August Derleth - The Solar Pons Omnibus Volume 1

by August Derleth

  "Let us not fence, your lordship. Either you will direct us to Mason by letter, which is in your power to do, or I will lay the facts before Scotland Yard and the newspapers. I am beyond the power of all the wealth in England."

  Lord Delapoer gazed with stony fury into Pons's eyes; then he crumpled Pons's note and threw it to the floor. "Wait here," he said, and turned on his heel.

  In a very short time another clerk appeared from the room into which Lord Delapoer had vanished and brought Pons a letter enclosed in an envelope, addressed to Leopold Manadal at an address in Sheffield.

  Once outside the building, Pons unceremoniously opened the envelope, and took out the note inside.

  "Delapoer is likely to think that violence may dispose of us," he explained. "It is a possibility we cannot obviate." He read the note. "Ah, he has considered his position; he does not know, after all, how much we may already have disclosed. 'Admit the bearer to see Mason,' he writes, and signs it simply, 'Delapoer.' I daresay this will do."

  In less than fifteen minutes we were being shown into a darkened room where a tall, broad-shouldered man lay bound and gagged on a bed. Despite the objection of his burly captor, a dark-skinned foreigner to whom Pons's note from Lord Delapoer had been given, Pons unceremoniously ripped the gag from Mason's mouth and cut his bonds.

  "Permit me, Mr. Mason —Solar Pons, at your service. I fancy we are regrettably too late to save your proxies, but by an immediate appearance at the stockholders' meeting of Northern Steel you may yet avert Delapoer's coup. There is a cab below."

  "What else could Mason have carried to make his absence from the meeting important save proxies from American stockholders who, like Balfour Danals over here, are dissatisfied with the present directorship?" explained Pons on the train back to London.

  "Of course, now you have pointed it out, it is obvious."

  "It was from the beginning," rejoined Pons. "No other explanation was tenable in the circumstances."

  "But if I might be so bold," I went on, "it seems to me that the crux of the problem remains unsolved. Sir Ernest McVeagh will still want his locomotive."

  "Ah, as for that, you laid eyes on it yourself earlier today, Parker. It stands in the company's abandoned yards as number 729 —which is only number 177 renumbered, for these numerals lend themselves very easily to such an alteration in haste. The real number 729 was converted to scrap at the time that the company received a report of carriages having been cut up; I think you will find that Lord Delapoer's company also controls various plants for the accumulation and disposal of scrap-iron, and unquestionably the yards between Girton and Kendon-on-Lea are under the control of

  Northern Steel. In foreseeing every contingency, the real 729 was cut down earlier.

  "The locomotive could not, after all, have vanished into thin air. It was not sunk into a mine shaft, no tarn or lake offered itself for the convenience of Mason's enemies, and the locomotive was clearly not run back past Girton or on past Kendon-on-Lea. We have as yet no lorry large enough to load up and cart away an entire locomotive, and anything other than a lorry would have been obvious even in the darkest night. So there remained only the branch- lines along the road. And what more simple and efficacious than a locomotive yards, where the stolen locomotive might be left to stand in plain sight without being suspect?"

  Three days after our search for the missing locomotive, Pons greeted me at breakfast with a marked copy of the Financial Times.

  "Our little adventure has had an epilogue," he observed dryly.

  I read the account he had marked for cutting. "Balfour Danals New Chairman of Northern Steel," read the small caption. The story itself was succinct and clear, though it failed to tell all.

  "Following the dramatic appearance of James H. Mason, an attorney from New York City, representing American stockholders of Northern Steel, charging irregularities at the meeting three days ago, stockholders voted to hold a new meeting yesterday. As a result of the new meeting, Lord Delapoer lost the chairmanship of the Board of Directors to Balfour Danals, to whose supporters rallied Mr. Mason with proxies obtained by cable from American stockholders. ..."

  "And, if I am not mistaken, I daresay the new directors will soon expose gross mismanagement, if nothing more serious, under Delapoer. The loss of the chairmanship of itself could mean nothing if it were not for the possibility of damaging disclosures to follow."

  Nor, as time and events made clear, was Pons in error, any more than he had been in any other aspect of the remarkable abduction of the Great Northern Railway's special locomotive.

  The Adventure of the Five Royal Coachmen

  RETURNING from a professional call to the lodgings I shared with Solar Pons at 7B Praed Street, early one June morning in 1922, I was astonished to find my companion engaged in the contemplation of a fishing-rod. He stood in the centre of our sitting-room just away from the mantel and not far from his desk, flexing the rod in his long, supple fingers. At my entrance, he favoured me with a glance from his keen grey eyes and the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  "I note your amazement, Parker," he said. "Let me assure you that my interest in matters piscatorial is not recent. Alas! I have but lacked the opportunity to try my hand at that ancient and honourable sport of angling. Come, what do you say to a holiday on the Test?"

  "My dear Pons! You are surely joking!"

  "Ah, I find too little opportunity for jesting. Now that I have concluded that little matter of the lost locomotive to the satisfaction of the directors of the Great Northern Railway, a holiday would not be amiss. The Test should be beautiful at this time of year. And the trout are rising. So, at least, the papers have it."

  He tossed me a copy of a newspaper from his desk. It was folded to a brief account on the front page carrying the total catch taken a day ago by an angling party under the leadership of Sir Ronald Masterman, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

  "But this is a record of the catch the day before yesterday," I protested. "Trout are unpredictable. What was yesterday's total?"

  "Ah, the morning papers are remarkably silent in the matter."

  I laughed. "You see! They took none. And it is now you talk of going trout-fishing!"

  Pons put down the rod and took up his calabash, which he proceeded to fill with shag. "By the way," he said presently, "I am expecting a caller at any moment. Be so good as to admit him if he should arrive while I am in my room."

  "Aha! I thought there was more to this than met the eye!" I exclaimed.

  "Is there not always more to everything than meets the eye?"

  So saying, he vanished into his chamber, leaving me to puzzle over whatever new venture engaged his attention, for my companion's reputation for the kind of confidential inquiry work in which he specialized had now spread far beyond the boundaries of metropolitan London. The year, as I recall it, was one of those hectic years in the decade following the Great War, when most of the capitals were uneasy still, and peace seemed but a temporary illusion.

  Pons was back in our sitting-room when the bell jangled to announce the visitor he had been expecting. Pons's immobile features told me nothing, but there was a restrained air of anticipation in his bearing. Nevertheless, I was not prepared to greet a visitor of such distinction as the tall, broad-shouldered figure whose austere, bemonocled face was familiar to every Englishman and, indeed, to half the globe, as that of Lord Hilary Kilvert, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

  He was brisk and singularly direct. With but a flickering glance for me, he inquired, "You received my message, Mr. Pons?"

  "Pray be seated, Lord Kilvert. My companion, Dr. Lyndon Parker, is a man of utmost discretion; you may speak freely before him."

  "I sincerely trust so." He took off his bowler, laid it unceremoniously on Pons's desk, and mopped his brow with his handkerchief, although I should not have called the room warm. "Forgive my not sitting down, I beg you. I am too restless, far too restless to sit still. The matter is one potentially fraught with the gr
avest possibilities —let me repeat, Mr. Pons, the gravest possibilities."

  "Dear me, Lord Kilvert," observed Pons tranquilly, "I should not have thought that a commonplace angling excursion on the Test should occasion such concern even though it involves a few foreign diplomats under the guidance of the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs."

  Lord Kilvert whirled on his feet and stared at Pons, his face ashen. "Good God! Mr. Pons," he exclaimed, "surely there has been no leak to the press?"

  "Pray compose yourself," Pons hastened to assure him. "It seemed to me beyond the bounds of coincidence that your urgent call should be unrelated to the expedition duly chronicled in the papers three days ago and followed in detail daily thereafter until this morning when the matter is conspicuous by its absence from the news columns. Surely it is not too much to suppose that some event took place which might have certain international complications?"

  "Thank Heaven! I feared for a moment that some word of Spencer's disappearance had reached print."

  "Ah, so it is young Rigby Spencer who has vanished! I submit, your lordship, that this much-touted angling expedition served only to cover events of considerably more significance to His Majesty's Government and to your office particularly. The members of the party were not minor diplomats, but special envoys empowered by their governments to conduct talks on a matter close to our government. If I may venture a guess —the disarmament question?"

  "You are close, Mr. Pons. The precise subject was the ratio of naval disarmament. We may assume that certain foreign countries would be most anxious to obtain advance information on this subject before our government is ready to release any public statement."

  "Specifically, Japan and Russia," said Pons crisply. "Let us hear the story as you know it, Lord Kilvert. If espionage is involved, there is no time to be lost. The game is already well afoot, and we are not yet set upon it."

  Without ceasing his restless pacing to and fro, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs began to talk rapidly. "You should understand, Mr. Pons, that our government had fixed upon a certain basic ratio of naval disarmament some time ago; this had been arrived at after preliminary talks by representatives of the United States government. It was committed to a formula and entrusted to Rigby Spencer, precisely because we felt that any foreign agent interested in an attempt to obtain the formula and the ratio might reasonably suppose that Sir Ronald Masterman would be carrying it. Since we will not retreat from our basic ratio, but might well be able to obtain an even better ratio, we would lose all chance to bargain if once our basic ratio were known.

  "We had inaugurated the meetings officially in London. After early talks, we permitted the press to report that we had taken a brief recess, ostensibly to wait for other delegates, and some of our number went trout-fishing on the Test from Chilbolton to Leckford, a lovely stretch of water, Mr. Pons, if you have ever had the good fortune to fish it. The party had its headquarters at an inn in Chilbolton, and journeyed from there every morning, well attended, with hampers of food and all the necessaries.

  "Of course, the gentlemen enjoyed the fishing; they were meant to do so; but each evening, and occasionally at luncheons, they proceeded with the talks. They made little progress. The American delegate was quite stubborn and did not have the freedom of action which most of the others exercised; the French delegate consistently pressed for every advantage without revealing his government's demurrers in a manifest attempt to force our hand; the Japanese delegate, suspecting that his country would be asked to accept a greater ratio of disarmament, was naturally reticent and suspicious. Thus, beneath the apparent smoothness of the talks and the quite evident pleasure the gentlemen shared in the angling, there existed a definite stratum of unrest.

  "However, all went well until yesterday. There had been a violent disagreement in the course of talks at the inn the previous night; the Japanese delegate had left the meeting in anger, though he rejoined the party in the morning as blandly as if nothing untoward had taken place the night before. The party went in two motor-cars to that stretch of water which lies just above Leckford. The fishing, according to Masterman, was quiet at first; some trout rose, but not many. The day was grey with an overcast; rain impended. The party separated in mid-morning and did not come together again until luncheon. There was some discussion as to the advisability of returning to Chilbolton; they voted on it, but, though there were three votes for returning, the majority of the party were for continuing. Just before noon, the fish had begun to rise to the bait, and enthusiasm was growing. They went out again after luncheon. At about two o'clock rain began to fall, and, though it did not last long, the party began to come back to the cars to return to the inn. Spencer alone did not return. They waited some time for him, they searched for him; there was no trace of him. We have not seen anything of him since.

  "Of course, we threw a cordon around the entire area within an hour. Inspector Jamison of Scotland Yard has been in charge and is on the spot. We are reasonably certain that Spencer was not taken out of the region by any road or railway. What happened from the time he disappeared until Scotland Yard arrived on the scene, we cannot say; but that time was not more than two hours at maximum, and it might well have been considerably less, for we have some evidence to show that Spencer had fished his way for approximately half a mile upstream from the place at which they had lunched; he could hardly have done so in less than half an hour.

  His footprints, or what we assume to be his footprints, lead up to a small rise in the river bank; they do not take up beyond it."

  "There was no evidence of a struggle?" asked Pons.

  "None, Mr. Pons. The scene was studied with the minutest care, and it seems patent that the abduction was carried out with consummate skill. Inspector Jamison has confessed that he is baffled."

  Pons smiled wintrily. "Ah, that is not a condition which could be described as exactly foreign to Inspector Jamison."

  "I must impress upon you the need for the swift recovery of the memoranda," said the Foreign Secretary.

  Pons sat for some time without replying, his head sunk on his chest, his eyes fixed upon the hearth-rug. His elbows rested on the arms of his chair, and his fingertips touched in a Gothic arch before him.

  "And the other delegates?" he asked presently.

  "They have naturally returned to London," replied Lord Kilvert. "We have been delaying talks since then, because, until we know where Spencer and the memoranda he carried are, we are at a disadvantage. The Prime Minister, who has been informed of developments, is pressing us for a rapid recovery of our position."

  "And the ratio? The memoranda? How were they set down? Were they documented or ciphered?"

  "We do not know, Mr. Pons. The ratio and memoranda were left entirely to Spencer's discretion. The ratio need not have been set down at all; it was short enough to be remembered. But there were certain possible variations approaching the basic ratio which made it necessary to have at least some of these figures written down. We believe, therefore, that Spencer carried somewhere on his person such memoranda as were vital to the discussions."

  "At whose suggestion was the expedition on the Test undertaken?"

  "Why, I believe it was young Spencer's suggestion. He is an expert angler, and has also achieved some small fame as an amateur fly-tier of no mean abilities."

  "How much time does His Majesty's Government give us?" asked Pons.

  "Twenty-four hours. We cannot possibly delay any longer. We can put a car at your disposal immediately."

  "On the contrary, it would be more desirable that Dr. Parker and I appear on the scene as disinterested disciples of Walton. There is a train leaving Waterloo Station within the hour. We shall be on it."

  I doubt that anyone would have taken us for other than what Pons intended us to represent at Chilbolton, a duo of amateur anglers. Though he had observed rather pointedly that I needed little alteration save in appropriate costume, Pons himself had undergone a considerable transformation. He looked the epitome o
f a countryman out for a day of piscatorial sport; he had altered his face with the addition of spectacles and side-whiskers, together with a small goatee, and, like myself, he was attired in typical angling clothes, save for his deerstalker cap, which was not inappropriate.

  The Foreign Secretary had supplied Pons with a carefully drawn map of the region between Chilbolton and Leckford, painstakingly detailing the area in which Spencer had vanished, so that we had a very clear picture of the scene in mind. Pons had suggested that Lord Kilvert say nothing to Inspector Jamison save that Pons had been consulted and would arrive on the scene in good time and manage to reach the inspector when he needed his assistance. With this, Lord Kilvert had to be content, though he had given the impression on taking his leave of Pons that he thought him an eccentric indeed.

  For most of the way to Chilbolton, Pons sat studying the map, making muttered comments from time to time.

  "From Testcombe Bridge, below Chilbolton, the railway follows the Test for some distance," he said at last. "Beyond that, on the farther side, lies the road, which is not yet tarred, so that any hurried activity on the road would have thrown up a cloud of dust; it had not rained long, according to Lord Kilvert's account. Both railway-line and road thus follow the river at no great distance, but it is to be noted that the Test divides not far from the bridge, and it is then soon joined by the Anton. There are level marshes and reed- beds beyond, leading to the wooded hills of Longstock Park, and the high chalk-downs of Salisbury look upon the scene beyond Stockbridge. The party was not fishing the main stream of the Test, but the secondary stream which runs through Leckford before again joining the main water above Stockbridge. That is a region of poplar groves and, beyond the marshes in the vicinity of Leckford, there is ample cover for any venturesome rascal. Yet it would seem a daring foreign agent, indeed, who could hope to abduct in broad daylight a member of a party as large as this one, would you not think, Parker?"