The Bat that Flits

by Norman Collins

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have,” I replied. “Three of them. But I didn’t see why I should say so in front of everyone. In my view there’s been too much talking already.”

  “Three, d’you say?” Gillett asked.

  I got the impression that he didn’t like being outbid in the matter of secret messages. Also, that he didn’t entirely believe me.

  “Three’s the number, brother,” I replied.

  And taking out my notecase I unfolded all the earlier specimens. They were a bit creased by now, and looked rather as though I had been sleeping in them. But the typing still showed up black and clear against the obviously inferior-quality paper that the unknown typist had been using.

  Wilton took the piece of paper and began to examine it. Not very professionally either. He merely tilted back the shade of the desk-lamp and held the paper up against the naked bulb.

  “Mind,” I warned him. “Don’t scorch it.”

  But either Wilton hadn’t heard me or he always looked at pieces of paper that way.

  “It is German,” he said at last. “There’s a bit of the watermark in this piece.”

  Gillett stepped forward as though he were on parade-ground. But, after all, it was my piece of paper, and I cut in front of him.

  “Me first,” I said.

  There wasn’t very much to see. For a start, it was right down in the corner. All that I could make out was what might have been an eagle’s head and a scroll with some writing on it. The trouble was that the scroll was half-cut off, and the letters “ . . . HE PAP . . . IND . . . ” didn’t convey very much to me. Wilton must have seen the expression on my face.

  “Deutsche Papier Industrie Gesellschaft,” he explained.

  That certainly seemed to fit well enough. My respect for Wilton went up again. It isn’t everyone who can read about one-sixth of a foreign watermark.

  But Wilton didn’t seem particularly excited about his discovery.

  “Not that it gets us very far,” he said. “They used to make about three-quarters of all the paper in Europe.”

  “But not three-quarters of all the paper in Bodmin,” Gillett observed.

  Wilton smiled. It was not much of a smile. A mere slackening among the muscles. Practically a paralysis. And because it added to the general air of limpness Wilton looked rather sadder when he was smiling.

  “It’s still three-quarters of all the European paper,” he said. “And there are letters coming through the whole time. There’s Kimbell’s chess. And Swanton’s League of Free Scientists. And Bansted’s been fixing up for a holiday in the Tyrol. And there’s you.” Here Wilton jerked a thumb in Gillett’s direction. “You’re going to Switzerland. There’s paper like this pouring in all the time.”

  “Not in blank sheets,” Gillett observed.

  I noticed that he sounded rather defiant about it. And I wasn’t altogether surprised. I wasn’t ready to say that his theory, whatever it was, had anything in it. But, at least, it was a theory. And he was trying hard to push it. It must have been pretty depressing for a man of Gillett’s energy to have to deal with someone about as nimble and enthusiastic as a used bath-towel. But if Wilton thought that Gillett was going to leave it there, he had underestimated him.

  So had I. We were both of us completely unprepared for the Gillett pocket-model H-bomb that he suddenly produced. He had stepped back and was facing us with a ram-the-enemy-if-your-guns-are-jammed kind of expression on his face. His hands were shoved down hard in the pockets of his jacket, and his feet were planted firmly in readiness for the head-on collision.

  “If you won’t take any action, I will,” he said.

  “What sort of action?”

  Even now, Wilton seemed to be not much more than casually interested. He was scratching the part of his leg where the suspender should have been.

  Gillett paused. It was quite obvious that the pause was purely for effect. But what he had to say justified it. He didn’t want there to be the slightest misunderstanding anywhere.

  “Action that will lead to the arrest of Dr. Mann on a charge of attempting to murder my fiancée,” he said, clearly and distinctly.

  Wilton looked up. There was no pause this time.

  “I suppose you’re aware that it’s a serious charge you’re making?” he asked.

  “It’s because it’s a serious charge that I make it in front of a witness,” he said. “I don’t want there to be any backing out this time.”

  “And if I tell you you’re wrong?”

  “I shall go into Bodmin and lay in my information before the nearest J.P.,” Gillett answered. “I’m bloody well sick of policemen.”

  It was certainly plain speaking. And Wilton seemed to understand it. He started creaking and came slowly to the upright position.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” he asked wearily.

  “I want you to come with me and collect the weapon that Dr. Mann used when he fired first at me and then at Una.”

  “Is it far?” Wilton asked.

  He had narrowed his eyes down and was looking hard at Gillett. There was something characteristic about the attitude, and I realised what it was. Whenever Wilton was really looking hard at anyone it was never full-face. Always from the side.

  “I suggest to you that it is hidden in Mann’s room at this moment,” Gillett replied. “And I suggest that if it isn’t taken away from him he’ll use it again. It isn’t your life that’s in danger, remember. It’s mine.”

  “And Una’s,” I put in.

  But I don’t think he heard me.

  “Why should yours be?” Wilton went straight on.

  “Because he knows I suspect him,” Gillett replied.

  “How does he know that?”

  There was another of those little pauses. Though whether it was for effect or not this time I couldn’t say.

  “I told him,” Gillett answered.

  Wilton paused with an unlit cigarette between his lips and the stub of the old one raised half-way towards it.

  “When?” he asked.

  “To-day,” Gillett said. “After coffee. I couldn’t stand another damn minute of it. He was sitting there like some bloody little Buddha talking about international brotherhood and nation-shall-speak-peace-unto-nation and all that rot, and I suddenly had enough of it. There were just the two of us. And I told him what kind of a swine I thought he was. . . . ”

  I suppose that if you conserve your energies the way Wilton always did, you have more to draw on in an emergency. But whatever the explanation, Wilton certainly had something there. He was off in a burst that any ostrich would have envied.

  “Where are you going?” Gillett asked as soon as we had caught up again.

  “See Dr. Mann,” Wilton answered.

  The speed with which things were happening seemed to have shaken Gillett a bit.

  “Don’t . . . don’t you want a warrant or anything?” he asked. But by then Wilton had gone too far down the corridor to answer.

  3

  When we got to Dr. Mann’s room it was empty. And tidy. I don’t mean to say that the other rooms along that corridor weren’t tidy, too. There was a cousin or something of the Phoenician who played the part of bedder; and wastepaper baskets and hair-tidies were all regularly emptied by nine-thirty. But there was a neatness about Dr. Mann’s room that was a straight projection of his own precise and systematic soul. The safety razor with which he had replaced the cut-throat I had stolen, hung from two little nails that he had driven into the woodwork. And even his dressing-gown was on a hanger. It was just the sort of room that any housemaster hopes to find when he is taking round a new parent.

  I could see that Wilton had searched a room before. And that wasn’t surprising. There must have been a period when he had been forced to get down to things and not merely stand around cloud-gazing. He started with the chest-of drawers, and worked very efficiently from the bottom upwards so that he didn’t have to waste a lot of time shutting the drawers before getti
ng to work on the next one. But he was just wasting his time: I could see that as soon as he started. The only thing that was the slightest bit unusual was a cardboard box in one of the drawers. It contained three bars of milk chocolate, a tube of toothpaste, two lengths of elastic, some safety-pins, and a tin of Lyons’ coffee. It was obviously the beginnings of another of Dr. Mann’s gift parcels, and I remember wondering whether it would ever get there.

  I caught Gillett’s eye while Wilton was going through it. But he quickly looked away again. I don’t think that at this particular moment any of us wanted to be reminded of the dependence of Dr. Mann’s female relatives. But ordinary human feelings didn’t seem to play a large part in Wilton’s make-up. By now, he was already going through the clothes in the wardrobe. And he was working quickly and methodically, patting the pockets and the seams as he worked over them one by one. When he had finished, he turned to Gillett.

  “Give me a hand with that trunk, will you?”

  It was easily the most solid piece of furniture in the room. And it looked as though it had been in Dr. Mann’s family for a long time. Members of the Hanseatic League must have transferred their valuables in trunks like this one. The lock alone would have needed a hammer and cold chisel to break it open. It came as something of an anticlimax, therefore, when Wilton put his fingers into the catch and the hasp flew open. Somehow I couldn’t see any man hiding a revolver in a tin trunk without a key. And I was right, too. That trunk was as innocent as a case of new-laid eggs.

  Wilton turned towards Gillett.

  “Satisfied?” he asked.

  I don’t think that it was the wasted effort he minded so much as the stooping. For the last five minutes he had been bent over double. And at this moment he was reaching the upright in a series of jerks and creakings. But it wasn’t at Wilton that I was looking. It was at Gillett. He was standing in the doorway, his hands still thrust into his jacket pockets and his jaw sticking out farther than he usually carried it.

  The air of cocksure jauntiness had completely gone, however. He didn’t even look up when he answered.

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  “Quite sure?”

  Gillett nodded. This time he didn’t even bother to say anything.

  But Wilton had been put to a lot of trouble in the past few minutes. And it was obvious that he didn’t like being put to trouble. There was a mean side to his nature, and it came out now.

  “No afterthoughts?” he asked.

  Still no reply. Just a sad, sullen headshake.

  Wilton, however, had no intention of letting Gillett off as lightly as all that. He just stood there giving the screw an extra turn or two for good value.

  “Absolutely and completely satisfied?” he asked again.

  As with banns it was the third and last time of asking. And this time Gillett couldn’t stick it any longer.

  “I’ve said so, haven’t I?” he replied.

  Wilton grinned. It was a wide, unpleasant schoolboy grin with Wilton’s two large ears on the outer ends.

  “Well, I’m not,” he said.

  There was only one other article of furniture in the whole room—the laundry basket. Wilton went across to it. Every cubicle had its own laundry basket. It was a wicker affair like the chair; and, also like the chair, it was painted rose bud pink.

  I could have told him what he would find in it. At least, at the start I could. Out came two dirty shirts, one of them a bit patched round the tail in a rough, amateurish kind of way as though Dr. Mann had been doing his own needlework. Next there was a pair of socks, ditto, with some fancy cross-stitching round the toes and the heels. And a pyjama suit with trousers that didn’t match the jacket. About averagely sordid was how I would have described that basketful.

  I even had a feeling that I was being a bit disloyal to Dr. Mann, just standing there rubber-necking while a high-grade army nark went through the wash-bag. But Wilton might have been sorting soiled undies all his life. And when he came to the end began battering the poor basket on its head. The bottom fell clean away. But it was a false bottom. Cut the same shape as the basket, it fitted neatly round the sides and left a space of about four inches underneath it. And the first thing that came tumbling out of that space was an old Luger holster—empty.

  This was Gillett’s moment. His eyes were shining, and he uttered a deep, long-drawn-out “Ah” as he saw it.

  But it was also my moment too. Because there was more than a revolver-case in that little cavity. There was a whole collection of pieces of very inferior-looking paper all neatly typed with letters in heavy black capitals. And the one that I was staring at had a sort of crazy logic that was all its own.

  “RELAX NOW. THE BIRD HAS FLOWN,” was what was written there.

  Chapter XXVII

  The mist at Bodmin had a highly developed sense of the dramatic. It knew exactly when to come down and when to keep away. And I could see the windows steaming up as I stood there. The small ventilation pane at the top had been left open, and long tendrils of the mist were already reaching into the little cubicle.

  Wilton had already picked up the Luger case by the strap and had wrapped it up in the old pyjama jacket. As for the messages he didn’t seem to be nearly as interested in them as I was. He simply scooped them up into a ball and shoved them all in his pocket. It was Gillett he turned to, not to me.

  “Lock the door after us, there’s a good fellow,” he said.

  It was noticeable that his manner towards Gillett had changed considerably during the last few minutes. Wilton was now trying all he could to rub out those nasty marks that the thumb-screws had left. And the change showed itself in the confidence that he placed in him.

  “Better put the key on your key-ring,” he added. “I don’t want anyone else coming in here until I get back.”

  That left me free to go off with Wilton. But Wilton was doing his ostrich-racing act again, and it was as much as I could do to keep up with him. He was looking for Dr. Mann.

  The first place that we went to was the lab. But that didn’t help us very much. Nor did Kimbell. He was the only person in the lab. when we got there. And I thought he looked a bit startled.

  “Last time I saw Mann he was going out somewhere,” he told us. •

  “How d’you know?”

  “He’d got his raincoat on.”

  “Was it like this?”

  Wilton indicated the window. Visibility was practically nil by now. It was as though someone had hung up a wet bath-towel across the woodwork.

  “Not so thick,” Kimbell replied, and went on pretending to screw up a clamp that looked to me perfectly firm already.

  “How long ago?”

  “About half an hour. I was just coming in.”

  “See which way he went?”

  “Over towards the kennels.”

  “Sure?”

  Kimbell paused.

  “Pretty sure,” he said. “I didn’t notice him particularly.”

  And giving the clamp an extra turn that I had known all the time it didn’t need, he splintered the S-bend that it was holding. It was quite good acting, so far as it went. But it just didn’t go far enough. A better actor would have asked if there was anything wrong.

  Wilton had set his own pace, and I followed behind like a pet Corgi. I’d never known Wilton so energetic before—I think that Gillett’s threat of the Bodmin J.P. must have scared him. And he was inclined to be irritable. The first thing that he did was to get the Old Man to call the roll. But everyone had knocked off by now, and getting them together was work for a good pair of sheep dogs. It took twenty minutes before he’d got all of them assembled. All of them in the Institute, that is. Swanton wasn’t there because he was keeping a date with a dentist in Bodmin. Hilda had left early saying that she wanted to get away while she could still see to drive. Dr. Mann we had known all the time wasn’t there to show up. And Una was the one missing one.

  It shook Gillett when he discovered this. He had kept his pro
file under strict orders for years. But he had nothing like the same degree over his complexion. It went suddenly pale when he heard. And he wanted to go out there at once and start searching. But Wilton stopped him.

  “Got to be done properly,” he said, his voice taking on that hard edge which I had heard only once before—the time one of the cub captains had put too much pressure on to a loaded soda siphon. “I don’t want everyone getting lost.”

  He turned to the Old Man.

  “Better ring up for an ambulance,” he said. “I’m going out with them.”

  We were lined up in the hall by now, and Wilton addressed us.

  “It’s thick already, and it’s getting thicker,” he said.

  “That means it’s going to be difficult. Don’t forget to keep within calling distance. And if you don’t get an answer yell harder.”

  He was right to be careful. For all the good it did going out into the courtyard, we might just as well have remained inside. The mist wasn’t just the standard Grade A white stuff. It was a real mid-Atlantic sea-fog that had overshot itself. The other side of the courtyard was blotted out completely even though it was only about fifteen feet away. Even getting across to the gate was largely guesswork.

  Suddenly there was the strange throbbing bleat of a police whistle. But it was only Wilton putting his scout troop through their battle training.

  “If you hear that again,” he said, “it’ll be me. And it means ‘Stop where you are.’ Don’t forget: when you hear that, stand still until I tell you what to do.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” I answered.

  “You and Gillett stay next to me,” Wilton went on. “I may need you.”

  “At thy side, master,” I promised for both of us.

  If it had been thick in the courtyard, it was simply silly out there on the moor. Your own mother might have been a couple of feet away from you and you would never have known it. First, we combed the kennels but without catching a glimpse of anyone. And now we were moving forward in a long half-crescent. It was actually a straight line that Wilton had ordered. But the direction from which the shouts were coming to us showed that the two ends were already getting a bit ragged.