by Roger Bax
Blueprint for Murder
AN INSPECTOR JAMES MYSTERY
ROGER BAX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roger Bax is a pseudonym of the classic crime writer Paul Winterton. Born in Leicester in 1908, Winterton was both an author and a journalist whose prolific output included over 40 novels, ranging through the genres of mystery, detection, thriller, espionage and romance.
His first book, A Student in Russia, appeared in 1931. The nom-de-plume Roger Bax saw its first outing with Death Beneath Jerusalem (1938), a crime fiction set in Palestine. Five more Bax crime novels were to follow it, including Blueprint for Murder in 1948; his later novels were published under the pseudonyms Andrew Garve and Paul Somers.
Winterton was a founder-member of the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953. He died in 2001.
This edition published in the UK by Arcturus Publishing Limited
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Design and layout copyright © 2011 Arcturus Publishing Limited
Text copyright © 1948 The Estate of Paul Winterton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person or persons who do any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
ISBN: 978-1-84858-363-4
Cover artwork by Duncan Smith
Typesetting by Couper Street Type Co.
PROLOGUE
Cross stepped over the blackened body, reloaded his gun, and stood tense at the edge of the camp, wondering if the moment had come to run for it. Two or three other grey-green figures, fifty yards away, were mechanically going on with their butcher’s work. The flames, rising higher than the tops of the silver birches, made all the open space as light as day. But here, in the shelter of the wood, he was in shadow. No one would notice if he slipped away. The time was very near when every man would be thinking only of himself.
The Russian guns were unmistakably closer, and seemed to be working round to the south. The camp ought to have been evacuated earlier, before the offensive, before the break-through. But that did not worry Cross till later. His sole interest now was that there should be the maximum of chaos and a disorganized German retreat. That would give him his best chance of going underground. He had to gamble on his judgment, and his judgment was that Germany was finished.
Suddenly, above the rumble of the guns, the crackle of the burning logs and the hideous sounds of men and women in agony, he heard a new note. The Russian Stormovik came in low, without opposition. A bomb fell plumb into one of the blazing heaps, scattering it. Cross dropped behind a fallen tree-trunk, while red-hot embers showered around him. The least injury now might be fatal to his plans. The bomber was circling, and as it came in again he saw the trail of its rockets. The Commandant’s block blazed. There was a little flak, desultory and futile.
Cross was just deciding to make a move when there was a new explosion, loud and near. Surely that whine had been a shell! He peered over his tree-trunk. A sleek black car was shooting away from the Commandant’s block – making a getaway. Another shell burst near the car. Cross could hear a great deal of shouting, could see running figures. In a moment he knew why. A dark shape was suddenly silhouetted against the flames – a heavy tank. Cross could see the red star and the long barrel of the 88-mm gun. This was the end. The Russians could shoot up the whole camp now. The moment had come.
He turned and plunged into the birch-wood. It was hard going; at every step his boots sank deep into the sandy soil. There was enough light from the blazing camp to guide him to his cache. He quickly found the spot where he had buried his pack the night before, and heaved it out of the ground by the strap. It felt a fearful burden on his narrow shoulders, but there was nothing in it that he would not need. It would have been safer to take twice as much. His food, unsupplemented, would last him about a week. He had good maps, identity papers, field-glasses, and his gun. He took a quick glance at his luminous compass and set his face to the west. Away on the right there was a glimmer of moon over the Baltic. To the south, the enveloping Russians. Ahead, woods and lakes and rivers, birches and pine trees and sand. He plodded carefully forward, alert for any movement. The ghastly inferno of the camp was now only a glow in the sky behind him. The air was cool, touched with the light frost of early spring.
Towards dawn he lay down in thick undergrowth and slept for an hour. His sleep – as so often – was troubled, for scenes which appeared to leave no mark on his conscious mind came back with added vividness at night. Blood and fire and pain. He woke in terror at first light, unrefreshed, and pushed on after a hurried breakfast of bread and sausage and cold water. The guns were still drumming on his left. Of all the dangers perhaps the greatest was that he would be taken by the Russians. He must get right away from them, even at the risk of marching by day.
He walked by compass, on a prepared course which skirted all known centres of population. Once the sounds of battle had died away he lay asleep or hidden while it was light, for his grey-green uniform might attract unwelcome attention, particularly when he left the shelter of the woods and began to cross cultivated fields and pastures. It was hard work marching at night, for the ground was often rough and treacherous. Twigs and branches scratched his face and hands, ditches yawned before him, rabbit-holes invited careless feet. There were lakes to avoid, rivers to ford or swim. All the same, he covered a lot of ground. He saw practically no one. Avoiding all roads, except to cross them after careful reconnaissance, he saw no military traffic, no soldiers. In the daytime, from some hide-out, he would watch farmers working in the fields, seemingly unaware of the conflict raging not far away. Cross, indeed, found it difficult to believe, in his unbroken quiet and total isolation, that the German Army was being compressed and crushed between two greater ones, and that guns and tanks would soon be rolling over these fields, too.
Water was one of his earliest worries, for he could carry only a small quantity in his bottle, and marching was dry work. Sometimes, of course, there was plenty of water, but he could rely on finding it only if he worked forward from stream to stream with the help of the map. He had some thirsty days, but he found that with care he could manage. Food was a greater problem. Whenever an opportunity came to supplement his meagre rations, he took it, but such opportunities were rare. He was no woodsman; he knew nothing of edible plants or fungi, or of trapping rabbits, and he was reluctant to approach inhabited places in search of food. But as the days passed he was obliged to take greater risks as his need increased. His appetite was heightened by fresh air and exercise, and he was always hungry. One night he broke into a shed near a farmhouse and filled his pack with potatoes, which next day he roasted over a fire by a stream.
Though most nights passed without incident, others were nerve-racking. Once he blundered suddenly on a military encampment and was challenged by a German sentry. He lay motionless in the undergrowth for an hour before he dared to crawl away out of danger.
The days were tedious. His only companion was anxiety. He still had hundreds of miles to go, and as he reviewed his situation his prospects looked poor. His boots were in a bad state and would evidently not last out the journey. If it had been dangerous for him to show himself in his uniform in the early days, it was unthinkable now, for the grey-green was filthy and torn. Though he still kept himself shaved, he knew that he looked more like a deserter than an officer. Somehow he must get hold of some civilian clothes before long. He had other troubles. The weather
was not always kindly, and constant sleeping in damp places had brought rheumaticky pains to his shoulders and back.
Through the long idle hours his mind was occupied with sharply contrasted hopes and fears. His life was a thing of extremes. Hell was behind him, and heaven ahead. He was going to make up to himself for the wasted years and allow nothing to stand in his way. He was going to find luxury and ease when he reached safety. He would soak himself in all the pagan pleasures of the world – pleasures for which he had already paid. How he had paid! Hatred and resentment burned fiercely within him. He had sold his soul to the devil – at least he would get his money’s worth of fun.
He crossed over into the Polish Corridor on a moonless night, the frontier being apparently unguarded. His maps were not so good now, but the country was more open. In East Prussia he had had to steer a careful course among the neat Teutonic villages, the many roads. Here, in Poland, there was more elbow-room. Concealed one day in a copse on the side of a hill, he saw for the first time the stream of refugees moving westwards ahead of the Russian advance – an endless line of women and children and old men, of waggons and handcarts and prams, of people loaded with bundles, of limping wounded. In civilian clothes he might at a pinch have joined them. His condition was beginning to get desperate. His store of food was almost gone, and the little he could collect in his daily march was not enough to maintain his strength. Around harvest-time, or even in high summer, there would have been no great problem, but at this season Nature was at her meanest. Food was all stored at the farms, and at the farms there were dogs and men.
He knew that he could get what he wanted through sudden violence, but he was anxious to do nothing which would leave any kind of trail. Yet hunger would not be denied. One night Cross stunned a sheep with a piece of rock and then beat out its brains. Clumsily, with the help of a jack-knife, he cut the wool and skin away and hacked out bits of bloody meat. Deep in a wood, when daylight came, he lit a fire and did his best to cook the mutton on a spit. He gorged himself with the half-raw flesh, slept heavily and at dusk carried a packful of reeking meat away with him, having first thrust the torn carcase into a ditch. He lived on the meat until it began to go bad. Once, for twenty-four hours, he ate nothing but mangold wurzel, picked up from an old dump. The day after that he was luckier. Emerging cautiously from a wood to look around after a morning’s sleep, he saw in front of him a poultry farm, sloping down the length of a ten-acre field to a shack at the bottom. He knew the risk, but he accepted it. The nearest hen-house was less than fifty feet away, and he made a quick sortie. He collected nine eggs from four nest-boxes, and retreated unobserved into the wood.
If he could have walked openly by day it would have been easier to pick up food of sorts. But at night he could barely see what he was doing, and the need to keep marching was almost as great as the need for food. By day he watched with hatred the well-fed labourers who, in distant fields, carried on their daily work. For hours he would observe these men, wondering if the time had come to kill one of them and steal some clothes. One day, cautiously skirting a field, Cross took the hunk of bread and sausage which a labourer had left there for his lunch. But each small capture sufficed only for an hour or two. Cross knew that a crisis was approaching. He had become very thin. He could feel with his fingers the deep hollows beneath his cheekbones. His joints ached so much that it was becoming painful to walk.
One night he was caught in the open by heavy rain, and, not for the first time, was soaked through and through. Previously he had taken no harm, apart from a little more stiffness, but now he caught a bad chill. He felt his temperature rising; he had alarming pains in his body. He felt certain that unless he could get food and rest he would die; to struggle on was beyond his strength. That evening, when he cared no more what happened to him, a light in a farmhouse window beckoned him. He would have to trust to the friendliness of these Polish peasants. He dragged his body to the door and knocked with his water-bottle. He felt light-headed. A man appeared against the light, and Cross said in Polish, “Not German – English escaped prisoner.” And that was the last he remembered for quite a time.
*
Returning to consciousness after the crisis, he became aware of a thin shaft of sunlight across a bare room and of clumsily tender hands arranging his blankets. They belonged to the farmer’s daughter, Dziunia, a stocky peasant girl of twenty or so, with high Slav cheeks and yellow hair. Neglecting her other duties, she had devoted herself to this frail young man whom chance had brought to the farm. He made no prepossessing picture, with his sunken eyes and grey, bearded face, but to Dziunia he was a romantic stranger.
She chattered a good deal, and Cross soon found that he could converse with her scrappily in a mixture of German and Polish. Stanislav, the farmer, was hardly more conversational than his animals, but the grey eyes in his hard, round head were friendly as well as shrewd.
For several days, Dziunia said, they had thought he would die. He had been delirious, apparently, and had raved wildly. “It was a strange language,” said the girl, “so we knew you were not German, in spite of your hateful uniform.” Cross smiled and told them as much of his story as he thought they needed to know. After escaping, he said, he had killed a German officer and stolen his uniform and his belongings so that he could get through Prussia. Stanislav grunted approvingly – there was no doubt what he thought of the Germans. Cross knew that these Poles were risking death by sheltering him, but if they were uneasy they gave no sign.
The farmhouse was only a big log hut, devoid of comfort, but the food was all that a convalescent could want – milk and butter and eggs in abundance, and good home-baked bread. Cross knew that he had been incredibly lucky. He constantly expressed his gratitude in words, but there was no gratitude in his eyes. The more his strength returned, the more morose he became. There was nothing to read or to do, and these stupid peasants irritated him. He fretted to get away. Inactive, he became the prey of old and new fears. His thoughts went back to the night of his escape, and the sudden eruption of the Russian tank. The camp demolitions had not been completed, the prisoners had not all been dealt with. There were facts which might come out. ... Somehow, he had to keep ahead of those facts.
Every day he asked Stanislav for news of the war. The farmer said it was impossible to believe the German papers, but the ‘underground’ was certain all would be over in a few weeks. The advances had gone on, east and west. One night, coming in from the farm when the wind was in the east, he declared that he had heard gunfire. Russian gunfire.
The possibility that the Russians might catch up with him made it imperative that Cross should continue his journey at once. It was nearly a month since the farmer had taken him in, and his recovery had been steady. He felt strong enough to face the last leg of the long march. Careful preparations were made. Stanislav provided him with some old clothes, badly fitting and patched, but perfect to disguise him as a farm-hand. More surprisingly, the farmer – having borrowed one of Cross’s old boots – found him a pair of sound ones which fitted. Cross imagined that the ‘underground’ had helped. On the last evening Dziunia filled his pack with food till it bulged. It was decided that he should leave just after dark.
It was irksome, waiting for night to fall. Dziunia was gazing at him with sad cow’s eyes, so that he wished he could get the hell out of it. He had carefully planned his route across the North German plain and hoped to run into Allied troops somewhere south of Hamburg. With civilian clothes and plenty to eat, what lay ahead should be comparatively simple.
Dziunia said: “You will soon be in England. You must write us a letter when you are safe and the war is over.” Cross said, “Of course,” and was silent. Stanislav was busy outside. Cross, drumming with his fingers on the chair-arm, heard the latch click and turned his head. The farmer stood in the doorway with the old grey-green uniform across his arm. He looked puzzled.
“I was going to burn this,” said Stanislav slowly, “but I found this.” He held out a p
aper, and Cross saw that it was his German identity card. What a fool he’d been – what a thoughtless, blundering fool! To forget a thing like that, just because he’d been ill! He got up slowly. Should he try to bluff? Could he get away with a new story? Suddenly he knew that he couldn’t. His only hope of safety lay in undisturbed flight. He was surrounded by enemies, any of whom would be glad to hang him – the Russians, the Germans – yes, and now the Polish partisans.
The farmer blocked the doorway, stolidly accusing. As Cross reached for his revolver, Stanislav moved lumberingly across the room. But he was much too late. Cross fired once, expertly and without pity, shooting to kill.
The girl screamed and Cross turned on her. She flung herself on him, blind to consequences. Even the sight of the pointed gun did not stop her. He had to fire three times before she lay still.
He did not give the bodies another thought. He reloaded his revolver and prepared to leave. There was nothing he need do, except destroy the uniform and documents. He opened the stove and pushed the clothes deep down among the hot embers. He watched them burn, saw his photograph turn brown at the edges and curl and flame. Then he went out into the darkness, listened for a moment, and turned west once more. By morning he would be twenty miles away.
Life was easier now. As a labourer, Cross could move with considerable freedom even by day. The grey-green uniform had been a menace; the farm clothes were the ideal form of protective colouration in the fields. The large military pack might attract some comment, Cross thought, but he was unduly sensitive to danger and, in fact, it gave no trouble. He was travelling much faster than before. Whenever he found an unfrequented road or track going his way, he took it. He passed the time of day with many people, both before and after he crossed over into Germany. He was cheered by the reassuring weight of food on his back. For the first few days after leaving the Polish farm he tired quickly, but gradually his body became reaccustomed to the hard routine. The April weather was kind. Altogether, his prospects had vastly improved. The chief risk now was that, through misfortune or folly, he would find himself asked for papers. But who, in this crumbling State, would be likely to trouble the solitary straggler out of millions?