Ramble had the seventy-three prisoners lined up in the hall when Travers arrived. Captain Friedemann gave his usual obsequious bow from the waist up, and said he would be happy to translate.
The ranks broke into quite a babble of conversation when the news was heard, and Ramble had to give one of his best Achtungs! Then one of the so-called passengers approached Friedemann and made a short speech, and there was more interchanging of bows.
“What’s he say?” asked Travers.
“He says that everybody is very sorry,” Friedemann said.
“Tell him his condolences will be conveyed to the proper quarter,” said Travers dryly.
The new order of things was explained. Friedemann said that as Captain Travers was now Commandant, could he have that interview he had been promised? All in good time, Travers told him suavely.
What in fact he would have liked to do was to lure Friedemann into one of those stiff bows, and then to administer a running kick at his pants. For when Travers had caught sight of Beckner, a pullover collar had been ostentatiously rolled up round the ears. In other words, the tunnelling had been begun. Somewhere floor-boards had already been removed, and day and night shifts would be working at the hole which its optimistic diggers imagined would emerge outside the encircling wire.
No sooner was Travers back in the office than Mafferty was asking to see him. The interview took place in the Commandant’s office, and in one way it was rather amusing, with Mafferty standing stiffly to attention, and his tone as rigid as the ends of his waxed moustache.
“I’ve come to apologise, sir.”
“What for?”
“Losing my temper with the Commandant, sir. And being out of camp contrary to orders.”
“You expect to be charged?”
“Yes, sir. I committed the offences, sir, and I’m prepared to take the consequences.”
“Don’t be a B.F.,” said Travers bluntly. He got to his feet, then wheeled round, cigarette case in hand. “Have a cigarette. And sit down in that chair.”
“Now then, Mafferty, you and I are going to have a talk,” he said. “Tell me exactly what you did when you left camp yesterday.”
Mafferty took a long time getting it out. There were some things, he said, he didn’t even remember, he had been so blind with rage. What he presumably had done was to head straight for open country, and when he really came to himself he was at the Piebald Stag at Mantlebury. It was almost dark then and he went in and had some tea. There was no fire in the room and he had been deadly cold, so the landlord laced the tea with rum and he had another stiff tot before starting back to camp. There he arrived at round about eight o’clock and he went straight to his quarters. The air and the rum had made him sleepy, and he lay on the bed just as he was with a couple of blankets over him.
“We’ll forget it,” Travers said, hoping to heaven the easy optimism would be justified. “Only one thing I have to say, and it’s in the strictest confidence. Major Stirrop didn’t die by accident. He died because someone caught him a terrific crack on the back of the skull in the dark.”
“I wouldn’t have done that, sir,” Mafferty said, jumping to it. “If I’d hit him, sir, it’d have been on the point of his jaw.”
“Forget that too,” Travers said. “The less said about hitting, the better. But what you’ve got to remember is that in the very near future someone’s going to ask a whole lot of official questions about your last night’s movements. That someone won’t know you as well as I do. He’ll have heard about what happened yesterday and he’ll have your record in front of him.”
Mafferty licked his lips.
“Yes, sir, I see that, sir.”
Travers got to his feet again.
“Now you know as much as I do. If I thought you’d told me a lie. I’d throw you to the lions. As it is, all I’ll say is this. Get on with your job and keep your mouth shut.” He held out his hand and for the first time allowed himself to smile. “One other little word—which is that I’m on your side.”
Then the ’phone bell went again.
“Call for you. Captain Travers. I’m putting you through.”
It was Colonel Caithby speaking from Garrison.
“That you, Captain Travers? The Brigadier would like to see you as soon as you can manage it.”
“Very good, sir,” Travers told him. “I’ll be there inside ten minutes.”
There are few dyed-in-the-wool infantrymen who feel at home at any Headquarters. Travers felt particularly uncomfortable that morning, and for no special reason, unless it were old prejudice. As he waited outside the Brigadier’s room listening to the very faint murmur of voices from inside, one or two elegant young officers came by with casual glances that seemed to show how great a gulf there still yawned between such as himself and the very elect. The mere fact of waiting was none too soothing to the nerves, and it seemed an age before Colonel Caithby came out with a smile and a nod.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting. The Brigadier will see you now.”
The two went in. Travers had met the Brigadier at least twice before, though only as a satellite of Major Stirrop, but he had remarked the taciturn directness and the steely grey eyes. As they met those of Travers that morning, they seemed more gimlet-like than ever. And to Travers’s guardee salute and brisk “Good morning, sir,” he merely gave a nod and, “Stand easy, Captain Travers.” Then he was into the heart of things straightaway.
“You have seen the doctors’ report on your Commandant? What do you make of it?”
Travers’s fingers moved upwards towards his glasses, then fell.
“Do you want me to say everything I think, sir?”
“Of course.”
Travers began at the discovery of the body, his observations and precautions, and what Colonel Caithby and himself had further deduced. Then, feeling rather like a commercial traveller with samples, he produced the cap. The brigadier and Caithby had a good look at it.
“To be perfectly frank, Major Stirrop was murdered,” the Brigadier said, his voice as cold and impersonal as if he had remarked that the bottom button of Travers’s tunic was unfastened—which it was.
“I’m afraid that is so, sir.”
“Have you any ideas, or suspicions?”
Travers shook his head. “It’s rather too early for that, sir.”
“Too early?” His eyes narrowed. “That’s one way of looking at it. But you have no idea whatever as to who might have done it?”
Then he leaned forward in his chair, eyes glancing up from under his thick white eyebrows.
“Yourself, for instance. You didn’t do it?”
“No, sir.”
“Can you prove that you didn’t?”
“Yes, sir. Major Stirrop was killed at about a quarter past eight. From before eight o’clock until a quarter to nine I was in my office at work. Captain Winter was in the adjoining room and could prove it.”
“You went both in the same room or in constant contact?”
“No, sir, but we were doing parts of the same job. Captain Winter must have heard me every now and again. Besides, if I may point the fact out, sir, it would have taken at least a quarter of an hour to kill Major Stirrop and dispose of his body.”
“I see.” He leaned still farther forward. “The reason why I put that direct question was that yesterday you had an interview with Colonel Caithby, in which were made certain disclosures about your camp. I’ve no reason to disbelieve what you said. I think you’d have been a fool to report what you couldn’t substantiate. But when you turned down Colonel Caithby’s advice to make an official complaint to me, you gave as your reason that you preferred at the moment to handle Major Stirrop in your own way—or words to that effect.”
He sat back in his chair as if to watch the effect of his own bombshell. Travers gave explanations, but what he was saying he hardly knew. Those steely eyes were holding his own till he was as if mesmerised, with his own voice coming from some enormous distance. Then the Bri
gadier was saying that murder was a serious thing and ordinary policy must be overridden—at least Travers thought afterwards that that was what he had said. For in the next moment the whole of Travers went endways. A sheet of paper was being held towards him and he was being asked to account for it.
He blinked, polished his glasses, then had a look. His staring eyes met those of the Brigadier again. The sheet of paper was headed The Case of the Murdered Major, but what was beneath the heading was at the moment nothing but a blur.
“This was taken from my office last night, sir.”
“Indeed? It reached here this morning, presumably with your office correspondence, and it was addressed to Captain G.S.”
“May I see the envelope, sir?”
“I’m sorry, but the envelope was destroyed. What I’m interested in is your explanation of that paper itself and what’s written on it.”
“I’m afraid you’ll find the explanation rather feeble, sir.”
“Leave me to be the judge of that.”
“Exactly, sir.” He smiled feebly, then began what he knew was sounding even more feeble. It included Scotland Yard, and George Wharton, and a rather scarifying description of the last few months in the camp.
“I see,” said the brigadier. “Colonel Caithby and I were wondering why you handled the matter so well from the start, and he seemed to recall your name in connection with Scotland Yard. This morning we rang them.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Travers, even more fatuously.
“The point now is this,” said the Brigadier, disregarding the gratitude. “None of us want the local police to go into the matter. It would make too much talk. I am prepared to regard your camp as what it is—a Prohibited Area—if I can justify the situation.”
Colonel Caithby put in a quiet word.
“The Brigadier would like to hear your suggestions.”
“Well, sir,” Travers said, “the matter is primarily one for the Home Office and the War Office together. If you yourself were to get into touch with both departments, sir, you might get someone sent down. If I may so, sir, I think Superintendent Wharton would be the ideal man.”
“Got that, Caithby?” the Brigadier said, and pushed back his chair.
The interview, Travers supposed, was at an end. Feeling more like a commercial traveller than ever, he began replacing the cap.
“Your name was on that sheet of paper,” the Brigadier was suddenly saying. “I knew a Gunner—a Ludovic Travers; I was at school with him, in fact. Any relation of yours?”
“My father, I expect, sir.”
“Really?” said the Brigadier, in a tone that was almost human. “Is he still alive?”
Travers again explained. The Brigadier gave a nod that might have been anything from consolation to dismissal. Travers gave as good a salute as the attaché ease would allow, and departed.
Colonel Caithby accompanied him downstairs.
“You’d better go back in my car,” he said, and, at the door: “The brigadier’s bark is worse than his bite. I expect you gathered that. Good-bye. I’ll keep you informed of events.”
As Travers was being carried back towards the camp, he was feeling like a convict reprieved. Then as his fingers went fumblinglv towards his glasses, he smiled sardonically. He, of all people, saved by the old school tie. But for that, and a clean bill of health from the Yard, and he might have been in the local clink. And then as he neared the camp, the smile went. What he had remembered was the sending of that paper, the typing of his name on it, and the motive that must have laid behind it all. If the million to one chance came off, and George Wharton did come to Shoreleigh, there would be things to relate that would make the old General’s eyes pop out like marbles. Which reminded him. Someone else must be told the state of affairs. By hook or crook he must get hold of Lading.
Wherever Travers directed his gaze during the rest of that morning, he saw a something that gave him a kind of cold shiver—those steely grey eyes that held his own. Every time he recalled his own gaucheries, he would wince. Army discipline had always been a fearful and eccentric thing, but in the old days one had been resilient and took what came. Now, in one’s years of maturity and with the knowledge that one knew one’s job better than the beak before whom one happened to be hauled, there was also the wonder whether it was the beak who might make an ass of both the law and himself.
And, but for a series of happy coincidences—the old school tie, for example, and having had a father, and Colonel Caithby—there might have been something of disaster if circumstantial evidence had alone been taken into account.
“Looking at the matter fairly and squarely,” said Travers to himself, “it wouldn’t have been a bad break for whoever killed Stirrop if I’d been put out of action for a few days. Which was just what the murderer had in mind when he sent that blasted paper to H.Q. With me out of the way there’d be opportunity to remove various pieces of evidence. And, wait a minute. One or two other little things, I’m beginning to see.”
At once he was jotting down ideas as they came, and highly promising they were. Above all, he was glad he had told the Brigadier nothing whatever about Lading, or the queer business of the extra prisoner. In the former he had in any case been bound by secrecy, and the latter was still no fact beyond possibility of doubt.
He settled again to that tray piled with arrears of work. Once or twice he looked through into Winter’s room, but he was not there. It was nearly midday when he came in.
‘I had a brainwave,” he said. “I thought to myself, it’ll be a hundred to one that some brass hat or other will be round the camp at any moment, and you know what they always want to see—P.A.D. stuff.”
“My hat, yes!” said Travers. “What’s this for, and what’re you doing about that, and why haven’t you got something else.”
“Lucky I did go round,” Winter said. ”Those blasted troops must have scrounged some of the buckets. A couple of stirrup pumps were missing and other stuff had been shifted about. Mafferty’s going round now, having a check.”
“You’re a good fellow,” Travers told him, thinking with horror of what might have happened if some officious brass hat had come prowling around. And in the same moment he was realising that he had not been quite fair to Winter—the last person to have been kept in the dark.
Five minutes later a pow-wow was begun in the Commandant’s room. Ramble and Mafferty were there, with Winter, but Travers had seen no reason for including Byron.
“We four have got to run this camp now,” he said. “It may mean extra work, but we don’t mind that, and we haven’t got to be too particular about doing the other fellow’s job. But what I really wanted to see you all for was to keep you informed and to ask for your help.”
He began at the actual method by which Stirrop had been killed. Winter interchanged glances with Ramble.
‘’You’re really sure he was sandbaggcd?”
“Absolutely certain,” Travers said.
“Then I’ll tell you something that Ramble and I both noticed this morning. The sand in the buckets had been interfered with. One or two of them definitely hadn’t as much in them as they should have had.”
“Let’s get this clear,” Travers said. “We’re to assume it was one of the P.W. who contrived somehow to kill the Commandant. That fits in to this extent—it shows why there were no footprints outside. On the other hand, it doesn’t explain how on earth the body could have been taken outside and deposited where it was found. Still, leaving that out for the moment, we assume a P.W. decided to kill him by hitting him on the skull with a few pounds of sand in the end of a bag. In order not to raise suspicions, the sand was taken from several buckets. Is that what you’re getting at, Winter?”
Winter said it was. P.W. had access to all the fire-points on the ground floor, practically all of which were in the corridors.
They talked that over without getting much further, then Travers came to that vital matter of the man who had entered Winter’s ro
om and for some reason or other had stood behind the door. Two things proved that he had been there: the melted snow on the floor, and the stolen document—as Travers described it—from the Adjutant’s office.
“I’ve lost something too,” Winter said. “This morning I wanted a list of P.W. divided into categories—you know, Nazi, not-so-Nazi, and all that sort of thing. It wasn’t where I’d left it. In fact, I’m sure it isn’t in the room at all.”
They discussed the usefulness of that and once more arrived nowhere. Then Travers divulged that someone would almost certainly be coming down from the Home Office. Everybody must expect to be questioned, himself included, and there must be no standing on dignity.
Lunch hour had already gone and the conference was dismissed. Travers called Winter back and gave him in the strictest confidence the astounding news of Lading’s presence in the camp. Never had he seen a man more surprised, and pleased. Everybody got on well with Lading.
“Wouldn’t he have been the very one to have tackled this business?” Winter said. “If he shaved off that beard and got back into uniform, nobody inside would dream of suspecting him.”
“I think he’s doing better work inside, and so does he, apparently,” Travers said. “And about that tunnel, you agree it’s best to do nothing till it’s well on the way? Lading will keep us informed.”
Winter agreed. Travers added a final word.
“What we’ve both got to do is to be damnably careful how we make contact with him. One careless step and we may land him in the soup. The best policy, in my opinion, is to ignore him. He’s a cunning devil, is Lading, he’ll get in touch with us if he wants to.”
Winter gave a reminiscent smile.
“I’d like to see him in the Mess again, wouldn’t you? A tankard of beer, and yarning away. Devil of a chap to yarn.”
“All in good time, young feller,” said Travers confidently. “All in good time.”
But what Travers was thinking when he had gone was of a most peculiar thing. Stirrop had been instantaneously killed. What, then, was that other depression that lay in the snow beyond where the body had been? Could the body have been put in the one place and then moved the few inches into another? And why? Looking at it all ways, Travers knew it made no sense.
The Case of the Murdered Major: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 13
