Fen Country

by Edmund Crispin

  “Would but won’t,” said Campbell. “You can take it as read that he’ll be kept surrounded by watchful comrades the whole time he’s over here. Since Petrov, they’ve been very cagey about that sort of thing. So that even if Dietrich did feel inclined to ask for asylum, he’d have to do a tricky escaping act first… Not,” Campbell went on, probing delicately, “that we have any reason to suppose—”

  “Nothing that would convince your superiors, no,” said Fen with a grin. “Just the same, I should like to know where Dietrich and his friends are likely to go when the meeting’s over.”

  Campbell regarded him with suspicion. “Look here, you be careful,” he said. “Some of these people are genuinely dangerous. If you’re thinking of trying to strike up an acquaintance—”

  “I am not,” said Fen truthfully. “I’m curious, that’s all. How do the comrades relax? Will they go to a pub, I mean, or—”

  “They’ll probably go to that pub over there.” Campbell pointed across the road. “The Grapes.”

  “Good. I can do with a drink. And don’t you worry about me. I’m quite capable of looking after myself.”

  Campbell contemplated him for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I believe you are. Just don’t start heiling Mosley when you’re in The Grapes, that’s all. The clients don’t much like that sort of thing.” He smiled and waved and went.

  Fen had no intention of heiling Mosley, in The Grapes or anywhere else. He bought beer and settled down by the bar to read the evening paper, with the Light Program burbling innocuously at his elbow; and after half an hour or so was rewarded by the arrival of Dietrich with three English comrades—a young fanatical-looking one, an older and decidedly tough one, and a clerkly fellow in rimless glasses. They carried their drinks to a table in the corner, and Fen began taking serious stock of the situation.

  It was unpromising, he found. Dietrich was obviously being closely watched, and it was clear that conversational overtures from a stranger such as Fen would arouse instant suspicion. Some communication with Dietrich there plainly must be, however, if anything were to be accomplished. As to how—

  “…opens our program of ‘Music for the Multitude,’ ” said the radio, “with that rousing…”

  At which Fen sat upright abruptly on his stool, and for the first time that evening favored the Light Program with the whole of his attention. For he had recognized the announcer’s voice. By one of those coincidences which ere so much commoner in life then in fiction, this particular announcer was an ex-pupil of Fen’s. Fen knew, moreover, that he had quarreled with the BBC and was leaving them quite shortly. And that being so—

  There was a telephone-box a short way along the road. Fen left the bar, and after a rapid reconnaissance of the back of the inn’s premises, made two calls.

  At The Grapes, when he returned there, he was gratified to find everything as before. He resumed his position at the back, and presently, when the second item of “Music for the Multitude” had reached its tawdry conclusion, stretched out his hand, as if idly, to twist the radio’s volume control.

  “We come now,” said the announcer, “to a popular march based on the old German folk-tune ‘Der hohe Herr am Barwird Ihnen winken: dann, deutscher Kamerad, gehen Sie bitte sofort in die Herren.’ Ladies and gentlemen—’Anchors Aweigh.’”

  A great splurge of brass and cymbals filled the room. At a glare from the landlord Fen hurriedly turned the volume down again and went back to his paper. Perhaps ten minutes later, a very large, very drunk young man appeared and demanded a double whisky. With an air of great self-approval, he drank about half of this. Then all at once his expression altered; he mumbled something; holding a hand to his mouth, he made hurriedly for one of the doors at the back.

  “There’s another of them can’t take it,” said Fen to the landlord. The landlord nodded, and with mournful emphasis Fen nodded back.

  Dietrich got to his feet. Now he was heading for the door the young man had disappeared through. The tough middle-aged comrade was following, while the younger one slipped out into the street—no doubt with a view to stationing himself strategically under the relevant window. Fen finished his drink and left. In the narrowing deserted street behind The Grapes he was in time to see a car’s tail-light vanishing. The youthful comrade, though unlikely to recover consciousness for some minutes, was not seriously injured, Fen thought. He went and found himself a taxi.

  “Most irregular,” said Sir Somebody two hours later, in an office of the Special Branch whose whereabouts is not known to the general public. “Two respected citizens of Stepney with great stunning bruises on the backs of their heads, and no trace of miscreants…”

  “Undergraduates, perhaps,” Fen suggested. “For instance, I happen to know that a couple of pupils of mine are in London at the moment—”

  “No, they’ll never be caught.” Sir Somebody was firm. “Not a chance of it, I’m afraid. As to this business of kidnapping an important personage from East Berlin… well, really…”

  Herr Dietrich grinned all over his broad, florid face. “Such a very good plan,” he murmured. “At the first, you realize, I am a little surprised that it is carried out by amateurs. But then I understand that most probably my hint is too slight to be acted on by your—what do you call it? by your big brass. I am surrounded all the time, so I do not dare to do anything more emphatic, but I hope that perhaps it will be thought I am a masquerader, for always at these political meetings there are secret police listening. When I heard the instruction from the BBC—”

  “Which reminds me.” Fen reached for the telephone, dialed a number, asked for a certain extension, spoke, listened, chuckled.

  ‘It seems,’ he told them, ringing off, “that quite a surprising number of German-speakers listen to ‘Music for the Multitude.’ They’ve all been ringing up wanting to know why the BBC should suppose that ‘Anchors Aweigh’ is based on the German folk-song ‘The tall man at the bar will give you a signal: then, German Comrade, please go straight to the Gents.’”

  Sir Somebody laughed. But Campbell, the fourth member of the party, said rather irritably: “I still don’t see it; I still don’t see how you could tell from that meeting that Herr Dietrich was wanting to stay in this country.”

  “Oh, simple,” said Fen. “He pronounced ‘Eisenhower’ wrong. Despite the spelling of the last two syllables, it’s a German name, of course, which every German recognizes as such. What’s more, we in England and America pronounce it exactly as a German would. ‘Eisssenhoer,’ from a Berliner, was just ridiculous. Either Herr Dietrich wasn’t Herr Dietrich at all, or else he was relying on the Stepney Communist Party’s ignorance of German—as I relied on it in arranging for that broadcast message—to send out a distress signal. Ike to the rescue! A good thing, in the circumstances, that they didn’t elect Stevenson.”

  A Country to Sell

  “So what it comes down to,” said the young American, in a voice which no amount of self-discipline could keep entirely steady, “is just this: either this top guy in Washington is a traitor, or I am. The FBI’s picked me for the honor—and if they could get any kind of concrete evidence against me, I’d be going back to the States for a long, long spell in jail. Even as it is—well, but never mind me. All I’m saying now, in italics, capitals, is that I was NOT careless and I did NOT sell out. And if you accept that, there’s only the one alternative.”

  Gervase Fen, in whose rooms at St. Christopher’s the conversation was taking place, regarded his visitor thoughtfully. “In strict grammar,” he observed, “there is of course never more than one alternative; sometimes, though, the list of candidates for the position is rather larger than one imagines…” He hesitated. “Look, Christopher, why have you come to me?”

  Christopher Bradbury considered; then he answered slowly: “I guess I just had to tell somebody. A man can’t keep a thing like this boiling inside of him indefinitely without going haywire. And the question now is, do you believe I’m telling the
truth?”

  “Yes, I do,” Fen assured him. “But before I say anything more then that, I’d like to go over the facts once again and make sure there’s nothing I’ve missed.

  “Like this: on going down after a misspent career here at Oxford, you got a job in a top-secret department of the FBI, working in London in collaboration with our Special Branch.”

  “Check,” said Bradbury.

  “Your only relative in England is—no, was: you said he’d just died, didn’t you?—was a stepbrother of your mother’s, an elderly retired lawyer called Darling who lived in Sussex by the sea.”

  “Check.”

  “Last month you were given a fortnight’s leave; and you went to Sussex for the second week of it to stay with Darling. “There you met, among other people, a family called Anderson—mother, father, grown-up daughter—who were old acquaintances of Darling’s and who had rented a house near by for their summer holiday.

  “On the day before you left you were due to telephone direct to your top man in Washington for instructions. Your uncle was in poor health, and more or less permanently confined to one room—and unfortunately that was the room with the telephone in it. So rather than embark on the insane enterprise of trying to get through to Washington from a public call-box, you went along to the Andersons’ house and asked to use their telephone.”

  “So far, correct.”

  “The Andersons,”—Fen went on—”showed you into the parlor, where the telephone was, and left you alone there. You closed and fastened the door and the windows, so that even if anyone had been listening outside them, they could have heard nothing. And—”

  “And also,” said Bradbury, “I made sure—it was just routine, of course, but I was still thorough about it—that there were no ventilators, to let out sound, and no hidden persons or recording machines.”

  “Good. You then picked up the telephone and asked for your number. I’m not quite clear about these technical precautions you mentioned…”

  “If anyone asks for that particular number,” Bradbury explained, “by the time the exchange rings him back he’s through to a special switchboard, on a line which can’t be tapped and has no operators to overhear. The FBI checked that part of it—naturally—and it was foolproof. That has to be accepted, whether we like it or not.”

  “All right. You got through, were given your instructions, rang off, thanked and paid the Andersons, and went back to your uncle.”

  “And twelve hours later, before I’d even left Sussex,” Bradbury concluded grimly, “a valuable man was shot dead in Hampstead, and months of work collapsed in ruins, because those instructions were known.

  “Not even my colleagues or my boss in this country, not even your Special Branch, had any idea what those instructions would be. It wasn’t necessary for me to pass them on, any part of them, to anybody, and they weren’t written down. They went direct into my head, and that’s where they stayed.”

  And with a despairing gesture Bradbury fell back in his chair. “So what, I ask you, is the answer to that?”

  Fen chose to regard the question as rhetorical; and a heavy silence descended on the room. Presently, without much appearance of optimism: “I can understand,” Fen ventured, “how the line from your special switchboard to Washington could be made safe from tapping. But the line from the Anderson house to the switchboard, now…”

  Bradbury shook his head. “No soap. They have instruments to detect if a line’s being tapped, and this line just wasn’t.”

  “In that case there’s got to be something you haven’t told me… These Andersons, for instance. What sort of people are they?”

  “Ordinary. Middle class. Fairly well off, I’d say. Not intellectual giants, but reasonably lively and pleasant. Marion, that’s the daughter, was crazy about some guy her parents didn’t approve of—he wasn’t down there in Sussex, though…” Bradbury paused. “Yes, go on,” said Fen impatiently.

  “About Marion? Well, naturally she was wanting to marry this guy. She knew her parents thought he was after her for her money—she has a bit of her own—so that was holding her back. But I got the idea that if they’d seriously tried to prevent her seeing him, she’d have eloped with him there and then: she’s twenty-five, twenty-six maybe, so there’d have been nothing to stop her. Mind you, she didn’t seem too happy about things…”

  Bradbury’s voice trailed away; then with more energy he said: “Look, Gervase, I don’t see how all this stuff about Marion—”

  “Stop grumbling,” said Fen peevishly. “What I was wondering, you see, was whether…” And at that he too broke off, so that again the silence stretched between them. Bradbury noted, however, that his ex-tutor’s lean and ruddy countenance no longer wore its look of distressing blankness; it was alert now, and grew more so momently as Bradbury watched…

  “Christopher,” said Fen abruptly. “Do you want my advice?”

  “What would that be?”

  “My advice,” said Fen,”is that you go to Mr. Anderson and ask him to tell you, in confidence, if there wasn’t something a bit odd about that telephone in the house he rented.”

  Bradbury stared. “Odd?” he echoed. “There was no extension, if that’s what you mean—”

  “No, no.”

  “And if by any chance you’re thinking that the instrument itself can have had some sort of a dictaphone hidden inside it, I can assure you, most earnestly—”

  “Don’t argue, Christopher,” Fen interrupted him. “Just go away and do as I say.”

  So Bradbury looked at him again; and thereupon ceased to argue, and went away and did as he said.

  And certainly it was a transfigured American who returned to Fen’s rooms the following evening.

  “Sherlock does it again!” he crowed inanely. “The deductions of the great man proved beyond question that—”

  “Not deductions,” said Fen with some rancor. “Intelligent guess-work—nothing more.” He is fond of compliments, but likes accuracy even better. “Have a drink and tell me about it.”

  “Well, here’s how it must have happened,” said Bradbury as soon as he was supplied. “Our—our opponents, let’s call them, get hold of my uncle and suggest that information he can give them about my activities will be well paid for. Since I myself have been keeping that possibility firmly in mind, he isn’t too hopeful.

  “But then his friends the Andersons come down to the neighborhood to stay. Pa and Ma are on hot bricks because daughter Marion has fallen for a jerk. They daren’t thwart her openly; but they know said jerk has promised to telephone Marion every evening while she’s away.

  “So when clever old Mr. Darling suggests that they put a wrong telephone number—his number—on to the instrument in the house they’ve rented, they think that’s just fine: Marion will give the transferred number to the boy-friend; the boy-friend will phone Mr. Darling—thinking it’s the Anderson house; and Mr. Darling, representing himself as a friend of the family who’s on Marion’s side, will tell him that Marion’s ill, but will get in touch with him later, and also that he’s not to write, because with Marion confined to bed there’s a chance his letters will be intercepted and withheld.

  “The boy-friend will believe all this: ‘Marion’s nuts about me,’ he’ll tell himself if she weren’t ill, she’d certainly be hanging around the phone waiting for me to call—so this literally can’t be just a trick to choke me off.’ But meanwhile, of course, Marion will be wondering why the heck she’s not hearing from him—and she can’t write him or phone him herself, because he’s a commercial traveler moving around the country all the time, and.she doesn’t know where he’ll be. So maybe, with any luck, she’ll decide he’s neglecting her badly, and react accordingly. Even if she does subsequently meet him again, his explanations, when you come to think of it, are going to sound very, very fishy indeed…

  “But of course, it isn’t Marion’s welfare that clever old Mr. Darling has chiefly in mind: what interests him about the set-up is t
he possibility of tripping me—because so long as I have any private long-distance calls to make, the Anderson house is the likeliest place for me to go.

  “And I fall for it. So help me, the one thing no one ever questions is the number set into the dial of a phone. Naturally I gave it to the exchange when they had to call me back so that when the connection was made, the house they actually called was my uncle’s. He imitated my voice—he’d been expecting something—”

  “No password?” Fen interposed rather brusquely.

  “What? Password? Hell, no, The Washington number I called was password enough in itself: any unauthorized person capable of worming that number out of me would be quite capable of worming out a couple dozen passwords as well…

  “Where was I? Yeah, well, the rest’s obvious, I guess. My uncle imitates me in talking to the boss in Washington; then he rings the real number of the Anderson house and imitates the boss in talking to me. Circle complete.”

  “H’m,” said Fen. “Your uncle was taking a good fat risk, though.”

  “Old buzzard!” And Bradbury scowled ferociously. “But no, there couldn’t be any serious risk. Not for him. He was dying, you see, and knew it. The only thing was, he’d run through all his money…

  “And clever old Mr. Darling wasn’t going to any pauper’s grave so long as he had a nephew, and a man’s life, and a country to sell.”

  A Case in Camera

  Detective Inspector Humbleby, of New Scotland Yard, had been induced by his wife to spend the first week of his summer’s leave with his wife’s sister, and his wife’s sister’s husband, in Munsingham, and was correspondingly aggrieved.

  Munsingham, large and sooty, seemed to him not at all the place for recreation and jollity; moreover, his wife’s sister’s husband, by name Pollitt, was, like himself, a policeman, being superintendent of the Munsingham City CID, so that inevitably shop would be talked.