It had been easier even than he had dared hope. From first to last luck had been with him. He had come that afternoon in order to kill, and chance had shown him how he could do that and at the same time turn a moment’s carelessness to advantage.
It remained only for him to get out of the house now.
He had no intention of departing by the way he had come. There was no need for that. Cautiously he drew the curtains aside just enough to allow him to peer out. The garden was empty, deserted, not even a shadow stirred.
Very, very gently, with a facile ease born of long experience in the art he began to raise the window inch by inch. To his immense relief it moved soundlessly. When the aperture was large enough to allow him to crawl through it he stopped, flung one leg over the sill, followed with the other, and gave a sigh of heartfelt gratitude as he felt the soft soil of the garden beneath his feet.
Meticulous always he turned, and closed the window before moving from the spot. He took half a dozen paces forward, then thought of the gas-mask still clamped to his nose. He tore it off, and gulped in the sweet fresh air of night. It struck him, however, that he had better get rid of it at once. It was a useless encumbrance now, and he might yet have to move with haste.
He was looking round for some convenient bush into which to fling it when he fancied he heard a faint sound behind him. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder.
“Hands up, Luss!” snapped a voice with a parade-ground rasp in it.
He whirled with an inarticulate cry, and the brilliant beam of a large hand torch struck him full in the face. For the moment he was blinded, then as his vision cleared he recognized Colonel Ormiston and saw the ugly-looking automatic he held in a rock-steady hand. Behind the Colonel were other shadowy figures.
Luss groaned. The game was up. He had walked into a trap.
IV
A room in the house was cleared, and when the gas had been dissipated the little party entered. Luss, handcuffed now, glared round at Ormiston, Terry, and the couple of men from the Special Branch who had helped to rope him in. The senior of the latter was speaking to Ormiston in a low voice.
“I’ve phoned,” he said. “Our men will go through his house with a fine tooth-comb. If there’s a copy of that code hidden there they’ll find it.”
Ormiston nodded approval. “And they’ll let us know the result promptly?” he said with a shade of anxiety in his voice.
“They’ll telephone through to here the moment they find anything,” the man assured Ormiston. “You can trust them on a job of this sort, Colonel, you know that. They don’t miss much, and they work with an amazing celerity. They have to.”
Once again Ormiston nodded. He turned to the table where the things they had taken from Luss’s pockets made a neat little pile. On the top was an envelope addressed to a Mr. Bula. The letter it had contained, innocuous in itself, was ample evidence that this was Luss’s latest alias. More. The superscription had told them where the man had been lodging.
The proper course, so Terry thought, would have been to take Luss off to the police-station, and there charge him. Ormiston thought differently, and since he had been given a free hand in the matter it was his word that counted. Had he been asked to state the reasons why he hesitated he would have found some difficulty in marshalling them. All he could say was that something—instinct, if you like—warned him that the incident had not yet reached a climax. There was more to come, but what, or in what way he could not say.
Luss must have caught something of what had passed between Ormiston and the man from the Special Branch. The glum look cleared from his face, was replaced by something curiously like triumph.
“What do you think you’re going to find at my place, Ormiston?” he demanded, twisting round.
“You know as well as I do,” Ormiston retorted.
Luss grinned openly. “Perhaps I do. But I’m not telling.”
“Listen.” Ormiston took a step nearer to him. “It’s a copy of that supplementary code.”
Luss’s face went blank. “What the devil are you talking about?” he said.
“Don’t pretend you’re innocent,” Ormiston snapped back. “The gaff’s been blown, Luss. Kioski’s told us all he knew.”
“Kioski!” Luss’s face was a study in amazement. “Why, I’ve never even heard of the man!”
“No?” Ormiston’s tone had suddenly become dangerously quiet. “That’s queer. We roped him in this morning.” Briefly, pungently, he outlined what had happened.
Luss took the blow without winking. Even now he was prepared to brazen it out, though his object was not very apparent.
“I repeat,” he said at the end, “that I don’t know anyone of that name, and if he says I do he’s a liar.”
“Perhaps.” But there was not so much certainty in Ormiston’s voice this time. He quite realized that it might not be so easy to prove to the satisfaction of a jury.
“Listen.” Ormiston’s voice tensed. “I set a trap for you…with live bait in it. Myself. You walked right into it. I guessed that before you left England for good you’d try to even up old scores with me.”
“I’m damn well sorry I didn’t succeed,” Luss snarled.
“I can believe that. But you bungled both times. This afternoon you missed me as near as don’t matter with that poisoned dart of yours. If your aim had only equalled your daring there might have been a different tale to tell. But I imagine that something distracted your attention at the crucial moment. What was it?”
“Never mind. I’m not telling.”
“Perhaps I can guess. But we’ll come to that later. Again to-night you made the mistake of assuming that we were in the house. We weren’t. In anticipation of a visit from you we got outside, and kept ourselves concealed until it was time to pounce on you. So despite that remarkably efficient little gas pistol of yours we’re still alive.”
“But only just,” Luss spat at him. “And talking of people assuming things, I’m not the only one who has made a mistake that way.”
Ormiston jerked to attention. “What do you mean?” he demanded in a hard voice.
Luss laughed in his face. “Find out,” he said.
“I’ll make you talk,” Ormiston threatened.
“You can’t, not in England. You’re not allowed to grill a man here.”
Ormiston’s face went an ugly red. At that exact moment a bell rang somewhere in the house.
“The telephone,” Terry said startlingly.
The Special Branch man jumped to his feet. “That will be the boys,” he said. “I’ll answer it.”
Ormiston hesitated. “All right,” he said the next instant. “Be careful, though. That gas should be all cleared away by now, still you never know.”
The man nodded, went out.
Two minutes later he returned. His face now wore a crestfallen look.
“They’ve searched everywhere,” he announced, “practically pulled the place to pieces, and they’ve found just nothing.”
Ormiston sat down heavily. Luss grinned in open triumph. “I told you,” he said.
Terry watched him curiously. He had the feeling now that Luss meant to use the missing copy of the code as something with which to strike a bargain. Perhaps in the last resort he would barter it for his liberty.
Through Ormiston’s heart a dreadful feeling stabbed. They had caught Luss, but all their work would count for nothing if the code got out of the country. Unless he could make the man speak they would be worse off than ever. He wished now that he had not invoked the help of the Special Branch. He and Terry should have handled the whole affair on their own. Had there been no outsiders present the two Secret Service men between them would have found some way of opening Luss’s lips. But he dared not propose anything now that savoured in the least of third degree methods.<
br />
“How big,” said Terry suddenly, “would the paper be on which the code would be copied?”
It was something that he had never thought of asking until this very moment. Despite the mixed way in which he put the question Ormiston guessed what was in his mind.
“It wouldn’t take up so very much room, Terry, if that’s what you’re thinking about,” he said. “It’s not a complete code, by any means. That sort fills a small volume, you know. But this is only a number of supplementary alterations and additions dictated by exigencies that have only recently arisen. I should have made that plain to you at the start.”
“So it wouldn’t take up much room at all,” Terry said thoughtfully. “It could be comfortably inscribed on both sides of a couple of sheets of writing-paper?”
“Less than that,” said Ormiston unhappily.
Out of the corner of his eye he had been watching Luss, and saw the man’s mouth open, then close abruptly again as though the fellow had been on the point of interrupting, and had immediately thought better of it. He wondered irritably what it was that had been said to catch the man’s attention.
He swung round, and raked him with a withering glance. But Luss merely grinned evilly, with a show of white and perfect teeth, the significance of which did not at once strike Ormiston. Then suddenly he jerked upright. The Luss he had handled on that historic occasion in the past had been in rather more need of dental treatment.
“Luss,” he said in the easy tone of one who is merely bent on satisfying an idle curiosity, “you’ve had your teeth out since I last saw you, haven’t you? Those you’ve got now look to be false. Aren’t they?”
Some queer apprehensive spark seemed to flicker in the other’s eyes for an instant, and as quickly died away.
“Well, what of it?” he said defensively. “There’s nothing wrong in that, is there?”
“I should hope not,” Ormiston said virtuously, and would have added more had not Terry gasped suddenly.
All eyes flashed to him as he flung himself across the room on to Luss. What followed was never quite clear as far as details were concerned. The one fact that emerged was that somehow Terry had managed to get his hand into Luss’s mouth, and the two of them were struggling violently.
“Hold him, you fellows!” Ormiston’s voice cut into the chaos.
Terry lurched back abruptly. His fingers were clutching an upper case denture. Luss, with a dark malignant look on his face, was plunging in the hands of his captors like a maddened steer.
“Let me at him,” he said thickly.
“The so-and-so swine’s bitten me,” Terry said ruefully. “It will be rotten luck if I’ve got the wrong lot, and have to give him the chance of another bite. Even a dog isn’t legally entitled to more than one.”
“Terry, what the hell…! Here, talk sense!”
“I am.” Terry was prodding over the denture now, seemed to be trying to take it to pieces. Suddenly some of the teeth parted from the vulcanite, swung sideways as though on a pivot.
“Has any one got a pin, please?” Terry asked in a mild self-satisfied voice. “This set seems to be hollow. I wondered why it felt so thick.”
Some one produced the pin, and Terry set to work. In next to no time with its help he had extracted something from the hollow between the two plates of vulcanite with the dexterity with which the devotee harpoons a winkle. It was a tightly rolled wad, of paper apparently.
Ormiston took the exhibit from him, and unrolled it. It was extremely thin, yet quite strong paper, of a sort that could be compressed into a surprisingly small space, and yet remain of reasonable length and width. Back and front it was covered with writing in a microscopically small hand.
Ormiston dived on his desk, snatched open a drawer, seized a reading-glass and examined the paper in detail. Luss plunged like a frightened horse.
His mouth worked oddly. He looked as though he were going to have a fit.
Ormiston dropped the reading-glass back in the drawer.
“This is it!” he cried excitedly. “There’s no longer any doubt whatsoever about it.”
Had any still lingered in his mind Luss’s behaviour would have been sufficient to banish it. Now that it had become evident that the game was up the man showed signs of going to pieces. Perhaps he realized at last the position in which he stood. There was no longer any hope for him.
Ormiston folded the paper carefully, put it into his wallet, and slid that into an inside pocket.
The chief of the Special Branch men looked up expectantly, but failed to catch Ormiston’s eye. Luss had that temporarily.
“You win, Colonel,” he said huskily. “Or rather it was that infernal brother-in-law of yours.”
He looked balefully at Terry. Terry met the glance with a cheerful grin.
“I think,” said Ormiston carefully, “that I know what it was that distracted your attention when you fired at me this afternoon.”
He crossed to the table and took up the little blue-prints Luss had found in the safe.
“These?” he said questioningly.
Luss nodded. He could not trust himself to speak now.
Ormiston looked at the prints a moment, then very slowly and methodically tore them across and tossed the pieces into the empty fireplace.
Terry gave a smothered exclamation of protest.
“It’s all right,” said Ormiston calmly. “They’re only fakes. They, too, were bait of a kind.”
The prisoner parted his lips in a sickly grin. He had lost all along the line.
UNCLE HYACINTH
ALFRED NOYES
ALTHOUGH BEST KNOWN as a poet, Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) also wrote fiction and nonfiction, frequently espousing pacifism.
After attending Oxford University, he published his first book of poems when he was only twenty-three, and followed it with many more collections during a prolific writing career. In 1906, he published his most famous work, “The Highwayman,” a narrative poem based on the life and adventures of Dick Turpin, the notorious bandit, presenting him romantically as a swashbuckling knight of the road, though he was actually no more than a horse-stealer, burglar, murderer, and torturer. When the BBC polled the British public about its favorite poem, “The Highwayman” came in fifteenth. It has the rare distinction as a poem to have inspired two motion pictures, along with “Dick Turpin’s Ride” (a ride actually made by a different highwayman). The Highwayman (1951) credits the poem as the basis for the screenplay by Henry Blankfort, with the adaptation of Noyes’s work to the screen by Jack DeWitt and Duncan Renaldo; it starred Philip Friend, Charles Coburn, Wanda Hendrix, Cecil Kellaway, and Victor Jory. Oddly, it appears to have been remade in the same year under the title The Lady and the Bandit, with the same credits for the story (DeWitt and Renaldo) and inspiration (“The Highwayman”), but with a screenplay by Robert Libott and Frank Burt; it starred Louis Hayward, Patricia Medina, Suzanne Dalbert, and Tom Tully.
Noyes wrote numerous antiwar articles and poems but, when faced with the conflicts of World War I and World War II, he wrote patriotic stories about Great Britain’s military history and the morality of its position. His short stories are largely forgotten today with the exception of two that may turn up in collections of vintage ghost stories, “The Lusitania Waits” (1916) and “The Log of the Evening Star” (1918). The stories have not been popular with current readers because, unfortunately, his dedication to the brevity and clarity of his poetry did not extend to his fiction.
“Uncle Hyacinth” was originally published in the February 2, 1918, issue of The Saturday Evening Post; it was first collected in Walking Shadows (London, Cassell, 1918).
UNCLE HYACINTH
ALFRED NOYES
ONE OF THE BEST code stories of the first World War centers in the ignominious exploit of the German light cruiser Magdeb
urg which, with other ships of the Kaiser’s navy, had been roaming the Baltic, clashing with the British blockade and raiding as far as the Russian coast. On one of these missions, as Fletcher Pratt tells the story in his Secret and Urgent, the Magdeburg went hard aground in a fog and came under the naval guns of the Russians. As the cruiser was being pounded to pieces, the captain apparently ordered the code books taken by a small boat some distance from the ship and heaved overboard. This order for some reason was not completely carried out and the code officer instead plunged from the deck of the cruiser itself with the secret volumes in his arms.
At the close of the battle, the victorious Russians, with a gesture of chivalry, determined to give the German sailors a formal burial and hauled up those who were lying in the comparatively shallow water surrounding the Magdeburg. One of the officers thus retrieved still bore in his arms the weighted lead covers of the German naval code. Some very serious and determined diving followed and the code itself was found, damaged by water but still legible. A British destroyer rushed the prize to London where the British Admiralty and its Room 40, famous in both fact and fiction, began to work on it.
The code was a multiple dictionary type, each German word being represented by not one but several code words or letter groups. It was soon evident, moreover, that although there were several code variants for each German word, these variations were always composed of the same letter groups, although in a different sequence for each variation. For example, the letter groups for German words beginning with B were used, in an alternate column, to represent words beginning with F, and again for words beginning with S, but the same sequence relationship was always maintained among these letter groups, thus making the decoding of any of these variations much easier. This permitted the Germans to change their code at intervals and the discovery of the system gave the Allies the same facility in decoding, so that the Germans were disastrously surprised in several naval engagements thereafter.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 31
