by Howard Mason
“Yes.” He watched me as I dried my face on a rough towel. “My men are doing the milking. When they are finished, I will send one to the village for the policeman.”
The policeman. In the singular. It didn’t sound promising. I said: “Does he live alone, too?”
He gazed at me, uncomprehending. “The policeman of Blint is a married man,” he said at length.
I put down the towel. “D’you think he’ll have a telephone?”
“It is possible.”
“How long will your men be with the milking?”
“Another half hour, or thereabouts.”
I left the sink and came to the fireplace, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was half-past five. Nobby and I must have been knocked out at about half-past one in the morning. They had four hours’ start. If they were going to Germany, they would already be across the frontier. The trail was cold all right, and there didn’t seem to be much hurry.
I said: “I’m going back to the car now for my driver. Can we wait here?”
“If you wish.” He turned to the door. “I will speak to the cowman.”
“Thank you.” He waited for me to go out, and then went himself, moving off towards the back of the house, where the farm buildings lay.
I made my way back to the car, thinking things over.
Mott had timed his move well. He must have known he was being followed much earlier on. It would have been little use trying to dodge us, because it was obvious that he was making due east towards Germany, and we could always have picked him up again. He hadn’t held us up sooner, because then we might have been able to have him stopped at the frontier; the police could have had the car’s description circularized. As it was, he was clear away into Germany, and the Belgian police wouldn’t take much interest in him. Even if they believed my story.
I reached the car, and found Nobby struggling to his feet. He looked at me hazily.
“Well, fancy meeting you here,” he said, rubbing his head.
I said: “There’s some cold water up the road,” and gave him a hand.
We made our way up the lane, and I got his story out of him. He had waited in the Rolls, when I had gone up the lane, until he thought he heard the sounds of a scuffle; this was when Rivera had landed me. He had got out of the car, and had gone only a few steps when Hedge had emerged from the ditch to make a sudden attack from behind. The hypodermic had been used on him straight away, and that was the last he knew.
When I’d finished giving him an account of my own part in the night’s work, we came up to the farm.
In the yard, a young cowman was mounting a horse. He looked at us, curiously, as we approached, and touched his cap uncertainly. Then he wheeled his horse away down the lane at a trot. He was off to fetch the policeman of Blint, who was a married man.
We found our way into the kitchen. A few minutes later I was sound asleep, on a piece of straw matting in front of the fire.
* * * *
At eleven o’clock that morning, I stood in a garage at Hasselt, watching three mechanics hard at work on the Rolls’ bonnet. I had promised them a double fee if they could get the thing straightened up within a day, but it didn’t look very hopeful.
I left Nobby with them, and strolled into a nearby café for a drink.
The policeman of Blint had arrived at the farm on a bicycle at seven o’clock, listened to my story politely, and departed. Shortly afterwards he had returned with a borrowed car and driven us to Hasselt, where we told the story all over again at the district police headquarters.
The Hasselt police were at first distrustful, then unwillingly convinced, and finally sympathetic. They would greatly like to lay hands on the felons and teach them a lesson. But alas, if they were already across the frontier, what could be done? It was a great pity that I had not informed them earlier of the outrage. They hoped that such a thing would not happen again while I was in their district. If it did I was to let them know right away. They could recommend an excellent repair garage, run by the brother-in-law of the police commandant.
I swallowed my drink and ordered another, considering the situation.
“Agag” was Walter Mott. This was the first pill I had to digest, and it took a bit of digesting.
Until now, I had thought that Agag had been brought into the affair by Alfred Hedge. It now seemed clear that things were the other way round. Walter Mott had his own sources of information. All the sources, in fact, that are open to a solicitor with perseverance and an inquiring mind.
He had “explored all the avenues,” he’d assured me; I had no doubt he was speaking the truth. The only trouble was, he’d omitted to inform me of the results of his investigation.
Hedge’s position in the affair now seemed equivocal. I remembered that he had been engaged by my great-uncle only six months before his death; was it Mott, I wondered, who had sent him to Stony? It seemed more than likely. Mott must have wondered about that money for a long time, ever since Stony’s sell-out, in fact; and when his two strokes made Stony’s death seem imminent, Mott might have decided to send a scout into the camp, in order to find out what he could before the old man died. In that case, Hedge’s visit to me must have been a side-show; an attempt to make a profitable little transaction on his own account.
The question was, what had they found out? And where did the red bishop come into it?
Had Mott known about Johann Braun of Godesberg Asylum?
He hadn’t seen that warden’s letter. The caretaker didn’t find the box it was in until the day I went to Stour.
But he knew something about the bishop; in fact, he clearly knew a good deal more than I did. And he had been to a lot of trouble in order to get it.
That made me think that his information about Stony’s money must have been obtained from some less obvious source than the bank passbooks or brokers’ records. A red chess bishop, I thought, would hardly figure in those chaste financial documents. No, he must have found something at Stour.
Whatever he’d found, it wouldn’t be there now. Mott would have seen to that.
As far as I could see, there were two avenues open to me, one promising, one not so promising. The first was Godesberg Asylum.
I had written to the warden before leaving England, but there hadn’t been time for a reply to reach me. Godesberg was near Bonn; less than a hundred miles east of Aix. And it was through Aix that Mott had been aiming to enter Germany. It would make as good a starting-point as any; and besides, I was certain that if I followed the red bishop, I should be on the right track. Since I couldn’t follow it forwards, in pursuit of Mott, at least I could trace it backwards, through Braun of Godesberg.
The second and less promising avenue was the investigation of Stony’s passbooks and other papers, or such of them as had not been carefully removed into Mott’s safekeeping. And here, I thought, old St. Pancras ought to be able to help. He was Mott’s fellow-executor, after all; in fact, his existence must have limited Mott’s scope a bit, because St. Pancras would have had to be satisfied. As a matter of fact, I suspected that the old boy had been only too willing to leave all the work to Mott, merely providing his signature where necessary. But he’d have to do a bit of work now, I thought. I ought to have a look at those passbooks for the years 1937-38, at the least; there might be something there that would give me a lead, and which Mott, in his own characteristic fashion, had omitted to mention.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to go back to London, because with Mott hourly nearing the finishing-post, time was valuable. Besides, there was Godesberg to visit.
I decided, swallowing my drink, that I’d have to send Nobby. He could fake a letter to the bank, and I’d send a wire to St. Pancras asking him to pave the way.
Having come to these conclusions, I called the waiter and paid my bill. Then I went to a telephone and got on to a travel agency, and
booked a place for Nobby on a plane leaving Brussels at two o’clock that afternoon.
I looked in at the garage to inform Nobby of his imminent departure. He was covered with grease and in a bad temper, and he didn’t like the idea much. I told him to sort himself out, and meanwhile I sat down on a garage bench and composed a note to the manager of Stony’s bank, asking him to grant the bearer, Mr. Norton Chalmers, free access to any of my great-uncle’s papers which he desired to see. I added all the legal-sounding flourishes I could think of, because I wasn’t sure whether they’d be too happy about it; and when I’d done that I composed some telegrams.
Nobby was ready by the time I’d finished, and I gave him the note to the bank and saw him on to the Brussels train with about three minutes to spare. I instructed him to find out anything he could from the bank, and if he drew a blank there, to try Stour, or Churt, or Mott, Babington and Pettigrew’s offices, or anything he liked, as long as he found me some information. He was to communicate anything he found right away, to the Rhein-Hotel, Godesberg.
The train moved off just as I finished my instructions, and Nobby, withdrawing his head from the window in a blaze of red hair and indignation, settled down to sleep till Brussels.
I made for the main Hasselt post-office and sent off my telegrams.
There were three of them; the first read:
CHURT NEW SCOTLAND YARD LONDON
SUGGEST INVESTIGATE MOTT BABINGTON PETTIGREW SOLICITORS THROGMORTON STREET STOP WALTER MOTT ALIAS AGAG NOW DRIVING NORTHWEST GERMANY IN BLACK HISPANOSUIZA LXE 254 CAN YOU ENLIST GERMAN POLICE AID SEACRH STOP HAVE BEEN ASSAULTED STOP LOVE TO PERKINS
STONYBRIDGE
I didn’t think Churt would be able to do very much, for the English police couldn’t act unless they started extradition proceedings; and they hadn’t enough evidence for that. Still, I didn’t want Churt to feel out of things, and I wished him to look into the solicitors’ firm. I suspected that it was, as a firm, perfectly above-board; it had been looking after Stony’s affairs for twenty or thirty years, I knew. But its partners had probably changed since then, and Mott might have joined it fairly recently, finding it a useful cover for his less respectable activities as a receiver.
The second wire went:
ST PANCRAS ATHENAEUM LONDON
IMPERATIVE INVESTIGATE STONYBRIDGE BANK RECORDS YEARS 1937-38 AND PRECEDING URGENT STOP FEAR SOLICITORS MOST UNRELIABLE STOP ASSISTANT NORTON CHALMERS ARRIVING LONDON 4 PM TODAY CAN YOU ARRANGE IMMEDIATE ACCESS FOR HIM
STONYBRIDGE
The third telegram was sent just to satisfy my curiosity. It was to Mrs. Hilly, the caretaker at Stour, and read simply:
CAN YOU TELL ME WHO RECOMMENDED VALET ALFRED HEDGE TO MY GREATUNCLE
I made them reply-paid at the “Urgent” rate to the Godesberg hotel. They set me back a good many francs, but it couldn’t be helped.
After that I returned to the garage. The Rolls, they swore, would be ready by three o’clock. I mentally added a couple of hours to their estimate, and went in search of somewhere to sleep.
CHAPTER VII
It was nearly five when the car was ready to move; the bonnet was still pretty battered, but she moved all right. I drove out of Hasselt, heading east.
At Aix, I got into conversation with the frontier police, and managed to elicit the information that a Hispano-Suiza with three occupants had passed through the post during the previous night—or rather, at about four o’clock in the morning. It had been noticeable, at that hour, and they had remembered it; but they didn’t know where it had been heading, except that it was continuing cast.
This fitted in with my calculations; and as I turned off towards Bonn and Godesberg, I began to wonder if Godesberg itself could be Mott’s destination. It was uncannily close to their route; and it seemed likely that they had at least paid a visit to it, even if it wasn’t their final aim.
In this speculation, however, I turned out to be wrong.
It was after eight when I finally reached Godesberg; and the first thing I learned from the warden was that he had had no visitors resembling Mott and his party; so that was that.
The warden proved to be an anxious little man, wispy and eager to please. He insisted on showing me all round the grounds of Schloss Meiningen, before he would take me into his study to talk of my business. I didn’t see any of the inmates; they were presumably kept tucked away in the nether regions of the castle.
I learned that the Asylum was a privately-run charitable institution, founded during the First World War by a group of decaying but rich noblewomen calling themselves the Daughters of Nassau-Hesse. One of the Daughters had given Meiningen Castle, her own home, to the cause, and the place had been instituted originally for the benefit of shell-shocked veterans, mostly scions of the old Empire, who had lost their fortunes as well as their wits. There hadn’t proved to be enough suitable members of the officer class to occupy the place, and so, as time went by, the tone had had to be lowered. Various pieces of driftwood from the Great War had found shelter there; some with relatives who paid a small sum for their keep, others homeless and bereft, who would otherwise have been taken into the State asylums, but who had been collected instead by the zealous Daughters to swell their little band.
The institution was now greatly impoverished, and struggled along as best it could. It had no State recognition, and after I had seen something of the haphazard, amateurish way in which the place was run, I was not surprised that Johann Braun’s name had not appeared promptly on Churt’s official lists of missing persons.
The little warden, Ulbrecht, took me at last into his office and offered me coffee, which I accepted and found exceptionally good.
“And now,” said Ulbrecht, in his painstaking English, “this Braun; from your letter, I understand you have seen him?”
I nodded. “I’m almost certain of it.”
“And in what condition was he?”
I decided that he might as well have it.
“He was dead,” I said. I told him what I knew of my anonymous visitor, describing his appearance in detail. The warden nodded his head when I came to the red chessman.
“This was Braun. Always he carried this chessman with him, wherever he went. He could not be parted from it.”
I said curiously, “Did he have it when he first came here?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“How long ago was that?”
“It was—” Ulbrecht paused, thinking. “It was a few months after the Armistice; yes, early in 1919.”
Over thirty years ago. This was a facer.
“Where did he come from?”
“That I cannot tell you. He simply walked in. Yes, he walked in one day, it must have been in the January. I remember it myself; I was then the deputy-warden.”
I stared at him. “Walked in? How do you mean?”
Ulbrecht poured me another cup of coffee. “He was found in the grounds of the castle, wandering about as though in a trance. He was unshaven, dressed like a tramp. The keeper thought he had found his way in through the main gates, when they stood open to allow some car to enter.
“He couldn’t answer questions; he could hardly speak. We thought at first he was ill. He was very emaciated, and his body showed signs of ill-treatment. But when our doctor examined him, we found that it was his mind that was ill. Indeed, one might say that it was altogether gone.” Ulbrecht paused. “We tried to identify him, of course, but we never found out who he was. It was a chaotic time, just after the war, and there were many people looking for lost relatives, but nobody claimed him.” He paused again, reflectively. “He was a fine-looking man, once we had cleaned him up and found him some better clothes.”
I said: “It was odd, him walking into this place like that. Almost as though he knew he was booked for an asylum.”
The warden wagged his head, wisely. “Not so odd; the
castle is close by the river, and he was not the first tramp we had seen. There were a good many of them in those times, making their way up or down the Rhine. If a person has nowhere to go,” he added, “a river at least gives him a direction to follow.”
I nodded, and asked him to go on.
He shrugged his little hunched shoulders. “There is not much more to Braun’s story. We gave him that name, of course; he had none.
“Though he improved physically, his mind was perpetually clouded. He hardly ever spoke; he would never answer a question. He hated being questioned. We gave him work to do, in the gardens, and he managed it well enough.
“It was only this year—several months ago now—that he began to change a little, to improve. Not very much, of course; but he seemed less apatisch, less—lethargic? And he wandered about restlessly, talking to himself. This he had never done before. We used to listen to him, carefully, but nothing he said told us anything about his origin. Until he spoke the name of Stonybridge—your name,” the warden bowed. “Or rather that of your late relative. One day, he wrote it down.”
I pricked up my ears. “Had he written before?”
“Never. One of the orderlies found him with paper and pencil, struggling to write this name. He spelled it correctly—just as you wrote it yourself. Just the one word, Stonybridge.
“Of course, we didn’t know at first that it was a man’s name. We thought it might be a town—an English town. We tried to identify it, but of course it wasn’t to be found. And then one day, when I was trying to ask him about the name, he said quite suddenly: ‘I wish to finish my game—Ich will mein Spiel beendigen.’”
I interrupted him. “Did he always speak German?”
“When he spoke at all, yes. Until now. When he said this about the game, I asked him: ‘Welche Spiel?’ What game? And he said, in English as good as you speak to me now, ‘With Stonybridge… Where is Stonybridge?’ I said: ‘Who is this Stonybridge?’—speaking English myself then—and I remember noticing that he was clutching hard to this little chessman, the one he always carried in his pocket. He had it in his hand, holding it very tightly, his knuckles were quite white—and suddenly he cried very loudly, several times, ‘I am in check, I am in check, I am in check’—and then he sat down and lowered his head, and fell silent.”
