“Oh, ’e was in the war all right, but I’ve got a feeling ’e was on the wrong side. ‘Is battles is right enough, but they’re the wrong way round if you get me, sir. Another little thing, ’e’s got a real nasty scar on ’is forearm, and when I says something about it ’e says it wasn’t so bad only for them crepe-paper bandages. Didn’t bind, like, as a proper one should, an’ stuck to the wound something ’orrid. Well, we didn’t use crepe-paper bandages.”
“No, but the Germans did,” said Marden. “This is most interesting; please carry on.”
“Digging trenches, ’e talks about long-’andled shovels. Ours was short-’andled jus’ like a garden spade ’andle, you remember, sir. We used to think them German long-’andled ones was a good idea; ’e says no, they was that awkward in a confined space.”
“Case proved to my mind,” said Marden. “The fellow’s a Jerry. Any news about the household?”
“Doesn’t talk about that much. ’E can’t meet me Friday ’cause the gentlemen are goin’ to be out, and when they’re out ’e’s got to be in.”
“Curious,” said Marden. “I should have thought a manservant could more easily be spared for an hour or so when his masters were out.”
“I suppose they’ve been at home more lately since Smith has been able to get out,” said Warnford.
“I suppose so. They haven’t been at the Spotted Cow the last twice we were there,” said Marden.
“Smith did say they’d been more at ’ome lately, but I’ve never seen ’em.”
“Does he ask you in, Ashling?”
“No, sir, never. If I ’ave called for ’im by arrangement ’e’s always ready for me, and the twice I went too early a’purpose ’e said would I mind strolling on and ’e’d overtake me. ’E did apologize for not asking me in, said it was a awkward ’ouse, ’aving no back door, which no doubt is true, sir.”
“Thanks, Ashling. I think you’ve done very well.”
“ ’E might ask me in, sir, if I was to be took ill one night on the way ’ome.”
“It’s an idea; we’ll think it over.”
“Well, Warnford? What about it?”
“I think I’d like to have a look round the house, don’t you?” said Warnford slowly.
“I think it might hold points of interest, even if they’re only the points of automatics. Ashling?”
“Sir?”
“Does Smith carry a latchkey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“An impression of it would be a help.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Good man.”
“Do we go,” said Warnford, “when the masters are out and the man’s in, or when the man’s out and the masters are in?”
“When the masters are in, I think,” said Marden slowly. “For two reasons. One is that if Smith is out with Ashling we shall know when to expect him back—at about ten past ten; we should have no such certainty about the Johnsons. The other reason is that if the two old boys are at their nefarious work, whatever it is, there might be more stuff lying about. I expect they put things away pretty tidily before they leave the house.”
Warnford nodded and said, “I think we two should be a match for the sausage merchants.”
“I think so, too, though if one man’s got a gun and the other hasn’t, their respective waist measurements don’t come into it so much.”
“Take your ebony ruler, sir,” suggested Ashling with a grin. “A crack on the wrist with that and ’e won’t ’old a gun for months.”
“Don’t remind me of it, Ashling,” said Marden. “The sight of it gives me an inferiority complex.”
* * *
“Number seventeen,” said Warnford. “It’s the third door from here.”
“I’ve got the key,” said Marden. “Nice quiet street this, isn’t it? Don’t step on the coalhole covers.”
“You’d notice noises here.”
“That’s what I meant. We ought to have hired a barrel-organ to play ‘I wonder who’s under her balcony now?’ Well, here goes.”
The key slid in with very little reluctance, considering that Warnford had made it himself, and the door opened quietly. The two men went in; Marden shut the door silently, and they stood in the dark hall listening. There was no sound at all in the house, but there was a smell of cigar smoke, and presently someone coughed. The sound came from the room on their left. Marden touched Warnford’s wrist, and they moved along the hall towards the kitchen premises at the back. That door was ajar; they pushed it open and went in. Marden switched on his torch and threw the beam round the room. It was a very ordinary London kitchen with a dresser at one side, a gas cooker on the other, and a table in the middle; on their right as they entered there was the matchboard partition masking the cellar stairs, with a door at the far end. Warnford went to this door and lifted the latch with his fingers; a straight flight of steps ran down.
“Coals or beer?” breathed Marden.
“Both, by the smell. Let’s go and see.”
“Why?” said Marden, but Warnford switched on his own torch and went down, Marden following.
“Quite a big place, isn’t it?” whispered Warnford. “Runs the whole depth of the house, of course.”
“And the coals fall into it through the hole in the pavement outside, at the far end. A few packing cases and an odd table. Beer this end. Are you thirsty, or making arrangements to blow up the house? If not, why are we here?”
“Just idle curiosity,” said Warnford. “Besides, I always like to know what, if anything, is behind me. There’s room for twenty men down here. I only thought that a cellar the full depth of the house might have something interesting in it.”
“There’s a wire running along the wall here, look,” said Marden, shining his torch closely. “Thin wire, like piano wire, painted. Goes up the wall”—running the light up—“and through the ceiling into the room above, presumably. Whaffor, as they say?”
“Something to do with the house wiring?”
“I’m no electrician, but I never saw house wiring like that before. Where does it go to the other way?”
“Along the wall towards the front of the house,” said Warnford, following it with his torch. “Right into the coal cellar. Not so easy to see here; it’s so coal-dusty. It disappears here somewhere. Never mind, I don’t suppose it concerns us unless it’s a burglar alarm.”
“Funny place for a burglar alarm unless they expect people to slither through the coalhole and pinch their kitchen cobbles. Of course you may be right. These bricks on which we stand may be flashing red and blue lights all over the house. Hidden eyes may be watching us through inverted periscopes. Presently a sinister voice, apparently coming from the wall, will——”
“You’ve been reading thrillers,” said Warnford.
“Habitually. Well, now we’ve seen that, what next?”
“Go and call on the owners in that room upstairs? Or have a look round first?”
“Pay our call first, I think. We can look round the house more comfortably when they’re trussed up.”
“Suppose the room door’s locked?”
“Bad mark to you,” said Marden reproachfully. “The key was in the outside of the door, and you didn’t notice it.”
“Might be bolted inside.”
“I withdraw the bad mark. I am only a simple burglar, unversed in the tortuous ways of spies. Then we will burst it in. Come on.”
The whispered conversation ceased, and two silent shadows crept up the stairs, through the kitchen, and along the hall to the sitting room door behind which someone coughed again. Marden threw a light on the door handle; Warnford grasped it, turned it, and flung the door open all in one movement.
The bright light within dazzled their eyes for a moment; all they saw was that one man was sitting in a chair while another man was kneeling on the floor, facing the wall opposite. The next instant the light went out and the man in the chair hurled himself straight at Warnford. Marden thoughtfully shut the door
behind him and waited, amid the confused sounds of conflict, for somebody to try to bolt. Someone came towards him; he switched on his torch momentarily and landed his opponent an uppercut which lifted him off his feet. He crashed into something which broke and thumped to the floor.
Marden judged by the noises that the other man was still too busy with Warnford to shoot, so he turned his torch on the battle. The little bald man, fighting with astonishing ferocity for one so short and fat, had got hold of Warnford’s hair with one hand, his collar with the other, and was apparently trying to kick him with both feet at once; Warnford had already hit him on the nose with copious results and was now hammering at his head with short jabs less effective for being at such close range. Helped by the light, the soldier pushed the man away with such violence that he cannoned into the wall and bounced back. Warnford hit him once more, and that finished it.
Marden found the switch, turned the lights on, and surveyed the battlefield. “Well, that’s that,” he said. “We will tie them up tidily before they come round, in order to save unnecessary argument. We will gag them, too, to obviate yells. We will park them in the kitchen, I think. Who’d ha’ thought these City Magnates would have fought like that?”
When this was done they returned to the sitting room. Warnford began looking through the contents of an open roll-top desk, but Marden stared round with a puzzled look.
“What’s the matter?”
“Where’s the safe?”
“There’s no safe in this room.”
“Yes, there is,” said Marden positively. “I heard it shut just as the lights went out. Hang it, man, if I don’t know the sound of a closing safe, who does?”
4. Unofficial Subscriber
Warnford left off opening drawers and looked at him. “Are you sure? I didn’t hear anything.”
“My dear chap, you were much too busy with your boy friend to notice a little thing like that, but I did. Hiss of escaping air, thud of closing door, followed by a clanging noise. Why the clang? And where’s the safe?”
“Fellow was kneeling on the floor opposite the door, wasn’t he?”
“He was, yes. In front of the electric fire, warming himself, presumably. No, by heck, this fire’s stone cold. He wasn’t warming himself, unless he’s got an unusually strong imagination.” Marden switched the fire on, and the elements began to warm up. “It’s a real fire too; it works.” He switched it off again and began to feel round it, pressing here and pulling there, while Warnford went back to his pigeonholes full of papers till an exclamation from Marden stopped him again.
“My soul! Now, what d’you know about that?”
The whole panel of the electric fire swung open on hinges, and behind it was the door of a safe. “Four-number lock; now we shan’t be long.”
Marden returned to the hall to fetch the small attaché case he had concealed on the coat stand, got out his listening apparatus, put the ends in his ears, and stuck the other end on the safe door.
“Warnford!”
“What?”
“There’s somebody talking in that safe.”
Warnford felt his nerves prick in his finger tips and his scalp tingle; Marden’s face, turned half towards him, showed the whites of his eyes all round the pupils. The soldier pulled himself together.
“It isn’t a real safe,” he said. “It’s a door leading somewhere. Better be careful.”
“A door eighteen inches by twelve for those fat men! Don’t believe it. Get the poker or something and stand by; I’m going to open it.”
But electric fires have no pokers, so Warnford armed himself with a heavy ruler from the desk which made Marden smile when he saw it. In a matter of seconds Marden took the earpieces out of his ears, laid his hand on the handle of the safe door, and said, “Now for it.” Warnford stood with the ruler poised for action, and the safe door swung slowly open.
Inside was nothing but a telephone receiver of the pedestal type with the earpiece lying on the bottom where Stanley Johnson had dropped it in his haste. Somebody at the other end of the wire was talking, for the earpiece was squeaking and gibbering to itself after the manner of earpieces when the line is good and the speaker has a resonant voice.
Warnford and Marden stared at the telephone and then at each other. Marden picked up the receiver and listened, but a moment later the receiver said, “Good-bye,” quite audibly and followed it with a loud click, after which there was silence.
“He’s rung off,” said Warnford in such an aggrieved tone that Marden laughed. “Just as well, perhaps,” he said. “We can have a look at it now; there may be something funny about it.”
But the receiver presented no unusual features except that there was no bell that they could see anywhere. There was another perfectly normal telephone on a small table near the door; when Marden lifted the receiver of this a bell said, “Ting!” in the hall outside.
“Well, that’s that one,” he said, putting the receiver back. “No connection at all with the firm on the other stand. What shall we do, wait for Clarence Cholmondeley to ring up again, or give the house the once-over?”
“Let’s wait just a few minutes,” said Warnford.
“We haven’t too much time; it’s nearly nine now.”
“I know, but let’s give it a few minutes more. This may tell us more than anything else we can find.”
“We might have a look round this room while we’re waiting,” said Marden. “Did you find anything interesting in that desk?”
“Not in the unlocked drawers; there’s one locked one here I was just going to deal with. What’s that you’ve found?”
“Portable wireless, rather a natty little set. I thought I’d look inside because, in a book I was reading the other day, there were papers concealed in a portable—— Hullo, this is rather a funny wireless set, isn’t it? I’m no expert, but it looks a bit unusual.”
Warnford abandoned the roll-top desk and went to look.
“I know these sets; we have—they have them on tanks, or something very like this. They are receivers and transmitters. You listen in with headphones in a tank, of course; probably this one’s got a loud-speaker—yes, it has. If they want a reply they say, ‘Over to you, over,’ and you turn that switch which brings the transmitter into action and then you can answer.”
“I see. What shall I do with it, put it back where I found it? Or break it up?”
“Leave it for the moment,” said Warnford. “It might be rather amusing to take it away with us and see if anyone wants to talk to us. I’ll just look through——”
There was a click from the telephone receiver in the safe; Warnford made a dive at it and got it to his ear just as the squeaking started again.
* * *
In July 1938 Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon returned to London via Danzig from a very long visit to Germany and after a short period of leave was posted to the Foreign Office to pick up the threads of current affairs and make the acquaintance of men who had come there during his absence. His room was small, but he had it to himself except for his secretary, who occupied a desk facing his own. Both desks were austerely furnished with an inkpot, a glass pen tray, two trays labelled “In” and “Out” respectively, lots of blotting paper, a pile of narrow sheets of yellowish paper—the traditional “buff slips”—and twin receivers from the same telephone extension.
Tommy Hambledon did not really care about having a secretary at all; he said it made him feel old. The fact was that so many years of working underground in the dark, like a mole, had made secrecy second nature to him, and it fidgeted him to have a man there all the time hearing what he said and seeing what he wrote. He fell gradually into the habit of extending his lunch hour till it was nearly time for his secretary to leave, and then working far into the night when he had the place to himself.
This evening he had a visitor, a long lean man who was sitting in the secretary’s chair with his feet on the secretary’s desk and drawing cats on the secretary’s blotting paper. He was
filling up a few gaps in Hambledon’s information about men and affairs; his name was Charles Denton.
“What worries me most at the moment,” Hambledon was saying in rather an irritated tone, “is having to be so infernally law-abiding. I can’t even have anyone brought here for questioning just as and when I want to, or they demand a solicitor or write letters to their M.P. about it, and as for going through a house——”
“I know,” said Denton. “You have to get a search warrant signed by the local authorities——”
“Who want to know why, and you can’t and won’t tell ’em——”
“Does cramp your style more than somewhat, doesn’t it?”
“ ‘As is well known to one and all,’ ” quoted Hambledon. “Unfortunately for us. Look at this fellow who’s arriving tomorrow. D’you suppose he’d blow airily into Germany like that? Or Russia? Not on your life. Yet if I go through him and his goods with my customary thoroughness and fail to find what I’m looking for I shall just have to let him go. He will then go and take a room at the Carlton or somewhere and write letters to The Times, complaining about the hostile and suspicious attitude adopted towards friendly foreign visitors by the officious mutton-headed jacks-in-office here. ‘What,’ he will say, ‘is England coming to? Once the door-ever-open to the by-inordinately-despotic-governments-oppressed stranger, now the loathsome trail of a more-than-Nazi-heel tyranny bars the entry of a——’ ”
“Can a trail bar an entry?”
“Of course it can. Look at ivy.”
“Have it your own way,” said the amused Denton. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Have him pulled in and chance it. You heard the report about him on the telephone just now, didn’t you? I think that’s good enough.”
Hambledon picked up the telephone receiver and gave a number, waited a few moments, and began.
Without Lawful Authority Page 4