The Smiler With the Knife

by Nicholas Blake

  Still talking, the porter emerged from the waiting-room. He was followed in a minute by David Renton, who carried his parcel under an immaculate, black-sleeved arm. Next moment, Peter heard the engine of Renton’s car start up and saw it move decorously down the decline into the village. He leapt into his own, and followed Renton again. The secretary did not stop anywhere in Ashwell, so Peter could reasonably assume that the message must have been left at the station.

  Mr. Goltz was not due till 4.15. That gave Peter rather less than half-an-hour’s grace. He drove his car into a garage, took out his bag, and walked up to the station. As far as he could tell, Renton had stopped nowhere except for that minute he had been alone in the waiting-room. But how the blazes did you leave an address in a waiting-room? Peter discovered soon enough the answer to that. The cricket-enthusiast porter had retired to some sanctum of his own, and Peter had a clear run in to the stuffy, white-washed room whence Renton had taken his parcel.

  It was undeniably, almost aggressively, empty. There was nothing but dust on the long table and the benches: in the fire-place there was nothing but cigarette-ends and orange-peel. Perhaps Renton had given the porter the address, to be passed on to this Goltz. No, the very essence of all the E.B. tactics was that nothing should be done which might give any one—even their own agents—a line on Chilton Canteloe. Discouraged, Peter moved over to the far wall of the waiting-room. “Well, I’ll be——!” he exclaimed.

  That white-washed wall was the answer. The address was written there in pencil. It was one of the two or three dozen names and addresses scrawled up there, together with inscriptions of a less reputable nature, by the summer tourists who alighted at this station for a day’s outing among the bracken and swarming flies of Sherwood Forest. Peter could not help laughing at his own discomfiture. He might as well be looking for one particular lump of coal in Newcastle. No doubt Goltz had been told exactly where to find his address on the wall. Well, he would certainly have to wait for Goltz now.

  He filled in the time by disguising his appearance a bit, for he did not want to be recognised here by the porter or any chance traveller. Peter always carried a few theatrical properties in his bag: when rain washed out play, he would amuse the teams with his deft little character-sketches. He gave himself pince-nez, a drooping, wispy moustache, and brushed his hair out to fall lankly over his right temple. He looked like a professor of chemistry in a provincial university, or a melancholy but quite prosperous grocer. Thus disguised, he bought a first-class ticket to Nottingham and returned to the waiting-room.

  A long mineral train clanked past on the up line, the trucks jolting and clashing as the train gathered speed down the bank. Then there was no sound but the clucking of the station-master’s hens from across the line. At last the wires under the platform’s edge whirred, and a distant rumble followed. The 4.15 was due. Peter stood up, opened his bag, and dropped one or two articles on to the floor.

  When the man in the green pork-pie hat entered the waiting-room, he saw a fussy, disconsolate figure stuffing a pair of pyjamas into a bag. The man hesitated a moment. He had not expected to find any one here. He looked around quickly, walked over to the communicating door of the ladies’ waiting-room, glanced at something written on the wall level with its handle.

  “This is the gentleman’s?” he asked the other traveller, a faint guttural note in his voice.

  “The gentleman’s? Oh, I see. Oh, no. That’s along the platform.”

  The man hurried out. Peter straightened, studied the place on the wall where Goltz’s eyes had rested. Yes, a name and address. “Sam Silver, 420 Easthwaite Street, Nottingham.”

  Peter went on to the platform, peered short-sightedly up and down. The porter was fetching a crate out of the goods-van at the top of the train. The man in the pork-pie hat marched back along the platform.

  “Pardon,” said Peter timidly. “This is the Nottingham train?”

  The man nodded brusquely, got back into his first-class carriage. Peter followed him in, tripping awkwardly over his bag.

  “Very inconvenient, these local trains,” said Peter. “No—er, I mean, no conveniences.”

  The man stared at him with undisguised contempt. “The English trains! Ach!” Then he pointedly settled down behind his newspaper. He was a thickset man, about Peter’s own height, with a clipped, stubbly moustache which did not mitigate the hairless impression that is given by a Prussian head. Peter, glancing at him, altered his plans. He had only intended to follow Goltz, then communicate the Nottingham address to Sir John. But why shouldn’t he become Goltz, just for to-day? There was time to play Goltz to-day and beat the Notts men to-morrow. Here at last might be the opening he was looking for.

  He began a flow of dreary small-talk, which Goltz after a while could no more ignore than a man can ignore the dripping of water on his forehead. Peter studied his tones of voice, the abrupt, hacking gestures he made with his hands. Whoever was expecting Goltz at the other end might conceivably have met him before; though the water-tight-compartment organisation of the E.B. made this improbable.

  Fortunately, Peter had travelled on this line before. He remembered that, after Bulthorpe station, the train climbed a steep incline with a wild heath at the foot of its embankment. Five minutes before they reached Bulthorpe, he got up to look at the map on Goltz’s side of the compartment.

  Turning to sit down, he tripped over the man’s feet.

  “Oh, I say, I’m awfully sorry,” he said, leaning apologetically towards Goltz. The next instant he had let fly a blow which caught the man on the point and knocked him cold. Peter tied Goltz’s feet and hands with the straps from the man’s own suitcase: he whipped out some adhesive plaster and strapped it over his mouth: he emptied Goltz’s pockets. Then, as the train slowed down into Bulthorpe, he pushed the senseless body under the seat.

  Let’s hope nobody tries to get in here, he thought. Pretty safe. First-class compartments are not much in demand on this line. He stood in the window, scowling, prepared to repel boarders, but there were no passengers on the platform. The train started off again, clattered round a curve, approached the stiff incline of Bulthorpe bank. Peter dragged out Goltz’s body, now beginning to twitch and stir a little. He wedged open the door, and tipped the body out: its fall should be concealed by the steep wall of the embankment down which it was rolling. Well, that takes care of him for a bit, he’ll roll down into the heath and stay there till we send someone to pick him up.

  Peter stood by the mirror, clipping his moustache till it resembled Goltz’s. With Goltz’s pork-pie hat, that would serve for the present. He began to examine the articles he had taken from the man’s pockets. Not much information could be gleaned from them, but, such as it was, it was invaluable. Inside his watch an E.B. disc was pasted. His diary had an entry for to-morrow, “Nottingham, 8.30.” So Goltz was not due at Sam Silver’s till to-morrow morning. Well, that would give Peter more time; unfortunately, it would also leave more time for the real Goltz to be discovered.

  Alighting at Nottingham, he went into the hairdresser’s at the station hotel, and had his hair clipped short. Then he sought out a smaller hotel, registered there as H. Goltz, and settled down to examine Goltz’s suitcase in the privacy of his bedroom. It contained, amongst other things, some overalls, a suit of dark-grey worsted, and some blue-prints which, not being an engineer, he could make head nor tail of. He remembered his car, left at the garage in Ashwell. When Goltz returned to the fold, he would have no possible reason to connect the droopy-moustached individual, who had attacked him in the train, with Peter Braithwaite, the cricketer. But it would be as well to leave no loose ends lying about. Peter went along to the hotel where his own team were staying, and sent up a message to Frank Haskings, the wicket-keeper, a close friend of his. He had removed his moustache in a public lavatory on the way, but he came in for some chaffing at Frank’s hands about the convict cut of his hair.

  “Frank. I had to leave my car in Ashwell. Will you borr
ow one and drive me over to fetch it? And please keep all this to yourself. I’m—well, for one thing I shan’t be sleeping here to-night.”

  “Oh, a dame? Well, that’s your business. Did she tell you to get your hair cut, too?”

  Frank’s entirely gratuitous inference gave him another idea. When they reached the Ashwell garage, he took its proprietor aside and fiddled suggestively with a one-pound note.

  “Look here, if any one comes snooping round, you might forget the fact that my car was left in here this afternoon. Fact is—well, there’s a lady in the case, and I don’t want——”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Braithwaite. You drove in this afternoon for a minor repair, and you was off again in ten minutes’ time. How’ll that do? Hope you gets a century to-morrow. I’m an old Middlesex supporter myself, see?”

  That’s that end stopped, thought Peter, driving his car back to Nottingham. The garage is at the extreme end of the village, and it’s fifty to one nobody could have noticed me putting the car in or taking it out.

  He garaged at Nottingham, resumed his disguise, and returned to his hotel. There, he wrote a brief report of to-day’s events which would go to Sir John Strangeways through the usual channels. He also wrote a note to Frank Haskings, telling him to put the police on to Sam Silver, of 420 Easthwaite Street, urgently. He would hand this note to the hall-porter when he went out to-morrow morning, asking him to have it delivered at Trent Bridge ground if he himself had not returned by eleven o’clock.

  That was all he could do by way of precautions. The rest must be left to luck and his own resource. He was taking a grave risk, he knew. But he was tired of playing for keeps with the E.B. The same blend of audacity and impatience that, on the cricket field, compelled him sometimes to take a dip at a bowler who was pegging him down, in the hope of knocking him off his length, possessed him now. They might get his wicket. Well, let them. It was better than pottering about. . . .

  Easthwaite Street, a long, squalid thoroughfare, lay under the shadow of Nottingham Castle and its towering rock. Just before eight-thirty next morning Peter was standing outside Number 420. “S. Silver, Furniture Dealer,” was the legend over the shop-front. Peter marched in, with the jerky, military stride of Mr. Goltz. A small man wearing a baize apron and a gap-toothed smile, appeared from behind a clutter of furniture like a rabbit out of a burrow. I hope to God there are no passwords or anything, prayed Peter. He clicked his heels and said:

  “Mr. Silver?”

  “That’s me. What can I do for you, sir? Looking for a nice bedroom suite perhaps?”

  “My name’s Goltz. You are expecting me,” Peter rapped out. The silence that followed took him by the throat like a fog. The little man was staring at him dubiously, scratching the thinning hair on top of his skull. Was that crack about the bedroom suite a password? Did he have to reply, “No, I want a couple of mahogany sideboards,” for instance? Staring back at the man with all the Prussian insolence he could assume, Peter took out Goltz’s watch.

  “It is eight-thirty,” he said. “We must get to business.” He allowed the watch-cover to flip open, exposing the E.B. disk on its back. That brought Sam Silver into camp all right. Bidding Peter follow him, he retired towards the back of the shop, led the way down a ladder into a basement stacked with second-hand furniture, opened the door of a large wardrobe that stood against the wall, and stepped inside it. It was done so quickly that Peter had scarcely time to savour the oddity of the proceedings. Does the local E.B. hold its meetings inside a wardrobe? he asked himself, feeling all the bewildered interest of Alice in her Wonderland.

  This wardrobe was a unique one: it had no back. Or rather, its back was a door in the wall—a door that led into a dark, low passage, along which Peter now followed the beam of Mr. Silver’s torch. He remembered that the ground beneath Nottingham was honeycombed with these passages, burrowed out of the sandstone by prehistoric hands. He remembered, too, the use to which the Cagoulards had meant to put the underground warrens of Paris. It would be wise now to turn back. He could easily get away now, and he had learnt the secret of the furniture shop. But that strange mixture of happy-go-lucky daring and deep fatalism, which made up Peter Braithwaite’s character, led him on. Another hundred yards, crouching along the low-roofed passage, moving always perceptibly downhill, and they arrived in an immense chamber brilliantly lit with electricity which must be generated on the spot. Two men were working at a metal lathe. A third, at the far end of the chamber—Peter did not need any scientific knowledge to be sure of it—was filling bombs. The underground room was both a munitions factory and an arsenal.

  “Here’s Mr. Goltz, boys,” said Sam Silver, and ducked back again, more rabbit-like than ever, into the warren.

  The men looked up from their work. The place grew instantly silent. Peter could hear nothing but the faint hum of a dynamo from beyond the opening at the other end of the room. One of the men, a big, greasy-faced fellow with a nervous tic that kept fluttering beneath his left eye, came up to Peter and put out his hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Goltz. My name’s Tooley. We’ve been at sixes and sevens here since Mr. Haines went sick. Now we can get going again.”

  Peter felt a stab of apprehension. Goltz had been sent to supervise the munitions-making. How much longer could he sustain the part of Goltz now? He clicked his heels, ignored Tooley’s hand, barked out harshly:

  “So. Goot. Above here is what? ”

  “You needn’t worry. We’re too far down for any danger of interference.” The man jerked his thumb at the roof. “Up above’s a piece of waste land, and a derelict factory. Now, if you’ll step this way, sir. This cutter—Harry’s spoilt two jobs on it already. Seems it’s got out of alignment.”

  Peter bent studiously over the machine. It might have been the Koran for all he knew about it. Well, nothing like taking the offensive.

  “So,” he said. “This machine has been mishandled. I must return to my hotel and fetch some tools.”

  “Mr. Haines’s kit is here, sir. You were to use them.”

  Tooley led him over to a bench littered with drawings, scribbled formulæ, and instruments. Peter glanced at them in dismay. He must get out. At any moment his ignorance would be betrayed. He made a hacking gesture with his hand, exclaimed gutturally:

  “Ach, these are no goot! We need a—how do you say it?—verbinderungschaft?” And let’s hope none of them know any more German than I do, he thought, for I don’t know a word of it. He stalked angrily away, feeling three pairs of eyes boring like cold steel into his back. He was five feet away from the opening of the passage when Sam Silver appeared again. Something in his rabbity face told Peter that all was up with him. He made a dash for the passage, hurling the little man aside. But it was too late. The passage was blocked—blocked by the stocky body of the real Mr. Goltz.

  It was a good fight while it lasted, but five to one is too great odds, even against a man who knows that defeat means death. They knelt on him, kneeing him into the floor. Breathing hard, Mr. Goltz bent down and brutally tore off Peter’s moustache. The jerk of pain sickened him.

  “You see, gentlemen?” said Goltz.

  “By God! A bloody spy!”

  Then they had tied him up, spreadeagled on one of the work-benches. The faces round him gave no hope. It was their lives or his. Their eyes showed all the viciousness of frightened men who can revenge their own fear on another’s body.

  “Who are you? Who sent you here? If you tell us everything, we shall make things a little easier for you,” said Goltz.

  “Oh, take a jump at yourself.”

  “So.” It was like an echo of his own voice. Yes, thought Peter, with a flicker of pride even in this extremity, I got his intonation just right.

  Tooley said, “Put the bleeder’s fingers in that vice. He’ll talk.”

  Pain ground into him, furrowing his flesh like grapnels. After a while he fainted. They waited till he came round, and then started again. He lost all track o
f time. There was nothing in the world left for him but this agony, and his determination not to speak. He knew that the pain must win in the end. Later—hours or minutes later—there was a lull. Words were running blindly in Peter’s head, running, flickering to and fro behind a mist. He strove to capture them, they would help him to resist a little longer, painfully he pieced the lines together out of his shattered consciousness—

  “. . . For the field is full of shades as I near the

  shadowy coast,

  And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a

  ghost,

  And I look through my tears on a soundless-

  clapping host

  As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,

  To and fro,

  O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!”

  “Will you talk now, damn you?”

  “As the run-stealers flicker to and fro.”

  A great flash of pain burned across his whole body, and everything went dark again.

  The M.C.C. flag, drooping above the clock-tower. The tiered, white seats all round. The wide glass windows over the Members’ Balcony. The news-reel cameras on their tower. A cluster of figures watching from a factory roof. This was Lord’s Cricket Ground. He recognised it. The Australians, in their bunchy, long-peaked caps, small, bronzed men, all on their toes, fighters to the last ditch. He patted the crease. He looked up at the scoreboard. His score was ninety-eight. The bowler was running up—that loping indefatigable stride. The ball was pitching a little short, well to the off. He flashed his bat at it in a sweet, controlled square cut. Backward point, cover point left standing. The rattle of the ball against the stand merged into the louder roaring of the crowd. The roaring came nearer. It was in his own ears.

  Water splashed over Peter Braithwaite’s head. The real voices began again.

  In spite of everything, a miraculous sense of strength welled up in him. His head was suddenly clear, but he knew this clarity would not last long. He had his vision, now he must obey its prompting.