Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Margery Allingham
Map
Title Page
1 Back Door to London
2 The Old Pal’s Act
3 The Swallow Café
4 The Road to Saltey
5 The Company at The Demon
6 The Poet of the Saltings
7 The Mark of Teague
8 The String Man
9 Social Evening
10 Doctor and Patient
11 At Cheffin’s Farm
12 Beware of Ghosts
13 The Moving Finger
14 Conference
15 The Night of the Demon
16 Twenty Years After
17 The Picture on the Wall
18 The Tethered Goat
19 Death of a Legend
20 Cargo of Eagles
Copyright
About the Book
Albert Campion sets out to plumb the secrets of Saltey, an ancient hamlet on the Essex marshes. Once the haunt of smugglers, now it hides a secret rich and mysterious enough to trap all who enter – and someone in the village is willing to terrorise, murder and raise the very devil to keep that secret to themselves.
About the Author
Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904. She attended the Perse School in Cambridge before returning to London to the Regent Street Polytechnic. Her father – author H. J. Allingham – encouraged her to write, and was delighted when she contributed to her aunt’s cinematic magazine, The Picture Show, at the age of eight.
Her first novel was published when she was seventeen. In 1928 she published her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, which had been serialised in the Daily Express. The following year, in The Crime at Black Dudley, she introduced the character who was to become the hallmark of her writing – Albert Campion. Her novels heralded the more sophisticated suspense genre: characterised by her intuitive intelligence, extraordinary energy and accurate observation, they vary from the grave to the openly satirical, whilst never losing sight of the basic rules of the classic detective tale. Famous for her London thrillers, she has been compared to Dickens in her evocation of the city’s shady underworld.
In 1927 she married the artist, journalist and editor Philip Youngman Carter. They divided their time between their Bloomsbury flat and an old house in the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex. Margery Allingham died in 1966.
ALSO BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM
The Crime at Black Dudley
Mystery Mile
Look to the Lady
Police at the Funeral
Sweet Danger
Death of a Ghost
Dancers in Mourning
Flowers for the Judge
The Case of the Late Pig
Mr Campion and Others
The Fashion in Shrouds
Black Plumes
Coroner’s Pidgin
Traitor’s Purse
The Casebook of Mr Campion
More Work for the Undertaker
The Tiger in the Smoke
The Beckoning Lady
Hide My Eyes
The China Governess
The Mind Readers
Crime and Mr Campion
The Return of Mr Campion
Mr Campion’s Quarry
Mr Campion’s Lucky Day
This book was left unfinished by Margery Allingham at the time of her death in June 1966. It has been completed by her husband Youngman Carter who had been her partner for nearly forty years and had helped to hatch many of her plots. The whole fabric of this story had been mapped out long before her death and the book has been finished by him at her specific request.
All the characters are fictitious and no reference to any person, living or dead, is intended.
The estuary, the village of Saltey, the Rattey river and the ‘back road’ to London will not be found on any official map.
‘By this time the road was full of passengers, everyone furnish’d with no small appetite. Citizens in crowd, upon pads, hackneys and hunters, all upon the titup, as if he who rid not at a gallop was to forfeit his horse. Some spurred on with speed and cheerfulness, as if they never intended to come back again. Some rode double, some single. Every now and then a lady drop’d from her pillion, and another from her side-saddle, some showing the milky way to bliss to the company, which, tho’ it made them blush, made us merry.
‘Horses, coaches, carts, waggons and tumbrils fill’d the road, as if the whole town had been going to encamp; all occupy’d by men, women and children, rich, poor, gentle and simple, having all travelling conveniences suitable to their quality. In this order did we march, like Aaron’s proselytes to worship the calf, till we came to the newrais’d fabric call’d Mobs Hole, in Wanstead Parish, where the beast was to be eaten.’
The London Spy by Ned Ward
Cargo of Eagles
Margery Allingham
1
Back Door to London
THE RAIN WAS falling in a sweet relentless fashion as it does in spring in London and it was all very peaceful and pleasant if uncompromisingly wet. The voice in the car echoed the unhurried pace of the afternoon.
‘I found this absurd place Saltey, you’re so interested in, perfectly enchanting in an off-beat sort of way but I’m damned if I can tell you quite why.’
It was a young man talking to a middle-aged one. He was not being completely disingenuous, for subsequent generations seldom are with each other, but at least he was playing scrupulously fair.
‘I realise that the whole township—or as you’d say, village—pretends to be deeply and secretly wicked, which is naïve and kind of endearing. I wish I had more to report on it,’ he went on, ‘but unfortunately its modern life appears to be almost entirely vegetable. If you were interested in its history I could do better. I’m very sure a full scale archaeological dig there would pay off, for one thing. But the living inhabitants are not exactly go ahead except for the couple at the pub who are working like hell—or at least the woman is—to get a little tourist trade.’
‘Is she having any luck?’
The lighter voice of Mr Albert Campion betrayed interest. He had curled his long body in the passenger seat of the Lotus Elan and seemed anxious to talk.
The driver shook his head. ‘A little—at weekends. The natives themselves don’t respond to anything which looks new or difficult, however profitable. Their great interest is the contents of each other’s wills. They sit around speculating for hours and there’s a grand frustration scene every time one gets published.’
‘An end will come to that, in due course,’ said Mr Campion. ‘Mark my words.’
‘You’re telling me!’ The driver laughed and slid down behind the wheel in an attempt to get a better view through the railings of the public gardens beside which they were parked. ‘Are we sitting here in the middle of London waiting for someone? Or do you just feel that this is the quietest place to talk?’
‘It has its advantages.’ Campion surveyed the deserted scene with satisfaction. Lunch time was over and the streams of office workers had been sucked back into the tall buildings for another few hours before the next mass exodus. Although the Lotus was in one of the busiest parts of the town, between the University and the Oxford Street shopping centre, there was for the moment hardly a pedestrian in sight and the other cars parked regimentally at their meters were empty.
Mortimer Kelsey, Morty to his friends and the other members of his faculty at Vere University, Constance, New Jersey, appeared a happy man. A great deal about Britain struck him as funny after nearly a year’s residence, but he was also deeply attracted by its ancient spell. Both the el
egant car body and his casual clothes, conscious efforts in understatement without dullness, were custom built. His haircut was long for one country and short for the other and managed to make him look mildly distinguished. This was fair, for he was already a marked man among the newest crop of historians and he was one of that army of Western scholars who have discovered so much more about the cities of the old world than their inhabitants dream there is to know. He was in his mid-twenties, a good looking youngster with well shaped, compact bones, a deeply scored face which already showed signs of the notable scholar he would appear in later years.
He was lucky not to appear offensively intellectual—which is to say not at all—and he was not conceited although the pundits expected interesting results from the piece of original research on which he was now engaged. His father was American, his mother English: both families unfashionably well endowed. Mr Campion had met him through his own son Rupert who was now working for an honours degree at Harvard.
The two men although very different in age had a good deal in common. Albert Campion, too, was tall and fair but he was over-thin and the careful veil of affable vacuity which had begun, like his large spectacles, as a protection and had become a second skin, had robbed him of good looks, whereas Morty’s thick light brown hair had a wave in it and there was nothing bleak or colourless about his grey eyes.
In his own apologetic way Mr Campion was a celebrated figure. In his time he had performed a number of services for a great many causes. He was a negotiator and an unraveller of knots and there were still people who suspected, because of his war time activities, that he had a cloak and a dagger somewhere concealed. Those who disliked him complained that he seemed negligible until it was just too late.
At the moment he was looking out at the patch of rain-soaked London green which formed the centre of Killowen Square. The downpour which had persisted all morning was getting lighter but the air was soft as if there might be more rain to come.
‘If I should want you to go back to Saltey for a while, could you manage it?’ he asked suddenly.
‘I was hoping you’d say that. When will you know?’ Morty’s eagerness seemed a little surprising, even to himself, for he coloured faintly. ‘It’s got something,’ he said defensively.
The older man continued to look out at the garden. The prospect was not imposing. Four wet asphalt paths met in the centre of a roundel of grass and the dripping plane trees in their scant shrouds of new green looked sparse and sodden. The only ornamental feature of the place was a tiny Victorian bandstand perched among regimented tulips. Constructed of florid cast iron work, it was white painted, gay as a sunshade and just as silly on a rainy day. Mr Campion glanced over the empty garden to the immense wall of the buildings beyond.
‘That over-stuffed contraption squatting under the new skyscraper is Lugg’s favourite hotel,’ he remarked. ‘You saw him down there, of course? He considers the old Ottoman is “quite the article”, which is his highest praise. In my father’s day the valets there always ironed the laces when they cleaned the boots and a rope ladder was kept under every bed in case of fire. How is Lugg?’
‘Very impressive. He shoots the most magnificent line ever. I’ve heard him on the well pressed bootlace. Was he ever in Royal service?’
Mr Campion controlled his amusement. ‘He’s looked after me for quite a few years as a sort of housekeeper,’ he began cautiously.
‘I know, but he says this was when he was younger. He was telling one of the architects he did a spell for the Monarch before he lost his figure.’
The thin man relaxed. ‘That was only for six months,’ he said. ‘It was the—er—Palace of Wormwood Scrubs, I believe. Which architects are these?’
‘The people who are gunning for the job of building his bungalow.’ Morty spoke with authority. ‘He’s retiring to Saltey to take up archaeology, or so he says. Didn’t he tell you? He could choose a worse place.’
‘Oh, what is there?’
‘I’m not sure, yet.’ The distinctive young face had become earnest. ‘As you know, the paper I’m doing is on London’s approaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and when you asked me to investigate that crazy damn story there, I was genuinely looking for something else.’
‘Saltey: gateway to the East End?’
‘You’re not so far out, and it’s my own beautiful discovery.’ Morty’s grin was joyful. ‘There’s not a breath of it in any of the authorities but I think I’ve got proof that the little harbour there, which is practically silted up now, is all that is left of the ancient bolt hole, old London’s eastern emergency exit. As a matter of fact, Saltey is the other end of Mob’s Hole. I’m sure of it now. The lower half of the village where the best pub stands is called Mob’s Bowl today and that’s hardly a distortion, is it? There it is, written on the survey maps and the signposts.’ He paused in sudden doubt. ‘You have heard of Mob’s Hole?’
‘Should I?’
‘Perhaps not. I’m quite besotted with my subject. Anyway, you can take it from me that it existed in Wanstead about seventeen ten or so. It was a rakehelly dive, a kind of roadhouse where the “mobility”—that’s the joke name of the period for the tarts and townees who had transport—used to ride out of the city for a feed, what we’d call a barbecue, and a punch-up. There is a fine fruity account of it in The London Spy.’
‘Do the present day people of Saltey subscribe to this?’
‘Gosh, no. They’ve never heard of it. They think, if they think at all, that the Bowl is derived from the silted up tidal basin by the quay and that it could be a relic of a prehistoric salt panning industry. One old biddy told me it was “Mab” and not “Mob” and was a direct reference to the Fairy Queen.’
‘How old is Saltey?’
‘Oh, dateless. In prehistoric times it was at the edge of the single great river mouth. Then it became a delta as the mud banks shifted and finally it grew into the marsh and plough we know. Since its heyday, which was probably pre-Saxon, it must have grown more and more inefficient as the clay took over. I’m certain there’s an early fortress by the highest part of the sea wall just waiting to be uncovered.’ He sighed and laughed at himself for it. ‘That’s not my period and so is not my province, which is the infuriating thing about history. It does keep repeating itself but only in its untidy way. New names get attached to old happenings and vice versa. If I don’t stick to my own period I’ll be lost in a morass of extra information. But it’s a honey of a find. Do you know what the upper or respectable end of the place is called? Forty Angels.’
‘Really?’ Mr Campion so far forgot himself as to take his eyes off the garden he had been watching so steadfastly. ‘Come to think of it, I did know that one. It’s later than the other end and the name was given it as a safeguard against slander. Call a gathering The Forty Thieves and it could mean trouble, but say Forty Angels and no one wants to black your eye. Yes, your meaning is clear. Isn’t that right?’
Morty wagged his head.
‘It looks pretty damned odd on the Ordnance Survey,’ he said. ‘It’s a crazy name for a village district, even in England. Saltey was on the end of an escape route. It was the funnel through which secret goods or people were smuggled in or out of East London. It’s remote even now. Not in miles of course—it’s just cut off. The approach is terrible.’
‘Through that maze of lanes lying beyond the Southend road, I suppose?’
‘Oh yes, it’s still a Cinderella. Today there’s a bungalow dormitory two miles wide but before that one has to pass a waste of worked out clay pits which have been turned into a wilderness by various army training courses and old defence works. Long before they were as much as thought of, that was where the Great Dump was.’
In the back of Mr Campion’s mind a faint bell rang. ‘Was that “The Trough”?’
‘That’s right!’ Morty was delighted. ‘It was a swamp really. The little Rattey River rose in it and drained out to reach the sea at Saltey. It first appears as
a place of ill omen in the Middle Ages, when for a time it was thought to be the source of the Plague. For generations it was a no-man’s land, an Alsatia worse than any shanty town. Bands of diseased beggars wandered around. Indestructible rubbish was shot there. Rats and wild dogs bred there and I believe there were ferocious wild pig as late as eighteen hundred. No one in his senses took a path through the place and there are some hair-raising tales of kidnappings, murdered coachmen, wandering lunatics and even cannibalism. On the far side of it, nearer the coast, there was woodland, an arm of the old forest which covered the whole country at one time. Then there is a strip of twitchy heath, some of which isn’t enclosed even now, and after that the mouth of the tiny Rattey River estuary and Saltey. You can drive through it all now, but it’s still not easy to find. No industry you see. Not suitable land for development. Just the saltings and Saltey. When you do reach it, there it sits, smug and deserted and not very pleased to see you.’
‘You say there are no new residents?’
‘None that I’ve heard of.’ He turned and glanced across the garden. ‘Its only claim to fame is that a peculiarly revolting mother-figure was found in a field at Firestone, four miles away, in nineteen hundred. That’s in the British Museum now—in the horror comic room. Hey!’
He leaned forward. A solitary figure had appeared on the path approaching the bandstand. He was some distance away and was making for the distant gate in front of the skyscraper and the baroque hotel.
‘See who that is?’ he demanded in some excitement as he took a small gunmetal cylinder from the open map compartment in front of him. ‘I think I’m right, though I’ve only seen him once before. He’s almost commonplace close to, but utterly distinctive from a distance. It’s the thing I particularly noticed about him. Hang on, I’ll give you the bird-watching glass in a moment.’ He put the little telescope to his eye and crowed.
‘I’m right! That’s L. C. Corkran, head of Intelligence and Security or whatever you call it over here. My, my! He looks pretty sour, doesn’t he?’
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