I had taken in the full import of only a few sentences when I realised that they were now deep in the controversy of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Looks; and that it was to tackle his visitor on the matter without fear of interruption that Sir Charles had brought him down to the cottage.
To them the arguments on both sides were too well known for either to need to go into any details, and I gathered that the visitor had already made it clear that he was not prepared to give an opinion on the present strategic value of the Royal Navy; so the discussion revolved mainly round the possibility of amalgamating the three Services into a Royal Defence Force. Sir Charles not only pressed for it, but argued that the Government might be called to account later if it delayed too long in taking this first step towards a general readjustment of forces rendered necessary by the introduction of thermonuclear weapons. The other pointed out that many adjustments were already taking place, that others had been agreed on, and that if any such sweeping reform was proposed without preparing the country for it the results might prove disastrous to the Government.
Having agreed about that, Sir Charles said with a smile that he had had a private plan for pushing public opinion in the right direction, but that unfortunately it had broken down; so, in view of the urgency of the matter, he had felt that without further loss of time he must make an attempt to bring matters to a head through orthodox channels.
Seeing the wretched situation in which his ‘private plan’ bad landed Johnny, I would have liked to curse him roundly for ever having departed from ‘orthodox channels’; but it was no good crying over spilt milk, and I waited with deep interest to learn how the conversation would develop.
In that I was fated to be disappointed. At that very moment my glance was caught by a queer outline low down on the door which gave on to a short passage leading to the kitchen. To my sight it was like the shadow of a kneeling man whose head was on a level with the door knob. Marshalling my powers of concentration, I stared at the door and, sure enough, on the far side of it a man was kneeling down peering through the keyhole.
‘Spy’ was the word which instantly flashed through my brain. Here was the sort of situation which one read of in thrillers—the secluded cottage in the depths of a wood, the Minister of Defence entertaining privately the man who could aid or counter his efforts to revolutionise our entire defence policy, their free discussion of the most vital secrets over a bottle of wine and a good meal together, and the agent of a foreign power, who had somehow gained access to the house, eavesdropping in order to report their decisions to his paymasters.
I had often enjoyed reading of such scenes, but always afterwards had the slightly cynical feeling that they never took place in real life. Yet here, incontestably, I was faced with one. The man beyond the door was listening at its keyhole. What possible reason could he have for doing so other than to obtain illicit possession of official secrets? Swiftly I passed through the door and stared down at him.
He had red hair and looked to be in his middle thirties. There was no suggestion about him of the suave ex-officer secret agent of fiction, who moves freely in the highest society, traps the wicked mistress of the enemy Chief-of-Staff into giving away the plans that have been confided to her and ends up with the soft arms of his own Ambassador’s daughter round his neck. On the contrary, this fellow looked like a working man. His hands were rough, his suit ready-made and his heavy shoes unpolished. Yet his apparently lowly status made him no less of a menace; and it seemed much more likely that for active operations the Russians employed men of this sort rather than untrustworthy crooks who were capable of passing themselves off as ex-public-school men.
Once again the fact that I was both invisible and inaudible made it impossible for me to do anything. I could only hover there, an intensely worried spectator, while the spy alternately peered through the keyhole and listened to a discussion which might ultimately result in a complete change in the system of defence of the whole of the Western Powers.
Through the door I heard Sir Charles urging the importance of reaching a decision before the meeting of the Foreign Ministers at Geneva in October, and stressing how greatly the adoption of his proposals would strengthen our hand at the Conference. Then a sound behind me made me turn. The door at the other end of the short passage had opened and Maria stood framed in it.
‘Hist!’ she made the sharp warning noise from between her teeth and, frowning, beckoned to the kneeling man to come away. He turned to glance at her, but shook his head and once more applied his eye to the keyhole.
I was so agitated that I could no longer put such snatches of the conversation as I caught into their right context. But a few minutes later I gathered that something had been settled, as I heard Sir Charles say:
‘Well, I’m glad we agree to that extent. I have brought down in my brief-case a copy of the report by the Committee of Inquiry and when you have read that I feel pretty confident that you will give me your full backing. Anyhow, that is as far as we can go for the moment. Now; how about some coffee?’
As the bell rang in the kitchen, the spy swiftly tiptoed back into it. Maria had already retreated, and a minute or two later re-emerged carrying the coffee tray. Having delivered it she rejoined her red-headed friend, who had perched himself on the kitchen table with his short legs dangling from it.
They exchanged several swift sentences in a foreign tongue. She was obviously upbraiding him and he was laughing at her. At the language they were speaking I could only guess. From her greeting to Sir Charles’s friend I had naturally supposed her to be an Austrian; but now it seemed certain that she was a Czech, an Hungarian or, perhaps, even a Russian.
Now that I had a chance to study the man more closely I could see that he came of peasant stock, but had probably improved himself by education; and his quick dark eyes, on either side of a long thin nose, showed him to have plenty of shrewd intelligence. It occurred to me that he had a faint resemblance to Maria; so it was possible that they were members of the same family, and had been working together for a long time, or that he might have some hold over here.
When they had finished their argument, he produced a small glass bottle of colourless liquid from his waistcoat pocket. After holding it up to the light, he wagged his finger at her several times while evidently impressing upon her how it should be used, then thrust it into her hand.
She seemed loath to take it, and again they entered on an argument which was to me unintelligible gibberish. But several times he pointed to a big ginger cat that was sleeping on a rug in front of the fire-place.
At last she left him, went into the larder and returned with a saucer of milk. Into it she put a couple of drops of the liquid, then set the saucer down in front of the cat. It was a big, heavy animal, and even when she woke it by stroking its back it seemed too somnolent to be interested. Lifting the saucer a little so that it was within a few inches of the cat’s face, she splashed the milk about gently with her finger. The cat’s pink tongue came out. It gave two laps, was shaken with a violent convulsion, went rigid for a moment, then rolled over dead.
The man sitting on the table smiled and spread out his hands as if to say: ‘You see how quick and simple it is.’
The woman shrugged resignedly, picked up the saucer and washed the remains of its contents carefully away in the kitchen sink.
With growing horror the meaning of the scene I had just witnessed dawned upon me. The Soviet Secret Service was said to be extremely efficient. They must have found out that Sir Charles was the key man in the battle to bring about the New Look, which would so enormously strengthen our power to defend ourselves in the event of Russian aggression. The killing of the cat had been a try-out. Maria was a pawn in the hands of Britain’s enemies and had been ordered to murder her master.
* * * *
Appalled by the conclusion, I asked myself if I could possibly be right. From time to time Presidents and Ministers are assassinated on the Continent; but not in law-abiding England. One mo
ment though. In 1923 Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson had been shot dead in Eaton Square, and attempts had been made on the life of both Lloyd George and King Edward VIII. Moreover, during the past few years the Western Powers had lost several of their strongest supporters among the national leaders of the Near East through Communist-inspired assassinations. Why, if the dividend were deemed high enough, should the long arm of Moscow strike its secret blows repeatedly in the Moslem countries and refrain from doing so in Surrey?
The excellence of our Immigration and Police systems no doubt explained the general immunity enjoyed by our leading statesmen; and in London or while travelling each had the protection of a private detective specially trained to act as his bodyguard. But here there was not even a policeman within a mile, and as the murder was to be committed by poison no shots would alarm any neighbours. If the deed were done when Sir Charles was alone in the house with Maria many hours might pass before his death was discovered. The extremely capable organisation for which she was acting would have ample time to whisk her away to an airport, provide her with a forged passport, and on a pre-arranged passage get her out of the country.
The more I thought of it the more convinced I became that I was right. She had surreptitiously summoned the man Klinsky, before dinner; so he was living somewhere in the neighbourhood and evidently visited her frequently. Sir Charles had brought his brief-case with him and left it in the hall, so that was doubtless his custom. He would of, course, keep it locked, but Maria would have had many opportunities of taking an impression of its key when he was in his bath. The odds were that when he had finished looking through the papers in it he left it down in the sitting-room for the night. What could have been simpler than for Maria to telephone Klinsky and for him to pay the house a nocturnal visit for the purpose of photographing its contents? In that way his masters would have learnt all about the New Look and his resolve to press the Cabinet to agree to its adoption. Should Sir Charles be eliminated the interests opposed to it might secure a postponement of the issue for many months. For our enemies no man’s life could pay a higher dividend. I could no longer doubt that I had stumbled on a plot to murder him.
What could I do? How could I save him? How get a warning to him? My only hope lay in finding someone like Daisy. There must be quite a number of people who possessed psychic powers equal to hers; but how was I to find one? Urged to it by my anxiety for Johnny, I had sought out Sir Charles in the hope that he, or someone close to him, might prove a medium; but I had known that to be an outside chance, and so far my efforts had got me nowhere.
As I racked my brain for a means of preventing Maria from accomplishing her nefarious design, I saw that Klinsky had picked up the dead cat and was preparing to depart. It flashed upon me that I ought to find out where he lived; so that if I could get a message through the police would be able to lay him by the heels or, perhaps, through him get a line on the whole of his section in the Soviet espionage network.
He and Maria exchanged a few more sentences in their own language, then, still carrying the cat, he slipped out through the back door. It was now dark outside; but I had no difficulty at all in following him, and he naturally had not the slightest suspicion that he was being shadowed.
Taking a path through the wood he followed it for about two hundred yards, then threw the dead cat into the bushes. A little further on the wood ended, and crossing a stile he stepped down into a lane. For another ten or fifteen minutes he walked on at a smart pace until he came to a cart-track and turned up it. At its end there was a house with a few outbuildings which I at first took to be a farm, but on closer inspection it proved to be only a fair-sized cottage of the sort inhabited by small-holders who keep pigs and poultry and cultivate a few acres.
Crossing the barnyard Klinsky pushed open the front door and entered a narrow, lighted hall. At the sound of his arrival a door on the right was opened by a young woman of about nineteen. She was not bad-looking but had a heavy body, her hands were calloused with rough work, and her ill-dyed fair hair was none too tidy.
Giving him a reproachful look, she said: ‘So there you are! I do think it was mean of you to insist on going down to the pub for a drink on the night I persuaded Mum and Dad to go to the pictures.’
He grinned at her and replied in heavily-accented English: ‘We have plenty of time yet, little naughty one.’
‘Not much,’ she objected. ‘They’ll be back in half an hour.’
‘Plenty of time,’ he repeated, following her into a small untidy sitting-room. ‘I soon show you.’ Upon which he threw his arm round her, buried his mouth in her neck for a moment, then pushed her backwards on to the couch.
The situation needed little adding up. As I had judged, Klinsky came of peasant stock. With labour so short he would have had small difficulty in getting himself taken on as a helper for his board and keep and a bit over, and he had made the robust daughter of the place his mistress. What cover could have been better for a spy allocated the task of keeping Maria up to scratch and reporting all that could be learned about Sir Charles.
Leaving the unsavoury couple to indulge in their animal propensities, I hastened back to Sir Charles’s; but, to my fury, I took a wrong path in the wood and lost my way for some minutes, so something over an hour elapsed between my leaving the house and re-entering it.
Maria was in the kitchen and had just finished washing up the dinner things. Sir Charles and his companion had not moved from the dining-room and were still engrossed in talking, now about Mr. Butler’s latest proposals for checking the drain on our gold and dollar reserves. Feeling that, at the moment, it would prove a waste of time to attempt a further effort to make either of them see me, I cast about for some less direct means of conveying a warning.
I then remembered Sir Charles’s chauffeur; so I passed out of the window and round the bend of the drive to the building I had seen through the trees. As I expected, it was a garage with a flat over it. Upstairs in the living-room the chauffeur—a dark, curly-haired young man—was sitting in his shirtsleeves with one arm carelessly thrown round the shoulders of a skinny peevish-looking girl wearing an apron over her cotton dress, presumably his wife.
To my annoyance they were both watching television; and their idiotically-blank but absorbed expressions told me that I stood little chance of impinging on either of them. Nevertheless, I placed myself in front of the screen and did my best. It was no good; neither of their faces altered by as much as the flicker of an eyelid.
I was just about to leave them when a whining cry of ‘Mum … ee!’ penetrated through the voice of the comedian which was being thrown out by the television set.
‘There’s the child again,’ said the man.
‘Oh shut up,’ replied the woman testily. ‘I want to watch this bit. Isn’t he a scream? She’ll go off to sleep in a minute.’
As they settled down again I passed into the room from which the cry had come. The darkness there being no bar to my sight, I saw that in a cot beside a double bed a small girl of about four was sitting up. She had kicked off all her bedclothes, was shivering with cold, and large tears were running down her cheeks. Unquestionably she saw me at once.
She stopped crying, her eyes grew round, for a moment she stared at me in silence; then she let out a piercing yell.
The door was flung open and her mother flounced into the room. ‘Stop it, you wicked girl! Stop it,’ she shrilled, ‘or I’ll give you something to shout about.’
‘The man, Mummy; the man!’ howled the child.
‘What man? There’s no man here ‘cept your father.’
‘I seed him come through the door.’
I was then beating a retreat through it, but I heard the mother exclaim: ‘So it’s lies you’ve started to tell now, is it? I’ll teach you to tell wicked fibs to me, Miss!’
There came the sound of two sharp pats, rather than slaps, but they were followed by another outburst of yelling, and coming to the door the man protested:
‘Oh let her be, Gloria. You’ll only make her worse.’
At that moment the telephone shrilled, cutting through the combined noise made by the child and the loopy-looking man on the T.V. screen. The chauffeur answered it, reached for his tunic, and called to his wife:
‘I’ve got to take the Big Shot back to town, dear.’
The child’s yells had subsided into muffled sobs. Gloria came out of the bedroom, pulled its door to behind her, and complained: ‘Oh, that’s too bad! Their sort have no consideration for other people.’
The man shrugged. ‘What’s the use of belly-aching. Most chaps have to work harder than I do for less pay. Anyway I told you the odds were against me being able to stay the night.’
‘Yes but I was hopin’ you would. Why couldn’t he have his own car sent down to fetch him?’
‘Ask me another. Got something else to think about perhaps. There’s places called Cyprus an’ Egypt, you know; and how many votes it’s going to cost him if ‘is pal Butler slaps a bigger tax on cars.’
‘Still, it’s early yet, Bert. They might have let us see the telly programme out.’
‘He’s not going to his dowdy bed, don’t you fret yourself. When he gets home there’ll be a stack of red and green boxes like I sometimes see in the boss’s office, with all sorts of conundrums in them for him. I wouldn’t have his job for a packet. Where the hell are my driving gloves?’
Gloria picked them up from behind the television set, handed them to him and enquired: ‘And what about Sir C. Will he be going up with you?’
‘Don’t expect so. He likes a night in the country, whenever he can get it.’
The Ka of Gifford Hillary Page 33