The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Read online

  Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel

  The curtain had been drawn back and there was the bed. Wharton and a stranger were standing by it, and when Wharton moved to meet me, I saw on the bed the body of Penelope Craye.

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  Wharton merely nodded.

  Once again, we meet our old friend Ludovic Travers—now Major Travers, and commandant of Camp 55 in England during World War Two. Nearby lives the rather mysterious Colonel Brende—mysterious because he is in possession of certain fact relating to aerial defence.

  Travers’s suspicions that all is not well are intensified when Penelope, the colonel’s flashy secretary, is murdered. Then George Wharton appears on the scene—the Scotland Yard man who has already solved some strange mysteries. In the rush of exciting events which follow, Travers plays a major part in solving the baffling happenings. Christopher Bush, Ludovic Travers, and George Wharton—at their best!

  The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel was originally published in 1942. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “Curiosity is whetted by the aptness and neatness of his plots . . . All kinds of whys and wherefores could plainly be devised, but it would be hard to imagine any so satisfying as Mr. Bush’s.” Times Literary Supplement

  “Well written, supplied with good characters, its setting and military incidentals realistic . . . in short, a good specimen of detective-story fitted to war-time England.” Sunday Times

  “No wonder Ludovic Travers is puzzled, and so will be the reader in this amusing variety of the orthodox spy story.” Guardian

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Titles by Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Fighting Soldier – Title Page

  The Case of the Fighting Soldier – Chapter One

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  A Mystery Writer Goes to War

  Christopher Bush and British Detective Fiction’s Fight against Hitler

  After the Francophile Christopher Bush completed his series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers’ nostalgic little tour of France (soon to be tragically overrun and scourged by Hitler’s remorseless legions) in the pair of detective novels The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939) and The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940), the author published a trilogy of Ludo Travers mysteries drawing directly on his own recent experience in British military service: The Case of the Murdered Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942). Together this accomplished trio of novels constitutes arguably the most notable series of wartime detective fiction (as opposed to thrillers) published in Britain during the Second World War. There are, to be sure, other interesting examples of this conflict-focused crime writing by true detective novelists, such as Gladys Mitchell’s Brazen Tongue (1940, depicting the period of the so-called “Phoney War”), G.D.H. Cole’s Murder at the Munition Works (1940, primarily concerned with wartime labor-management relations), John Rhode’s They Watched by Night (1941), Night Exercise (1942) and The Fourth Bomb (1942), Miles Burton’s Up the Garden Path (1941), Dead Stop (1943), Murder, M.D. (1943) and Four-Ply Yarn (1944), John Dickson Carr’s Murder in the Submarine Zone (1940) and She Died a Lady (1943), Belton Cobb’s Home Guard Mystery (1941), Margaret Cole’s Knife in the Dark (1941), Ngaio Marsh’s Colour Scheme (1943) and Died in the Wool (1945) (both set in wartime New Zealand), Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger (1944), Freeman Wills Crofts’s Enemy Unseen (1945) and Clifford Witting’s Subject: Murder (1945). Yet Bush’s three books seem the most informed by actual martial experience.

  Like his Detection Club colleague Cecil John Charles Street (who published mysteries as both John Rhode and Miles Burton), Christopher Bush was a distinguished veteran of the First World War (though unlike Street his service seems to have consisted of administration rather than fighting in the field) who returned to active service during the second, even more globally catastrophic, “show” (as Bush termed it), albeit fairly briefly. 53 years old at the time of the German invasion of Poland and Britain’s resultant entry into hostilities, Bush helped administer prisoner of war and alien internment camps, initially, it appears, at Camp No 22 (Pennylands) in Ayrshire, Scotland and Camp No 9 at Southampton, at the latter location as Adjutant Quartermaster.

  In February 1940, Bush, now promoted from 2nd Lieutenant to Captain, received his final, and most controversial, commission: that of Adjutant Commandant at a prisoner-of-war and alien internment camp established in the second week of the war at the recently evacuated Taunton’s School in Highfield, a suburb of Southampton. Throughout the United Kingdom 27,000 refugees and immigrants from Germany, Austria and Italy (after the latter country declared war on Britain in June 1940) were interned in camps like the one in Highfield. Bournemouth refugee Fritz Engel--a Jewish Austrian dentist who in May 1940, after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and inaugurated his infamous “Collar the lot!” internment policy, was interned at the Highfield camp--direly recalled the brief time he spent there, before he was transferred to a larger camp on the Isle of Man, for possible shipment overseas. “I was first taken into Southampton into a building belonging to Taunton’s School,” he wrote in a bracing unpublished memoir, “already surrounded by electrically loaded barbed wire. . . .” (See Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century, 1999.)

  Similarly, Desider Furst, another interned refugee Austrian Jewish dentist, wrote in his autobiography, Home is Somewhere Else: “[Our bus] stopped in front of a large building, a school, and the bus was surrounded by young soldiers with fixed bayonets. We had become prisoners. A large hall was turned into a dormitory, and we were each issued a blanket. The room was already fairly crowded. . . . We were fed irregularly with tea and sandwiches, and nobody bothered us. We were not even counted. I had the feeling that it was a dream or bad joke that would end soon.” He was wrong, however: “After two days we were each given a paper bag with some food and put onto a train [to Liverpool] under military escort. The episode was turning serious; we were regarded as potential enemies.”

  Soon finding its way in one of Bush’s detective novels was this highly topical setting, prudently shorn by the author of the problematic matter of alien refugee internment. (Churchill’s policy became unpopular in the UK and was modified after the Arandora Star, an internee ship bound for Canada, was torpedoed by the Germans on July 2, 1940, leading to the deaths of nearly 1000 people on board, a tragic and needless event to which Margaret Cole darkly alludes in her pro-refugee wartime mystery Knife in the Dark.) All of Bush’s wartime Travers trilogy mysteries were favorably received in Britain (though they were not published in the U.S.), British crime fiction critics deeming their verisimilitude impressive indeed. “Great is the gain to any tale when the author is able
to provide a novel and interesting environment described with evident knowledge,” pronounced Bush’s Detection Club colleague E.R. Punshon in his review of one of these novels, The Case of the Murdered Major, in the Manchester Guardian.

  For his part Christopher Bush in August 1940 was granted, after his promotion to to the rank of Major, indefinite release from service on medical grounds, giving him time to return full throttle to the writing of detective fiction. Although only one Ludovic Travers mystery appeared in 1940, the year the author was enmeshed in administrative affairs at Highfield, Bush published seven more Travers mysteries between 1941 and 1945, as well as four war thrillers attributed to “Michael Home,” the pseudonym under which he had written mainstream fiction in the 1930s. Bush was back in the saddle--the mystery writer’s saddle--again.

  The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942)

  The secretive scientific researcher who is working on a startling invention of incalculable value to the war effort and is thereby beset at his country house by ruthless Nazi spies and insidious fifth columnists was, during Britain’s life-or-death martial struggle with Germany in the years 1939 to 1945, a staple of fiction, stage and cinema. The first espionage story performed on stage during the Second World War, Geoffrey Kerr’s Cottage to Let, debuted in July 1940, prompting theatre reviewer Herbert Farjeon (a brother of thriller writer Jefferson Farjeon and children’s author Eleanor Farjeon) in his rave notice to observe, “It is a tribute to the serious nature of this war that we should have had to wait eleven months for the first spy play.” The next year Cottage to Let was adapted under the same title as a film, directed by Anthony Asquith and starring several of the same actors from the play, including Leslie Banks as the reclusive inventor and the late George Cole as Ronald, the evacuee cockney boy who to the surprise of everyone around him reveals that he possesses the deductive faculties of an embryonic Sherlock Holmes.

  Some of the more notable British detective novels (as distinct from thrillers) which draw on similar surefire mystery plot elements to those found in Cottage to Let are Mary Fitt’s Death on Heron’s Mere (1941) (Death Finds a Target in the US), G.D.H. Cole’s Toper’s End (1942), Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942), Miles Burton’s Dead Stop (1943) and Patricia Wentworth’s The Key (1944). The basic plot had become commonplace enough by the time Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel was published that the author’s Detection Club colleague E.R. Punshon, reviewing the book in the Manchester Guardian, was moved to query, “Does Mr. Christopher Bush . . . tell of yet another of those stupendous war secrets which enemy agents so persistently and so unsuccessfully try to secure?” Punshon’s answer provided full encouragement to doubting detective fiction fans: “Well, perhaps, but with a difference. No wonder [Bush’s sleuth] Ludovic Travers is puzzled, and so will be the reader in this amusing variety of the orthodox detective story.”

  The mystery opens in April 1941 with Ludovic Travers (who narrates the novel, as he will all the future ones in which he appears) learning that he is being transferred from No. 54 Prisoner of War Camp at Shoreleigh, where he had been Commandant since the exciting events detailed in The Case of the Murdered Major (1941), to Camp 55, near the city of Dalebrink in Derbyshire. There he is to take charge of guarding “two highly important factories, two vital tunnels, a bridge or two and a certain hush-hush establishment”—Dalebrink Park, a long-ago playground of the Hell-fire Club and now the private domicile of Colonel and Mrs. Brende. At Dalebrink Park the Colonel and a trio of experts in physics--including Professor Heinrich Wissler, a refugee from Prague who resembles Einstein as a young man--are conducting nationally vital research on defenses against the Nazis’ night-flying aircraft.

  Assisting the experts at their important tasks is the Hon. Penelope Craye, a second cousin or thereabouts of Mrs. Brende and Colonel Brende’s well-born and alluringly lovely private secretary. (“She looked Garbo and Hedy Lamarr all rolled into one.”) As seems his habit with the beautiful and all-too-often calculating women who cross his path, Ludo gravely doubts the personal motivations of the Hon. Penelope Craye. Recalling those notorious fascist-loving Mitford sisters, the Hon. Diana and the Hon. Unity, we learn that before the war the Hon. Penelope had been the subject of much speculation in society “that she was one of the set of Hitler’s apologists” and that “some would not have been surprised if she had been clapped in clink at the time of the Fifth Column round-up” (as in fact were Diana Mitford and her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists). Why on earth, Ludo wonders, has so dubious a personage as Penelope Craye, if not “clapped in clink,” been allowed free passage over a place as important to the anti-fascist cause as Dalebrink Park?

  Also of concern to Ludo and others in the military administration is the presence, in Dalebrink’s progressive “garden suburb” (home to “all the cranks in England”) of the pacifist and leftist New Era Group (N.E.G.). Led by Sir Hereward Dove, “a man of some wealth and a dabbler in architecture and spiritualism,” and local Anglican minister Rev. Lancelot Bennison (suggestive names both), the idealistic N.E.G. recalls the real-life Peace Pledge Union and the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, both of which were founded in the 1930s in response to the deteriorating political situation in Europe as Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and made ever-mounting territorial demands of his neighbors.

  Christopher Bush’s son, the distinguished composer Geoffrey Bush (who sadly was never acknowledged by his father), was himself a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and a conscientious objector during the Second World War, which began when he was only 19 years old. Although he had been admitted in 1938 to Balliol College, Oxford, Geoffrey Bush spent his war years at the Hostel of the Good Shepherd at Tredegar in Monmouthshire, Wales, looking after “difficult” evacuated children—rather more challenging charges one gathers than cheeky young Ronald in Cottage to Let. Although the mystery-writing Christopher loved classical music and the music composing Geoffrey loved detective fiction (he co-wrote the crime tale “Baker Dies” with Oxford classmate Edmund Crispin, himself a future composer and mystery writer), the father and son never met during Christopher’s life and there is no doubt that Christopher would have looked askance at Geoffrey’s pacifism (had he followed his son’s activities at all), given Ludo’s dismissive comments about the movement in The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel.

  When Colonel Brende vanishes from Dalebrink Park, presumably having been abducted, some suspicion is cast at the N.E.G.—members of which, so the thinking goes, might have been crackbrained enough to have resorted to drastic criminal measures in pursuit of peace. Yet there also is the matter of come-hither Penelope Craye, whom George Wharton from Scotland Yard, having arrived to investigate the matter, suspects might have been carrying on an affair with Colonel Brende. “He was a man and she was a woman,” Wharton coarsely observes to Ludo, “you’re a man of the world and you can put two and two together.” Was Mrs. Brende, the Colonel’s elder by a decade or more, jealous of her husband’s relationship--whatever it was--with the Hon. Penelope? And what about Mrs. Brende’s dubious Mayfair nephew, Howard Craye, “a lounge lizard in uniform,” and mysterious Major Passenden, recently returned to England from Europe, where he was thought to have died during the retreat to Dunkirk? With a missing notebook, a haunted summer-house and a poisoning in the offing as well, Travers and Wharton find themselves confronting one of their most challenging cases yet, with the security of the very Empire at stake.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  Fresh Woods

  IT was at about nine o’clock on a morning of April of this year when a call came from the War Office. It was a Colonel Billow speaking, and he said he understood my Camp was being closed down. How was the job proceeding?

  I said it was proceeding very well, whereupon he wanted to know if my adjutant was sufficiently competent to finish it up on his own. When I said that he certainly was, I was told to report at the War Office the following
morning at eleven hours, at Room 365. It was a question of a new appointment.

  I knew he was about to hang up so I got in my question very quickly.

  “Do you mind telling me, sir, if I shall be able to get back here again, or had I better assume that I shan’t?”

  That was a bit off his line of country. He told me to hold on for a minute, and I knew his hand was cupping the receiver while he asked an opinion of someone else. It was a couple of minutes before he spoke.

  “That you, Major Travers? About that question you put. I think you’d better assume you’ll be leaving for good.”

  So that was that, and to tell the truth I was by no means sorry to get a change of job. It is melancholy work clearing up, or well and truly interring, a biggish concern like ours which has been one’s whole life for a matter of eighteen months.1 Also we had been pretty well blitzed, and I was rather hoping for a job where the bombs might be of some less irritating kind. I was hoping, too, that the new job might be the least bit more active. Twelve hours a day and seven days a week in an office never was my idea of soldiering.

  It was not till late afternoon that I was able to get away. I had managed to get hold of my wife at the hospital where she was nursing, but all she could say was that she’d do her best to get off, but they were frightfully understaffed. She was not at the station as we’d tentatively arranged, so I went on to the hotel. It seemed as queer as ever not going to the old flat in St. Martin s Chambers, but that had been closed down for the duration and my man Palmer had been pensioned off.

  When I registered at the hotel the clerk said there was a message for me. It was from Bernice, to say that she would be at the hotel at as near nine o’clock as possible. I told the clerk that I’d risk whether my wife had dined, and wait dinner till then. By the time I’d cleaned up generally and had some tea, there were still three hours to wait. In the old days they would have been easy to pass. Now I was feeling somewhat restless, and loafing about the lounge or strolling aimlessly about the streets had no appeal whatever, and then it suddenly came to me that I might do worse than walk the few hundred yards to the Yard and find out the whereabouts of George Wharton. If he happened to be in town he might dine with Bernice and myself.