Dictator's Way

by E. R. Punshon

  “Peter says we must wait till it’s dark and then we ought to have as good a chance of avoiding them as they will have of finding us. If we tried to send out an S O S, they would pick it up first, and ram us at once, and in the daylight we shouldn’t stand a chance of getting away. Peter thinks most likely they don’t know we know who they are, and they’ll expect we shall show lights as soon as it’s dark, and then it will be easy.”

  They heard Peter’s step outside. He came back into the cabin and laughed.

  “All our chaps want to do something,” he said. “I think they would feel better if we all sat in a row and made faces – some sort of action. Our only chance really is just to do nothing – yet. Then our friends will think we don’t suspect anything and that when it’s dark and we hang our lights out, then we shall be an easy mark – sitters. But we shan’t show any lights, and the dark will give us a chance to run, and anyhow we’ve got to get our messages off at the time arranged or things may get upset. If it doesn’t all go like clockwork, the rising may never come off at all, with everyone waiting for the other fellow to begin, and then the Redeemer’s destroying angels will be able to get in their shootings and hangings at their leisure. I say, Olive, what about some grub?”

  ‘‘I’ll go and see about it,” she said and went away. Peter sat down and lighted a cigarette.

  “Tough job, waiting,” he said. “Especially for our people – we are a bit of an excitable race, I suppose. Not so much when it comes to action but when it’s waiting we do get the fidgets.”

  “Why did you tell me about Macklin?” Bobby asked. “You know I’m a policeman.”

  “My dear chap,” Peter answered with his friendliest smile, “you’ve got no proof, have you? You tell your bosses what I said as much as you like, only you can tell ’em at the same time I shan’t admit it to them. Besides, I’ve got a perfect alibi. I can produce a dozen responsible witnesses to swear I was in their company that afternoon.”

  “But you told me –”

  “Not in writing,” Peter pointed out. “I don’t mind telling you as much as you like, because I think you know it all already. But of course I shall deny it to anyone else. I’ve arranged for my alibi, or rather a lawyer pal of ours who is in with us, has one arranged for me. Your Special Branch will know better but they won’t dare to prosecute, not against my alibi. Besides, we can do a spot of blackmail on our own, if we have to. We’ve given your Special Branch quite a lot of information about the activities of all the different dictators in England – the whole lot of them. They won’t want that to come out. Make an awful stink. Most embarrassing for your Government when it’s trying so hard to pretend everything in the garden’s lovely.”

  “It wouldn’t be allowed to come out,” Bobby said. “You don’t know how things can get hushed up.”

  “You’re thinking of the Basilisk affair, and the torpedo that wasn’t fired, and the depth charge that wasn’t dropped, and the submarine that wasn’t there and so it wasn’t sunk?” Peter asked smiling. “Oh, yes, I know you English have a genius for saying nothing – most annoying, too.”

  “It’s not only that,” Bobby said. “Murder is murder. I know you can pull a lot of strings in England, but not, I think, about murder. What made you kill Macklin?”

  “He was in the pay of the Etrurian Government. He had a list of all the Etrurians in England in touch with the People’s Party. If he had got that into the hands of the Etrurian Government, it would have meant utter ruin, prison, death perhaps, for all the friends and relatives in Etruria of the people whose names were on it. You don’t understand, you can’t in your safe, secure England, you can’t imagine quiet, harmless people, business people, a lawyer perhaps in ordinary practise, or a doctor, or a University professor thinking of nothing but their own private affairs – their next course of lectures or how such and such of their patients are going on – and then in the middle of the night, because it’s generally at night, there are armed police knocking at the door. Next day the neighbours ask no questions, and the tradespeople don’t call, and the doctor or professor or whoever it is doesn’t come back till the friend or relative abroad has come to heel. And if he doesn’t – well, they don’t. The little ways dictators have, you know.”

  “And it was because of that –”

  “It was because of that I killed him,” Peter Albert said slowly.

  For a long time they were both silent. Bobby thought to himself that it was a duty and a right to track down those who themselves had declared war on society, a secret war that had to be combatted and repressed if society was to endure and decent people sleep secure in their beds. But this was different and yet it was the same – entirely different and yet so precisely the same.

  Indeed to the complications that life may offer, there can be no end.

  Yet none the less, must they be met and faced and straightened out.

  “You’re thinking you’ve your duty to do and you’ve got to do it,” Peter said presently. “That’s all right – it’s one of the reasons why you English are a great people, because so often you put duty first. Only don’t call it murder what I did. It was no more murder than it was murder in the war when your officers, as I have read in a book written by one of themselves, shot down any of their men who showed signs of breaking under an unbearable strain. Their duty, I suppose, and it may be your duty to get me hanged – though you won’t find that so easy – and in the same way my duty to do what I did.”

  “You ought to have come to us,” Bobby said, but only weakly. “Anyone in the country has a right to police protection.”

  Peter shook his head, smiling a little.

  “What could you have done?” he asked. “The list of names Macklin had was what was important – and for you what was it but a list of names? What harm is there in a list of names? – especially one headed as this was: ‘to be asked to subscribe to the Etrurian Hospital Rebuilding Fund.’ But we knew what would happen if that list got to its destination. There was an old Professor of the Etrurian National University – a member of half the learned societies in Europe. He was connected with both Olive’s step-father’s family and mine – her step-father and my mother were some sort of cousin. He was busy with a work on Moral Philosophy – been writing it all his life, more or less. His nephew got mixed up with what in Etruria is called Communistic propaganda – really just about what the Chartists in England were agitating for a hundred years ago. But in Etruria they label it Communism because they know you only have to whisper the word ‘Communism’ in English middle-class circles and all argument ceases automatically. Look at your Foreign Office. Someone murmurs ‘Bolshevism’ and at once all there run round in circles screaming in terror. Nervous wrecks, in fact. When they’ve recovered a bit they wipe their perspiring brows and say: ‘Thank God for Mussolini, he may be trying to chuck us out of the Mediterranean but at least he’s fighting Bolshevism. Thank God for Hitler, he may want our colonies but at least he’s fighting Bolshevism.’ I don’t know if they thank God for Oswald Mosley, too. Perhaps nobody could go quite that far.”

  ‘‘That’s all just politics,” Bobby said moodily. “A man can’t give himself the right to kill.”

  ‘‘Why not? What right for that matter has any man to deny another’s right? Are you God to say this is right and that is wrong, to lay down commandments on tablets of stone? Not that I meant to kill. But we knew Macklin had the list and we knew he was going to hand it over to a go-between for the Etrurian Ambassador. But we didn’t know where the meeting was to take place and we didn’t know who the go-between was. We watched Macklin and we had observers posted at what we thought likely meeting-places. I was assigned The Manor, Judson’s place – and that was where Macklin turned up. I was waiting and I followed him into one of the rooms and asked him for the list. He drew a revolver. I was ready for that because we knew he had bought one from Troya, the little man who keeps ‘the Twin Wolves’. Troya had a police permit for a pistol. It’s been stolen twice –
if you ask me, it wasn’t stolen at all but sold. Troya got away with it, though, and we knew about the pistol, and I knocked it out of Macklin’s hand before he had time to get to using it. He whipped out a knife then and went for me so I knocked him out. He was pretty badly hurt.

  I caught him with the knobby end of my walking-stick and it’s a nice bit of ash. I wasn’t going to touch him again.

  I didn’t think there was any need after I got the list of names. I was pretty sure there was no copy and without the list, and the notes of evidence Macklin had got together even the Etrurian Government couldn’t pay much attention to his report. I said something like that to him and he began to laugh. He was bleeding where I had hit him and the blood ran down his face while he was laughing. He said he had half a dozen copies but I didn’t believe him. He was crawling along the floor, trying to get to the ’phone. I watched him. I thought he was going to call up the police and I didn’t care. I had my answer. We had it all fixed up what to say. I should have told the police it was a confidential list of business clients Macklin had stolen to sell to a trade rival and he could prosecute if he liked.

  We knew he wouldn’t dare. Too much would have come out. It was awfully quiet up in that room. I had never even seen a dead man. What was I saying? Oh, yes, he was crawling to the ’phone and I watched him. He got hold of the receiver. He said over his shoulder: ‘I know all the names by heart. I know every one. I know it all off pat. I’ll ring them at the Embassy and tell them they shall have it written out fresh first thing tomorrow.’ You know, that was a silly thing to say. He shouldn’t have said that, should he? After that it all happened very quickly. I got hold of him by the collar and pulled him away. I knew I had to kill him, but I didn’t know how. Funny how difficult it is to kill a man. We were rolling on the floor. There was the pistol I had knocked out of his hand but it had gone under a book-case somewhere. He had his knife and he was jabbing at me with it. He cut my hand a little through the glove I was wearing. I had put on gloves because of finger-prints, you know. There was a cushion on one of the chairs and I took it and held it over his face. I pressed it down. Funny how easy it is to kill a man.”

  He paused. Bobby said nothing. There was a horror in that quiet recital which possessed him utterly. There was sweat on his forehead and he wiped it away. Peter seemed quite unaffected. He might have been talking about a good hole at golf. Bobby found himself mumbling:

  “Does Olive know?”

  “I daresay she suspects,” Peter answered. “She doesn’t know. No one does. Except you. I feel better now I’ve told someone. I suppose you always want to tell someone. I suppose that’s why it’s always so easy for police to get a confession. There’s a kind of wish to tell. I had to do what I did and I would again. It was his life – or that of others and ruin for many more. Well, I’ve got that off my chest. Of course, I shall deny every word, and I’ve got my alibi. That’s been seen to. Only I think somehow I wanted you to know.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Peter said. “I think we might have been friends – if things had happened differently. I had to tell someone anyhow, and I didn’t want it to be Olive. I knew you suspected. I suppose you call it murder?”

  “Yes,” Bobby answered.

  “I thought you would, I thought you would feel like that. Just as well I’ve got my alibi fixed up.”

  “I shouldn’t trust too much to that,” Bobby said slowly. “A sham alibi is – well, it’s sham, and shams don’t hold. When they know it’s you they go on digging up evidence, bit by bit, more and more, slowly very slowly, till in the end they’ve got enough. I know, for so often I have helped to do it.”

  “I know,” said Peter again. “British. You just go on, don’t you? I suppose that’s why you always get there. All the same, I had to do it. I could do no other. Luther said that, didn’t he? or was it someone else? Anyhow, I say it, too, hang or not.”

  “You burnt the list of names?” Bobby asked. “That was the ashes in the dustbin?”

  “Safer burnt,” Peter answered.

  “I was thinking it would have been evidence,” Bobby explained. “Might have brought it down to manslaughter. I don’t know. Now there’s nothing to show. No proof. Did you take the hundred pounds that Macklin had?”

  “Secret service money,” Peter said. “It was to pay the go-between, whoever he may have been. I think Judson myself, but I’m not sure. Perhaps it was a man named Yates.”

  “Yates? Do you know that was the man who attacked Miss Farrar? At least, he may have been. She told you about that?”

  “She said something about it. Looks as if the Etrurian Secret Service had got on to her, too. Luckily there was nothing in the cottage, nothing at all. We used to meet there sometimes and it was a kind of clearing post, registration office in a way. There were two men, weren’t there?”

  “Yes. I’ve been thinking since, it’s come to me now. I half believe the man I saw bolting was Waveny. Do you know him?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Olive knows him,” he said. “She introduced me once. He and Macklin had a row. He thought Macklin was annoying her. Really Macklin was trying to pump her – they suspected her, they suspected everyone. Dictators always do.”

  “What made you leave those one-pound notes outside the back door?” Bobby asked.

  “Bit feeble, wasn’t it?” admitted Peter. “I think the idea was to make it look like an ordinary robbery. I took his watch as well. I threw it in the lake, the revolver and the knife, too. I expect they are there still. I kept the rest of the money. I liked the idea of using our pet Redeemer’s own coin against him.”

  “It’ll be traced to you,” Bobby said. “Then there’ll be evidence.”

  Peter shook his head.

  “All precautions taken,” he said. “Another thing, now you know the truth, don’t go after anyone else. I may be a bloody-minded murderer, as I expect you’re thinking, but I don’t happen to care about seeing anyone else let in for what I did. That’s another reason why I wanted you to know the truth.”

  But Bobby found himself wondering if it was the truth. In what he believed to be his country’s cause, Peter said that he had killed. It followed then he would be willing to lie, too, if he thought the lie serviceable and if he wished for any reason to prevent the facts being known. Difficult, Bobby felt, to see a clear way through such tangled motives, where right, it seemed, became wrong, and men of good will and honesty of purpose could think secret killings and dark intrigues were justified. And Olive – where did Olive stand in this scheme of things so remote from all ordinary standards? He thrust away the awful thought that would keep trying to force a way into his mind, and yet he knew if it were so, it would make no difference. Whatever the truth might be, the truth remained a part of her. He said suddenly and loudly:

  “Precautions my hat. They’ll trace the money to you and then they’ll have you.”

  “Changed the same evening at a greyhound racing-track – and not by me,” Peter answered. “No questions asked at greyhound racing-tracks.”

  Bobby made no comment. But he thought that Peter had really a very small idea of the persistence, the methods, the resources, of the C.I.D.

  Peter guessed his thoughts and laughed.

  “You’re thinking you’ll get me hanged all the same,” he said. “My dear fellow, not you. Though I’m not altogether sure you’ll ever get a chance to try.”

  Olive came again to the door of the cabin. She was wearing an apron now. She said:

  “Supper’s ready, but the men want you first. They want to know what to do. The other boat’s getting up speed. It looks as if they are getting ready.”

  “It’s not dark yet, is it?” Peter asked. “I thought they would wait till then. All right. I’ll have a look.” To Bobby he said: “Like to come along?” He led the way out of the cabin. Over his shoulder, he said: “I wish I knew if they had a searchlight.”

  CHAPTER 23

  IN PERIL ON THE SEA


  The question was soon answered. The darkness was rapidly increasing, for always heavier clouds were gathering in the west where the sun, though not yet set, was hidden beneath their lowering mass, so that already the gloom of night was heavy on that lonely sea.

  “We had better show no lights,” Peter said, and almost at the same instant a beam shot from the other yacht and searched and found them, picking them out in its steady unwinking glare.

  “To tell us we are for it,” said Peter.

  The wind was increasing with every passing moment, blowing in sharp gusts that each time they came seemed to be more violent, to last longer, to lash the sea into a greater turmoil.

  A spurt of water splashed over the deck. Two or three of the crew became busy, making all taut and ready for the coming gale. Peter said:

  “Thank God for bad weather.”

  The other yacht had drawn nearer. It was quite close now, running on a parallel course. A man on it was shouting something through a megaphone. It was impossible to catch more than a word or two of what he was saying and to Bobby even what little he did hear conveyed no meaning since it was Etrurian the other was speaking. To Peter, Bobby said:

  “What is it? Can you hear?”

  “I can guess,” Peter answered. “It’s ‘Dilly, dilly, duck, come and be killed.’”

  “They want you to surrender?”

  “They want it very badly. They think that if we did they might be able to find out things – with the help of a rubber truncheon. Not for us, thank you. We won’t sink the ship or split her in twain, for there’s still a chance. But better fall into the hands of God than into the hands of – into their hands.”

  The man with the megaphone had given up shouting now. Instead they were signalling with an electric light. Morse.

  “Same thing,” said Peter. “Promises. Pardons. Rewards. Appeals. Invitations to the crew to hand me over. Invitations to me to hand the crew over. Invitations to us all to hand each other over. Why not help the Redeemer go on redeeming? I gather I myself would shortly be made Commander-in-Chief of the Etrurian Navy. Oh, well, it all takes time, thank God, and while there’s time, there’s hope.”