The Bat that Flits

by Norman Collins

  “You don’t actually see the blood, do you?”

  The Inspector brought out his iced-gimlet look again.

  “It isn’t the size of a dewdrop,” he said pityingly.

  “Well, thank you, Inspector,” I replied. “You’ve explained it very nicely. I want to help you all I can, and I’m quite ready to consider it. I’ll speak to my doctor this evening. If he thinks I can give that much with safety you’re welcome.”

  But I don’t think that the Inspector was really an understanding kind of man. Either that or he was in a hurry. This time it wasn’t simply the ice squirt that he gave me. It was the whole berg, hurled hard and hammered home.

  2

  By now, however, the Inspector was already on his way out. M.I.5 had decided to take over from him. Their own men, a colonel and a couple of captains, had come straight down from London the day the missing culture was reported.

  The two captains didn’t amount to very much. They were mere note-takers and coffee-carriers. But I must say that I was more favourably impressed by the head of the mission. He was a chain-smoker like myself, and he had bags under his eyes that would have roused the suspicions of any Customs officer.

  Wilton, his name was, and I found out afterwards that he had been in the Egyptian drug-control racket for over twenty years. He was a B.Sc. London. But somewhere in the Courts of the Pashas, he had acquired a kind of unconcealed boredom that made him indistinguishable from the genuine Cambridge article. And thank God, when it came to cloak-and-dagger stuff in a research laboratory, he spoke our language.

  The Director had made over his breakfast-room for temporary Gestapo headquarters. And Wilton sent across almost straight away to say that he would like to see me. But compared to the ice-eyed Inspector, Wilton might never have conducted the interrogation of a witness before. He simply stretched his long, thin legs in front of the fireguard, wriggled his shoulders like a camel settling itself, and said: “Well, tell me all about yourself.”

  I grinned. “There isn’t much to tell beside what’s in the dossier,” I said.

  “Isn’t there?” he asked.

  While he was speaking he lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of his old one, and dropped the butt into an open ashtray without even troubling to stamp it out. There was a whole lifetime of excessive smoking in that single gesture. But he didn’t press the point. Didn’t even give the impression of being the sort of man to press anything.

  “Where do you suppose the stuff’s gone?” he asked at last.

  I paused.

  “Russia, I suppose.”

  “And do you think it got there?”

  “One of us must have sent it.”

  “Any idea which one?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not a clue,” I told him.

  “That’s my trouble, too,” he said.

  While he was speaking, he uncrossed those long legs of his. And now that he was standing I could see how tall he was. He wasn’t camel-type any longer. It was definitely somewhere in the giraffe series that he belonged.

  “Have a drink,” he asked.

  Considering that it was only makeshift, he had got the place remarkably well equipped in no time. There was a bottle of Scotch and two of Gordon’s in the corner cupboard, that up to last week had contained nothing more exciting than a few pieces of Crown Derby and old Rockingham.

  When I said, “Gin,” he poured me out a glass that even I looked at respectfully. And I found myself hoping for his sake that M.I.5 took a generous view of his expense accounts. Then we both had the other half. We didn’t say very much while we were drinking. And Wilton spent most of the time simply staring out of the window.

  “Mind if I go on asking you a few questions?” he inquired, still with the same general air of vagueness.

  It occurred to me then that, perhaps the Egyptian sun had got at the poor fellow. Either that or he’d taken to sampling some of the choicer drugs that he had confiscated. Because in the real sense of the word, he hadn’t so far asked me anything. We’d just been gossiping.

  “Carry right on,” I invited him.

  “If the stuff’s gone to Russia, I suppose that means a sympathiser here in Bodmin, doesn’t it?” he said.

  He seemed to be thinking aloud. And the thought didn’t strike me as particularly brilliant either.

  “That’s how I see it,” I agreed with him.

  “Noticed any signs of Communist activity since you came here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not a hint.”

  It was a silly question, anyhow: Communists aren’t all that dumb.

  “Happen to know if any of the people you’re working with are Commies?”

  Again I shook my head.

  “Nobody tells me anything,” I answered.

  “Or ex-Commies?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  He continued to stare out of the window as though sunlight and white clouds were something new to him. And I wondered if the cross-examination was now over.

  “That was an awful lot of tripe you told the Inspector,” he said at last. “What made you?”

  “Just shyness,” I said.

  “D’you often go into Plymouth?”

  “Who says I was in Plymouth?”

  Wilton had closed his eyes by now. From the peaceful expression on his face he might have been ready to doze off at any moment.”

  “You were, weren’t you?”

  This time I was the one who paused.

  “As a matter of fact, I was,” I said simply.

  There was another pause.

  “Would you like me to make a fresh statement?” I asked. Wilton blew his lips out.

  “Not worth it,” he said. “Besides you probably don’t remember the details by now.”

  We didn’t seem to me to be getting along very fast. And the same thought must have crossed Wilton’s mind. He straightened himself like one of those Angle-Poise lamps returning to the upright, and got up.

  “I’d much rather you forgot about it and helped me to find a Commie or an ex-Commie here on the staff of the Institute,” he went on. “That’s your job.”

  “But why me?” I asked.

  “Only because I thought you might be able to help me,” he replied. “But don’t lose any sleep over it. If you can’t, somebody else will. The facts are bound to turn up sooner or later.”

  With that, he shook hands with me. And I noticed then what a limp, feeble sort of handshake the man had. My own grip seemed rather bad form by comparison. But I didn’t like the turn the conversation had just taken. And he seemed rather to be harping on it.

  My trouble was that I had joined the Communist Party right back in 1926. And I didn’t want to have anybody nosing his way around me.

  Chapter XIII

  1

  I wasted a lot of time wondering how much Wilton really knew. And, in the end, I decided that it couldn’t be very much. Otherwise, he would have pounced. Not that I was alone in wondering. There seemed to be an unconscionable amount of speculation going on up at the Institute.

  Alone among us, it was our great Dr. Smith who showed brave by publishing his conclusions.

  “Looked at dispassionately,” he said with irritating slowness, “it might appear that some person or persons”—here he stared hard at Kimbell and Swanton while he was speaking—“had an interest in preventing, or at least delaying, any positive outcome of the experiments. Now that the work is over, the accidents have ceased entirely, and the law of averages can apply again. That is a characteristic of all sabotage.”

  “Thank God for that,” Bansted said devoutly, before either Kimbell or Swanton could get their little forked tongues into the forward position. But a split second later Kimbell cut in like a radio comedian.

  “So it was sabotage, was it?” he asked. “Have you told the Sunday Express about it?”

  “Sabotage, or rather the fear of it,” observed Swanton, taking the cue up perfectly, “only occurs during a
decline. Any society that is expanding never gives a thought to it. But once the whole bloody thing starts crumbling then the word begins to crop up. Look at the papers. Ammunition train blows up—sabotage. Naval turbine breaks down—sabotage. You never even hear the word ‘strike’ nowadays; it’s industrial sabotage every time.”

  By now Kimbell was talking again.

  “As for these accidents having stopped,” he asked, “isn’t it a bit early to speak? How about your theory, if something happened to-morrow? Gremlins do sometimes return, you know.”

  And to-morrow was precisely when the next accident did occur. One of us, Gillett’s own girl-friend Una, very nearly went up to heaven in gauge oo pieces.

  I don’t expect laymen to know what an anaerobic jar is. But if you’re working on the anaerobes you have to simulate their normal living conditions, and exclude the oxygen. To do this you take a large glass jar, seal it hermetically and begin pumping the air out. Then when most of it has gone you add a little hydrogen to taste.

  So far, it’s mere nursery stuff. But just to make sure that all the oxygen has really gone and that you’re giving the anaerobes a sporting chance, you begin heating the mixture. This brings on condensation and leaves room for more hydrogen. By the time you’re through, it’s a thoroughly hydrogen-happy little jar that you have with you. But the heating bit can be tricky. There is an element of palladium black right inside the jar to lay on the heat. Naturally the little capsule is all wired off, like the Davy safety lamp that miners use. That’s because hydrogen when mixed with even the remains of oxygen and brought into contact with a naked flame makes one big Brock’s benefit. And it’s easy enough to monkey about with the element to make it lethal.

  It was the demure one who was working the jar. And the two of us were the only people who were in the lab. at the time. Young Mellon, who had just located a new ash-blonde in the St. Austell area, had slipped off rather early to reconnoitre, and Gillett had taken Bansted out to gloat over a pregnant guinea-pig. I was aware somewhere at the back of my mind of the hum of an electric motor which told me that the demure one was using the vacuum pump on the anaerobic jar, and I heard the faint clink of metal on metal as she fitted the spanner into the hydrogen cylinder. Nothing on earth could have been more normal so far.

  But it didn’t stop that way for long. The demure one bent down for a second to pick up a pencil or something that she had dropped, and at the same instant the jar exploded. There was a bright white flash like a pocket atom-bomb, a bang like Judgment Day, and no more anaerobic jar.

  And no more demure one—that was my first thought. I made my way as quickly as I could across the litter of busted plates and smashed-up bottles, and found her. She was lying in a heap on the floor right up against the side of the opposite bench. There was blood on her forehead where one of the little slivers of glass had cut it, and her legs were twitching. She might have been dead or she might not. I couldn’t say.

  I bent down to pick her up. And, while I was still holding her, Gillett came bursting in.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I told him. “It’s just the way friend Kimbell said it would be.”

  “Is she all right?”

  I nodded.

  “You’d better have her,” I said.

  And, with that, I passed her over from my arms into his. Then I paused. Gillett was so pale that I thought for a moment that he was going to faint, too.

  2

  Then something happened that made the whole thing seem odder still. What’s more, the oddity came from quite the most unexpected quarter. It came from Hilda. And when she asked me if I would go for a walk with her on the moor, I knew that there was really something up.

  She was an uncompromisingly open-air kind of girl, and she walked rather faster than I did. If I had attempted even to hold her hand I should have had to start running just to make sure that I didn’t have to let go of her again. Then, about a mile from the Institute, Hilda got to the point.

  “I want you to do something for me,” she said.

  “Agreed,” I told her.

  “I want you to help me to get Una away from here.”

  That stumped me. If she had asked me to persuade Bansted to shave off his moustache I felt that I should have had about the same chances of success.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t,” Hilda replied, with the astonishing substitute for logic that women have been using for years, and usually get away with.

  “But, still, why me?” I asked her. “I’ve hardly spoken to the girl.”

  “Because you’re about the only person here that I trust,” she told me.

  That really meant something, coming from her.

  “Could be,” I answered. “But I still don’t see how to set about it. I’m not the kidnapping kind.”

  “Don’t be silly.” she said.

  I wished that Hilda hadn’t got quite that governess sort of note in her voice. It didn’t go with her eyelashes. But it went with everything else apparently.

  “Listen to me,” she went on. “I want you to talk to Gillett and say that after what Una has been through you feel that she should go away somewhere. And I want you to be tactful about it. If he thinks that you’re trying to get her away from here for good of course he’ll oppose it. Make it sound only like a few days. That’s all I want you to do.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll do everything else there is to do.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Hilda’s mouth tightened.

  “Meaning that when she’s gone she’s never coming back again,” she said. “Never.”

  “So,” I answered non-committally.

  Perhaps too non-committally. Because it didn’t seem to satisfy her. She suddenly thrust her hand out and laid it on my arm. I was surprised to find how strong her grip was.

  “It’s your job to get Una away from here,” she said fiercely. “Just that. Afterwards, it’s my business.”

  When I got back to the Institute it was already after six o’clock. I went straight along to the bar to drink things over. If Hilda had been the first girl to tell me that I was the only living male whom she could trust, I might have been bowled right out by it. But members of the other sex had been telling me that kind of thing for as long as I could remember. I think that it must be something to do with my appearance —the hacked-out ruggedness and the crowning disfigurement of the scar. There is an ineradicable Puritan belief among the English that the ugly must necessarily be good.

  And I was still suspicious. Gillett was so easily the Institute’s best-looker that I could understand any girl, even Hilda, wanting to get him back again all for her own. The only thing was that I didn’t see why I should help.

  I still had other plans for Hilda.

  Chapter XIV

  I think that it must have been the presence of M.I.5 that led our local Inspector to redouble his own efforts. Perhaps he was hoping for a transfer from the rick-fire and cattle-maiming side. Whatever it was, he certainly dashed about a bit. And he was just on the point of arresting a tubercular tramp somewhere over in Wadebridge and charging him with the post office burglary, when he suddenly found the shop that had sold a pair of the right-sized plimsolls.

  That changed everything. The two young captains started behaving as though the trial were to-morrow, and went stamping about the Institute with bundles of papers under their arms and an aloof, mysterious expression on their faces like children playing Red Indians. And I can tell you that it caused a bit of a sensation inside the Institute when we heard that poor little Dr. Mann had been asked by the Inspector to attend an identity parade.

  The only person to remain calm and apparently disinterested was Colonel Wilton. He ordered—and, what was more remarkable, actually got—another half-case of Scotch and six of gin, and invited me across to help him get through it.

  I didn’t enjoy it quite so much as I should have done.And there were two quite
different reasons for this. The first was that Wilton would keep harking back to Party members and ex-members, which gave me a distinctly coolish feeling in the pit of my stomach every time he mentioned them. And the second was that I couldn’t help feeling pretty badly about Dr. Mann. He was taking things worse even than I would have expected. It didn’t even seem to comfort him any when I told him that I had agreed to stand in as an extra in the identity line just to keep the numbers up and see fair play. And I still had a sort of haunting feeling that he might feel like borrowing somebody else’s razor rather than go through the ordeal of looking a lot of policemen in the eye.

  The identity parade took place at 9.30 a.m. sharp. I drove myself down just to show off the new licence on the windscreen. And when I got there I found myself let in for a bit of a surprise. Two surprises, in fact. The first was that the whole ruddy Institute was assembled. Apparently at the last moment, the Inspector had gone round explaining that the more people who turned up, the better Dr. Mann’s chances were likely to be. Wilton explained to me afterwards that the only thing that the girl in the shoe-shop could remember about the person to whom she had sold the plimsolls was, that he was foreign-looking and somehow didn’t seem to belong. And it was simply to avoid standing Dr. Mann up amid a lot of sheepish and bewildered cowhands, that the police had roped in the most convenient colony of obvious misfits that they could lay their hands on.

  The shoe-shop assistant was a tired, drooping sort of girl, rather like a limp black plimsoll herself. And she spoiled the whole effect by pointing out Dr. Mann as she came in through the doorway. And that made the rest of us feel rather foolish. We were left standing there like a lot of nightmare Ziegfeld girls playing to a stone-cold house.

  But the Inspector asked us if we would mind not breaking off for a moment. And that was where surprise Number Two came in. Because the next instant he came back again with my little fair-haired friend from Plymouth. She looked pretty ghastly in the hard morning light of the courtyard—that dredged-up appearance came out more strongly than ever. But I must say that she behaved magnificently. True to the finest traditions of her profession, she went down the whole line without batting an eyelid. And then, balancing herself on her five-inch heels, she said that she had never set eyes on any one of us before.