Wharton it was, full of beans and self-satisfaction. Out went his hand to the Colonel.
“Well, I’ll say good-bye to you, sir, and thank you for all you’ve done. If ever you’re in town, look me up. Call at the Yard and I’ll show you round.”
Caithby’s eyes twinkled.
“I certainly will. By the way, Travers, you ought to get an adjutant and a new interpreter sometime this afternoon.”
“Nothing like working with the top-notchers,” Wharton remarked complacently as Travers moved off in the borrowed car. “Not a bad chap, that Brigadier.” He swivelled round in his seat. “You’re a bit of a top-notcher yourself, so they tell me.”
“You know?”
“Know!” snarled Wharton. “I knew yesterday.” He gave a second snort, and one of profoundest contempt. “We’re supposed to know nothing, we old stagers. The Army’s not what it used to be. We get left behind. That’s all I’ve heard since I’ve been here.”
Travers smiled to himself but made no comment. Life at that moment was far too good. For Wharton he had never felt such an affection, and there was Colonel Caithby, too, one of the very best. Even that Colonel Cross who’d done what no other brass hat had ever done in history—shaved off his moustache in the good cause. And there was the camp in sight again. Not a bad spot after all. Many a worse place than P.W. Camp No. 54.
The gate was opened, and then a strange thing happened. As the car passed through, the sentry elaborately presented arms!
“What the devil was he doing that for?” demanded Travers. “There isn’t another car behind us, is there?”
Wharton guffawed.
“Aren’t you a Major?”
“Good Lord, yes!” said Travers, and smiled sheepishly. “But how did he know?”
“Somebody must have rung up Byron and given him the tip,” Wharton said, rather off-handedly, “Perhaps it was some old stager who hasn’t forgotten after all. Time may march on you know, but—”
“George, you’re a damned old humbug,” Travers told him, and drew the car up. “All the same, if you come in the Mess I’ll defy Regulations and stand you a drink.”
THE END
About The Author
Christopher Bush was born Charlie Christmas Bush in Norfolk in 1885. His father was a farm labourer and his mother a milliner. In the early years of his childhood he lived with his aunt and uncle in London before returning to Norfolk aged seven, later winning a scholarship to Thetford Grammar School.
As an adult, Bush worked as a schoolmaster for 27 years, pausing only to fight in World War One, until retiring aged 46 in 1931 to be a full-time novelist. His first novel featuring the eccentric Ludovic Travers was published in 1926, and was followed by 62 additional Travers mysteries. These are all to be republished by Dean Street Press.
Christopher Bush fought again in World War Two, and was elected a member of the prestigious Detection Club. He died in 1973.
By Christopher Bush
and available from Dean Street Press
The Plumley Inheritance
The Perfect Murder Case
Dead Man Twice
Murder at Fenwold
Dancing Death
Dead Man’s Music
Cut Throat
The Case of the Unfortunate Village
The Case of the April Fools
The Case of the Three Strange Faces
The Case of the 100% Alibis
The Case of the Dead Shepherd
The Case of the Chinese Gong
The Case of the Monday Murders
The Case of the Bonfire Body
The Case of the Missing Minutes
The Case of the Hanging Rope
The Case of the Tudor Queen
The Case of the Leaning Man
The Case of the Green Felt Hat
The Case of the Flying Donkey
The Case of the Climbing Rat
The Case of the Murdered Major
The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel
The Case of the Fighting Soldier
The Case of the Magic Mirror
The Case of the Running Mouse
The Case of the Platinum Blonde
The Case of the Corporal’s Leave
The Case of the Missing Men
Christopher Bush
The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel
The curtain had been drawn back and there was the bed. Wharton and a stranger were standing by it, and when Wharton moved to meet me, I saw on the bed the body of Penelope Craye.
“She’s dead,” I said.
Wharton merely nodded.
Once again, we meet our old friend Ludovic Travers—now Major Travers, and commandant of Camp 55 in England during World War Two. Nearby lives the rather mysterious Colonel Brende—mysterious because he is in possession of certain fact relating to aerial defence.
Travers’s suspicions that all is not well are intensified when Penelope, the colonel’s flashy secretary, is murdered. Then George Wharton appears on the scene—the Scotland Yard man who has already solved some strange mysteries. In the rush of exciting events which follow, Travers plays a major part in solving the baffling happenings. Christopher Bush, Ludovic Travers, and George Wharton—at their best!
The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel was originally published in 1942. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
“Curiosity is whetted by the aptness and neatness of his plots. . . All kinds of whys and wherefores could plainly be devised, but it would be hard to imagine any so satisfying as Mr. Bush’s.” Times Literary Supplement
“Well written, supplied with good characters, its setting and military incidentals realistic . . . in short, a good specimen of detective-story fitted to war-time England.” Sunday Times
“No wonder Ludovic Travers is puzzled, and so will be the reader in this amusing variety of the orthodox spy story.” Guardian
CHAPTER I
Fresh Woods
IT was at about nine o’clock on a morning of April of this year when a call came from the War Office. It was a Colonel Billow speaking, and he said he understood my Camp was being closed down. How was the job proceeding?
I said it was proceeding very well, whereupon he wanted to know if my adjutant was sufficiently competent to finish it up on his own. When I said that he certainly was, I was told to report at the War Office the following morning at eleven hours, at Room 365. It was a question of a new appointment.
I knew he was about to hang up so I got in my question very quickly.
“Do you mind telling me, sir, if I shall be able to get back here again, or had I better assume that I shan’t?”
That was a bit off his line of country. He told me to hold on for a minute, and I knew his hand was cupping the receiver while he asked an opinion of someone else. It was a couple of minutes before he spoke.
“That you, Major Travers? About that question you put. I think you’d better assume you’ll be leaving for good.”
So that was that, and to tell the truth I was by no means sorry to get a change of job. It is melancholy work clearing up, or well and truly interring, a biggish concern like ours which has been one’s whole life for a matter of eighteen months.1 Also we had been pretty well blitzed, and I was rather hoping for a job where the bombs might be of some less irritating kind. I was hoping, too, that the new job might be the least bit more active. Twelve hours a day and seven days a week in an office never was my idea of soldiering.
It was not till late afternoon that I was able to get away. I had managed to get hold of my wife at the hospital where she was nursing, but all she could say was that she’d do her best to get off, but they were frightfully understaffed. She was not at the station as we’d tentatively arranged, so I went on to the hotel. It seemed as queer as ever not going to the old flat in St. Martin s Chambers, but that had been closed down for the duration and my man Palmer had been pensioned off.
When I registered at the hotel the clerk said
there was a message for me. It was from Bernice, to say that she would be at the hotel at as near nine o’clock as possible. I told the clerk that I’d risk whether my wife had dined, and wait dinner till then. By the time I’d cleaned up generally and had some tea, there were still three hours to wait. In the old days they would have been easy to pass. Now I was feeling somewhat restless, and loafing about the lounge or strolling aimlessly about the streets had no appeal whatever, and then it suddenly came to me that I might do worse than walk the few hundred yards to the Yard and find out the whereabouts of George Wharton. If he happened to be in town he might dine with Bernice and myself.
The last time I had been on leave, which was at the Christmas, George had been out of town, and they told me at the Yard that he had been for some time engaged on special hush-hush work. Since I am one of those unofficial so-called experts whom the Yard frequently employs, though in my own case the former ownership of an uncle as Chief Commissioner made my employment perilously near simony, no bones were made about telling me just what the hush-hush work was. As I very well knew, from Dunkirk time till the utter collapse of France, an enormous number of refugees had managed to reach this country. Among them were undoubtedly enemy agents, and so Superintendent George Wharton had become a kind of scrutineer-in-chief, and was working with both the Special Branch and Military Intelligence, not to mention the Home Office. But wherever he was working, the right man was for once in the right place, for George is one of the few men I’ve ever come across whose French is definitely as good as his English, moreover he has up his sleeves tricks that would have made Bill Bye and the Heathen Chinee look like amateur conjurers at a children’s party.
But I had no luck at the Yard that evening. There was no one there whom I knew particularly well, though I learned that the General—at the Yard they know him as the old General, and the adjective, I may tell you, is one of affection—was still on special duty. Then someone turned up whom I knew, or who knew me, a little better, and he told me that George was at the moment in Derbyshire. When I asked for his address, he pretended there was no late information, and he looked sorry for mentioning Derbyshire at all. Then I actually wormed out of him that George’s temporary headquarters were at a place called Dalebrink, about which I’d faintly heard. No sooner had he told me that than he was qualifying it by insisting that George wasn’t really there; it was merely a species of operational centre.
As if to make up for the paucity of information, he told me quite a lot about Dalebrink. According to him it appeared to be divided like all Gaul into three parts: a small area where there were two mightily important factories, the town itself with its residential portion which made it a caravanserai for Lancashire, and a Garden City part by itself which was a cranks’ home.
“Ah ha!” I said. “So the General’s doing Buchan stuff, is he?”
“Buchan stuff?” he said blandly.
“That’s right. Thirty-nine Steps, Mr. Standfast, and so on.”
He smiled at my childish chatter, but there was something in his eye which told me I had not been so far out. Still, I did no more winkling out of information, and after I’d stood him a drink at a nearby hostelry, I made a slow way back to the hotel. Bernice actually turned up a quarter of an hour before time.
She was as sorry as I was that I had not been able to get hold of George, and during the meal we fell naturally to talking about him, for George is one of those people about whom one simply must talk as soon as their names are mentioned. George has it, and that little something the others haven’t got, and though I am not modern enough to know the nature of its ingredients—he doubtless has considerable quantities of oomph. But the best thing about him is that he is fully aware of his own gifts and qualities. Bernice loves him and describes him consistently as a darling. As for my own opinions, the fact that he never ceases to be a source of delight does not alter the other fact that I have for him a tremendous respect and affection, even if I have concealed both under the remark that if ever anything happens to him I shall insist on having him stuffed.
Since George is going to be the major part of the queer things which I hope to relate, perhaps you would like to meet him well beforehand. George is a subject ripe for the brush or pencil of Belcher, in fact he bears some resemblance to the gent whom Belcher has immortalized with the cornet. But George is a walking paradox. His vast weeping-willow moustache gives him a henpecked look, and when he puts on his antiquated spectacles, he assumes at the same time an old-world, disarming simplicity. He believes himself that the Yard robbed the stage of a great character actor, and showmanship is the sap of his very vitals. Women, as he has boasted in his expansive moments, are as putty in his fingers, and he can smell a liar quicker than the devil can catch the whiff of holy water. His snorts, his grunts, his little hypocrisies, and even his sudden and terrifying assumptions of dignity and wrath, are merely the rich colourings of a ripe and fruity personality. George can dance, and who more deftly, with them that dance, and as for weeping with them that weep, he could make a crocodile blush for its puerile efforts. Both his memory and patience are prodigious, and while he has made enemies enough in his time, I have never known him lose a friend.
As I neared the War House the following morning, I felt the approach of the usual depression and with it an apprehension. Many other men have told me they always feel precisely the same way. And in case you may ask why this holding-up of a story because of what may sound like a private vendetta, let me hasten to say there is no private vendetta, and that some little knowledge of, say, the whimsicalities of the War Office may be most important in its bearing on the queer story I hope to relate.
Not all departments of the W.O. are daubed with the same brush. There are some to whom I am always ready to present arms, since they know just what they want, say so in the fewest possible words, and go the right way to work to get it. As to others, some pretty damning accusations have been made in the House. I doubt if it can be denied that an enormous number of us have come to regard the W.O. with feelings compounded of maddening rage, sardonic despair, and a helplessness utterly without hope. Sum it up by saying that if I make a slip of utter unimportance compared with the muddle, contradiction, waste and ineptitude of which the W.O. is freely and frequently capable, the same W.O. will rear in wrath and threaten to treat the wretched delinquent as if he had virtually lost the war.
Still, to get back. It was not my fault if I felt depressed. After all, I was about to interview someone who, for all I knew, would be the usual specialist in putting round pegs in square holes, and who had the authority to send me forthwith to Fiji or the Outer Hebrides. Argument would be out of the question. If there was a gap in the department’s private jigsaw, in I would go, fit or not.
At the War House I signed the usual chit stating my business and with whom. A careful eye was run over me, and when it was apparent—regretfully, let’s hope—that I was unlikely to assassinate any of the more decrepit colonels, I was handed over to an orderly and taken upstairs. In the corridors were wandering from department to department aloof young officers who in the Great War could have been found at the business end of a feeding-bottle, and everywhere was decorum amid a slightly mouldy smell as of new distemper. I was kept under observation till ten minutes past eleven when I entered Room 365.
Colonel Billow was an agreeable surprise, because in under five minutes I was out of that room again. He was elderly but very, very brisk, and if I had wanted to say anything beyond a “Very good, sir,” I’d have had no chance. He said I was on loan, as it were, from my old department, and was to take on the job of Commandant at a brand new kind of camp, known merely as Camp 55. The personnel were mixed and the duties were merely those of guarding various points. Camp 55 was near Dalebrink in Derbyshire, which was its address.
When he said that, my eyes popped. Instead of a “Very good, sir,” I so far forgot myself as to say, or begin to say, “Did you say Dalebrink, sir!” Before the first words were out, he was waving an i
mpatient hand for silence, for he had picked up the local receiver and was about to speak.
“Is Major Splint there? Send him in, will you?”
The receiver was replaced and I was asked if I needed a railway warrant. I said I had one I could fill in, and then the Major Splint was shown in. He was told that I was Major Travers who was taking over from him, and would we have a talk about things as arranged. That appeared to be all. We saluted and out we went.
I liked the look of Splint, and I liked him still better when he said at once, “Let’s get out of this goddam Zoo and find a drink.”
“I don’t think I’d care to drink,” I said, “with a bloke who speaks so disrespectfully.”
He shot me a look, then grinned. Inside five minutes we were having some really excellent coffee and he was telling me all about Camp 55. Not that it was necessary, as he said, because down there I should find the very prince of adjutants who could make me conversant with things as we went along. What we talked therefore might be classed as generalities and scandal.
The Camp was a hutted one, he said. Some of the troops were permanent, but two Companies stayed for about three months and were then replaced. All did guards and at the same time carried on training, for which there were facilities, including two excellent ranges. What had to be guarded were two highly important factories, two vital tunnels, a bridge or two and a certain hush-hush establishment.
As for the lie of the land, I should soon pick it up, he said. No map was required, for most things were along a line running north-west to south-east. Start north-west and there were the two factories, both well camouflaged. Proceed south-east along the line for a mile and there was the town of Dalebrink—what might be called the old town with its shops and the residential area of the hoi polloi. Another half-mile and one came to the Garden City, small and well spread out, and occupying the slopes of some attractive hills. Another half-mile and there was Dalebrink Park, as it was known—a private estate on which was situated the hush-hush affair that had to be guarded.
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