Traitor's Purse

by Margery Allingham

  He strode on, hoping devoutly for the best, and plunged down a dusty aisle lined with tea chests and bulging sacks of cereals. He heard the boy moving behind him, then a new step on the boards and a lot of whispering. He was going to be stopped. Now, at the eleventh hour, he was going to be held up, caught like a mouse, in a damned grocer’s shop.

  There was a bundle of long, old-fashioned soft brooms hanging from a hook in the ceiling and he snatched one of them. The door leading into the Masters’ domain was unlocked, as before, and when he went through it he took the broom with him and wedged it between the door panel and the angle of the opposite wainscot. It was not a very effective barrier but it would certainly hold the door against the most determined shoulder for a minute or two, and it seemed most unlikely that any longer period was going to matter very much.

  Once inside in the dark a new difficulty presented itself. He had no torch. Everything in his pockets except his cigarettes had been taken from him at the police station and was probably hanging up now in a little official bag outside the cell door.

  He began to climb in the dark, praying against giddiness and keeping one hand tightly clasped over the things in his coat pocket. He was desperate with exasperation at his own slowness. Every moment counted. Every minute which galloped by might be the one which made all the difference between success and failure. His journey across the Council Chamber turned out to be a crawl through hell. Once he cannoned into the table, the hard wooden edge missing the burden in his pocket by inches, and all the time the seconds were racing by.

  He found the farther door after what promised to be complete defeat, by observing a minute sliver of light showing just beneath it. He got it open, to discover that the corridor within was lit by a hurricane lantern standing at the entrance to the first of the Masters’ storerooms. Although Campion was profoundly relieved to see it from one point of view, it presented another danger. He had no desire to run into anyone before he reached the Nag’s Trough.

  He went on, still with the same cautious haste which demanded every ounce of nervous discipline he possessed. His eyelids were sticky and his muscles hard and bunched against his bones.

  There were lanterns in every vantage place and the damp stone had dried round them, indicating that they had been burning for some time. A great change had come over the Masters’ storerooms. The packing cases were empty and the great caverns in confusion, as if an army had been at work there. There was so much debris about, so many dark corners and unexplained machines, that he hardly dared move, convinced that at any moment a living figure must detach itself from the chaos and bar his way.

  He pushed on, feeling like a hurrying snail with all the world depending on his speed. The iron ladders required very cautious negotiation in the half-dark and he had his precious coat pocket to take care of during the descent.

  He came down into the last narrow passage without being seen. Here the fumes of gasoline were almost suffocating and the throb of revving engines made the very heart of the hill vibrate.

  He edged on towards the right-angled bend which would bring him out on to the ledge overlooking the whole Trough. At least some of the trucks were still there, although by the sound they were on the point of moving. The police could never have arrived in time, and even had they done so there could hardly have been enough of them. No one, not even Hutch in war time, could conjure up such a large army of police at five minutes’ notice.

  He turned the right-angled bend cautiously and looked out into the Nag’s Trough. It made an amazing picture. The only light in the high cavern came from the masked headlamps of the vehicles themselves, so that the lorries and vans looked like great black humped insects trembling on a lampshade. There appeared to Campion’s horrified eyes to be thousands of them, all loaded to capacity with bursting sacks.

  He kept flat against the dark wall of rock and edged farther along, so that he could get a glimpse of the entrance round the protecting screen of the natural rock partition.

  When at last he was able to get an uninterrupted view his heart jolted violently. There was a sacking curtain hanging over the single exit of the coast road, and the foremost truck was stationary a good twenty feet away from it. If he could do anything he was still in time.

  The whole place was alive with people but voices were kept down and the roar of engines predominated. It was a ghostly inferno of a scene. He knew the trucks and vans must all be loaded up with financial dynamite, freight far more dangerous than ammunition. It was the counterfeit all right, that much was obvious, but inasmuch as its form of presentation and distribution was still undiscovered it remained a secret weapon, its degree of danger known only to the Enemy.

  Campion strained his eyes through the gloom. Exhaust fumes were rising all round him and he was beginning to feel their effects. Was that Pyne in the far corner over by the sacking curtain? He thought it was. The man was calmly checking trucks over on a time-sheet as if he had been running a goods yard.

  The fumes were growing worse up in the roof. Campion felt himself swaying and he put out his arms to steady himself. The sudden movement must have caught the attention of someone in the crowd below, for a shout went up and immediately the wide beam of a powerful torch began to rake the ledge on which he stood.

  Campion made up his mind. He had no idea what the effect of his solitary ‘lucky bean’ might be. From the beginning it had only been a forlorn hope, but now the time had come to take the risk.

  As the torch beam came nearer he drew the little steel egg from his coat pocket and pulled out the pin. It had been really disgracefully easy to steal it from Butcher’s workshop. That had simply been a question of walking in and lifting it from its rack in the cupboard. The whole proceeding could not have taken more than five minutes.

  The phoenix egg nestled wickedly in the palm of his hand. Below him the trucks trembled and steamed. The torch beam was within a yard of him. He threw up his arm and stood spread-eagled against the wall.

  ‘I hope you’re praying,’ he said grimly to Amanda wherever she might be, ‘because this is our first attempt at a miracle and it’s got to come off.’

  The egg sailed through the air to the goal he had chosen for it, low down on the left-hand side of the entrance to the Trough. At the same moment the torch beam got him and he dropped forward on his face as a bullet spat at him.

  The next moment the world pancaked. It was no ordinary explosion. Campion’s immediate thought was that Butcher was another of those damned maniacs with a passion for understatement.

  There was very little noise, but it was as though some gigantic animal had placed its lips to the entrance to the Trough and had sucked in very sharply, only to blow out again immediately afterwards. There was a rumble and the exit to the coast road disappeared under several tons of earth and limestone sliding down from the Nag. The roar of fire followed as a score of petrol tanks exploded and the whole of the upper half of the cavern became a mass of flying paper.

  Campion scrambled to his knees. Blood was trickling into his mouth and his body felt as if it had been through a clothes wringer, but he was alive and, as far as he knew, unwounded, save for the bullet graze across his face.

  Below him, in the bowl of the Trough, there was a sea of blazing petrol and paper and the fumes of smouldering sacks. Millions of envelopes covered the place like a fall of brown snow. Injured men swore and died under their lorries, while others fought each other in their attempt to clamber on to the ledge. But the ladders which were normally used for this purpose had been smashed to matchwood and the bare sides of the rock provided no foothold.

  Campion gathered up a handful of the letters which were still fluttering down over him as the hot air winnowed them up from the bonfire below, and, using every ounce of strength left in his body, he crawled painfully towards the mouth of the passage.

  Hutch and his handful of men found him at the foot of the first iron ladder as they came swarming in through the Masters’ storerooms to investigate the explo
sion, which had shaken the town. The sergeant and the constables went on at once to do what they could for the temporary staff of Surveys Limited trapped in the horrors of the Trough, but the Superintendent sat down by Campion on the stones and they looked at the envelopes together.

  There is something unspeakably shocking about a very simple idea which, as well as being elementary, is also diabolical.

  Both Campion and Hutch were highly sophisticated members of a generation which has had to learn to steel itself against ever being astonished by anything unpleasant, but there was a streak of frank bewilderment in both their expressions as they glanced at each other across the handful of envelopes.

  The plan by which false inflation was to have been induced overnight in the most civilized island in the world was an exquisitely simple one. Each of the envelopes was of the familiar Government colour and pattern. On His Majesty’s Service was printed across the front of each in the standard ink and type, as was also the black frank-mark, the familiar crown in the circle. Each envelope was, in fact, exactly the same as any of those others which were being circulated officially in millions on behalf of Minute Fifteen.

  By the light of the Superintendent’s torch Campion opened one of the packets. It was addressed to a Mr P. Carter, 2 Lysander Cottages, Netherland Road, Bury-under-Lyne, and it contained seven of the spurious and artificially dirtied banknotes, as well as a buff-coloured printed slip, the text of which was masterly in its uncomplicated wickedness.

  ‘The Ministry of Labour, Whitehall, London, S.W. SRG. 20539.

  ‘Dear Sir/Madam,

  ‘The enclosed sum of £7 os. od. has been awarded to you on the War Bonus Claims Committee’s recommendation.

  ‘This money is paid to you under the arrears of remuneration for Persons of Incomes Below Tax Level Board (O. in C. AQ430028), as has been announced in the public press and elsewhere.

  Note. You will help your country if you do not hoard this money but translate it into goods immediately.

  ‘R. W. Smith,

  ‘Compt.’

  The second envelope was directed to a Mr Wild, or Wilder, of 13 Pond Street, Manchester, 4. It contained a copy of the same slip and four of the counterfeit notes.

  The third should have gone to a Mrs Edith somebody of Handel Buildings, Lead Road, Northampton, and contained, beside the familiar slip, nine pounds in spurious notes.

  The addresses explained the scheme to the two men and they shivered. It was very obvious. Someone had simply got hold of the registers belonging to the various social service schemes functioning in the poorer districts of the industrial towns. These would contain between them the names of most of the permanently unemployed, those who had ever received help from State or local bodies, and all those thousand-and-one poorer folk whose names and addresses had ever been tabulated.

  Campion held his breath. It all pointed directly to Pyne again. Lists of addresses of that kind would be just the thing in which Surveys Limited would have specialized. More than probably millions of addresses like these constituted the firm’s main stock-in-trade. Many of them would be out of date, of course. The main bulk was bound to be damagingly correct.

  The central idea lay revealed in all its destructiveness. Vast numbers of needy folk in all the poorer parts of the country were suddenly to be presented with a handful of money and instructions to spend it. The evil genius of the proposal lay in the fact that the windfall was to appear to come directly from the one authority from whom the recipients would accept money not only without question, but also with the dangerous assumption that it was in some inexplicable fashion their right to receive it.

  As soon as Campion saw the scheme in its simple entirety he realized the overwhelming fact that in such circumstances the only thing any Government could hope to do was to admit the notes as legal tender and accept the consequences, however terrible they might turn out to be. It would be quite impossible to take the money back.

  The practical arrangements had been a miracle of efficiency. The money had been inserted in the envelopes by a machine. The trucks were obviously due to spread out all over the country, posting their ‘Government mail’ at main post offices all over the West of England, By synchronizing the plan with the launching of Minute Fifteen at a time when the authorities were prepared for an enormous influx of official letters, the G.P.O. was to be neatly tricked into rendering vital assistance and ensuring that the secret blow would fall at the same moment in every part of the land. The earlier, clumsier method of distributing the money must have been in the nature of a try-out to test the actual currency itself.

  Campion wiped his face, which was still bleeding slightly. He felt sick with relief. Hutch leant close to him and his eyes were questioning. Campion guessed what he was asking and as suddenly knew the answer also. The whole vivid procession had brought them directly to Pyne, and Pyne was not convincing. The principal thing about him, the thing that overshadowed everything else, was that he was first and foremost an ordinary commercially-minded business man. There was no passion in him, no fanaticism, no emotional driving force. As a full-blown enemy agent he seemed unlikely; as a Quisling he was frankly absurd. From first to last he had behaved like a business man undertaking a delicate job for a client, and in that case who was his principal? Who? Who was employing Pyne? Who was it who had carried this half-prepared plan of the enemy’s through to within an ace of success? Who had discovered the presence of the counterfeit and had then, either with or without direct contact with the enemy country, put the whole diabolical scheme into existence? That was the question.

  The answer seemed to be contained in another. Who had the facilities for acquiring and accommodating a large army of local volunteer labour to address ‘Government envelopes’? Who would have had access to sufficient petrol, real or synthetic, to propel so many lorries?

  Sir Henry Bull’s description of Lee Aubrey came back very vividly to Campion.

  ‘He’s a curious product, part genius, part crank. One moment he’s doing untold service and the next he’s trying to advance a hare-brained scheme for running the country.’

  XXI

  CAMPION LEANT AGAINST the wall in Lee Aubrey’s gracious, comfortable study and considered the scene before him. It was one of those lucid, almost contemplative moments which sometimes arrive in the very heart of a crisis. Just for a moment he saw the whole history of the plan and its defeat in the round, as if it had been a play and this present moment the final scene.

  The picture in front of him might easily have been on a stage. It was so brightly lit, so tense, so painfully dramatic. The room was very quiet. The two constables on the door stood stiffly. The distinguished company, with Oates himself in the middle looking like a grey corpse which had begun to fidget, was anxious and constrained. Sir Henry Bull, who had just arrived from London and was now surrounded by most of his fellow Masters, was glancing at the documents over which Hutch’s Chief Inspector and an M.I.5 man were presiding.

  The cupboard beneath the high bookcase stood open. So did every drawer in the room, as the squad of trained men methodically packed and docketed the papers they were taking away.

  Lee Aubrey himself stood on the hearthrug with a plain-clothes man on either side of him. He looked astonished and faintly irritated, but there was no trace of alarm in his big-boned face and he was certainly far less gauche than usual.

  It was the importance of the men which made the scene unique in Campion’s experience. There was a note almost of domestic tragedy about the situation. It was like the disowning of the eldest son, the disgrace in the regiment, the expulsion from the school.

  The Masters of Bridge were angry and horrified but also deeply hurt and ashamed. Even the police were not triumphant.

  ‘The evidence against that fellow Pyne, who was killed, is of course conclusive,’ said Oates to Sir Henry. He spoke softly but included in his glance the thin, scandalized man who was Aubrey’s solicitor and had only just arrived.

  Sir Henry nodded griml
y without speaking.

  ‘I think there is no doubt that he must have been the moving spirit,’ the solicitor was venturing timidly when Aubrey interrupted from the hearthrug.

  ‘My dear chap, don’t be an ass,’ he said. ‘I employed Pyne because, not only was he obviously the right man for the job, but he had the right kind of organization at his fingertips. He was doing his work very efficiently until he was stopped.’

  ‘Take care.’ Oates turned on the man sharply, his haggard face unusually grim. In the background a detective-sergeant had begun to scribble in his notebook unobtrusively.

  Aubrey’s colour darkened and he threw out his long arms in an awkward gesture.

  ‘My dear good people, this is all too absurd,’ he said, his deep pleasant voice flexible and persuasive as ever. ‘I’m perfectly willing to reserve my defence as you all advise so magnificently, but there’s no point in making a mystery of the thing where none exists. It’s quite clear what I’ve been doing. For heaven’s sake see those fellows at my desk handle the green folders with care, because they contain the one vital scheme of government for this benighted country at the present time. I had to be unorthodox in my methods of forcing the Government to take it up, I admit that, but it was a case of necessity.’

  ‘Good God, Aubrey, do you realize what you’re saying?’ Sir Henry’s face was as white as his hair.

  ‘Yes, Bull, of course I do.’ The Principal of the Bridge Institute was at his most gently superior. ‘A great deal of the blame is yours. You made a very dangerous mistake last year when you failed to understand the importance of the financial scheme I put up to you then. All these Social Credit fellows, and Keynes and the rest, they have glimmerings of the idea, but they’re none of them sufficiently drastic or far-reaching. My plan would have put the economic life of the country on an entirely new basis. Since I could not get a government to see reason by argument I realized I had to put them in a position in which they would be only too glad to listen to me. I had to smash their existing economy and create a chaos in which they would automatically turn to the one man who could save them. That’s perfectly clear. There’s nothing difficult to understand about that.’