The Bulldog Drummond Megapack

by H. C. McNeile

  “Then came an amazing piece of luck. We motored down—John and I—and we passed the house of last night. There was of course nothing suspicious about it—nothing to mark it as the spot we wanted. Except one thing, and therein lay the luck. As we went past the drive another car coming towards us slowed up, evidently with the intention of turning in. And sitting beside the driver in the front seat was the gent called Paul. That settled it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You couldn’t be expected to know,” he answered, “but I should have thought old Toby’s grey matter would have heaved to it, especially as he spotted the astounding likeness to the late lamented Lakington. Don’t you remember the message Phyllis scrawled with her finger, in the blood at the back of her seat? Like LAK. It couldn’t mean anything else, unless it was the most astounding coincidence. So we were a bit on the way, but not far. We’d found a house connected with them, but whether Phyllis was inside or not I hadn’t an idea. However, being a bit of an adept at exploring houses at night, I intended to do so until you two bung-faced swabs went and made fools of yourselves at Stonehenge that afternoon.”

  “Never,” he grinned cheerfully, “in the course of a long and earnest career have I heard two people give themselves away so utterly and so often as Toby and Dixon did that afternoon. It was staggering, it was monumental. And the man they deliberately selected to be the recipient of their maidenly confidence was Paul himself. Beer—more beer—much more beer.”

  “Damn it, Hugh,” cried Sinclair.

  “My dear lad,” Drummond silenced him with a wave of his hand, “you were the finest example of congenital idiocy it has ever been my misfortune to witness. The stones of Stonehenge are little pebbles compared to the bricks you dropped, but I forgive you. I even forgive jolly old Dixon’s scavenging propensities in waste paper baskets. Such is my nature—beautiful, earnest and pure. But you assuredly caused me a lot of trouble: I had to change my plans completely.

  “Paul obviously suspected you. No man out of a lunatic asylum could possibly avoid doing so. And as I had no possible means of knowing that all he wanted to do was to get on with the job, I had to assume that he would pass on his suspicions to Irma, and proceed to rope the pair of you in. Time had become an urgent factor. So I wired Algy, and when he arrived, I told him by letter what to do. He was to announce loudly that he proposed to go to the Friar’s Heel by night, but as he valued his life, he wasn’t to do anything of the sort.”

  He leaned back in his chair, and looked at me with twinkling eyes. “You may be a damned idiot, Joe,” he said, “but I looks towards you and I raise my glass. Had it remotely dawned on me that you were going there yourself, I’d have given you the same warning. But it didn’t.”

  “You knew I was there?” I stammered.

  “Laddie,” he remarked, “hast ever listened to a vast herd of elephants crashing their way through primeval forest? Hast ever heard the scaly rhinoceros and young gambolling playfully on a shingly shore whilst they assuage their thirst? Thus and more so, was your progress that night. Like a tank with open exhaust you came into action. Like a battalion of panting men you lay about, in the most obvious places you could find, and breathed hard. You were, and I say it advisedly, the most conspicuous object in the whole of Wiltshire.”

  He frowned suddenly.

  “You know what we found there, the others don’t. Some poor devil who looked like a clerk—stone dead. What he was doing there we shall never know, but it was perfectly obvious that he had been mistaken for Algy. The black had blundered, and it was a blunder which might prove awkward. You heard them talking, Joe—Paul and Irma: but it didn’t require that confirmation to see how the land lay. All along I had realized that Phyllis and I were the principal quarry. If she got you so much the better, but we came first. And what I was so terribly frightened of, as soon as I saw that body, was that Irma would get nervous, and believing I was already dead, would go back, finish off Phyllis straight away, and then clear out. I still had no definite scheme; I didn’t even have a definite scheme after I’d functioned with the black. In fact I didn’t really intend to fight him at all.

  “I suppose he must have smelt me or something, at any rate he came for me. And by the Lord Harry, it was touch and go. However “—he shrugged his shoulders—”I pasted him good and hearty in the mazzard, and that was that. In fact he is in an awkward predicament that black. I dragged him into one of those disused sheds, and handcuffed him to a steel girder. Then I put his victim beside him. And he will find explanations a little difficult.

  “The trouble was that all this had delayed me. I hadn’t got a car, only a bicycle—and that house had to be explored at once. My hat! laddie,” he said to me, “I didn’t expect to find you as part of the furniture. How on earth did you get there?”

  “On the luggage grid of their car,” I said.

  “The devil you did,” he grinned. “The devil you did! Joe—you are a worthy recruit, though when I saw you through the skylight I consigned you to the deepest pit of hell. But, thank Heavens! you didn’t give away the fact that you’d seen me.”

  “I thought you were one of them,” I said.

  “I know you did, old boy,” he laughed, “What we’d have done without your thoughts during this show I don’t know. They have all been so inconceivably wide of the mark that they’ve been invaluable.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him, Mr Dixon,” said his wife.

  “My darling,” he protested, “I mean it. Joe has been invaluable. The air of complete certainty with which he proclaimed the exact opposite to the truth has saved the situation. I’ve been able to bank on it. And once I realized what that foul female intended to do I wanted every bit of assistance I could get.

  “The first alternative was to try and get you out of the house single-handed, but I dismissed that as impossible. I didn’t know your room, the house was stiff with men, and—most important of all—that woman would have shot on sight.

  “The second alternative was to get all the bunch into the house without arousing her suspicions. And when I heard her reading the letter she was sending Algy I realized we were getting on. John and Toby could be brought in at a suitable time, and there only remained the problem of what I was going to do. I confess I didn’t think of it. John suggested the black. It was a risk, but it proved easier than I thought.”

  “Damn it, Hugh,” cried Darrell, “why didn’t you say who you were in the afternoon? You were alone with us, and if you’d set us free then we could have tackled the whole bunch.”

  “Because, Peter,” said Drummond gravely, “it would have taken us some minutes to tackle them. It would have taken Irma half a second to kill Phyllis.”

  “At any rate,” said Jerningham, “you might have let us know. Jove! old boy, I never want to go through twenty minutes like that again.”

  “I know, chaps—and I’m sorry. I’d have spared you that if I’d thought it safe. But then you would all of you have been acting, and I wanted the real thing. I knew that Dixon thought John was me, and would tell you so, too. And I wanted you all to carry on as if you thought so. The rest you know. It was easy for me to talk every time instead of John, with the room in semi-darkness as it was. And I think you’ll admit we staged a damned good fight.”

  “When did you spot it, Phyllis?” said Darrell.

  “When I kissed John,” she laughed.

  “And very nice too,” grinned that worthy. “Unrehearsed effects are always best.”

  Drummond rose and stretched himself.

  “All over, chaps, all over. Back to the dreary round. Algernon,” he hailed a passing waiter, “bring, my stouthearted fellow, eight of those pale pink concoctions that the sweet thing in the bar fondly imagines are Martinis. I would fain propose a toast. But first—a small formality. Mr Joseph Dixon will place his hand in his pocket and extract there from coins to the value of five shillings. I will then present him here and now with the insignia of the Ancient Order, feeling that he ha
s well merited that high honour. Our anthem he knows; he has already sung it twice in his cracked falsetto. The privileges attendant to our Order you will find enumerated in this small book, Mr Dixon, and they should be studied in the solitude of your chamber when alone with your thoughts. Especially our great insurance treble which guards your dog from rabies, your cook from babies, and yourself from scabies. Great words, my masters, great words, I perceive that Algernon, panting and exhausted after his ten-yard walk, is with us again, carrying the raspberry juice with all his well-known flair. Lady and Gentlemen—to our new Froth Blower. And may I inquire which of you bat-faced sons of Belial has pinched the five bob?”

  TEMPLE TOWER (1929) [Part 1]

  CHAPTER I

  In Which the “Maid of Orleans” Leaves for Boulogne

  The Maid of Orleans drew slowly away from the side. Leaning over the rail was the usual row of cross-Channel passengers calling out final good-byes to their friends on the quay. An odd Customs man or two drifted back to their respective offices: the R.A.C. representative raised protesting hands to High Heaven because one of his charges had departed without his triptyque. In fact, the usual scene on the departure of the Boulogne boat, and mentioned only because you must start a story somewhere, and Folkestone harbour is as good a locality as any.

  Standing side by side on the quay were two men, who had been waving their hands in that shame-faced manner which immediately descends on the male sex when it indulges in that fatuous pursuit. The targets of their innocent pastime were two women, whose handkerchiefs had fluttered in response from the upper deck. And since these two charming ladies do not come into the matter again it might be as well to dispose of them forthwith. They were, in short, the wives of the two men, departing on their lawful occasions to Le Touquet, there to play a little golf and lose some money in the Casino. Which is really all that needs to be said about them, except possibly their last remark chanted in unison as the ship began to move:

  “Now mind you’re both good while we’re away.”

  “Of course,” answered the two men, also in unison.

  And here and now let us be quite clear about this matter. Before ordering a dinner the average man consults the menu. If his mouth is set for underdone beef with horse-radish sauce it is as gall and wormwood to him to be given mutton and red-currant jelly. Similarly, before reading a book the average reader likes to have a pointer as to what it is about. Does it concern the Sheik of Fiction carrying off a beautiful white woman on his thoroughbred Arab; or does it concern the Sheik of Reality riding a donkey and picking fleas out of his burnous? Does it concern a Bolshevist plot to blow up the policeman on point duty at Dover Street; or does it concern the meditations of an evangelical Bishop on the revised Prayer-Book? And honesty compels me to state that it concerns none of these things, which is just as well for all concerned.

  But it occurred to me that the parting admonition of those two charming ladies might possibly be construed to mean that they feared their husbands would not be good during their absence. Far from it: such a thought never even entered their heads. It was just a confirmatory statement of a fact as certain as the presence of Nelson in Trafalgar Square.

  “Dear lambs,” they remarked to one another as the boat cleared the harbour, “it will do them good to have a few days’ golf all by themselves.”

  However, I still haven’t given this pointer. And with it the last hopes of those who insist on a love story will be dashed to the ground. They must have received a pretty severe jolt when this matter of husband and wife was alluded to, though a few of the more optimistic ones may have had visions of a divorce looming somewhere, or even a bit of slap and tickle. Sorry: nothing doing. So if this is the mutton of my restaurant analogy you know what to do. But don’t forget this book weighs as much as “Pansy, or the Girl who Lost All for Love,” and will do just as much damage to the aspidistra if you hit it. Another thing, too, which it does not concern is golf. On that fact, I must admit with shame and sorrow that these two miserable men had deceived their trusting wives. The larger and more nefarious of the two had actually addressed his partner in crime at breakfast that morning on the subjects of handicaps and niblicks and things, and what they were going to do during their few days at Rye. His eye had not twitched: his hand when he helped himself to marmalade had been steady. And yet he lied—the dirty dog—he lied.

  And his companion in vice knew he had lied, though, to his everlasting shame, he said no word. Both of these scoundrels allowed their wives to leave them for a perilous sea voyage with a falsehood ringing in their ears. Which shows you the type of men you’re dealing with. However—that’s that: I’ll get on with it. Still not given the pointer? Oh! read the darned book and find out for yourself.

  I will take the larger one first. His height was a shade over six feet in his socks: his breadth and depth were in proportion. Which, in boxing parlance, entitles him to be placed among the big men. And big he was in every sense of the word. His face was nothing to write home about, and even his wife admitted that she only used it to amuse the baby. Anyway, looks don’t matter in a man. What does matter is his condition, and, reverting once more to boxing parlance, this man looked what he was—trained to the last ounce.

  It has always been a bit of a marvel to me how Hugh Drummond kept as fit as he did, in view of his incredible capacity for lowering ale. Nevertheless, the bald fact remains that in the matter of fitness he had all of us beat to a frazzle. I particularly wish to emphasise that fact, because I believe that this is the first occasion that one of his really intimate friends has written about him. Take, for instance, the extraordinary adventure with that crazy woman, Irma, on Salisbury Plain. Joe Dixon wrote that, and Joe, good fellow though he is, hardly knew Hugh at all. But fourteen years have gone by since I first met him, in the front line near Arras, and in fourteen years one gets to know a man. From which it will be inferred that I was the other of the two nefarious scoundrels who had stood waving to their trusting wives from the quay.

  Now, as will perhaps be remembered by those who have followed some of our adventures in the past, we got mixed up with a bunch of criminals shortly after the war. Their leader was a man named Carl Peterson, who was killed by Drummond in Wilmot’s giant airship just before it crashed in flames. And that led up to the amazing happenings on Salisbury Plain that I have already alluded to, when Peterson’s mistress kidnapped Drummond’s wife and nearly got the lot of us. But she escaped, and the first thought that had sprung to my mind on getting Hugh’s letter was that she had reappeared again. Up till now I had had no chance of speaking to him privately, but as the boat disappeared round the end of the jetty, I turned to him eagerly:

  “What’s the game, Hugh? Is it Irma on the scene again?”

  He held up a protesting hand.

  “My dear Peter,” he remarked, “have you noticed that the sun is in the position technically known as over the yardarm?”

  “And as the Governor of North Carolina said to his pal, let’s get to it,” I answered. “What about the Pavilion Hotel?”

  “It is a wonderful thing being married, Peter,” he said thoughtfully as we strolled along the platform.

  “Marvellous,” I agreed, and glanced at him sideways: there was a certain note in his voice that confirmed my suspicions.

  “And,” he continued, “it is good for all of us to sacrifice something in Lent.”

  “It is June,” I answered, “but the principle holds good.”

  “Peter,” he said, as we fell into two easy chairs in the lounge, “your brain has probably jumped to the fact that it was not entirely due to a desire to beat your head off on Rye golf links that I engineered this little affair at Le Touquet. Waiter—two large tankards of ale.”

  “Some such idea had dawned on me,” I agreed. “It seemed so remarkably sudden.”

  “My dear old lad,” he said with a grin, “you can’t imagine the diplomacy I had to use. I first of all suggested that we all four should go to Le Touquet—
a proposal which was jumped at by my devoted spouse. I then wrote you that masterpiece of duplicity.”

  “Masterpiece it may have been,” I laughed, “but it gave me brain fever trying to think of an excuse that would hold water.”

  “What did you cough up finally?” he asked.

  “I wrote to my lawyer,” I said, “and told him to write to me and say he’d got some urgent business on my dear old grandmother’s will. Sounded a bit thin to me, I confess, but, by the mercy of Allah, it went down. And Molly was deuced keen to go.”

  “So, bless her, was Phyllis,” answered Hugh. “Thin or not, Peter, it worked. For a few days we are going to be bachelors. And much may happen in a few days.”

  “As you say,” I agreed, “much may happen in a few days. At the same time, you haven’t answered my first question. Is it Irma?”

  “It is not, bless her. Maybe another time, for I should hate to lose her. But this time it’s something quite, quite new.”

  He drained his tankard and pressed the bell.

  “We will have the other half section, while I put you wise. Mark you, Peter, it may be the most hopeless mare’s nest, and if it is we can always play golf. But somehow or other I don’t think it is. In fact, in my own mind, I’m quite certain it isn’t. You don’t know this part of the world at all, do you?”

  “Not a bit,” I said.

  “Well, the first thing to do is to give you a rough idea of the lie of the land. Once we leave Hythe we come to a large stretch of absolutely flat country which is known as Romney Marsh. The word ‘marsh’ is a misnomer, as the soil itself is quite hard and gives very good grazing. There are a few small villages dotted about, and an odd farmhouse or two, but the prevailing note is solitude. Motor charabancs cross it daily from Hastings and Folkestone, and the roads are good but a bit narrow. But it is a solitary sort of place for all that; you feel that anything might happen on it.

  “A few centuries ago it was covered by the sea, which came right up to the foothills, so that all of Romney Marsh is reclaimed land. And from those hills you get the most marvellous view away towards Dungeness and Lydd—if you like that type of view, that’s to say. Open, free, with the tang of the sea in the wind. I love it; which was one of the deciding factors that led me to take our present house. It has a clear sweep for miles right out to sea, and I’ve installed a powerful telescope on the terrace—a telescope, Peter, which has been and is going to be of assistance. However, to return to our muttons. As I’ve told you, the Marsh itself is sparsely populated. The only considerable towns are Rye and Winchelsea—which can hardly be said to be on Romney Marsh at all. Rye is set on a sort of conical hill, and must in the olden days have been almost completely surrounded by water. But except for them, and Lydd, where the artillery range is, and New Romney, there’s not much in the house line, and those that are there belong principally to small farmers.