Death by Night (Department Z)

by John Creasey

  Sibilla, who was Vania, had been bought.

  Now they stood at the threshold of a victory which would double and redouble their wealth and their power. They could see nothing which could stop them. They had no country, no scruples, no patriotism, no concern for others. They were worshippers at the Shrine of Power—the Syndicate of Power.

  And Sibilla led them.

  They sat in front of Sibilla, in comfortable chairs, and it might have been the board meeting of an exceptionally affluent company. In the middle of the front row was a man older than most of the others—a gaunt scarecrow of an Englishman with white hair that stood upright from his head, baleful eyes, and a parchmentlike skin which suggested that he was even older than he was.

  At one end of the room stood Cartwright.

  The man looked pale and ill, and his hands were unsteady. He gave the impression that he had not slept for days. He saw men with whom he had worked, and whom he had trusted, members of that Syndicate of Power which was to crush his dreams. He hated them. Every man he hated—yet just behind him stood two uniformed officers of the Vanian Army.

  There was a hum of conversation which stopped as Sibilla rose to his feet. He lifted a hand, and he started to speak in French—the language more universally understood than any other.

  ‘Gentlemen, the ultimatums have been delivered, and the time-limit expires at six o’clock this evening—less than nine hours from now. Each country affected has seen a demonstration of our Power, and there is little-doubt of immediate acquiescence. We shall doubtless have isolated instances of insurrection when the fuller demands are made clear, but nothing is likely to be serious, except...’

  He paused.

  Had Loftus been watching he would have gained a sardonic amusement from the changes in the faces looking towards Sibilla. Practically every man there craned forward. Complacency and satisfaction disappeared—in some cases there was even alarm.

  ‘What is it?’ rasped the old man in the front row.

  ‘A word from Cartwright’s sister,’ said Sibilla. ‘She is in Venn, and due to arrive here at any moment. Since this meeting had been convened already I considered it wiser to discuss the matter with her in front of you all. She stated simply that she must talk with her brother about the lenses. She is bringing with her Cartwright’s technical assistant.’

  ‘Didn’t know he had one!’ growled the white-haired Englishman.

  Sibilla swung round towards Cartwright.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course. Several.’ The answer satisfied the members of the Syndicate of Power, and questions were flung at Sibilla from all sides. They referred mostly to the possibility of the Powers accepting the Vanian challenge. To all of them Sibilla gave reassuring answers, until the door nearest Sibilla opened, and a secretary stepped in.

  ‘They have arrived, Excellency.’

  ‘Bring them in at once.’

  The man bowed and went out. There was a rustling of movement, and every eye turned towards the door. The old man in the front row half-rose from his seat, to the annoyance of a fez-capped Turk behind him.

  Then Garry Cartwright came in.

  She glanced across at her brother, and her expression for a moment showed what she was feeling. Then she was cool and composed again, and stopped near Cartwright. At her side was another officer of the Vanian Army, and by the side of Bill Loftus as he entered were two men—both of them large. Sibilla proposed to take no chances with Cartwright’s ‘technician’.

  And then the old man roared:

  ‘Technician be damned, that’s Loftus!’

  The speaker was Professor Grafton!

  ‘Loftus,’ said Bill Loftus gently, and yet his voice carried through the large room. ‘Good morning, Professor. I wondered whether you had been kidnapped or whether you had left by your own volition.’

  ‘You damned fool!’ roared Professor Grafton, and in that moment his daughter would not have recognised the man, for his face was twisted with hatred, and his pointing finger quivered towards Sibilla. ‘This is Loftus, Department Z’s chief agent!’

  Sibilla snapped: ‘He is quite harmless! Loftus, if...’

  Loftus vaulted from the floor to the dais where Sibilla was standing and raised his empty hands above his head. Four automatics were trained on him while the Cartwrights stared and Grafton stood in front of the dais, his parchment-like face crimson with rage.

  And fear.

  • • • • •

  It was not Loftus’s size alone that gained him a hearing. There was something in his manner more impressive by far than Sibilla’s, although the latter was dressed in the formal fashion that was his custom, while Loftus looked as if he had slept in his rumpled grey suit for nights on end. But there was silence in the room, and forty pairs of eyes were turned towards the big man, who looked about him and smiled—smiled as if he was sharing the best joke of all time.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have nothing up my sleeve.’

  Garry snorted.

  Sibilla’s face paled, and his eyes glittered angrily.

  ‘Loftus, this is wasting time, and...’

  ‘But I come,’ Loftus steam-rollered on, ‘as the representative of the Allied Governments.’ He spoke with such conviction that it sounded true. ‘Your demands were, of course, anticipated before Jonathan Scott returned to England.’

  ‘Impossible!’ snapped Sibilla.

  ‘My dear Sibilla, credit the Secret Service with a little ability. We knew who had come here, and we knew when they were likely to leave. Cartwright’s negotiations were allowed to proceed but not in the secrecy he imagined. Grafton’s part in the affair has been well known for some time.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you act, you liar?’ roared Grafton.

  ‘We’ll get to that,’ said Loftus. ‘Sibilla—what are your demands precisely?’

  ‘If you need them repeated,’ said Sibilla icily, ‘they are the complete surrender of all arms and ammunition within a specified time. And understand that our planes can fly by night as if it were day, and that any attacking planes that might come from England or France can be sighted by night. There is no chance of your fleet escaping—nor the French.’

  ‘Take the fool out and shoot him!’ cried Grafton.

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Loftus gently. ‘I was searched for guns and other things, but they allowed me to keep this.’ He took a stout fountain-pen from his pocket and raised it—and his manner was so impressive that they stared, aghast.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Sibilla.

  ‘Nitro-glycerine,’ said Loftus. ‘An older invention than your lens, gentlemen, but effective. The pen is loaded with it. If I drop it on the floor now, or throw it towards the body of the audience, it will go off.’ Loftus looked at Grafton with his head on one side. ‘You will be good enough to confirm that, Professor? The ounce or two of nitro-glycerine in this pen will explode and completely wreck this room. And those in it,’ he added as if regretfully.

  ‘And you!’ cried Grafton.

  ‘And the Cartwrights,’ admitted Loftus. ‘A regrettable fact, gentlemen, but we will be prepared to make the sacrifice. After all, if the controlling geniuses of this remarkable syndicate are blown out of recognition, and Sibilla is destroyed, things will be at a standstill. Agents in Venn are waiting to hear the explosion and to advise the Allied Governments. The moment will be considered ripe for the attack on Vania, which Vania is not likely to withstand long. You do issue all instructions personally, don’t you, Sibilla?’

  There was a deathly silence in the big room. Loftus was able to see every man there, including the officers with their guns.

  ‘You do, don’t you?’ he insisted.

  ‘Of course he does!’ Cartwright snapped the words. ‘He was boasting to me today that he controls everything; the Navy and Air Force are waiting for word from him, and they won’t move without it!’

  ‘I’d hoped so,’ said Loftus. ‘You are holding the major Powers up, gentlemen—and I am holdi
ng you up in turn. Don’t imagine that I shall be unwilling to go out with the rest of you.’

  There was another tense silence.

  Garry Cartwright wanted to scream.

  An officer raised his gun, as if he were going to shoot and chance the consequences. Loftus looked at him, and his voice was harsh.

  ‘Turn about!’

  The man hesitated, and Loftus lifted the pen. Sibilla snapped an order, and the man turned round.

  ‘Hold your gun behind you,’ Loftus snapped.

  Again the man obeyed, and Loftus bent down quickly—so quickly that there was a gasp from the men gathered there, for the fountain-pen seemed to drop from his fingers. Loftus straightened up with the gun in his hand.

  ‘Get the others, Garry. Help her, Cartwright.’

  ‘But...’ an officer protested.

  ‘Get them!’ snapped Loftus, ‘or by God I’ll...’

  He raised the pen above his head, and a man in the middle of the crowd exclaimed on a high-pitched note, and then collapsed on his chair. The officers removed their guns so quickly that in different circumstances it would have seemed comic—and the Cartwrights collected them.

  ‘Did you order the demonstration of the lens, Sibilla?’ asked Loftus.

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘The sinking of ships by night, the bombing of men by night?’

  ‘It was necessary!’

  ‘It was mass murder,’ said Loftus, ‘worse because there was no declaration of war. Cartwright, has he got the formula for the lens?’

  ‘No. It’s in my head,’ Cartwright said slowly. ‘They can’t make more without me, but they’ve got enough to last them for years. There’s a factory here busy on the construction of it. I put the final touches in person.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Loftus, and he looked at Sibilla. ‘You know what happens to murderers?’

  ‘No, no!’ shrieked Sibilla. ‘You can’t...’

  Loftus fired.

  There was no pity in him, and he took that life without a moment’s compunction. He shot for the forehead, and the bullet found its mark. There was a spreading hole as Sibilla slowly collapsed, and a scream from the audience, while a dozen men jumped to their feet.

  Loftus looked down on them, and his lips curled.

  ‘That was Sibilla,’ he said. ‘No orders will be effective in Vania until there is a properly constituted Government—that’s a disadvantage of dictatorships. Garry, go round and get their names—if any man lies he’ll be treated as Sibilla was treated.’

  He waited there, while the Cartwrights collected names.

  They were flying back to England forty-eight hours after the triumph. In that time many things had happened. A Government had been formed hastily in Vania, Sibilla had been disowned, the ships watching the Seven Seas had been recalled—for without the factory and without the one man who knew how to make the lens Vania could not win through. The Syndicate of Power had been arrested to a man, for they had not escaped from the Senate House. Each of the four big Powers concerned had agreed to the re-establishment of Vanian neutrality, and the Syndicate was to be tried by a neutral Court. Loftus knew that in all likelihood the members would be imprisoned for the duration of the War; he would have preferred a more decisive punishment.

  Grafton had talked.

  He had failed to find the lens, although he had got close to it. His nearness had earned the interest of Forster and then Cartwright. Edward Grey had known what was hanging on to the success or failure of his experiments, and had financed him for that reason—Grey, also, was a member of the Syndicate.

  Grafton had staged the scene at the Cliff Royal to impress the Errols—even to collapse, and Janice had backed him up and yet been frightened of what might happen, of what he was doing. She had believed in Warncliffe and suspected her father of double-dealing. Even Grey had not known that Grafton, on the strength of his discoveries, had earned a place on the Syndicate—meaning to come out on the credit side whether he made the discovery or failed.

  The kidnapping had been staged.

  Paul had been a member of Cartwright’s organisation, and blackmailing Warncliffe because of the latter’s double-crossing. That the gangs organised by Forster and by Cartwright had been located by the police, and those against whom there was no specific charge would be interned. Cartwright’s men had all been actuated by the same ideal as Cartwright: Peace at all cost.

  He knew that Cartwright had staged the disappearance of the bodies of Horley and Wilson from the Manor, to impress Loftus—in the vain hope of shaking the Department off. He knew that Cartwright and Forster had been watching each other, and that the Waterloo dago and the man who had been shot outside the Brook Street flat had been Forster’s men—‘executed’ on Cartwright’s orders. Horley and Wilson had cheated and defrauded the Government—and Horley had given away information about Craigie and his men—and Cartwright had had them killed, while emptying the safes of all important documents with a view to having a stronger hold on the British Government, another weapon in the drive for ‘Peace’.

  Internationally, the situation was ‘as you were’.

  An International Neutral Commission under the auspices of the League of Nations would dismantle the Vanian ships and aircraft fitted with the lens, and the invention would disappear as a practical weapon in the present war. It could not have ended more satisfactorily, Loftus considered, now that Cartwright was dead and the British Government could not get the secret of the lens.

  As he had started the flight back to England he had gone through much of it in his mind, and with Garry. The one thing which had puzzled him was the two-headed disc—and when Garry had explained it he had laughed for the first time that day. For it was a Vanian coin, long since out of circulation, and worth a ha’-penny. In the affair of the Syndicate of Power it had meant nothing.

  ‘So many things do,’ said Loftus. ‘It’s a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff, my sweet.’

  And after that they had been silent until they had talked of Cartwright, and he had added:

  ‘And now we’ve got to talk about you.’

  ‘What about me?’ asked Garry dispassionately. ‘I’ve tried, and I’ve failed. I’ve been a party to killing, and motives don’t matter—and I can’t say I care.’

  ‘Could anyone make you care?’ asked Loftus.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was thinking of Mark Errol.’

  ‘What’s the use?’ she asked dully.

  And then she told him that she had seen Errol months before, and had known what she felt about him. It was why she had been at Waterloo, for she had wanted to make sure that Forster’s man did not kill the Errols, particularly Mark; Forster had wanted to teach the Department a salutary lesson, and the syndicate had learned of it through Warncliffe.

  ‘So he did something worth while,’ said Loftus. ‘Garry, sit back and hold tight. No one but a few of our fellows has ever seen you. No one can identify you as Cartwright’s sister. He’ll never be on trial, and the Press will never have this story in full—trust the Ministry of Information for that. All you have to do is to change your name—and let Mark know where to find you.’

  She leaned forward, a hand gripping his wrist tightly.

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘I can’t see,’ said Loftus, ‘why you should suffer from those ideals, Garry.’

  A fortnight later, Mark Errol applied to Craigie for a fortnight’s leave of absence—and got it. Loftus knew that he had heard from Garry. On that night Mike Errol and Davidson, Oundle, Thornton and the others were gathered together in Loftus’s flat, for the invalids had recovered and there was little to do. If Mike had a complaint it was that his cousin had deserted him.

  ‘Stop moaning,’ ordered Ned Oundle as he sprawled back on a settee. ‘He might have fallen for that large woman who wanted to marry the Professor. The one with the Freud complex.’

  ‘And he might not,’ said Mike with spirit. ‘Once an Errol always an
Errol and possessed of the best of taste. And that reminds me, didn’t you have a Talbot once?’

  ‘I got it back,’ said Ned cheerfully.

  ‘You even got your voice back, which is a disadvantage,’ said Bill Loftus. ‘And it’s time you fellows cleared out. I want some sleep.’

  He did not want to sleep, however.

  He wanted to think, and Oundle—who shared the flat—knew it, and joined the others in an onslaught on a respectable club whose older members considered that the young men out of uniform should be ashamed of themselves. While Loftus sat back in an easy-chair and thought of many things, including Forster and Paul, who had been shot, and Cartwright who had died with his ideals, and Grafton who had deserved to die but would live, and Janice Grafton—who had gone to stay with relatives whom he hoped would understand, and Mark and Garry...

  When Oundle got back in the early hours, Loftus was fast asleep in his chair, and Oundle tiptoed past him.

  The Island of Peril

  John Creasey

  1

  Loftus Entertains

  He was a large man, and a man who liked his comfort. The heat of the September evening made him view with disfavour the thought of dancing and drinking at the Dernier Cri, but his companion was proving most insistent.

  ‘Bill,’ she said—she pronounced it ‘Beel’—‘it is so long since I have had a chance of dancing. And in Paris, you promised to entertain me!’

  ‘Isn’t my company entertainment enough?’ demanded Bill Loftus.

  Yvonne de Montmaront had a pleasant, tinkling laugh and she used it now: proving that either she was not annoyed with him, or that she knew quite well she would get her own way. They were seated together in his parked Talbot; a gleaming, glistening thing which seemed incongruous beside the barbed-wire and sandbagged defences of Hyde Park. There were few private cars about, for London was denuded of nearly all traffic but that on official business, although to suggest that London was deserted was a delusion. Some four and a half million of its normal population remained, even in that era of total war; and those who passed Loftus and Mademoiselle Yvonne de Montmaront were surprisingly cheerful. A year before it would have been remarkable that there were no children in the park, but that had become a commonplace.