by David Marcum
“You realize, of course, what neither of us considered. I’m expected to stand with you while you hunt and load your gun for you,” I said, reflecting on how it was possible to discard too much from one’s mental attic. That I, the descendant of how many generations of country squires, should make such an oversight!
“Surely we can make a story to cover that, too,” said Deering optimistically. “Perhaps you were in the Army, and had a bad battle someplace, and are suffering from nerves. Can’t stand to be around explosions. Kandahar, perhaps. Or Maiwand. Can you pretend to have been in Afghanistan?”
“Can we fool the Ministry of Defence into believing I served in the Army?” I asked sardonically. “I haven’t, you see, and military men of the sort you’ve collected here this weekend have a great nose for spotting civilian imposters. They’re not as credulous as pantry maids. If one marches a valet in front of a pantry maid and says, ‘This is my valet’, why would she doubt? But if one marches a valet in front of a General and says, ‘This man fought at Arzu,’ he’ll immediately ask for regiments, and commanders, and comrades-in-arms, and did I know so-and-so. That sort of charade would be quite impossible to sustain without significant research.”
“Then perhaps you ought to come down with a cold,” he suggested.
“In August?” I hung his suit. “Will you prefer a hot bath? A cold bath? Or a cool bath?”
“I’ll save it for tomorrow,” Deering replied. “We’ll figure something out.”
It was midnight before I retired to my third floor bedroom, where visiting valets were hidden away. Although I had originally approved of this scheme due to the brevity of its duration, I found myself wishing for an extra few days to observe the habits and the schedules of the manor’s inmates. If the grouse shoot were to occur in the morning, and the field testing sometime after luncheon, that left precious little time to effect the substitution. However, there was nothing that said Rowland-Powell would strike on Saturday evening. Perhaps he would wait until Sunday, when the family, guests, and servants were at church. Or perhaps Sunday night would provide opportunity, as the week-end drew to a close, and anything gone missing would not be noted until it was too late.
I preferred to leave nothing to chance.
The plans were rolled into a short, tidy tube and tied with red tape, secreted at the bottom of my satchel. Deering had reluctantly given it to me as we had left London, although I would have preferred extra time before our house party to examine them myself. He would have kept them up until the moment of substitution, if he had had his way, but I explained that I worked alone, and my luggage was safer. Although a valet unpacks his master’s wardrobe, there was always the chance an officious maid or footman would interfere, and stumble across the plans by accident. I waited until the house settled, then slipped from my room down to the ground floor, where Wolverly’s library was located. Deering had described where to find the safe. It was hidden behind a large portrait of the first Viscount and his family.
Unrolling my case of instruments, I set to work.
There are two schools of thought in this line of work. The swiftest, easiest, and most straightforward method is to drill holes and punch tumblers. Obviously, when embracing this method, the miscreant does not care to disguise the fact of his presence. This is the method used when the thief has no intention of returning to the scene, such as in stealing piles of currency or bags of coin.
The alternate method involves tremendously more finesse. One must attempt to break into the safe, not through brute force, but as though one is the ordinary safe-owner opening his safe under ordinary circumstances. This is the preferred method in the pursuit of information, and when one wishes to disguise for as long as possible the fact that information kept in a secure location has been compromised.
It was this second method that I turned to as I began my work. My clamps, my drills, my punches, my augurs - these tools I ignored, as I set to work with the delicacy of a surgeon performing a critical operation. I looked the part as well, armed with a stethoscope, the better to magnify the clickings and movements of the tumblers.
There was no hurry, only infinite patience and tremendous concentration. All that existed was myself and the invisible tumblers, rolling here, clicking there. The combination dial twirled smoothly under my fingers at one point, and met with more resistance at another point. It took a combination of subtle internal sounds, the feel of friction, and the guidance of instinct and experience. The quarter-hours chimed distantly away in another part of the house, one after another, but I did not allow myself to heed them or be rushed.
With a gratifying sound of sliding steel bolts, the door swung open. I noted clear glass ampoules mounted in a bracket attached to the inside of the door. If I had forced my way in through the door, I would have triggered a cloud of gas, most likely phosgene.
Wolverly’s safe was not as impenetrable as he would have liked, but his security measures were solid. I did not realize I had been holding my breath so long. I exhaled quietly, slowed my heartbeat to its normal pace, and willed my hands to be steady. I sorted through the papers in the safe, taking care to disarrange nothing. The small roll of plans for the camera was easy to find.
I unrolled the two plans, side-by-side, and examined them by the light of my shaded lantern. Deering was correct: They were nearly indistinguishable, yet were different enough that, with both copies present for a comparison, it was clear that the copy Deering had provided was an earlier, imperfect version in need of significant refinement.
Before I left, I took a jar of kitchen ashes I had slipped into my pocket earlier, and sprinkled them delicately around the front of the safe. Not enough to draw attention, due to the pattern of the carpet, but enough to notice if someone stood before the safe and tracked them round the room.
I made it back to my bed unchallenged.
The next morning, I presume I functioned as smoothly as normal, but my nerves were taut. Would anyone suspect the safe had been tampered with? It was not the first time I had done such a thing - there had been the case of the Buffini diamonds and retrieval of the compromising letters stolen from the Countess of Redmond - but I preferred a quick, anonymous escape once my purpose was achieved, bolting to my Baker Street burrow, rather than this foolishness of loitering about the premises for another three days and waiting for something to go wrong.
However, the whole household was excited enough about the grouse and about the trials that any missteps I may have made would have been attributed to my inexperience as a substitute valet. Although some gentlemen’s gentlemen are noble creatures, the majority of them combine the two distasteful extremes of servility combined with foppishness. It is not the sort of career a man with ambition would embrace, and not the sort of role I would voluntarily assume for any extended period of time. I attended Deering as dutifully as a nursemaid. Servants do not wait table for breakfast, so I was free to proceed downstairs to listen to the servants’ idle chatter and help where I was needed. When the house was full, all hands were appreciated, but it was not long before I was called away to the field to wrangle gun and ammunition for my temporary master.
Neither of us made reference to any nervous conditions resulting from previous war experiences, and the grouse shoot was a success in that grouse were shot, and the guests were all pleased in consequence.
Mr. Rowland-Powell arrived towards the tail end of the shooting. He stood around with his hands in his pockets and told news in an amusing way, and laughed at the stories of others. I observed him without appearing to pay much attention to anyone. There was nothing striking or alarming about him. His tailoring did not indicate especial wealth, his features gave no hints as to extremes of personality. He seemed more of the type of country squire who preferred to fish than to ride or hunt or shoot, and the sort of man who was moderate in his food and his drink. Perhaps it was the fact that he was such an ordinary individual t
hat made him such a potentially perilous foe. One is not likely to hand over secrets to French anarchists or Dutch socialists or Italian adventuresses, but such secrets may indeed pass freely into the possession of ‘one of us’!
There was only one exchange of any note during the shooting. Rowland-Powell, hands still in pockets, came sauntering around to see what I was doing with a basket of freshly killed grouse. “You’re not his usual man, are you?” he asked in a friendly tone.
“I’m only temporarily engaged, sir, while his regular valet is indisposed.”
“What do you do when you’re not a valet?” he inquired.
“I write novels, sir,” I said. “I’m writing one now, but I’m stuck on a bit. I have a character who I think is selling secret technology to Unnamed Foreign Powers. Things like submarine plans, or a new kind of rifle. I haven’t decided. I say, Mr. Rowland-Powell. If you were to do such a thing, how would you go about doing it?”
He looked at me, then tilted his head back and roared with laughter. “What a question!” He raised his voice a bit to widen the conversation. “This valet’s writing a book and needs help with his character.” He proceeded to repeat the scenario to a few of his friends, who had stepped closer out of curiosity, while the others maintained their shoot. “If it were myself, I would probably wrangle an invitation to a gathering such as this, and then steal one of the cameras off the pigeon when no one’s looking. Harness and all. Maybe even take the whole pigeon and not mess with straps and buckles. Shove it in a basket or something. I’d take it to German scientists - the Germans are good at that sort of thing - and let them deconstruct the mechanism to reveal its designs. Its inner workings. That sort of thing. Then they’d know how to make it themselves - and they would.”
“That would be hard to do if it were a submarine, though,” objected General Rocker. “You can’t shove a submarine in a basket. Might be possible to wander off with a new kind of rifle. Depends on the security, and whether everyone standing around is a blithering idiot enough to allow you to do it.”
“Oh? What would you do?” he countered.
“If I wished to betray my country’s secrets,” mused General Rocker, “I wouldn’t worry about doo-dads. They’re only good for the one time. I’d probably focus on code books. Get a nice tidy sum per page, and codes are always changing anyways. I suppose Foreign Powers can intercept telegraphs. There must be a way of listening in to the wires, though I couldn’t explain how. But that’s why we use the codes. It wouldn’t be one big thing all at once - that’s unnecessarily risky. But a slow, casual trickle of information any number of men might possess - that would be hard to trace to the source.”
“If it were me,” put in Deering’s father, “I would take photographs. I wouldn’t risk trying to mess with the real thing. I’d probably develop the plates of whatever was interesting, and send ‘em through the post. Maybe stuck between the pages of a Bible. Or perhaps a good thick almanac, with squares cut out of its inner pages, to form a recess. Perhaps I wouldn’t trust it to the post at all - you remember Richelieu’s Cabinet Noir. I wouldn’t expect good solid Englishmen to investigate the post of other good solid Englishmen, but you never know, with all the socialists and anarchists running about these days. Perhaps I would have a designated shop, like a bookstore, or a tobacconist’s. And my contact would come in and deliver a key phrase, asking for something peculiar. Uncommon. ‘Have you a history of the Seljuk Empire?’ And that would be the signal, and the shopkeeper would give the countersignal, such as, ‘No, but have you read about the Anatolian beyliks?’ and they’d both know it was all right, and the shopkeeper would give him whatever object the photographs were parceled up into.”
“Of course, that would mean taking the shopkeeper into your confidence,” said Wolverly. “You don’t want that at all. You don’t want to be blackmailed once he starts wondering about mysterious packages he’s supposed to pass. I would run an advertisement in the agony column, and leave it at that. Sign it ‘Shuttlecock’ or ‘Cheops’ or something. No one would waste their time following up with all those nonsense assignations that already clutter the paper. I’d drop it off in a remote location, like in a particular hollow tree somewhere, and when the advertisement appeared, my foreign contact would know to visit the hollow tree and claim what I had cached, and deliver it to his handlers. My money, of course, would be paid directly to my bank.”
“Is there a way of tracing unusual bank deposits?” wondered Deering’s father. “One would think there was, but I’m not sure if I’ve heard of such a thing.”
“One would have to be sly about it, so as not to draw attention,” said Wolverly. “That’s the thing about greed. It makes one take risks one wouldn’t otherwise. Not just having inexplicable sums deposited to one’s account, but also not be rolling in wealth when everyone knows one’s living on an Army pension and a handful of investments.”
“Which is exactly why I was thinking of doing it by the page,” agreed General Rocker. “Don’t want to kill the golden goose with the golden eggs, or what-not. Just a slow, steady trickle of just a little extra. An extra ten, twenty, fifty here and there makes all the difference in the world. Especially if it came once, maybe twice a month.”
“But there’s also the ratio of risk-to-reward,” argued Rowland-Powell. “If one is going to risk one’s neck for treason, it isn’t going to be for a five-pound note.”
“Men have been killed for less,” pointed out Wolverly.
The subject drifted into anecdotes of men who had met untimely demises in foreign quarters over trivial incidents. I glanced at Deering, who was standing unhappily in a knot of the other men who had continued shooting grouse throughout our discussion, but had kept shooting glances in my direction. Perhaps he was unhappy because he had not been able to give a sufficiently imaginative answer. Or perhaps he was unhappy because I had not reloaded his gun for him in the last ten minutes.
I got back to work, and was aware of Rowland-Powell’s eyes upon me.
I, and the other valets on duty, were dismissed to pursue our own devices after luncheon. No one said so, but all knew they were going to test the miniature cameras. I spent an hour plucking feathers from birds for the cook, and got as much information as I could from her, which wasn’t very useful. Afterwards, I excused myself, and vanished for a few hours inside Wolverly’s library, hidden behind the drapery. It was not the best hiding place, as the summer drapes were hung, but no one entered the library at all, and I eventually was compelled to give up my vigilance as the party began returning to the house exhibiting all signs of high spirits.
I resumed my watch that evening, between the hours of one and four in the morning, but the library remained deserted apart from my presence. The ashes had remained undisturbed.
Sunday, the family, guests, and servants made their way to the village church. All were accounted for. No one left the service early or in a suspicious manner.
Each time we were together in private, as I helped him with his change of clothes or tidied his appearance, Deering repeatedly asked if I had been successful, and I repeatedly dissembled, never giving a straight answer or reassuring facts.
“The thing is to catch Rowland-Powell in the act,” I explained to him. “If you allow him to run off with false information, he’ll only do it again and again.”
“Yes, but I’m more interested with protecting my father’s invention, not in justice. You’re a fool to think you’ll actually catch him at it. He’s far too clever for that.” Deering had obviously grown irritable with my evasiveness. All signs of the fatuous man-about-town had been long since absent from his demeanour. He had not used the word “jolly” in my presence once since arriving at Bellingbeck Park. How true that a valet sees a man’s character in a way an acquaintance cannot, I thought!
“Don’t shout so, unless you wish to alert the entire house to your motivations,” I said. “To-
night is our last night. Surely he must make a move.”
“Surely you must make a move,” grumbled Deering. “I hired you to act, not to think.”
“If you wished for a slave, you should have kept your genuine valet,” I said. “But if you wish to protect your father’s invention, I have the situation under control. You hired me to work in a way only I can, so you must permit me to work in the way only I can.”
“My genuine valet didn’t go to a school that taught how to force one’s way into a safe!” he said. “I’m beginning to think you didn’t, either!”
“What if you’re wrong about this whole situation? What if Rowland-Powell never breaks into the safe?” I countered. “What fools we’d look then, having to explain to your grandfather why the plans in his safe were fakes, and how you ended up with the real ones!”
“I never said he was giving the plans to the Ministry of Defence this week-end,” said Deering. “These were only trials this weekend. I expect the plans to be refined a bit here and there. I can easily put my father’s originals back in his workshop, and he’ll just think he was absent-minded and put the wrong set in Wolverly’s safe. But I couldn’t keep Rowland-Powell from stealing the real plans, which was why I paid ten pounds for you to help me with that part. Ten pounds!”
When we left Bellingbeck Park early after breakfast, Deering sat coldly ignoring me. He was deeply grieved at my inability to act, and perhaps moreso grieved at the thought of the loss of his ten pounds. He had wasted all of his harrangues and abuse whilst action was still an option. Now all that was left to him was sullen reproachful disappointment.
The trip back to town was conducted in similarly stony silence. We shared the carriage with four fellow passengers, whose presence constricted any possible conversation.