The Bravo of London

by Ernest Bramah

  ‘It is! It cannot be anything else—direct from the main at this hour. My God! Nora, listening! Think, child—I can get him; can he get me? Can he understand? Do you see: our message! Hope, hope, just a tiny flickering light—someone somewhere listening!’

  He was not wasting the precious seconds now. Almost at Nora’s first words he had searched for and found the heel and as he spoke he tapped the pipe sharply with the butt of it in a never varying sequence: short, short, short; long, long, long; short, short, short—time after time repeated.

  ‘What is it you do?’ she asked in a half-awed whisper. ‘What are you sending?’

  ‘S.O.S.; S.O.S.; S.O.S.,’ he explained, rather absently under the intense concentration of listening, touching, feeling for a movement in reply. ‘Can he hear me? Will he understand?’ The seconds passed and nothing came: after all, was it likely?

  ‘Has he gone—was it just the last movement that I heard; or was he only adjusting?’ ran his thoughts as he never ceased the tapping. At any rate—‘Nora, my dear,’—this time aloud—‘the next minute will probably settle our business for good or bad. If you ever prayed in your life before, pray for an answer now, child.’

  CHAPTER XV

  THE MAN AT THE OTHER END

  WHENEVER a house in Maplewood Avenue came on the market—a not infrequent occurrence in point of fact—the house agents were wont to dwell on the rural and secluded amenities of the neighbourhood, rather than draw attention to the architectural, domestic or social attractions of the ‘property’: wisely, no doubt, since the one could be convincingly adduced, whereas a tolerant if not absolutely apologetic course was desirable when skilfully leading a client on past a too detailed examination of the others. Certainly at six o’clock in the morning the Avenue wore as tranquil an air of detachment from a city’s bustle as could be found within the ten miles radius. It was yet too early for dust-carts, milkmen, road sweepers and other kindred sleep-disturbers to be about while the intrusions of the official custodians of the law were, if leisurely in point of motion, in all other respects comparable to the proverbial angels’ visits.

  Such was the appearance Maplewood Avenue presented to the couple who turned into it, in pursuance of their rather mysterious ends, on the morning of the Saturday that was to be the climax of at least two adventurous enterprises. At that moment the only sign of life—other than vegetable—that the Avenue presented was a large Persian cat seated beneath a sycamore and a full-throated bird pouring out its string of melody from the precise apex of the tree, exactly above the spot where the cat was sitting.

  ‘Now there ought to be a trap somewhere just about here,’ said the senior of the two intruders, when in due course their progress along the road had brought them to a part somewhere about midway along the thoroughfare. A substantially built, no-longer-young, level-headed-looking workman of the capable if mildly pragmatic type, his status was sartorially proclaimed, for in addition to wearing the chaste blue uniform provided by the Metropolitan Water Board his official cap was embellished with the word INSPECTOR, clearly rather than aesthetically displayed within a neat oval. His underling, a mere youth who just escaped the category of ‘hobbledehoy’ by virtue of a couple of months’ mild discipline, did not appear to let his superior’s rank and authority overawe him. On this not unattractive early morning round at least his usual title of respect was ‘uncle’ or ‘dad’ with an occasional lapse into an even freer style if the occasion seemed to permit it. The inspector received it all in the best of parts as became a man who was prepared to give and take, with the full assurance that if the need arose he could assert the dignity of his badge in a perfectly conclusive fashion. Both carried an implement of their craft, that of the inspector being a listening-rod—outwardly nothing more than a serviceable walking-stick with an overgrown head—while his underling had a sinister-looking tool that combined the unpleasanter qualities of a small harpoon and a native spear. Actually its industrial use was to impale and open trap-doors but it bore little suggestion of this pacific function.

  ‘It must be somewhere just about here,’ reiterated the inspector argumentatively. ‘See anything of it, ’Orace?’

  ‘Not a trace,’ replied Horace, alternating his interest between the bird and the cat in a speculation as to which would afford the better cock-shy. ‘Reckon they must have tar-sprayed and gritted it over, same as we found that one in Badger Lane. Miaou! Miaou!’

  ‘Well, dash my nob if the cat isn’t sitting right atop it!’ exclaimed his chief, now that his attention was turned in that direction. ‘Puss, puss. Come along, Thomas, we’ll trouble you for that spot for a couple of minutes.’ Whereupon the Persian, rightly concluding that in the circumstances it was no use waiting any longer for the thrush to fall straight into its mouth, got up and walked away in a decidedly cutting manner.

  ‘Keeping the place warm for us,’ grinned Horace.

  ‘Picking it out to be cool for itself more likely. They’re funny in their ways, you might perhaps think, but they have their own ideas,’ moralised the inspector. ‘Now I suppose you never take any particular notice of cats, ’Orace?’

  ‘Can’t say as I do. Except now and then to have a whang at one.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what you do take any notice of—except the whistle and short skirts,’ speculated his superior. ‘But no doubt ideas are germinating.’

  ‘I follow Chelsea,’ maintained Horace.

  ‘Well, I should say that’s harmless. But speaking of cats, there’s a good deal to be learned about women from them, ’Orace. Not in a spiteful sense, mind you, but they’re very alike in many ways—cats and women.’

  ‘You let some of them hear you say that and they’d scratch your eyes out.’

  ‘That being a case to wit,’ pointed out the inspector. ‘But it doesn’t follow: it all depends—not on the woman as you might think but on the chap and his manner of putting it. Now if you made such an observation, ’Orace, no doubt, as you say, you’d carry away traces of it, but if it was done diplomatic—’

  ‘Same as you would, for instance?’

  ‘Approximately,’ admitted the inspector modestly. ‘At any rate I’ve known very few who wouldn’t admit, between ourselves, that most others had a fair streak of the feline.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ sniggered Horace. ‘Regular old Don John you must have been in your time, I reckon, Uncle.’

  ‘It’s not that at all,’ protested the inspector earnestly. ‘Don’t go away with an erroneous impression of that sort, ’Orace, or I shall be sorry I allowed you to talk of your own affairs so freely. I regard the subject from a scientific, you might almost say Darwinian, standpoint. Now—there’s no particular hurry, lad; it’s no one’s time between now and seven—now to give you an instance. When I was about your age we had a farm and one Michaelmas we left it and moved away to another, a dozen or fifteen miles off, that the old man had taken. Of course all the stock went by road and the house cat—a jenny it was—was put into a basket and driven in the trap along with one or two particular things and the women. No doubt its feet were buttered as soon as it was let out but the next morning it was gone and sure enough it turned up again—we heard this afterwards from a neighbour who was there—at the old place, pretty nearly dead beat but evidently come back with the intention of staying. Well—this is the point, ’Orace—that cat was seen to look into every room in the house and when it understood that they were all empty and no one living there, dash my nob if it didn’t turn round and disappear again and the next day after that it was back at the new place and stayed on there quite content for ever … Do you get anything from that, ’Orace?’

  ‘Everyone knows that cats can find their way back when they’ve never seen the road. An aunt of mine—’

  ‘You’ve missed the point, my lad, but I didn’t expect any better. Pigeons will do as much—for hundreds of miles if it comes to that—but there’s nothing to be learnt—nothing that is to say on the human plane—from the behaviour of pigeon
s. Well, what about getting on with it now? This is the last road of the round and then we may as well drop down into the High Street and get a snack to carry us on till breakfast. I know a place not so far off where they make coffee of coffee and not chicory and ground peas.’

  ‘Suit me all right,’ assented Horace. ‘As a matter of fact my internals have been complaining out loud for the past half hour. Reckon they thought that me throat must have got cut or something.’

  The inspector had taken up a position of ease, leaning against the sycamore from which the thrush had lately sung, while he proceeded to write up his report-book. At this avowal he looked across at his subordinate meditatively.

  ‘It’s symptomatic how most young fellows always seem to be thinking about their stomachs nowadays, if you come to notice it, ’Orace,’ he remarked confidentially. ‘They don’t seem to have any what you might call reserve of endurance somehow. Did I ever happen to tell you how me and another signaller were cut off in a tower outside a little place called Binchey for the best part of a week and all the time we only had—?’

  ‘You did and that,’ replied the unimpressed Horace. ‘You told me at full length the first day I came on this job and you’ve referred to it now and then since at stated intervals. Don’t gloat so much on that there war, Father William, and the deeds that saved the Empire. It’s over and done with and we’re never going to have another—not so long as it rests with me anyhow.’

  For a moment the inspector seemed to be in doubt whether the point had not been reached when it was desirable for him to explain to Horace the precise obligations of their respective positions. He put the temptation aside on the reflection that there is generally more than one way of attaining an objective. With the butt end of an admonitory pencil he indicated the unopened trap.

  ‘Well, for the love of Moses get on with your job, boy,’ he directed severely. ‘I don’t want to be kept messin’ about round here all morning.’

  That was the chap all over, thought Horace bitterly, as he spiked open the lid and dropping the business end of his harpoon on to the connection inside applied his ear to the handle. Talk about his own blinking affairs for half an hour and then suddenly turn blinking well round and … Fat lot of good expecting anything to be worth while in a blinking shop where …

  ‘Come, come, ’Orace,’ said the inspector, leisurely elastic- banding his book and putting it away, ‘you aren’t supposed to be fishing down that hole, you know. Is it O.K. there?’

  ‘Nowhere in sight of it, if you ask me,’ replied Horace, diffusing an atmosphere of gloomy satisfaction. ‘There’s something going on somewhere here that’s beyond me.’

  ‘H’m,’ said the inspector, either with or without a special meaning. ‘That’s queer.’

  ‘Yes, it’s—’ere, what d’ya mean—“queer”?’

  ‘Well’—the inspector was satisfied now that he had restored correct relations and was mildly satirical—‘I was only thinking that it must be queer, lad, if it’s something past your comprehension. What’s this miracle like?’

  ‘Better have a squint yourself,’ suggested Horace, withdrawing his implement and resigning the position. ‘Listening posts are more in your line by all accounts, inspector.’

  Still smiling inwardly, the inspector stepped across and dropping the end of his rod into the cavity bent down and applied an ear to the bowl-shaped amplifier. Presently he twisted his head round a fraction so as to include Horace in his view and by a return to ordinary conversational terms indicated tactfully that so far as he was concerned their little difference might be regarded as settled.

  ‘It’s a rummy thing that we should have been speaking of signalling just now,’ he remarked tentatively. ‘If such a thing was credible I should have said that someone was talking morse along the pipe at this very moment.’

  ‘Oh,’ replied Horace, leaning against the tree in turn and languidly rolling a cigarette—doubtless equally prepared to let bygones go by but, as the aggrieved subordinate, inclined to be more guarded. ‘And wha’ d’z ’e happen to be saying?’

  ‘Nothing that you might call coherent—just the same word all the time: “sos, sos, sos”, over and over again if I understand it right. Half a minute though; that “sos” stands for something surely?’

  ‘Yes it does—sossages. And very nice too for breakfast.’

  ‘Tchk! tchk! Can’t you never leave off thinking of food even in your sleep, ’Orace?… Still going on: “sos, sos, sos”. Why, of course—where are your wits, lad? It isn’t ‘sos’ at all; it’s “S.O.S.” Signal of distress a sinking ship sends out. Now whatever—’

  ‘Why, of course,’ contributed Horace, refusing to be impressed. ‘The Clacton Belle must have drifted in somehow and now she can’t neither reverse nor turn round in the supply pipe. Why ever didn’t you think of that at first, Uncle?’

  But the inspector was not to be put off by the cheap witticism of irreverent youth. He had not lived for fifty years and gone all through the war without discovering that very queer things do occasionally turn up in real life. For a moment he thoughtfully balanced a spanner undecidedly in his free hand; then kneeling on the pavement he struck the metal connection below half a dozen times in measured succession.

  ‘What’s the game—what does that mean?’ demanded Horace, intrigued into drawing nearer and looking on in spite of his blasé bearing.

  ‘“R.U.”—code. “Who are you?”’ explained the other, returning to the listening attitude again. ‘Now we shall see where we’re getting.’

  ‘Seems to me this isn’t M.W.B. routine at all,’ suggested the flippant observer. ‘You must have got through to the picture house this time, Dad. “Snatched from Death’s Jaws” in seven snatches—’ He stopped short at that for the inspector’s right hand had suddenly shot out in a compelling gesture of warning and repression.

  ‘Get this down, lad,’ he said, with a note of sharp authority that admitted no discussion. ‘You have a bit o’ paper and a pencil, haven’t you? “C-A-R-R—”’

  ‘Right-o,’ was the brisk assent, as the boy discovered a news-sheet and a stub of pencil in his pocket, and folded the paper to afford a white space of margin, ‘“C-a-r-r”. Carry on, sergeant.’

  ‘“-a-d-o-s”.’

  ‘Carrados! Why, that’s the name of the bloke—’ He turned the page in an excited search for a heading. ‘There’s something here about a mystery of his movements. You don’t mean to say—’

  ‘Shut it, you pup!’ snapped the inspector fiercely. ‘Can’t you attend two minutes? Here—take it: “T-r-a-p-p-e-d p-h-o-n-e n-e-a-r-e-s-t p-o-l-i-c-e r-e-l-e-a-s-e u-r-g-e-n-t l-i-f-e d-e-a-t-h”.’

  ‘My Gawd!’ murmured Horace, experiencing a mental display of coloured lights. ‘That’s the stuff to—’

  ‘“A-m e-n-l-a-r-g-i-n-g l-e-a-k y-o-u l-o-c-a-t-e g-u-i-d-e p-o-l-i-c-e l-a-r-g-e r-e-w-a-r-d”.’

  ‘Phew!’ whistled Horace softly, drawing in his breath with an ecstatic foretaste of this shower of gain and glory. ‘Large reward!… Is that all, inspector?’ he concluded meekly.

  ‘“A-c-k-n-o-w-l-e-d-g-e i-f g-o-t”—you needn’t put that last bit in the message. You know how to telephone, don’t you, Horace?’

  ‘’Course I do. I was in the yard office before I came on here. And you don’t need a number for police; you—’

  ‘That’s all right, lad. Slip down into the High Street as quick as you can cut and put that through from the nearest kiosk. Here’s a couple of pennies—’

  ‘Don’t need ’em for police.’

  ‘Take them all the same—you never know and we’re running no risks; in fact you’d better have a few more to be on the safe side. Keep your mouth shut no matter who you meet and for the love of Moses don’t stop to get your breakfast on the way, there’s a good lad. This is going to mean a gold watch and a week’s outing at Southend with full pay for both of us or I’m a Dutchman.’

  ‘Garn!’ The prospect, added to the certainty of having a tale
to tell that would thrill and fascinate young lady friends for many a bright month to come, was reducing Horace to a state of giggling bliss. ‘A silver lighter and a day on Hampstead Heath more likely!’

  He set smartly off towards the shops while the inspector, humming a marching air as an emotional outlet to the suspense, proceeded to note the promised development in the volume of waste and to verify the direction. He was still testing the flow at intervals along the road when, some five minutes later, a closed motor car came along and slowing down as it went by turned in at one of the gardens. He did not fail to make a careful mental record of all its details.

  The motorists must have been noticing on their side also for very soon—they certainly could not have been right up to the house—two men came out at the gate in question and stood admiring the day, as proprietorial gentlemen will when the rising sun, as seen from their own demesne, seems to be an individual asset produced for their especial service. Both were observable figures; one a personable individual of foreign cut, the other—obviously in spite of his well-wrapped-up form—a pronounced cripple. Presently they happened to notice the waterman trying the road at no great distance away and—what more natural?—strolled down to take a friendly interest in his doings.

  ‘Morning, inspector,’ affably remarked the cripple—he had not failed to observe the badge—‘rather early for your job, eh? Nothing wrong with our supply up here, I hope, eh?’

  ‘Nothing at all, sir,’ said the inspector. ‘Just an ordinary routine round. We do them regularly.’

  ‘Ah, to be sure. I thought perhaps you might be calling here and there to see the taps and so on, eh? One likes to know—’

  ‘No need for that, sir, when it’s all O.K. We don’t want to give any more trouble than we have to. Shouldn’t be here myself only I’m waiting for my mate to knock off now for breakfast.’