The Case of the Murdered Major: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “And where’s our Camp?” I asked.

  “Half-way between the Garden City and the Park and just off the main road to the north,” he said. “There’s transport, by the way, to take your men, and there’s a special car for your own use.”

  “It sounds a cushy job,” was my opinion.

  “It is,” Splint said. “It’s a comfortable Camp, and the country’s lovely. In the summer it’ll be paradise. Still, you know what that part of Derbyshire’s like without my telling you.”

  “And what’s my own actual work?”

  “Just being chief executive. I used to pay surprise visits to the guards at all sorts of hours. Harrison, the adjutant, is kept pretty much to his office, so I used to take that load off his back.” Then he smiled. “Honestly, I think it’s a job you’ll like. Or won’t you?”

  “I’m wondering,” I told him. “Aren’t there any snags at all?”

  “Frankly,” he said, “I can’t think of any. Mind you, it isn’t a job where you’ll win any medals. Also you may expect to get more heavily raided than we’ve been up to now.”

  “No flies in the ointment at all then?”

  “Just one little one,” he said, and smiled. “There’s one young officer who’ll probably annoy you considerably–a chap called Craye. He’s a kind of lounge lizard in uniform, and with any God’s amount of sheer cheek. You may have to jump on him with both feet. He’s only just turned up or I should have had him well in hand for you.”

  “I’ll remember Craye,” I said. “But what’s the famous Garden City like?”

  “Gawd, what a place!” he said. “It’s a regular last ditch for all the cranks in England.”

  “What sort of cranks?”

  “All sorts. I don’t mind the arts and crafts gang and the long-haired poets and authors and so on. What I don’t like are the Neggers.” He caught my questioning look and explained. “We call them the Neggers from their initials—N.E.G., which is the New Era Group.”

  “A pacifist show?”

  He frowned. “It’s more tricky than that. The Neggers are planning a New Order and they’re a wily lot. It’s a pretty good camouflage to pretend to be planning the future while you’re doing underground work in the present. There’s some very bad blood between the City and the town. People want to know why the whole collection of Neggers aren’t under lock and key. You hear no end of talk about influence.”

  “What about the hush-hush place?”

  “That’s a different proposition,” he said. “I believe there’s research being carried on in connection with the fighting of night bombers. There’s a small gang of experts living in the Hall. Harrison will give you a special hush-hush document about it. I paid the usual courtesy call when the show started, but I haven’t been inside the place since. I don’t think one’s made any too welcome.”

  “I suppose,” I said with a vast assumption of indifference, “you never ran across a man called Wharton down there?”

  “Wharton?” he said. “What’s he like?”

  “A civilian. Biggish chap with an overhanging moustache.”

  He shook his head and I left it at that. In fact, the only other thing that happened of consequence was that he gave me the telephone number of Camp 55 and assured me there was an excellent train leaving at fourteen-thirty hours. I took him along to my hotel to collect my baggage, and before lunch I got hold of Harrison and arranged to be met at Dalebrink station.

  Splint was on short leave before going out East, so he disappeared after lunch and I rang Bernice to give her the news, the address and the telephone number.

  “Derbyshire!” she said. “My dear, what a dreadful distance away!”

  “Inverness would have been farther,” I said cheerfully, and before I could come in with other consolations, she was all agog with something she had suddenly remembered.

  “Dalebrink, darling. Don’t you remember? That charming Mrs. Brende.”

  “Mrs. Brende?”

  “You must remember. She was at our wedding. You know. Her husband was in India. He was a gunner or something. A dear old soul about sixty.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said diplomatically, and still unable to recall the lady. Fancy a man remembering people with whom he’s barely shaken hands on his wedding day.

  “You must look her up,” Bernice was going on. “It will be lovely for you, darling, having a home from home.”

  “You mean, she lives at Dalebrink?”

  “Darling,” she told me in a rather hurt voice, “haven’t I been telling you so all the time?”

  It was a good train as Splint had said, and on that comfortable journey two things happened. Strictly speaking, one was a happening and the other was an idea.

  With regard to the idea, it came at the tail end of a line of thought. As I lay back in the corner seat of the empty compartment, I began naturally to wonder about the new appointment. It is all very well for us old-timers to ape the fire-eater and to pray to be sent where the shells fall thickest, but there is something singularly attractive about a job where the Hun is not, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. While conscience therefore told me that though I was Category B Permanent, I ought to be a fighting man, something that I was pleased to regard as common sense assured me that I was about to do a job that someone had to do, and that they also serve who only stand and wait. The same insidious voice said it was humbug for me to regard myself as a real soldier. That tooth-brush moustache I flaunted in the world’s face was a pathetic camouflage for my bat eyes and horn rims, and six foot three of gauntness, let alone the grey hair that has long spread abroad from its once distinguished siting round my temples. Then an apt quotation came to my mind, from old George Peele:

  His helmet now shall make a hive for bees.

  And as I thought of that, I thought of George Wharton, and I suddenly knew why I was being sent to Dalebrink!

  Perhaps you don’t get it, as our American friends say. Well, I have a flibbertigibbet sort of brain. I suppose, like everyone else, I have a small repertoire of things that I really know well, but for the rest I fear I have dabbled in an incredible number of things and gathered a junk-house of information which finds application principally in the more abstruse cross-words. George Wharton gets exasperated by it because it serves to prompt me with an immediate theory to satisfy any problem. The fact that I am right only once in say, every four shots, does not discourage the furtive inner voice that prompts the said theories. George, as I said, becomes annoyed, sarcastic, and even epigrammatic about it all, but that hasn’t deterred him from profiting in the past from my more successful efforts.

  When I thought of that quotation then, my thoughts went like this. George Peele—George Wharton—bees—bees in the bonnet—theories—coincidence: and there it was. It could not be coincidence, I said, that I was going to Dalebrink to do a job that Harrison could do far better than I and where the few talents I have would be wholly unused, and where at the moment was mysteriously lurking George Wharton with whom I had always worked in the old days at the Yard. George, I said, must have approached the Powers-that-be and have asked for me to be sent to Dalebrink. In that case something mightily strange was going on down there. The warrior’s helmet, in fact, would not be a hive for bees. The warrior, for all he knew, might find himself in false whiskers, with a truncheon concealed under his armpit.

  As for the thing that happened, it seemed less than unimportant at the time. I had bought The Times to do the cross-word, and when I had finished it my eye caught an advertisement. It was for something I rather wanted, so I began cutting it out neatly with my penknife. Then I wondered, since I still wanted the paper, if I was spoiling something on the other side, so I had a precautionary look, and I then saw a paragraph which I had missed at my first discursive reading. Mind you, I saw no importance in that paragraph. It had a certain interest in the adventurous train of thought to which it naturally led up, but it did not stay docketed in my mind. There was no reason why it should. I eve
n forgot straightaway the name of the officer it mentioned.

  This was the paragraph.

  DRAMATIC ADVENTURES OF OFFICER

  News has come from Lisbon of the arrival there, after incredible adventures, of Major Passenden, R.A., who was reported as killed near Tourcoing during the retreat to Dunkirk. Major Passenden, it appears, was slightly wounded and he shammed death till after the enemy column had passed, and then tried to reach the coast. He was captured and escaped, and was sheltered at the risk of their lives by a French household. Two months later began the Odyssey which ended yesterday at Lisbon.

  1 See The Case of the Murdered Major.

  Published by Dean Street Press 2018

  Copyright © 1941 Christopher Bush

  Introduction copyright © 2018 Curtis Evans

  All Rights Reserved

  The right of Christopher Bush to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by his estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1941 by Cassell & Co.

  Cover by DSP

  ISBN 978 1 912574 12 4

  www.deanstreetpress.co.uk