by W E Johns
‘That could be the answer,’ murmured Gaskin.
‘I think we ought to have a look at this farm before we show our hand. It must come into the racket somehow.’
‘Or we could grab the car on its way back to Town.’
‘We’d look silly if we struck an occasion when there was nothing in it. We ought to be sure of ourselves before we pounce.’
‘That risk is always on the boards whatever we do,’ averred the. Inspector. ‘I don’t suppose these crooks leave the stuff lying about on the sideboard, either in Devon or in London.’
‘That’s why I feel we should know where it starts from before we try picking it up en route. Leave it for a day or two. I’ll run down to Devon and cast an eye over this farm from ground level.’
‘Okay, if that’s how you prefer it. There’s no hurry as far as I’m concerned.’ Gaskin nodded and went out.
‘Bring the car round, Ginger,’ ordered Biggles. ‘We’ll give ourselves a spot of fresh air if nothing else.’
‘Right away?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘Because today’s Saturday. You heard what Gaskin said about this cigarette importer and his wife spending the week-end on their country farm. They go on Saturday and return on Monday. That strikes me as the best time to make a reconnaissance. For which reason you’d better come along, Algy, and you, Bertie. If this farm is any size there will be a lot of ground to cover.’
It was late in the afternoon when the police car cruised through the quiet Devon village that was the postal address of Nifar’s farm. A boy directed them to it and they were soon moving slowly down one of those sunken roads so common in the county. With the banks ten or twelve feet high nothing could be seen beyond the hedges that topped them.
‘This is no use,’ observed Biggles, bringing the car to a halt. ‘Slip out, Ginger, and cast an eye around from the top.’
Ginger got out and scrambled up the bank. He was soon back. ‘It’s a field of beans,’ he announced. ‘I can’t see anything else because a barbed wire fence runs round the perimeter.’
They went on two hundred yards and tried again, with the same result.
‘Can’t you see any cattle?’ asked Biggles.
‘No. It’s the same beanfield.’
‘Why does he want a barbed wire fence round a beanfield?’
Nobody answered.
Biggles drove on, but slowed to a stop when an entrance gate appeared. A farm cottage stood on one side of it. A coloured man was working in the garden. He dropped his spade and came forward quickly as Biggles got out and advanced towards the gate. “This is a private road,’ he said shortly, with a thick foreign accent.
‘I can see that,’ answered Biggles evenly. ‘Can you tell me if I’m on the right road for Moreton Hampstead?’
‘Not know. I am stranger here.’
‘Thanks,’ acknowledged Biggles. He returned to the car and drove on.
‘He wasn’t letting anyone inside,’ said Ginger.
‘That, I imagine, is why he’s there,’ replied Biggles dryly.
He drove on for some way, the sunken lane persisting. From time to time he stopped, but only once could Ginger report that he could see a house and some farm buildings in the distance. Always the barbed wire fence was there.
‘We’re nearly back to where we started from,’ said Biggles. ‘We’ve been all round the place. There’s only one entrance and a man is guarding it. As I don’t want him to see us again for fear we make him suspicious we might as well go home.’
‘Home! Do you mean to London?’ asked Algy, looking surprised.
‘I do. If we can’t get a dekko at this establishment from floor level, tomorrow we’ll see what it looks like from up topsides. We’ll bring a camera, too, and then if necessary we shall be able to study the place at our leisure.’
A minute later Biggles had to pull in tight against the bank to allow a Rolls-Royce to pass.
‘So they’ve arrived,’ he observed. ‘It gives me an idea. As there’s only one entrance to the farm anyone arriving with a parcel of dope will have to use it. Algy, I’m going to drop you and Bertie off to keep an eye on that gate until we rejoin you tomorrow. All you have to do is watch the gate, keeping out of sight, and note anyone who comes or goes. Devon suggests that the stuff may be leaking through one of the county’s several ports, so don’t be surprised if you see a man looking as though he might be a sailor. There’s also a chance, of course, that the Rolls may go out to collect the stuff. In any case one of you will ring me at the flat at six o’clock tomorrow morning to give me the gen. There’s a phone box in the village. As long as one of you remains on watch the other can fetch enough food to tide you over until we come back.’
‘Okay,’ agreed Algy.
The car returned to London without incident.
At six the following morning the phone in Biggles’ room rang. Waiting for the call he picked up the receiver, listened for a minute or two, and then said: ‘Okay. We’re on our way.’ He hung up.
Turning to Ginger he remarked, ‘That’s odd. Algy says not a soul has entered or left the place. I felt sure they’d see someone during the night. Queer.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe this isn’t the week for the stuff to arrive.’
‘It could be the Rolls goes down on the off-chance that it might,’ offered Ginger.
‘True enough,’ agreed Biggles. ‘No matter. We’ll carry on as arranged. Let’s get cracking.’
Two hours later, at the controls of a police Proctor aircraft he was flying a straight course over the farm of which so little could be seen from the road. Now everything was in plain view, and Ginger was soon busy with the camera, concentrating on a large house with several outbuildings that stood surrounded by fields of crops. No cattle or horses were to be seen.
‘There’s your beanfield,’ observed Biggles casually. ‘Our jolly farmer friends must fairly dote on beans. There must be twenty acres of them.’ He broke off, and then went on in a different voice. ‘No. It couldn’t be.’
‘Couldn’t be what?’
‘Take a good look at the beanfield. You’ll notice two pale stripes running across it. They stop well inside the field on both sides. There are some men working in them.’
‘What about them?’
‘What do you make those stripes to be?’
‘It’s hard to say from here.’
‘Have you ever seen anything quite like them before?’
‘No. I can’t say I have. They look like flowers of some sort. I believe they raise flowers in this part of the world for the London markets.’
‘Spring flowers. What sort of flowers would growers raise in the summer and why put them in the middle of a beanfield?’
‘You tell me,’ said Ginger, helplessly. ‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘You’ll think I’m crazy, and I may be, but the only place I’ve seen crops looking like that is in the Middle East, where the farmers have a reason for growing certain flowers where they can’t be seen — and the middle of another crop is as good a place as any. Well — well — well. Would you believe it! No wonder Algy saw no one. How wrong I was in supposing that this Devon set-up was in order to be near the sea. There was a better reason than that.’
‘What was it?’
The climate — the mild climate which produces the early spring flowers.’
Suddenly Ginger got it. ‘You don’t mean those stripes down there are — poppies!’
‘Considering what we know, and for want of any other explanation, that’s what they look like to me, fantastic though it may seem.’
‘How are you going to confirm it? Are you going down?’
‘Not on your life. If I did, the people below would guess why, and scuttle like rabbits when a ferret pops in. We’ll get home and come back after dark properly equipped for the job. Blow me down and pick me up, as Bertie would say. An opium farm right on our doorstep. No wonder the Customs people were baffled. For sheer brass face
this is the tops.’
While he had been speaking Biggles had made a wide turn and was now heading east. ‘The thing’s so hard to believe that we shall have to make sure we’re not barking up the wrong tree,’ he went on. ‘A visit to the botanical gardens at Kew seems indicated.’
‘By properly equipped I take it you mean wire-cutters,’ said Ginger.
‘No. Should that fence be patrolled a gap in the wire would be seen; and that, in an establishment that seems to be protected like an atomic station, would be enough to set the pigeons flying. A couple of stiff rugs thrown over the wire will enable us to get over it without tearing ourselves to pieces, and without leaving a mark.’
In rather more than an hour the Proctor was back at its base, and within a few minutes, again in the car with a roll of doped aeroplane fabric on the back seat, they were on their way to Kew. It was Sunday, but as Biggles pointed out, that being a popular day in the Gardens, there was all the more reason to suppose an official would be on duty.
This turned out to be the case, and at the offices of the Royal Horticultural Society they were taken to the room of an assistant secretary, who asked what he could do for them. His eyebrows went up when Biggles introduced himself and showed his police pass.
‘I have come to ask you if you happen to have here a specimen of the opium poppy,’ began Biggles. ‘If so, I’d like to refresh my memory with a sight of it.’
The secretary smiled. ‘Had you been anyone but a police officer I would have hesitated to say yes, because it’s not a plant we would encourage the public to grow. However, come with me and I will show you Papaver somniferum, to give it its botanical name.’
‘I take it, then, the plant would grow in this country?’ questioned Biggles.
‘Certainly.’
‘In the open?’
‘Yes.’
As they looked at the plant the secretary said: ‘Are you interested in the flower or in its rather sinister byproduct?’
‘I’m interested in the possible production of opium in this country,’ returned Biggles, frankly.
‘No doubt a warmer climate would be more likely to produce a higher opium content than a cold one. The drug, as you probably know, is derived from the seed pod, or rather, the sap that oozes from it when it is scratched, and I imagine it would flow more freely in a warm place than a cold one.’
‘You think the plant would thrive in Devonshire, for instance?’
‘I see no reason why it shouldn’t.’
‘Thank you,’ acknowledged Biggles. ‘That’s really all I wanted to know.’
It was late in the afternoon when the car arrived back at the Devon rendezvous, where, as there was no longer any point in Algy and Bertie continuing their task, they were relieved and taken to the village inn for a substantial high tea. They still had nothing to report, so Biggles told them the result of his day’s work.
‘Sizzling sausages!’ exclaimed Bertie. ‘What will people get up to next?’
‘If opium is as easy as that to produce, the wonder is that no one has tried it before,’ said Algy. ‘What beats me is how you got on to it so quickly.’
‘That was merely a matter of that useful thing called experience,’ answered Biggles. ‘When I saw those stripes in the beanfield it touched off a chord in my memory. Years ago, when the R.A.F. was in Egypt, although I never did the job myself, there was a regular patrol on the look-out for poppies, the growing of which was illegal. At first ground forces handled it. But the culprits got over that by growing small patches of the stuff in the middle of ordinary crops. These couldn’t be seen from the ground but they were plain enough to see from the air. Maybe the fact that the crop here was beans had something to do with my remembering what I’d heard in the Middle East, because there it was usually in a beanfield that the stuff was spotted. Beans grow to about the same height as poppies. Anyway, there it is. According to Gaskin Nifar is an Egyptian, so he’d know all about it. On the face of it you might think he had a nerve to grow poppies here; but how many people would see them, and of those, how many would suspect their purpose? I happen to be one of those who could guess the answer.’
‘And what’s the next move?’ asked Algy.
‘Obviously, the next move is to prove what at present we only suspect, and the only way to do that is to get a sample of what Nifar is growing in his beanfield. There were some men working there this morning, and if my guess is right they were Egyptians collecting that infernal juice. It’s a job for an expert. The local people wouldn’t know how to do it. Besides it would be dangerous to ask them. They’d talk, and the village constable might well wonder what was going on. We’ll make a sortie over that barbed wire fence as soon as it’s dark. I’ve brought some fabric to throw over it, to save tearing ourselves, and our clothes, to pieces.’
‘And if these posies turn out to be opium poppies, what then, old boy?’ put in Bertie.
Biggles thought for a moment. ‘The particular dope we’re dealing with isn’t opium, although that may come into the picture. Donovan was getting heroin, which is worse, and has to be manufactured. The stuff may be produced here, or in London, although I’d say here, in one of the outbuildings. Either way, opium or heroin, when Nifar and his wife return to London, we can reckon they take some with them.’
‘Then you won’t grab them here, at the farm?’ Algy spoke.
‘No. That would mean bringing in the county police and time would be lost in explanations. We can clean up here after we’ve dealt with the agents who distribute the stuff in London. When we’ve checked that the plants are what I think they are we’ll get back to Town and leave Gaskin and his plain-clothes men to do the mopping up. The thing is to get the whole gang into the bag with one cast of the net. Nothing we do pleases me more than to jump on these drug traffickers. Every one of ‘em is a potential murderer — a slow murderer of the vilest kind.’
They killed time until sundown and then made their way quietly and without haste to that part of the lane which Biggles knew from his air reconnaissance was nearest to the sinister stripes that had first aroused his suspicions.
With Ginger carrying the roll of fabric he got out.
‘Turn the car and wait for us here,’ he told Algy. ‘We shouldn’t be many minutes.’
The car glided on into the fast gathering darkness.
Having climbed up the bank Biggles took the fabric and having folded it treble thickness arranged it on the barbed wire fence. In a matter of seconds they were over it, without injury to themselves or their clothes.
‘Walk up one of the drills,’ ordered Biggles softly. ‘We mustn’t knock flat more beans than can be prevented in case there’s an inspection every morning.’
They had taken only a few paces when Ginger stumbled and nearly fell.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Biggles irritably.
‘I tripped over something,’ explained Ginger.
Simultaneously, from no great distance away, came the barking of dogs.
Biggles took a pace back and groped for the object over which Ginger had tripped. ‘It’s a wire,’ he muttered. ‘That must have set off an alarm. Come on. Speed is the thing now.’
They hurried on towards the objective, now appearing in the gloom as a pale grey streak. At the same time the dogs were clearly coming nearer, and from the noise they made they were obviously not mere terriers. Biggles did not speak. Working swiftly with his knife he slashed through one of the plants near the root, and as this was all he needed he turned at once for the fence, breaking into a run.
Haste, though necessary, was nearly their undoing, for in the dark, and they dare not use torches, they struck the fence at a point below the fabric, and by the time they had corrected their mistake the heavy panting of the dogs, no longer barking, could be heard coming down the wire. In fact, two mastiffs rushed up, snarling, while Biggles was removing the fabric, and such was the fury of their attack that Ginger rolled down the bank into the road. Biggles followed with more haste than
dignity, for the animals could be heard throwing themselves against the fence in an effort to break through it, and there was reason to suppose that at any moment they might jump over it. Fortunately at that moment the car glided up.
‘Keep going,’ ordered Biggles tersely, as they tumbled in.
‘You seem to have started something, old boy,’ remarked Bertie, as the car shot forward.
‘Are you telling me!’ panted Ginger. ‘The bally place is guarded like a fortress. Trip wires, dogs, and what have you.’
‘Nifar had good reason to discourage trespassers,’ said Biggles. ‘No matter. I have one of his poppies.’
‘He’ll know someone has been in the field,’ said Algy.
‘He may think the alarm was caused by a poacher,’ speculated Biggles. ‘Why not? I imagine they have poachers here as well as most other places. He has no reason to suspect the truth, anyhow. Stop when you reach the village, Algy. I’m anxious to have a look at this bunch of flowers I’m carrying.’
When the car ran to a halt against a village lamppost he examined the plant he had cut in the field.
‘This is it,’ he declared. ‘Take a look at that,’ he went on, pointing out some cuts in a seed pod from which a white latex still oozed. ‘That’s what those fellows were doing in the field. Harvesting the dope. It’s all we need to know.’
‘Nifar might take fright and bolt, after that alarm,’ said Algy.
‘Even if he does he’s almost certain to make for his London house,’ asserted Biggles.
‘His car may be faster than ours,’ Algy pointed out. ‘If he started right away he could be there before us.’
‘That’s true,’ agreed Biggles. ‘We can easily make allowances for that. I’ll ring Gaskin and tell him what’s cooking. He’ll do what’s necessary. I might as well do it from here. Wait for me.’
Biggles got out and walked on to the call-box outside the village post office.
He was away about ten minutes. When he came back he was smiling.
‘I had a job to make Gaskin believe I wasn’t fooling,’ he explained. ‘A dope factory in Devon does sound a bit far-fetched, I must admit. So do a lot of things these days, if it comes to that. Let’s push on home. There’s no particular hurry. Gaskin says he’ll have everything under control long before we’re there.’
