Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery

by Freeman Wills Crofts

  Dangle paused and drew at his cigar. As he had foretold, Cheyne was already interested. The story appealed to him, for he knew that for once he was not being told a yarn. He had already heard of the rescue, in fact he had himself congratulated Price on his brave deed. He remembered a curious point about it. A day or two later Price had been hit in an encounter with another U-boat, and he and Schulz had been sent to the same hospital—somewhere on the French coast. There Schulz had died, and from there Price had sent the mysterious tracing which had been the cause of all these unwonted activities.

  ‘We crossed the Bay without further adventures,’ Dangle resumed, ‘but as we approached the Channel we sighted another U-boat. We exchanged a few shots without doing a great deal of harm on either side, and when a destroyer came on the scene Brother Fritz submerged and disappeared. But as luck would have it one of his shells burst over our fo’c’sle. Both Price and I were there, I at my gun and he on some job of his own, and both of us got knocked out. Price had a scalp wound and I a bit of shell in my thigh; neither very serious, but both stretcher cases.

  ‘We called at Brest that night and next morning they sent us ashore to hospital. Schulz was sent with us. By what seems now a strange coincidence, but what was, I suppose, ordinary and natural enough, we were put into adjoining beds in the same ward. That is the second point in my story.’

  Again Dangle paused and again Cheyne reflected that so far he was being told the truth. He wondered with a growing thrill if he was really going to learn the contents of Price’s letter to himself and the meaning of the mysterious tracing, as well as the circumstances under which it was sent. He nodded to show he had grasped the point and Dangle went on:

  ‘Price and I soon began to improve, but the blow on Schulz’s head turned out pretty bad and he grew weaker and weaker. At last he got to know he was going to peg out, as you will see from what I overheard.

  ‘I was lying that night in a sort of waking dream, half asleep and half conscious of my surroundings. The ward was very still. There were six of us there and I thought all the others were asleep. The night nurse had just had a look round and had gone out again. She had left the gas lit, but turned very low. Suddenly I heard Schulz, who was in the next bed, calling Price. He called him two or three times and then Price answered. “Look here, Price,” Schulz said, “are those other blighters asleep?” He talked as good English as you or me. Price said “Yes,” and then Schulz went on to talk.

  ‘Now, I don’t know if you’ll believe me, Mr Cheyne, but though as a matter of fact I overheard everything he said, I didn’t mean to listen. I was so tired and dreamy that I just didn’t think of telling him I was awake, and indeed if I had thought of it, I don’t believe I should have had the energy to move. You know how it is when you’re not well. Then when I did hear it was too late. I just couldn’t tell him that I had learnt his secret.’

  As Dangle spoke there was a knock at the door and a waiter arrived with coffee. Dangle paid him, and without further comment poured some out for Cheyne and handed it across. Cheyne was by this time so interested in the tale that his resentment was forgotten, and he took the cup with a word of thanks.

  ‘Go on,’ he added. ‘I’m interested in your story, as you said I should be.’

  ‘I thought you would,’ Dangle answered with his ready smile. ‘Well, Schulz began by telling Price that he knew he wasn’t going to live. Then he went on to say that he felt it cruelly hard luck, because he had accidentally come on a secret which would have brought him an immense fortune. Now he couldn’t use it. He had been going to let it die with him, but he remembered what he owed to Price and had decided to hand over the information to him. “But,” he said, “there is one condition. You must first swear to me on your sacred honour that if you make anything out of it you will, after the war, try to find my wife and hand her one eighth of what you get. I say one eighth, because if you get any profits at all they will be so enormous that one eighth will be riches to Magda.”

  ‘I could see that Price thought he was delirious, but to quiet him he swore the oath and then Schulz told of his discovery. He said that before he had been given charge of the U-boat he had served for over six months in the Submarine Research Department, and that there, while carrying out certain experiments, he had had a lucky accident. Some substances which he had fused in an electric furnace had suddenly partially vaporised and, as it were, boiled over. The white-hot mass poured over the copper terminals of his furnace, with the result that the extremely high voltage current short-circuited with a corona of brilliant sparks. He described the affair in greater detail than this, but I am not an electrician and I didn’t follow the technicalities. But they don’t matter, it was the result that was important. When the current was cut off and the mass cooled he started in to clean up. He chipped the stuff off the terminals, and he found that the copper had fused and run. And then he made his great discovery: the copper had hardened. He tested it and found it was, roughly speaking, as hard as high carbon steel and with an even greater tensile strength! Unintentionally he had made a new and unknown alloy. Schulz knew that the ancients were able to harden copper and he supposed that he had found the lost art.

  ‘At once he saw the extraordinary value of this discovery. If you could use copper instead of steel you would revolutionise the construction of electrical machinery; copper conduits could be lighter and be self-supporting—in scores of ways the new metal would be worth nearly its weight in gold. He could not work at the thing by himself, so he told his immediate superior, who happened also to be a close personal friend. The two tried some more experiments, and to make a long story short, they discovered that if certain percentages of certain minerals were added to the copper during smelting, it became hard. The minerals were cheap and plentiful, so that practically the new metal could be produced at the old price. This meant, for example, that they could make parts of machines of the new alloy, which would weigh—and therefore cost—only about one-quarter of those of ordinary copper. If they sold these at half or even three-quarters of the old price they would make an extremely handsome profit. But their idea was not to do this, but to sell their discovery to Krupps or some other great firm who, they believed, would pay a million sterling or more for it.

  ‘But they knew that they could not do anything with it until after the war unless they were prepared to hand it over to the military authorities for whatever these chose to pay, which would probably be nothing. While they were still considering their course of action both were ordered back to sea. Schulz’s friend was killed almost immediately, Schulz being then the only living possessor of the secret. Panic-stricken lest he too should be killed, he prepared a cipher giving the whole process, and this he sealed in a watertight cover and wore it continuously beneath his clothes. He now proposed to give it to Price, partly in return for what Price had done, and partly in the hope of his wife eventually benefiting. I saw him hand over a small package, and then I got the disappointment of my life, and so, I’m sure, did Price. Schulz was obviously growing weaker and he now spoke with great difficulty. But he made a final effort to go on; “The key to the cipher—” he began and just then the sister came back into the room. Schulz stopped, but before she left he got a weak turn and fell back unconscious. He never spoke again and next day he was dead.’

  In his absorption Dangle had let his cigar go out, and now he paused to re-light it. Cheyne sat, devouring the story with eager interest. He did not for a moment doubt it. It covered too accurately the facts which he already knew. He was keenly curious to hear its end: whether Dangle, having obtained the cipher, had read it, and what was the nature of the proposal the man was about to make.

  ‘Next day I approached Price on the matter. I said I had involuntarily overheard what Schulz had told him, and as the affair was so huge, asked him to take me into it with him. As a matter of fact I thought then, and think now, that the job was too big for one person to handle. However, Price cut up rough about it: wouldn’t have me as a pa
rtner on any terms and accused me of eavesdropping. I told him to go to hell and we parted on bad terms. I found out—I may as well admit by looking through the letters in his cabin while he was on duty—that he had sent the packet to you, and when I had made inquiries about you I was able to guess his motive. You, humanly speaking, were a safe life; you were invalided out of the service. He would send the secret to you to keep for him till after the war or to use as you thought best if he were knocked out.

  ‘You will understand, Mr Cheyne, that though keenly interested in the whole affair, while I was in the service I couldn’t make any move in it. But directly I was demobbed I began to make inquiries. I found you were living at Dartmouth, and it was evident from your way of life that you hadn’t exploited the secret. Then I found out about Price, learned that he was on one of the Bombay-Basrah troop-ships and that though he had applied to be demobbed there were official delays. The next thing I heard about him was that he had disappeared. You knew that?’ Dangle seemed to have been expecting the other to show surprise.

  ‘Yes, I knew it. I learned it at the same time that I learned St John Price was a myth.’

  ‘Well, it’s quite true. He left his ship at Bombay on a few days’ leave to pay a visit up country and was never heard of again. Presumably he is dead. And now, Mr Cheyne,’ Dangle shifted uneasily in his seat and glanced deprecatingly at the other, ‘now I come to a part of my story which I should be glad to omit. But I must tell you everything so that you may be in a position to decide on the proposal I’m going to make. At the time I was financially in very low water. My job, had not been kept for me and I couldn’t get another. I was pretty badly hit, and worse still, I had taken to gambling in the desperate hope of getting some ready money. One night I had been treated on an empty stomach, and being upset from the drink, I plunged more than all my remaining capital. I lost, and then I was down and out, owing fairly large sums to two men—Blessington and Sime. In despair I told them of Schulz’s discovery. They leaped at it and said that if my sister Susan and myself would join in an attempt to get hold of the secret they would not only cancel the debts, but would offer us a square deal and share and share alike. Well, I shouldn’t have agreed, of course, but—well; I did. It was naturally the pressure they brought to bear that made me do it, but it was also partly due to my resentment at the way Price had turned me down. We thought that as far as you were concerned, you were probably expecting nothing and would therefore suffer no disappointment, and we agreed unanimously to send both Frau Schulz and Mrs Price equal shares with ourselves. I don’t pretend any of us were right, Mr Cheyne, but that’s what happened.’

  ‘I can understand it very well,’ said Cheyne. He was always generous to a fault and this frank avowal had mollified his wrath. ‘But you haven’t told me if you read the cipher.’

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ Dangle returned. ‘We laid our plans for getting hold of the package and with some forged references Susan got a job as servant in your house. She told us that so far as she could see the package would either be about your person or in your safe, and as she couldn’t ascertain the point we laid our plans to find out. As you know, they drew blank, and then we devised the plant on the Enid. That worked, but you nearly turned the tables on us in Hopefield Avenue. How you traced us I can’t imagine and I hope later on you’ll tell me. That night we didn’t know whether we had killed you or not. We didn’t want to and hadn’t meant to, but we might easily have done so. When your body was not found in the morning we became panicky and cleared out. Then there came your attempt of last night. But for an accident it would have succeeded. Now we have come to the conclusion that you are too clever and determined to have you for an enemy. We are accordingly faced with an alternative. Either we must murder you and Miss Merrill or we must get you on to our side. The first we all shrink from, though’—and here Dangle’s eye showed a nasty gleam—‘if it was that or our failure we shouldn’t hesitate, but the second is what we should all prefer. In short, Mr Cheyne, will you and Miss Merrill join us in trading Schulz’s secret: all, including Frau Schulz and Mrs Price, to share equally? We think that’s a fair offer and we extremely hope you won’t turn us down.’

  ‘You haven’t told me if you’ve read the cipher.’

  ‘I forgot that. I’m sorry to say that we have not, and that’s another reason we want you and Miss Merrill. We want two fresh brains on it. But the covering letter shows that the secret is in the cipher and it must be possible to read it.’

  Cheyne did not reply as he sat considering this unexpected move. If he were satisfied as to Arnold Price’s death and if the quartet had been trustworthy he would not have hesitated. Frau Schulz would get her eighth and Mrs Price would get a quite unexpected windfall. Moreover, the people who worked the invention were entitled to some return for their trouble. No, the proposal was reasonable; in fact it was too reasonable. It was more reasonable than he would have expected from people who had already acted as these four had done. He found it impossible to trust in their bona fides. He would like to have Joan Merrill’s views before replying. He therefore temporised.

  ‘Your proposal is certainly attractive,’ he said, ‘but before coming to a conclusion Miss Merrill must be consulted. She would be a party to it, same as myself. Suppose we go out and see her now, and then I will give you my answer.’

  Dangle’s face took on a graver expression.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t do that,’ he answered slowly. ‘You see, there is more in it than I have told you, though I hoped to avoid this side of it. Please put yourself in our place. I come to you with this offer. I don’t know whether you will accept it or turn it down. If you turn it down there is nothing to prevent you, with the information I have just given you, going to the police and claiming the whole secret and prosecuting us. Whether you would be likely to win your case wouldn’t matter. You might, and that would be too big a risk for us. We have therefore in self-defence had to take precautions. And the precautions we have taken are these. Earlswood has been evacuated. Just as we left Hopefield Avenue so we have left Dalton Road. Our party—and Miss Merrill’—he slightly stressed the ‘and’ and in his voice Cheyne sensed a veiled threat—‘have taken up their quarters at another house some distance from town. In self-defence we must have your acceptance before further negotiations take place. You must see this for yourself.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  Dangle lowered his voice and spoke very earnestly.

  ‘Mr Cheyne, if you refuse you will never see Miss Merrill alive!’

  12

  In the Enemy’s Lair

  With some difficulty Cheyne overcame a sudden urge to leap at his companion’s throat.

  ‘You infernal scoundrel!’ he cried thickly. ‘Injure a hair of Miss Merrill’s head and you and your confounded friends will hang! I’ll go to Scotland Yard. Do you think I mind about myself?’

  Dangle gave a cheery smile.

  ‘Right, Mr Cheyne,’ he answered briskly, ‘by all means. Just do go to Scotland Yard and make your complaint. And what are you going to tell them? That Miss Merrill is in the hands of a dangerous gang of ruffians, and must be rescued immediately? And the present address of this gang is—?’ He looked quizzically at the other. ‘I don’t think so. I’m afraid Scotland Yard would be too slow for you. You see, my friends are waiting for a telephone message from me. If that is not received or if it is unsatisfactory—well, don’t let us discuss unpleasant topics, but Miss Merrill will be very, very sorry.’

  Cheyne choked with rage, but for the moment he found himself unable to reply. That he was being bluffed he had no doubt, and in any other circumstances he would have taken a stronger line. But where Joan Merrill was concerned he could run no risks. It was evident that she really was in the power of the gang. Dangle could not possibly have known about the throwing of the tracing over the wall unless he really had found her as he had described.

  A very short cogitation convinced Cheyne that these people had him in their to
ils. Application to Scotland Yard would be useless. No doubt the police could find the conspirators, but they could not find them in time. So far as retaliation or a constructive policy was concerned, he saw that he was down and out.

  His thoughts turned to the proposal Dangle had made him. It was certainly fair—too fair, he still thought—but if it was a genuine offer, he need have no qualms about accepting it. Frau Schulz, Mrs Price, Joan and himself were all promised shares of the profits. A clause could be put in covering Price, if he afterwards turned out to be alive. The gang might be a crowd of sharpers and thieves—so at least the melancholy Speedwell had said—but, as Cheyne came to look at it, they had not really broken the law to a much greater extent than he had himself. His case to the authorities—suppose he were to lay it before them—would not be so overwhelmingly clear. Something could be said for—or rather against—both sides.

  If he had to give way he might as well give way with a good grace. He therefore choked down his rage, and turning to Dangle, said quietly:

  ‘I see you’ve won this trick. I’ll accept your offer and go with you.’

  Dangle, evidently delighted, sprang to his feet.