Stratton moved restlessly in his chair, lighted a cigarette and then added, “You’re thinking I’m a snob. I’m not. I hate snobs, but I also hate the sort of aimless gossip Webster specialises in: I’ve no doubt he’s a decent good-hearted chap, but his mind is conditioned by the gossip column. Anything does to make a caption.”
“You say you saw him at the Streicher film last night,” said Macdonald, but Stratton retorted:
“I didn’t say so, because I didn’t see him. He saw me: he said he was sitting behind me: and since he knew I went on to the Leisingerkeller and got talking with some Austrians, presumably he was there. Otherwise he wouldn’t have known I was.”
“What time was this?”
“The film didn’t finish until eleven—it’s a damn good film, you ought to see it—and I stayed in the Liesingerkeller till it closed, which was around midnight, or a bit later. I was talking to a chap I met in the Albertina: one of these students of the Fine Arts you come across so frequently in Vienna and so seldom in London. He knows a damn sight more about the contents of our National Gallery than most Londoners know, to say nothing of being able to discuss the important films of Italy, France, Russia and Japan. Quite a chap.”
“How did you get back to Hietzing at that hour? ”
“Schneider—the chap I was talking to—had a motorbike: he gave me a lift on the back as far as Gunzendorf and I footed it the rest of the way, with some assistance from a patrolling policeman when I got lost.”
Stratton suddenly grinned, and his dark saturnine face looked quite different for a moment. “Well, I’ve done my best for you, Superintendent: you’ve heard the family history, my occupation and address, my dallyings with Webster and my doings yesterday evening. Isn’t it time I had a turn at asking questions?”
“Ask away.”
“Have you any substantial proof that either of Vanbrugh’s guests was deliberately attacked? You see, I mistrust melodrama. Why on earth should anybody have attacked that girl? She’s only a kid, isn’t she? ”
“You’ve asked if I have any proof: the answer is no: but I think even a person who distrusts melodrama has got to admit that there are too many coincidences about these accidents. Incidentally, while I realise you are short-sighted, I still think there’s a chance you might be able to recognise some of the other passengers on the Viscount if you saw them again. Will you look through these photographs and tell me if you recognise any of them?”
Macdonald had collected some photographs from the Polizeiamte, among which was Walsingham’s, and Stratton looked through them casually. The only one he paused over was Walsingham’s. When he came to it, he gave a sudden exclamation: then he pushed up his glasses and in the manner of the short-sighted held the picture close to his eyes.
“Good lord!” he exclaimed. “That’s odd.”
“Then do you recognise this one?”
“I’ve seen him—but not on the plane. Was he a passenger?”
“He was, yes.”
“Then who the hell is he?”
“Neville Walsingham. I’ve no doubt his picture will be in all the evening papers. Where did you see him before?”
“At my job—the Tutorial place—but he didn’t call himself Walsingham on that occasion.”
3
“As I told you, our main job is teaching languages and coaching,” said Stratton. “Any standard from Finals down to classes for tourists, and any language which is asked for. Obviously we have a lot of rum chaps teaching on what you might call ‘piece work terms.’ Japs, Chinks, Hindus, Koreans—you can get men who’ll teach any language under the sun in London. And because all is grist that comes to the mill, we arrange for translating to be done—also in any language. Well, about a month ago I’d just finished an hour’s grind with a moron who was studying Spanish and I went out—it was latish and the office girl had knocked off—I found a bloke at the door saying he wanted a translator for a short script—Czechoslovak into English. I told him if he’d leave it it’d be dealt with. But that wouldn’t do: he wouldn’t leave it. The translator could come to him or vice versa, but he wanted it done at once. Very urgent. Well, to cut a long story short, we’d got a hard-up Czeck ex-professor who didn’t get much work, one Stanislas Karillov, and I gave his address, mentioning about twice the fee that’s usually paid for the job, and the bloke with the script trotted off. He gave a commonplace name—Bond or Bourne or something like that—though he didn’t look commonplace himself. Rather the reverse. And this,” said Stratton, picking up the picture of Walsingham, “is Bond or Bourne. I remember people all right if I see them close to: I’m only sunk when they’re a few yards away. I remember thinking that the Bond/Bourne merchant looked a personality—he’d got something authoritative about him, and I wondered why he came to a small commercial undertaking like ours.”
“Did you ever hear any more about the translating job?”
“Oh, yes. That’s why I remember the incident. Karillov is a very honest chap: he came in next morning to offer to pay the office the usual ten per cent which is the rake off on jobs like that, and to thank me for putting him in the way of an extra fee. I asked him if the work had been interesting and he said ‘Very interesting.’ He then told me, in confidence, that he had an idea the script he’d translated was an official paper of sorts, probably pinched. He wasn’t allowed to type the translation out in the usual way: he was asked to translate it verbally. And then he said, ‘If there’s anything phony about it, I think I shall forget it. Just not know anything about it. I’ve had trouble enough one way or another without asking for any more’—or words to that effect. I agreed with him.” Stratton broke off and lighted another cigarette: then he went on:
“If a Czech, or any other foreigner for that matter, had brought an official-looking English document for translation into another language I might have thought it my business to draw somebody’s attention to it, but the man who wanted this translating done was an Englishman, and he looked a responsible person. So I left it at that. But it struck me as odd—the sort of incident one could boil up into a short story.”
“Didn’t you ask what the gist of the script was?”
“No, I didn’t. Quite deliberately. Damn it all, do you imagine I, wanted to go to Scotland Yard or the F.O.—or wherever one might go—and say, ‘An Englishman named Bond or Bourne or Bone, address unknown, got hold of our hard-up down-at-heels Karillov and got him to translate a document which may or may not have been honestly come by’? I just said to Karillov, ‘Sure you’re not imagining things?’ His sort do, you know. They’ve seen so many preposterous things that their norm is twisted. And he said, ‘Yes. I expect I was,’ and we left it at that.”
Stratton picked up the photograph of Neville Walsingham again and said. “This is the same chap—Bond or what-have-you. I wish I’d known. Come to think of it, it’s not so surprising—the translation incident—now I know it’s Walsingham. He’s written a lot about ‘Mittel Europa,’ and I expect he talks French and German and maybe Italian, but he’s sunk when it comes to Czech. So am I. I’ve started in on Russian, but the other Slav languages still have me beat.”
“Well, I’m interested in what you’ve told me,” said Macdonald. “It may have a bearing on my present job—just possibly. It seems a bit uncertain why Walsingham came to Vienna at this juncture.”
“Why did you come to Vienna?” demanded Stratton. “After Walsingham?”
“No. I didn’t come after anybody—I came for a holiday.”
“Perhaps he did, too, poor devil,” said Stratton. “Incidentally, where was he sitting on the plane?”
“Right forward—according to Webster.”
“Didn’t you see him yourself?”
“No, I didn’t. You don’t see many of the passengers unless you get up and walk down the gangway. The backs of the seats are too high.”
Stratton grinned. “Quite true. It’s only chaps like Mr. Nosey Webster who spot everybody. Has he told you about his auntie?”<
br />
“He has. He also begged me to go to see her.”
“That’s a nice touch: all open and above-board,” said Stratton. “Well, I’m sorry your holiday’s been translated into a job of work, Superintendent—all because somebody’s brakes weren’t up to standard. Though whose brakes were at fault seems to be a matter of contention in the local beer houses.”
“It will probably continue to be a contention for some time to come,” said Macdonald. “You have answered all my questions very patiently, Mr. Stratton. Will you round your evidence off by telling me where you were between four and five o’clock yesterday afternoon?”
“I was here, in this house, playing chess with Vogel. I beat him because he got rattled over the storm. I didn’t go out until the rain left off, when I went into Vienna and had supper and went to the .Apollo cinema. And Schneider works at the Kunstbeilage Printing Works if you want to find him.” Stratton suddenly grinned. “Did Webster tell you about his pictures?”
“He did,” replied Macdonald.
“What a damned odd life you must live,” replied the other, “always learning about the lives of total strangers.”
CHAPTER XIII
“ALL CASES are the same at the beginning,” said Inspector Nauheim. “You collect information all in a rush and get an access of blood to the head trying to sort it out: then the next stage is distinguished by complete lack of information and you decide it’s a stalemate.”
“Perfectly true,” agreed Macdonald. “Let’s hear the sum total of your researches this morning.”
The two police officers were sitting in the small bare room which had been put at their disposal by the “Polizeileutnant” of Hietzing, and Nauheim reported as follows: “First, the autopsy on Walsingham. He was dead when the car—or cars—ran over him on the Wattmanngasse, but he’d been in an accident earlier. There are two sets of bruises on his body, one set made while he was alive, the other after he was dead. The doctors think that he was run down, receiving injuries which caused his death, and that his body was then moved. I won’t go into the details—you can talk to the doctors yourself—but it looks as though Anthony Vanbrugh is clear. I can’t see any object in his moving the body in order to run over it somewhere else: can you?”
“Well—I might. But we can leave that for the moment and concentrate on facts.”
“Right. I’ve got the list of arrivals on your B.E.A. plane on Monday. Here it is.”
He handed Macdonald the list. There had been twenty-five passengers on the Viscount when it landed at Vienna: twelve British, eight Austrian, two American and three French. Of the British passengers, five were already known to the investigators; Macdonald himself, Sir Charles Bland, Miss Le Vendre, Ernest Henry Webster and Charles Stratton. The remaining seven were made up of two Embassy officials returning from English leave (John Prestwood and Guy Vincent), two English ladies visiting friends in the British Council (Mrs. and Miss Woodthorp) and two architects from the Ministry of Housing (Patrick Tindale and John Tomlinson), who were staying in Vienna’ as the guests of Herr Schwarz, a noted Vienna architect.
“They all seem respectable enough; I can look into them later and see if their powers of observation help us along at all,” said Macdonald. “The B.E.A. list of passengers from London will give us the names of those who left the plane at Zurich.”
“Next,” said Nauheim (who was intent on passing on his information), “you may like to know about the people who have reported seeing Miss Le Vendre when she walked up to the old gun emplacement. She was noticed by several people, all of whom were hurrying home because they realised a storm was going to break shortly: Frau Pilsener, who lives on the verge of the woods, said the girl had Miss Vanbrugh’s daschund on a lead and she was talking to the dog encouragingly. A gardener who works at a house on the farther side of the woods saw the girl when she was nearly at the top of the hill. A couple of children with their nurse and an old man also saw her. They all say she was alone—and all thought she was quite mad not to be running home. They saw nobody else going up into the woods. When the storm broke with the first big flash, just after five o’clock, it seems probable that there were no local people within a mile of the emplacement—and I doubt if we shall get any further information, not until—or unless—Miss Le Vendre can tell us what happened. The storm complicated matters,” added Nauheim thoughtfully. “Viennese people have no love of their woods in a thunderstorm: nobody but an English girl would have been perverse enough to go on, farther and farther away from shelter, with a sky like that.”
“Which means that anybody who noticed the girl could have been pretty sure that there would have been nobody else on the ridge by the time she arrived there,” said Macdonald.
“Do you think she would have walked up there by herself, with no motive at all, on an afternoon like yesterday?” asked Nauheim incredulously.
Macdonald laughed. “Yes, I think so. She was young, she was bored. She had been translating old letters and typing them all day, and it had been a stuffy day. I can well believe she went out for a walk determined to climb up to the ridge and get some fresh air. She might not have expected the thunder, but she wouldn’t have been frightened of it. Well, that’s as far as we can get in that direction.”
“Gewiss,” murmured Nauheim. “I am not taking you very far, Superintendent, but I don’t want you to think the Hietzing police have not been trying. Every available man has been put on the job, asking about Miss Le Vendre, about the van (or jeep) described by Mr. Vanbrugh, and about Walsingham himself. So next, about the van. It seems pretty certain that no locally registered van (which could be mistaken for a jeep) was on the road at midnight last night. There are three converted jeeps owned by Hietzing tradesmen, but it wasn’t any of these. However, a van with a low square body was seen by a patrolman shortly after midnight, travelling towards Vienna. It was in the Penzinger Strasse, just beyond the Hietzinger Bridge—the railway bridge.”
“Travelling towards Vienna,” observed Macdonald, and Nauheim nodded.
“Yes. This interested me in relation to the final piece of evidence which has come in. An old man named Glock—a drunken old ne’er-do-well—came into the Police Station and said that just before eleven last night he saw three men in the Hietzinger Platz, near the church. One of these men he knew by sight—Hans Flüchs, the journalist: another he said, was an Englishman, in a light raincoat. Glock knew he was an Englishman because he had seen him driving an English car with a C.D. plate earlier in the day: the third was a tall dark man who hurried across the Platz to catch a Vienna-bound tram. Glock says that Flüchs and the Englishman parted outside the church at the comer of the Platz, and the Englishman walked on to the corner of Lindengasse—in the direction of Trauttmansdorffgasse—and waited there a moment, until a big car pulled up and the Englishman got in and was driven off in the direction of Vienna—or at least away from Hietzing.” Nauheim stopped and gave a large sigh. “And whether Glock is telling lies in the hope of getting a reward, or whether he has been bribed to tell lies, who can say?” he said. “It is true that Flüchs and Schulze and Walsingham walked from the Grünekeller to the Hietzinger Platz and that Schulze caught the tram at the Brücke: we have witnesses to corroborate that: also Flüchs parted from Walsingham outside the church: but no one save Glock saw Walsingham get into a car (if he did get into a car) at the corner of Lindengasse. It is a very quiet road—you may remember there are small shops on the ground floor, all along, and the shops were all closed, of course.”
“And you don’t think much of Glock as a witness?”
“Ask the Hietzing men,” replied Nauheim. “Glock has been run in for begging and cheating and pilfering: he’s a habitual drunkard and he beats his old wife. He’s a cunning old fraud—and the devil of it is that he may be telling the truth on this occasion. If he is, the whole situation is altered.”
“Meaning that Walsingham may have been killed in Vienna and his body brought back to Hietzing,” said Macdonald.
&nb
sp; “Just that—and put in a position where it was pretty certain that Anthony Vanbrugh would pass by the body—or over it,” replied Nauheim. “It’s known that he always drives back from Vienna by that route, and there are plenty of people to testify that he often drives as though the road belongs to him.”
“Is this developing into an all-out attack on the Vanbrugh family?” queried Macdonald, and Nauheim replied:
“I don’t know, but can you tell me this: had Walsingham any particular reason for visiting Vienna just now? Did Sir Walter Vanbrugh tell you if Walsingham mentioned any purpose he had in view—people to see, information to seek?”
“Sir Walter does not know. My own impression is that he himself was surprised at Walsingham’s visit. It’s true that Sir Walter had given him an open invitation, but the visit seems to have been arranged at short notice: and we also do not know why Walsingham broke his journey in Zurich. But let’s get back to the Vanbrugh angle: there have been three incidents connected with their household. The abortive attack on Clara, the accident to Miss Le Vendre, and the death of Walsingham. I take it the story about Clara has now been reported?”
“Yes, it has, and Greta Schwab has been questioned. Greta is almost ‘simple,’ as you say, but she comes of a respectable family and there’s no .reason to disbelieve her. When she and Clara were coming home through the woods on Wednesday evening, a man jumped out at Clara with a raised stick. Greta was a little way behind her. Clara screamed and Greta screamed and they both ran away—a silly story: the only relevant fact is that Clara was wearing Miss Le Vendre’s coat—and so far we know nothing about Clara except that she is a liar. The address she gave in Wiener Neustadt is a shop whose owner denies any knowledge of her, and the woman who gave her a reference has herself left Vienna. But it must be admitted that such stories are not uncommon in Vienna. However, it’s being followed up. And I think the most useful thing I can do is to see if we can get any report on the big grey car in which, according to Glock—alas, only Glock—Walsingham drove away from the Lindengasse.”
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