But Ivor – such was the necessity of their plot – was not to return for a good many hours yet. Bloody but unbowed, he was to stagger in with the news of his own near-murder and the snatching away of Humphrey. And in the interim – such still had been the plan – the dimly perceptive Thewless was to have been put off with vague speculations of the boy’s mere truancy – a truancy from which Ivor was to be represented as no doubt busily recovering him…
Thus did Cyril Bolderwood, nervously stuffing banknotes and negotiable securities in a convenient grip, doubtfully recapitulate to himself the plot that had seemed so admirable so short a time ago. Abundantly wishing for his son’s return, he yet felt with some misgiving that it might not be easy to justify his own deplorably abrupt and implausible change of front to the wretched Thewless hard upon the shattering telephone call from Jollard. Up to that moment he had played heavily (and in the light of the night’s events even absurdly) on the ‘run-away’ theme which was to keep the tutor quiet for a vital twelve hours, and which was to be exploded only by the reappearance of a grievously battered Ivor. But when it had become apparent that the police of two countries must know enough to be moving against them now, and at the best they would find themselves faced with the closest questioning, it had appeared to him essential to drop at once an attitude that cool inquiry must inevitably brand as grossly irresponsible. Moreover, he had at last fully seen the advantage, the blessed hope of safety, resident in the fact that others besides themselves were ‘after’ Humphrey. That was the card that they should have played for all it was worth as soon as ever the truth of it was apparent to them. For its astonishing interlocking with their own design, its vast scope as both corroboration and obfuscation, surely by far outweighed the few hours’ grace that the pretended belief in a mere truancy was designed to secure them.
But where were they now? Just how far did the news from London carry them? Was he perhaps precipitate in his feeling that all, or nearly all, was lost? And Cyril Bolderwood looked at the preparations for panic flight which lay around him with something like embarrassment. Conceivably this was just the sort of mistake that, in Ivor’s absence, he was prone to make… He sat down to think it out.
Murder is always undesirable. And the fatal mischance that had befallen them was the necessity Ivor had discovered for arranging the liquidation of Peter Cox. The police had moved on that rapidly. They had identified the dead man. And they had traced his connexion with Humphrey Paxton.
And now Humphrey Paxton had been kidnapped while staying with his cousins, the Bolderwoods. That was by this time an accomplished fact. There was no going back on it. Even if they were to cry off now, and present the appearance of the boy’s having been freed by his misdoubting captors, stringent inquiry would inevitably follow. That, of course, they had always envisaged; the whole elaboration of their plot was designed to withstand it. So – after all – were things so very much altered?
Cyril Bolderwood paused on this flicker of hope, and in a moment saw that it was delusive. Cox had been killed on the eve of his setting out with Humphrey for Ireland. The police knew this. And the police would ask why.
Perhaps it was to secure the boy’s going with some other tutor, a tool of the kidnappers? Very little investigation of the blameless Thewless, Cyril Bolderwood grimly saw, would eliminate any such hypothesis as that. And only one other explanation was reasonable. Cox was killed because Cox must not go. Why? Because he would discover something. What? The crux lay here.
If the kidnappers were indeed persons working, as it were, from the dark, mere anonymous conspirators without identity, they would have no reason to fear anything that a particular man might know. And what Cox had known must be something at the very heart of the design; not something that some minor variation of it could get round. For – once more – murder is undesirable; one does not perpetrate it as a matter of minor convenience. What should it be, then, that Cox so fatally knew; what should it be but something compromising about persons who had identity; who, somewhere, stood, and were bound to stand, openly in the picture? And so (the police would say) we must cast about. What, to begin with, of those distant cousins in a remote and wild country, with whom the boy, so conveniently, had gone to stay? Is their respectability, their integrity, as unchallengeable as it seems? And is there conceivably some point at which their history, traced back, would be found to cross with the history, similarly traced back, of Peter Cox?
And Cyril Bolderwood, who in this analysis knew himself to have captured something of the cool intelligence of his son, once more reached for the bank-notes. For it was all up. This precisely, was the degree of investigation that they could by no means stand up against. So now –
At this point he broke off, hastily thrusting the so convenient and bulging grip out of sight. For his study door had opened and Mr Thewless had entered – very pale, very quiet, with a small note-book in his hand.
‘It’s much worse than we thought – or, at any rate, much more complicated.’
Mr Thewless, as he spoke, sat down and looked gravely at his host – looked at him, Cyril Bolderwood swiftly noted, entirely without distrust.
‘They are after the boy, without a shadow of doubt. He is in deadly danger. But I judge that your son – if he is endeavouring to guard the boy – is in graver danger still. You see, Humphrey they must have alive. But about others – the rest of us – their ruthlessness would be absolute. Already there has been murder. And the thing is so – so big.’
‘Murder, Thewless? Good God – what do you mean?’
‘In a cinema. I can’t quite make it out. But it certainly connects up. Humphrey, you see, has been keeping a diary. This is it.’ And Mr Thewless held the little notebook up in the air.
‘Good heavens! Let me look at it.’
But Humphrey’s tutor, though apparently in no distrust, put it quietly in his pocket. It was still a private diary, after all. ‘I think I can sufficiently explain. He went to a cinema. He went to see a film called Plutonium Blonde. There’s a kind of irony in that.’
‘An irony?’ Cyril Bolderwood looked blank.
‘You’ll understand in a moment. The film is about atomic warfare – that sort of thing.’
‘Well?’ said Cyril Bolderwood. ‘Well?’
‘And what these villians are really after – But I’ll come to that. He went to this cinema just before joining me at Euston. And something disturbed him. Actually, he talked to me about it on the Heysham steamer, and I took it to be all moonshine. It must have been this mysterious shooting – probably you noticed it – that was reported in yesterday morning’s papers. I bought one in Belfast.’
‘But I don’t see–’
‘The point is this. What he saw, or heard, in the cinema gave him an inkling – it’s not made clear how – that there was some plot against him; that in coming to Ireland he was walking straight into danger. And, all the same, he came.’
‘What!’ Cyril Bolderwood had paled. ‘You mean that he came as a sort of decoy; that the police–’
‘Not that at all.’ Mr Thewless too was very pale. ‘He came because he read it all as a sort of challenge, as a test of his power to control himself, to grow up. It’s all in the last pages of this queer little book. But there was something else as well. He seems to have had some idea – not a very rational one, surely – that he was drawing the danger away from his father; that he was protecting him.’
‘What extraordinary nonsense!’
‘I don’t know. Humphrey appears to have formed one idea in which there is a good deal of sense. Sir Bernard is extremely wealthy, as you know; and it would be natural to suppose that the kidnappers would be after money. But, of course, Sir Bernard is something else as well – one of the key men, at present, in the – well, in the country’s power to wage war. And he has in his possession some sort of plan of an extremely vital sort. Humphrey has concluded that what the kidnappers would be after – privately, as it were, and beneath any more overt demand for money �
�� would be that.’
Cyril Bolderwood, who had been standing rigidly before his guest, sank into a chair much as if his legs had been knocked from under him. ‘The boy worked that out?’
‘Why, yes – so it would appear.’ Mr Thewless looked momentarily puzzled at the form this question had taken. ‘And then there’s a most remarkable thing. Humphrey – who must have been scribbling all this under my very nose, on that interminable light railway – Humphrey really has the queerest insight into character. He writes that his father, in his opinion, pays for his towering intellect in not having much guts.’
‘Guts?’
‘He appears to mean will-power, moral fibre – things like that. And he thinks that that was part of the calculation.’
‘You mean that Humphrey worked it out that the – the criminals would rely–’
‘Precisely. Humphrey himself is the one point at which Sir Bernard has an emotional life worth a tinker’s curse. That, I may say, is the boy’s very turn of phrase. He has, you know, streaks of extraordinary intellectual maturity.’
Cyril Bolderwood gave a sort of groan. ‘If only we’d remembered’, he said, ‘that he was Bernard’s son and Ivor’s cousin!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing – nothing, my dear Thewless. I am becoming utterly confused. But, for heaven’s sake, go on.’
‘Humphrey judged that his father, secretly receiving unnerving threats as to what would happen to his kidnapped son, would simply crack up and part with anything he had – not with anything he had of his own, you understand, but with what he had, so to speak, of his country’s. It was a thought unbearable to the boy. And he felt that he had to protect his father; that it was his job to protect him. He has the notion, you see, that he is the strong member of the family, and that he must always give his father a hand.’
‘I wish to heaven Ivor were here!’ Cyril Bolderwood, by an association of ideas not altogether obscure, came out with this with considerable vehemence. ‘But I don’t see – I can’t for the life of me see – how it was going to help his father to – to–’
‘To come to Ireland and put his head into the lion’s jaws?’ And suddenly Mr Thewless brought out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘Well, it’s here we come to the bit that’s really grim; to a point’ – for a moment Mr Thewless was vaguely magniloquent – ‘where all these personal issues, Humphrey’s fate and ours – are transcended. At this point the boy’s faculties – terribly at a stretch, after all – seem to have broken down. He makes an obscure, rather childish note to the effect that he has cheated, broken the rules, taken some underhand way of baffling his enemies. What he means by that isn’t quite clear, but I’m afraid it’s something pretty appalling. He had access to the plan.’
‘What!’ Cyril Bolderwood was suddenly trembling all over.
‘With some sort of child’s cunning, and in the pursuance, one may suppose, of an innocent fantasy of secret service work and that sort of thing, he had possessed himself of the combination of a safe in which the thing is kept.’
‘I can’t believe it! It’s incredible! You mean – simply in Paxton’s own house?’
‘So it would appear. And the boy resolved that, before coming to Ireland and running the risks of which he’d had so odd a warning, he would put it out of his father’s power to comply with the demand that might be made on him. So he went straight home from the cinema, possessed himself of this vital document, and brought it along with him.’
Cyril Bolderwood made a choking noise in his throat, so that his companion positively thought for a moment that he had suffered an apoplexy. ‘Do you mean that – that it’s in this house now?’
‘It may be, if he has hidden it cunningly. I have come straight from ransacking his room – I took that responsibility at once – and I could find no sign of it. He may simply be carrying it on his person. The diary, you understand, breaks off without being specific on the point. It is only apparent that as he sat opposite me yesterday in the little train, scribbling this astounding matter in his notebook, the document may have been somewhere within a yard of us. Or that is how I read the matter. And you see how catastrophic is the situation that confronts us.’
‘Quite – oh, quite so, quite.’ Cyril Bolderwood was staring with an almost glassy eye into space. The sudden, enormous hope in the thing had actually dazed him. What would the disappearances of the South American magnate, the Irish squire, matter if he and Ivor, in disappearing, took the thing with them after all – the whole speculative business of the pressure upon Sir Bernard short-circuited, obviated, by his son’s crazy act? ‘Quite – it’s too terrible for words. But I still can’t see why the child did it. It’s quite mad.’
‘I judge that he is not capable of thinking in terms of a nation’s safety; that he has no realization of the vast public issues involved. His vision stops short with his father’s honour. And he had saved that. If caught – and he was going to do his best not to be caught – he had the document to hand over and cry quits with. The thing then could not be charged against his father’s weakness, but only against his own childish folly.’
‘I see. I see.’ Cyril Bolderwood was almost impressed.
‘And I see too.’
The voice was a weak whisper. Both men turned in surprise. The study door was open. And just inside it lay Ivor Bolderwood in a pool of blood.
24
With Humphrey the first flush of returning consciousness had been sheerly pleasurable, like waking up on his birthday. He had behaved in a heroical manner; he had been extremely clever; he had eluded, confounded, mocked his enemies. It was matter to compose a song about, full of thrasonical brag. Not Toad himself, when he had outwitted the barge-woman and sold her horse, was more outrageously pleased with himself than was Humphrey in these seconds during which his faculties were coming back to him.
But he was extremely cold, extremely bruised, extremely stiff. And there was something like a tiger gnawing at his right knee. Opening his eyes with some idea of investigating this phenomenon, Humphrey realized that it was dark.
Naturally it was dark. Lying quite still, he summoned hasty argument on the matter. This was the little cave – the one into which the entrance was a mere slit – and beyond that was the big cave; and of the big cave there was perhaps as much as a hundred yards before its gentle curve admitted a first gleam of daylight… So naturally it was dark.
But this, although it located him, orientated him, really helped very little. A box of matches, or the nursery nightlight for which he had never entirely shed a lingering regard, would have helped a great deal more. He shut his eyes once more – it was absolutely his only means of dealing with the darkness – and thought again. His pursuers, if they had been outwitted and adequately insulted by himself, had yet been finally routed by some exterior agency. There had been a police whistle which had sent them, already rattled as they were, pell-mell to their motor-boat waiting at the other end of the cave. But what had happened after that? Not – his recollection, although it was dim, told him – any massive irruption of the blue-clad (or here, rather, green-clad) forces of the law. And certainly no comfortable tramp of constabulary feet echoed in the cavern now. There were noises – and noises reverberating so that he by no means had to strain his ears to hear them. But they were only the murmurs and lappings, the dull explosions, the odd and muted musical notes, that the place contrived, as it were, on its own steam.
He must wait. Quite simply, he must do that. He had suggested to his enemies that their best chance was to retire a little and lurk – and might they not be doing so now? Whatever had disturbed them was apparently departed, and the possibility that they were themselves still a force actively in the field was at least something too substantial to take chances with. He had practically told them so, given his assurance that he would in no circumstances emerge until substantial and authentic succour had appeared. And it would appear; there could be no doubt of that. Let a man and a boy disappear in th
is district, and such a cavern as this would suggest itself as one of the first places to be hunted through. Even were he to fall unconscious again where he lay – or, worse, in that corner of the little cave inaccessible to inspection from without – competent searchers would not neglect the possibility. Ultimately, he was entirely safe… And thus Humphrey comforted himself, as he was so frequently able to do, by the slightly complacent exercise of his own good brain. Only, of course, he was neglecting the factor of the dark.
And it was dark. Here in the little cave the very most attenuated quiver of the sense of sight was absent. This was something he did not at all like. And in a flash he realized that there was still danger. Or rather there was a choice of dangers. Another five minutes here and he would have lost his nerve, would be battering himself wildly against the rock in a panic so catastrophic as to deprive him of all chance of finding and negotiating the narrow cleft leading to ultimate sunlight. That was one, and a very horrid, danger. The other danger, of course, was simply that they were waiting. He had said that he would die rather than fall into their hands, and he had abundantly meant it. But to die was one thing; to buffet himself into madness against invisible rock was quite another… He got to his feet – it was an action surprisingly difficult of accomplishment – and felt his way cautiously round the little cave. It occurred to him that there might be bats. He resolved to keep on remembering this, because a bat when one was thinking of bats would be rather less upsetting than, as it were, a bat from the blue. And, now, here was the narrow slit.
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