Judging by the sound, whoever it was must have been in a hurry. There was a kind of flick and scurry rather than a good solid crunch about the footsteps. And they were heading straight in my direction. Either I had a bat for a co-worker, or somebody was taking risks in the darkness.
It wasn’t a bat. And apparently I wasn’t the only person in Bodmin with a marked vitamin A deficiency. For the next moment I was bumped into. Bumped into hard by someone who was running. And that someone was carrying something small but heavy that went clattering across the courtyard.
But then came the unlikeliest part of all. Because it was a woman who had cannoned into me. And, as a sex, women don’t usually go dashing about from place to place the way men do. There is some protective biological reason that usually makes them take far better care of themselves.
But this was a woman all right. And, when I heard the gasp she gave, I recognised it. I knew then that it was Una that I had grabbed hold of.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
But she was evidently in no mood for being held. She still seemed pretty frantic about something.
“Help me find it,” was what she said. “You’ve got to help me find it.”
“Find what?” I asked.
It was obviously no use expecting to get a reasonable answer out of her in her present mood. She was already down on her knees searching. And I went down on all fours and began searching too. It seemed thoroughly silly, the pair of us playing bears out there in the darkness, especially as one of the bears didn’t even know what it was looking for.
And the next moment I put my hand right on top of something. It was a leather case, half jammed down into what seemed to be a lady’s handbag. And from as much as I could feel of it, it seemed to be a very ordinary pair of binoculars that Una had been carrying.
“Here it is,” I said. “You can stop worrying.”
But that was apparently the one thing that Una couldn’t do.
“Mind,” she said. “Don’t point it at yourself. It’s loaded.”
I lowered the case and handbag gently into my raincoat pocket. Then I put my arm round Una.
“Come and tell me all about it,” I said.
But she was too nervy.
“There’s nothing to tell,” she answered. “I just want you to get rid of it for me.”
I still had my arm round her, and we were walking over in the direction of the car.
“Look here, lady, I said. “That doesn’t make sense. You were trying to find it just now.”
“I wanted to give it to you.”
“But you didn’t know I’d be here.”
“Yes, I did. I saw you come out.”
“And you came after me?”
“Yes.”
“That makes a difference,” I agreed. “But what am I supposed to do?”
“Throw it into the sea,” she replied. “It’s safest.”
“Why, what’s it done?”
“I can’t tell you. I just want you to get rid of it.”
“And if I don’t?”
There was no argument about that one.
“You’ve got to.”
“Leave it to me,” I said.
Then I had an afterthought.
“That your handbag it’s wrapped up in?” I asked.
“It’s only an old one,” she replied, in the way that makes all female reasoning seem as though it’s being carried on according to a quite different set of regulations.
“But it’s still yours,” I pointed out. “Could be awkward, you know, if that got fished up in a lobster-pot.”
“Oh, very well then, give it back to me.”
She was so obviously impatient that I think she suspected me of simply raising difficulties. But she seemed relieved by one thing. She had got rid of the revolver, and that was all that mattered.
“Where d’you find it?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you,” she said.
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Not even in a hundred years’ time when we’re both of us old and grey.”
“Not even in a hundred years.”
She turned away as she said it without even so much as a thank you or a sorry-to-be-such-a-nuisance.
“I’ve got to go back now or they’ll be missing me,” she said.
“Who’s they?”
“Mrs. Clewes and the Old Man,” she said. “They don’t know I’ve ever had the revolver. I’ve been hiding it . . . ”
But by then Una had gone. She was running again.
2
I got the car out, and about half a mile along the road I parked. The one thing that I had been thinking about was the bulge in my pocket. And I wanted to examine it. The holster looked to me extraordinarily like the one that I had seen come falling out of Dr. Mann’s wash-basket. And this wasn’t surprising. Because when I opened it and put the weapon on my knees, there was the word “Luger” stamped into the gun-block. Evidently there must have been quite a cache of Lugers up at the Institute.
A moment later I had to cover the Luger up with the corner of my raincoat. That was because there was a sudden glare of headlights from behind me as young Mellon whooshed past at about eighty. I let him disappear into the distance with the array of rear lamps on his Buick as bright and lustrous as a firework display. Then I concentrated on the Luger again. Something told me that before getting rid of it the most important thing was to discover whether it had been fired recently. I’m not, however, very much of a gunsmith. As a matter of fact, this was the first automatic I’d ever handled. I knew enough not to look down the barrel while pulling at the trigger to see if it worked properly. But that was all that I knew enough not to do. And when I removed the safety-catch to see if I could remove the clip I made the mistake of not removing my finger from the mischief point. That trigger, moreover, must have been on the light side. And my finger evidently wasn’t. There was suddenly a noise as though a land-mine had gone off right under my nose, and for the moment I thought that I was blinded. But the business end of the Luger had been pointing up into the night sky, and this was one of the occasions when I was glad that there was no hood to my car.
I sat on there quietly thinking things over. I have a real affection for anything mechanical that works smoothly. And I had just proved that this Luger would have passed any gunnery sergeant’s inspection. To throw the thing away as Una wanted me to do would have been nothing less than sinful. Besides, it wasn’t really the manner of its disposal that concerned Una. All that she wanted was to get rid of it. Inside my pocket would be every bit as safe as lying on the sea-bed for the first low-tide to uncover. Women don’t remember about natural phenomena like tides.
So, having settled that point, I began thinking about Una. I’d got two girls on my hands by now. But there was a big difference somewhere. One of them trusted me, and one didn’t. While I was still wondering why, a voice spoke to me close at hand out of the darkness.
“That you, Hudson?”
I jumped as though the Luger had gone off again. The voice was familiar. It was Bansted’s voice. He must have been walking along the grass verge, and I hadn’t heard a hint of him until he was right on top of me.
“You going into Bodmin?” he asked. “Can I get a lift?”
“Sure,” I said, transferring the Luger into my other pocket so that it wouldn’t bump against us as we drove. “That is if I can get her to go. The timing’s all to hell or something. She’s been back-firing like a machine-gun all evening.”
“I know,” Bansted replied candidly, “I heard you. I thought for a moment you’d shot yourself.”
That wasn’t so good coming from Bansted. Because Bansted was our ballistics man. And he’d been hearing rather a lot of Lugers lately.
Chapter XXXII
Later that same evening I met Bansted again.
As it happened, I was in bed at the time. I’d been in bed for about half an hour, in fact. The light was out, and the dormital was beginning
to simmer gently. I could feel a delicious, cotton-woolly drowsiness closing in on me. In another minute I should be clean off.
Then, cutting in suddenly from the world that I was trying to let slide, I heard the sound of my door-handle turning. It wasn’t much of a sound. But it was enough to rouse me like a shot of strychnine. There wasn’t a more wakeful man in the whole Institute by the time the catch had slid right back and the door began to open.
I don’t mind admitting that I felt a shudder go right down my spine as I watched that door. It wasn’t that I was frightened. Nerves of that sort have never troubled me. It was simply that it was so horribly like what I had grown accustomed to in the old days when Dr. Mann had still had his room farther down the passage. And as I struggled up from sleep like a diver surfacing I had one thought and one thought only in my mind. It was straight nightmare. I wondered in what state I would find the top of my visitor’s head.
But the figure that came round the edge of that door wasn’t in the least ghostly. It was wearing a very ordinary camel-hair dressing-gown and felt bedroom slippers. Except that it was behaving rather more quietly than I had ever known anyone in the annexe behave, it might simply have mistaken its little cubicle. But the fact that it didn’t put the light on showed that it couldn’t be that. And a moment later when it switched on one of those little fountain-pen torches of the kind that doctors carry I guessed that the poor thing must be up to something.
I played sleepy-cat while the beam came over in my direction. And then, after I had felt the beam tickling my closed eyelids and go away again, I counted ten and opened up. It was just as I had expected. The visitor was hovering like a big moth round the chest-of-drawers. In the reflected light of the torch I could see that he had the top drawer half-open already.
Now I may not be nervous, but I am fussy. I’ve always been that way. Going through the Customs I have never liked having my scanties pawed over. And I didn’t even know that my new room-mate’s hands were clean. So I decided to do something at once.
“Looking for the Eno’s?” I asked.
As I asked it, I switched on the bedside lamp. And there was Bansted. I was a bit taken aback because I had thought I recognised the dressing-gown as Dr. Smith’s. But I was evidently not nearly so taken aback as Bansted. After all, I was only sitting up on one elbow being polite. Whereas he had transferred the torch to his left hand and was pointing a revolver at me with his right.
“Don’t move,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked. “Anything wrong?”
It could have been that my reply annoyed him. Or he may have been afraid that I would take a flying leap out of the bed and try to grapple with him. Whatever it was he began moving away from me.
“Give me that automatic you’ve got.” he said.
“What automatic?” I asked.
“You know,” Bansted told me.
I shook my head. But Bansted was still in earnest.
“If you don’t hand over that automatic I shall c-call for help,” he said.
“Okay. You call, I’ll help,” I promised.
And judging by the way things were going, I thought that he would pretty soon be in need of some kind of assistance. Burgling somebody else’s room does rather take it out of you if you’re not used to it. And I’d noticed that there was a distinct break in Bansted’s voice the last time he had spoken to me.
“I’m not jok-ing.”
The same little break again. This suited me. Because, above all things, I needed time. It seemed now as if Una had been very sensible in wanting to dispose of that Luger. And it did look as though the bottom of the sea would after all have been the best place for it.
“How d’you know I’ve got an automatic?” I asked.
“I saw you fire it?” he said.
“Where?”
“On the moor. Last night. In your car.”
“Oh, that,” I said, with a shrug of my shoulders. “That wasn’t an automatic. I told you. That was a back-fire. You saw yourself how badly she was running.”
For a moment, I thought that had settled it. The shrug of the shoulders had been a very good one, and the pyjama jacket had concealed nothing. But the next remark of Bansted’s made things difficult again.
“You hadn’t got the engine running,” he said. “You were holding the automatic in your hand when it went off.”
“Were you all that near?” I asked.
“I was,” Bansted replied. “If you’d pulled in a bit sooner you’d have hit me.”
“Pity I didn’t,” I told him.
“I wondered if you’d say that,” Bansted answered with just that note in his voice that revealed the triumph he was feeling. “Now will you give it to me.”
“Oh, very well, then.”
I gave that same shrug of the shoulders again. But there was another reason for it this time. I’ve got Una’s automatic under my pillow. And I had to wriggle to get at it.
“There it is,” I said, pointing it full at him. “I think this must be the one you mean.”
Even at the time the funny side struck me. But the fun escaped Bansted entirely. His eyebrows went up at the same moment as his jaw went down, and I saw him suddenly change to pistachio colour. Not that this was surprising. He’d seen me with a revolver in my hand before.
Considering the state he was in, he behaved very creditably.
“It’s—it’s no use, Hudson,” he said. “If you do anything foolish you’re for it. I took the precaution of telling Rogers what I was doing. If I’m not back inside ten minutes he’s going to sound the alarm.”
“You don’t say,” I answered. “Is he in this too?”
That interested me. Because I’d never been able to see how anyone single-handed could have got away with things so successfully. It was because of this that I had been keeping an eye on the Kimbell-Swanton combination. But a Bansted-Rogers unit was much more promising.
“He is,” I heard Bansted saying. “Rogers and I are acting strictly in conjunction.”
“Then let’s have him in,” I replied. “He’s got a right to be here.”
There wasn’t much difficulty in getting hold of Rogers. After all, it was only about three-quarters of an inch of Office of Works boarding that separated us. With my free hand I banged hard on the dividing wall.
“That you, Rogers?” I asked. “Could you spare a moment. We need you. There’s no one to say when to fire.”
He very nearly came through the wall he was with us so soon. And he had evidently been sitting up in readiness for a summons of some sort. His hair wasn’t rumpled, and he still had his collar and tie on. This wasn’t bad considering that it was after one-thirty already.
“Would you like to go back for a firearm of some sort?” I asked. “I’m sure Bansted would lend you one.”
Then I turned to Bansted.
“Be a good fellow and make this thing so that it doesn’t go off,” I said. “Then I’d like to have it back, please. Sentimental reasons, you understand.”
I had to hold the Luger by its muzzle before Bansted would come forward to collect it. And even then I was aware that Rogers was right up on his toes just to make sure that I didn’t crack his pal over the skull with the butt. A sigh went up from both of them as soon as the weapon was safely in Bansted’s possession. Then, as so often happens with anyone who is deeply in your debt, he turned nasty.
“You probably think you’ve been very clever, don’t you?” he asked.
“Only so so,” I replied. “I’ve found out you’ve got a revolver of your own as well as a rifle. But that’s about all. Is Rogers the typist?”
Both sides were now putting up a very good acting performance. I was doing the casual Wilton stuff. And Bansted and Rogers were behaving with a church-warden kind of dignity that was not bad for a bedroom thief and his accomplice. The typist remark, for instance, had been received with raised eyebrows and nothing else.
“I’ve had my eye on you for some time,” Bansted went on.
“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t. I’m ready to offer friendship but nothing more. Besides, think of Rogers.”
Bansted crossed his arms. This is usually one of the most effective attitudes. But a dressing-gown is not the right costume for it. He reminded me of a comic on the music halls.
“I think, Hudson,” he said, “that you rather underestimate our intelligence. Rogers’s and mine.”
“Impossible,” I said. “Tell me more.”
He nodded his head.
“That’s what I propose to do,” he said. “In the first place, this was a quiet, hard-working Institute before you came.”
“Go on.”
“The day someone fired at Gillett you couldn’t be traced, remember?”
“I knew where I was,” I said. “All the time.”
“And when you found you’d missed him,” Bansted went on, “you tried to spread the story that he’d invented the whole shooting.”
“That’s one reading,” I agreed.
“And when Una was fired at you were the only witness.”
“What about Una?”
“I’ve come to the conclusion,” said Bansted slowly, “that she’s concealing something.”
That was practically the first thing he’d said that made sense. Because I’d arrived at the same conclusion too. But I wanted to hear what else Bansted had to say.
“Did I shoot Mann too?” I asked.
“Mann shot himself,” Bansted replied. “Probably because he knew you were after him. He was in your room most of the night. Rogers heard you . . . ”
I turned towards Rogers.
“Don’t say we kept you awake,” I interrupted. “I know these walls are just plywood, but . . . ”
Bansted, however, hadn’t finished yet.
“And we have proof you were in Plymouth the night after the culture was stolen. We know how you got rid of it.”
The Bat that Flits Page 17