The Bat that Flits

by Norman Collins

“Arresting him, too?” I asked.

  Wilton’s eyebrows returned to normal. The expression was pure Neanderthal again by now.

  “Not my affair,” he said. “Pity she’s a married woman. He’ll hate being cited. Tried to pretend the encounter was accidental. That won’t help him any.”

  “Checked up on her character?” I asked.

  “Horrible” Wilton answered.

  “Like Rogers’s wife,” I suggested.

  It was the grin’s turn again.

  “He mentioned her to you, too?”

  “And to the rest of us,” I told him.

  “Poor old Rogers,” Wilton said, and touched his forehead with his forefinger.

  “Comment?”

  “Hasn’t got a wife,” Wilton explained. “Doesn’t want one either. It’s a Ph.D. that he wants. Felt a bit out of it among all you clever chaps. Invented the whole thing just to make himself at home.”

  He paused.

  “But you go on,” he said. “I’m just listening.”

  Here I paused at full Wilton length.

  “The rest,” I said slowly, “is largely guesswork.”

  “Don’t apologise,” Wilton answered. “that’s what I’m arresting you on.”

  I pretended that I hadn’t heard.

  “For a start, I’m dubious about Mellon,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  “Spends too much time in that car of his.”

  “So would you if you were looking for a forebear.”

  My face went vague. I could feel it happening.

  “Forebear?” I repeated. “Don’t get you.”

  “Searching for cousins,” Wilton explained. “Old West Country family, the Mellons. Told him to be careful. People round here don’t understand.”

  This was my chance.

  “It’s a blind. Won’t wash,” I said. “Told the last one she had hair like his mother’s. I heard him. Should have said ‘father.’”

  “Not necessarily,” Wilton answered. “Pa and Ma were cousins too. All Mellons marry their cousins.

  There was a pause.

  “Know anything about the girls?” Wilton asked at last.

  Here I strayed off half a pace. I’d overcome most of my inhibitions already. But there are limits to the impression which even a really deep heel can afford to make.

  “No success there,” I said. “Not their type.”

  Wilton was looking at the clouds, and seemed to have forgotten all about me again.

  “Una get rid of her gun all right?” he asked.

  This needed steady handling.

  “No trouble at all, thank you,” I said.

  “You’re wrong there,” Wilton answered. “Plenty of trouble. Everybody’s been hunting for it.”

  “Whose was it?” I asked, still in the same carefully casual kind of voice.

  “Search me,” Wilton said. “Didn’t even know she had one until Ma Clewes found it.”

  “Snooping?”

  “Not her fault,” Wilton replied. “I asked her to.”

  “Then why didn’t you arrest Una?”

  “Wanted to see what she’d do with it.”

  “And did you find out?”

  Wilton looked down at the ground as though inspecting the worm-casts.

  “Not properly,” he said. “Recovered it from Bansted’s room in the end. But with your fingerprints all over it. Gave it up finally.”

  “So did I,” I told him.

  We’d passed the sixth hole by now and were sauntering down the middle of the fairway. There was a road that crossed the links just beyond the seventh, and then there came the long climb back up towards the club-house. At this rate I should still be a free man by lunch-time. Or longer, if I had my way.

  “You haven’t said anything about Gillett,” Wilton reminded me.

  “If I did, you’d only knock it down.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Well, to start with, he killed Dr. Mann.”

  “Only figuratively.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “Didn’t like him perhaps,” Wilton suggested.

  “Or he wanted to make it look as though Mann was guilty.”

  “Could be,” Wilton replied.

  What I really wanted was to keep the conversation going until I got to the road. It’s no good trying to run on a grass surface.

  “And there’s another thing . . . ” I began.

  But Wilton laid his hand on my arm again.

  “Don’t mind telling you at one time I thought it was Gillett,” he confided.

  “Then what made you change your mind?”

  “His answers all came out straight,” Wilton said. I paused.

  “And mine didn’t?”

  “Yours didn’t.”

  Wilton waited long enough to scrape away a worm-cast with his toe.

  “Any views on Hilda?” he asked.

  “Nothing there,” I told him. “She’s just gone R.C.”

  But it wasn’t quite the bombshell that I had expected.

  “Apart from that I mean,” he said.

  “Well, you kept the Communist papers,” I reminded him.

  “Only overnight,” he said. “In any case, they’re cancelled now. Doesn’t need them any more. She knows they’re true.”

  It was only another twenty-five yards to the roadway. But I needed every single one of them.

  “How did her confession go?” I asked.

  As I asked it I had a sudden chilly feeling. Perhaps he had been playing with her, too. For all I knew he was proposing to go back and arrest her as soon as he had finished with me. But he seemed open enough.

  “Fine,” he answered. “Very intelligent girl, Hilda. Said she’d given you the opportunity of coming clean. But didn’t think you meant to take it.”

  I paused, remembering the coldness of our only kiss.

  “So it was that, was it?”

  “Did she actually ask you to arrest me?” I inquired. Wilton shook his head.

  “Hilda’s not the interfering kind,” he replied.

  “Only public-spirited.”

  “Only public-spirited,” he repeated.

  “Say why she suspected me?”

  Wilton shrugged his shoulders.

  “All rather vague,” he admitted. “Something to do with your sincerity. Said you were a bit too glib to be genuine. Always inventing things.”

  I breathed more easily.

  “But that’s not evidence,” I pointed out. “That’s purely a moral judgment.”

  “Just what Hilda said.”

  There was another of those awkward silences. Then I spoke again.

  “If it isn’t rude,” I asked, “what are you arresting me for?”

  “Being a Communist,” Wilton said.

  “That’s not a criminal offence,” I pointed out.

  “Not declaring it is,” Wilton replied.

  “You mean that form I had to fill in?”

  Wilton nodded.

  “You signed it.”

  We had now mounted the crest of the last bunker before the seventh hole. It was the secretary’s prize exhibit, that bunker. There was a ten-foot cliff in the centre, and Wilton and I had reached the lip of it. This seemed as good a place as any. But I still wanted to wait for the cub-Captains to catch up with us.

  Wilton helped by beckoning them to come forward. We were now a nice tightly bunched little group just as I wanted us.

  Wilton turned his long neck towards me.

  “Sorry about this,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” I answered. “Do as much for you any day.”

  Then I broke off.

  “What’s that policeman want?” I asked.

  As a device it wasn’t much better than first-form standard. There was no policeman that I could see. But it worked perfectly. Wilton and the two cub-Captains swivelled round and stared incredulously up the course. And as they did so I gave them a shove from behind. Wilton was the first to go down,
and he upset the others. There was a lot of rather aimless clutching about in mid-air and then, under the full load of M.I.5, Bodmin branch, the secretary’s nicely kept grass edge broke off like a piece of biscuit and the three of them disappeared into the bunker.

  As I turned round and started to run for it, I realised that I must have second sight. Because there was a policeman. Only he was behind me. I even knew the policeman. It was the ice-eyed Inspector who didn’t like me. And to show that he hadn’t warmed up in his feelings he was holding a shotgun at the ready.

  I put my hands up.

  “Hold your gun, sir,” I said. “I think the Colonel needs you.”

  Chapter XXXVI

  Wilton seemed to have thought of everything. There was a police car as well waiting just out of sight around the bend. And, as soon as someone had dusted the sand off my party, they came along and joined us.

  It occurred to me then that pleasantness on my part ought to be the keynote of that ride. After all, it might be quite a long trip to Bodmin Jail or Dartmoor or the Tower of London or wherever it was that we were going. And when I heard Wilton say, rather anxiously: “Have you got him there?” I was the first to answer.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m all right. I’ve got the arm-rest.”

  Wilton wasn’t taking any chances, however. He came over and pressed his face up against the car window. That was my second cue.

  “I’m with an old friend,” I told him. “Look—we’re inseparable.”

  So we were, too. The Inspector had put handcuffs on me the moment he got me inside that car. And handcuffs evidently satisfied some very deep pre-natal longing in his nature. I’d never seen his eyes so tender as when he produced them from his pocket. But for some reason he seemed to dislike any sort of exhibitionism.

  “Put ’em down,” he said sternly.

  “Very well, constable,” I answered, and let my hand rest lightly in his lap.

  But by now I was listening to a conversation that was going on between Wilton and the two cub-Captains. Seating-room was apparently the trouble. The car was only a Wolseley twelve horse-power. And with the driver and the Inspector that made six of us. Wilton had just told the dark-haired Captain to make his own way back to the club-house and take Wilton’s own car on from there. That was cue number three.

  “I wouldn’t hear of it,” I said loudly. “Not at his age. He can have my place, I’ll walk.”

  In my eagerness to make myself heard I may have leant forward a bit too far. At any rate, the Inspector yanked me back into the seat with a jerk that nearly dislocated my whole shoulder. I turned towards him.

  “Careful,” I said. “We don’t want to snap them.”

  “Where are we off to?” I asked, as soon as the car began to move.

  The Inspector did not seem to have heard. Either that, or he didn’t want to tell me. But Wilton replied for him. “Bodmin,” he said.

  I sighed.

  “Seems so aimless somehow,” I pointed out. “Just backwards and forwards. Why didn’t you arrest me up at the Institute?”

  “Guessed you might try something violent,” Wilton answered.

  I could see his eyes in the driving-mirror, and I shook my head at him.

  “Not with my nature,” I said. “That’s more the Pyknic type.”

  Wilton did not reply, so I turned towards the Inspector.

  “Hope I’m not crushing you,” I said. “It’s not really me. It’s the corners.”

  When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to reply, I tried again.

  “And could I have the sun visor down, please?” I asked.

  “Otherwise I can’t see you properly.”

  I saw the driver glance up at the sun visor. It was dead horizontal. Even so, he shoved it up a bit. I took this for a snub, and decided to sulk instead. I was still sulking when we got to Bodmin. That was what made the police station stuff so difficult.

  “Morning, Sergeant,” I said. “There’s been a silly mistake. I’m not taking any further part in it.”

  “Can I have your full name, sir?” the sergeant asked.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My lips are sealed. I want my solicitor.”

  That ditched them, and there was a little conference between the sergeant and the Inspector, with Wilton right away in the background, staring out of the window.

  Then the sergeant looked up.

  “May I have his name and address?” he asked.

  “Whose?”

  “Your solicitor’s.”

  “Oh, him. Certainly. Can you write?”

  The sergeant drew his lips in and waited.

  “But I’m afraid it’s rather a long one,” I began. “I’ll spell it. I-V-A-N, that’s one word. V-A-S-S-I-L-O-V-I-T-C-H, two s’s. And better put ‘and Sons.’ I think he’s got the boys in with him. Now comes the difficult part. One-one-eight-seven P-R-E-O-B-A-R-D-S-K-J-Y, that’s one word— P-R-O-S-P-E-K-T. Prospekt with a ‘k,’ of course. Nidjni-Novgorod. I don’t need to spell that. The postman’ll know it. And better make it air mail. I’ll pay,” I paused. “You might read it back to me,” I asked. “I don’t want to have to hang around here.”

  Wilton had sauntered over and was staring at me in that curious impersonal way he had. We might never have met before.

  “Why are you doing all this?” he asked.

  “Playing for time,” I told him.

  “You’re wasting it.”

  “We’re all doing that,” I said, and Wilton moved away again. I turned back to the sergeant.

  “Of course, you can phone if you’d rather,” I said.

  “But the line’s terrible.”

  It is difficult to keep your spirits up in a cell. What I most resented was that it was cold. Really cold. And after two or three attempts I gave up all thought of sleep. I’d asked earlier if one of the lads would mind cycling up to the Institute for a pill. But the answer had come back that he would mind.

  There were bars at the window. And, despite the poet, you can take my word for it that stone walls and iron bars quite unquestionably do. In fact, as I lay staring up at the ceiling I realised that I was in a mess. A real mess. And jollying things along wasn’t going to help me any more. If there is one thing that sets an Old Bailey judge against a man it is the slightest impression of joie de vivre. It is only the pale and the obviously dying that ever get mercy shown to them. That was about my only comfort.

  What I didn’t like was the fact that Wilton had got on to that Communist background of mine. But even then he’d got it wrong. Because when I joined the Party it was back in the old days when we all belonged. In my line of business you were a bit of an outsider if you weren’t a member.

  And as I lay there, it all came back to me. It was the Spanish Civil War that had finally decided things. There had been a strange feeling of being at a cross-roads. In one direction there seemed to be a reasonable, orderly Europe— not very exciting perhaps because any civilisation planned in concrete necessarily shows up a bit dismal, but at least with scientists given the place that this country gives to the Lords Spiritual. That suited me.

  As a matter of fact, it was largely accidental that Spain should have come into it all. But I knew Spain, and the alternative that it offered didn’t look too good. It seemed to consist mostly of rather flash young men wearing bracelets and driving about in enormous Hispano cars, while whole families were so poor that they were living in cracks in the cliffs. There seemed to be a racket on somewhere. And it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t the cliff-dwellers who were the racketeers. I’d have been on their side even if there hadn’t been a war.

  Then when the trouble started, and the Nazis decided to start pocket-battleship practice on Guernica I felt that I couldn’t just sit quietly in W. D. P. Inc. without being somehow mixed up in it. And the Communists certainly did work. United Front, it was called. I remember that at the time I used to wonder how long the front would have held if there hadn’t been some pretty energetic Party secre
tary somewhere at base headquarters sending out the leaflets. But the public responded. The Liberals, who for years had been used to talking to two rows of empty chairs, suddenly found themselves addressing full halls. It may have been pure vodka in the speaker’s carafe. But at least people became indignant again. And for the first time I began to understand what my father had always been trying to tell me about Mr. Gladstone.

  It wasn’t difficult to join the Party in those days. There were the high-grade conversions, of course. Top-liners got the same sort of publicity that comes to Hollywood actresses when they marry rajahs and go Moslem. But mine was a very quiet little ceremony with no photographs. I was merely told to report to somebody called Arthur whose real name I knew perfectly well was Oliver; and most of my work consisted of canvassing in the Harrow Road area. If you know the Harrow Road you’ll realise that it was good hunting all the way. And some of the sights I saw once I had got my foot inside those front doors persuaded me that it wasn’t only in Spain that someone was working a bit of a racket.

  But I wasn’t really the kind of recruit they were looking for. I recognised that from the very start, and they got into it not so long afterwards. There is colossal initial impetus in my make-up that carries me up any hill, but on the level my staying power is only so-so. And, above all, I’m a failure at listening to political speeches. I found myself always getting to the end of the sentence before the speaker. Then I used to grow restless and begin doing cube-roots in my head just to stop myself from fainting clean off through sheer boredom. It was always the same speech, too. Up to the cube-root point, I could have prompted even without the notes.

  At the end of about three months, I was getting about zero for Party attendance, and had to be careful to avoid seeing a lot of Arthur. That wasn’t difficult, however. Because round about that time I was being equally careful to make sure that I saw a lot of someone else. Elspeth her name was. She was a nice girl, and there was some idea of our setting up house together. Elspeth was in the Party, too. That was really the difficulty. Because she was the sincere, intense, zealous sort. Even if we had shared a flat, I wouldn’t have been sharing it with Elspeth. I should have been living in sin with an abominably noisy typewriter, a Gestetner duplicating machine and about twenty comrades, aged eighteen but looking younger, who came in for coffee and Communism every Thursday evening.