The Bat that Flits

by Norman Collins

  “Dr. Mann,” she said. “Would you mind going over to see the Director, please?”

  It was impossible to get down to any really serious work while the Gestapo stuff was still going on in the Institute. In the result, we packed up and spent the next few hours of Government time simply talking things over. Hilda and the demure one had both withdrawn. We were thus just one big unhappy stag party. And there were one or two quite interesting side-lights on human nature by the time we had finished.

  For a start, young Mellon was obviously feeling rather pre-occupied about something.

  “Say,” he asked at last, “are those guys thorough? D’you reckon they check up on what you tell them?”

  “The English police force,” I said slowly, “is the mother of all the police forces in the world. If you think you’ve made the least slip in anything that you may have said to them I should correct it now before it’s too late. They’re always ready to make allowances for carelessness. But deliberate lying—never.”

  Mellon began fingering his gold lighter-cum-cigarette case. It was a very comprehensive piece of Fifth Avenue jewellery, and looked as though there might be a portable wireless built into it somewhere.

  “Aw, hell,” he said. “It isn’t that. I told ’em all right. It’s just that I don’t want the dame’s husband drawn in. We haven’t ever been introduced socially you see.”

  Dr. Smith raised his eyebrows.

  “You’d much better call your lawyers,” he advised. “But, in any case, the Embassy will probably stand by you. They can always plead diplomatic privilege if it comes to it.”

  “But not matrimonial.” It was Bansted who had spoken. He looked more than ever like a bank manager to-day. “I happened to run into an old friend of my wife’s yesterday,” he went on. “Purely accidental, of course. Hadn’t seen her for years. But it could look bad, all the same. I know just how Mellon’s feeling.”

  As he said it he gave a little laugh that sounded like the jingle of handcuffs. And I took up from there.

  “Were you seen together?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “It was over at the Royal Crescent at Newquay,” he replied. “I booked a table for eight-thirty. Name of Jones. Her idea, not mine. All most unfortunate. You see, she’s waiting for her decree to be made absolute.”

  “Bad luck,” I told him. “Anyone see you?”

  Bansted paused.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “But the waiter’s bound to remember us. I upset the claret. He had to put a clean napkin over the tablecloth.”

  “That’s tough,” I replied. “But I shouldn’t worry. It’s a test tube, not a woman they’re looking for.”

  I was careful to conceal the admiration in my voice as I said it. It seemed to me that he had sewn up his alibi very neatly. Upsetting a glass of claret shows the hand of real experience, and I wondered how often he had used that old dodge before.

  But Dr. Smith was speaking again. And, when he had finished, he revealed that he was better at almost anything else than being consoling.

  “Do you really think so?” he asked. “I should have imagined that if something were missing the first thing that the police would look for would be an accomplice.”

  “But why advertise the meeting place?” Swanton demanded.

  I think that he was playing his part quite straight at this moment. I liked him best when he was applying his mind to problems where the Daily Worker hadn’t told him the answer already.

  Dr. Smith merely re-raised those eyebrows of his.

  “That will be for Bansted to explain,” he said.

  Then Rogers began to wriggle as though he too wanted to make his confession. Altogether it was becoming more and more like the Oxford Group every moment.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I was with a woman myself last night.” He paused rather obviously for effect. “Only in my case, it’s different. She happens to be my wife.”

  “Then what have you got to worry about?” I asked.

  “We aren’t living together,” Rogers replied. “I suppose that much is obvious. Or I shouldn’t be here. As a matter of fact, she came down here to discuss a separation.”

  Bansted coughed.

  “Isn’t this rather personal?” he asked. “I mean, you don’t have to tell us if you don’t feel like it.”

  Rogers frowned for a moment.

  “Not so personal as all that,” he said slowly. “You see, it was something to do with politics we parted over. She’s been mixed up in it all her life. She’s secretary of an Anglo-Russian Fellowship Group at this moment. It may look a bit fishy, you know, having her down here on the night the thing was stolen.”

  “Distinctly so,” Dr. Smith agreed. “Did you tell the police?”

  “Only in general terms,” Rogers replied. “I didn’t want to blacken her character more than it’s already blackened.” He was silent for a moment. “Extraordinary thing politics,” he said. “She’s a very brilliant woman, my wife. Ph.D. and M.Sc, and all that.”

  His voice curtsied almost visibly as he spoke of the degrees.

  “Better go back and tell them the rest of it,” Dr. Smith urged him. “Save time all round later on.”

  There was a kind of gloomy virtuousness about our Dr. Smith that I found increasingly irritating this morning.

  “Come to that,” I said, “where did you spend the evening?”

  Dr. Smith smiled rather wanly.

  “In bed,” he answered. “I was tired and gave myself the whole day in bed. What’s more, I feel much better for it.”

  “Anyone come to see you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I particularly gave orders that I wasn’t to be disturbed. I looked after myself entirely.”

  “So we’ve only got your word for it that you were there at all?”

  Dr. Smith smiled again.

  “Precisely,” he said. “And it will be rather interesting to see whether the Inspector appreciates the significance of that fact. There is no corroboration whatever.”

  He regarded his finger-nails for a moment.

  “Come to that,” he went on, “Kimbell’s and Swanton’s alibi is no better. A reciprocal alibi is really no alibi at all.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Kimbell swung round on him as though up to now his word had always been taken for his bond.

  “Meaning that you and Swanton went for a walk on the moors,” Dr. Smith said quietly. “It would have been possible for the two of you to have made an assignation with a third party, who again was either not seen or not noticed by anyone else. Someone in a car, for instance. There are roads across the moor, you know.”

  “And Russia has vast fleets of helicopters,” Swanton reminded him.

  But by now Kimbell was frowning at Swanton, and I got the impression that he didn’t want to figure in the conversation much longer.

  “In any case, we aren’t the only ones,” he said. “What about Gillett, for instance?”

  “I understand,” Bansted replied, “that Gillett spent the whole day with his fiancée. Una had a cold and they didn’t go out at all. The Director himself vouches for both of them.”

  “And Hilda?” It was Kimbell’s Manchester voice that asked the question.

  “Church bazaar at St. Clynt’s. She was in charge of it. Whole village saw her there.”

  It was Rogers who supplied this piece of information, and he had the knowing air of someone who had been asking a few questions on his account.

  Then Dr. Smith turned his smile on me.

  “And how did Dr. Hudson spend his time?” he asked.

  I did not reply immediately. But when I did I gave the answer loud and clear.

  “Mackerel fishing,” I said. “I was out all night. Alone. I only saw one submarine. It wanted to know the way to Murmansk and I told it. That’s all that occurred. Nobody’s got anything on me.”

  Chapter XI

  1

  I’ve never seen anyone in worse shape tha
n Dr. Mann when he came back from the Director’s office.

  “This is the end of me,” he said as he sat himself back down in his chair. “I am finished.”

  Dr. Smith turned his round smooth face towards him.

  “What happened?” he asked. There was no noticeable sympathy in the voice, merely a cold scientific curiosity.

  “Third degree, by the look of it,” Swanton answered for him. “The police are all swine when it comes to it. If they weren’t swine they wouldn’t be police.”

  Whenever Swanton was excited by anything his voice always rose a semi-tone or two. He was now positively fluting at us. It was the corncrake note of Kimbell that put in the rest of the chord.

  “Precisely,” he said. “And if they can see that there’s a tender spot naturally they jump on it. They probably prefer someone who’s been mauled over once or twice before.”

  “No doubt. No doubt,” Dr. Smith answered, with a little wave of the hand. “But perhaps Dr. Mann himself could tell us.”

  Dr. Mann, however, could not speak immediately. He was crying; actually crying.

  “Plees,” he said. “It was not like that. Not at all. They were very kind to me. Good, also. They offered me a chair and a cigarette.”

  Kimbell and Swanton both gave a gesture of despair as they heard him. If Dr. Mann had said that he had been strapped on to a triangle with an electric iron held against his big toes they would have felt that they were getting somewhere.

  But Dr. Mann was still talking.

  “Everything I said they have believed,” he went on. “Everything. The Inspector shook hands with me. But now I see that I have made one mistake. It will betray me. I am finished.”

  “What was the mistake?” I asked.

  That, however, was what Dr. Mann was telling nobody. He shook his head fiercely.

  “No,” he said. “I am too suspect. I cannot tell. A man who has dug his own grave must lie in it. I must be alone and think. It is all very terrible.”

  Then he started weeping again.

  2

  I’ve already hinted that in the ordinary way I can do without highly-emotionalised Central Europeans. There is something about adult cry-baby stuff that dehydrates all my own tear-glands. But I could not help feeling sorry for little Dr. Mann. He was so utterly defenceless. Two different experiences, the first with the S.S. and the second with N.K.V.D. had stripped all the outer skin clean off him. I knew that he was all bare flesh and nerve endings.

  He didn’t come down to dinner at all. Kimbell and Swanton both agreed that despite the nice things he had said about the Inspector he must have been worked over pretty thoroughly. When I left them they were getting all ready to compose a letter to the Council for Civil Liberties. It was Kimbell who volunteered to type it. And I took note of the fact that he was a typewriting enthusiast.

  For my part, I thought that I would go across to the annexe to see whether Dr. Mann would like anything. A Guinness, for example. I had one myself in the bar first and then took the other one over to him on the off-chance. And I had to hammer on the door panel to get him to open up.. When he did come, he looked blotchier and more distraught than ever.

  “No, go away, please,” he said as soon as he caught sight of me. “It is unwise for you to be seen with me. I tell you, I am finished.”

  I put the Guinness down on the corner of the washstand. And as I did so I noticed that his razor was open on the toilet shelf. He was the old-fashioned sort of shaver, and used an open razor of the kind that looked as though it had come from a cavalry regiment. I took one more look at him, and finally shut up the razor and slipped it absent-mindedly into my pocket.

  But I could not get him to drink the Guinness. All that he wanted to do, he said, was to be left alone so that he could think. And for that his head must be clear; quite clear. No alcohol, plees, he kept saying.

  So just to show friendly I sat down on the end of the bed and cleared up the Guinness myself. All the time, Dr. Mann had his eyes fixed on me. I told myself that he was trying to appear grateful for my kindness and compassion in calling on him at all. But he succeeded only in looking impatient. And, finally, with a pat on the back that nearly broke his spine, I withdrew quietly and left him to his Sturm und Drang and Weltschmerz, and all the rest of it.

  I may have been a bit worried myself, I suppose. At any rate, I couldn’t sleep properly: the dormital only made me feel faintly sick. And by the time 2 a.m. came along, I thought that I might slip along the corridor to see how Dr. Mann was progressing. For all I knew he might have a spare razor hidden away somewhere. So I folded myself up in my thick Jaeger, slid into my bedroom slippers and slopped along the corridor to cubicle B.

  There was no answer when I knocked. And no sound from inside the room either. But the door wasn’t locked, and I went straight in and switched the light on. Then I breathed more easily. The bed was crumpled, but not bloodstained.

  Because I hadn’t got much else to do, I put the light out and lay down on the bed and waited. Waited for quite a long time, in fact. It was nearly three-thirty when I heard some faint pussy-pussy footsteps in the corridor. And then, a moment later, the door handle turned, very quietly.

  The bed was behind the door, which meant that Dr. Mann did not see me immediately when he turned on the light. But I could see him all right. He had on a raincoat, and a ridiculous little Tyrolean hat that was tied down over his ears by a muffler. On his feet were ordinary gym-shoes, muddy all over and soaking wet. And something must have happened to his hand. It was cut right across the knuckles, and the blood had come through the handkerchief that he had wrapped round them.

  When he saw me lying there grinning at him with my head up against the bottom rail and my feet on his pillow, he put his hands up to his face for a moment. But he didn’t scream or faint or attack me or anything. Instead, he came over and with a wet little hand, the uninjured one, he clasped mine.

  “Plees, plees” he said piteously. “I can explain everything. Everything. But not now. You must not have seen me. If you see me, I am sentenced.”

  “I haven’t seen anyone,” I told him. “But I should just burn that handkerchief, if I were you. It doesn’t look sterile.”

  Dr. Mann sank down into the wicker-chair and stared at his poor damaged hand.

  “If I am still alive, I can explain everything,” he said again.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I told him, and with that I went back to bed.

  Next morning I heard that the village post office had been burgled, and last night’s collection from the Institute had been found strewn over the floor. All the envelopes had been ripped up, some of them so carelessly that the contents were just in strips and slithers.

  Chapter XII

  1

  The Ice-Eyed Inspector was really working on his right level when it came to the post office job. The whole thing by now is probably a Hendon College classic. For a start, the Inspector interviewed everyone within a two-miles radius— all fifty of them, including the seven who were bedridden. Police stock went up several points in consequence. Then the Inspector got the sub-postmistress on to checking up all her dubious accounts—Old Age Pension forms with smudged signatures, Savings Books with badly written sevens that might really have been nines, missing postal orders and that sort of thing. And while she, poor old soul, was trying to behave as though she really understood what the innumerable little forms and columns of figures were all about, the Inspector was doing his fingerprint and footmark stuff all over the house and garden.

  Judging by the questions that he asked us later on that day up at the Institute, it must have been good growing weather. The post office was apparently dimpled all over with finger-smudges, and there was a simply magnificent footprint, the footprint of a lady’s rubber plimsoll, right under the broken window.

  The lady’s footprint interested me a great deal. Dr. Mann had very small feet, rather like castors on a comfortably built armchair. And he had certainly been wearing gym-sh
oes when he came back. I didn’t wonder that he was jittery,

  I discovered afterwards that there was another piece of evidence that had confirmed the police in their belief that they were looking for a woman. The evidence was a small embroidered handkerchief with traces of what seemed to be scent still on it. Only it wasn’t scent at all, really. It was NASOL, one of W.D.P.’s products, with which Dr. Mann had been trying to fight back a common cold. And the handkerchief had been intended for his elderly female relative in the East Zone. It was simply that Dr. Mann had run through his own stock that had made him take his old Grossmutter’s along with him.

  But by then I had decided that perhaps the Inspector’s I.Q. wasn’t so very high after all. And that was because he was so ingenuous about his reasons for wanting a blood specimen from each one of us.

  “The county pathologist will be over in the morning, sir,” he said. “It won’t take a moment and it’s quite painless.”

  “But don’t tell me that there was blood all over the money orders and things,” I exclaimed, clasping my two hands together. “Good gracious, how terrible! Why, they’ll have to cancel them.”

  “There were traces of blood,” he admitted.

  “And if you find a trace of blood can you really say who it came from?” I asked.

  I was leaning right forward by now like a gallery first-nighter.

  The Inspector nodded.

  “There are groups. We work that way,” he said with the simple pride of a Cornishman speaking of something where Cornwall was so obviously leading the rest of the world. “Then if the blood in the stain and the blood in the specimen are found to belong to different groups we know that we’re on the wrong track. It’s more a method of eliminating the innocent than finding the guilty party, if you follow me, sir.”

  “It’s difficult,” I said. “But I think I do. And are you sure it’s really painless—getting the blood, I mean?”

  “Just a pin-prick.”