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

  I had the B.2606 in my pocket-book and smilingly handed it over. To my surprise he made no bones about taking it, and when he handed it back, all he said was. “Good.” I didn’t like it. Perhaps I’ve described the brief episode badly, but what he did was not prudent or careful, and it savoured of the officious and unnecessary. It changed the whole man and gave a glimpse of someone who had the capacity for making himself damnably unpopular. I think I must have shown something, for at once he was going out of his way to make himself most friendly and informative. Naturally one had to be most careful at the Hall, and he was sorry he couldn’t tell me just what the research was out for.

  “Things going well, sir?” I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders and gave me a little smile.

  “Can’t grumble,” he said, and it was easy enough to tell that things were going uncommonly well.

  Then he got to his feet and was saying that there were some things he could show me, if I cared to look. I was hopping up at once, and just then there was quick tap at the door and in walked Penelope Craye. She was carrying some papers, apparently for signature, but she had on a tweed costume and her hat as if she were just going out. I told you, didn’t I, that she was a pretty woman? I apologize for the understatement. That afternoon she looked Garbo and Hedy Lamarr rolled into one.

  As soon as she saw me, she gave a little “Oh!” and followed it up with, “I beg your pardon. I’ll come back again.”

  “Not at all,” said the Colonel, and at once went across to his desk. “You don’t know Major Travers, do you? This is Miss Craye, my secretary.”

  “Heavens!” she said, and stared. But she wasn’t swindling me with those airs of surprise. I’d have betted all I have in War Loan that she knew I was in Dalebrink as soon as Brende knew, and that if the door through which she had come was that to her office, then she had been listening ear to keyhole.

  “You two know each other?” Brende said.

  “We’ve met in town,” I said, and, with my very best smile: “We’ve worked together on Hospital Committees as a matter of fact. You like it down here, Miss Craye?”

  She didn’t bat an eyelid. Even during the five minutes she was in the room I could tell that a remarkable change had come over her. There was a certain demureness, and whenever I caught her eye there was a look in it that was trying to assure me that the past was over and she was a reformed character whose only wish was to be friends. Her keynote had changed too. The clothes she was wearing might be first-class, but they were quieter than the paradisal adornments she had affected in the old days, and her manner was that of a high-class secretary—quiet, knowledgeable and unobtrusive.

  “I think I would redraft this,” I heard Brende say from the corner to which I had withdrawn. “It won’t take you five minutes to knock it off on your typewriter. And perhaps you’d better take down that chit for Department Q/Z.”

  She picked up a slip of paper from the desk and took down the dictated note in shorthand.

  “Sorry to be all this trouble,” Brende smiled at her when she had finished.

  Her eyes fell demurely.

  “Not at all, I’ve heaps of time before I need go out.”

  “How is your wife?” she asked me as she passed.

  “Very well, and very busy,” I said.

  “She’s an absolute dear. I do admire her so.”

  Before I could recover from that, she was gone. Her look had had the same appealing quality of forgiveness, and Bernice might have been the friend of her bosom, and while I was wondering what was this new scheme she was planning, and its significance, Brende was rising from the desk. He drew back an etching from the wall and disclosed a hidden safe in which he put some papers.

  “Have you a dislike for working upstairs, like me, or don’t you mind not working on a ground floor?”

  Before I could answer, he was saying that convenience was everything. There was the secretary’s room, and that other door opened into his own bedroom.

  “There’s some pretty dangerous stuff here,” he said, and waved at where the safe had been. I had the idea that after the unnecessary way he had inquired into my credentials, he was now trying to show me how completely he trusted me.

  “Now what about a look downstairs?” he said briskly.

  Two rooms were given up to research work, but I was allowed in only one, which was the old music-room, and a big one at that. Nobody was there at the moment as it was used principally at night, but I caught sight of various contraptions and machines. The other big room had most of the experimental gadgets, and there was also an office in the old billiard-room. The servants’ parlour had been taken over for a lounge, and the breakfast-room was fitted with forms, folded flat, and tables, trestle folding, and used as a dining-room.

  In the office he introduced me to three of the staff. The fourth, Squadron-Leader Pattner, was hardly ever there except at night, and I gathered that he was principally liaison between the research group and the R.A.F. The other three looked most interesting, even if the haphazardness of their clothes and the general untidiness might have made one tremble for the efficiency of their labours.

  Newton, the greatest living authority on acoustics—as I was told later—was a mousy little man wearing the baggiest flannels I have ever seen, and an aged pair of tennis-shoes from which protruded a big toe. He looked about fifty, and might have been taken for a down-at-heel clerk.

  Riddle, who looked about twenty-five, was tall and bony, and had the most carroty mop of red hair I have ever seen. He had a comical face, by which I mean that it had the most cheerful and friendly grin, and he looked the sort of chap who’d be still grinning if he fell off a sky-scraper, being certain in his mind that a few elephants had passed that way. One day, according to Brende, he was going to make Einstein look like a quack.

  And talking of Einstein brings me to Heinrich Wissler, who was a Czech, for he looked much as Einstein must have looked as a young man. If Riddle’s hair was a mop, then Wissler’s was a super mop, and it looked as if he had long since given up hope of getting out the tangles. He was fattish and his face very red, and though he looked well over forty, they told me he was a terror at table-tennis, which, with darts, was the hobby of the gang in its leisure periods. Wissler cast on me a look of extraordinary apprehension as soon as he saw me come in. I don’t know why, for I am a harmless-looking cove even in war-paint, and it couldn’t have been his English which made him nervous of meeting strangers, for it was as near perfection as can be.

  They were a friendly three and looked happy as sand-boys. Naturally we talked about everything but the job in hand, and I promised to come along some time and take on their best man at darts, a game to which my elongated form makes me peculiarly adapted. When we got outside Brende told me about Wissler, whose name was also one to conjure with. Some said already that he was the greatest living physicist, and Brende admitted that he had a staggering brain. He had clung on at Prague till after the German occupation, and had then managed to do a bolt. His wife was still there, and his son had died in a concentration camp.

  The evening was still young and I had nothing, as far as I knew, to recall me to Camp before dinner, so I thought I would drive through the Garden City again in the hope of catching George Wharton. When I had driven a few hundred yards I came to a place where the woods made a fine shelter against the cold wind, and then the sun felt absolutely warm, so I pulled up the car and stoked my pipe, and did a few minutes’ basking.

  Naturally also I did some thinking. I told you of that unfortunate habit of mine of staring at other people’s private and valued possessions, and here’s yet another peculiarity of mine, which has arisen through a few years’ work at the Yard. I have got into the regrettable habit of treating the ordinary meetings, happenings and circumstances of life as if they were those connected with a Yard case. I try to deduce things about people, and nose out mysteries, and if there are no mysteries, that worries me little for I can always imagine them.

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nbsp; So as I pulled at my pipe, here are some of the things I was thinking and wondering. In that side hall to which I had been admitted there was no telephone, and there had been none in Mrs. Brende’s room. But there had been one in the main hall. with mysterious extensions to the main office, Colonel Brende’s room and doubtless to the office of Penelope Craye. It seemed, therefore, that Mrs. Brende was something of a recluse who rarely phoned or received calls. When she did they were transmitted to her through the liaison of Ledd and Annie.

  Penelope had not taken tea with us, perhaps because she was busy, but it was strange that Mrs. Brende had not mentioned even a distant relation who was living in the house. Colonel Brende had also not been mentioned till in that queer way at the very last moment, and it seemed reasonable therefore to draw certain conclusions. Mrs. Brende was a recluse, though an active enough woman mentally and bodily, and the reason perhaps was the nature of things, by which I mean that she was rather out of place, though the house was her home, in a station of highly secret and important research. When she offered the house to the Government she had probably made it a condition that she should still be allowed to keep her own rooms, and the Government had countered with the insistence that she should keep to those rooms.

  Mind you, I did think to myself that Brende might find the situation quite bearable. To be candid, his wife was of an age and temperament to offer him little physically, and he looked as full-blooded as they make ‘em. Shakespeare may talk about the woman always taking a younger than herself and so wearing to him instead of still further from him, but the Bard is not infallible and I have known many such marriages that were as near perfection as may be, except perhaps for the physical side, and even there one can imagine toleration and latitude. People like the Brendes don’t wear their affection on their sleeves, and for all I knew the two might have settled down to an affection the more deep since it was altogether unobtrusive.

  Very woolly, all that thinking, wasn’t it? But the problem of Penelope was clear cut enough. I’d never credited her with lack of brains. Carelessness, over-confidence and trusting too much to luck, perhaps, but I’d never doubted that she had a brain both cold and calculating, and talents enough for the using. But it had never occurred to me that she could have endured the slog and grind of learning typing and shorthand for the sake of serving anyone else but the Hon. Penelope Craye. Why then the change of heart and outlook? Why did she want to be friends with me? Where was the catch in it all?

  Just then a low, scarlet sports car flashed by me, and I caught a glimpse of Penelope at the wheel. I was certain she had not spotted or suspected me, so I moved my own car on in steady and wary pursuit. We passed the smaller houses of the City, then the church and the Neggers’ Institute, and as we came to the larger houses with the spacious gardens, Penelope’s car slowed down considerably, and I followed suit.

  She went on at a crawl like that till the last house had been passed, and even then she didn’t quicken speed. My car was now a hundred yards behind hers, and I was wondering if I ought to overtake her, for by now she was surely aware that I was on her tail. Then she rounded the bend where the road turns to rejoin the main highway. I still crawled on, and as I came round the bend, my eyes were once more goggling. Standing on the verge path and in earnest talk with Penelope was George Wharton!

  Then he was replacing something in his breast-pocket and getting into her car. On it shot, and at the main road turned left. Then it fairly hummed along and I lost it, but when I reached the shopping centre of the town, there it was drawn up outside what Harrison had told me was the only high-class tea-shop left. And there my nerve failed me. Much as I should have liked to stroll carelessly past the table where the two were undoubtedly sitting, and to bestow a knowing wink on George, there was Penelope to consider, and the last thing in my thoughts was to let her know I had been on her tail. As for George Wharton and the rest of it, in the words of Samuel Weller, latter adopted by George himself, the whole thing fairly beat cock-fighting.

  CHAPTER IV

  Enter Wharton

  WHEN I came in to breakfast the following morning, Harrison told me that there would be night flying by our planes. It was usual for us to be informed by the Hall since an alert would alter the disposition of the sentries. The local civil authorities were also informed.

  “Isn’t that unnecessary?” I said. “Surely if the local siren doesn’t go, everyone must know the planes are ours?”

  “You’d think so,” he said. “It’s all the result of our friend Benison’s mischief-making. He said the fact that the sirens didn’t go wasn’t enough, and nervous people wouldn’t sleep unless they were dead sure whose planes they were.”

  “Many planes, are there?”

  “It varies,” he said, “but never more than a few. Sometimes they’re on for an hour, and they have been on most of the night.”

  After the office work was finished that morning I made a routine inspection of Camp with the R.S.M., and when I returned there was an officer in battle-dress waiting outside my door. He turned out to be a Captain Cross, commander of the local platoon of the Home Guard, an old-timer who had been on retired pay for the last six years and now was back in harness again.

  Reminiscence is a vice among us old-timers, and we settled down to comparing experiences in the last war and finding mutual acquaintances. Then at last we came to the local Home Guard, and he told me it was well up to strength and keen as mustard.

  “Where do most of them come from?” I asked.

  “Oh, the town,” he said. “The factories run their own platoon, also we don’t get a lot from the City.”

  “And they’re Anti-Neggers,” I suggested.

  He smiled. “They’ve put you wise about that then, have they?”

  “To a certain extent,” I said guardedly. “But what’s the actual position at the City? Most of the young men called up?”

  He said they were, though people considered there had been a surprising number of exemptions. Also the City had been accused of dodging the taking in of evacuees by importing their relatives and friends from bombed areas. Though those that had come forward for the Home Guard were the very best type, the City was lousy—his word and not a bad one—with slackers. If they could flock to join that fake defence body which Benison had started, why couldn’t they be doing work of national importance?

  “What’s your genuine opinion of the Neggers?” I said. “Ought they to be taken seriously? Are there any really dangerous characters?”

  “You’re not for them in any way?” he said, and gave me a sideways look.

  “God forbid!” I said hastily.

  He smiled. “Then I don’t mind saying they’re a collection of bastards. Excuse my language, but that’s plain talking.”

  “By Hitler, out of Wedlock,” I said, but as it was a very bad joke he naturally didn’t see it.

  “I don’t know that it’s quite Hitler,” he said frowningly, “but some of it is. Where does Benison get his money from?”

  “Where indeed?” I said, not knowing what he was getting at.

  “The living’s four hundred a year,” he was going on, “and he lives up to it. Indeed I’ve heard there used to be trouble over tradesmen’s bills. Now he’s got a fine car and he’s spending money hand over fist. And what about Haw-Haw knowing all that’s going on here?”

  I frowned knowingly, though all the Haw-Haw business leaves me cold. Half the things he’s supposed to say exist only in the minds of the self-important windbags who originate them.

  “You regard Benison as a bad hat?” I suggested.

  “I regard him as absolutely ruthless,” he said. “I believe he’s unscrupulous and I know he’s vindictive, and he’s as cunning as a pack of monkeys. He knows just how far to go. And he knows how to hint at things so that he can’t be pinned down to words. If he was clapped under lock and key Garden City wouldn’t stink the way it does. All this Negger business would go plumb to pieces.”

  Then he was smi
ling feebly as if he knew he had let his tongue rather run away with him, and it was he who changed the topic.

  “Still, I don’t want to take up your time with those damn Neggers. What I really came to see you about was the question of co-operation.”

  “I’m rather in the dark,” I said. “Perhaps Captain Harrison will come in and help us out.”

  Cross knew Harrison well enough. When the Camp had been temporarily short of guards owing to sudden changes over, the Home Guard had lent a hand.

  “The position here is this,” I said, “and Captain Harrison will correct me if I’m wrong. We don’t pick men for guard. We have control over certain standing troops and personnel. The rest of the troops are ostensibly for training, and we call on their officers to supply so many guards by day and night. They make out the rosters, and once they’re actually on guard, then they’re under our control and supervision. What you’re being good enough to suggest is that if there’s a deficiency, you’ll continue to make it good.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “But what I would like are some co-operational exercises. Something on the lines of trying to enter certain spots which your men are guarding. Pretending to be parachute troops, in fact.”

  “That sounds good,” I said. “What’s your idea, Harrison?”

  “I think it would ginger up everybody all round,” Harrison said. “We’d have to have a big pow-wow with our people first. You’d want one too, Cross. If your people didn’t halt when challenged, for instance, they’d most certainly be fired on, exercise or no exercise.”

  “Why not?” Cross said cheerfully. “That’s all part of the training. So what about it, gentlemen? Can we fix anything up?”

  “No time like the present,” I said.

  In half an hour we had a scheme. Allowing two days for the two pow-wows, zero night would be on the Monday. The factories’ platoon would not be asked to co-operate at the moment, but every other place we guarded would be considered liable to sham attack. One only per night was to be an objective, and that objective would not be settled on till the morning, and then by arrangement between the three of us over the phone. The scheme might be an elastic and continuous one, starting from the first night, and we all thought it a really first-class piece of training, Not only would it keep the guards on their toes but it would relieve all monotony. I was so pleased about it that I made up my mind to give a hundred cigarettes—if obtainable—to the one who captured most of Cross’s parachutists, and Harrison was so pleased that he took Cross off for an immediate drink in the Mess.