“What’s the staff like?” I ventured to ask him.
“Pretty good,” he said. “A mixed lot, of course. A sprinkling of Regulars, and some Not-so-Regular.” He gave me a queer look as he said that, and then was hastily going on. “Of course one needs all sorts in a job like that.”
“And what’s my category?” I asked him, with a fine pretence at jocularity. “Regular, or Not-so-Regular?”
“You’re—well, you’re quite different,” he said, and blushed a bit confusedly. “I mean, we have both your records—your Service and civilian ones. That’s really why you were picked out for a likely second-in-command.”
I don’t want to be prolix about all these preliminaries to my arrival at Peakridge, so I’ll say that as far as the War House was concerned, that was that. As for the remark that the staff would consist of Regular Officers and those Not-so-Regular, I knew far more about that than my young friend had imagined when he had allowed his own feelings in the matter to be clearly read from his look. Whispers, for instance, had got abroad that in Home Guard schools there had been antagonisms between the two classes he had mentioned, and I had often wondered what truth there had been behind the rumour. Volunteers in the Spanish War, for instance, had been considerably employed, owing to their knowledge of anti-tank warfare and devices, and of guerrilla tactics. It was said that the products of the Staff College regarded these with the tolerance and mild amusement that one quietly gives to crude but enthusiastic amateurs who have the additional demerit of not being pukka. You will notice that I express no personal opinion but merely acknowledge having heard the rumours.
And if you are wondering why I have brought in the subject at all, let me say at once that what I have said is very relevant to the story I have to tell. Even before I actually reached Peakridge, rumour became something more than rumour. What I have only hinted at therefore, was something which was slowly to assume alarming, and even terrifying, proportions. After the tragedy it was to lie like a mist across the path of investigation. And since I am becoming cryptic, I will leave it at that, and let the story tell itself.
Until my wife arrived at the hotel that evening, I got down to an analysis of that bundle of A.C.I.s. Owing to a shortage of hospital staff she had to get back to duty in the middle of the morning, and I thereupon settled down with the stenographer to a compilation of the proposed lectures in spite of Bernice’s strict instructions that I was, in so many words, to make those lectures a War Office headache and not my own, and get out to the Park for a constitutional instead. The reason why I did not take Bernice too seriously was that I knew she was peevish at having missed the lunch which had been fixed up with George Wharton.
If you have never met George before, his personal appearance can be fixed on your mind in a very few words. He is tallish and rather bulky, but contrives to look neither. That is because of three things: the slight stoop which he affects, the vast weeping-willow moustache which he flaunts, and the patient, harried look which his eyes deceptively bear. Those are all part of his stock-in-trade. He regards it as all to the good that no man looks less like a Superintendent, and a senior one at that, of New Scotland Yard. What he loves to be taken for is a hawker of vacuum cleaners or an insurance agent, and preferably one down on his luck. Hence perhaps the aged bowler, the overcoat with the slightly frayed velvet collar, the antiquated spectacles in their disintegrating case, and the huge handkerchief with which he divests both mouth and moustache of the remnants of a meal.
As an actor, George is in the front rank, even if his showmanship is somewhat flamboyant. Flamboyant to me, that is, for I have learned through long association to see behind the repertoire of tricks and dodges. I can interpret his grunts, his derisive snortings, his affabilities, his hypocrisies and blandishments, and I can whiff his red herrings long before he has produced them from his pocket. That doesn’t mean that I regard George Wharton solely as an amiable old humbug. Those are the trappings of the man, donned for specific purposes. For the man beneath them I have an enormous affection; and for his talents, his prodigious memory and tenacity I have the profoundest and most envious admiration. In that I am at one with the Yard, one of whose unofficial experts I have long been, though I have often wondered why. At the Yard they smile when George’s name is mentioned, and he has never been known as anything but “the old General,” but the smile is one of affection, martinet though he can be, and the nickname a comprehensive summary of what I have just told you.
George persists in regarding me, to my face at least, as the neophyte who joined him ten years ago, but somehow that never irritates me. He forces me to theorise so that he can pick what brains I have, and he bullies or wheedles me into courses of action which I loathe. He conceals information for his own purposes and assumes a tragic and mightily offended air when he considers that I have not spilled the whole of the beans. And the curious thing is that those are the things which make him so likeable. Once when he used to wax indignant, I used to be placatory; now I know he is staging something for his own or my benefit, and I enjoy the show. It is all part of a game. He knows that I see through him, but we both enjoy the pretence that he doesn’t.
George was standing lunch that Friday and we met outside a quiet little restaurant just off the Strand. It was some months since we had met, and we were glad to see each other and not ashamed to show it. But that didn’t last long, for he was soon trying to pull my leg.
“Still kidding yourself you’re a soldier?” he said, peering at me over the tops of his antiquated spectacles, which he had donned for the purpose of reading the menu.
“That’s right, George,” I said. “And what particular fraud are you putting on the market at the moment?”
He said he was still at the old game of separating the goat refugees from the sheep. Hunting had been bad, but he had collared one suspected enemy agent only the previous week. Then he was asking with something of a startled air just why I was in town. Before I could tell him, he was smiling with what he doubtless believed to be cynical amusement, and supposing that I was having yet another of my numerous leaves. I told him I had a new job, at a place called Peakridge.
I saw his eyelids give a quick flicker. Then he frowned slightly. Next he shot a look at me, and I was wondering what he was going to produce from his sleeve.
“Peakridge, eh? On the staff of that new Home Guard school?”
My fingers went to my horn-rims, a trick I have when knocked off my mental perch, or when aware of a discovery.
“So you’ve been prying into my private affairs,” I said bitterly. “You rang Bernice and wormed it out of her, and now you’re trying to make out that you’ve achieved it by one of your comic deductions.”
George was trying to look hurt. He gave me his word that until I had just mentioned Peakridge, he had had no idea that I was going there.
“How’d you know about the Home Guard school?” I challenged him.
He delayed artistically the moment of revelation. The last of his soup had just disappeared, and he spent a good few moments wiping his mouth and moustache with florid sweeps of his voluminous handkerchief.
“The fact of the matter is,” he said, “I happen to know someone else who is going there.”
Then he was telling me all about it. He lives, by the way, in one of the nicest of the residential suburbs, even if there is a Tube station within a minute of his front door. Jane—Mrs.—Wharton, was friendly with a neighbour who took in one paying-guest to eke out her means. In the summer before the outbreak of war she secured a treasure, a Mr. Ferris. He was supposed to be doing something connected with the Army, and when he was not away on Army business his evenings were practically always spent in the house, for he was an enthusiastic stamp collector. In appearance he was tall, dark-haired, and looked like a student, though his age was not far short of thirty.
“And where do you come in, in all this?” I had to interpose.
“You let me tell my story in my own way,” George said. “My youn
g nephew’s a stamp collector too, isn’t he? Well, he was only a street away so he got into the habit of going round and spending the evenings with this Mr. Ferris. The way I got called in was because Ferris was having a little bother with the local police.”
“A crook?” said I, raising my eyebrows.
“Crook—my foot!” George told me contemptuously. “No, what had happened was this. Ferris’s real name was Ferrova. He was one of those who didn’t spend his time hollering about liberty; he went off to Spain to fight for it.”
“You needn’t scowl at me, George,” I said. “First you as good as call me a tin soldier, and then you’re grumbling because I’m not a professional gladiator.”
“A guilty conscience,” he said. “Still, this chap Ferrova got to be the equivalent of a Brigadier out there, and I’ve heard from other sources that he was a damn’ brave chap, and a brainy one. He was wounded twice, and he was one of those who got away afterwards to France. The reason why our local police were after him was because he changed his name to Ferris. He thought—and he thought right—that any foreign name wouldn’t be too popular when war broke out. His father was a Spaniard, by the way, and his mother English. They’re both dead now. He came to see me as soon as the local police began questioning him, and that’s how I came to know all the details. He’s a naturalised Englishman himself, and very pleasant and all that, but he’s got a look in his eye that must have scared the livers out of some of Franco’s men.”
“And he’s going to Peakridge?”
“Didn’t I tell you so?” glared George. “I happened to meet him only this morning and he told me in the course of the little chat we had. He’d talk to me where he wouldn’t open his mouth to a lot, and I don’t mind telling you he’s told me quite a few useful things since I got to know him.”
So much for that, but naturally I had to tell George in confidence about the Regular and Not-so-Regular, to which latter category Ferris would most certainly belong. George gave a preliminary snort then exploded.
“Damn all their blasted snobbery! I’m a democrat, that’s what I am. This is the people’s war; not made for the benefit of a few goddam brass-hats.”
I had to sh! him down for people were rather staring at us. George rumbled on for a bit before he subsided, and that was only because I proclaimed myself a hundred per cent on his side. As a matter of fact I was serious enough. People of what they are pleased to call my class, have often regarded me as eccentric because I hate convention, but convention, to my mind, is only an outward and visible sign of snobbery and class distinction. In fact, as I assured George, when I got to Peakridge, my sympathies would be with my kind—the Not-so-Regular—if any sympathies were required. Perhaps all those rumoured antagonisms were after all only a myth, and we should all be pulling together.
And that is practically all that concerns this story. What we ate and what it cost is nobody’s business, but I will add that I insisted on standing cigars, of which George is inordinately fond, even if a pipe is rarely out of his mouth. It was while he was puffing away and at peace again with all the world, that he added something.
“I wouldn’t mind a job like yours, you know, myself.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I told him. “And what special nostrum would you like to inflict on the students?”
“You needn’t be so goddam superior,” he told me, and not undeservedly. “You’re not the only one who’s ever been in the Army, you know. Take that time when I copped that supposed Frenchman—”
“Not again, George,” I said. “You’ve told me that story a dozen times. I know you were a soldier and then got transferred to Intelligence, but that isn’t answering my question. What would you lecture on at Peakridge?”
“Security,” he said promptly, and then chuckled as my face fell. “That’s a part of modern training, isn’t it? Isn’t there a Security Officer to every Home Guard battalion? Couldn’t I tell ’em a thing or two about tricks and dodges?”
“You certainly could,” I said fervently.
He basked even in that ironic approval.
“The Old Gent isn’t dead yet by a long way. You’d open your eyes, wouldn’t you, if he was to turn up at this school of yours one of these days?”
“I dare say I would,” I told him. “And I’ll add this, George. When you do turn up, I hope to be able to stand you as good a meal as you’ve just stood me, and in as good company.”
So much for preliminaries. All you have heard is the tuning-up of the orchestra, and the overture has not begun. You have heard of three members of the cast, if you include myself, and of four if you include Wharton. You know something of the play and the setting, and all that remains is for the orchestra to strike up.
But there is something I want to do first, and because I think it may hasten the action rather than delay it. In books one often meets a host of characters in the first two chapters, and it is hard to place them easily and associate names with what I might call functions. Now in this book it is obvious that I cannot even hint at the real names of the actors, and names have therefore to be invented. In their invention I have tried an old device, of making the name suggest the man and his duties at that School for Instructors of the Home Guard.
Colonel Topman, for instance, was the top man of the lot of us. The School Adjutant is called Harness, for if ever a man is always in harness and at everyone’s beck and call, it is an adjutant, as I have had in my time good reason to know. A man called Mortar will deal with trench mortars and weapons, and one called Staff will deal with the tactics he learnt at the Staff College special course. Flick will be in charge of the school cinema, which was a valuable part of training and education. Brende will be an expert on the Bren and other arms, and Store will have charge of the armoury and explosives magazine. Compress is the school medical officer, and the last man to be tabulated—Collect—is so called because of his prosy manner and the boring nature of his delivery. In fact, I could never see him without knowing that the perfect parson had been lost to the world when he first joined the Service in the dear old days. Two other characters remain—Feeder, who was Captain Mortar’s batman, and Nurse Wilton, who was far too pretty to be given a tab for a name.
And now I assure you that all the preliminaries are really over. The action begins on the Saturday morning when I took my seat in the train bound ultimately for Peakridge. I am an old traveller and I was early enough to secure a corner seat. Even first-class compartments are crammed these days, but I had for travelling companions only two youngish-looking lieutenants. For myself I was at peace with all mankind and just the least bit complacent. My proposed lectures were in triplicate, and in my small attaché-case. True there had to be three of them, but I flattered myself that they were well to the point and suitably garnished with anecdote. In an hour’s time the first lunch would be on, and I had booked for it, so after a quick look at the same old news in another paper, I settled in my corner seat and closed my eyes with the hope of a half-hour’s sleep.
Published by Dean Street Press 2018
Copyright © 1942 Christopher Bush
Introduction copyright © 2018 Curtis Evans
All Rights Reserved
The right of Christopher Bush to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by his estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1942 by Cassell & Co.
Cover by DSP
ISBN 978 1 912574 14 8
www.deanstreetpress.co.uk
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The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 25