It was not too far off midnight when we got a reply from the War House, and it was another half-hour before we were through to the Colonel Henrison with whom I had had dealings before. I had to do the talking, and I did as much repetition as possible so as to keep Topman in touch with what was being said at the other end.
Colonel Henrison remembered me well enough, for before taking up an appointment at the outbreak of war he had been an official at the Yard. What was finally settled was this. By hook or crook he’d get George Wharton sent down, and the inquiry would thereupon become a confidential one. If we were at the end of the line at nine hours in the morning, he would give further news. He agreed on the spot, however, that we should proceed with the rebuilding of the demolished rooms.
The Colonel was delighted, as he had reason to be. Then the last elements of uneasiness asserted themselves. “This Superintendent Wharton; what’s he like?”
I knew what answer he hoped for, and I gave it.
“He’s a mightily important man,” I said, “and more than competent. What’s more, he’s tact itself, and he’s the sort to go down well with the Home Guard.”
“Good, good,” he said. “But how are we going to explain him away?”
I suddenly smiled. Somehow I always smile when I think of George. “Let him give a special lecture on Security,” I said. “He was an Intelligence officer in the last war, and I think he’d do it.”
“You mean, make it appear that he’s one of the staff?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Even if his lecture’s never delivered, it’ll be a first-rate camouflage. He can be called a civilian expert.”
Well, that was all settled. A successor to Mortar would be arriving on Monday at the latest, and the Colonel and I were to meet after breakfast to make any rearrangements of syllabus. Harness was to go to Peakridge and make with a building firm there a case of priority for the rebuilding of the shattered rooms, and as the work was chiefly timbering, it might be rushed through in two or three days. In his address to the new Course, after dinner on the following night, the Colonel was to make a subtle allusion to the danger of tampering with electric lights or explosives, and he would pronounce a brief oration over poor Mortar. The Colonel and I were to compose the actual wording at that after-breakfast conference.
“Come and have a drink, Travers,” the Colonel told me both genially and with concern. “I feel as if I could do with one.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” I said, “but I don’t think I will. I’m devilish tired and I think I’ll get straight into bed.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “A long day ahead of us to-morrow.”
So we parted at Harness’s office. The Colonel had one or two matters he wanted to discuss with his Adjutant, and I made my way to my room. A window or two had been broken by the blast from the explosion, and as I stood for a moment looking at them I fairly gave a leap, for a hand touched my shoulders.
“Could you spare a minute or two, sir?”
It was Ferris.
My batman had rigged me up a bedside light, so I turned it on and kept the stronger light off in case a gleam of any sort should be seen from the outside. I also cautioned Ferris to speak quietly. There was a double partition between the rooms and it was difficult to overhear, but I was taking no chances, especially with Collect.
I might have been doing him an injustice, but I thought him capable of flattening his ear against the partition.
“Any more news?” Ferris wanted to know.
I told him there was nothing important, and then he said he had seen Feeder.
“I thought he was confined to his hut,” I said.
Ferris’s lip drooped. I hated his doing that, for it changed his face into something malevolent and even cunning. It was curious how there should be three sides to Ferris, and that only one should strike me as the real man. There was the scholarly, good-looking Ferris, quiet in manner and dry in humour, and he, I somehow felt, was not the real man. There was the Ferris of the guerrilla lectures, with burning eyes, tense voice, and clenched, smiting fists. That was the real Ferris—the Ferrova who had commanded a Brigade in Spain and made his name a terror to Franco’s men. It was also a Ferris for whom I had a tremendous, if sneaking, admiration. Then there was this other Ferris, with a sneer that almost bared his lower teeth. He was the night prowler, and something more savage even than the man of the twisted knife.
“Feeder wouldn’t give a damn for an order like that,” he said, “He’s got ways and means the same as I have. He thinks the same as me. Mortar was wiped out, and we’re going to get the one who did it.”
“Look here, young fellow,” I told him sternly. “I’m not going to listen to talk like that. This isn’t Spain, and I’m the second-in-command of this school. From now on I warn you that I’m reporting every word you say.”
His eyes were fixed so burningly on mine that somehow I was forced to turn mine away.
“Be sensible,” I told him. “Don’t you think I’m as eager as you are—and Feeder—to see this business through? I liked Mortar, and if I can do anything to help hang the one who killed him, by God I’ll do it! If he was killed, that is.”
He gave that same sneering smile again. Suddenly I remembered where I had seen that smile before, and what made it so distasteful to me when I saw it on the face of Ferris. It was in 1930, when I was having a holiday in Donegal and got friendly with a guest at the same hotel. I thought him a good fellow, generous, genial, and a good friend to myself and to Englishmen generally. Then most indiscreetly I happened to speak disparagingly of the Irishman’s love of trouble, and in a flash I was horrified and frightened by the expression of his face. The landlord told me later that he had been in the thick of the Rebellion and that no man was a more fanatical hater of everything English.
The look went from Ferris’s face and all at once he was what I might call his first self.
“I see that, sir. And I think you’re quite right. Are you going to let out about the Northover that nearly got him and the Mills that nearly got me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I will tell you this, and in the strictest confidence. You’ll know why I’m telling you as soon as you hear the name. A special investigator is coming down, and nobody’s to know who he is. Wharton—Superintendent Wharton of New Scotland Yard.”
He stared, then gave a lame sort of smile. “Good heavens, sir, how did you—”
He was speaking far too loudly and I held up a warning hand. Then I explained, and I pledged him to absolute secrecy.
“So you see,” I said. “I can tell him in confidence what I as good as swore I wouldn’t tell anyone else—what you and Mortar told me in the Greyhound.”
“Good,” he said, and nodded. “You tell him everything, sir. But speaking of stamps, there’s one thing I’d like you to do for me. I believe the Colonel thinks I was trying to get into that burning room of Mortar’s in order to try and get Mortar out. I don’t want him to think I was a ruddy hero. I wasn’t doing anything of the sort, sir. I knew there couldn’t be much of Mortar to get out. What I was after was rescuing my stamps, and I believe I might have done it if it hadn’t been for that interfering fool, Brende.”
“Good Lord!” I said. “Those stamps of yours. Pretty tough luck, that.”
“Several hundred pounds,” he said, but far more philosophically than I should have spoken. “Luckily I’ve a few duplicates but—well, there we are. They’ve gone and that’s that.”
He was getting to his feet and I rose too. My hand went to his shoulder. “Take my advice,” I said. “Leave everything to Wharton. If you have to think, keep your thoughts to yourself.”
He nodded. Then his eyes narrowed. “I’ll tell you this, sir, and you can do what you like about it. If you see me pally with Store, don’t be surprised.”
“Store?” I said, and stared. “What on earth could he have to do with it!”
“He’s pally with Brende,” he told me almost offhandedly.
“That Mills that nearly got me came out of the magazine, and so did whatever killed Mortar. Store may have faked the books. One other tip, sir. Don’t forget Flick. He should have been running films off to-night, and he wasn’t.”
A whispered good night, and he was letting himself out. As I closed the door and went over to my bed, I was trying to make sense of what he had just told me. I never had liked the look of Store, who struck me as one of the shifty kind, and as for Flick, I knew already that he had not been running off films all the evening. But when it came to good hard thinking, my brain refused to act, and I knew that the only thing for me was sleep.
Inside five minutes I was snuggling down in my camp bed, and then was asleep before I knew it. Yet I had one of the worst nights in my life, and it is essential that I should tell you why. I hate to read about other people’s dreams, but my particular nightmare was something different.
Did I tell you that when the fougasse was let off during rehearsal week, I was the one who did it? Well, I was, or I should have been. There was the box with electric contact ready to be made by the simple depression of the plunger. Perhaps I was wool-gathering, or maybe I hadn’t listened sufficiently closely to the instructions, but when Mortar who was standing by my side, called. “Now!” I merely fumbled round. As my hand fell on the top of the plunger, his hand closed on it to help me. He saw my hesitation, in other words, and as the explosion was timed to a second, he was covering up my hesitation by depressing the plunger himself, and unknown to the others, whose eyes naturally were on the bank from which the blazing barrel would emerge.
At any rate his hand closed over mine, and never had I felt anything so icily cold. My own was warm, for it had been in the pocket of my British warm. And that was what I was to dream about all that Saturday night, or so it seemed. There was I, getting into hopeless muddles over that fougasse—muddles that varied chaotically from dream to dream—and always Mortar’s ice-cold hand would settle over mine, and then I would wake with the perspiration literally streaming down my face. Only towards morning did I know what it was that caused those dreams. My bed was an old iron type, and in my restless sleep my hand would keep going beyond the bed clothes and coming to rest on the cold iron framework of the bed! The hotter I was, the colder the iron seemed.
In the morning I was up early, and I flattered myself I was easily the first in to breakfast. Then the orderly told me that Harness had breakfasted more than an hour before, and when I came out to the parade ground I saw him coming back to his office. It appeared he had already put in half a day’s work, and that after being up most of the night, and there he was fresh apparently as a daisy.
Everything was going well. A Sapper officer and a sergeant were due at any minute to make the official search of the debris in order to determine the nature of the explosive. The building contractor at Peakridge would have men on the job of rebuilding that very afternoon, and his lorries would be delivering material within an hour. Harness had also seen the undertaker at Peakridge, who would get a full-sized coffin ready at once, and Harness told me that after I left the previous night, the Colonel and he had decided that unless anything unforeseen happened, the funeral would be at Peakridge on the Monday afternoon. The Course would be in the lecture-room, unaware that a funeral was taking place.
I had overtaken Harness short of his office, and I saw the sentries doing their patrols round the shattered building, for I had been too busy with my thoughts to notice anything when I left my room to go to breakfast. In Harness’s office we had a good look at all correspondence concerning Mortar and could get no information about next-of-kin. Every officer, however, is required to fill in for the War Office a comprehensive account of himself and his previous service on a special long form, but Harness had not yet had time to get the forms filled in by officers at the school. A new hand, that is; an officer who had served before in this war, would have made one out at his previous place of appointment, and the War Office would have a copy. Harness said he would get the number of Mortar’s previous School of Instruction and they could refer to the form, if they still had it.
Nine o’clock was zero hour for that call from the War House, and well before the time the Colonel and I were at the telephone. The call came through promptly enough, and what Colonel Henrison had to tell us was, as far as I was concerned, simply splendid. Wharton would be leaving London that morning by train, and he would arrive with the full authority of the War Office behind him. Every facility should be given him for inquiry, and within the bounds of his own discretion there was apparently nothing he was not empowered to do.
“One thing I want to put up to you,” Henrison said. “Would it be a help if he came in uniform? For camouflage, I mean? He held a captain’s rank in the last war, and, personally, I think it would be a help.”
I was absolutely flabbergasted. Somehow I didn’t dare trust myself to think of George in uniform, but Topman had never seen George and his moustache and his private paraphernalia, and he jumped at the suggestion. Wharton would be one of the staff, and the new Course would be completely in ignorance of what he really was.
Henrison said he’d fix things at once. He also gave permission, subject to Wharton’s approval, for the funeral to take place on the Monday afternoon.
“A real good job done, Travers,” Topman said when we had at last hung up. “I think we might as well keep the staff in ignorance, too, about who this man—this Captain Wharton really is.”
I said it was an excellent suggestion, though I was already sweating as to whether Ferris’s discretion could be relied on. Then I put it to the Colonel that as the train from the junction would be crowded with the new Course of students, it might be as well if I met Wharton at the junction by car. That would also allow me to give him some ideas before his arrival. The Colonel thought that was an excellent suggestion, too.
Then we adjourned to the Colonel’s room for the conference, which was over in no time. We amended the syllabus, even if we had to throw more work on Ferris, and towards the end of the Course we fitted in a lecture on Security by Wharton. Then we decided on the wording of the allusions the Colonel would make after dinner that night to both the accident and Mortar himself. I left the Colonel committing the speech to memory’.
Next I had a look round and decided to take a brisk walk in the direction of the town. Then Harness collared me to introduce the Sapper major and the highly efficient-looking sergeant, who were just beginning their search of the ruins, helped by a couple of our men. Then, when I got going again, I ran into that cinema operator assistant of Flick’s.
Before I tell you what we talked about, I might as well make something perfectly plain. When I was first associated with George Wharton, I took my stand on the question of lying. In my callow way I thought we should play cricket, and all that. To tell deliberate lies and create false situations in order to entrap even a criminal seemed to me to be hardly playing the game. George, who regarded me with the contempt I deserved, said he’d stop lying, as I called it, if the criminals began first.
It took me a goodish time to come round to his way of thinking; indeed I still wince inwardly a bit when I perpetrate some terrific untruth in the cause of justice. But on the whole I have become a fairly fluent liar when a situation seems to me to demand it, even if I can’t quite separate such private and necessary duplicity from personal morals. Mind you, George still has me stone cold in the Ananias line. At times he will even lie on my behalf, and I find that he has committed me to the most outrageous statements.
“Well, how’d the films go?” I said to this operator of Flick’s.
“Pretty well, sir,” he said.
“I just peeped in,” I said, “but Mr. Flick wasn’t there. Or perhaps I didn’t see him.”
“Oh, no, he wasn’t there,” he said. “He had to go away, and we carried on.”
“You gave him a report afterwards?” I suggested.
He showed a momentary surprise and then said that I was right. Mr. Flick had as
ked for a detailed report on each film—a kind of synopsis, in fact.
The artistry of lying—according to Wharton—is never to overdo it, so I nodded cheerfully and moved off towards the town. On the way I passed a big lorry loaded with timber, and on my way back a second one overtook me. What I thought about on that hour’s walk is—like what the soldier said—not relevant evidence. Then when I did get back I went across to the ruins where the Sappers were still at work.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” the major said quietly. “We know what caused the explosion.” His voice lowered. “This is not official, of course, and even you had better keep it under your hat. It was that Blacker bomb.”
Then he was giving me a queer look as I stood there blinking away and polishing my glasses.
“Don’t tell me you’d guessed?”
As a matter of fact I had had from the first ideas at the far back of my mind, though I had never let them get farther than that. For one thing the shattering roar of the explosion was more than could have been made by a whole box of Mills bombs.
“I knew it was possible,” I told him. “After all, your chaps were never able to find that bomb for us.”
He nodded and frowned. “That chap Mortar must have been a first-class lunatic to’ve gone tampering with a thing like that.”
I shook my head and said nothing, then we stood for a minute or two watching the progress of the tail-end of the search. All the floor-boards of the three huts had long since been ripped away, or at least the charred ends that showed where the boards had been, and most of the ashes had been sifted. Small sacks, properly labelled, stood ready to be taken away for analysis and further research. Suddenly the Sapper sergeant was straightening his body and having a good look at something. He wiped it carefully with his handkerchief, then held it to the light again, and was shaking his head and frowning.
“What’s that you’ve got?” the major called.
The sergeant came over to us, and he spoke very quietly. What he handed over was something I could recognise—the cartridge used to propel a Blacker bomb from the bombard.
The Case of the Fighting Soldier: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 10
