The Malady in Maderia

by Ann Bridge

  “Hold on—how long ago was all this?”

  “We went up to the plateau exactly a week ago today.”

  “And you first saw the spy-boat ten days before that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please go on.”

  “Well, the sheep were coughing and wheezing frightfully, and seemed all dopey” Julia pursued. “Usually they are frightfully wild, according to the Armitages, but this time they took no notice of anyone till they were quite close to; and they were turning their heads about in an odd way.”

  “And what steps did Mr. Armitage take about this ailment in the sheep?”

  “There was nothing much he could do, till Monday. Mrs. Armitage took a sample of the water in one of the pools on this plateau place, to have it analysed, and they sent for the vet—but he was in Lisbon, and only got back on Monday, so he couldn’t get down till Tuesday. But Mr. Armitage asked the men who carry one up in hammocks if any other tourists had been there lately—in case someone had poisoned the water.”

  “And had they?”

  “Not poisoned the water, no—it was absolutely normal.”

  “I expressed myself badly” Sir Percy said. “I meant, had any strangers been up to the plateau?”

  “Yes” Julia said, with great emphasis. “Ten tourists had been up, and had spent the night, with lots of luggage and camping-gear, some days earlier.”

  “You are sure of that?—that they spent the night? That could be very important.”

  “The hammock-men were positive about it, because they were told to come again next day to carry everything down—an absolute gold-mine for them, of course; they’ll remember it for years,” Julia said, laughing a little. “They were vague about the exact day, as peasants often are, but we were able to settle that later, more or less.”

  “How?”

  “Well, the men said they thought the tourists had come up from the other side of the island, so on the Sunday Mr. Armitage drove over to Seixial and made enquiries, and learned that a number of foreigners had landed there rather over a week earlier, and had hired mules to take their luggage up to the foot of the plateau, and down again next day.”

  “Was Mr. Armitage able to ascertain what boat they came off?”

  “All the locals could say was ’a fishing-boat’, but of course that is what these spy-trawlers are supposed to be.”

  “Quite so. Pray continue.”

  “Well, I had a sort of idea about the trawler, because I had met Russian trawlers before, engaged on illegal activities” Julia said.

  “Indeed? What sort of activities?” Sir Percy asked in surprise.

  “Planting satellite-detectors in remote spots in the Hebrides and the Scillies” she replied nonchalantly. “So I decided to ask the hammock-men one or two questions myself, and what they told me made me feel fairly certain that the people who had camped on the plateau were Russians.”

  “May one know what questions you did ask them?” Sir Percy enquired, bending a gaze half-admiring, half-quizzical, on the beautiful young woman beside him.

  “Yes. I asked if they had smoked” she said, turning to him with an amused smile.

  He gave a brief laugh. “I’ll buy it! I’m no good at guessing. What did you learn?”

  “That these tourists had smoked brown cigarettes, not white; that had created a great impression on the men. And of course Russians do smoke beige-coloured cigarettes. So I felt pretty sure those campers had come off the trawler.”

  “What did you do then? Send for Mr. Monro?”

  “No, not then. I told Mr. Armitage, and we decided not to tell anyone else for the time being.”

  “May one know why?”

  “Oh yes—to keep everything as quiet as possible till we know more. You see—or you will see when you look at a map—it seemed highly probable that local accomplices were involved. So it was much better not to alarm the authorities here too soon.”

  “Vairy good” Sir Percy said again. “Please go on.”

  “Well, then I saw the child” Julia said; “a boy of ten or eleven, who lives on the farm. He had been ill for a week—coughing and wheezing, and with terrible headaches; the village doctor could do nothing for him.”

  “Had he also been up to the plateau?”

  “Yes—though we didn’t know it then; Mrs. Monro found that out the next day, after the doctor from Funchal had been sent for to see him.”

  “Ah, the one human case that the good Major mentioned! Where is he now?”

  “In a clinic in Funchal; the doctor took him straight back in his car, to keep him under observation.”

  “I shall need to see him” Sir Percy said, with a certain animation.

  “Oh, you will!—you’ll be staying in the same clinic” Julia said, laughing again. “But he’s much better now—nearly well, the doctor told me this morning.”

  “How did this happen? Do you know at all?”

  “Yes—the doctor saw some syrettes of atropine that my cousin had brought, just in case, and that gave him a new idea, and he dashed upstairs and gave the child an injection at once.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last night, after my cousin arrived—we went straight to the clinic from the plane, because I was so worried about the child.”

  “By your cousin you mean Mr. Monro?”

  “Yes—oh, sorry. We are cousins.”

  “Quite so. But you have not told me yet why you sent for him —from Spain, was it not?”

  “Yes, I have been working in Spain” Colin put in, from the back of the car. “My wife comes in here, sir. She overheard a conversation between the village doctor and Dr. de Carvalho, which gave her a clue.”

  “Hold on a moment—the doctor who has the child in his clinic now is Dr. de Carvalho? Who worked on gas research in France?”

  “Yes sir, that is the man.”

  “Ah yes—Hartley mentioned him. He is quite reliable, it seems. And very helpful, since he is going to put me up! Where do you stay?” the scientist now asked Colin.

  “Also in the clinic, sir.”

  “Vairy good. All right—now let us hear the clue.”

  “Here we are!” Julia said, swinging the car into the clinic’s entrance; she pulled up at the front door. Two men in white coats at once appeared, took out the luggage, and led the way to one of those large lifts common in nursing-homes. “I’ll wait down here” Julia called to Colin, as he and Sir Percy entered the lift.

  In the small pleasant bedroom Sir Percy looked about him with approval. “Most pleasant! And you are where?”

  “Next door, sir—through the bathroom; or I imagine this partition on the balcony has a door. Yes, it has. We eat up here —we are supposed to be patients.”

  “Are patients allowed to drink anything?”

  “Yes—I ordered in a supply.” He went along the balcony and into the next room—“Yes—it has come, but it hasn’t been undone. I rather think the doctor is expecting us for drinks downstairs, though. But while I have the chance, will you just let me get this clue business over, without my cousin?”

  “By all means.” Sir Percy sat down on a chair on the balcony and lit a cigarette. “Does she not know about it?” he asked.

  “Oh no—unhappily she knows only too much.” He also sat down, and rapidly recounted the story of Philip Jamieson’s death. Then he went on to tell of de Carvalho’s reference to respirators in his talk with Dr. Fonseca, which Aglaia had overheard. “So my wife realised that quite probably it was some form of nerve gas that had affected both the sheep and the child, and got Mrs. Jamieson to send for me. But that was the clue—only I didn’t want to explain it all to you in front of Mrs. Jamieson.”

  “I see. All the same she realises that I have come here expressly to try to ascertain what type of nerve gas is involved here, does she not?—if it is a nerve gas.”

  “Oh yes, sir. And she is as brave as a lion about that, and everything else! It’s only that for her the word ‘respirator’ is like a thorn u
nder a thumb-nail.”

  At this point one of the white-coated attendants appeared, and in rather halting French said that the Senhor Doutor desired their company downstairs; he led them out through a typical Funchal garden, a mixture of rampant flowers and neat beds of onions, lettuces and melons, in which avocado pear-trees stood here and there. At the upper end a vine trellis shaded a small paved space, open on all four sides and set with chairs and tables; here Julia was seated, drinking a cocktail. De Carvalho rose to greet his new guest; when Colin introduced him— “Non! Sir Percy comes himself? This is indeed an honour. Ah, now we shall resolve our problem!”

  “Espérons” Sir Percy said briefly; he expressed polite gratitude for the doctor’s hospitality. Then they got down to brass tacks. Julia, listening, was fascinated by the three different angles— the medical, the scientific, and the Intelligence—from which the three men approached their common problem. Almost at once Sir Percy asked for a map; one was coming, Julia said—she had just telephoned to Mr. Armitage’s office for it. And indeed in a few moments an errand-boy brought a large-scale map of the island—a table was cleared, and the sheet spread out on it; the three men pored over it intently. Colin pointed out first the plateau itself, and then Seixial, down on the north-west coast—it was from there that the strangers had come up, he said.

  “Mais oui, mais oui” Sir Percy said brusquely, brushing this aside; but what was the height of the plateau above sea-level?— and the temperature? The altitude was easily checked from the map, just under 5000 feet; but none of those present had any idea of the temperature up there in the early morning. At midday, Julia put in, it had been quite hot; “but when the mist came up, after lunch, it turned chilly.” Sir Percy pounced on the mist— was it frequent? None of them could say. “Well, we must take temperature readings, and find out about the mist. Would your friend Mr. Armitage know?” he asked Julia.

  “He might; he lives nearer the Paúl than anyone else.”

  “Show me, please.” Julia indicated the quinta on the map.

  “So you see, Monsieur le Professeur, the boy managed to walk all that distance, after encountering the gas” de Carvalho put in.

  “Yes—most interesting. But one aspect at a time” Sir Percy said. “Mrs. Jamieson, how quickly do you think you could get hold of Mr. Armitage?” He was running his finger across the map from the quinta towards Funchal.

  “Oh, if he’s in his office, quite quickly; he was there ten minutes ago, when I sent for the map” she said.

  “Then please try.”

  But here Colin intervened.

  “You are quite sure you wish Mr. Armitage to know that you, yourself, are out here, sir?”

  “I don’t see how I can get very far without him” Sir Percy said. “He lives on the spot, he knows the terrain, he can talk to the locals; his help seems to me indispensable. And Mrs. Jamieson has told him of her suspicions about the trawler. Have you any reason for distrusting him?”

  “Oh no—he’s my wife’s cousin.”

  “Then pray try to get hold of him, Mrs. Jamieson.”

  But when Julia telephoned to the office she was told that Mr. Armitage had gone out, and would not return till after lunch; she left a message asking him to ring up the doctor at the clinic as soon as he came in. When she went back to the garden no one was there but Colin.

  “Where are the others?” she asked.

  “Gone to look at the child. I seem to have floated slightly” Colin said.

  “What about?”

  “Oh, Terry. I mean, this Mossy person is so frightfully well-known.” But he didn’t look unduly troubled.

  “All the same, I think he’s right; he’ll get on much better with Terence in on it. I wish I knew what he wants to know, exactly. What can the altitude have to do with it?—and the temperature?”

  “They all come into the degree of efficacy, I believe. I’m not very well up in all that myself; I didn’t get a lot of briefing on the scientific side.”

  Julia did not pursue that; she realised that the person who would have been most fully briefed was her husband. Just then Sir Percy and de Carvalho reappeared, talking hard in French. “So you took blood specimens on Tuesday morning, and sent them by air to Paris?”

  “Via Lisbon.”

  “Then you should get a result any time now. Très bien. Certainly the symptoms as you have recorded them point to a strong nerve-agent; and his recovery with the atropine injections is almost conclusive, in that limited sense.” The scientist turned to Julia. “Well, is your friend going to join us?”

  Julia reported what had happened. “They could not say when Mr. Armitage would be free this afternoon.”

  “Oh well, we must get on with the ground-work by ourselves.” He sat down by the table with the map.

  “Sir Percy, may I ask you one thing, before you get going?” Julia asked, sitting down too.

  “You may ask me more than one” he said, looking at her very benignly. “After all, we owe this opportunity mainly to your astuce.”

  “Why should the Russians want to use this gas here, in Madeira?—and on sheep?” she asked.

  “That is two questions” he said, smiling. “I will take the first first. You probably know, what the Major told me, that the defector who first reported the invention of this new agent to our authorities mentioned that it was intended for use against Britain.”

  “Yes, I did hear that.”

  “Then it was obviously essential to test it in a climate as like that of the British Isles as possible, what is called an ’oceanic’ climate—fairly mild and fairly moist. There is nowhere within the bounds of the Soviet Union where such a climate is to be found; it lies entirely on the Euro-Asiatic land-mass, with the driest climates in the world, and great extremes of heat and cold. Where it does touch the ocean at all, it is either the Black Sea, much hotter than Britain, or the Arctic Ocean, much colder. Madeira is slightly milder than Britain in winter, but otherwise the climate is very similar.”

  Dr. de Carvalho had come over with the cocktail-shaker to fill up their glasses; at the mention of the Soviet Union he rounded on Colin.

  “Alors, Monro, it is les Russes who do this thing? You did not tell me that.”

  “I assumed you would realise it must be them” Colin said.

  “Have you any proof that the Russian Government is involved? This puts a more serious complexion on the matter.” He looked worried, and rather cross. Julia decided to put her oar in.

  “Doctor de Carvalho, it is only my theory that the Russians are responsible for this business, not my cousin’s—he was not here. We have no actual proof, yet; it is an assumption, based on various clues. We hope, with Sir Percy’s help, to learn much more— is not that your wish also?”

  “Certainly” he said, but rather grumpily.

  “Then should we not proceed on Madame Jamieson’s assumption, which I do not reject—yet?” Sir Percy asked blandly.

  “For the moment, yes.” He now carried out his original intention, and refilled Julia’s glass and Sir Percy’s. That worthy thanked him, and then turned to Julia.

  “As for your second question about the sheep, most mammals react to these agents in a way corresponding fairly closely with the reaction of human beings. Of course to carry out an experiment like this without the permission of the government concerned—which we must assume to be the case here—a certain degree of isolation is essential, and this plateau does seem to be very isolated.” He studied the map again. “Yes, there appear to be no dwellings at all close to it. Tell me” he said, turning back to Julia, “is it fenced in any way?”

  “Not that I saw; of course we only went half-way across.”

  “Where did you go up?—could you show me?”

  Julia peered at the map.

  “There’s the end of the tunnel” she said. “Yes, and we went along this sort of faint track to where the hatching begins—that must be the cliffs.”

  “Where you were carried up in hammocks, I think
you said?”

  “Yes—and the people who went up and camped were carried up at the same place. I imagine the cliffs are so steep that they don’t need fences to keep the sheep on the top.”

  “I wonder how they get them up?—and down?” Sir Percy speculated.

  “I believe I’ve heard that they are slung up in nets, as the sheep are slung ashore onto some of the Scottish islands” Colin put in.

  “Yes—yes. Well, the whole set-up is of course a gift to our Tartar friends, for the purposes of this experiment” Sir Percy said. “A relatively confined space, and remote. Rather large though to get the concentration.” He got out a small marked ruler, and laid it on the map. “H’m—between two and three miles each way, vairy roughly.” He whipped round on Julia. “You say ten men camped up there? You are sure of that?”

  “That was what the hammock-men said, and it’s the sort of thing they would be dead accurate about, because of the money. Peasants are always as accurate about money as they are vague about dates, don’t you find?”

  “I know few peasants; no doubt you are right. Ten men” the scientist said again, thoughtfully. “It is very few for the space. I wonder—”

  He was interrupted by a sudden disturbance in the garden. With loud shouts, which were echoed from neighbouring gardens, a man, a youth, and two little boys rushed in, and began frantically to adjust small wooden sluices, through which water now splashed and dashed over the melons, the lettuces, and the onions, and filled shallow trenches round the avocado pear-trees. “What on earth is going on?” Sir Percy asked.

  “It is a water-day—I had forgotten” de Carvalho said. “I am sorry for the noise, but they must distribute the water.” He explained about Madeira’s irrigation system; Sir Percy listened with deep interest.

  “I must say I would like to see one of these levadas” he said, watching the men and boys at work—their eagerness and enjoyment were so evident that involuntarily he smiled as he spoke.

  “Oh you will, tomorrow” Julia assured him. “You’ll go along one of the tunnels that brings the water through the mountains to the dry side of the island.”