Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens

by Michael Gilbert

  “Correct. And if you’re looking for a ride, I’m afraid all my horses are booked just now.”

  “Oddly enough, I was simply going for a walk.”

  “Then let me give you a word of warning. Don’t bring your dog too near the farm. I’ve got an Alsatian called Prince. He’s a killer.”

  “We will both bear it in mind,” said Mr. Calder. Rasselas grinned amiably.

  The cathedral clock sent out its sixteen warning notes into the still, bonfire-scented air and then started to strike nine times.

  The wireless set in Canon Trumpington’s drawing room said, “This is the nine o’clock news. Here are the headlines. In Chinese Turkestan, an earthquake has destroyed sixteen villages. After a football match in Rio de Janeiro the crowd invaded the pitch and was dispersed by tear gas. A subsequent bayonet charge resulted in twenty-five casualties. There has been an unexpected rise of twenty-seven per cent in the price of copper. The death toll from the as-yet-unexplained outbreak of cholera at the Al-Maza Military Research Station near Cairo has now risen to seven, and includes a number of Egypt’s leading scientific experts. Professor Fawazi, head of the establishment, who was seriously ill, is now off the danger list. . .”

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Mrs. Trumpington. “Turn that machine off, Herbert.”

  Canon Trumpington stretched out a hand, and peace was restored to the pleasant room in the South Canonry. In the garden outside an owl was serenading the full moon.

  “Is it my imagination, or does the news get worse and worse?”

  “There wasn’t much to cheer anyone up tonight, I agree. What do you say, Behrens? Is the world running down? Are we all on our way out, in a maelstrom of violence and silliness?”

  Mr. Behrens said, “Is it the world that’s getting old? Or is it us? The older we get, the more we value calm and peace, and a settled routine. Our nerves aren’t as strong as they were. Things which look like a desperate threat to us – if we were forty years younger, they might look like an adventure.”

  “I may be old,” said Mrs. Trumpington with spirit, “and I may be nervous, but I can’t see how anyone, whatever their age or state of health, could regard a thousand people being wiped out in an earthquake as an adventure.”

  “Certainly not. But the first reaction of a young man might not be one of horror. It might be a desire to go out and help.”

  Mrs. Trumpington snorted. The canon said, “He’s quite right, you know.” He made a mental note for his next sermon.

  “And what about those poor Egyptian scientists?”

  “There,” said Mr. Behrens, “I must confess that my own reaction was one of incredulity. Cholera nowadays is controllable by quite simple forms of immunisation. If the outbreak had been in some primitive community, where serum was unobtainable – but in a scientific institution . . .”

  “It said an unexplained outbreak. Might it be a new and more virulent type?”

  “It’s possible. I remember when I was in Albania before the war a particularly unpleasant form of skin disease, akin to lupus. . .”

  “If you go on like this,” said Mrs. Trumpington, “I’m going to bed.”

  Mr. Behrens apologised, and said, “Tell us what you’ve got planned for tomorrow.”

  “We’re going to take coffee at the Deanery. There’s a bring-and-buy sale in the afternoon. I’ll let you off that. And we’re having tea with Marjorie and Albert Rivers. Although I don’t expect he’ll be there. They have that cottage just outside Harnham Gate. He’s one of the top scientists, out at Porton. She’s a bridge fanatic.”

  “Not a fanatic, my dear. An expert. That’s something quite different.”

  “They’re both very good, anyway. No-one round here will take them on any more.”

  “When people say that,” said Mr. Behrens, “it usually means they think they’re a bit sharp.”

  “No. Nothing like that. They’re simply above our standard. They’re both county players. Indeed I’m told that if Marjorie Rivers had the time to devote to it, she might be an international.”

  “A scientist and a bridge international,” said Mr. Behrens. “They sound an interesting couple.”

  “If there’s one thing I can’t abide,” said Mrs. Wort, “it’s rabbits. Rabbits and rats. They’re both vermin. And as for eating them . . .”

  “I’m not very fond of them myself,” admitted Mr. Calder. “It was Rasselas who insisted on catching them. I should bury them and forget about it.”

  The great dog was stretched out in front of the fire, his amber eyes half shut, the tip of his tail twitching.

  “I declare,” said Mrs. Wort, “I think he understands every word you say. And isn’t he enjoying his holiday! The Plain was a grand place for dogs, before the army messed it up. I remember the time, when I was a girl, there wasn’t a soldier in sight. Just a few airmen, in what they called the Balloon School. Now you can’t move for ‘em.”

  “You can’t indeed,” said Mr. Calder. He was as relaxed as Rasselas, full-length in an armchair as old and faded and comfortable as everything in the farmhouse kitchen. “I ran into them myself this afternoon. And I nearly got run into by a high-spirited female on a horse.”

  “Swore at you, did she?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then it’d be Missus King-Bassett. Keeps a riding stable out at Hurley Bottom, and a kennels, and runs the farm. You know what they all call her up at the camp, don’t you? The merry widow.”

  “Then Mr. King-Bassett is dead?”

  “If he ever existed.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Calder. “If he ever existed. That sort of widow. How long’s she been here?”

  “She bought the place—oh—three, four years ago. When old man Rudd died. She’s pulled it up, too. She’s a good farmer, they say.”

  “It’s a lonely sort of spot.”

  Mrs. Wort sniffed, and said, “She’s not lonely. Not if half the stories you hear are true. There was a major from Larkhill, made a perfect fool of himself over her. Married too. Now he’s been sent abroad. So it’s off with the old and on with the new.”

  “And who’s the new?”

  “I wouldn’t know, and I wouldn’t care. There’s a lot of men to choose from round here. Soldiers and airmen, and all the scientists at Porton. They say the scientists are the worst of the lot. Would you be wanting anything more?”

  “Not a thing,” said Mr. Calder sleepily. “As soon as I can bring myself to stir from this beautiful fire, I’ll be toddling up to bed.”

  When Mrs. Wort had departed on her nightly round of locking up, he sat for a long time, staring into the red heart of the fire and wondering why an attractive and capable woman should want to hide herself away in the wilds of Salisbury Plain.

  “I’m sorry Albert couldn’t be here this afternoon,” said Marjorie Rivers. “They’re keeping him very busy out at Porton just now. Some new gas. He doesn’t talk to me about his work. Most of it’s secret, anyway.”

  She was a thick, competent-looking, grey-haired woman and reminded Mr. Behrens of the matron at his old preparatory school.

  “I was telling Mr. Behrens,” said Canon Trumpington, “what a formidable record you and your husband had established at the bridge table.”

  “Are you a player, Mr. Behrens?”

  “I’m a rabbit. What I really enjoy about the game is the curious psychological kinks it throws up. I played with a man once who would do anything to avoid bidding spades.”

  “That must have been rather limiting. Did you find out why?”

  “I discovered, in the end, that he stuttered very badly on the letters.”

  Marjorie Rivers gave a sudden guffaw and said, “You’re making the whole thing up. Another cup of tea, Mrs. Trumpington? Mind you, I agree with you about psychology. Albert’s a scientist, you know.”

  “And a very distinguished one,” said the canon politely.

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking about his work. I meant at the bridge table. He counts points,
adds them up, calculates the probability factor, applies the appropriate formula, presses a button, and expects the answer to come out. And so it might, if the players were automata. But they aren’t. They’re human beings. Now I play by instinct, and I reckon I get better results.”

  “I entirely agree,” said Mr. Behrens. “I’d back instinct every time.”

  “Are you in Salisbury for long?”

  “The Trumpingtons are kindly putting up with me for a few days.”

  “We have a little bridge club. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, at half past two. Would you care to come along tomorrow?”

  “It’s quite safe,” said Mrs. Trumpington. “Most of us are beginners. I shall be there.”

  “I can’t manage tomorrow, I’m afraid. I have to run up to London. But I might come along on Friday.”

  “We’ll look forward to it,” said Marjorie Rivers with what seemed to Mr. Behrens to be rather a grim smile. Or maybe it was his imagination.

  He carried the question up to London with him on the following day and propounded it to Mr. Fortescue, the Manager of the Westminster Branch of the London and Home Counties Bank.

  Mr. Fortescue said, “She is certainly a remarkable woman. A top-class bridge player, with the sort of mind which that implies. A competent linguist in half a dozen languages, and the holder of very left-wing views which, to do her justice, she makes no attempt to conceal. But whether she, or her husband, or both of them are traitors is the precise matter which you and Calder have to decide.”

  “There is a leak, then?”

  “That is one fact which had been established beyond any reasonable doubt. And it was confirmed by this outbreak at Al- Maza.”

  “I never really believed in that cholera. What was it?”

  “It was the delayed effects of a prototype form of dianthromine.”

  “Remember, please,” said Mr. Behrens, “that you’re talking to someone whose scientific education never got beyond making a smell with sulphuretted hydrogen.”

  “Dianthromine is a non-lethal gas. It is light, and odourless, and it freezes the nerve centres of the brain, causing sudden and complete unconsciousness, which lasts from four to six hours, and then wears off without any side-effects.”

  “That sounds a fairly humane sort of weapon.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately the prototype had a delayed side-effect which did not become apparent for some days, when the subject went mad and, in most cases, died.”

  “How many people did we kill at Porton?”

  “We killed a number of rats and guinea-pigs. Then the defect was traced and eliminated.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Behrens. “Yes. How very fortunate. It was the experimental type that our traitor transmitted to Egypt?”

  “It would appear so.”

  “The traitor being Albert Rivers?”

  “That’s an assumption. He was one of four men with the necessary technical knowledge. And his security clearance is low. So low that I think it was a mistake to let him work at Porton at all. He’s a compulsive drinker, and is known to be having affairs with at least two women in the neighbourhood. He’s also living well above his means.”

  “If it’s him, how does he get the stuff out?”

  “That is the interesting point. He would appear to have devised an entirely novel method.”

  Mr. Behrens said, “Do you think it could be his wife? She goes abroad a fair amount to bridge congresses and things like that.”

  “It was one of the possibilities, but the Al-Maza incident proved it wrong. Porton knew about the side-effects of dianthromine at the beginning of August. We must assume that Rivers would have transmitted a warning as quickly as he could. Yet the fatalities in Egypt did not occur until the third week in August. By the end of the month they, too, had corrected the defect.”

  “So we’re looking for a message which takes two or three weeks to get through. It sounds like a letter to a safe intermediary.”

  “His post has been very carefully checked.”

  “Radio?”

  “Too fast. He’d have got the news out before the trouble occurred.”

  “Some form of publication – in code. A weekly or fortnightly periodical?”

  “I think that sounds more like it,” said Mr. Fortescue. “You’ll have to find out what the method is. And you’ll have to stop it. There are some things going on at Porton now which we would certainly not want the Egyptians to know about. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

  “I’ll have a word with Harry Sands-Douglas. He knows as much about codes as anyone in England. I can probably catch him at the Dilly Club.”

  The University, Legal and Professional Classes Club is never referred to by that full and cumbersome title. Its members long ago rechristened it the Dons-in-London, abbreviated to the DIL, or the Dilly Club. It occupies two old houses in St. John’s Wood on the north side of Lord’s Cricket Ground. It has the best cellar and the worst food in London, and a unique collection of classical pornography, bequeathed to it by the Warden of one of the better-known Oxford colleges.

  Mr. Behrens found the club very useful, since he could be sure of meeting there former colleagues from that group of temporary Intelligence operatives who had come, in 1939, from the older universities and the Bar, created one of the most unorthodox and effective Intelligence organisations in the world, and had returned in 1945 to their former professions, to the unconcealed relief of their more hidebound professional colleagues.

  “The idea which occurred to me,” said Mr. Behrens, “was that you might conceal a code in a bridge column.”

  Harry Sands-Douglas, huge, pink-faced, with a mop of fluffy white hair, considered the suggestion. He said, “Whereabouts in the column? In the hands themselves?”

  “That’s what I thought. Every self-respecting bridge column contains two or three sample hands.”

  Old Mr. Happold said, “Most ingenious, Behrens. What put you on to it?”

  “Rivers and his wife are both bridge fiends. It’s become the rage of Salisbury. So much so that the local paper now runs a bridge column. A weekly bridge column, you’ll note. If, as I rather suspect, one of the Rivers is contributing it—”

  Sands-Douglas had been making some calculations on the back of the menu. He said, “It’d be a devilish difficult code to break.”

  “I thought nowadays you simply used a computer.”

  “You talk about using a computer as if it was a tin opener,” said Sands-Douglas. “It hadn’t occurred to you, I suppose, that you’d have to programme it first. The fifty-two cards in a pack can be arranged – in how many ways, Happold?”

  “One hundred and sixty-five billion billion – that is, approximately. We shall have to do something about this claret, we ought to have tackled it earlier.”

  “It’s the 1943. The only war-time vintage they produced in the Medoc.”

  “I expect the vignerons had other things to think about in 1943,” agreed Mr. Happold. “It’s our fault. We should have drunk it at least ten years ago. What were we talking about?”

  “Bridge,” said Mr. Behrens. “The possible permutations and combinations of a pack of cards.”

  “A large computer probably could deal with that number. But there’s a snag. I don’t suppose your chap is sending code messages every week?”

  “Almost certainly not. Half a dozen times a year, probably. He’d key the column in some way – put an agreed word or expression into the first paragraph so that they’d know a code was coming.”

  “Exactly. So if we took, say, fifty-two examples, and fed them into a computer with instructions to detect any repeated correlations between the cards in the hand and known alphabetical and numerical frequencies in the English language, and the mathematics of physics – which is roughly how it would have to be done, if you follow me . . .”

  “I didn’t understand a word of it,” said Mr. Behrens. “But go on.” He was sipping the claret. It was quite true; gradually, imperceptibly, over the years i
t had built up to maturity, had climbed from maturity to super-maturity, and was now descending into gentle ineffectiveness. “Like us,” thought Mr. Behrens sadly.

  “If only ten per cent of your examples were true,” said Sands- Douglas, “and the others weren’t examples at all, but only blinds, even a giant computer would turn white hot and start screaming.”

  “Is that true?” said Mr. Happold. “I’ve often wondered. If you abuse a computer, does it really start screaming?”

  “Certainly. It’s only human!”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more definite,” said Mr. Calder to Colonel Crofter. “And I do appreciate the awkward position it puts you in – as head of the department and Albert Rivers’ boss.”

  “And it’s really only suspicion.”

  “Most security work starts like that. Something out of the ordinary—”

  “Rivers isn’t ordinary. I grant you that. Very few of our scientists are. They’ve most of them got their little peculiarities. I suppose it’s the price you have to pay for exceptional minds. All the same, if it’s true, it’s got to be stopped. The stuff we’re working on now is a damned sight more dangerous than One-to-Ten.”

  “One-to-Ten?”

  “That’s our laboratory name for dianthromine. It’s not instantaneous. If I gave you a whiff of it, and counted slowly, you’d go out as I reached ten. That’s one of its attractions. Imagine a Commando raid on enemy headquarters. One of our chaps lets off the stuff in the guard room. Until they start dropping, they’d have no idea anything was wrong. And when they did catch on, it’d be too late to do anything whatsoever about it.”

  “Commandos! It’s light enough to be humped around easily, then?”

  “Oh, certainly.” Colonel Crofter unlocked a steel cabinet in the corner and pulled out something that looked like a small fire extinguisher. “A man could carry two or three of these in a pack. And it’s very simple to operate. Just point it and pull the trigger. Only don’t because it’s loaded.”

  “Fascinating,” said Mr. Calder. “Useful bit of kit for a burglar, too.” He handed it back with some reluctance. Colonel Crofter locked it away and said,” Just what are you planning to do next?”