The Case of the Murdered Major: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Read online

  “Darling, they’ve offered you a job!”

  Travers hooked off his horn-rims and began polishing them—a trick of his when at a sudden loss or on the edge of discovery.

  “Who’s they?”

  “The War Office, darling!”

  Travers beamed fatuously, took the letter, and had a look at it. The look became one of reproof.

  “But, my dear it’s addressed to me and smothered all over with Secret and Confidential.”

  “That’s why I simply had to open it,” she told him disarmingly. And then, quickly, “What’s Qmr. stand for?”

  Travers read the document slowly through. What he was being offered was the appointment of Adjutant/Quartermaster at No. 54 Prisoner of War Camp, Shoreleigh. He was asked to state whether or not he would accept the appointment, and he was further confidentially informed of the method by which he would be apprised of the imminence of war and his orders to move.

  “What rank will you have, darling?”

  “Rank?” said Travers, and blinked. “Oh, yes—rank. Captain, of course. An Adjutant’s always a Captain, except when he’s a Major.” He gave a reminiscent smile. “Not a bad job when you come to think of it. What I was doing in the last show.”

  “But, darling, that was twenty years ago!”

  “Well?” said Travers, with a smile of some condescension. “I can do that job on my head.” Then a slight frown. “Of course I don’t know a lot about the quartermastering side, but that ought to be easy.”

  Travers let his moustache grow and proposed trimming it to a toothbrush, and for some days after that he might often have been seen in his leisure moments, long legs stretched out from his favourite chair, the tips of his fingers pressed lightly together, and on his face the look of a benevolent Buddha. What he would be thinking of was that old camp of his in Egypt, the quiet, smooth routine in the office tent, the companionship of the Mess, the old Turk with his shifts and wiles, and likeable personality, and, above all, he would be recalling his old Commandant, Major Brand. A great chap, Brand. Knew his job from A to Z and left other people to get on with theirs, and above all blessed with an impish humour and a withering scorn of red tape.

  And so to the end of August, when at breakfast one morning the ’phone went. It was a friend—and also a personage—giving confidential news, and ending it with the somewhat flippant remark that if Travers had not bought his uniform he had better do so.

  That last evening in August it was the wireless at nine o’clock that gave Travers, with others, his orders to go. Next morning Bernice saw him in uniform for the first lime.

  “Darling, you look lovely!” she said. “Do let me kiss you.”

  Then there were inquiries as to what the ribbons were, and a dozen other things. And before the train went everything that had been rehearsed overnight was gone through once more. Shoreleigh, a fine seaside town, shouldn’t be a bad billet. Bernice could come down on leave from her Red Cross work, and when Travers’s own leave was due, he could come to town, and one of these times he might bring his Commandant with him.

  “That would be rather jolly,” Bernice said. “Except, of course, that you mightn’t like him.”

  “Not much risk of that,” Travers assured her largely. “Mind you, he mayn’t be a tip-topper like old Brand, but you bet your life he’ll be all right.”

  “Darling, now you’re a soldier you must use the correct, terms,” Bernice told him with mock reproof. “What you mean is that he’ll be a sahib.”

  Travers laughed. “That’s it. Absolutely pukka. He may even be Poona.”

  At the station there was something of a thrill—presenting his free warrant and finding the clerk passing out a ticket without demur. It was a kind of symbol that sent him back twenty years and in some curious way bound him to the Army again. More than ever he knew he would have no difficulty in picking up the old threads. The job was going to be easy, as he told Bernice.

  “No, darling, not easy—cushy. Isn’t that the word?”

  Travers laughed again. Cushy was indeed the word.

  It was Travers’s first visit to Shoreleigh, and in the falling rain of that early afternoon he found it a grim sort of place, with mean and sprawling suburbs and everywhere factory chimneys belching their smoke. He was somewhat perturbed, too, that the taxi-driver had not immediately known where the Prisoner of War Camp was situated, and indeed it took a good five minutes of inquiry before it was discovered to be four miles out of the town.

  Do you know what a Prisoner of War Camp is like? If you think you do, you may be wrong, and for the very simple reason that such camps have about only one thing in common—a solid surround of barbed wire. The building itself may be a school, the grandstand of a racecourse, a huge private house, or empty mansion—anything, in fact, even huts, where prisoners can live in confinement under the conditions which Geneva has laid down for minimum decency or comfort. As Travers was nearing that Prisoner of War Camp which was to be known as No. 54, he was thinking of his old camp in Egypt, with its tents and flimsy reed-thatched buildings and the first sight of his new home was therefore something of a shock.

  The building he saw was a Victorian monstrosity a huge out-of-date hospital that had long been the town’s while elephant. Two good things about it were that its walls looked mightily substantial, and that it lay in several acres of parkland. Round the actual building a double apron of barbed wire had already been erected; and everywhere contractors’ men were swarming like ants; wiring windows, erecting huts, draining here and sandbagging there, and generally transmogrifying the landscape.

  Travers paid off the driver, hunched his shoulders against the rain, and looked round for someone to question.

  “Any military about here?” he asked a lineman.

  “There’s an officer in that building there,” the man told him, and hollered to a navvy to help with the luggage.

  That building there was a palatial kind of outhouse, two-storied and rather like a coach-house that had been made into tiny flats. A door was open and seated at a table, busy with an al fresco sort of lunch, was a Captain with a couple of ribbons. As he got to his feet he looked taller than he had been when seated, for his shoulders were immensely broad. His jaws were square, his hair a badger grey, and his eyes a cold blue. His smile and his manners were charming.

  “Hallo!” was Travers’s greeting. “You belong here? I’m Travers, the Adjutant, so I’m told.”

  “I’m Winter, the Interpreter.”

  “Interpreter? That’s a new one on me. In my old show we used to make do with Armenians.”

  Winter smiled at that, then looked inquiringly.

  “Had any grub? There’s plenty here.”

  Travers made sure there was, then set to. He was going to like Winter, he was telling himself. He was obviously the quiet sort, and he looked as if he knew his job.

  “So you’re a German expert?”

  “In a way yes,” Winter told him diffidently. “Practically bilingual, really.”

  It turned out that he had been brought up under a German governess, and as a young man had spent years in Germany, where his father had business interests. His war experience had been interesting, for he had fought with Smuts in Africa. Like Travers, he had applied for a job and had promptly been booked as an interpreter. That, as he and Travers agreed, was a miracle, since the War Office had put a round peg in a round hole.

  “What’s the Commandant like?” Travers asked.

  A curious look flashed across Winter’s face, and then was gone.

  “Not too bad,” he said. “He’s only been gone a few minutes, as a matter of fact. Stirrop’s his name. Major Stirrop. A local man. I mean be lives about twenty miles away. I expect he’ll spend the day here and pop home every night till we get really started.”

  “And when’s that supposed to be?”

  “We’re actually Z.21,” Winter said off-handedly.

  “What on earth’s that?” Then Travers’s fingers went hastily to
his glasses. Rather dropping a brick for the one man in the show who was always supposed to know everything, to be confessing ignorance.

  “The fact of the matter is,” he explained, “it’s twenty years since I was in this sort of game. Things must have moved on a bit since my time.”

  “Moved on?” Winter smiled. “My dear fellow, you won’t know the job. A man I know tells me there’re fifty times as many Army Forms and red tape as there were in the last show.”

  “I’ll get the hang of it,” Travers told him confidentially. “I mean, the adjutant side of it. I will own up that this quartermastering business is bothering me rather.”

  “That’ll be all right,” Winter assured him. “When the· Administrative Staff gets here, you’ll have plenty of help. You get a full-blown regular regimental quartermaster-sergeant. He’ll know all the ropes.”

  Travers had felt another shiver at the mention of an Administrative Staff, arid when Winter handed him a list—which he had copied from the official one in Stirrop’s possession—he read it with an aplomb he was far from feeling. Compared with the old free-and-easy administration, effective enough too, the list was terrifying. There was to be a regimental sergeant-major, provost-sergeants, a civilian doctor, and a regular R.A.M.C. staff with an equipped hospital for both prisoners and guard. There was office staff, cooks, batmen, and the Lord knows what.

  “Talking of that Z.2I business,” Winter was saying. “All it means is that Z is the date when the balloon really goes up and twenty-one days after that we’ve got to be ready to receive prisoners.”

  Travers nodded sapiently as he handed back the list.

  “What about guards?”

  “A company of the 2/5th Midshires, so Stirrop says. They’ll march in as soon as their huts are ready. Would you like a quick look round, by the way, or would you rather go along to the hotel?”

  The Mess Room and sleeping quarters for officers would not be ready for a few days, so Winter had installed himself at an hotel about a mile away. He had conveniently brought his own car down to Shoreleigh, and they piled Travers’s luggage in.

  That night Travers insisted on celebrating, or christening, the new show with a full bottle at dinner, and to his great surprise Winter turned out to be a man who couldn’t stand a great deal of tipple. That taciturn tongue of his became gradually loosed, and Travers learned a whole lot of things. One other thing should be said about that comparative loquacity on the part of Winter.

  Several things about Ludovic Travers would become obvious before you had been long in his company, and Winter had had some hours in which, if he wished, to study him. For one thing. Travers’s manners were always delightful and unforced. He was the perfect listener and supremely well-informed. For all his disregard of diehard convention and his occasional quaint mannerisms, one knew one’s self assuredly in the company of a man of rare sympathy and insight; with whom confidences would be implicitly safe and to whom sharp practice would be more than an abomination. Travers himself, often puzzled why people should make him the depository of their secrets, was wholly unaware of the qualities that invited them. Once more he was to be surprised when Winter began to talk so freely.

  “What’s Stirrop actually like?” Travers had asked.

  Winter shrugged his shoulders. Travers raised his eyebrows.

  “Like that, is he?”

  “He’s got his points, I suppose,” said Winter. “Too much of a damn’ windbag for me. Can’t get a word in edgeways with the man. Knows everything and done everything. And a hell of a lot of the dear old regiment.”

  “Fighting soldier?”

  Winter grimaced. “Not so’s you’d notice it. Makes out he knows everybody in the Service. You know: talks about Freddy So-and-so who used to command the So-and-so’s, and Tommy Somebody Else who’s got a damn’ good job at the War House. You know the palaver.”

  “I know,” said Travers. “Blimps in the making. Still, it takes all sorts to make a world.”

  There was a whole lot more Travers learned about Major Stirrop. After the last show he had got a job in Burma, and he’d now been retired for about ten years. His civilian activities were connected with a local brewery, of which he was a director. He was married and had a son in the Service, and so would be fiftyish, which was the age of Travers himself and Winter.

  That night as he lay waiting for sleep, Travers was not so happy as he had been about the cushiness of the new job. Somehow he was beginning to suspect that in twenty years things had moved and he himself had stood still.

  “All of which,” said Travers to himself, “is damn’ puzzling. When we fought the Boer War we started where we left off at the Crimea. Then in the last show we started off at the Boer War. If we’re not going to start off this one where we left off in 1918, then there’s been an earthquake at the War House. Beg its pardon, the War Office. And as I haven’t read about it in the papers, we’ll take Master Winter with a grain of salt.”

  The following morning Travers met his new Commandant, Major Percival Stirrop. He was a bantam of a man, full of quick and self-important nervousness, with all the jargon of the Service and several of those little ingratiating tricks of manner that appear so charming until discovered to be no more than mechanical and second-rate veneer. For instance, he came bounding forward to Travers with outstretched hand.

  “How are you, Captain Travers? So glad to see you.”

  Then the spate of words began. Travers heard what was later to be known as “The Story of My Life.” He gathered that the Major had for a short time been in a Prisoner of War Camp during the last show, and that this new camp would carry on from there. This new war, which was bound to break out officially at any second, was obviously going to take place on the special behalf of Major Stirrop. There was a lot of talk about the “old Bosche,” and various So-and-so’s who had commanded this and that, or had been in Rangoon. There were also some subtle questions about Travers’s regiment and his connections, and there the impish mind of Travers deliberately refused to flourish the old school tie.

  “Well, I suppose we’d better talk business,” Stirrop said at long last. “You’d better be getting on with your indents. Have you got any Army Forms?”

  “I can soon have ’em,” Travers told him craftily, and then changed his mind. “One thing I’d like to say to you, sir, point-blank. I told you the experience I’ve had as Adjutant, but all this Quartermaster business is new to me. You’ll have to allow me a little time to pick up the job.”

  “That’s all right, my dear old chap,” Stirrop assured him. “If it comes to that, we’re all new to the job.”

  But deprecating as that last remark was, Travers could see that Stirrop had been therein included for purposes of politeness only. What’s more, he had not liked that quick, petulant look in Stirrop’s eye at the mention of straight talking and limitations. The new Commandant, he was rapidly becoming aware, was going to be something more than a handful.

  The rest of that morning was infuriating. Stirrop pranced round the camp with Winter and Travers at his heels, and all the time he talked and talked and talked. If it were not to his two satellites, then it would be to foremen or workmen, while the satellites cooled their heels and begun to feel more and more hungry. Then when at long last the three returned to the office, Stirrop had an enormous list of things for Travers to get on with. Office furniture and stationery must he indented for at once, and all the lists had better be drawn up of stores required, and equipment, medical supplies, and heaven knows what.

  It was almost three o’clock when he announced his intention of returning home. He gave Travers his telephone number.

  “Ring me up if anything happens. I don’t suppose it will. Good-bye, old chap. See you in the morning.”

  “Blast him!” said Winter. “Doesn’t he think we ever want to eat?”

  That early evening Travers went off on his own, announcing that he would not be in to dinner. What he had come to realise was that the job he had so gaily bitten
off was likely to be more than he could at the moment chew. Moreover, if there was the likelihood of argument with Stirrop, then the sooner he knew that job, and his own rights and duties, the better.

  He had noticed troops in the town, and what he now did was to hunt up their headquarters. There he found a warrant-officer of the good old type, and after a few confidential words took him off for a meal with suitable liquid refreshment. When he returned to the hotel, the taxi brought a more than respectable bundle of Army Forms, all duly noted for uses and occasions.

  And he had learned a good many things—that people like regimental sergeant-majors and regimental quartermaster-sergeants were nowadays the virtual equivalents of subaltern officers, for instance, and should be addressed officially as “Mr.,” and by the troops as “Sir.” He learned where to indent for stores and equipment, and how to do it; what returns to make and where to render them; what sort of orders were likely to be published, and the nature of Army Council Instructions. Above all, he was furnished with a fairly recent copy of King’s Regulations, which is the soldier’s Bible, and the whole evening left change out of a couple of pounds.

  One thing particularly pleased him.

  “This adjutant’s job of mine. Any alterations from my day?”

  “No change at all, sir,” the old boy told him. “The Adjutants the most important man on the job. He’s the one who’s got to know. Between you and me, sir, that Commandant of yours will be the usual figure-head. He signs on the dotted line, where you put your finger.”

  There was no perturbation in the mind of Travers as he waited for sleep that night. In a week’s time he’d know that job endways and backways. And he’d show Stirrop as much. And without blethering about it. All the same, he had the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that Stirrop wouldn’t go through life content to do nothing but sign on the dotted line.