The Bat that Flits

by Norman Collins

  All the same, I wasn’t too happy about Wilton’s behaviour. When a man orders two hundred cigarettes and promptly shuts himself away from everyone it usually means that he is thinking about something. And I didn’t like it any better when he suddenly asked me to drop over and see him.

  What I wasn’t prepared for this time as I went inside was to find that Wilton had other company there. And of all extraordinary choices he had picked on Dr. Smith for a drinking companion. Moreover, from all the signs, Dr. Smith had apparently just succeeded in being clever. The smirk that was on his face might have been applied with a builder’s trowel.

  “ . . . Around the turn of the century,” he was saying, “the best brains in the chess world grew tired of the limitations imposed by the conventional game. Any number of variants have been tried out at one time or another. But it was Capablanca who took things furthest. He introduced the Marshal and Chancellor. It proved too difficult. The Emperor game was more successful. With nine pieces aside and the Emperor himself combining the moves of Queen and Knight while leaving those pieces themselves with their full powers, the new combinations were practically limitless. Indeed . . . ”

  Dr. Smith was in full flood by now. Since the death of Macaulay the world can hardly have seen anything like it. The sheer bad taste was simply appalling.

  “So there could be an ‘E,’” I said, turning to Wilton.

  “And there could be squares that don’t seem to exist on a chess-board. It must have been Emperor Chess or whatever it’s called that Kimbell was playing.”

  Wilton, however, was still only uncoiling himself after the interruption. And even when he was right way up, with his various limbs in approximately their correct places, he still didn’t reply immediately.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “Dr. Smith here doesn’t know anything about the game that Kimbell’s been playing.”

  “Sorry I spoke out of turn,” I answered.

  I wouldn’t have upset Wilton for anything. Not just at present, that is. But Wilton wasn’t all that easily upset.

  “Let’s ask Kimbell to come over,” he suggested very casually. “You and I can have a drink, while he and Smith play chess together.”

  This proposal, however, brought the great Dr. Smith as near to open panic as I have ever seen him. He actually blushed.

  “If you don’t mind I’d rather not,” he said. “You see, I don’t actually play chess, I’m only interested in the mathematical theory. That’s quite different. Also”—here he began pawing the ground a bit—“Kimbell and I haven’t really got very much in common.”

  This didn’t seem to put Wilton out in the slightest. Indeed, he hardly seemed to be listening. He was pouring out another drink for Smith while he was still speaking, and obviously couldn’t care less who were Dr. Smith’s little play-chums and who weren’t.

  “Oh, well,” he said, “just say good evening to him and slip away quietly. No one’ll notice.”

  I admired Wilton for the way he had got in that last bit.

  But already I was busy admiring Wilton for something else. The suggestion that Kimbell should come over had evidently not been quite the afterthought that it had sounded. Because at that moment there was a knock at the door, and Kimbell and the Captain arrived with the bond of invisible handcuffs between them.

  I have never seen anyone quite so ill at ease as Kimbell. He kept his eyes to the carpet, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other as though he had on a pair of very tight new shoes. It was his palest duck-egg blue complexion that he was wearing this evening.

  Simply judging from his appearance I’d have been ready to suspect him of anything. And I noticed that when Wilton thrust a glass into his hand he promptly put it down again. Evidently he wasn’t going to risk getting talkative.

  But what was even more marked was the episode of the cigarette case. It was a rather nice plain gold one that Wilton carried about with him. And he offered Kimbell a cigarette along with the drink. But Kimbell, who was naturally a thirty-to-fifty-a-day-man, refused it out of hand. I may have been imagining things, but I got the impression that he did not want to touch that plain gold cigarette case for fear of leaving fingerprints.

  But Wilton was an expert as a society hostess in not noticing when one of the guests is behaving a bit queerly. He just went straight on in his tired, dreary-sounding voice as though the whole idea of counter-espionage was a frightful sort of bore that fortunately had its funny side.

  “We had a warrant out for your arrest last week,” he said. And he dropped his voice so low while he was speaking that Kimbell had to ask him to repeat what he had just said.

  “Your arrest,” Wilton repeated. “We had a warrant out.”

  Kimbell drew in his lower lip, and began biting at it. There was a long pause.

  “Did you?” he asked. He sounded about as casual as a man who has just been told that the house is on fire.

  “All because of those chess games of yours,” Wilton went on.

  Kimbell’s particular shade of egg-shell went about two tones paler.

  “How d’you mean?” he asked lamely.

  Wilton was lighting another cigarette. And that always took a little time because he didn’t seem to know about things like matches and petrol lighters. His idea of the sacred fire was a wisp of smouldering tobacco at one end of a sodden and discoloured butt about quarter of an inch long.

  “It was all a mistake,” he said. “Rather a silly one come to think of it. Only nobody in the department plays chess, you see. It was Smith here who solved it for us.”

  But Wilton’s last remark seemed to have annoyed Kimbell. It was the first thing that had roused him in the slightest. You could now see more than a hint of a yolk beneath the shell.

  “Have you been discussing my affairs with Smith?” he asked.

  Wilton nodded.

  “Expert witness,” he said. “Cleared things up in a moment.”

  “And is Hudson here supposed to be an expert in something?” he asked.

  “He reached the eighty-first square before we did,” Wilton answered. “De-coding could make nothing of it.”

  “De-coding?” Kimbell asked sharply.

  “Naturally,” Wilton answered. “If you can’t read anything, you send it to De-coding. It’s what they’re there for. They’ve had a strip torn off them this time.”

  “And what are you doing about it now?” Kimbell asked.

  “Playing the game right through,” Wilton answered.

  “We’ve got someone from headquarters staff to help us. Used to play second board at Hastings. He’s rather good.” Wilton paused. “I’m afraid I’ve got some rather bad news for you,” he added.

  “Bad news?” Kimbell asked. There was no attempt to keep the anxiety out of his voice.

  Wilton nodded. “Received his report this morning,” he said. “Takes a very poor view of your position. Advises you to resign. More dignified.”

  Chapter XXIII

  1

  The inspector hadn’t been doing too well lately, and he knew it. All that his posse of policemen had discovered in their last search of the moor had been a perfectly good thermos flask, a watch glass and a lady’s compact. The thermos remained untraced but was obviously unimportant anyway—very few murderers are the picnicking type. The watch glass belonged to Bansted and had come out of the case when he was on the moor looking for Una after the shot had been fired—he was able to prove that one. And the compact had Hilda’s initials inside it. She identified it immediately and said thank you. I was probably the only person who thought twice about it. But that may have been because I was the only person to have had my dream.

  So far as suspicion went there were two of us who were not entirely in the clear—Dr. Mann and myself. In Dr. Mann’s case, it was rumour. The whole characteristic of rumour is that you can’t pin-point it. It is atmospheric rather. And I was conscious of the way it was closing in on Dr. Mann. The evidence admittedly was so negative as not to amo
unt to evidence at all—simply that things had been entirely quiet while Dr. Mann was away, and then had broken out again at their most sensational almost immediately after his return. By now it was pretty general knowledge that Dr. Mann really had pinched the penicillin. And, in minds like Bansted’s and Rogers’s, theft is one of the really awful things, like travelling first with a third-class ticket or seeing if the other end can hear you before you finally push button A. It meant that he was a bounder and outsider, as well as a foreigner. And if there had been rape or arson, let alone attempted murder, anywhere in the neighbourhood it was clear that they would both of them have been ready to pin it on to him.

  I, on the other hand, was the Inspector’s suspect. And he was keeping me all to himself. Admittedly the ice-cold eye was getting a bit chipped round the edges. But it could still focus. And I must have retold my version of the shooting at least a dozen times. What made it so peculiarly trying was that I made no attempt at improvements, and told the plain truth every time. It seemed safer that way. Safer, but more boring.

  2

  Dr. Mann had been telling the truth, too. He really was having an interview with the Old Man at the time when the shot had been fired.

  But that was only part of the truth about Dr. Mann, and he wanted me to have the whole and nothing but. In consequence, he began turning up at all hours whenever he couldn’t sleep. It was like having an owl about the place. I used to lie there after lights out, thinking longingly of the dormital bottle and wondering whether at any moment the familiar scratch and flutter would indicate that another visit was impending.

  This evening, for instance, he would keep trying to tell me how poor his people were.

  “There is my mother, my grandmother and my sister,” he said. “There is only one room. That is not much, no?”

  “It’s close quarters,” I agreed with him.

  “And they can afford so little,” he went on. “One meal a day. That is all they have.”

  “What time of day do they have it?” I asked.

  I wasn’t meaning to be callous. I really wanted to know. But Dr. Mann merely shrugged his shoulders.

  “For everyone in Germany it is bad,” he said. “People say that it is more bad for the old. I tell you that the old do not matter. For them it is nearly over. It is for the young ones that it is most bad of all.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I agreed.

  But by now Dr. Mann had tears in his eyes.

  “What is to happen to my mother if my gifts to her are to cease? If I go to prison she will die.”

  “You’re not there yet,” I reminded him.

  But Dr. Mann shook his head.

  “I have no hope,” he said. “I wish I were to be executed. Then I should not know what happens to my family.”

  He was really crying by now. And I wished that he would stop. But when he resumed he was calmer. He was reaching that Weltpolitik stage that all Germans so easily slide into. And it can be pretty anaesthetising, except presumably to other Germans.

  “To understand Germany,” he led up to it, “you must realise his position in the land mass of Europe. And his history. Also his imperial tradition. Likewise his birth-rate and his need for the colonies that he has lost.”

  I didn’t say anything, and Dr. Mann continued like the voice of the old Bundesrat speaking.

  “And in the nineteen-thirties,” he said, “Germany was a moral waste land. He had lost his soul. All women sold themselves. Perversion was everywhere. The revolution was waiting.”

  “You mean the Nazi revolution?” I asked.

  Dr. Mann jumped to his feet. He was trembling all over.

  “Never,” he said. “Never. There were always two ways. The Nazi way that called up the dragon that is in the heart of every German. And the Communist way. The way of order and human reason. I chose the Communist Party. I joined a Betrtibs-Zelle and a Strassen-Zelle when I was nineteen. My family disowned me.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Somehow I had never imagined Dr. Mann in any role as active as that of a Communist. If he had been sent out at night to put up illegal posters, I felt pretty sure that he would have contrived to paste them on upside down. But, in any case, that meant that there were two of us for certain with a C.P. past and I wondered how much Wilton knew about that.

  I was still wondering when Dr. Mann came up very close and started to whisper as though the N.K.V.D. and the Gestapo were both listening just outside the door.

  “And there is another,” he said. “Why else should someone among us change his name and use a poste restante address for secret communications?”

  “Could be shyness,” I suggested.

  But Dr. Mann shook his head.

  “He is not shy,” he answered. “He is proud. Very proud.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Dr. Smith.”

  There was a pause.

  “Have you told the Inspector?” I asked.

  Dr. Mann shook his head.

  “It would serve no purpose,” he said sadly. “I am no longer believed.”

  Chapter XXIV

  Walking has always seemed to me to combine all the disadvantages of being too tiring with those of being too slow. If the same amount of pedal energy could take you along at about fifteen m.p.h. I would have nothing against it. But even at four miles an hour it is a useful way of keeping the body ticking over while the mind is doing its thinking. And it was precisely because I wanted to think without interruption that I took myself out on the moor that afternoon.

  The path that I had taken led towards the more distant of the tors. But I hadn’t the slightest intention of going as far. That would have meant walking about four or five miles across wet bog-land. And even if I’d been out there in search of exercise—which I wasn’t—it still didn’t look like the sort of afternoon for really serious walking. The mist wasn’t exactly thick. But there was enough of it about to take the sparkle out of everything. The whole moor was one subdued general dampness. And I didn’t trust the moor any longer.

  It was when I stood still for a moment to light a cigarette that I discovered that I was being followed. I don’t mean that there was anyone on all fours darting about among the bushes. The man who was coming up the path behind me was as unconcealed as a policeman on patrol. But not half so impressive. He was a short fat man in a dark mackintosh. And he was wearing one of those black snap-brim trilbys that were put on the market specially for literary journalists. The snap-brim wasn’t being given its fair chance, however. That was because it had just started to rain, and the short fat man had pulled the brim down all round like a small black umbrella.

  It wasn’t until we were practically on top of each other that he looked up. And then he shied away as if he hadn’t been wanting to meet anyone. Whatever the reason, he turned his face away again the instant he had looked up.

  Not that there was anything very remarkable about the face. You see whole rows of faces just like that in every café between Dieppe and Naples. It is the continental common denominator countenance. It was simply here that it was remarkable. If I’d been a casting director going round the agents in search of a foreign spy second grade, I’d have agreed to any terms if I could have been sure of getting hold of the little dago in the black trilby.

  It occurred to me later that it might have been cleverer to have done a bit of shadowing myself. But I’m not awfully bright all the time. Particularly when I’m thinking about something else. And it was mostly Una that I was thinking about. I was heavy enough with my own cares already. My country brogues were letting in the water like a pair of superior double-welted sponges. I’d had a slight headache all day because of a miscalculation at the bar on the previous evening when I had fooled around with the gin, and mixed two different brands. And I was wondering why nobody really seemed to like me. That question, I must admit, had passed through my mind several times before. But it was only now that I suspected that I knew the answer. It could have been
that I didn’t like other people very much.

  It was getting on for dusk by now. And the landscape might have been made to order to match my thoughts. During the last five minutes the moor had turned a deep lead colour that was about as bright and as cheerful as a coffin lining, and the path across it glistened slightly like the trail a snail lays. Even Maida Vale seemed preferable, and I wondered why I had ever come here.

  Then as I breasted one of the little hills I saw two people standing on the path ahead of me. One of them was Hilda. She was wearing a light-coloured transparent sort of raincoat that I’d have recognised anywhere. I couldn’t see the other person. But they were obviously in conversation about something. And they were holding hands. It was a man that she was with all right. He was clasping her right hand in his, and he’d got his left hand cupped over them both. If he had been using adhesive tape he could not have made more sure of her.

  It was round about this point that they both noticed me. And, as soon as they saw that I was watching them, they sprang apart. Then I saw who the man was. And I wished I hadn’t.

  It was my little dago friend.

  Chapter XXV

  1

  Then something happened that put Hilda’s dago friend right out of my mind. A big something. And, in the result, a very unpleasant one.

  It all started with another of those cryptic messages. Only this time the method of delivery was different. Instead of being left for me on my pillow-case, it came by test tube. Or, rather, it was in the test tube and I collected it.

  There were five of us in the lab. at that time—Bansted, Rogers, Mellon, Gillett and myself. Bansted and Rogers were on my side. And Mellon was opposite. Gillett had a bench under the window just behind. Lunch was over, and altogether it promised to be one of those long, quiet, boring, unsatisfying afternoons that all research workers know so well. It was an afternoon that would end at about five-thirty, with eternity left behind somewhere around tea-time.