Somebody at the Door

by Raymond Postgate

  “Is that David Ellerton?”

  “Yes.”

  “Harold here. Look, I’ve had some luck. I’m talking from a call box near you-know-where, but I’ll have to get back to the office quickly because it’s a long way. Shall I come round after work this evening and tell you?”

  “No, I’ve got something on. Got to go out. I tell you what, Harold. I’ll come round at two-thirty to your place on Saturday—to-morrow, that is—and we’ll have a proper talk. Maybe I’ll have some news too. Can’t you tell me just briefly now, though, what’s happened?”

  “Well, just I’ve been out to Delancey Avenue and there is a house called ‘Ewelme,’ and I’m almost certain I saw a man go into it who was the taller of the two men I saw at St. Omer—the one with eyes rather like a cod. I think, if you’re out to-night, I’ll go back there this evening and stroll around till it’s dusk and keep a watch on the place. I’d like to settle things in my own mind, anyway. Sorry, I must buzz off now. Cheer-oh.”

  “So long, see you to-morrow.”

  David put on the receiver and turned to his fellow conspirators. “Children,” he said, “Harold has beaten us to it. He went down east and he found ‘Ewelme,’ Delancey Avenue, and he thinks he saw a fish-eyed Nazi go in. He’s going to check up to-night. And that means we must really get on with our job.”

  “Our job” was nothing less reckless than a burglary. The four of them, each encouraging the other, had come to the point of deciding to break into the office of Mr. “H. W. Opell” that night, at the very time, as nearly as might be, that the various offices were closed for the night. According to Diana’s observation, there were approximately twenty minutes between the time when the offices closed and the cleaners came round to clear up for the morning. In that time it might be possible to go rapidly through the files and find—what? They did not know; but they were rashly gambling on the traffic carried on there being so iniquitous that even if they were caught Mr. “Opell” would be only too glad to hush things up. Or rather, that was Preston’s calculation: Herron did not think a burglary serious, and anyway, young Ellerton was well to do and would see him right; David saw no reason (as the young and rich do not) why he should not do just as he pleased; and Diana followed him faithfully for her own reasons.

  5

  The Providence that looks after fools, and the carelessness that comes over even Nazis when they have been left untroubled too long, saved the group from the disaster which they deserved. The three men burgled the Opell office soon after six o’clock—the lock resisted Herron a very short time—and made a rather haphazard search which left the most obvious traces if anyone had been in a position to make use of them. But it was fairly clear that the occupants of the offices were not likely to be able to. The evidence was too clear. There were a large number of files which corresponded closely to the bundle of papers which Harold had stolen in St. Omer. It might have been actually a stray from one of them. The differences consisted chiefly in the amount of the “weights” given, and the names of the victims. Four of these— Rosen, A., Vogeling, K. and D., and Leibnitz, H.—corresponded to the names of refugees of whom Preston had already heard in his inquiries. In each case the victim had been expected over this side, had left Berlin or whatever might be his home town and had been neatly collected at the frontier. The dates, so far as Preston remembered them, corresponded too.

  It was a considerably sobered group which climbed into the car Diana drove, and one which rather glumly refused to give details to her until they reached David’s flat. Even then, it seemed that there was nothing much to be done; Rosen, A., Vögeling, K. and D., and so on were the only gravestones. Except perhaps in one case, which was in the equivalent of a pending file. Mannheim, Albrecht, scientist. A half-Jew, a physicist, and a man of some importance.

  “The record,” said Preston, “showed that he has just paid the advance instalment of 15 per cent, to the man called R.R.G. at the Cafe am Zoo. He is probably arranging for his train journey now. And the German police are already waiting for him. There’s nothing you can do. It’s all in the bag.” He spoke rather ill-temperedly, and directly to Diana, as if it was some fault of hers.

  “We could tell the police,” she said, uncertainly. “We could explain about the burglary. I expect they wouldn’t make a great fuss, when they knew what we found out.”

  “Then what?” said Preston. “If they believed us at all, they’d check up, and in due course something would happen. Some day. But that wouldn’t save Mannheim. Nothing will save him, bar warning him. And we have no way of doing that.”

  “We could go and tell him,” said David, for whom this was already a superb game of cowboys and Indians.”

  “How, go?”

  “There’s nothing difficult about going to Berlin. I can afford it, and I’ve got a passport. I could just go and call on him, show him what we have found and warn him. It’d probably save his life.”

  “It would more probably end his life altogether. There’s no doubt that he’s being watched, and your visit will be recorded. Inside twenty-four hours of your call he’ll be in a concentration camp if he’s even alive,” said Preston. “Put it out of your mind. There’s nothing that Jews or Liberals in Germany like less than visits from well-meaning foreigners.”

  “I could bring him back with me.”

  “How?”

  “With a forged passport. If I travel by air, looking very rich, I can almost certainly conceal it about me. They don’t search the rich closely—not yet, anyway. And forged passports can be got; can’t they, Boss?” He looked at Preston ingratiatingly.

  “It’s been done,” said Preston, “but not cheaply, and not just at any time to order. I think it’d be crazy. Very dangerous to you as well as to him. I don’t think you’d come back. Wash it out, David.”

  “It’d be better to turn all this over to the police and hope to have the burgling excused,” said Diana. “You mustn’t be silly.”

  David rather reluctantly agreed. Anyway, they would wait until Harold reported next day, if he had tracked down his St. Omer people.

  6

  Harold never reported.

  When David went round to his lodgings at Penfold Road, Croydon, next Saturday afternoon, he found the front door open, which was unlike the careful habits of Mrs. Edge, the landlady. And when he went upstairs to Harold’s room, there was Mrs. Edge herself sitting in tears at the table, and a uniformed constable standing beside her in a condition of great embarrassment.

  He stared at the group. “Where is Harold Birch?” he said. “I was to meet him here.”

  The policeman turned to him with obvious relief.

  “Did you know Mr. Birch, sir?” he asked.

  “Did I? I do know Mr. Birch. What do you mean?” asked David anxiously.

  “Would you be willing to come along and identify a body which we have reason to fear may be Mr. Birch’s?” asked the policeman. “We found this address on the deceased, but this lady doesn’t feel quite up to the job. A most trying business, sir, and if you do know Mr. Birch, perhaps you would spare her the trial.”

  The room quivered suddenly in David’s sight, and his throat turned very dry. To his great astonishment he found he could not speak. He had to walk up and down the room twice before his voice came back. Then he spoke creditably firmly. “Yes, officer. I’ll certainly do that:”

  He did not move, however. He stood staring at the room which had been Harold’s, as if the many evidences of his friend in it were some guarantee that he was still alive. Those books, that letter on the desk—obviously they were confidently waiting for their owner’s return. He was motionless until the policeman said a second time: “Shall we go along now, sir?”

  They walked down the road together.

  “We’ll take a police car: that is, the sergeant will take you in one, sir,” said the policeman. “It’s quite a step: beyond New Cross.”

  “New Cross,” repeated David.

  He said nothing more until a
silent sergeant took him into a mortuary off the Brockley Road. David did not need to look more than a few seconds. Harold’s face had always been white and still: it was curiously unchanged in death. The crushed-in back of his head had been mercifully camouflaged by whoever laid him out.

  He walked out rather quickly and said: “Yes, that is my friend Harold Birch, who lives at the Penfold Road address where you picked me up. He works at Messrs. Evenings, the big printers. His people live in Wolverhampton, but I don’t know their address. He’s not married.”

  His face was working unhappily. “He’s taken it bad,” thought the sergeant.

  “Would you tell me, please,” said David, “how Harold was killed and where you found him?”

  “It was a bit queer,” said the sergeant. “I don’t know how Mr. Birch came to be there, but there were few other places in the district where he could have remained unnoticed so long. The doctor says he must have died some time last night, but he wasn’t found till after dawn.

  “Most of the district is well-lit, but there’s one place where the lamps are poor. There’s an open space called Eastfields, used as a playground, and with a hedge round it. Part of it doesn’t have a pavement outside at all. There’s just the hedge, and a bit of a ditch, as it was when it was all country here.

  “So far as we can see, Mr. Birch must have been walking in the road and been struck by a car and rolled with the impact or been thrown, so that he fell lengthwise into the ditch. The hedge is a bit overhanging and the body wasn’t really noticeable until full daylight. There’s practically nowhere else it could have happened like that.

  “Of course we take a serious view of this, sir,” went on the sergeant, talking to give David time to get back his composure. “These kit-and-run drivers are very dangerous, and they’re a growing menace. There were skid-marks on the tarmac in the road, and if we find out what car did it, there’ll be serious trouble for the driver.”

  But David was not silent from physical nausea. He was wondering what his duty was. He thought that this might well be no hit-and-run driver, but a deliberate murder.

  He thought of the room he had just seen. There was an unfinished dutiful letter from Harold to his mother: no more would ever be written of it. There were clothes—a few books—a few photographs. Someone would pack these up and address them to Wolverhampton, and thereafter there would be no trace of Harold Birch in Penfold Road. His desk would remain unattended for a day or two at Messrs. Evenings, and then someone would sit down at it, rearrange his papers and finish whatever he had left undone. Immediately the trace of him would be gone. And he would be as utterly vanished as if he had been a stone dropped into a pond. The ripples would cease and with them he would disappear. Presumably there was a house in Wolverhampton where he would be remembered and missed. But apart from that he would be quickly forgotten.

  He made up his mind that someone at least should not forget. He would hand over to the police the packet that Harold brought back from St. Omer, and tell the whole of that story.

  He would not, yet, tell the story of his own burglary.

  “I think,” he said at last, “I can help you to find out a little more than that. My friend told me on the telephone yesterday that he was watching a man of bad character in this area, whom he believed to be living at an address in Delancey Avenue, a house called ‘Ewelme.’ I think it may just be possible that this is not wholly an accident.”

  “That’s a very grave statement, sir. I think you’d better tell me more.”

  David took out of his pocket the originals of the material Harold had brought back from St. Omer. “I will, gladly,” he said. “But you see most of the material is in German.”

  “Oh. I think you’d better speak to the Inspector. Excuse me a minute.”

  The Sergeant was away some five minutes, and then fetched him into a square, whitewashed room where an Inspector was sitting at a desk. David went up to the desk, laid on it the originals, and this time a copy of his own translation.

  “Before you read these,” he said, “I think I should explain their meaning.

  “Harold Birch, as everyone will tell you, was a man of very high principles indeed. He was deeply opposed to the abominable things that are being done in Germany, and if he could impede the persecution that goes on there, he was going to do so. This summer he took a short holiday at a place in France called St. Omer. While he was there, two Nazi agents were arrested in his hotel, and he got possession of an envelope of papers which they had left behind. That is that packet you’ve got there. The agents were released before he left, but he kept the papers to study because he thought that they were evidence of some criminal activity.

  “I think he was righter than he knew. Anyway, in his opinion, those letters didn’t deal with trading affairs at all, really; but with an attempt to smuggle refugees out of Germany—or anyway, with a refugee named Goltz. If you look at them carefully, Inspector, you’ll see that one signed J.R. dealing with the affair says, ‘See V.B. 13/6/38,’ and there is the Völkische Beobachter, V.B., of 13/6/38. And it tells you that Mr. Goltz was given away to the police. Harold, who knows the Nazi habits pretty well, discussed these documents with me, and decided that what he had stumbled on was a ring which pretended to give the persecuted people in Germany a chance to escape, and, in fact, sold them to the police. And he thought that this J.R. might be the J. Reynolds, ‘Ewelme,’ Delancey Avenue, whose address is on the other slip of paper.

  “Yesterday after midday, he rang me up to say he had found out that there was such an address and he had seen one of the Nazis he met in St. Omer going into it. A tall man with fishy eyes. He told me he was going back last evening to do a bit more watching. And now you find him dead, his body hid in the only place for miles around where it wouldn’t be seen. Do you ask me to believe that’s an accident?”

  The Inspector made no immediate answer, but studied the papers for a considerable time. At last he spoke.

  “I don’t say you’re right, and I don’t say you’re wrong. But I will say that I want to speak with this Mr. Reynolds. If you choose to come along, since you have a description of him, I would be pleased to have you with me.”

  7

  Nobody answered the door of “Ewelme.” The house was silent and apparently unoccupied. The lady in the house next door said she thought they’d moved. Early in the morning a car had come for them and gone off with a lot of luggage on it. Them? Why, “them” was the foreign gentleman, tall, with fishy eyes, and his wife, at least supposed to be his wife, about forty-fiveish, plump, always well dressed, but with a veil and an old-fashioned hat. That morning she’d been dressed in a dark green coat and skirt, with a brown overcoat over it, and walking shoes and brown stockings, and a toque like Queen Mary’s, but still the same veil and brown gloves; but the informant hadn’t had time to have a proper look at her. They’d not been in the house more than a month, anyway.

  The police had been all round the house: nevertheless the Inspector said: “Vansittart”—such was the improbable name of one of the constables—“I think if you went round the back you might find a window open.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll see, sir,” said the constable after a glance at David.

  A few seconds later he opened the front door.

  “I found a window open, sir,” he said without a trace of a smile.

  “Very good,” said the Inspector. “Go round now to the station at Crawshalton Road, and tell them I’m here, and what for. If there’s an Inspector in charge, get him to come round here; if not, bring a sergeant. Tell him to bring along all the information about these tenants he can, and if he knows who the house agents are to bring the keys too.”

  He marched into the front room, an ordinary suburban parlour, and stood with his arms folded, in a Napoleonic attitude. “We’ll have to tear this apart,” he said.

  For a time David watched, marvelling at the meticulous care with which the police went over every square inch. But before long he got weary. The
house had obviously been taken furnished, and the temporary inhabitants seemed to have left no trace. Except, indeed, fingerprints: the men with insufflators seemed to be the only satisfied persons. In the end he was glad to go back to his office, with the promise that the Inspector would see him in the morning.

  “The name is Johnston,” said the Inspector with imperial condescension.

  Next morning, when David called to see him he was still friendly, though magnificent.

  “It was fortunate that you gave us that information,” he said approvingly. “We’ve got some fine sets of prints. There’s quite a mixed bunch, but two lots keep recurring. It’s reasonable to suppose that they belong to the man and his wife. Crooks will do one job in gloves, but fortunately nobody’s going to spend a whole month in a house with his gloves on. If this man’s come from abroad, it’ll help a great deal. They have no nonsense about getting fingerprints there. We are communicating with the police of Rome, Paris and Berlin—though, if your friend’s idea was correct, we won’t get much help from there. However, that’s a matter of high politics and the less said about it the better.”

  “Did you find anything else in the house?” asked David.

  “Not much worth mentioning.” The Inspector licked his thumb preparatory to turning over his papers, and then angrily wiped it on his trousers. Do what he could, he kept on doing that trick which betrayed the fact he had spent years as a common P.C. He went on with an even more severe expression.