Then, suddenly, it wasn’t there. Not only was it not there, but the current of cold air which surrounded her had attained Arctic dimensions.
But once in London, and on their way to the famous War Office, she thawed a little. The wine-like September air had its effect. The sky, September blue, was dotted with the silver shapes of the captive balloons. Little had changed in wartime, except for the sand-bags buttressing some buildings, and the gas-mask containers which most of the crowd carried slung over their shoulders: but these were carried with rather the air of people carrying lunch-boxes and had a look more of festivity than of war.
‘Bill,’ said Monica, in the taxi from Marylebone Station. It was the first time she had used his Christian name for two days.
‘Yes?’
‘We are going to see Sir Henry Merrivale, aren’t we? The head of the whole Military Intelligence Department?’
‘We are.’
Monica began to wriggle.
They got out of the taxi at a court-yard, enclosed on three sides by a massive grey building, and paved with uneven small stones which reminded Monica unpleasantly of the cobblestones of Eighteen-eighty-two. A number of cars were parked in the court-yard. They moved in the direction towards which people seemed to be going – a big door on the left.
Inside, in a big, dingy reception-room, it was crowded. Here there were no signs whatever of marble halls or deep carpets. And there were no uniforms, except one or two with the red arm-bands of staff-officers. Bill Cartwright elbowed his way through the crowd to a counter on the left, where a capable-looking messenger, with one arm and a walrus moustache, was attempting to deal with a hundred things at once.
‘Yes, sir? Got an appointment?’
Bill held out the letter.
‘You’re all right, sir,’ the other assured him heartily. ‘Just sit down over there and fill in one of those white slips.’
While Monica’s mind conjured up magnificent images behind those darkish walls, Bill filled in the slip. All things balance themselves. Upon Bill Cartwright the War Office was working exactly the same effect as the film-studio had worked upon Monica Stanton. His hands shook so much that he could barely fill out the particulars. Now that he was here, with an actual introduction to Sir Henry Merrivale, what might not happen? Mightn’t they give him a job in Military Intelligence, even? This, the ultimate dream of his life, was so dazzling a prospect as to make him resolve never to be so logical or so compelling as during the forthcoming interview.
He returned the slip.
‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the messenger, conferring with some others. ‘Captain Blake, Room 171. But what’s this about “Miss Stanton”?’
‘That’s this lady. She’s with me.’
The messenger’s thick eyebrows went up. Some swift telepathic instinct warned Bill that he was about to receive a terrific kick under the ear.
‘But the lady can’t go up with you, sir.’
‘She can’t?’
‘No, sir.’
He caught Monica’s eye. After this Monica began to look very steadily and thoughtfully at the ceiling.
‘But why not? My business here concerns this lady. She’s the most important witness I have. It was because of her that I was granted an interview at all. She –’
‘Sorry, sir,’ returned the messenger, with finality. He drew a black line across the slip. ‘The letter says you and nobody else. Didn’t you know that when you brought the lady here?’
‘Monica, I swear I didn’t know that!’
‘Why, Bill, of course you didn’t,’ laughed Monica, suddenly galvanized into patting his arm. ‘I quite understand. It’s hardly my place here, anyway, is it?’
‘Look here: I won’t be long. You don’t mind waiting here for me?’
‘No, of course not. Not a bit.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Good heavens, of course not!’
(You villain. You low, mean, despicable, sneaking hound.)
‘Look, Monica: you mean that, don’t you? You’ll stay here? You swear to me you won’t go back to Pineham?’
‘Why, Bill, why ever should you think of such a thing? Of course I’ll wait. You run along and have a good time.’
‘This way, sir,’ interposed the messenger, patient but weary. ‘Keep that white slip. You’ll want it to get out again.’
Holding tightly to the brief-case he had brought with him, Bill was escorted away.
2
‘Phooey!’ said Sir Henry Merrivale.
Bill Cartwright, from information he had received at various times from Chief Inspector Masters, was prepared for certain things. He knew that H.M.’s manner was seldom one of effusive cordiality. He did not expect to be greeted with a slap on the back, or with the polished politeness of most Government departments. He knew that the old man was apt to get into a bit of a tear now and then.
But at the same time he was not prepared for the extraordinary, quiet malignancy of H.M.’s expression. H.M. sat back in a creaky swivel-chair, twiddling his thumbs over his paunch. His big bald head shone against the light from a window. His spectacles were pulled down on his broad nose, and the corners of his mouth were drawn down almost to his chin. On his face was an expression which would not have been out of place in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.
Bill had already seen adventure. Captain Blake was not to be found in Room 171, nor in Room 346. Bill and the messenger traversed long, broad, business-like corridors paved with dingy tile. They went up several flights of a broad, low stone staircase built round a central shaft. They passed much old lumber stacked in the corridors: wooden filing-cases, chairs, ancient tables. They finally found Captain Blake’s new quarters in Room 6-something, whose door bore a little card labelled M.I.
Here, in a big office which looked like a draughtsman’s room, Captain Blake grinned and shook hands. He wore a staff-officer’s uniform, and seemed to be in charge of a number of men in street-clothes, who sat or wrote at various big bare tables and did not appear to be engaged in anything very secret.
‘This way,’ said Captain Blake, leading him through more offices. ‘Mind those cabinets. We’re doing some reorganization here. Sir Henry has been moved from his old office, and he – er – doesn’t like it much.’
‘You mean he’s on the war-path?’
The other hesitated. ‘No, not exactly,’ he said, looking very hard at Bill. ‘Only I thought I’d warn you. And I’ll give you another tip. Whatever you do, don’t mention the House of Lords.’
There was not time to inquire the reason for H.M.’s antipathy towards the House of Lords. Captain Blake opened the door of an untidy office, with two windows overlooking the court-yard; and behind a broad desk H.M. sat and twiddled his thumbs and glared at them.
‘I been expectin’ you,’ he said. ‘Sit down, son.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Have a cigar?’
‘Thank you; I’ll stick to the pipe, if you don’t mind.’
Bill Cartwright, if necessary, was prepared to out-stare the devil himself. But this was rather different. While he filled one of his favourite pipes (an atrocity to Monica Stanton), two fishy-looking eyes continued to regard him over the tops of spectacles.
‘I got here,’ said the big hulk in the alpaca coat, suddenly coming to life and stirring papers on his desk. ‘I got here a very rummy letter from you. I also got what you call a transcript of evidence. Now looky here, son.’ His voice changed slightly. ‘What’s on your mind, exactly?’
Bill drew a deep breath.
‘What is on my mind,’ he said, ‘is murder. At Pineham in the last three weeks we have had two attempted murders: one a piece of brutality so senseless that it sounds like the work of a maniac, and both directed against the same person. A girl named Monica Stanton.’
‘Uh-huh. Well?’
‘This girl hasn’t an enemy in the world. There seems to be no earthly reason why anybody should want to kill her. I want you to
find out why, and to get the proof that will put this swine where he belongs. I can’t get the proof. He is either phenomenally brilliant or phenomenally lucky. He openly leaves his handwriting on a blackboard, and on two letters – and yet I can’t trace it to him. He openly shouts out words outside a window – and yet none of us can identify his voice. And this is all the worse because I am practically certain I know who the person is.’
‘Uh-huh. Who do you think it is?’
‘A fellow by the name of Kurt von Gagern.’
‘Uh-huh. Reasons?’
‘But, sir, I wrote you –’
‘H’mf, yes. But never you mind that, son. Just tell me your reasons.’
It was his chance.
‘If I have the floor, then, I’d like to go back to the first incident that happened, exactly three weeks ago to-day. They were shooting a scene from a film called Spies at Sea, whose background was a bedroom cabin aboard a luxury liner. Howard Fisk (apparently by accident) knocked over the water-bottle on the bedside table, and it was found to be full of sulphuric acid. Now that set was reproduced, it was said, from photographs of the German liner Brunhilde; but it was arranged and supervised by Gagern, who is famous for the realism of his details … Sir Henry, did you ever travel aboard an Atlantic liner?’
‘Sure, son. Well?’
‘Well,’ said Bill Cartwright, ‘did you ever in your experience see a glass water-bottle on a bedside-table?’
After a pause he went on:
‘I don’t think you did. In luxury cabins, or any first-class cabins, there are only two types of water-bottle. One is of very heavy glass; it is carefully placed, so that it can’t fall over, in a rack above the wash-basin. The only other type of bottle you find is a thermos, with a heavy bakelite or chromium cover, which contains iced drinking-water. The reason is patent. To put an ordinary glass water-bottle – such as you or I might have in our homes – on the bedside-table in a liner’s cabin, would be plain lunacy. It would go over smash with the first roll of the ship.
‘No steamship company would do that. No steamship company has ever done it. Gagern, who says he has crossed the Atlantic umpteen times, must have known that. Even if he didn’t, there were the photographs of the Brunhilde to show him. No. I maintain that he put it there deliberately, on a table where it could be knocked over; and he deliberately saw to it that it WAS knocked over.
‘Read what Howard Fisk has to say about that! Howard says: “Gagern and I were talking, and I was walking backwards, and he said: ‘Look out!’ I bumped into that little table by the bed” – and so on. Gagern again, you see.
‘Now, Howard Fisk’s clumsiness is notorious. If I wanted to engage him in a conversation, crowding him backward so that he was certain to bump into something and upset it with his fifteen-stone weight, I will offer a small bet that I could do this without Howard or anybody else ever suspecting it was done deliberately. That, sir, is what happened. Gagern was the vitriol-merchant. Which is the very devil of it. I will swear to my dying day he did it. But for the life of me I can’t think why he did it.’
3
He paused, and drew at a pipe that had gone out.
Now Bill Cartwright at the War Office, like Monica Stanton at the film-studio, suffered from being impressed so much that he barely noticed external things. He was talking his head off, before his audience should interrupt him. And he felt that he was talking well. If ever in his life he wanted to impress anybody, he wanted to impress these people.
Throughout this recital H.M. had not interrupted. Poker-players at the Diogenes Club have found any attempt to read H.M.’s face a highly unprofitable proceeding.
‘Well … now,’ he said, ruffling his hands across his big bald head. ‘That’d seem logical. Y’know, son, you remind me a bit of Masters. Got anything else?’
‘Yes. The first attack on Monica Stanton.’
‘Well?’
‘You have a résumé of her statement. You’ll see what she says. A few minutes before the page-boy approached her, to tell her “Mr Hackett” wanted to see her on Eighteen-eighty-two, she was sitting near the ocean-liner set and talking to Frances Fleur. They were getting on very well; they had just settled down to a good intimate chat, when all of a sudden F.F. seemed to notice something. She interrupted the talk, jumped up, excused herself hurriedly, and dashed off. The question was: why? … Do you know anything about Frances Fleur, by the way?’
‘Ho ho,’ said H.M.
An expression of ghoulish pleasure went over his face. He rubbed his hands together. He treated Bill to what in anyone less eminently placed would have been called a lecherous leer, and chortled all over his stomach.
‘I’ve seen her on the screen, son. Burn me, what a woman! I say, Ken.’ He turned to Captain Blake. ‘Do you remember the time we went to see her play Poppaea? And your wife carried on and called her names all the way through the show, and for the rest of the evening afterwards?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Bill, ‘she’s not Poppaea.’
‘No?’
‘No. All F.F. asks from life, beyond a little admiration and attention, is just to sit down and take it easy. She’s the director’s prayer. She will sit for hours while you arrange lights or take stills; and all she asks is to talk during the meantime. She doesn’t excuse herself for anybody. She doesn’t jump up for anybody. She doesn’t run for anybody.’
He paused.
‘That is – for anybody except one person. I mean her husband. He’s the only person in the world who could make her do that. They’ve only been married a few months; I grant you it’s a genuine love-match; and they do things in public that startle spectators and just stop short of actual business. She takes it casually; he takes it with a kind of wolfish seriousness, as though he’d never seen a woman before.
‘What Frances saw while she was talking to Monica (depend on it) was Gagern furiously beckoning her away. And then sending her somewhere on some tom-fool errand. Otherwise, you see, Frances would have been talking to Monica till doomsday. And Gagern had to have Monica alone. He had to have her alone so that she could be decoyed to the other set, and the acid poured down the speaking-tube into her face.’
The words had an ugly ring; Bill Cartwright knew it.
H.M. spoke sharply. ‘Got any proof of that, son?’
‘No, sir. And I’ll tell you why.
‘After the acid-pouring trick, the six of us – Gagern, F.F., Howard Fisk, Tom Hackett, Monica, and myself – got together to thrash out the question, and try to decide who had done it. Howard suggested that it might be a good idea if we accounted to each other for our movements at the time it happened.’
‘Alibi?’
‘Yes. Tom accounted for his movements, though he hadn’t any witness to them. The same applied to Howard, who had been wandering about. I told my story. Whereupon Gagern drew himself up and turned into the complete baronial stuffed-shirt. He said it was intolerable. He said he really could not endure my impertinent and unwarranted interference any longer. He refused to give any account of himself; and instructed his wife to do the same. Of course, F.F. obediently backed him up. As a result, I haven’t been able to get a word out of her since.’
‘Just a minute, son,’ said H.M.
He seemed bothered by an invisible fly. He sniffed.
‘There’s one thing I’m not clear about,’ he went on. ‘Suppose all this is true? I say: supposin’ it is? What’s your proposition? What do you want here? This’d be a job for the police, wouldn’t it? Why bombard me about it?’
Now they had come to the crux. Though he tried to be very casual, as befitted a prospective candidate for Military Intelligence, he found an annoying lump in his throat.
‘Because,’ he replied, ‘Gagern is a Nazi espionage agent; and I can prove it.’
‘Go on, son,’ said H.M.
‘It’s a curious fact, sir, that the one thing which never rouses anybody’s suspicions is a big film-company shooting on location. Suppose I were a spy who wa
nted – in peacetime, of course – to get some photographs of naval defences. If I tried creeping about the place with a little camera, every guard in the place would be after me in two seconds. But I could roll up in grandeur with five motor-cars, two sound-recording lorries, and a battery of the biggest and finest cameras in existence; and the very admirals would pose for me.
‘That is what Gagern did. In some mysterious way he managed to persuade the Admiralty to get what he liked at Portsmouth, Gravesend, and Scapa Flow, as exteriors for this film Spies at Sea. This was before the war, naturally. Most of the stuff can never be used now in a film; the Ministry of Information would have a fit. But it was taken. Further, it was all arranged for by Gagern, though that’s normally the producer’s work. Lastly, there is a point which I didn’t learn until this morning, from Tom Hackett. Gagern was supposed to shoot five thousand feet of film. He actually did shoot eight thousand: of which the greater part has now disappeared, leaving Albion Films wild.’
(There was definitely an atmosphere in the room now. Bill Cartwright could feel it.)
‘I’ve got just one thing more to say, sir, and then you can take what action you see fit. I tell you frankly, I’m more interested in Monica Stanton than in any question of espionage. For more than two mortal weeks, Gagern has been supposed to be confined to his house with a bad attack of ’flu. He was supposed to have caught ’flu from a dousing while directing a submarine sequence. Well, he didn’t.’
‘Didn’t what?’
‘He didn’t catch ’flu. He’s as well as you or I.’
H.M. opened one eye. ‘So? How do you know that?’
‘Because I’ve stuck to his trail,’ returned Bill, not without relish.
‘So,’ said H.M. thoughtfully, ‘you’ve stuck to his trail, hey?’
‘Yes, sir. I have kept on that gentleman a gaze which would have embarrassed Medusa. He and F.F. have a rose-bowered cottage in the most idyllic style; and, black-out or no black-out, I’ve haunted it. I don’t say he has not been able to get away from me once or twice, since he was able to leave those infernal anonymous letters. But in general he hasn’t been able to stir out of the house.’
And So To Murder Page 11
