasonable remark, but the little foreman appeared to find it highly humorous. ‘Ah, it isn’t the barrels,’ he shouted. ‘It’s what’s in ’em.’
‘Shells, you mean?’ hazarded Roger, relieved to find that the burly workman appeared just as bewildered as himself before the foreman’s wit.
‘Shells?’ replied that humorist. ‘No, wot I mean, it all depends if you know what you’re lookin’ at.’
‘’E’s looking at a gun-forging, same as you are,’ rejoined the burly workman, with an air of finality. ‘Come on, mates.’
Roger was not sorry to be rescued at that moment by his host.
Arthur Luscombe at school had been a large, heavy boy, with a passion for imparting unwanted information in a ponderous manner. Now, as the managing director and virtual owner of Luscombe and Sons, he seemed to Roger to have altered very little. Leading his guest with measured footsteps towards his private office, he appeared determined on sacrificing his valuable time to pouring into Roger’s reluctant ears just about everything anyone could want to know about steel, and a good deal more than most did.
‘Austenite-alloy steels … low elasticity … manganese steels … toughness … resistance to abrasions … high-tensile alloy steels … gun-tubes … resistance to shock … nickel … chromium … molybdenum … you’re not listening, Sheringham!’
‘I am,’ Roger protested, as they turned in the managing director’s office. ‘You were talking about steel, I mean,’ he added hastily, after a glance at the other’s face. ‘You were saying that some—er—alloys were harder than others, and … and some not so hard … I mean, greater elasticity … yes, and … I say, though, wouldn’t Hitler give something to see what I’ve just seen?’
The managing director’s response to this artless query surprised its maker. It was with a positive start and a look of something remarkably like suspicion that he snapped: ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
‘Well … er … nothing,’ Roger returned lamely. ‘As a matter of fact, it wasn’t even original. Your foreman said it, so I thought—’
‘Johnson had no right to say anything of the sort.’
‘But it doesn’t matter, does it?’ Roger asked, still more surprised. ‘I mean, munition works and so on … naturally Hitler …’
‘Yes, yes. Of course. Naturally. Still, Johnson … However, it’s of no importance. Now, I can just spare another ten minutes, Sheringham. Would you care to see our sidings? I have to go there myself in any case.’
‘I should like to, above all things,’ Roger said agreeably.
Five minutes later he was trying to look intelligently at long lines of railway trucks, but over which Mr Luscombe threw the complacent eye of proprietorship.
‘Most interesting,’ Roger said, doing his stuff. ‘And I suppose this is the—er—raw steel, or whatever you call it. Where does that come from?
‘Sorry, I can’t answer that sort of question, Sheringham,’ his host retorted, with (Roger thought) insufferable complacency. ‘Official secrets, you know—Yes, O’Connor, what is it?’
Seeing his employer’s attention distracted, the sidings foreman grinned sympathetically at Roger. ‘Not that there’s much official secret about it, sir,’ he said, behind his hand. ‘Anyone’s only got to look at the labels on the trucks.’
Roger looked.
‘Exactly. In fact, you get the stuff from Henbridge, wherever that may be—looks like a Government works.’
‘Well, no, as a matter of fact we don’t. We’re getting our steel now from Allen and Backhouse, of Wolverhampton—this other label. That one’s cancelled: some consignment from Henbridge to Allen and Backhouse, nothing to do with us.’ The foreman saw Mr Luscombe returning, and hastily stepped back with an air of childlike innocence.
The rest of Roger’s visit to the premises of Luscombe and Sons was uneventful. Indeed, it might very easily have passed out of his mind altogether. It is true that on getting home he had the curiosity to look up Henbridge in the gazetteer, and learned that it was a small village in the more inaccessible part of Cumberland, remarkable only as the site of the only coccodium deposits in England; whereupon he looked up coccodium in the encyclopaedia and gathered that it was a rare metal, resembling vanadium, but possessing certain unique properties, found only at Henbridge, in Cumberland.
It was just one of those coincidences, which so often do happen, which brought the name of Henbridge up in a conversation a few days later at Roger’s club. It appeared that the man to whom he was talking lived there. Roger asked him about it.
‘Used to be a grand little place—if you like ’em remote,’ replied the other. ‘Pitched up among the Cumberland fells and nearly a dozen miles from the nearest railway station. But it’s all spoilt now. They’ve put up a huge great factory or something just outside, and the fells are covered with wooden huts. Just breaks my heart.’
‘It seems queer,’ Roger suggested, ‘to choose a site a dozen miles from the nearest railway for a factory?’
The man snorted. ‘But isn’t it typical? Besides, that wouldn’t worry them. They’ve brought the railway to Henbridge!’
‘It certainly seems off,’ Roger said mildly, and went away to look up trains.
‘And you were as bad as any of them,’ Roger was saying severely to a stricken Mr Luscombe a few hours later. ‘Your works foreman was like a child playing with fire; couldn’t help trying to be clever and drop hints that the stupid visitor wouldn’t understand. He showed me there was some kind of secret going on; a simple remark of an irritated workman showed that the hands weren’t in the secret, so it obviously wasn’t a new hush-hush weapon; and then you gave me the biggest clue yourself.’
‘I only told you a few elementary facts that you could have got out of any text-book,’ protested the deflated remains of the managing director.
‘It was the way you marshalled them. I know nothing of steel, but even I gathered that the hardest steels won’t stand up so well to shock, and the ones that stand up best to shock have other drawbacks. You showed me that this fact, above all others concerned with steel, was most important to you. Naturally enough, perhaps, as one occupied in making gun-tubes, but there it was; the ideal steel alloy for a gun-tube had yet to be found, all the known ones lacked full efficiency one way or the other.
‘Then your sidings foreman gave away that your suppliers have recently been changed, and I learnt that these suppliers are receiving consignments of what can only be coccodium. The inference is obvious. Experiments, using an alloy with coccodium to combine high resistance to both shock and friction have been successful, consignments of this coccodium steel are now reaching you, and are being tried out for six-inch naval guns. If Hitler had any idea of it, the works would be blown sky-high within 24 hours. So what?—And after all, why talk at all?’
‘Look here, Sheringham,’ pleaded the unfortunate man …
In the end Roger magnanimously promised to carry the matter no further. He decided that the managing director had learned his lesson—and it was quite certain that he would teach the others theirs.
ANTHONY BERKELEY
Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971) is one of the most important writers of the Golden Age. Cox had a playful approach to the business of writing crime and detective fiction. His penchant for twisting tropes and confounding expectations undoubtedly played a major role in the genre’s development away from a simple linear narrative—in which characters are introduced, a crime is committed, clues are solved and the criminal is detected—into a more complex form in which almost anything can happen. Cox’s ‘great detective’, Roger Sheringham, is virtually the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes, arrogant rather than showily omniscient and unlikeable rather than unclubbable. Nonetheless, with only a few lapses from greatness, the detective stories that Cox wrote as ‘Anthony Berkeley’, as well
as the smaller number of psychological thrillers published as by ‘Francis Iles’, should be on the bookshelf of anyone who professes to love crime fiction.
Cox was born in Watford, north of London, and educated at Sherborne, a boarding school in Dorset. After school he went to Oxford and after coming down in 1916 with a Bachelor of Arts degree from University College, Oxford, he enlisted in the British Army, serving in France. After being demobbed, Cox embarked on a career as a humourist, producing countless short stories and comic sketches for a huge range of magazines while, working with J. J. Sterling Hill, he expanded a twenty-minute vignette into a futuristic opera, The Merchant Prince. He also started to write crime fiction, exclusively so once he found it paid better than other genres. His earliest novels were published anonymously and Cox’s career took off with the publication as ‘Anthony Berkeley’ of Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) and, as A. B. Cox, Mr Priestley’s Problem (1927), which he went on to adapt for the stage the following year as Mr Priestley’s Night Out. Cox was never without a sense of humour and in all of his Anthony Berkeley novels his tongue is firmly in his cheek, a tendency deplored by some contemporary reviewers. As well as incorporating humour and taking an iconoclastic approach to the genre’s ‘rules’, Cox found the history of crime a ready source of inspiration, using several infamous crimes as the starting point for a detective story. He also broadcast on the BBC and its predecessor 2LO. Finally, as the self-styled ‘first freeman’ of the Detection Club, the dining society for crime writers that he and others had created in 1929, Cox played a key role in developing ideas to raise funds, including an anthology of crime writing as well as the Club’s novel The Floating Admiral (1931) and other multi-authored stories.
Cox never made any secret of the fact that his motivation was money and at the end of the 1930s he stopped writing crime fiction when he found that he could be paid well for simply reviewing it, which he did up until shortly before his death in 1971. Since Cox’s death his books have drifted in and out of print, but many will be familiar with his Francis Iles book Before the Fact (1932) in the form of one of Hitchcock’s most successful films, Suspicion (1941) with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, as well as the late Philip Mackie’s superb 1979 serial for the BBC of Malice Aforethought (1931), starring Hywel Bennett.
‘Hot Steel’ was one of two syndicated stories written specially to raise awareness of the dangers of loose chatter during the Second World War. The story was published in the Gloucester Citizen on 27 April 1943, with the postscript: ‘Do you work in a munitions factory? If so, do you ever drop hints about the work you are doing? Don’t! What may seem only a hint to you may be a whole explanation to someone else. And there are dangerous people about, you know.’
THE MURDER AT WARBECK HALL
Cyril Hare
CHARACTERS
LORD WARBECK, master of Warbeck Hall.
THE HON. ROBERT WARBECK, Lord Warbeck’s son.
SIR JULIUS PRENDERGAST, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Warbeck’s nephew.
LADY CAMILLA PRENDERGAST, Lord Warbeck’s step-niece by marriage.
MRS BARRETT, wife of John Barrett, M.P., a colleague of Sir Julius.
JAMES ROGERS, a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, assigned to protect Sir Julius.
BRIGGS, the butler at Warbeck Hall.
SUSAN, the butler’s daughter.
Editor’s note: The British Parliament is a bicameral system: the lower house is the House of Commons and comprises elected members; the upper house is the House of Lords and comprises hereditary and appointed peers.
NARRATOR: It is the afternoon of Christmas Eve. In the library of Warbeck Hall, a large, dilapidated country house in the North of England, Lord Warbeck is reclining on a sofa, looking out at the steadily falling snow. He is a man of not much more than sixty, but with a face prematurely sharpened and aged by illness. Presently he rings a bell beside him. It is answered immediately by the butler.
BRIGGS: You rang, my lord?
LORD WARBECK: (his voice is rather thin and tired, but quite firm) Yes, Briggs, I thought I heard a car in the drive. Mr Robert arrived?
BRIGGS: Yes, my lord. He has just come in. I told him your lordship was asking for him. Shall I serve tea now, my lord, or wait for the ladies? They should have been here by now, but I expect the snow has delayed them.
LORD WARBECK: I think we’ll wait for tea until they come, Briggs. Where is Sir Julius?
BRIGGS: Sir Julius Warbeck, my lord, is writing in his room. From his expression I should judge that he is contemplating an increase in the income tax.
LORD WARBECK: (laughing) Let’s hope it isn’t as bad as that! It’s lucky for me, I’m not likely to live till next Budget Day, anyhow!
BRIGGS: Quite, my lord. That is—I’m sure, we all hope—
LORD WARBECK: That’s all right, Briggs. Say no more about it.
BRIGGS: No, my lord. Er—there was one further matter, my lord.
LORD WARBECK: Yes?
BRIGGS: The—the person Sir Julius brought with him, my lord. Will he be having his meals with the family or the staff?
LORD WARBECK: The person? Oh, you mean the detective? Well, I hardly think even a Chancellor of the Exchequer needs protecting at meals in this house. With the staff, certainly.
BRIGGS: Very good, my lord. And will it be in order for him to be asked to assist with the washing-up?
LORD WARBECK: From my limited experience of Scotland Yard, I should say, undoubtedly.
BRIGGS: I am glad to hear it, my lord. Here is Mr Robert, now.
ROBERT WARBECK: (a fresh, vigorous young man’s voice) Sorry I’m so late, father. I’ve had a simply poisonous journey here!
LORD WARBECK: Robert, dear boy, it’s good to see you! How well you’re looking!
ROBERT: And you’re looking—(he pauses, and then goes on in an anxious voice) How are you feeling, father?
LORD WARBECK: The same as usual, Robert. I’m feeling quietly expectant, waiting for the aneurysm to blow up or whatever aneurysms do. I was told three months ago that I should not live till Christmas, and now with only a few hours to go I think I should do it. Indeed, I’m relying on you to tide me over till Boxing Day. It would be very ill-bred to expire with guests in the house.
ROBERT: Guests! You never told me there was going to be a house party!
LORD WARBECK: Certainly not a house party, Robert. Simply the ordinary family circle we have always invited here at Christmas—what there is left of it.
ROBERT: But father—
LORD WARBECK: As it is to be my last Christmas, I certainly don’t propose to break with tradition now.
ROBERT: ‘The family circle’—you don’t mean that you’ve invited Julius!
LORD WARBECK: Certainly. Cousin Julius is here now—and, according to Briggs, is filling in time putting something on the income tax.
ROBERT: It’s all very well to make a joke of it, but—
LORD WARBECK: Income tax is no joke, I am well aware. But Julius is the only near relation I have left alive, yourself excepted. I thought it proper to offer him hospitality.
ROBERT: And he thought it proper to accept it! The man who more than anyone has meant ruin to us—ruin to the whole country! I suppose you realise what the effect of the new Land Tax is going to be—when—
LORD WARBECK: (bluntly) When I die, Robert. Yes, I do. It will mean the end of Warbeck Hall. But until it does end, I mean to carry on.
ROBERT: (loudly) Well, I—
LORD WARBECK: Don’t shout, Robert. It’s a nasty habit you’ve acquired from speaking at street corners. Besides, it’s bad for me.
ROBERT: I’m sorry, father. Well, who else is there in the ‘family circle’?
LORD WARBECK: You can guess. Simply Mrs Barrett—
ROBERT: She’s as bad as Julius. Oh, I know she was mother’s best friend, but since she married that wretched self-seeking politician, she cares for nothing but pushing him up the dirty political ladder.
&nb
sp; LORD WARBECK: Well, at least you won’t be troubled with the dirty politician. He’s abroad, she tells me. There is one more guest, Robert.
ROBERT: (gloomily) I suppose you mean Camilla Prendergast.
LORD WARBECK: Yes, I do mean your cousin Camilla, Robert. It would be a great comfort to me if before I go, I could know that your future was assured. She is very fond of you. I used to think that you were fond of her. But since you came out of the R.A.F. you seem to have changed. Why don’t you ask her, Robert? If your engagement could be announced this Christmas, I should die a happy man.
ROBERT: Look here, father, I’ve been wanting to tell you, but it’s difficult. I—
BRIGGS: Lady Camilla Prendergast and Mrs Barrett, my lord.
LORD WARBECK: Camilla, my dear! You’re a sight for sore eyes! Have you a kiss for your aged step-uncle by marriage?
CAMILLA: (clear, young voice) Of course I have! (Sound of kiss) It’s lovely to be back at Warbeck.
LORD WARBECK: Mrs Barrett, I daren’t ask you for a kiss. You keep them all for your husband, I know. What sort of a journey have you had?
MRS BARRETT: (middle-aged woman’s voice—inclined to gabble) Dreadful; dreadful! I thought we were never going to get through! And now we are here, goodness knows how we are to get out. The snow was so thick at Telegraph Hill …
(Her voice fades out. Robert and Camilla speak in low voices close to the microphone. Faint sound of voices heard behind)
CAMILLA: Well, Robert, how are you?
ROBERT: Oh, well, thank you. Are you well?
CAMILLA: Yes, thanks. (Pause) There doesn’t seem to be much else to say, does there?
ROBERT: No, there doesn’t.
CAMILLA: Look at the snow! It seems as if it would never stop. Wouldn’t it be awful if we were kept here for days and days, with nothing to say but ‘How are you?’
ROBERT: Awful …
MRS BARRETT: (Fading in) … Luckily the driver had chains or I don’t think we would have ever got here.
BRIGGS: I am bringing in tea now, my lord. I have told Sir Julius that it is ready.
