'I'd love to,' he gave her a quick smile, 'if that wouldn't be robbing you too badly.'
'Oh no! That is, if you don't mind something simple, like scrambled eggs?�
'What could be nicer?'
Having been frustrated in his intention of cultivating Ratnadatta, he had decided to ask Mary out to dinner again in the hope that through her he might learn more about the Indian, pending his next chance to get hold of him, which would not be for another week; so her invitation, while it took him by surprise, could not have pleased him better. But as he followed her into the house and upstairs, he felt that it would be wise to keep off the subject for a while, at least; as he thought her such a prickly pear that she might fly into a temper unless he handled her very tactfully.
Mary, meanwhile, was regretting that she could not give him the sort of supper she had prepared the previous week, and wishing that she had tidied up her sitting-room before going out. But she had bought fresh flowers the day before, and the bottle of Hock was still unopened.
While Barney laid the table and opened the wine, she cooked a dish of scrambled eggs, bacon and tomatoes, and as they called to one another during these preparations the very naturalness of this little domestic scene put them more at their ease than they had so far been when together.
Over the meal he got her talking about her work as a model, and of films she had recently seen; so by the time they lit cigarettes with their coffee, her mind was a long way from the supernatural and it came as quite a shock when he asked:
'How did you get on last Saturday?�
His question had been quite casual, but it instantly brought back to her the scene in the Temple. Swiftly averting her eyes, she played for time. 'On Saturday? What do you mean?�
'Why, you told me you were going to meet that chap Ratnadatta again.'
'Er . . . yes; of course.'
He smiled at her. 'Well, how did the party go?�
'Oh, much the same as on the previous Saturday.'
'Just Yoga, and that sort of thing?'
She nodded.
'Look,' he said, 'I'd like to learn a bit about Yoga. Will you take me along to Ratnadatta's place one evening?'
'No. I couldn't do that. I'm not a member and one has to be introduced by somebody who is.'
'I see. Well, anyway, you might let me have the address; then I'll write him a line and ask him if he will introduce me.'
'I can't. I don't know it.' The moment she had spoken she realized that she had made a stupid admission which might lead him to suppose that something less innocent than Yoga went on there, but he only shrugged and remarked:
'Of course, I'd forgotten. He blindfolds you when he takes you there, doesn't he?'
'Oh no.' She quickly retrieved her error. 'I made that up just as I did about the Great Ram and his black imp, and all the other things I told you. The only reason I can't give you the address is that I didn't hear Ratnadatta give it to the taxi-driver either time, and it is in a district that I've never been to before; so all I know is that it's somewhere up in North London.'
Barney knew that she was lying, and it was clear that she did not mean to tell him anything, so he said: 'It doesn't matter. I meant to ask Ratnadatta tonight about his Yoga circle, but I didn't get the chance. I'll have another shot when I see him at Mrs. Wardeel's next week.'
He then tactfully changed the conversation, but her reaction to his questions worried him. As she did not know where the place was to which Ratnadatta took her that meant that he really did blindfold her when taking her there; and he would not do that unless something much more sinister than the innocent practice of Yoga went on at his circle. That being so, she must be playing with fire and might get herself badly burnt. If she would, or could, have let him go with her next time she indulged her curiosity about occult mysteries, that would have been one thing; but for her to continue going on her own to these parties was quite another. In consequence, after they had talked cheerfully again for a further half-hour, and he stood up to go, he said:
'Listen, Margot. You're a queer girl, and a bit of a mystery, living on your own like this with no family and apparently very few friends. But I like you a lot, and I'm worried about you.'
She smiled at him. 'Why should you be? There are lots of girls like me earning a living in London on their own.'
'Not many who are so darn good-looking,' he grinned back. 'But that's beside the point at the moment; and I'll tell you why I'm worried. I was watching your face this evening when that old crystal-gazing bag told you that you were heading for trouble.'
'What, with a fair-haired boy-friend? Don't worry. I'm not a precocious school girl, to be lured to her fate by the offer of a ride in a Jaguar.'
'Of course not. But I mean before she mentioned him. It was when she warned you to watch your step. She rang a bell then; because for a moment you looked as if you were scared to death. You are frightened of something. I'm sure of it. And I've a hunch that Mr. Ratnadatta is the nigger in your wood-pile. He may only be teaching you Yoga exercises at the moment, but you know yourself, or anyhow suspect, that it's leading up to something pretty dangerous. I want you to cut Ratnadatta out. Promise me not to go with him to this place again, there's a good girl.'
She shook her head. 'I'm afraid I can't do that; and, as I've told you, I'm quite capable of looking after myself.'
'Well, cut him out for the time being, then. Come and dine and dance with me again. Let's put on our glad rags on Saturday and go to the Berkeley.'
For a moment Mary hesitated. Ratnadatta had not asked her to meet him on Saturday; he had even implied that it might be some weeks before he took her to the Temple again, so why should she not accept Barney's invitation?
'Very well,' she said, accompanying him to the door of the flat, 'I'd love to; and I'm awfully sorry about our last evening together having been such a flop. As a matter of fact, I'd formed a little plan to make amends.'
'You had nothing to make amends for. That was up to me for having ruined your dress.'
'No, it was my fault, and if I'd had any sense I'd have asked you to bring me back here at once so that I could change it; then we could have gone up there again, and still had a couple of hours' dancing. But that never occurred to me, and next day I felt awful about the way I'd treated you. I expected to see you at Mrs. Wardeel's last Tuesday and meant to ask you here to supper as some compensation for having ruined Saturday evening. If you had been there you would have fared much better than you have tonight; Westphalian ham, fresh salmon and all the trimmings.'
'Really?' A delighted grin spread over Barney's face. 'Margot, you are a dear. If it wouldn't be taking advantage of your having asked me up to your flat, I'd kiss you. But sometime, perhaps. Anyway, see you Saturday. I'll come down about 7.30 to pick you up; and thanks for this evening. Goodnight.'
With a look of astonishment on her face, Mary stared at his curly hair and broad shoulders as he went down the first flight of stairs. 'Taking advantage' of her! She could hardly believe she had heard aright. Of all the men in the world, Barney Sullivan was the very last she would have expected to let his evident desires be hampered by old-fashioned notions about chivalrous conduct. Could it really be possible that the leopard had changed his spots?
Turning on the lower landing, Barney gave her a cheerful wave, then disappeared from her view. As he descended the rest of the stairs he was thinking. 'She really is a peach, and there can be no doubt about it that she likes me. Saturday should be fun. I wish to God, though, that she wasn't mixed up with that swine Ratnadatta.'
Not being aware that Mary had no appointment with the Indian on Saturday, he went on to congratulate himself on having anyhow stalled her off from going to the circle again for, as he thought, another eleven days; and that, he hoped, would be enough for him to queer Ratnadatta's pitch with her altogether.
Having nothing special to report that week, Barney did not go to the office until Friday, and then only because C.B. had sent for him. The Colonel's
reason for doing so was to show him the list of people who paid money into the bank account of the Manual Workers' Benevolent Society. Giving him a copy of the pass-book sheets for the past year, Verney said:
'Sit down and take a gander over that, young feller. Those are the boys and girls who wittingly, or unwittingly, finance some of these unofficial strikes, and probably other Communist activities as well.'
Barney took the wad of sheets and ran his eye down one after another. In several instances there were in-payments of as much as a thousand pounds, and against these the names were nearly all foreign; but the great majority were British and most of them appeared regularly early in every month for amounts ranging from twenty to one hundred pounds. The contributors were men and women in about equal numbers but, apart from the names of a film star, a Conservative M.P., and a big motor-car manufacturer, they meant nothing to him.
Handing the list back, he said: 'I don't get it, Sir. To contribute such big sums, most of these people must be jolly well off. That's not to say that some of them may not be generous enough to give lavishly to all sorts of charities; and presumably, in this case, they have no idea of the use to which their money is being put. But it seems odd that a Tory M.P. should cough up forty pounds a month regularly to a workers' benevolent, and old Benson, who runs Roadswift Motors, has the reputation of a skinflint.'
'I don't get it either,' agreed C.B. 'During the past week we have managed to identify most of the contributors. They are all rich and there are a number of titled people among them. With the assistance of the Treasury we've worked it out that, on average, they are putting into this show about twenty-five per cent of their incomes; and, super-tax being what it is, what in the world can induce them to do that? It doesn't make sense. Neither do the bigger payments. One is from a Dutch bulb-grower, another from an Indian Rajah, a third from an Argentine meat shipper. They were all on visits to this country at the time their payments were made. Why should wealthy foreigners, who are here only temporarily, suddenly donate big sums to help along British working families that have struck it unlucky?'
'Ask me another, Sir. Unless . . .' Barney paused a moment, 'unless they do know what the money is being used for and are fellow travellers. There are rich people who believe that Communism is bound to get the upper hand here in the long run, and this crowd may be paying a form of insurance to be allowed to hang on to the bulk of their fortunes if the worst happened.'
'That's a thought,' Verney conceded. 'But I can't believe it is so. Short of our losing an atomic war, Britain is as safe from having a Communist Government in the foreseeable future as she is from being submerged by another Flood. Awfully few rich people can be so batty as to believe otherwise. In any case, I'm convinced that the majority of the contributors can't know the sort of thuggery they are supporting with their money. There is a Bishop among them, an Admiral and two Generals; all die-hard Tories who'd sooner be cut in pieces than knowingly contribute to Communist funds. I wanted you to look through the list, though, just in case you happened to know anything odd about any of them.'
Barney shook his head. 'As no ranks or titles appear on cheques, and many of them are only surnames with initials, the only name I recognized at first sight, apart from the Tory M.P. and the motor-magnate, was that of Diane Duveen, and I should not have thought a little blonde smack-bot like that would have enough brain to be interested in any serious movement.'
'No, she is a bit out of series. To the majority of them a common denominator applies; they are super-tax payers, middle-aged to elderly, not known to have any affiliations with Labour or to be particularly generous to other charities and, outwardly, at least, respectable. But that doesn't get us anywhere.'
With a shrug of his lean shoulders, Verney put the pass sheets in a drawer, and added: 'Well, that's that; no doubt we'll solve the puzzle in due course. Now tell me what you've been up to?�
'The usual thing, Sir. Attending branch meetings most nights, and getting a bit closer to my Communist buddies in between times. I handed a detailed report in to your P.A. just now. There is nothing in it of special interest; but I've made one bit of progress on what you call my second string.'
'You mean Mrs. Wardeel's set-up and the lovely that you have been interesting yourself in?�
'That's it; Mrs. Mauriac. We had a bit of an upset when I last took her out, two Sundays ago; but I saw her again on Tuesday at Mrs. Wardeel's and we patched it up. In fact, she took me back to her flat afterwards and gave me supper.'
'She did, eh!' C.B. raised a prawn-like eyebrow. Then I'll have to ask you for your expense money back.'
Barney grinned. 'No, there was nothing like that. And I couldn't get her to talk. All the same, I'm convinced that her pal, the Indian occultist Ratnadatta, is leading her into something pretty nasty; and I'm more than ever inclined to believe that Ratnadatta got hold of Teddy Morden and led him up the same street.'
'When we last talked of this you said the Mauriac woman had assured you that Ratnadatta's circle went in only for Yoga. What has happened since to convince you that she was lying?'
'Well, first go off she 'fessed up to Ratnadatta's crowd being a bunch of Satanists and said he had blindfolded her both going to and returning from their hang-out. Then spilling a glass of wine seemed to rattle her, and she abruptly took it all back; swore she had only been pulling my leg. But she had already told me that she was going for the second time to a meeting there with Ratnadatta the following Saturday. Last night I tackled her about it. She tried to sell me the Yoga stuff again, and refused to tell me where the meeting place is. As I had no means of making her, she could have got away with that if she hadn't made a stupid blunder. She said that she couldn't give me the address of the place because it is in a district in which she had never been before, somewhere up in North London.'
'And what do you deduce from that?'
'That she honestly does not know where it is; so she really must have been blindfolded both times when she was taken to it. And Ratnadatta would not have taken the precaution of blindfolding her unless something much more sinister than Yoga goes on there.'
'Come, come! It's too much to expect any woman to know every district well enough to identify a street in which she is set down from a taxi after dark!'
'I agree; but where she bogged it was telling me that the place was in North London.'
'Why shouldn't it be?'
'Because I know that it was not. She was taken to a house off the far end of the King's Road, Chelsea. That S.W.10 district, as you know, is now made up of big blocks of post-war Council flats, mostly built on sites that were left derelict by bombs, and streets of slums that escaped them. This place is down near the river, only a stone's throw from where Cremorne Gardens used to be. At one time I believe they rivalled Vauxhall Gardens as a favourite haunt of eighteenth century boys and girls at which to have their fun.'
'How did you find out that she was taken there?'
'She had told me that she was going to meet Ratnadatta at Sloane Square Tube at nine-thirty. I parked my car nearby, watched them meet and, when they got into a taxi, followed them.'
Verney gave a thin-lipped smile. 'Good work, partner; good work. And what sort of a place was it that he took her to?'
'An old Georgian mansion, most of which is concealed behind high walls. Sounds a bit improbable in a slum quarter like that; but that's why I mentioned Cremorne Gardens having once been nearby. This place must be a relic from those days. Its entrance can be approached only down a cul-de-sac, and they're darned careful not to attract the attention of the locals to the fact that quite large meetings are held there. In a courtyard in front of the house there were a few cars, but I stooged around for about half-an-hour and nearly all the people who entered the place, including Ratnadatta and Mrs. Mauriac, either paid off their taxis or parked their cars some way off, because they arrived at the place on foot.'
After pulling at his thin-stemmed pipe thoughtfully for a minute, Verney opened a drawer in his des
k, took out a folder, threw it across to Barney, and said: 'I'd like you to read that through. It's a report, by our man at the Long-Range Rocket Experimental Station down in Wales, on a scientist there who seems to be going a bit round the bend, and a statement by the egg-head himself. Take it over to the armchair by the window while I get on with some other work. When you've done, let me know what you think of it.'
Barney moved over to the window and spent the next twenty minutes reading through the contents of the folder. To Squadron-Leader Forsby's original report and the two sections of Otto Khune's account of his strange association with his brother, Lothar, a final document dated two days previously had been added.
It was a letter from Forsby in which he said that Otto appeared to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and had given out to his colleagues, as a reason for his state, that he was suffering from terrible nightmares; so Forsby had installed a tape-recorder id the scientist's bedroom on the chance that it might pick up something if he talked in his sleep.
It had. From the long jumbles of talk that had been recorded, it emerged that Lothar was proposing a clandestine exchange of secret information about the latest rocket fuels, by which, he argued, each of them could gain great prestige as a scientist on producing as his own discovery the other's knowledge. Just as he had in 1950, he was now working on Otto and pressing him to meet him in London on the coming Saturday or, if he could not manage that, on the Saturday that followed, and showing him in his dreams a house to which he should come at midday, with directions how to find it.
When Barney reached that passage, he jumped to his feet and exclaimed: 'C.B.! Sorry, Sir, I mean. The description of the place at which Lothar wants Otto to meet him next weekend ...'
The buzzer on the Colonel's desk sounded, cutting him short. Verney answered it, then looked back at Barney and nodded.
'That is why I asked you to read the Khune file. I felt pretty certain you'd confirm my impression. It tallies with yours of this Georgian mansion to which Ratnadatta took Mrs. Mauriac'
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