CHAPTER XII A TANGLED SKEIN
On the previous Tuesday night Mary had gone to bed in a very happy frame of mind. For the best part of two hours she had forgotten her loneliness and bitterness and had felt more like her normally cheerful self than at any time since she had lost her husband. Barney's anxiety that she should break off her association with Ratnadatta had obviously been inspired by genuine concern for her, and to have once more a man eager to safeguard her well-being was just the tonic she had needed.
Even so, by Wednesday evening she had decided that leopards did not change their spots. There was no mistaking from his attitude that he would like to start an affair with her, so his wish to protect her from trouble could as equally well be put down to a selfish, as an unselfish, motive. Recalling the way in which he had left her in such a desperate plight five years ago, she felt convinced that his nature could not have altered, and that he would still use his gay attractiveness to get what he could out of any pretty woman, then leave her in the lurch the moment it suited him.
But, she thought, with a suggestion of cynical amusement, it was he, and not she, who was now playing with fire; for she knew his form, whereas he still knew nothing about her except what he had learnt since their meeting just over a fortnight before. Moreover, as a companion he was great fun, and there was no reason at all for her to hurry the denouement of her plan; so why should she not enjoy as long as possible the benefits of the present situation? It would be time enough to tell him that she was the Mary McCreedy he had put in the family way at the age of eighteen and then deserted when he made the pace too hot for her to keep him on a string any longer. In this mood she began to look forward to Saturday, and when he called for her that evening she greeted him with her loveliest smile.
He had brought his car and, after dropping her at the Berkeley, left it in the garage at the bottom of Hay Hill, then rejoined her. As they had both determined to make the evening a success, it went well from the start. Both of them had healthy appetites, so enjoyed their dinners, and when they danced afterwards, just as had been the case before, they forgot everything else in the pleasure of the movement and rhythm. The time went all too quickly and when the restaurant began to empty he suggested that they should go on to Churchill's. She willingly agreed, so they took a taxi round to Bond Street and spent two more happy hours dancing and talking in the dim rose-shaded light of the night-club.
It was getting on for three in the morning by the time he pulled up in his car with her in Cromwell Road. Having thanked him for a lovely evening before getting out, she said:
'I'm afraid it's too late to ask you in, but here is something you wanted the other evening.' Then she leaned towards him quickly and kissed him.
He put out an arm to catch her to him; but she already had one hand on the door handle, so was able to slip out of his embrace and from the car on to the pavement.
'Hi!' he exclaimed. 'That's only a sample. Don't leave a poor fellow to go thirsting to his bed. Come back, there's a sweet.'
'No,' she laughed, 'that's enough for now,' and turned to run up the steps to the house.
Scrambling out, he hurried after her, and caught her by the arm.
'No! Please Barney. Not in the street,' she said quickly.
'All right,' he agreed reluctantly. 'But what about tomorrow? Today, rather. How about coming for a run in the car and lunching somewhere in the country?'
'If it's a fine day, I'd love to,' she replied at once.
'Splendid!' he grinned. 'I'll pick you up then. Shall we say half-past eleven?'
Getting out her latch-key, she nodded. 'I expect I'll come to about ten; so that should be all right. Goodnight, my dear.'
'Margot, you're a honey! But it's "good-morning", and we're all set now for a happy day together. Happy dreams!'
By mid-morning the weather prospects had worsened and, although it was not actually raining, grey clouds obscured the sky; but they decided to risk the weather and drive down to the Hut, at Wisley.
Just as he felt certain that she had been lying to him about what went on in Ratnadatta's circle, she felt sure that he had lied to her about his being Lord Larne, and that his story of being in England only on a visit from Kenya was a wily stratagem put out in advance, which would provide him with the excuse that he had to return there should he wish to terminate any love affair that looked like becoming troublesome for him. So on their way down into Surrey, she amused herself by asking him, with apparent innocence, a number of awkward questions.
Although unsuspicious of her motive, he was far too old a hand at posing under a false identity to let himself be caught out easily, and by now he had had ample time to get used to thinking of himself, when with her, as a titled visitor from Kenya. About his having a car, he said, he had hired it for his stay; about the length of his visit, that it would depend on how long it took to complete the tie-ups for his travel agency, and that would take another month, at least; about where he was staying, that he was lucky in having many friends who were willing to put him up for a few nights at a time, so he moved around from one to another; about his home in Kenya, that he had a house in one of the better suburbs of Nairobi, but not a very large one as he was not particularly well off; about his parents, that both of them had died while he was still young, which was the truth; and he was able to keep her amused for quite a time by improvising on an imaginary upbringing.
She scored only one hit, and that was when she asked him to tell her where he was staying at the moment, in case she wanted to get in touch with him. In reply he had to give her the address of his flat in Warwick Square, but he said that it had been temporarily lent to him by a friend of his and, as he was a stranger there, any message for him should be sent care of Mr. Sullivan.
Having pushed him into using his own name and, as she saw it, as good as admitting that he had no right to a title, gave her a quiet laugh; but afterwards she wondered a little grimly how many young women he had led up the garden path by the idea that he might make them the Countess of Lame.
They lunched at the Hut hotel and the rain held off until they were half way through the meal, but then for about half-an-hour it came down hard. Barney had been hoping that during the afternoon they would be able to go for a walk in the woods, and find some pleasant spot suitable for improving their relationship from the point it had reached in the early hours of that morning, but as the rain had made mossy banks and fallen tree-trunks too wet to sit on he had, for the time being, to confine his amorous intentions to getting closer to Mary mentally, in a long talk.
They discussed many things and found they had many tastes in common so, by the time they returned to the Hut for tea, a much greater degree of intimacy had been established between them, and he felt that his afternoon had been far from wasted. Unfortunately, however, he was debarred from following it up. That evening he had to attend a subscription concert got up by some of his Communist contacts at which one of their number was to receive a presentation on retirement from office; so he had to excuse himself to Mary for not asking her out to dinner by saying that he had a long-standing date, that he could not break, to dine with friends whom he had entertained when they were on a visit to Kenya.
Throughout the day he had purposely refrained from mentioning Ratnadatta, but he had every intention of doing so before they parted; so he was pleased when, on their way back to London, she raised the subject herself by remarking: 'I take it that you will be going to Mrs. Wardeel's on Tuesday and that I shall see you next there?'
He looked at her in feigned surprise. 'Yes, I'm going. But surely you don't mean to change your mind? You can't let me down like that?'
'Let you down?' she frowned. 'What do you mean?'
'Why, you promised me only last Tuesday that you would keep clear of Ratnadatta�for a while, anyway.'
She hesitated for a second, then took refuge in a prevarication. 'I didn't go out with him last night.'
'No, bless you. But that's all the more reason for avoidin
g him on Tuesday. You'll escape having to make excuses, then, perhaps being wheedled into promising to go to his circle with him this coming Saturday.'
'I ought to apologize to him for not turning up,' she prevaricated again.
'To hell with that! He's up to no good, and you promised me to have no more to do with him for the time being.'
'By that I thought you meant not going to his circle.'
'I did, as I am sure that doing so is really dangerous for you. But I also think that when you talk to him he exerts a dangerous influence over you. So I really meant for you to keep away from him altogether.'
'He couldn't do me any harm at Mrs. Wardeel's, especially if you are there with me.'
'I don't agree. You've refused to cut him out for good; so even talking to him again might tempt you into attending another of his meetings sooner than you otherwise would.'
As she did not reply, he put out a hand, took hers, and went on: 'Forgive me if I am making a nuisance of myself, my sweet; but I'm becoming terribly fond of you, and I can't bear the thought of your being led into the sort of filthy business that I believe is Ratnadatta's real game. Give me a little time to find out a bit about him. If he turns out to be only an honest practitioner of Yoga, we'll go to his parties together and learn to keep ourselves warm by rhythmic breathing, or whatever they do. But if you won't agree to keep clear of him for a few weeks, you are going to be the cause of my having an awful lot of sleepless nights.'
Mary had been thinking furiously. Ten days ago it would have given her considerable pleasure to picture Barney twisting and turning in his bed, a prey to agonizing thoughts of her being raped by Satanists; but that was so no longer. Her naturally generous nature made her feel that it would be horribly unkind to inflict such torture by imagination on anyone who was striving to protect her. But what would happen if she disobeyed Ratnadatta's order, and failed to appear at Mrs. Wardeel's on Tuesday? Would he descend upon her, demand an explanation and, if he did not consider it satisfactory, ill-wish her? It was a frightening thought. She had herself witnessed examples of the power of the Great Ram. Ratnadatta's, although far less, might still be formidable. But she could say she had been ill and, if he had not actually been overlooking her at the time, how could he be certain that she was lying? The fact that Barney would be there, somewhere in the offing, to stand by her, finally outweighed her fears, and she said:
'All right, then. I won't go on Tuesday. But come to supper again afterwards and tell me how the meeting went.'
To that he cheerfully agreed and, a quarter-of-an-hour later, he set her down with a smiling farewell in Cromwell Road.
Before going to the subscription concert, Barney had another date to keep. It was with C.B. at a small hotel in Chelsea to which the Colonel sometimes asked his young men to come if he wished to see them on a Sunday and did not want to go up to the office.
At their last meeting on Friday, after it had emerged that Lothar was pressing Otto to keep an appointment with him at the old house in Cremorne, they had gone very thoroughly into the implications of this unexpected link between the twin of the scientist down in Wales and Ratnadatta's circle.
Up to the point of that discovery, while reading Otto Khune's statement, Barney had been strongly of the impression that the scientist had become the victim of hallucinations; but he had described the old mansion with such unmistakable clearness that, short of the whole document being an apparently pointless fraud, it seemed that a vision of it really must have been conveyed to him by psychic means.
C.B., who knew much more about such matters, had also pointed out that, according to the statement, the twins had been gifted from childhood with supernatural powers, and many times in their lives each had used those powers to inform himself about the situation of the other. Moreover Lothar, in whom the power was evidently greater, having used it with such vicious unscrupulousness to wreck his brother's marriage, obviously had an intensely evil personality; so, his turning out to be a Satanist was not particularly surprising.
The passages in Otto's statement describing his meeting with Lothar in 1950 made it clear that the latter was working for the Russians. The purpose of his visit to London then had been to induce Otto to return to Russia with him; his purpose now was, obviously, to tickle Otto's vanity with the prospect of securing data which would give him new triumphs in his own scientific field, then to trick him in the exchange and make off with the formula of Britain's latest rocket fuel. In any case, there could be little doubt that he was acting as a Communist agent.
The fact that he was both a Communist and a Satanist had raised the interesting question of how far might a tie-up exist between these two supposedly separate forces for evil? It could be that Lothar was using the old mansion in Cremorne from time to time simply as a guest. Satanism, as Verney knew, was world wide, and Black Magic still practised in every country under the sun; so Lothar could have secured an introduction from a Satanic circle to which he belonged abroad to the circle in London. If so, it did not follow that his hosts knew him to be a Soviet agent, or even that he was a Communist, and they themselves might play no part in Communist activities.
But Verney had told Barney that he regarded that as most unlikely. From the beginning he had believed that Teddy Morden had died as the victim of a human sacrifice to Satan. There was no factual evidence that he had ever gone to the mansion in Cremorne but the circumstantial evidence that he had done so was too strong not to be accepted. Not only had the nightmares that had afflicted Morden for several weeks before his death been of a nature to indicate very strongly that he was attending Black Magic ceremonies, but during them he had also several times mentioned an Indian. They knew Morden to have been a regular attendant at Mrs. Wardeel's as, too, was Ratnadatta; and Barney had established the fact that the Indian was a link between her Theosophist circle and the Satanist circle at Cremorne, so it now seemed as good as certain that Ratnadatta had taken Morden there. But why should the Satanists have murdered him? His mission had had nothing to do with occultism of any kind. It had been the very down-to-earth business of finding out the ramifications of the Communist campaign to sabotage British industry. Yet it must have been something to do with that which had led him to Mrs. Wardeel's and to cultivate Ratnadatta; and, later, the discovery of what Morden was up to that had led to his death.
If that was so, it followed that Lothar was not making use of the house at Cremorne just because he had the entree to it as a Satanist; it must be because the Satanic circle there was hand-in-glove with the Communists.
To have reached this conclusion was most satisfactory to C.B. and Barney, as they felt that it gave them an excellent chance of killing two evil birds with one stone. But the problem remained of how best to arrange matters so as to get the maximum number of this devilish crew in the bag at one fell swoop.
Apparently Lothar came to the house at Cremorne only on Saturdays, so to raid the place on any other day would leave him at large. It was, too, on Saturday nights that the Satanist circle gathered there, so there was good reason to believe that he came up from some hide-out on that day to be present at their weekly celebration. If, therefore, Special Branch surrounded the place the following evening and raided it about eleven o'clock, they should get him in the net with his associates.
Against such a proceeding there was one snag. The law of England was cumbersome and, owing to its proper concern with protecting the rights of the individual, often made the task of the Security Services extremely difficult. Even should the Satanists be caught naked in the midst of an orgy, whoever owned the place, or was its legal tenant, could be charged only with using it for immoral purposes, and those caught in it with indecent behaviour. Lothar, if it transpired that he was accredited to the Soviet Embassy, might plead diplomatic privilege, and so escape scot-free.
On the other hand, if Otto had called on him there earlier in the day, it would be a very different matter. Once the brothers had actually met, .even if Lothar was not caught with Briti
sh scientific data on him, the tape recordings Forsby had secured, which gave the reason for their meeting, could be used to incriminate them.
In consequence, Verney had decided to have the house at Cremorne watched in case Otto gave way and came to the rendezvous next day. If he did, the place was to be raided that night. If not, they would hold their hands till next Saturday, then repeat the drill.
C.B. had then told Barney that he had to be out of London on other business for the next two nights, so would not be able to let him know what had happened till Sunday, and made an appointment for them to have a drink together that evening.
Barney found his Colonel in a snug little parlour at the back of the hotel and, having been provided with a drink, eagerly enquired what had taken place at Cremorne the previous day.
'No luck, partner,' C.B. replied at once. 'As a matter of fact I had no great expectations anyway. Lothar gave Otto the choice of two Saturdays and it's only natural that anyone under pressure should postpone the issue up till the last moment. It's quite on the cards that he won't give way at all or, if he does come up next Saturday, it will be with the intention of murdering Lothar. But if he doesn't, Lothar won't leave it at that. You can bet on it that rather than go back to Russia empty handed he'll make some other move; and the more desperate he gets, the better chance we'll have of pulling him in red-handed.'
'Was Lothar seen to go to the house?' Barney asked.
Verney shook his head. 'From nine o'clock on in the morning no one resembling him turned into the alley leading to the place; and, as he is Otto's twin, I was able to give Special Branch a pretty good description of him from that I obtained of Otto from Forsby. But, of course, he may have come up from the country on Friday and spent the night there, or perhaps his psychic faculties told him that Otto did not mean to play, so there was no point in his turning up himself.'
'While they were keeping observation did the police pick up anything fresh about the place?'
'Nothing. Apart from deliveries of food, it had the appearance all day of being deserted. Between nine and ten in the evening five cars arrived containing seven people, and a further twenty-one came to it on foot. From about four in the morning they began to leave and by six they had all dispersed. None of them appeared to have been drunk or could have been pulled in for any other reason; and, anyway, I'd given orders that, unless Lothar and Otto had both put in an appearance, nothing was to be done which would prematurely stir up this nest of vipers.'
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