‘Oh yes. You’d got yer ’ead screwed on then. You was as bright as I am. You just seemed sort of mystified, as though things weren’t running the way you’d thought. About eleven in the morning you slipped out again, still in yer old clothes, and that was the last time I saw you right in the head.’
It was an unfortunate way of putting it, but evidently Lugg was one of those Britons without the celebrated national gift for euphemy.
‘You left your little old basket,’ he said, ‘You locked it in the table drawer, but you took one or two things out of it and put them in your pockets. About tea-time yesterday Happy came in with a tale that ’e’d picked up in the shop about you being mixed up in a row down at the waterside. A rozzer had been killed and two or three men took to horspital.’
He paused hopefully, but Campion shook his head. In spite of the sudden chill which this confirmation of his worst fears produced in him, he still could not remember. Lugg breathed gustily.
‘Never mind,’ he said again but without any sort of conviction. ‘Never mind. It’ll come back sudden. Then young Amanda called for your suitcase with your good clothes in it,’ he went on, ‘and Happy told her some of what he’d heard – ’
‘Yes, I know. She came to the hospital.’ Campion spoke absently and did not see the small black eyes flicker.
‘Oh, you’ve seen ’er, ’ave you? Did you recognize ’er?’ The jealousy was very faint, but it was there and Campion noticed it.
‘Not for a long time,’ he said. ‘I – er – like a fool I thought she must be my wife.’
‘So she will be in a week or two, if you’re not strung up.’ Lugg’s dreadful directness was irrepressible. The words came into his head and he said them.
A shadow passed over Campion’s lean wooden face.
‘I rather think that’s off,’ he said shortly. ‘She – she didn’t realize what had happened, you see. She doesn’t know now and I don’t particularly want her to, so, should you see her, for God’s sake don’t refer to it. She broke the engagement.’
‘She did?’ Lugg was clearly incredulous. ‘Why? ‘As she seen someone else?’
Campion writhed. The discussion was distasteful and also, he discovered, quite unbearable. (Ah, Amanda! Oh, my blessed smiling sweet! Oh, sensible, clear-eyed, unembarrassed beloved! Oh, dear God Almighty, what is to happen to me without you?)
Lugg took his silence for consent, apparently, for he pursed his mouth and jerked his head with resigned regret.
‘I see that coming,’ he remarked brutally. ‘It was your fault for mucking about. Courting a woman’s like cooking something. There comes a time when it’s done. After that you had ought to eat it. If you don’t, and keep it simmering on the side so to speak, you’re apt to forget it and when you do come to look for it all the goodness is gorn away and you’re left with nothing but a bit o’ skin. And it annoys the young woman too. It doesn’t do her any good.’
He paused and glanced at the other man’s face.
‘Sorry, cock,’ he said abruptly.
Campion said nothing. Outside the storm was working itself up to fury and the rain hissed and spat against the windows like a host of serpents.
‘Avert something tremendous.’ The command blazed at him suddenly, wrenching him out of his small private hell. ‘Hurry, hurry. Think, think. Pull yourself together. Get on with it.’
‘Where’s the basket?’ he said. ‘The whole story sounds nuts, but let’s see it anyway. There may be something in it.’
Lugg looked at him curiously. ‘Don’t you know what’s in it?’
‘No, of course I don’t. Do you?’
‘I ’ad a look, naturally. I’m ’uman. The lock on the drawer could be turned with a bent pin.’
‘Oh, all right. What’s in it?’
‘I didn’t touch anything, of course,’ he said, taking up a piece of wire which he kept conveniently on the mantelshelf. ‘It got me wondering, though.’
He squatted down and poked at the lock. It was child’s-play to open, as he had said, and he pulled out a wide drawer, revealing a fair-sized rush bag lying inside. Campion thrust his hand in the basket. An expression of blank amazement spread over his face and he shook the whole contents out on the table. A slippery, feathery heap of old one-pound and ten-shilling notes appeared before him.
‘Six ’undred and eighty-four pounds exactly,’ said Lugg. ‘I counted it after you left.’
Campion took up a bank note and rubbed it between his fingers. Then he held it up to the light. Britannia’s head and trident shone out of the watermark at him. None of the notes appeared to be new. Their uniform shabbiness suggested months of circulation.
‘Extraordinary,’ he said, looking blankly at the fish-basket. ‘I took some more out with me, you say?’
‘Yes. About seventy quid. You didn’t trouble to count it – what was that?’
Both men stood listening. At first they thought there was no sound but the storm, but an instant later there was a gentle thud outside the inner door and the shopkeeper put his head in.
‘Take sights,’ he whispered. ‘They’re all round the house. Plain-clothes. I’ll watch the front.’
Lugg swept the notes into the basket, thrust it into the drawer, and pulled back the tablecloth. The whole movement was as smooth as if it had been done by a conjuror. He thrust a gun into Campion’s hand and produced another from his hip. He touched the sick man’s arm and nodded towards the french doors, laying his finger on his lips. Campion nodded obediently and moved silently into the darkness at the back of the room.
The gentle knocking on the glass sounded like the Last Trump when it did come.
XII
IT WAS QUIET, insistent tapping on the french windows. The gentle summons was very near and very intimate. It sped through the weeping of the storm and stood close to them.
They waited in silence and let it come again, still discreet but a fraction sharper, determined, inexorable.
Lugg glanced over his shoulder. Campion was well in the shadow, so he picked up his gun and advanced towards the window with all the easy confidence of an innocent householder expecting a visit from the police.
He drew back the curtains cautiously, as a good citizen should, allowing only the minimum of light to escape. For some seconds he stood peering into the darkness, alert as a dog at a rat-hole. Finally he unlatched the doors and pushed one of them open a few inches.
‘’Ullo?’ he demanded suspiciously.
There was no direct reply but there was a new movement out in the storm and Lugg became tense, his bald head with its fringe of greyish hair held oddly on one side.
Standing just below him in the driving rain was the figure he expected. The drab mackintosh and slouch hat of the plain-clothes man were there, but the stranger was not looking at him squarely. He peered up slyly out of the dark and from his white hand hung a large white handkerchief which fluttered significantly in the downpour. It was impossible to mistake its meaning.
Lugg backed slowly into the room and the newcomer came in after, holding the white rag ostentatiously before him.
He took up a position some little distance from the table and the heavy shade over the lights cut him off from the breast upwards as far as Campion was concerned. As soon as the window was closed behind him he held up his hands.
‘You can take my gun,’ he said distinctly.
Lugg searched him promptly and efficiently, setting down the man’s heavy Webley on the table well within the circle of light. Then with a glance at his visitor he produced his own gun and put it down beside the first. There was a long pause and then Campion also stretched out a hand in the darkness and added his weapon to the other two. He kept his face out of the light, however, as did the newcomer.
They made a curious headless group standing round the three guns, since all the light in the room focused on the weapons and on their three pairs of hands. Lugg and Campion maintained their advantage and waited for the visitor to make the first move.
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‘I’ve got a message for the man calling himself Campion,’ he announced at last. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’
‘Never mind which of us it is,’ corrected Lugg sharply. ‘What’s the dope?’
‘He knows.’ The stranger spoke meaningly, jerking a hand towards Campion. ‘It’s up to him, that’s all.’
This was an unforeseen impasse. Campion’s thin hands remained expressionless and Lugg’s great ham-fists did not stir. The silence persisted. The room was hot and its very quiet was ominous and uncomfortable amid the bellowing of the storm which raged round the house. Lugg found it unbearable.
‘The boys outside’ll get wet,’ he observed pleasantly.
‘I’m waiting.’
‘What do you think we’re doing?’
‘He’s only got to make up his mind. He knows.’ The visitor had begun to reveal a personality. He was not a big man and his raincoat hung on him in concealing folds, yet he managed to convey an impression of wiry strength curiously and rather horribly allied to ill-health. His voice was not without culture of a sort, either, but it had a thin tinny ring to it and when he coughed, as he did frequently, his lungs wheezed and groaned dangerously. Yet he was a force in the room. There was no question but that he knew what he was doing and was determined to waste no time.
Since his head and shoulders were hidden, his hands were his only distinguishing feature and these were frankly repulsive, being womanish, degenerate, and quite abominably dirty.
A sixth sense warned Campion to hold his tongue. It was not that the half seen, headless figure was actually familiar, but the atmosphere of rank evil he brought with him was. Campion left the talking to Lugg, who seemed quite prepared to deal with it.
‘Knowing’s not always saying,’ the fat man remarked, managing to infuse a wealth of craft into the observation. ‘Your call, mate.’
‘He knows,’ the newcomer repeated and one of his repellent hands slid inside his raincoat.
The two others had their guns up off the table like one man. They waited, the two weapons levelled and the two-barrels gleaming dully in the circle of light.
The visitor did not waver or hesitate. He went on with what he was doing smoothly. He seemed to have considerable experience of guns. His hand came out of his coat with something in it. He laid his offering on the red tablecloth and they all looked at it. It was a thick packet of old banknotes secured with a rubber band.
‘Two-fifty,’ he said, ‘and we ask no questions.’
Lugg laughed. It was a genuine expression of surprised amusement and was entirely convincing. The newcomer was standing very still. Campion could feel him trying to pierce the shadow which shrouded both their heads. He made no movement himself and kept his gun steady.
Once again the dirty hand crept inside the sodden coat and presently another packet lay on top of the first. Once more the silence became suffocating.
The performance was very slow, definitely sinister, and, of course, in the circumstances entirely fantastic.
‘Chicken feed,’ said Lugg thickly and a third packet of notes appeared on the table and finally a fourth.
‘That’s the limit,’ said the stranger at last. ‘Take it or leave it. Suit yourself.’
‘And supposing it’s a deal?’ Lugg was showing more finesse in an impossible situation than Campion would have expected from him.
‘He quits his racket and gets out.’
‘Where to?’
‘London. Hell. Anywhere. We’re not fussy.’
Campion’s condition was making him slow-witted. It had taken him some minutes to realize that he was not dealing with the police, as he had expected. This man on the other side of the table, whose face he could not see, represented a new element in a complicated and terrifying predicament. He represented the element which until now had been maddeningly elusive. Here at last must be a definite materialization of the enemy. Campion’s limping brain seized on the discovery and he struggled to make as many bricks as he might out of this meagre straw.
The stranger belonged to a very definite class. He was a thug, one of that mercifully small army of professional bullies who in previous ages were euphoniously called ‘soldiers of fortune’; men, that is, who would undertake violence for a fee. It did not occur to Campion that it was strange that he should recognize so much. He accepted the fact without thinking, as a natural deduction based on some past experience which he had forgotten. He went on with his reasoning. Since the man was what he was it argued that he possessed employers, some intelligent organization which had the sense to use professional servants. The question now was what sort of organization? It was obviously anti-social, but how large? How dangerous? How big? International importance?
The old phrase came into his head and he rejected it. It was not quite right. National importance? That was it. He had heard something like that described lately and in some connexion which, taken together, had had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was an amazing experience. He was remembering something not mentally but emotionally. The ghost of an emotional upheaval was returning to him. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. The whole thing was recent, too, very recent. Anger was coming back to him and with it something else, something new and overwhelming, a passion. That was it. Something deeper than affection, something more primitive and disturbing than love of women.
For a moment he felt it again, experienced it as he had done some time so very lately, a burning, raging, invigorating thing, the stuff of poetry and high imagining, the fountain-spring of superhuman endurance and endeavour.
Once again a fact came to him without recollection. He knew something suddenly as surely and clearly as if he had arrived at it by a long process of thought.
He belonged to a post-war generation, that particular generation which was too young for one war and most prematurely too old for the next. It was the generation which had picked up the pieces after the holocaust indulged in by its elders, only to see its brave new world wearily smashed again by younger brothers. His was the age which had never known illusion, the grimly humorous generation which from childhood had both expected and experienced the seamier side. Yet now, recently, some time very lately, so near in time that the tingle of surprise still lingered, something new had appeared on his emotional horizon. It had been something which so far he had entirely lacked and which had been born to him miraculously late in his life. He saw it for what it was. It was a faith, a spiritual and romantic faith. It had been there always, of course, disguised as a rejected illusion, and must have lain there for years like a girl growing to maturity in her sleep. Now it was awake all right and recognizable; a deep and lovely passion for his home, his soil, his blessed England, his principles, his breed, his Amanda and Amanda’s future children. That was the force which was driving him. That was the fire which was crowding him on through and over the obscene obstacle of his own unnatural weakness.
He glanced towards the man with the filthy hands. This, then, this professional crook, this must be a hair on the hide of the Enemy, and, like the zoologists, from this one hair he must somehow reconstruct a whole beast. For God’s sake what organization was he up against, and what particular machination was it engaged upon now?
He pulled himself up, despair facing him. He was annihilatingly helpless. He knew so horribly little, even about himself. For instance, what sort of man was he, if this enemy, which was shrewd enough in all conscience, should so confidently expect to be able to bribe him?
A possible explanation of that final question occurred to him. It was so absurd and yet so likely that he laughed outright. Bending forward suddenly, he allowed the full light from the chandelier to fall upon his face.
It succeeded. Miraculously the outside chance came home, proving him right beyond all question. The effect on the man was immediate and sensational. He drew in a gulping breath and there was a faint rattle from the dreadful lungs.
‘Campion!’ he ejaculated in a thin voice. ‘Campion. You are Campion.’
He dived forward to snatch up his gun but Lugg was before him, bringing down his own revolver across the grimy wrist as it shot out over the cloth. It was a tremendous blow which might well have cracked the bone, and the sound it made was one of those ruthless noises which are inexplicably shocking in themselves.
The man sobbed once, deep in his throat, with pain, and then, before either of the others realized what he was doing, he turned and rushed from them, leaving gun and money still on the table. He threw himself at the window and burst out into the storm, leaving the curtains bellying behind him as a gust of rain surged into the room. Lugg stood gaping after him. Presently he went over and closed the window. He swore steadily for some little time.
‘What d’you know about that?’ he said at last. ‘Dirty little tyke! He made me sit up the moment I saw ’im. ’Oo’s ’e working for?’
Campion felt himself giggling. The money and the gun and the ridiculous mistake were all absurdities out of a nightmare.
‘I think I know that,’ he said, recovering himself. ‘I’m sure only one person could come to the conclusion that I was impersonating myself. Who was that man? I never saw his face clearly.’
‘That was no loss.’ Lugg was grimly amused. ‘I know ’im, and I’d like to know ’oo ’e’s sold ’is mortgaged little soul to this time. You know ’im all right. That was Weaver, B.’
He mistook Campion’s blank expression for lack of recollection and hurried on to explain, all his old anxiety about the younger man’s condition returning.
‘You’ll remember his brother better,’ he said coaxingly. ‘Weaver, T. A. They were both in the army together one time and they distinguished them like that, using the initials last. You remember them. I’ll tell you ’oo they was both working for when we struck them last. Simister. The man we kept calling Ali Baba. Doesn’t that ring a bell? Weaver, T. A., wasn’t the class this chap is. He ’adn’t the brains. He was killed with a tommy-gun when the Denver boys came over. This little sweep Weaver, B., went in for jam-jars afterwards. ’E’s a wizard with a petrol engine. If ’e’s in this there’s something big going on in the car line. Does that bring anything ’ome?’
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