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

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  DRAMATIC ADVENTURES OF OFFICER

  News has come from Lisbon of the arrival there, after incredible adventures, of Major Passenden, R.A., who was reported as killed near Tourcoing during the retreat to Dunkirk. Major Passenden, it appears, was slightly wounded and he shammed death till after the enemy column had passed, and then tried to reach the coast. He was captured and escaped, and was sheltered at the risk of their lives by a French household. Two months later began the Odyssey which ended yesterday at Lisbon.

  1 See The Case of the Murdered Major.

  CHAPTER II

  A Look Round

  I FOUND Harrison the very good fellow that Splint had described, but as he enters very little into this story I shall not introduce him further. What I should say is that if Harrison hadn’t been capable of running that Camp blindfolded, then I should never have been able to take the part in this story which circumstances, and George Wharton, forced upon me.

  Camp 55 also requires no description. It was situated in parkland with its hutments on the gentle slopes of the sheltering hills, and everywhere were trees to camouflage from bombing. A large stretch of level grassland lay beneath, which was handy for training of troops, and quite a good road led out to the main highway.

  There were about a dozen officers in Mess, but young Craye, over whom I was anxious to cast an eye, was off duty and dining probably in the town. I’d like to be clear, by the way, about Craye. I had no intention of coming the martinet or schoolmaster. All the same, if the young feller-me-lad had anything in him that was worth the finding I flattered myself that I could lick him into shape without his being too aware of it.

  At breakfast the following morning I spotted him at once, but as the more senior of us sat in somewhat awful state at one end of the long table, and the smaller fry had lumped themselves for their own comfort at the other end, I had no word with him. But in appearance he was just what I had imagined—tall, rather pallid, very languid and with a kind of petulant aloofness. There was breeding enough about him even if the whole man did seem in process of going to seed. The dark circles under his eyes were evidence of the thoroughness of the night’s festivities.

  There were three standing officers in the Camp, of whom Craye was one. I had already met all the officers of the two movable Companies, and the Warrant officers, including my own, but as the standing officers were not all in Camp overnight, Harrison was bringing them to my office for introductions immediately after breakfast. I had a general word with him about them beforehand, and all sorts of interesting things emerged about Craye.

  The three officers worked on what might be called three-day shifts. On one day an officer was on duty for twenty-four hours, visiting and inspecting guards, including night visits at surprise hours, and since the distances were large, each used a motor bicycle. On the second day he was off duty altogether, but was not allowed out of Camp till sixteen hours. On the third day he was Camp Orderly Officer, and an important thing about the arrangements was that he was never allowed to change duties with another officer without the express sanction of Harrison or myself. In my old days as a subaltern I should have considered the job of standing officer as something definitely cushy.

  “Craye’s got a relative living quite close,” Harrison told me. “At the hush-hush house to be exact. Mrs. Brende, wife of the Colonel Brende who’s the head man there.”

  “Good Lord!” I said. “I’d been meaning to ask you if you’d heard of a Mrs. Brende in these here parts. She’s an acquaintance of my wife who asked me to look her up. And she’s actually living at Dalebrink Hall, is she?”

  “She’s young Craye’s aunt,” Harrison said. “Putting it an-other way, I rather fancy he’s her favourite nephew. There’s talk of his coming into her money.”

  “Craye,” I said reflectively. “I seem to know someone else named Craye.”

  “There’s a Miss Craye—Penelope Craye—there too,” Harrison said. “She’s a very distant relation. Second cousin or something. She’s Colonel Brende’s private secretary.”

  There was a mightily curious look in his eye as he told me that, and then it changed as he saw the look of perturbation on my own face.

  “Oh, my hat!” I said. “Penelope Craye!”

  “Not an old flame of yours, sir?” he said, and grinned.

  “In that respect thy servant is as a dead dog,” I told him fervently. “But how the devil did that woman get into that particular galley?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Ask the War House. Or put it this way, sir. Why shouldn’t she be there?”

  “You’re getting too deep for me,” I said. “You tell me the details in words of one syllable.”

  So he did, and the facts were as follows. Harrison knew them well enough because he’d been at Camp 55 since the word go. In spite of his smashed shoulder and crippled arm he was a very presentable bloke, and I was rather of the opinion that he’d fallen under the spell of Penelope and knew in consequence more than anyone else about the hush-hush affair.

  Mrs. Brende was a Craye. She had the money and Dalebrink Hall was hers. She was much older than Colonel Brende, to whom she had been married about fifteen years. Harrison put her age as sixty, and the Colonel’s at forty-nine or fifty, but the trouble was that whereas he looked forty, she was looking well over her age. Rumour had it that she controlled the purse-strings pretty rigidly.

  As soon as the Hun began night bombing, Camp 55 was formed. Since Colonel Brende, a gunnery expert, was in charge, and Dalebrink a highly convenient place for the research work, what more natural than that Mrs. Brende—directly or through her husband—should offer Dalebrink Hall and its grounds? Why shouldn’t it be wangled that young Craye should be one of the Camp’s standing officers and near the doting aunt? And since Colonel Brende had to have an amanuensis, why not Penelope?

  “Now, now, young feller,” I said to Harrison. “I can swallow a lot, but I’m not a python. Penelope Craye a friend of yours?”

  “I loathe the woman,” he said.

  Just then the R.S.M. reported that the officers were waiting outside, so Penelope was left for future discussion. In came the three and were introduced. Craye’s salute was most puzzling. The hand went none too briskly to somewhere in the region of the right eyebrow, and his back arched at the same time as if he had changed his mind and was about to kiss my hand instead. When after our brief and friendly chat he gave the same weird salute on dismissal, I really had to do something about it.

  “Oh, Mr. Craye, just a minute.”

  The two went out and his eyebrows rather rose as he looked at me.

  “What is the peculiar disability you suffer from with regard to your back?” I asked him sympathetically.

  “My back, sir?” Craye, by the way, never really smiled. The corner of his mouth would twitch upwards a little, that’s all. Now there was something condescending in the twitch.

  “Yes, your back.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my back, sir.”

  “Then I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “You’re not carrying a lot of worries on your shoulders either, by any chance?”

  He just twitched and said nothing. His look was a bit wary as if he were wondering—naturally, I admit—with what queer fish he had to deal.

  “Since everything seems to be normal,” I said, “I shall expect you to salute like a young officer who has respect for his own bearing and for the example he gives his men. Salute again please.

  “A bit better,” I told him, “but it still won’t do.”

  I didn’t want to labour the point, and after a moment’s silence Craye’s voice came with a rather peculiar quality of veiled insolence.

  “Is that all, sir?”

  I swivelled round in my chair.

  “Yes, Mr. Craye, except for one thing. If that salute of yours isn’t what it ought to be next time you give it, I shall make no bones about putting you under the R.S.M. to learn saluting by numbers.”

&n
bsp; “I’m sorry about that,” I said to Harrison when he’d gone.

  “I’m very glad you did jump on him, sir,” Harrison said. “I’ve had him on the mat for the same thing before. I think he gave that Mayfair salute of his to annoy me because he knew I shouldn’t speak in front of you. Also he’s one of the kind who just flicks up a finger instead of returning the men’s salutes.”

  “What is it?” I said. “Just damned superiority?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “It isn’t really an aggressive superiority—at least not always. He’s grown up to lounge his way through life, and he’s the grandson of a peer, and thinks he’s got plenty of influence behind him, and now he’s got a uniform on he doesn’t see why it should make any difference.”

  Harrison had spoken feelingly, and I was making up my mind that if there was any genuine trouble with Craye I’d have that gentleman shifted elsewhere, even if I had to fight whatever influence he was supposed to have. Harrison and I were going the rounds of the guard posts that morning, and while I waited for him to clear off the routine essentials of the morning, I was thinking not of young Craye but of the distantly related Penelope, for her presence at Dalebrink Hall had come as something of a startler.

  She would be, I thought, about thirty, and since Penelope Craye and racing parlance seem to have much in common, I might describe her as a fine mover and a good looker. Her poise was an insolent cock-sureness, and her patrician beauty has been described in detail and viewed in an ironical setting of repose by the readers of face-cream advertisements, for Penelope is none too well blessed with cash and was one of the first to realize that features have an investment value. Always in the forefront of the more dubious of the Smart Set, and a standby of the snobbish illustrateds, she had the deft knack of getting kudos from various activities while others did the work. Her name had been connected with a man or two, and she had that kind of notoriety which takes the form of furtive whispers and hints at the unsavoury. My opinion of her—and I had run up against her many times—was that she was as hard as they make them, absolutely unscrupulous, a thruster of the first order, and an expert in making use of an easily summoned charm.

  But all that doesn’t really matter compared with the mystery of Penelope Craye at Dalebrink Hall. There she was apparently as private secretary to the head of an important secret research department, but what was she actually doing in terms of sheer honest-to-God work? She could be gushing, plausible and cajoling, but to think of Penelope as taking down notes in shorthand, using a typewriter, filing correspondence and drafting letters was as fantastic as seeing the languid Craye in navvy’s get-up sweating at an electric drill in a road-repair gang. Who then was actually doing the real work while Penelope got the credit?

  But more staggering still was the wonder why she of all people should be entrusted with the secrets of a hush-hush establishment. Before the war it had been hinted pretty openly that she was one of the set of Hitler’s apologists, and some would not have been surprised if she had been clapped in clink at the time of the Fifth Column round-up. And since publicity was the breath of her nostrils, how was she existing without it? I’d seen the weekly illustrateds regularly, and I hadn’t seen a picture with the wording—The Hon. Penelope Craye with Colonel Brende and a friend. The Hon. Penelope is doing very secret war work somewhere in England. Then if she wasn’t getting publicity, just what was she getting?

  The whole thing was a mystery, even if I did find some sort of a theory to account for things. Penelope, I told myself, was probably blitzed to blazes in London. The experience scared several kinds of hell out of her, and she was glad to work the ropes to get the job in the sylvan security of Dalebrink. Money perhaps was tighter than usual, and she was glad of the cash coupled with a free home. And if there could be no publicity, she could at least let all her pals know that she was a highly important cog in the war machine.

  I thought no more about Penelope Craye when Harrison and I started off on that visit to the guard posts. I had a private map and could follow all routes and sitings, but what interested me most was the beauty of the country-side in that belated spring. The car, officially known as mine, had pre-selection gears so that Harrison could drive it, and that gave me the chance for a good look round. I had never visited the Peak District, and these outlying spurs of it were something quite new to me. In the sun of that cold April morning, the hills had the most fascinating colourings that shifted with the clouds that crossed them, and the detour road we took, that often overhung a sheer drop to the dale below, was a real switchback.

  We took in a tunnel and a couple of bridges before coming out at the two factories. When we turned for home it was along that line of main road that Splint had mentioned. We inspected another tunnel and in a minute or two were at the town. Its population was about eight thousand and was far more pastoral than I had imagined. The shops were good and there were quite a lot of hotels. As it was near midday we halted at one for a drink. When we came out I noticed the police-station opposite. Something told me to go in and ask if they had any information about George Wharton. Then I foresaw complications— proof of identity, for instance—and changed my mind.

  Harrison suggested that I should drive from then on so as to get used to the gears. The road was dead straight to the Garden City, but before reaching it I had to turn right if I wanted to see it, as it lay on a kind of by-pass.

  “Splint was telling me a little about the Neggers,” I said. “An interesting collection of coves, and I wish he’d told me more.”

  Harrison didn’t smile. He just frowned and gave me a sideways nod.

  “I think they’re a damn dangerous lot,” he said.

  When in Rome, believe what the Romans, do, so I frowned portentously too, and at once Harrison was getting everything off his chest. The Neggers, it appeared, had been very active in pacifist palaver and propaganda for months after the outbreak of war. When the Government instituted the campaign against loose or defeatist talk, they at once lay doggo. When the campaign petered out, they emerged from the long grass, and were now as active as ever.

  The main plank of their platform was that the war was caused by man’s inhumanity to man, in other words Versailles. A just peace was still perfectly possible, and every death from an enemy bomb added to the blood guilt of the Government. There should be redistribution of Colonies, and so on. Nothing very new, as you can see, but there were brains in the Garden City who could make the hackneyed and illogical look mightily attractive.

  The President of the Group was Sir Hereward Dove, a man of some wealth and a dabbler in architecture and spiritualism. The moving spirit was, however, the Rev. Lancelot Benison, the incumbent of St. Luke’s, the church of the City. According to Harrison he was a menace. He had split the church by pacifist sermons, and so could be certain that the substantial flock that remained were Neggers dyed in the wool. The town and the factories had been at times seething with rage. After a speech made by Benison at a Neggers’ meeting a very ugly situation had developed. A gang had been organized at the factories to smash up the vicarage and the building known as Neggers’ Hall, but the police were tipped off just in time.

  Benison thereupon organized his own defence body and threatened retaliation if necessary, and the police were afraid to take action because they had very much played into his hands through their ignorance of the factory plot.

  “But isn’t there anybody of sufficient drive and standing to organize local opinion and get something done?” I said.

  “The town bigwigs are nearly all tradesmen,” Harrison said. “Think how much money goes into their pockets from the City. The local paper does smite ’em good and hard. Oh, yes, and there’s Colonel Brende. At least it’s supposed to be Colonel Brende.”

  He explained. Letters written by one Patria had appeared in the local paper, showing up the Neggers and demanding action. Colonel Brende was supposed to be their author, perhaps because his wife was a Dalebrink notability, and because the first letter had blas
ted hell out of Benison for demanding an immediate ceasing of night-flying planes over the area. The research work at Dalebrink Hall required co-operation of that kind, and it guessed that nobody but Colonel Brende could have been in possession of the material for that devastating reply.

  “What did Benison do then?” I asked.

  “He hinted at retaliation.”

  “But surely that was pure hot air?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Curious, wasn’t it, that Haw-Haw should have the whole thing at his finger-tips inside a week?” He gave that same ominous sideways nod. “I tell you Benison’s a dangerous man. He’s a fanatic, and he’s got a following. The sabotaging of Dalebrink Hall isn’t as fantastic as you might think.”

  Then he suddenly broke off and his hand was on my arm.

  “Slow down a minute, sir. There’re our two coves. Those two at the church gate.”

  I not only slowed down—I drew the car to a halt about forty yards away. Two men were in earnest conversation and with them was a third—a burly man with slightly stooping shoulders, and this burly man was evidently the life and soul of the party, for as the car stopped he was all at once giving a mighty guffaw and digging the more elderly of the other two in the ribs. Both laughed as if the joke were a vintage one. As for me, my eyes were popping clean out of my head, for the life and soul of the trio was none other than George Wharton!

  Harrison noticed nothing of my surprise, and we sat there for a couple of minutes with our eyes on the three at the gate. Dove was a huge old man of about seventy, with a monstrous paunch and a patriarchal snowy beard. Benison was tallish too, four-square on his pins and hard as nails. Dove I had mentally classed as a William Morris run to fat and foolishness; Benison’s vicious mouth and beetling eyebrows made him John Knox with his whiskers off. And in case you may think I was regarding the whole thing as a joke, let me say at once that I hated the sight of both Dove and Benison, and when the three moved on towards the church and our car got going again, I said to Harrison that they looked a highly unpleasant couple.