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

  Travers first saw the red light clearly in that short period before Mafferty’s arrival, when all the work was on his own hands. After a comfortable night at his home, and lined with a good breakfast, the Commandant would reach camp at ten-thirty or later. He would be genial enough; address his Adjutant as “old chap,” and Travers would hope for a quiet day. That something would happen.

  “Have you indented for those fire-buckets? I think you ought to.”

  “I’ve already indented,” Travers might say patiently.

  “How many?”

  “I can’t say off-hand,” Travers would say. “I’ll look it up for you if you wish.”

  “But, damn-it-all, man, you’re the Quartermaster. You ought to know. Fancy indenting for buckets and not knowing how many you indented for.”

  The first time that kind of thing happened. Travers made a stand. He pointed out that he was indenting for thousands of things on scores of forms, and that to carry everything in one’s mind would be to have the memory of a Datas. Stirrop refused to take it like that, so Travers pointed out something else.

  “If the Brigadier or anyone else comes here, sir, and asks you a question, you can’t always answer point-blank. You have to look things up, or refer to me.”

  “That’s nothing to do with it,” Stirrop said. “You’re the Quartermaster and you ought to know. Damn-bad staff work. Damn-bad.”

  Thereafter Travers was never free from those infuriating challenges—“You’re the Adjutant!” or, “You’re the Quartermaster!” The trouble was that once Stirrop was crossed, he flew into a rage, and he would sulk for hours. Never once did Travers hear him admit an error, though if something he did was too patently wrong to be disowned, he would make it a joke.

  “Extraordinary of me doing a thing like that. Not like me at all.”

  But no sooner did the camp get settled down than Stirrop found the niche of his darlingest imagination. He became the hub of things, and liked to see himself as the great controlling brain of some mighty organisation. He was always asking for the ’phone to be put through, and for Miss Dance to be sent in to take down letters, and in the meanwhile Travers himself or Mafferty would want to ring up about something vital, and instead would be kept hanging about for hours. And, of course, while he had the ’phone through to him, various departments would ring up from outside. Then Stirrop would settle himself comfortably in his chair, one vast importance.

  “Commandant No. 54 Prisoner of War Camp speaking.”

  It might be an inquiry about troops’ pay, or rations, or clothing, but he naturally liked to handle it himself, and since he lacked the most elementary knowledge of methods or procedure, Travers and Mafferty would find themselves with errors to remove and mismanagement to put right, or would discover they had been committed to something that broke every regulation of the Service. Or letters would arrive which were Greek to them, till they discovered that they arose out of some wordy and windy effusions that Stirrop had taken on himself to write to all and sundry without reference to a soul. Mafferty was sometimes livid with rage.

  “The fact of the matter is, sir,” he told Travers bluntly, ‘you’re being treated like an office boy and I’m just a ration clerk.”

  “No point in taking it too seriously,” Travers told him. Once the camp had really settled down, he kept on assuring himself, then Stirrop might settle down to something decent too. Perhaps Stirrop was worrying because that Z.21 business had gone phut, and prisoners might really arrive before the camp was ready.

  In those first few weeks Travers managed to retain somehow a sense of proportion and a sense of humour, for until repetition staled them and they became actually menacing, many of Stirrop’s little ways were genuinely funny.

  His impatience, for instance, and the way he imagined—or at least acted—as if he were the one person in this world who was right, but that the rest of the world was not only wrong but in a conspiracy against himself. As soon as he arrived in the office of a morning, Travers would be there with the necessary correspondence, and would invariably hear and witness something like the following.

  “Sign this, do I? Now where’s my pen? What the hell’s happened to my pen! Would you believe it? One can’t leave anything on this desk without some bloody fool has to go and touch it.”

  Meanwhile he would be picking up this and that and throwing it down and working himself up to a fine little rage. Then Travers might discern the pen.

  “Oh. There it is, then. Now the bloody thing won’t write. Who the hell’s been tampering with this ink!”

  It would be the same with poor Timms, his batman, or even with Ramble, his supposed-to-be right-hand man. He would come dashing into Travers’s office.

  “Have you seen my batman? Where the hell’s that bloody fellow got to? Would you believe it! I saw him only a minute ago, and now he’s gone and disappeared.”

  But to accompany the Commandant in his car from the camp to town was the titbit. Travers would rarely say a word, but would be listening to something like this.

  “Damn these cyclists. Why the hell they let ’em on the roads I can’t make out . . . Now is that fellow going to stop, or isn’t he? Make up your mind, you bloody fool! There! Would you believe it! Didn’t give a signal of any sort! . . . There we are. Lights against us again. Why the hell they have the lights I’m damned if I know . . .”

  Then there was another side which Travers earlier found most amusing. When Stirrop spoke in a quiet voice and addressed him as “old chap,” then some favour was about to be asked. It might be could Travers spare him if he took a day off for a shooting trip, or to see old Charles So-and-so “who used to be my Company Commander at So-and-so.” Or he would ask if Travers minded if he made the week-end last out till Tuesday morning as this and that really must be done at home. Travers always urged him to take every spot of absence he could. After all, Stirrop’s absences were holidays for all, and were later to be the oases in hell.

  Once Stirrop lost a page or two of camp standing orders, later to be discovered under an old newspaper in his office. But in he rushed to Travers, and all the clerical staff had to be assembled and questioned. When he had gone, Miss Dance remarked in her languid voice:

  “If I do find it, how shall I know if it belongs to the Commandant?”

  Winter grunted.

  “Easy enough. Every page’ll have about ten ‘What the hell’s’ and a dozen ‘Would you believe it’s.’”

  Towards the end of November there was a first-class row. Travers had seen it coming. Ramble and Mafferty had been getting more touchy and on the jump, and the former was losing his sense of humour. Then the balloon went up—twice.

  The first ascent was at an air-raid test. Stirrop forgot as usual the very orders he himself had issued, and imagined that this was taking place, when something else was laid down. The point was that Ramble was not just where he expected him to be. First came mutterings and stamping of feet, then the temper was lost altogether. In front of all the assembled squads Stirrop was rushing furiously about.

  “Ram-BLE! . . . Ram-BLE!! . . . Where the hell’s the bloody old fool got to? . . . RAMBLE!!! What the hell do you think you’re doing!”

  So much in brief for that. The second event was when the Commandant paid a visit to Mafferty’s room on some business or other, and on coming down went straight to Travers. In his cold little eyes was that narrowing look that meant trouble.

  “Are you aware that Mafferty writes letters?”

  “Of course I am, sir.”

  “What! You allow a quartermaster-sergeant to write letters!”

  “You’ll pardon me, sir, but he’s not a quartermaster-sergeant. The world’s moved on since our time. Mafferty’s a second-class warrant-officer . . .”

  “Are you telling me my own business? Haven’t I been a Company Officer?”

  “Excuse me, sir, but let me speak. This isn’t a company, and this isn’t twenty years ago. It’s expressly laid down in K.R. that Mafferty can and sho
uld write letters . . .”

  “But, good God, man! A quartermaster-sergeant! What are you here for?”

  Travers sighed. “If you’d have allowed me to go on, sir, I’d have said that the same para. of King’s Regulations lays down safeguards, which I follow. Mafferty writes letters about things which concern his particular department, but it’s I who read them and sign them.”

  Crossing him was the final straw, as Travers should have known.

  “I don’t wish to hear any more about it. It’s got to stop. You understand that? It’s got to stop.”

  Travers knew the time had come to make a stand.

  “What you mean, sir, is that I’m to inform Mafferty that he isn’t to write any more letters?”

  “That’s it. As a matter of fact, I’ve already told him so.”

  “Very well, then, sir. I’m telling you here and now that I shall countermand that order. If you wish to take disciplinary action, then I shall fight. I shall go straight to the Brigadier with that para. of King’s Regulations in my hand.”

  A vicious little sneer came over Stirrop’s face, but there was also a wariness as Travers could see.

  “I’d sleep over that if I were you. It wouldn’t be easy, perhaps, for you to get another appointment.”

  But Stirrop refused to force the issue. Travers had won, but to know that Stirrop, who never forgave a defeat, would be well on his tail from then on.

  Those two happenings, which took place in the same week, had a sequel. Ramble and Mafferty approached the Adjutant and asked for a private and confidential interview, to which, as men having a grievance, they were entitled. The camp was too dangerous, and that early evening they met in the saloon bar of the Green Man.

  Something else should here be mentioned first. It would have been tedious to rehearse all the rest of Stirrop’s little tricks, though it should be remembered that they were at the back of those two warrant-officers’ minds. That he was grossly selfish may have become apparent, but there remains also the fact that he was a liar who believed his own lies. He was a hogger of the limelight, and what could be more galling to those who had sweated, improved, and reorganised, than to hear someone else throwing his weight about over the ’phone or in the presence of some brass hat, with: “I soon found out what was wrong here, sir. . . . It took me a long time to work this out, sir. . . . Do you think I’ve done right, sir, in . . . Now this is something I was rather pleased about, sir, when I thought of it. . . .”

  To put the whole thing bluntly, therefore, Stirrop had the implicit obedience of the whole camp. Discipline was good—Ramble and Travers saw to that—but men see, hear, and talk. What Stirrop had lost was every man’s respect, and he was to be dangerously near losing their loyalties.

  “The truth of the matter’s this, sir,” began Ramble, when the drinks were on the quiet corner table. “Mafferty and I are thinking of asking to be returned to our units.”

  “We can’t stick it, sir, and that’s the end of it,” Mafferty said.

  Travers smiled. “Now, now, now. You mustn’t talk like that. You’re not the only people who have to put up with things—”

  “We know that, sir, and if we were you, sir, we wouldn’t put up with it either.”

  Travers listened to a very long list of complaints, and knew that a first-class scandal might burst on Shoreleigh Garrison at any minute unless there was careful handling. He argued and persuaded, and even asked what he should do if they, his two essential men, should go and leave him in the lurch.

  “That’s the only thing that’s kept us back, sir,” Ramble told him. “If it hadn’t been for you, sir, and the way everybody likes you, we’d have made these complaints days ago. You don’t mind us talking like this, sir?”

  “Not at all,” Travers said. “I wish, perhaps, you hadn’t brought me in personally, but there we are. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, and what I think you both ought to do.”

  The upshot was that the two agreed to carry on. Travers reminded them of their promise to stand by him, and his own never to let them down. Now, as soon as they had a very real and definite grievance, they should come to him, and at once he would insist on an interview with the Commandant. And, to start with, he would have an interview the following morning, and try to get things on a new footing.

  Stirrop was forgotten for a few minutes, while new drinks came and the corner grew hazy with tobacco smoke. Then Ramble mentioned something specially confidential which Travers ought to know. He approached the matter sideways by asking if Travers had heard anything about Miss Dance.

  “Yes,” said Travers dryly. “I did gather that the camp name for her was The Whore of Babylon, and I’d meant to ask you to jump down hard on anyone you caught using it.”

  Ramble made a wry face.

  “It wasn’t that exactly, sir. She’s been seen out with the Commandant, and the men are talking about it.”

  “What do you mean by out?”

  “Well, once it was walking out in a lane pretty late at night.”

  Travers thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  “Better leave that alone. It’s dynamite.”

  “All the same, sir,” went on Ramble doggedly, “I thought you ought to know.”

  “You never know what’s safe in your own room, sir,” put in Mafferty, "if she goes in the other room with tales.”

  “True enough,” said Travers. “All the same, hasn’t she got a bloke of her own? I’ve rather gathered that impression.”

  Travers, as a matter of fact, had gathered more than an impression. Recently a man’s voice had asked for Miss Dance on the ’phone, and by her attitude he had judged who the caller was. Young Pewter of the Midshires had mentioned going to a dance and how he had seen her there with a cove called—what was it now?—Tester—that was it. A Captain Tester, who had been in mufti.

  As for the quiet work that Stirrop was putting in, Travers could now understand a good many things. Once he had tapped quickly at the Commandant’s door and gone in, only to be aware of certain quick movements, and a strange scarlet on the face of the shorthand typist. But, as he had told the warrant-officers, that business was far too dangerous to be even aware of.

  The following morning he requested a few minutes of the Commandant’s time, but was unable to state even a case, for as soon as the purpose of the interview became apparent, Stirrop refused to discuss the matter. Travers, he said in so many words, had his remedy. If he was dissatisfied, all he had to do was resign. Travers gave him a straight, level look, and then walked out of the room.

  Resignation was a thing he had thought of, but it would mean leaving his successor to suffer the same treatment, and it would mean desertion of Ramble and Mafferty. Moreover, to run would be cowardly. And yet to fight would be merely to rat on one’s senior officer, and he more than suspected that Stirrop had dug himself so well in at Headquarters that to fight him would be a forlorn hope.

  One afternoon in the following week the Commandant walked into Travers’s office with a stranger, As usual, when in the company of others, he was most genial.

  “May I introduce Captain Tester. This is Captain Travers, the Adjutant.”

  Miss Dance had got to her feet. Travers had scrambled up to be aware of a blond young fellow of about thirty, in a really immaculate lounge suit.

  “I've heard of you a good deal, Captain Travers,” he said.

  “And not all to my good,” Travers said.

  Tester laughed. “Not to your bad, if that’s the right word.”

  Stirrop actually patted Travers on the back.

  “Make out a pass for Captain Tester, will you, old chap? We’ve just been having a look round the camp.” He was off again as he spoke. “See me before you go, Tester, will you? And you might come in a minute, Miss Dance, if Captain Travers can spare you.”

  While Travers made out the pass to the camp, Tester told all about himself. He was Indian Army, but a shot through the belly in Wazirstan had nearly scuppered him altoge
ther. As it was he had been invalided out.

  “Tough luck,” Travers told him.

  “It was, rather,” Tester said. “Still, I’m hoping to get back. Working the good old influence for all it’s worth.”

  Meanwhile, he said, he was staying at the Royal, where Travers must come and dine with him some time. Travers said he would be delighted. Then before Tester went on for a farewell word with Stirrop, the two inspected Tester’s rakish-looking car.

  After that—and contrary to every regulation—Tester was always looking in. Stirrop and he were much together, and Travers could make neither rhyme nor reason of it all. Which of the two was the ami complaisant, he did not know. What he suspected was that Tester was the one in ignorance, but as he had never cottoned to him, he didn’t give a hoot either way. What he did object to was Tester’s popping in and out of his own room at all hours, and it was on his account that he made a habit of seeing that both the outer door and that leading through to Winter were locked when he himself was out.

  Winter, too, expressed a dislike for Tester. As for Travers’s relationships with Winter, they were very vague and shifting. Winter was a queer cuss. He never stood up to Stirrop, and though Stirrop had rapped his knuckles more than once in public, he said very little behind his back. Sometimes he would even make excuses for him, and to his face he was the very model of correctness. Travers felt in fact that all the weeks he had known Winter, he had never really yet visualised the man as a whole or assessed his real personality. Not that he disliked him. Far from it. Winter in many ways was a good sort—though even there he sometimes seemed just too anxious to please.

  The second week in December word suddenly came from War House that prisoners were coming. They turned out to be the crew and the German passengers of a Hun ship—sixty in all. Then there was panic. Stirrop was making arrangements, forgetting them and making others, rushing round like a madman, bawling here and bellowing there, and working himself up to such a state that the whole camp was on edge.