Buldog Drummond At Bay

by Sapper

  Ronald Standish glanced round the lounge, then he led the way into a small alcove.

  “Not,” as he explained, “that I think anyone here is likely to be interested in our conversation, but I want to keep you two fellows out of sight as much as possible. I don’t matter – yet; but you are known.

  “The Key Club started a few years after the War in Central Europe. The members used to wear a tiny key as a badge in the lapels of their coats, which was supposed to signify the unlocking of the door leading to a more satisfactory world. Things were in a shocking state, especially in Germany and Russia, and quite a number of similar societies sprang up, flourished for a time, and then they died painlessly of their own utter futility. For some reason or other, however, the Key Club survived. Branches began to appear in France, and finally in England, and it became, in fact, an international organisation. Members were pledged amongst other things to abolish war, and so long as it remained at that nobody cared. They talked the hell of a lot and there it ended.

  “And then about four years ago there occurred a very startling development. At the time I was on a special job which entailed me being for the greater part of the day at the War Office. And one morning a peculiar-looking bird rolled up and asked to see someone to whom he could impart information. He hadn’t any appointment; he didn’t seem to know anyone by name, and so one of the messengers decided to send him to me. He got through on the phone and I told him to send the man up. All sorts of crazy blokes come along with useless schemes, and I was prepared for him to be one of them. And when I saw that little key in his buttonhole I was certain of it. To my amazement, however, he produced from his pocket the formula of a new high explosive which he told me had just been perfected by the French. Now, we happened to know that the French had been experimenting on those lines, and therefore the information, if true, was of value. But since, so far as I was concerned, it might have been the formula for a new baby food, I passed the word along for an expert to come and vet it. And his report was that, though he could not possibly say what value there was in it without practical experiment, it undoubtedly was an explosive of sorts.

  “‘How did you get this?’ I asked my visitor.

  “‘That,’ he answered, ‘is nothing to do with you. There it is, and good day to you.’

  “I stared at him open-mouthed.

  “‘But look here,’ I cried, ‘don’t you want any payment for it? We shall have to make a few inquiries first, of course.’

  “‘Make any inquiries you like,’ he said. ‘The thing is yours.’

  “And he stalked out of the office, leaving the chemical wallah and me gaping at one another. Birds with worthless stuff to sell I had met, but a man with valuable information to give was a bit of an eye-opener. And when we discovered that it undoubtedly was the genuine formula of this explosive our amazement increased. The man had vanished, and I’d been too thunderstruck at the time to have him followed. I’d got his card but there was no address on it, and at that the matter rested for a few weeks, when the next extraordinary development took place.

  “Through devious channels we discovered that Germany, Italy, Japan, America – in fact every Power that counted – had been presented with the same formula, free, gratis and for nothing. Which, as you can imagine, caused a positive riot of joy amongst the French military authorities.

  “However, that was their funeral; what was intriguing us was the reason for such an apparently pointless thing. That the secret must have been obtained by bribing some Frenchman was obvious, but why give it away? More than that, why give it to everybody? And at last we were forced to the conclusion that the motive underlying it was a sort of perverted idealism. These people realised it was impossible to stop research work: that first one country and then another would be bound to get hold of something which would place that country temporarily at an advantage. Their notion, therefore, was that if they could find out what that something was each time and pass it on to everybody else, the temporary advantage would be gone and we’d all start level again. Crazy – if you like – and yet there, staring us in the face, was the actual proof of the pudding. The composition of the new French high explosive was public property.

  “Now, all this is, of course, stale news. But I think it’s rather important that you should get hold of things from the beginning. And so we’ve got to the point where the members of this club ceased being a harmless hot-air factory and began to act. Still more or less harmless, it is true: since everybody was put wise, nobody gained. But a new agency had definitely arisen, though no action could be taken against it: it had done nothing wrong or criminal. So the powers that be held a watching brief and waited.

  “For two years nothing more happened. Reports came in from time to time showing that the members were still holding meetings, but at that it remained. And then one day – I don’t know if you remember the case in the papers – a man was found dead in his bunk in the Harwich–Hook of Holland boat. At the first glance it looked as if death was due to natural causes, but when the steward turned him over he saw to his horror that a dagger had been driven up to the hilt in his heart. It was a tiny weapon, but quite large enough to kill him.”

  “Are we getting a line here, I wonder?” said Drummond thoughtfully. “It was quite a small one this afternoon.”

  “Quite possibly,” said Standish. “To resume, however. The strange thing about the man on board was that there was literally nothing by which to identify him. There were no letters in his pockets; his passport had disappeared. His clothes and underwear were not marked, and beyond the fact that his overcoat and hat had both been bought at Harrods there was no indication whatever as to who he was, or even as to his nationality. He looked English, but that was about all that could be said for it.

  “Naturally there was the devil of a commotion when the boat reached Harwich. The murderer was on board, but it was manifestly impossible to detain over three hundred people. And so, after the police had taken every passenger’s name and address, the boat train proceeded to London, and the stewards and everyone else on board were put through the hoop.

  “The results were meagre. The cabin steward stated that the man spoke English, but was not prepared to say whether he was an Englishman or not. He also stated that he was carrying with him an attaché case. Of this he was positive; he had seen it lying on the bunk whilst the man had been out of the cabin just after leaving the Hook. To the best of his belief the man had turned in about half an hour after they sailed, but he couldn’t swear to it. And more than that he couldn’t say.

  “The bar-room attendant was the next man to be questioned. He said that the man had ordered a whisky and soda and some ham sandwiches before the boat started, and that he had remained in the bar for about twenty minutes. He had not actually seen anyone speak to him, but that did not of necessity mean that no one had, as several men had been in the bar at the time and he was busy serving them. He, too, was not prepared to say if the man was English, though he rather thought it.

  “And then a rather significant fact came to light. About a quarter of an hour after they had sailed, and so presumably after he’d finished his sandwiches, the man had gone to the lavatory to wash his hands. The boy in charge was certain of that fact because he had stood beside him holding a towel in readiness. And while he was standing there, and the man was leaning forward over the basin, the boy noticed that a small key was fixed to the back of the lapel of his coat. That key was not found on the dead man.

  “At the time the local police attached no importance to it: they had never heard of the Key Club. And it wasn’t until the information reached headquarters that its significance was realised. The boy was questioned over again and stuck to it, and since it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone would be likely to invent it was accepted as a fact. The man had been a member of the Key Club.

  “The point, however, that occupied us was whether there was any special significance in this; did it give a clue to the motive for the murder? Robbery w
as ruled out – the man’s money was intact. If it was revenge, or if a woman was at the bottom of it, would the murderer have bothered to remove the key? But if there was a connection between the crime and the badge it was obvious that he would take it off. It was by the merest chance that the key had been seen at all; and but for the boy in the lavatory no one could have known anything about it. Had the dead man, therefore, been guilty of treachery or something of that sort, for which death was the penalty? The trouble was that from what we knew of the Club up to date, it was not an institution that patronised murder. It was almost as baffling as if it had been the Salvation Army involved.

  “In due course the man was buried, still without any clue to his identity. And since the affair had considerable publicity in the English Press, it seemed probable that the man was not an Englishman. A full description of him had been given, and it was almost incredible that he should have no kith or kin. And then one day about a week after came the next development. An extraordinary letter was received at Scotland Yard, which the authorities at first believed to be a hoax.”

  Standish took out his pocket-book.

  “I made a copy of it at the time, and after I’d seen Peter this afternoon I looked it out. Here it is.”

  He passed a sheet of paper over to Drummond.

  With reference to the recent murder in the Harwich boat, why was Mario Guiseppi stabbed at the corner of the Strada Marino in Genoa two days before it happened? What was in the lost attaché case? The Key Club still maintains its ideals, but there is treachery at the top.

  “There was no signature,” continued Standish, “and the postmark was Kensington. The handwriting was an educated one; the paper was the ordinary stuff you can buy anywhere in a penny packet. So the police, not thinking anything would come of it, got into touch with Genoa, and somewhat to their surprise found that a man named Mario Guiseppi had been stabbed at the corner of the Strada Marino two days before the murder in the boat. And further inquiries elicited the very important fact that Guiseppi was a skilled draughtsman in the employ of the Italian Navy who had been working on some extremely confidential drawings with regard to their latest submarine.

  “Things were moving, though they were still pretty dark. Had the man who was murdered in the boat brought copies of these plans from Guiseppi, and the transaction been discovered? Had Guiseppi been killed as a punishment for being a traitor to Italy, and the man in the boat been murdered in order to get the tracings back? It seemed possible, and the list of passengers was scrutinised. There was no Italian in it, though that, of course, didn’t prove anything.

  “So the Yard advertised and broadcasted for the anonymous writer of the letter. They were discreet in what they said, though naturally it was necessary to be explicit enough for the man to know whom the advertisement was intended for. And that, I fear, is what did it. The morning after the broadcast a man was found with his neck broken, lying in some bushes in the small garden of a house in Kensington. It transpired that he occupied the fourth story of the house, which was let as rooms, and that the preceding night he had had visitors who had stayed late. So much the lodger underneath him could say, as the visitors were still talking when he had gone to bed.

  The extraordinary thing was that no one seemed to have seen these visitors. The landlady had not, but she had been occupied in the basement. And, since no one could get in without a latch-key, it seemed clear that the dead man, whose name was Johnstone, had brought them in himself. Apparently he was a quiet sort of bloke, who went out very little, and his main hobby was reading. And at first the sergeant who was called thought it might have been an accident, until an examination of certain marks near the window convinced him that there had been a struggle. The lodger below had heard nothing, but he was a sound sleeper and his bedroom was at the back. At any rate, the sergeant phoned the Yard, and Inspector McIver went down. And the first thing he noticed was that a specimen of the dead man’s handwriting on his desk corresponded with the writing in the letter.

  “Now they thought they really had something to follow up, but once again they were disappointed. The only relatives they could run to earth were two elderly female cousins who lived down in the West Country and hadn’t seen the dead man for ten years, and an uncle who lived up North and hadn’t seen him for fifteen. Nor did he seem to possess any friends; at least nobody volunteered to come forward. There was nothing to help them in his correspondence, and the discovery of the familiar small key in a drawer only confirmed what they already knew from his letter.

  “In fact – an impasse, and the Yard authorities were annoyed. They dislike unsolved murders, and here were two in the course of a few days. That there was a connecting link between them and the death of the Italian in Genoa was obvious: that that link was the selling of secret information with regard to the new submarine was likely. But beyond that stood a blank wall, from which there emerged during the next few weeks only one further bit of evidence. It transpired that Guiseppi had been seen during the week before his death in the company of two men both of whom had a key suspended to their watch-chains. This information came from the proprietor of the small restaurant where the draughtsman used to have his lunch, but he could give no description of them that would not have fitted a hundred middle-class Italians.

  “And so for the time the matter rested. The official theory was that Guiseppi had sold information to the Key Club; had been discovered and murdered. That the emissary of the Key Club had in his turn been murdered in order to obtain that information. And that finally the man Johnstone had been done to death too, to prevent him passing on what he knew to the police. But as to whether the same criminal or bunch of criminals were responsible for all three, or what had happened to the tracings there was no means of telling. Certainly no offer was made of them to the British Government as had been the case before with the French high explosive.

  “Six months elapsed before anything more was heard. And then a very remarkable fact came to our knowledge, which though it bore out in part the police theory, also put the activities of the Key Club in a somewhat different light. You may remember that the time before they had given the secret to all countries; this time they had sold it to one. Through devious channels we found that the French had bought for a large sum of money the actual submarine details on which Guiseppi had been working at the time of his death. Abstract idealism had been replaced by concrete realism.”

  “There was damned little idealism about my bloke this afternoon,” said Drummond with a grin.

  “Just so,” continued Standish. “I’m getting to that now. When this last bit of information came to light we began making some pretty searching inquiries. It was all done on the quiet, naturally: there was nothing criminal to take hold of. And after a while, by piecing together little bits from here and little bits from there, a much more sinister aspect began to emerge; an aspect which bore out the letter written by Johnstone. He had called it treachery at the top; we called it by another name. For, in short, the Key Club had become a criminal organisation, which was all the more dangerous in view of the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the members were totally unaware of any change. They were being exploited by a small nucleus of international crooks – crooks who did not stop at murder.

  “At first sight it seemed surprising; at second the only surprising thing about it was that we hadn’t thought of it before. Here was a society capable of getting at times highly confidential information. And this society was insane enough to be inspired by ideals. Why, some of the big men must almost have fainted with horror at the thought of what they were missing! This milch cow already to hand, and nobody doing anything about it. The situation had to be remedied, and it was at the trifling cost of three men’s lives.

  “When exactly the criminal element got in we couldn’t find out, and it was immaterial. Obviously some time after the episode of the French high explosive, and before the Guiseppi affair. How many were actually posing as members of the Key Club we didn’t know – we do
n’t know now. One man in the inner councils would be enough to pass on information to his pals outside. But what we could do was to throw more light on the Harwich boat murder, or at any rate the reasons for it.

  “The man had been killed by some member of the nucleus who knew what he was carrying in the attaché case. At the time of his death he was undoubtedly on his way to the English Admiralty, from where the same procedure would have been followed as before with the explosive. Johnstone had been thrown from his window because by some means he had found out more than it was advisable for a mere member of the rank and file to know. And Guiseppi had been stabbed – this was only surmise on our part, but it fitted in – he had been stabbed to prevent any possibility of his again passing on the information to some other absurd idealist of the Key Club. In fact the cat had pulled a very plump chestnut out of the fire for the monkey to sell to France.”

  “How long ago was all this?” asked Drummond.

  “About eighteen months. Since then, as far as I know, they have done nothing. Now it looks as if they were on the warpath again.”

  “Any idea what they can be after?”

  “Not an earthly. I chucked the job I was on over a year ago. But I know all the boys who are still at it, and if – which is very unlikely – they are wise to anything, we may be able to help each other mutually.”

  “Why unlikely?” queried Darrell.

  “If they’re still hunting the same line of country, if as they did in the case of Guiseppi they’ve bribed one of our people to give away some secret, we shan’t know anything about it till it’s sold to a foreign Power.”

  “Guiseppi was killed,” said Drummond thoughtfully. “Do you know if anyone who would have been in a position to pass on information of value has gone west? There can’t be a frightful number of ’em.”

  “Not that I know of,” answered Standish. “But that can easily be found out. In fact I’ll do so now.”