‘I see. Any particular line?’
‘There’s no tie-up with any one crowd. They’ll take anything provided they can handle it. And provided the profit margin’s big enough.’
‘I’ve never known a receiver who didn’t feel cheated unless he made eight hundred per cent on every deal,’ agreed Tim.
‘It’s diamonds mostly. Country house stuff. If you’d said “Old Scotch” that would have been diamonds in an old-fashioned setting. Vat 17 – that you wanted £1,700 for them.’
‘I see,’ said Tim. ‘I see. I never got further than the opening gambit. I wonder what they thought I was up to?’
‘I know what I hope they thought,’ said Bazeley. ‘I hope they thought you were some amateur who didn’t quite know the ropes. If they did think that, then they may carry on. We don’t want them to close down. Such a useful little honey-pot.’
‘And I suppose you’ve had them under observation for some time.’
‘Just over a year,’ said Bazeley calmly.
‘And you’ve got a list of everyone who went in and out?’
‘Not everyone. It’s a pretty busy place. Anyone who turned up at all regularly, or seemed to be too pally with the Captain.’
‘I suppose I couldn’t look—’
‘Well,’ said Bazeley. ‘No. I’d need higher authority before I did that.’
‘All right,’ said Tim. ‘Let me put it this way. If I gave you a name, would you be prepared to tell me if that name was or wasn’t on your list.’
‘I expect I could do that. I’d have to find out.’
‘Splendid.’
Quite suddenly he felt desperately tired. He looked at his watch. It was just past midnight.
‘We can give you a shakedown, here,’ said Bazeley.
‘I’ll tell them to get your bed ready,’ said Detective Pontifex. ‘We’ll put you in the D. T. Cell. I’m told it’s very comfortable.’
‘I’d better do some telephoning first,’ said Tim.
If his mother had gone to bed, which he doubted, the telephone would have been switched through to her bedroom.
He got the number and heard the bell ringing. It went on for a long time.
Worried, he tried the General’s house. The result was the same.
This was inconceivable. On occasions of emergency, when he had had to get hold of him, the General, who was the lightest of sleepers, had answered in a matter of seconds.
He tried both numbers again, feeling the sweat prickling cold on his body with a premonition of disaster.
In the end he gave it up, and after a little thought and research he asked for Bob Cleeve’s number.
The receiver came off the hook so quickly at the other end that someone must have been waiting with a hand outstretched.
‘Tim,’ said his mother’s voice. ‘Am I glad to hear you! No, it’s all right. We’re all of us all right. Yes, all of us. We’re out at Bob’s place. There’s nothing you can do. No, nothing. But come down as quickly as you can in the morning. Something not very nice.’
Chapter Ten
MARCHE MILITAIRE
(CONTINUED AND CONCLUDED)
Armado: ‘We will put it, as they say, to “fortuna de la guerra”.’
On the morning of that Friday, as the General and Sue were finishing breakfast, Bob Cleeve’s large, maroon-coloured Bentley poked its nose into their front drive.
Sue opened the front door, ducked a fatherly kiss from Bob, and showed him into the breakfast room, where the General was unfolding the Times which it was his habit to read, pretty carefully, from cover to cover each day.
‘I’ve got a Chairman’s conference at Westminster,’ Bob explained. ‘Juvenile delinquency again. Thank you very much, Sue. I wouldn’t say no to a cup of your coffee. You’re looking particularly ravishing this morning. Must be because you’ve got such a clear conscience. The Press are going to be admitted and I don’t mind betting that it’ll be a regular jamboree. There’s something about juvenile delinquency that stirs the heart and soul of our newspaper-reading public.’
‘Well, it’s uncommonly kind of you,’ said the General. ‘If you really are going up I’d be pleased to come with you. I take it you’ll be going through Staines.’
‘Can’t avoid it.’
‘Splendid. And how very kind of you to look in on the off chance.’
‘I didn’t come to see you,’ said Bob. ‘I came to look at Sue. And, by Jove, she’s getting more worth looking at every day.’
Sue snorted and went on with her breakfast.
As the big car scudded along the pleasant stretch between Bramshott and Wentworth the General, feeling that silence would have been a sort of discourtesy, explained to Cleeve, in outline, what he was doing.
‘It’s worth a try,’ said Cleeve. ‘But I think you’ll be lucky if you find anything. You know what Courts of Inquiry were like. By the time the talking was over you felt so fed up that you shoved down the shortest account you could, consistent with not getting a rocket from the convening authority. “Court of Inquiry assembled this blank day of blank to inquire into the loss of Gunner Bloggins’ boots. Gunner Bloggins in evidence said, I am Gunner 99999 Bloggins—”.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the General. ‘I’ve done plenty of them. All the same, this wasn’t Gunner Bloggins’ boots. Someone had blown up the Commanding General. That may have made them a little more long-winded.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Bob.
The car swooped down Egham hill, by-passed Egham on the left, and entered the mile of gasometers and cafes that leads to Staines bridge.
‘We shall have to pack our conference up at four o’clock,’ said Bob, ‘whether we’ve finished or not, but I can’t guarantee to be here before five. Will that do?’
‘It’s extremely kind of you,’ said the General. ‘I think the place is somewhere behind here, on the right. Put me down at the bridge and I’ll find it.’
It had once been, and still looked like, a motor-car factory. The wire-mesh entrance gates were shut and the commissionaire’s hutch stood empty.
The General found a bell and rang it.
After a pause a door in the building opened and a man came out and crossed the yard. He was in neat battle dress, with shoes instead of boots and gaiters, and he wore the crown of a warrant officer on his forearm.
From the name and the rank the General had inferred someone with a red face, a lot of body and a hearty manner. Sergeant-Major Bottler was, therefore, a surprise. He was small and grey-haired and he wore steel-rimmed glasses. Only a certain self-sufficient neatness in his carriage and movement suggested the old soldier.
He said, ‘General Palling?’ and saluted.
The General raised his bowler hat punctiliously, and the Sergeant-Major unlocked the gate.
‘I gathered from the War Office something of what you wanted, sir. It’s going to be a bit of a job to find it. Mind your head.’
They ducked under the open porte-cochère, cut in a large steel door which had evidently not been fully opened since the day when the last car had rolled off the production line. They were in a roomy building, something between a barn and a hangar. A little light filtered through overhead windows. It was quite warm.
‘We have to keep the heating going,’ explained the Sergeant-Major. ‘Otherwise the damp would get at the papers. It comes up off the river. Damp and rats. They’re the two things we have to worry about most. You wouldn’t think rats could live on paper. But I believe they do – the little beggars. Only last week I found a nest of them, right in the middle of a bunch of A.B.104’s. Hold hard, sir. We’ll have some light on the scene.’
He clicked down two switches and a battery of big, overhead lamps opened up.
The whole floor space, as the General now saw, was honeycombed with wooden shelves. Not proper book-shelves, but slats resting on upright boards. On the lower shelves were different sizes of black tin boxes with drop-fronts. On the upper the papers stood piled in folders. The s
helves ran up to a height of about eight feet. Above them, grey over the swinging electric globes, loomed the vast obscurity of the factory roof.
‘There’s bats up there,’ said the Sergeant-Major. ‘If you shine a torch up you can see them. Would you care to step into my office, and I’ll just show you how we’re arranged.’
The Sergeant-Major’s office was a cheerful little room; a kettle humming on the stove, a cat sleeping in the corner; a snug cabin in a grey wilderness. The Sergeant-Major unrolled a plan which showed the layout and opened filing cabinet after filing cabinet as he demonstrated the arrangement of his huge charge. It was difficult to imagine anyone having an affection for a thousand tonnes of paper, but when a man is in love with his job it shines in his eyes and speaks through his speech.
The General found himself warming to the Sergeant-Major.
‘It’ll be in the north east block, that’s certain, sir. All the disciplinary proceedings are there, except sex. We keep sex in separate boxes against the north wall.’
‘How satisfactory,’ said the General. ‘I mean – I don’t think sex comes into this one.’
‘The next point is, when were the papers lodged? We can’t file them according to the year they relate to, you see, because that would mean opening every blessed paper and reading it, and that I can’t do. So we file them in years of lodgement.’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ said the General. ‘Not exactly. It can’t be before 1920 – probably later. But not likely to be much after 1924. They broke up those war-time formations pretty quickly.’
‘Then we’re cross indexed under countries. India, Egypt, Far East, and so on. This would be Germany, I take it.’ The Sergeant-Major rattled his thumbnail through a dozen cards. ‘Occupation Forces, we called it then. It’s all B.A.O.R. now. Anyway, that’ll be enough to get us into the right section.’
‘I think it’s extremely helpful,’ said the General. ‘I’d no idea it was all arranged in such a businesslike way.’
‘We try to be businesslike,’ said the Sergeant-Major, much gratified. ‘Would you come this way? That’s right. We’d better bring dusters. I get round the whole lot once a month, but it soon settles again.’
‘Now see here,’ said the General. ‘Don’t you bother to do the actual searching. I’m sure you’ve plenty to do. And I’ve got all the time in the world. I’ll soon get the hang of it.’
All in all, the General could not remember when he had passed such a satisfactory morning.
Almost at first dip he picked out the papers of that extraordinary business in which Tricky Pellow had almost lost his commission. Indeed, would have lost his commission had not justice been tempered with a good deal of imagination; a piece of long-sighted clemency which paid off when Pellow did so well in the South African War.
Thinking of Pellow, somehow put him in mind of Masters, and a disastrous piece of horse-coping, a matter in which he had been called on himself to give evidence. It gave him quite a shock to find his own name. ‘Colonel Palling stated that, in his opinion, the fact that the horse had thrown General Pargeter during a ceremonial parade did not, in itself, prove that the horse was vicious—’
How important it had all seemed at the time. How little it all mattered now. General Pargeter must have been dead half a century. Masters? Masters had died on the Somme, like a lot of other good fellows.
At this point the General was diverted from a train of melancholy by the happy discovery of the papers relating to the Covent Garden Ball rumpus.
When he had finished with these he looked guiltily at his watch and found that it was nearly two o’clock. So he went out to see if he could find some lunch, which he did, eventually, at a café which had been designed to deal with the summer boating trade but was now some weeks past its normal time for hibernation and inclined to be resentful about it.
During the afternoon he addressed himself more seriously and methodically to his task and by four o’clock he was getting warm. At one moment he thought he had it. He had untied a bursting buff folder labelled (promisingly enough) ‘Occupation Forces, Cologne. Headquarters Records’. They were in no sort of order, but that he was on the right track was proved by the fact that Lieutenant-General Artside’s name appeared with increasing frequency.
He was hampered by the fact that he could not remember the exact date on which the explosion had occurred. He seemed to remember that it was some time in October of 1920. He searched again through the file and discovered an odd thing. There were papers connected with every other month of the year, but nothing at all for October.
He went through it once again, to make certain. Then he looked at the backs of the other folders in that box. None of them seemed even remotely promising.
The General put the Cologne folder away, in the front of the box, and went to find Bottler.
‘I suppose you get a lot of visitors,’ he said.
‘One or two a day, most days,’ agreed the Sergeant- Major. ‘Mostly from War Office and Records. They come down to borrow papers.’
‘Borrow?’ said the General sharply. ‘But you’d keep a record of any papers they took away.’
‘Certainly sir. Any particular file you had in mind?’
‘It’s box M.B. – I’ve jotted the number down somewhere—here it is – 56.’
‘M.B.56.’ The Sergeant-Major consulted his filing system. ‘No there’s nothing out from that—except that—wait a moment. Well, now, that’s an odd coincidence. It really is.’
The General waited patiently.
‘There’s nothing booked out from that file but I do remember it was looked at. Normally, I wouldn’t remember a thing like that, but—M.B.56—you see, sir. That’s my wife’s initials, Madge Bottler, and it was her exact age. The day it was looked at was her birthday.’
The General thought hard.
‘How old is Mrs. Bottler now?’
‘Fifty-seven last April. April 10th.’
‘I see. Then it was on April 10th of the year before that someone went to that file. I expect you keep a visitors’ book.’
‘Certainly.’ The Sergeant-Major opened a ledger. The General noticed that his own name and rank had already been neatly entered.
Against April 10th of the previous year there was only one name. Major Robinson.
‘I’m afraid I don’t really remember anything about him,’ said the Sergeant-Major apologetically. ‘It was just the coincidence, you see, of the file and the number, and on that particular day.’
‘Hmp. The rank’s not very helpful either. There were a lot of very old Majors left over from the first war, and a lot of very young ones out of the second. Never mind. As you say, it was an outside chance that you remembered it at all.’
A rich-sounding motor horn spoke from the street.
‘I’ll have to knock off now,’ said the General. ‘That sounds like my lift home.’
The Sergeant-Major followed him out. It was Cleeve all right. He was hunched up over the wheel and what little could be seen of him looked depressed. The juveniles must have been more than normally troublesome.
The Sergeant-Major walked round and held the door open for the General. He shut it after him, and saluted. The General turned down the window, put his arm and shoulder out, and shook hands warmly.
‘You’ve been most helpful and considerate,’ he said, ‘and it’s been a real pleasure meeting you.’
The Sergeant-Major looked startled but pleased. He stood for some time staring after the long car as it gathered speed up the road.
‘I don’t know about you,’ said Cleeve at last, ‘but I haven’t yet found time for any tea. There’s rather a nice little place in Egham – that’s it – with the bottle glass windows. They make good toast, and plenty of it.’
He still seemed worried. Evidently there was more than juvenile delinquency on his mind. When he said, as soon as they were alone with their tea, ‘I saw Tom Pearce last night. He’s not at all happy about things,’ the General had no need to ask
him what business he was talking about.
‘He’s not the only one,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember seeing Liz in quite such a state before.’
‘Liz is a damned level-headed woman,’ agreed Cleeve. ‘But in this particular instance I think she and the police are worrying about different things. She’s worried that they aren’t taking her discoveries seriously. That’s where she’s wrong. They are. It’s what happens next that worries them.’
‘Yes,’ said the General. He was cutting the crusts carefully off a round of toast.
‘MacMorris was blackmailing someone. We might as well say it. We’ve all been thinking it. So someone decided to get rid of him. Very understandable reaction. It’s just the way he carried it out makes it so frightening. It’s not the sort of way I’d choose myself – too complicated and chancy. But you can’t deny that it was damnably effective. It not only destroyed MacMorris, it destroyed all the clues, too. You saw the house—’
‘Yes,’ said the General. ‘All the same, there was the suggestion of an unbalanced mind in it.’
Cleeve looked up sharply.
‘A madman,’ he said.
‘Yes. Or a madwoman. You haven’t really got much line on the sex of the murderer, have you? Single blonde hairs on the sofa, and so on. If there were any, they went sky high with the fingerprints and everything else.’ He added, ‘Don’t mean a raving lunatic. Someone with an element of unbalance in their make-up. The idea of wiping out a single threat with a great big explosion. There’s something elemental about that.’
The two men sat on in silence for a few minutes. The toast was, really, very good. It was buttery and soft enough not to worry the General’s teeth.
In the end he broke the silence himself.
‘It’s a point of difference,’ he said, ‘between dangerous animals and dangerous people. Animals just go on quietly being killers. They don’t let circumstances worry them. Humans are different. However sound their nerve may be, if they feel themselves pressed, they do stupid things. That makes them more dangerous in a way. But it makes them easier to catch.’
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