Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

‘He had the appearance of a man who believes himself to be pursued?’

  ‘That was my impression.’

  ‘Before he had any opportunity of knowing that you were on his track?’

  Kolmak considered. ‘But yes! As soon as he got off the bus he made his way to one point and another about Gloucester Green – and always looking uneasily about him. This, I am sure, was before he ever set eyes on me. Presently he went into a small hotel. I waited. He was there long enough, I should say, to get a meal. When he came out, our eyes met. Very foolishly, I had waited directly in front of the place. I know that instantly he suspected me of spying on him. He proceeded at once to put the matter to the test. My following of him was very clumsy and obvious. And quite soon he got away from me, boarding a bus that I was unable to catch.’

  ‘A bus coming out to North Oxford?’

  ‘Nun ja! It was a Number 2. And here was an end of my playing the detective – the secret agent! Only how surprised I was, on going out to call you back last night, to find you conversing with this man.’

  ‘I should much like to converse with him again. But there is still something further you have to tell me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kolmak’s face took on an expression more anxious than any it had yet worn. ‘There has been another message from Anna. It, too, has arrived by post – this morning, while you were still asleep. You have it, Tante Lise?’

  Frau Kolmak nodded and rose from beside the piano. There was something in her movement that betrayed the fatigue of long anxiety; and Appleby saw that she was an older woman than he had supposed.

  ‘Here it is, Kurt. I fear it occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of other matters. Had it not been so, Herr Routh would not have slipped away from us so easily.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about that, Frau Kolmak. It may give him a chance to make some interesting contacts. Perhaps he will be found with them by my Oxford colleagues. Routh is decidedly their main interest at the moment, and they are a highly efficient body of men.’

  ‘Sir John, here is Anna’s second note. Again it is unstamped. And the material seems not designed for the post.’

  ‘It certainly does not.’ Appleby was looking at a slim piece of cardboard, about four inches by three. Medially on one of the longer sides, and near the edge, there was punched a small circular hole. ‘It’s clearly meant for use in a card index. Addressed in the same way as the first, and posted in Milton Porcorum in time for the 4.15 p.m. sorting yesterday.’ He turned the card over and read its message in silence:

  Do not be hurt that I do not write. I am not a free agent, and there is danger in the attempt. Today or soon there is a crisis. Do nothing. But be by your telephone every day from 10 to 11 a.m. A.

  Appleby sat so long in thought before this enigmatic missive that Kolmak stirred uneasily beside him. ‘Sir John – it suggests something to you?’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘This about the telephone. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘In my room at Bede’s there is an instrument. And Anna has the number.’

  ‘But of course – stupid of me.’ Appleby nodded absently. ‘What Anna enjoins upon you is rather a nerve-racking routine, I am afraid. But you had better be off to it. The time is nearly half past nine now. Incidentally, I must go down and make another call from the Misses Tinkers’ machine.’

  Kolmak rose as if to open the door. ‘That will be to your colleagues, arranging that my line in Bede’s be tapped?’

  ‘You are very acute – again the secret service agent in the making.’

  ‘I am inclined to wish that I had told you nothing.’ Kolmak was very pale.

  ‘And that you had left me in that van?’

  ‘Aber nein!’ Impulsively, Kolmak took Appleby’s hand. ‘You judge Anna to be in danger?’

  Appleby inclined his head. ‘I do.’ His voice was grave. ‘She says so herself – and it appears that she is a level-headed and capable person.’

  ‘She is indeed!’ Frau Kolmak had come forward. ‘My daughter has a good brain and great courage. Can you, Sir John, whose experience must be so great, form any conjecture as to her situation and Rudi’s? If so, I beg of you to speak, however black the picture may be.’

  ‘There is no scope for conjecture yet. Your daughter is almost certainly in some sense a prisoner. But she has been able at some risk to send you a couple of notes, and at a pinch she believes she can command a telephone. She might have stated her precise whereabouts and has refrained from doing so. Twice she has said “Do nothing”. She has made no appeal for help, but at any moment she may do so. At the moment, that is about as far as we can get. Except, of course, for the parallel situation of Routh.’

  ‘The parallel situation?’ Frau Kolmak looked bewildered and rather displeased. ‘Surely you see no similarity between my daughter and that man?’

  ‘Certainly I do. Routh too, I suspect, has been in the hands of this mysterious organization. And Routh too has been fighting back. That is all to the good, since I suspect that we are very definitely in the presence of something to be fought against. But Routh and your daughter may prove to have something else in common.’

  Kolmak was looking at his watch. ‘Please do not speak in riddles,’ he said. ‘Please explain.’

  But Frau Kolmak laid a hand on her nephew’s arm. ‘I think I understand,’ she said quietly. ‘I considered the little man with attention, and when I gave him coffee I exchanged a few words with him.’ She was growing visibly paler as she spoke, but she stood very upright beside her piano. ‘We will not go further into this now.’

  Appleby moved to the door. ‘There is, as you know, another person who must be fitted into the design.’

  ‘The Verlobte of your sister – Mr Ourglass?’

  ‘Yes. He too, from what I hear of him, would fight back. But, in that other particular, he offers no parallel to Routh and your daughter.’

  Frau Kolmak considered. ‘Might the young man be freakish, adventurous – and affect – what you have in mind?’

  ‘That is a very shrewd suggestion. And now I must be off – and you too, Dr Kolmak, to that telephone.’ Appleby turned back to his hostess and bent over her hand with some formality. ‘Auf Wiedersehen, gnädige Frau.’

  On the little landing the aeolian harp was still uttering its muted music. Appleby wondered what Routh had made of it. He wondered, too, what he ought to make of Routh.

  5

  Jane Appleby left Somerville College at nine-fifty, thus missing her brother by five minutes. It was her intention to proceed to the Examination Schools and there hear a lecture by the Stockton and Darlington Professor. In spite of her engagement to Geoffrey Ourglass, or perhaps because of it, Jane had now been, for more than a year, in general sequacious only of the more severe intellectual pleasures. This particular weekly occasion she invariably found wholly delectable. For many of her fellows it was an hour of furious inactivity – and indeed it has been calculated that more young women are constrained to buy fresh notebooks after the discourses of the Stockton and Darlington Professor than after any other learned occasion whatsoever. Jane, however, was accustomed to sit in a still repose throughout. The substance of what the Professor had to say had, in point of fact, been bequeathed to her by an aunt who attended the lectures in 1925; and Jane was thus in the fortunate position of being able to sit as in a theatre and enjoy the finer points of the performance, without anxious thoughts of the likely bearing of such inactivity upon her examination prospects.

  But now that Geoffrey’s fate – or could it be behaviour? – had got her down (and to herself, at least, Jane now admitted that it had done this) Jane found herself, week by week, taking less and less delight in this particular facet of the pursuit of knowledge. The plain fact was that if she were not to be so miserable she must give her mind more active and tough employment than any that the proceedings of the Stockton and Darlington Professor could afford. She was very little disposed to sit and mope; she had been determined that her work was n
ot going to suffer on account of the miserable and bewildering turn which her affairs had taken; and when she had come up at the beginning of term to an Oxford still devoid of Geoffrey she had signalised this determination by extracting from her tutor, for work in a college examination, the portentous mark known in Oxford as a pure Alpha. But since then she had been finding it progressively difficult to avoid making an ass of herself, and she had found that her best weapon in this struggle lay in the more stretching forms of mental exercise. It thus came about that, halfway down St Giles’, Jane decided not to hear the Stockton and Darlington Professor after all.

  If this decision was of momentous public importance (as may, indeed, presently prove to be the case) the public showed no consciousness of the fact. Around and about that secondary hub of Oxford upon one border of which stands the College of the Provost and Scholars of the Venerable Bede, and upon another the miniature churchyard of St Mary Magdalen, both Town and Gown continued undisturbed upon their familiar occasions. Regius Professors, visibly bowed down beneath their weight of erudition, pottered about, buying cakes and pies. Heads of Houses, upon whom even more evidently reposed heavy burdens of administrative care, absently exercised dogs or companioned their wives through a morning’s brisk shopping. Outwards towards the Banbury or the Woodstock Road an unending stream of battered sports cars bore cohorts of male undergraduates, discreetly concealed amid golf clubs, shot-guns, and riding kits. Inwards towards the lecture rooms and libraries of the University rode an answering army of young women on bicycles bearing large baskets bulging with massive volumes, as if they were the delivery service of a community given literally to devouring books.

  It was as one in the main stream of this literary movement that Jane Appleby had now reached the lower end of St Giles’. On her right the reposeful statuary on the Taylor Institution – unknown whether mythological or symbolical, allegorical or historical – stared impassively across the hubbub to where Balliol, Trinity and St John’s expire in a complicated embrace. Before her was the Martyrs’ Memorial. To the right of this was Bede’s. Jane took one glance at the college of her vanished beloved and decided that the prime need of the morning was arduous thought. She would make her way not to the lecture of the Stockton and Darlington Professor but to the upper reading room of the Bodleian Library, where there happened to be reserved for her a work of very sufficient intellectual difficulty. She would wrestle with this until noon and then hunt up her brother. To this resolution Jane had come when she saw that somebody was waving an umbrella at her from the corner of Beaumont Street. It was Geoffrey’s uncle, Dr Ourglass. She signalled her intention of joining him when she could, and presently threaded her way at some hazard across the street.

  ‘My dear, I am very pleased to see you, and I was delighted to meet your brother yesterday evening. I was dining in Bede’s as the guest of Mr Bultitude, whom I am glad to be able to introduce to you.’

  It had been Jane’s hurried impression as she dodged the traffic that Dr Ourglass was standing beside a large barrel awaiting delivery to the Bede’s buttery. She now realized that she had been in error. The barrel was bowing to her with gravity. It was, in fact, the celebrated Mark Bultitude. ‘How do you do,’ he said. ‘I am afraid we divert you.’

  As Jane had been aware of an element of the ludicrous in the conjoined appearance of the gentlemen before her, she found this ambiguity disconcerting. ‘Oh, no,’ she said hastily, ‘I wasn’t going anywhere important; only to the Bodleian.’

  Mark Bultitude directed a faint smile upon Dr Ourglass, as if calling upon him to remark the delightful fatuity of the young. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘we can make this small claim upon your time with a clear conscience.’

  Jane, like most people of her age – and even a few quite mature ones – disliked detecting herself saying something silly. ‘It’s not wasted at all,’ she said. ‘One ought to meet the really interesting people.’ She contrived to let her eyes rest, rounded in admiration, upon Bultitude. ‘Yesterday I managed to talk to that funny old woman who peddles bananas.’

  ‘You have the right instinct. You will end by collecting all of us Oxford worthies. We are a diminishing band, after all. For one thing, there are so few openings.’ And Bultitude looked comfortably around him, as if seeking some enormous aperture through which he might edge himself.

  Dr Ourglass thought it well to change the subject. ‘It appears,’ he said carefully, ‘that Mr Bultitude is acquainted with a number of Geoffrey’s – and my – distant relations; and he has become interested in this distressing thing that has happened. He is very anxious to help. He even suggests that he and I make an expedition.’

  Jane received this communication with mixed feelings. She liked old Dr Ourglass, although she had no high opinion of his practical acumen. And she was spontaneously and instantly grateful to anybody – even this terrible great fat poseur – who expressed concern and a willingness to help in the horrible matter of Geoffrey’s inexplicable and now long-continued disappearance. At the same time she hated figuring as the young woman who had mislaid a young man. She was well aware that all sorts of low, sinister, or facetious constructions could be placed on such a situation, and she was only the more sensitive to these because none of them had ever been even faintly obtruded upon her. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I am quite desperate, you know. Geoffrey simply must be found. He may be terribly ill – so ill that he doesn’t even know his own identity.’

  Bultitude nodded soberly. ‘An able and well-connected young man,’ he said. ‘With everything before him here at Bede’s – and a further tie of which I am now very well able to estimate the force. I am extremely shocked. Birkbeck ought to have been altogether more vigorous in the matter. He cannot, poor fellow, afford to lose good pupils right and left. Ourglass tells me that your brother is taking the matter up. I am sorry not to have had any conversation with him last night. But we shall meet. We shall undoubtedly meet. I have never, I believe, known anybody in the police. But my uncle Hubert once had command of the Yeoman of the Guard.’

  Jane felt that the conversation in which she had become involved was somewhat lacking in direction. Dr Ourglass appeared to have the same feeling, and again changed the subject with unusual abruptness. ‘Jane,’ he asked, ‘has Geoffrey ever shown any disposition to write – for example, a play?’

  ‘I never heard him speak of such a thing.’ Jane was puzzled. ‘Geoffrey is simply a straight-out tip-top scientist. And they don’t usually write plays. Of course Geoffrey is fond of acting, but that’s a different matter. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Mr Bultitude had a notion that a long-continued retirement and – um – neglect of one’s friends is sometimes to be accounted for by absorption in a literary task.’

  ‘I see.’ Jane thought this decidedly a poor idea. Nor did Bultitude seem pleased at its being aired again. Perhaps Dr Ourglass was innocently labouring something that had really been one of his companion’s obscure jokes. Anyway, she was not going to stand any longer at a street corner gossiping like this. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’d better go off and do some work.’

  Bultitude nodded benevolently, as if here were another of the touching frailties of the young. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘What sort of acting?’

  For a moment Jane was at a loss. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What sort of acting is the young man fond of? Has he taken part in any plays here in Oxford?’

  ‘Oh, I see. No – Geoffrey hasn’t, I think, done any acting in a regular way since he left school. I just meant that he likes putting on turns. He can dress up a bit, and then pass himself off in a pub as pretty well anything. It’s a sort of freakish amusement that he gets quite a lot of fun out of from time to time.’

  ‘Impersonations, in fact.’

  ‘I suppose it may be called that.’ Jane found herself obscurely resenting the word. ‘Only not of individuals, you see. Just of types.’

  ‘Quite so. Impersonation, one might say, on the Theo-phrastan model
. It doesn’t sound a particularly dangerous hobby. The hazards ought not to extend much beyond a black eye.’

  At this Jane felt really cross. ‘You’d have to be quite tough, Mr Bultitude, to take to punching Geoffrey. He’d be back and finding a soft spot or two in no time.’

  ‘Capital – capital. Young men are too neglectful of those manly accomplishments nowadays. Have you ever joined in these impersonations, Miss Appleby? And has the young man any favourite turns?’

  Jane ignored the first part of this questioning. ‘He can do dons. And bewildered foreigners. And – let me see – yes, young clergymen, and down-and-outs.’

  ‘Young clergymen!’ It was Dr Ourglass who spoke, and he was apparently a little shocked. ‘I had no idea of this – and in a person of high academic promise!’ He paused as if looking for a more reassuring view of the matter, inoffensive to his nephew’s betrothed. ‘Versatility,’ he pursued, ‘is a wonderful endowment, I am all too conscious of being sadly without it myself.’

  But by this time Jane had turned her bicycle. A momentary break in the stream of traffic could be made the civil occasion, she felt, of a tolerably brisk farewell to her interlocutors. ‘Sorry,’ she said suddenly. ‘Here’s my chance.’ And at that she darted away.

  Although it had been accompanied by her best smile, Jane was not altogether happy about this manoeuvre. It was perhaps neither mannerly nor courageous; and she had only an obscure sense of why the encounter thus rather abruptly terminated had rattled her. When safely on the farther side of the road, therefore, she turned her head for a moment, intending to locate her companions of a second before and impart what cordiality she could to a parting wave. It was a movement involving her in a mishap which just escaped being serious.

  Dr Ourglass and Mark Bultitude appeared to have moved off, and Jane’s eye continued to search for them a fraction of a second longer than was compatible with wary cycling. In the same instant a man stepped blindly off the kerb in front of her; there was a bump; and Jane found herself in the unpleasant position of lying flat on the road, with the wheel of a bus hurtling past her head.