Campion was astounded. He had always found County Police particularly intelligent. This type of crass idiocy was new to him. The clock outside chimed another quarter hour and he cursed it. It had lost its charm and was now irritating. The whole thing was really damnably unfortunate. Besides, he’d got work to do. There was that date with the C.I.D. Super to go over the Nag, and he wanted to have a look at the Institute.
He had discovered the main game, he was sure of that. He had told Oates so, definitely. He lay down on the hard bed and began to rearrange his mind. He seemed to have the afternoon before him. Oates – and where was he, by the way? – had the wind-up. That was very unlike him and argued that he must have had the importance of the thing pretty hot and strong from the Cabinet itself.
Well then, to return to business. When Oates had borrowed him from Headquarters and had first come out with this staggering tale of thousands of counterfeit notes, so perfect that ‘one has to boil them down to detect them,’ he had said that he thought the scheme was on a colossal scale and might actually be aiming at some sort of sudden unofficial inflation, which would of course pitch the country’s whole economy into hell, destroy public confidence, pull down the Government, and, if issued at the right moment, bring about the moral collapse of the nation. Since Britain, as usual, seemed to have nothing absolutely ready to save her morals, the danger had seemed terrifying.
As he lay looking at the little barred window high in the wall, Campion reflected that so far he had been inclined to doubt the possibility of the scheme being so enormous. Oates had shown him the notes which had been found in two or three industrial towns. They had certainly been cracking good forgeries and could have been manufactured only in the official printing houses of an enemy power. Moreover, and the ingenuity of that move still took his breath away, they had been artificially dirtied most ingeniously.
Oates had put various picked men on to the job in different towns. All of them had drawn a blank save the man at Coachingford. He had reported the presence of some sort of crook organization, either in the town or at Bridge. Poor chap, he hadn’t got much further. They’d fished him out of the estuary with a broken neck. It had been professional work, very neat and nasty, done with a lead pipe as like as not.
Campion stirred uncomfortably. There was something curious about that killing, something personal and near at hand. What was it? There was something on his mind that kept escaping him. It was probably nothing important but he found it irritating.
That damned clock again. That was a quarter to three, he supposed. He dismissed his irritation and went on dreamily with his reminiscences. Well, Oates had borrowed him and sent him to Coachingford. Amanda had got them both an invitation to stay at Bridge with Lee Aubrey, who was brilliant, he supposed. Everybody said so. Personally he suspected these academic dreamers. Still, let that pass, He had instated old Lugg in the town with a stock of the counterfeit and some old clothes. Then he had spent half a day at Bridge making arrangements, had come into Coachingford, changed into a tramp’s outfit, and had gone off reconnoitring.
That had been an experience he would never forget. All the subversive element in the town was in a ferment. ‘Blokes were giving away cash – great wads of it.’ And the riff-raff of the place had been turned into a great greedy bulging-eyed secret society, getting rich quick as quids were handed to them behind doors, in doss houses, over greasy coffee-tables.
This had been a discovery, but it had been followed by another one. He had discovered that a whisper was going round to the effect that the great day was coming on the sixteenth. That was going to be milk-and-honey day, the day when it was going to be everybody’s duty to spend and the wherewithal was going to be miraculously provided.
That had been a peculiarly uncomfortable discovery because the sixteenth was to be a red-letter day in other, more orthodox financial circles. On the sixteenth the Minute Fifteen Defence Loan was to be presented to the public. There was no doubt about it, the whole affair was alarming. If it was by any staggering chance as bad as Oates thought it was then it was hair-raising.
Leaning back on the bench Campion reflected on his subsequent actions. For a long time it had been impossible to locate any of these munificent agents and he had finally decided to take the bull by the horns and appear himself as one of them. That had drawn the flock. The whole bunch had turned up together, as he had known they would. Both he and Oates had been able to get a good look at them. They had made quite an impressive gathering and it had occurred to him then that it had taken someone with a real flair for organization to get that crew together.
Then there had been the fight and the police had come up. He remembered very little of the action save the sticky paving-stones of the quay and the awful mud-coloured water, thick with scum and rubbish.
Since the police had no idea who he and Oates were, either, they had been extraordinarily lucky to get away alive. That was why it had been so criminally dangerous for Oates to have come down and taken part himself. Suppose they had both been put out, then what might have happened? Of course, if Oates’ theory of engineered inflation had anything in it at all he was justified in trusting as few people as possible, since any whisper of such a disaster might very easily start a scare nearly as bad as the thing itself. Good God, it was a horrible idea!
Campion pushed his hands through his hair and shivered. All the same, now he looked at it in cold blood he still maintained that the enormous scale of the plan as Oates saw it must be impossible because of the difficulties of distribution.
As long as the Enemy stuck to his present method of doling the money out by hand to the vagrant population the whole affair could be dealt with by the police. But a decisive blow of the kind Oates envisaged would demand instantaneous distribution of the stuff all over the country. Campion did not see how it could be done without the cooperation of the public. After all, the public had got to be induced first to take and then to spend the cash. It just was not possible. It is notoriously difficult to give away money by cash in the street. Generations of ordered living had taught the ordinary citizen that there is something very fishy and dangerous about banknotes which are not paid for in blood and sweat. No, the thing as Oates foresaw it could not happen, not on that scale, thank God.
And yet … yet …
He got up and walked irritably up and down the cell. This knock on the head was serious. It was having an extraordinary effect on him. The clock chiming another quarter sent an unexpected and unwarranted thrill of pure despair through him. Why was that? What the hell was the matter with him? There was a burden on his shoulders. Self-disgust leant on his arms. His feet were heavy with grief. Misery and the utter wretchedness of failure clung to him. This was terrible. This meant he was a … what was it? Manic depressive? Something like that. Perhaps he ought to try and sleep it off. After all, he must not go sick now. Today must be the fourteenth, by jove. And the sixteenth was the zero-hour. However, since he had located the actual men engaged the round-up should not take long. Fortunately the police had a few new powers under the Emergency Laws. They could finish this thing off quickly and release him to his work again. Perhaps there would be time to get married in the interim, if only … If only what?
Once again there was that physical tug at his heart, again that overwhelming sense of self-disgust, and again a definite picture in his mind of Amanda herself, hurt and puzzled, waiting for the other lines of a doggerel couplet. It was mania all right, obviously. Some variety of mental kink, probably irritatingly well known. The sooner he got himself out of here and put himself into the hands of a reliable doctor the better. All very well to be gallantly negligent about a sore thumb or a lump on the skull, but mental trouble was a different caper altogether.
It wasn’t going to be very easy to get out either, with this peculiarly obtuse specimen on the door. He must have been taken in completely by the vagrant’s outfit; that and the money, of course. Those two taken together would be a difficult pill for any honest copper t
o swallow.
He glanced ruefully at his clothes and made a discovery which took him completely off his balance.
He was not wearing the suit in which he had had the quayside fight.
He stared into the cloth of his trouser knees and wrenched at the inside pocket of his jacket to find the tailor’s label. It was his suit all right. He recognized it and knew too that it should have been hanging up in a wardrobe in his bedroom in Lee Aubrey’s house in Bridge. Moreover, it was a new suit according to the date on the label, yet as he looked at it now he saw that it was dirty and crumpled and showed signs of having had hard wear for some little time.
The jolt to his nervous system was tremendous, the mental equivalent of a gigantic thump between the shoulder-blades. Then a frightful misgiving crept up close to him and laid its cold cheek on his heart. He had been here some time. How … long?
Out in the town the clock struck again, announcing that yet another quarter of an hour had passed.
XIX
HE SAW AMANDA through the judas-window. She came walking into the passage with the turnkey, completely unselfconscious and comfortably serene.
‘Hullo,’ she said cheerfully as she caught sight of half his face through the slit. ‘They phoned your message to me, but they won’t let me bail you out.’
‘What message?’ The question was in his mouth but he did not put it. His eyes had narrowed and his thin face wore a startled expression. The instant he had seen Amanda it had come to him that something revolutionary, he was not at all sure that it was not evolutionary, must have taken place within him. He had grown old, or seen a great light, or else his blundering feet were on the ground at last. He thought he knew what it was all right. The symptoms were unmistakable. That sense of exasperated shame, that desire to kick himself or to cover his eyes with his great burning ears, all these indicated that his self-confidence had received a dangerous blow. A great weakness must have been uncovered. His misgivings increased and he remained staring at the girl through the judas-slit, with his eyes fixed and his forehead wrinkled.
Presently he realized what it was that he found so puzzling. He had known Amanda since she had been a child and yet now there was something new about her. He found out what it was. He was seeing her through some sort of mental curtain. His subconscious mind reached out for this infuriating barrier and drew it slowly aside like a wet page.
The complete picture lay before him.
He saw it all in a single dreadful moment of revelation. The whole kaleidoscopic history of the last thirty-six hours, painted with pitiless clarity and minute detail, unfolded before him in all its stark gravity; a mad, uncomic strip with himself wandering blindfold through it like a lost soul.
Then, as his two minds and personalities merged at last, as the new Campion’s witless discoveries fitted over the old Campion’s certain knowledge, the three-dimensional truth suddenly sprang out in blazing colours. He stood petrified. Good God Almighty! He knew now what the contraband was in those cases which the wretched Anscombe had been bribed to accept as honest Rhine wine! It could only be a counterfeit, the artificially dirtied indetectable counterfeit itself. Millions and millions of pounds’ worth of lies and disruption. Anscombe had been murdered because he was preparing to salve his conscience and to confess to the contents of those packing-cases. Probably he intended to hand over his own small fortune in cash to the Treasury by way of a gesture after his confession.
Then there were the lorries. They were for the distribution, obviously. How this was going to be done, and what the magic password was which would make the sober, suspicious British public accept and spend this dynamite, was still a mystery. But the time, the hour of striking, was not. Anscombe had given that away by mentioning Minute Fifteen. Today was the fifteenth, and they were not going to wait until tomorrow. The hour was now. Perhaps this very minute. It had all come back to him. He knew where he was. He knew what he had got to do.
The danger was stultifying. His body winced inside. A year, six months, even three months ago such a gigantic project would have been fantastic, but tonight, in this beleaguered England, with all the tides of a new and diabolically astute barbary lapping at her feet, the plan was a sound weapon and it was poised squarely at her heart.
Panic possessed him and all but choked him. The time was almost gone and he was piteously helpless. He pressed his face to the judas-window.
‘Amanda!’
‘Yes?’ She smiled at him quickly, reassuringly.
Campion took careful hold of himself and strove to compress and clarify the message he had to give her. Time had become as precious as a little drop of water in the bottom of a pannikin in the desert.
The clock chiming across the street was pure medieval torture.
‘Look, my darling,’ he said, aware of the state of affairs between them, aware of his loss and its magnitude and thrusting it out of his mind because of the racing minutes and the disaster ahead, ‘I’ve got to get out of here immediately. Listen, Amanda, there was some sort of scrap on the quayside before I got into that hospital. One or two people may have got beaten up in it, but that’s not the point …’
‘’Ere, what are you saying?’ The turnkey was very excited, ‘I’ll ’ave to ask you to repeat that.’
Amanda ignored the interruption. She leant forward to catch anything Campion might have to tell her.
‘Oates was with me then,’ he said distinctly.
He saw her brown eyes widen and a flicker pass over her face.
‘Where is he?’ he went on desperately. ‘I’ve got to get out, Amanda. I’ve got to get out and go down to the Nag immediately.’
‘Yes, I see,’ she said briefly. She turned on her heel at once and the turnkey had to hurry to keep up with her. She went so quickly that her going might have been desertion. The turnkey certainly put it down as that.
He came back a moment or so later, carrying a police memorandum. He was inclined to be amused by Amanda’s exit, but very soon the description of the wanted person took up all his time and intelligence. He was a type mercifully rare in the Force, but every great organization had its minor blunders. He sat on the long bench which ran down the corridor wall opposite the cell and spelt out the points line by line. At every fresh item he got up and came over to peer at his victim through the slit. He was studiously deaf to every remark addressed to him and frequently returned to the beginning of his task, having forgotten how far he had got in it.
Campion began to suffer the tortures of the damned. The war, with all its noisy horror as he knew it in the battle zones, was very close to him. He could see and hear it over Britain, not merely as air raids but as invasion, and then, as well as these, he saw the whole country suddenly hit in the wind by an entirely unexpected blow. The magnificent jingle from the end of King John came into his mind: ‘Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue, if England to itself do rest but true.’ ‘But true’: there was the talisman, there the strength, and there the danger. ‘But true’. But confident of her own solidarity. ‘But true’…
Oh, God, let him get out! O sweet sanity! O ultimate honesty and the final triumph of the best! O faith in good as a force and an entity, let him get out in time!
The turnkey began to read the description again with cross-references.
‘Yeller ’air … yeller ’air. Six foot two inches … well, just about. Very likely. ’Ere I say you in there, ’ow tall are you?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s a description of me.’ Campion’s voice was shaking with his effort to control it. ‘I admit that. Don’t worry about that any more. Now look here, this is serious. This is a million times more important and more urgent than any air raid siren. Either fetch me the most senior officer in the building or let me use the telephone at once. This is vital. Do you understand? It’s so vital and so urgent that if you don’t do it it won’t much matter if you’ve discovered grounds for an arrest on that bit of paper or not. If you don’t brin
g me someone in authority immediately I don’t think you’ll wake up in the same world tomorrow morning.’
‘Threats, eh?’ said the turnkey with idiot satisfaction. ‘I’ll ’ave to report all that. You want to be very careful what you say, my lad. This may not be the East Coast, but even so you can’t be too careful these days. Fifth Column, that’s what we’re looking out for all the time.’
‘Listen.’ Campion’s hands were sticky on the door of the cell. ‘I want to make a complete statement. I’m entitled to have a detective sergeant to take it down.’
‘In good time. In good time you shall have one of His Majesty’s judges listening to you,’ said the turnkey without stirring. ‘In half a minute I’ll take your statement myself.’
This was a form of torture new to Campion. The Ordeal by Fool might well go down in the calendar, he felt. He swung away from the judas-window and walked down the cell. His agony of exasperation was so acute that it was physical, catching him in the throat and diaphragm, pressing on them until he could scarcely breathe. He sat down on the bunk and stared at the stone floor. His mind began to work over the situation feverishly. There was the plan itself. That was simple and terrible. There was only one last secret there: how was this devilishly convincing counterfeit to be distributed in sufficient quantities and in sufficiently short time to do the work of destruction? It was just possible that this snag had not been entirely overcome. If so, there was just a chance of salvation still. Yet it was madness to hope for a mistake or a weakness in the Enemy. That was absurd. That was criminal.
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