Without Lawful Authority

by Manning Coles

  “We find you lacking in respect,” he said, showing his teeth like a dog, and a little foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. He was staring at the back of Richten’s head, and Hambledon had the utmost difficulty in keeping his eyes off him over the German’s shoulder.

  “Wonderful world these people must live in,” said Tommy conversationally, and found it an effort to keep his voice steady. There was a clatter of feet in the hall outside; somebody shouted something in German; an English voice answered angrily, and someone else screamed in a high-pitched shaking voice.

  “Alberich!” shouted Richten. “Ernst! Here to me,” but there was such a noise outside that no one answered him. The lunatic who thought he was a king, still fidgeting about behind Richten, swung his clock weight and hit himself on the leg with it. He looked down to see what had touched him, held the weight up, and looked from it to Richten’s head and back again, over and over again. The German was plainly uneasy, though he dared not take his eyes off Hambledon.

  “Look here, old chap,” he said. “Your Majesty, I mean. There are lots of other clocks in the house waiting for you to mend them. Go and have a look round; don’t stand there.” But the king did not seem to hear him.

  “We seem to have reached something of a deadlock, don’t we?” said Tommy cheerfully. “In the meantime, the police——”

  “I am going now, and if you move I will shoot you,” said Richten, and took a step back. “Damn you”—to the king—“get out of my way.”

  The king also stepped back, and his face was like nothing human. He swung the clock weight round and round on the end of its chain and brought it down with frightful force on the back of the German’s head. He dropped like a log, and the gun in his hand went off; Hambledon felt the wind of the bullet as it passed his ear. The king looked down and giggled.

  “Is that funny stuff his brains?” he asked.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” said Hambledon, walked hastily out of the room, and was uncontrollably sick in the hall. When he had recovered a little he realized that the place was full of smoke, growing thicker every moment, and that there was a series of fights in progress. It seemed to him that everyone was fighting everybody else and that a lot more people had arrived and joined in. Just in front of him a tall man with brown hair, one of the released prisoners, was hammering a large square man who was swearing in German. Eventually the Englishman knocked down the German, who hit his head on the marble pavement and ceased to offend. The tall man turned round, and Hambledon asked if his name was, by any chance, Warnford.

  “Yes,” said Warnford, panting. “Curse this smoke.”

  “I’m Hambledon. What is all this strife?”

  “Oh. Er—how d’you do? We didn’t have a nice time down in those cellars—especially Kendal. So whenever we see a German we hit him. The others are the loonies fighting their keepers. Gosh, what a brawl. There’s another,” gasped Warnford, and sprang at a man Hambledon recognized as Alberich.

  “I think I’d like some fresh air,” said Hambledon, and stumbled towards the front door, averting his eyes from the open door of the telephone room. In the doorway he met the lunatic who had once been a soldier.

  “Most irregular,” he said gloomily.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Hambledon.

  23. Conversation Piece

  “When we got there,” said the Westerham superintendent, “smoke was pouring out of the windows. It looked to me as though the place was well alight, but nobody was taking the faintest notice of it. The loonies were popping in and out like a lot of jack rabbits in a bury and fighting the attendants who were chasing about trying to round ’em up. Then there were three husky fellows busy knocking hell out of half a dozen bullet-headed toughs who were—well, they weren’t English. I gather that is all frightfully hush-hush and confidential, so we’d better forget it. The loonies were joining in that too; in fact, it was a real free-for-all. Then round the corner of the house came that poor boob Palmer, chased by a lunatic with an axe. I never saw a man run like it; I didn’t blame him. He threw himself at me, clutched me round the knees, and said he wanted to go back to jail; it was safer. I said I thought we could oblige him.”

  “And the lunatic with the axe?” asked the chief constable.

  “One of my fellows downed him with a truncheon, and the loony keepers collected him. Another of my constables saw a man in one of the rooms, so he rushed in to rescue him. The next minute my man—young Verrall it was—came flying out through the window backwards and landed in a flower bed. A cloud of smoke came out through the broken window, and a face appeared for a moment—a long melancholy face. It said, ‘Most irregular,’ and disappeared again. They got him out later. Young Verrall picked himself up, came up to me, and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, may I make a suggestion?’ Always very polite, young Verrall. I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to send for the fire brigade?’ ”

  “Hadn’t you?” said the chief constable.

  “I didn’t seem to have had time, sir; there were so many things happening at once. I did then. It was really rather awkward for us police; we knew from Mr. Hambledon of the Foreign Office that we’d got to arrest some spies, but even he didn’t know how many there were, and we didn’t know which were lunatics, their keepers, the spies, or the prisoners they were supposed to have locked up there somewhere. Especially as the place was so full of smoke you couldn’t see anything properly and, as I say, they all seemed to be milling round, fighting anybody they met. It was a proper picnic.”

  “How did you get them sorted out?”

  “Mr. Hambledon was very helpful, and we knew the head mental attendant. When we’d got everybody out, including a corpse with its head bashed in, there was still one lunatic missing. Besides Mr. Francis, I mean, he who recovered his wits and came over the wall at the outset. They found the missing one eventually outside the gate among the crowd there was there. I don’t know where all the people came from in the time.”

  “One never does,” said the chief constable, “but people always do arrive.”

  “There they were, all craning their silly necks like a lot of geese, and the loony in the middle. I don’t think he’d got the silliest face, either. As I say, sir, it was a proper picnic.”

  “I shall regret to the end of my days,” said the chief constable, “that I didn’t attend it.”

  * * *

  “In the course of my dubious career,” said Hambledon, “I have killed people in various unpleasant ways, but I think that was the nastiest. It seemed to go on for hours and hours, waiting for that poor lunatic to make up his mind to strike.”

  “I don’t see what you could have done about it,” said Denton consolingly. “If you’d said to him, ‘Whip behind,’ or something like that, he might not have believed you.”

  “No. But I didn’t even try—quite the reverse, in fact. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life, managing not to look interested in what was happening behind him. It had to be done, you know; he’d have given us a lot more trouble if he’d lived. Quite an able fellow, Richten.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Denton, “is why they’d locked up Palmer. Wasn’t he in with them?”

  “Oh, that was simple. He came along with one of the gang who told him Richten’d get him out of the country in exchange for information about that diplomatic satchel I found in his safe. As a matter of fact, Richten’s man slipped up; Richten’d lost interest in the satchel, and here was somebody totally unreliable who’d learned too much about him. Palmer was quite right; he is safer in jail. He was going to be taken up in that aeroplane they kept in the park, and I expect they’d have dropped him out over the Channel. I don’t know, but I’m sure they wouldn’t have preserved Palmer.”

  “Richten left it rather late if he was going to escape by plane,” said Denton. “What about warming up the engine? He would probably have crashed taking off, anyway.”

  “He
made a mistake coming to talk to me; he ought to have fled when he heard me telephoning. Perhaps he thought it might be useful in the future to know what I look like. I thought it would be more useful if he didn’t. Have a future, I mean, once he knew me.”

  “One final point. The real head of the lunatic asylum—what was his name? Goodwin? Where did he come in?”

  “Goddard. The unwilling accomplice. He’d blotted his copybook at one time, and Richten was blackmailing him. He really is an expert on mental diseases, and most of his work there was perfectly genuine. The place was financed by Richten, of course, as a cover for other activities. It’s a pity Goddard has disappeared; he might have claimed a cure in the case of Francis. Recipe, one two-pound slab of guncotton complete with cap and fuse. Ignite, throw, and pray.”

  * * *

  “We got over the wall all right,” said Marden, “but they must have been watching us. Captain Warnford went down first and held the ladder for me; I came down backwards and didn’t see anything happening. They must have clouted him when his back was turned and me as I came down. The next thing we knew was when we woke up in those basement cells with bumps on our heads.”

  “Of course,” said Ashling, “the captain ’asn’t ’ad any experience of real war or ’e’d know better than to turn ’is back on the enemy. Now, when I was on the Somme——”

  * * *

  Young Constable Verrall was standing outside Westerham Police Station wishing it was lunch time, when a depressed little figure came along the road pushing a handbarrow.

  “Morning, Mr. Mullins.”

  “Morning.”

  “So you got your ladder back all right.”

  “Oh, ah. Got me ladder back.”

  “So you’re ten bob to the good.”

  Mullins merely looked at him sourly.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I put it on Roast Potato yesterday,” said the painter reluctantly, “for the four-thirty.”

  “Oh. Hard luck. What did Mrs. Mullins say?”

  “She don’t know yet. She was making pastry this morning,” said Mullins, and passed on his way.

  “Pastry?” said Verrall thoughtfully. “Oh, rolling pin, of course. Poor old Mullins.”

  * * *

  The convicts, carefully spaced out, were taking their daily walk round and round the exercise yard, and one of them was talking. He did not move his lips and he desisted whenever he neared a warder, but the convict behind him heard what he was saying. He was giving his opinions of prison and its warders, its exercise, its food, its accommodation, and everything about it.

  “Oh, there’s worse places than this,” said the second convict, also without moving his lips.

  “What?”

  “Loony-bins,” said Palmer, the receiver.

  The first convict was so startled that he shied visibly. “What! You been in a——?”

  “No talking there,” said the warder. “Silence. And space out. Keep step, you there.”

  The convicts went on shuffling round and round the exercise yard, but every now and again one of them glanced nervously over his shoulder.

  * * *

  Mr. Gunn, landlord of the Spotted Cow, was having a quiet glass with his friend Captain Butler, who had spent so many years of his life on the Hooghly. Gunn was looking with interest at a picture in a newspaper; it was a photograph of some entrance gates with a lodge on either side and a group of men in the act of getting into cars. “Morley Park, Westerham,” said the caption, “the sumptuous private mental home which was yesterday set on fire by escaped lunatics. Police had to be called in to assist in restoring order, and in spite of the efforts of the fire brigade the place is a total ruin.”

  “You police do get some queer jobs,” said Butler. “Dealing with lunatics, now; that is awkward.”

  “There’s something behind all this,” said Gunn. “I’d dearly like to know what it is.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t you expect ’em to call in the police if the loonies got out of hand?”

  “The local police, if necessary, yes. But not Chief Inspector Bagshott of Scotland Yard and a small army of Special Branch men. There’s Sanders there; I’ve known him for years, and several of the others I know, too—Dicky Rice, for one, him on the left there, always called Birdseed.”

  “D’you mean to say,” said Butler, “that they got men down from Scotland Yard to deal with a few escaped lunatics?”

  “Doesn’t sound very likely, does it? That’s what I said; I wonder what’s behind it. There’s another man there, that short man—he’s not a policeman, but Bagshott is standing back to let him get into the car first. He must be somebody pretty important, but I can’t see his face; it’s turned away from the camera.”

  Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon always turned his face away from cameras.

  * * *

  “Of course I’m going on with my job,” said Roger Kendal. “What d’you take me for? I’ll be a bit more careful whom I engage as keepers in the future.”

  “I wish you’d do your work in the house,” said his sister anxiously, “instead of in that silly place on the far side of the gardens. There’s plenty of room in the south wing.”

  “All right, I’ll move the things up. It will be more convenient, really. I wish Warnford took more interest in my line; we might work together.”

  “He’s so happy,” said Jenny, “to be back with the regiment, I don’t think he’d leave it even to work with you. I have some news for you, Roger. I’m going to marry Jim quite soon.”

  “If you think that surprises me,” said her brother, “you’re wrong. I knew this would happen. Find me a good housekeeper before you go, won’t you? Dear old Pieface, I hope you’ll be awfully happy. Jim’s had a rotten time; he deserves all the best.”

  “I’m going to try and make him forget it.”

  “He won’t do that, but you can make it unimportant. How, exactly, does one give the bride away? I suppose there’s a drill for it; I must find out.”

  * * *

  Tommy Hambledon gave a little dinner at the Café Royal at which Warnford was unable to be present, owing to his regimental duties, but Denton was there, and Marden.

  “I miss him frightfully,” said Marden; “I must find something to do. They won’t have me in the Tank Corps at my age.”

  “Terribly good for the liver, I hear,” drawled Denton, “bouncing about in a tank. Counteracts middle-aged spread, and all that.”

  “You won’t have far to look for a job,” said Hambledon; “you are coming on my department.”

  Marden fixed his eyes on Hambledon and seemed about to speak, but the Intelligence man swept on without waiting for an answer.

  “I think you will be very useful. I hear you have a way with safes, and that is a valuable accomplishment in our line. I understand you can walk about a house without disturbing the inmates; I have often longed for a trained and obedient ghost. At least it won’t get you into jail in this country, though it’s true that Continental prisons are not too comfortable. Endeavour to keep out of them. Though I’m afraid that on your new job you may have to do many things without lawful authority.”

  THE END