I had risen to my feet and stood facing Sedel. ‘You fool!’ I said. ‘Do you think I haven’t prepared for this? You have burgled my club to get a statement of mine that I left with the secretary. But do you imagine that that was the only statement?’
He smiled. He had recovered his self-possession. ‘So, you have another statement? That was to be expected. But I do not think your friend Crisham will pay much attention to it. By describing this tin box as your coffin, I fear I have given you a wrong impression. You will live – for a time. And during the next few weeks you will send Crisham a number of statements. You will accuse various public men of crimes against the State, and each accusation will be more fantastic than the last. By the time he has checked up on a few of these accusations he will not be inclined to pay much attention to the original statement when it is placed in his hands. Nor will he be altogether surprised when he hears that you are an imposter and that the real Kilmartin is dead. You will be regarded as a madman.’
‘And who is to sign these false statements?’ I asked.
‘Why you, of course.’
‘You know I shall not,’ I replied hotly.
‘Oh, but I think you will, Mr Kilmartin.’ There was a gleam in his eyes, and the relief, which I had felt at realising that my death was deferred for the time being, vanished and my heart sank. The rubber truncheon, the steel-cored whip and all the other horrors of the concentration camp filled my mind. I had heard about these things so often. But they had been something remote, like a flood in China or an earthquake in South America. They had not touched me. I tried to think that torture was no longer a weapon used by civilised nations. I tried to persuade myself that this sort of thing could not possibly happen in the middle of London. But I knew it could. I knew that though I was in a well-known hotel in Piccadilly, I was as far beyond the pale of legal protection as I should be in Germany itself.
My eyes suddenly met Sedel’s and I braced myself. The little blighter was watching me with a faint smile on his lips. The gleam was still in his eyes, and at that moment I think I understood him. Germany is essentially an athletic country, and this man was no athlete. Physically he was weak. There is nothing so deadly as a man whose ambition is spurred on by an inferiority complex. Sedel’s absorbing interest in life, as I saw it then, was power. Not power in the big sense. But physical power. The power of life and death. The power to torture. For seven years he had laboured in a hostile country to build up a position that would give him the power to kill men. Now he was realising the first fruits of those labours. And as I looked into those eyes I saw stark bestial cruelty. The man was a sadist, and I had a horrible fear that his sadism would take a mental as well as a physical form. He might even drive me mad.
An awful horror surged through me at that thought. It centred itself upon the deed-box. I always had a horror of being shut up in a place with no means of getting out. It was a mild form of claustrophobia. It was sheer terror more than anything else that gave me courage. With a sudden movement, I sprang at him, swinging my fist as I came. He was not prepared for this sudden rush. He had no time to use his gun. I am a fairly heavy man, and he caught the full force of the blow on the mouth. I felt his teeth splinter. I swung my left to his stomach and dived for the door.
But the two men in livery cut me off. I turned back and flung myself on Sedel’s gun, which he still held in his hand as he sprawled, writhing across a table. My fingers closed on the steel barrel and I wrenched it from him. Then I turned, and I knew the game was up. I have a very vivid picture of that split second before I passed out. It remains in my mind like a still from a film. I can’t remember anyone moving. All I remember is one of the liveried men stooping forward towards me, his right hand half-raised and clutching the soda-water siphon by the neck. Across the knuckles of his hand ran a thin white scar. I also remember quite clearly that on the lapels of his jacket were eagles, swooping on their prey, emblazoned in gold. And then I knew nothing more until I awoke to the gentle movement of a car going slowly.
A great pain in my head came and went, came and went, in agonising rhythmic waves. Like a gentle murmur at the back of my brain I heard the engine of a car, and there were voices, too, but they sounded very far away. For a moment everything went blank again. Then I noticed that the car had stopped. And almost immediately started again. And alongside it was the pulsating roar of a diesel-engined vehicle gathering way.
For a time I could not think what had happened. Consciousness kept coming and going with the hammer strokes in my head. For a moment I thought I must have been involved in a street accident, for I had guessed that the diesel-engined vehicle had been a bus. I could hear faintly the sound of the London streets all about us and I felt certain that I was in an ambulance, being taken to hospital. Then, suddenly, I remembered the blow. It was not the actual blow that I remembered, but the picture I had seen as I turned, the man with his upraised arm, the little white scar and the eagles on his lapels.
And then an awful terror came upon me. Had I been blinded? I could see nothing. Yet I knew it should be daylight. Or, at any rate, there should be a gleam of light in the car. But though I opened my eyes wide, everything was as black as pitch. Men’s voices sounded quite close to me, though muffled. I tried to put out my hand to attract their attention. But I could not move. I tried to speak. But something seemed to stifle the words in my throat.
A sudden panic seized me. I cried out. I screamed. I struggled. It was like one of those awful nightmares in which you cannot move. At length I lay still, exhausted. And it was only then that I realised that I was bound and that there was a gag in my mouth. I tried to move my head, but found I could not. And then I remembered the tin box, and for hours it seemed I struggled with a terrible hysteria. But though I eventually calmed myself, I had a horrible fear that I might never be let out. And then I began to develop cramp. I don’t know which was worse, the physical pain in my joints or the mental horror of being shut up in that tin box for ever. And the strange thing was that I could not move my arms, legs or head the fraction of an inch. I was fixed to that tin box as though I were a dummy clamped into position.
At length the car stopped and there was much scraping of boots on the floor. The doors were opened just near my head and the familiar sounds of the London streets became suddenly clear. I heard a news-vendor crying the late night final and the murmuring shuffle of countless feet. I guessed that it must be rush-hour. My box shook violently and I heard the sound of a man’s breathing. And then I toppled over on to my side. Instinctively I tried to break my fall. But I could not move my hand. And anyway there was no fall. A second later I was on my head. The tin box grated on the road surface, and then I was righted and laid down on a little trolley. The iron wheels rang as it was pulled up the kerb. For a moment we were held up on the pavement. Quite plainly I heard one passer-by saying, ‘I was just speaking to old Jessop in the House and he told me …’ The rest was lost. But the word ‘House’ had given me a clue to my whereabouts. And this was confirmed when I heard another voice say, ‘… you were coming. You’re going to Liverpool Street, aren’t you? Well, I’m going to the Bank. Cheerio.’ I was in the City. ‘House’ meant the Stock Exchange.
I tried to attract the attention of those countless office workers, who hurried past my tin coffin to their firesides in the suburbs. I struggled and screamed. But I made no audible sound. The wheels rumbled across the pavement and bumped a step. Then we were crossing stone again, but the sound was different, and I knew we were inside a building. Then we stopped, and I heard a thick voice cursing the lift. When my carriage was manoeuvred into it, we went down, not up – and down a long way, it seemed. Then more stone passages that had an echoing ring like vaults.
At last came the moment when my box was lifted off the trolley. The journey was over and I felt an indescribable longing to see something and to move. ‘Is he right way up?’ I heard a voice ask. The answer was a grunt. ‘Wouldn’t do to let him die of apoplexy, would it?’ the voice s
aid. There was a chuckle at that, and then footsteps sounded on a stone floor. They were going away from me. They were leaving me. I cried out and struggled. I felt I should stifle. Then I heard the soft thud of a heavy door closing, and suddenly I went limp.
The practice of the Spanish inquisitors – and others before and since them – of walling people up has always had for me a particular horror, and, like all horrors, a particular fascination. I had often thought about that death and how terrible it must be. I know now just how terrible it can be. And I also know that that terror has its limitations. When that door closed, I really believed I was as near to madness as a man ever can be without actually going mad. The stillness, the sense of being deserted, the utter loneliness filled me with a childish terror. Suppose I were in an old river tideway? I was in the City and deep underground. Suppose I had been left here to drown as the tide slowly rose? I could hear small sounds that I knew instinctively to be rats. But the sound of the boots on the floor had been the sound of leather on dry stone.
It was not drowning I feared. And the more my imagination ranged, the more I began to wish that I had been placed in a tideway. At least it would be a quick death. As the alternative, I saw myself crouching in that tin box, immovable for days, whilst starvation and the intolerable ache of my limbs drove me mad. I did not fear death then. Death, I knew, would be the release. But I did fear madness. And for hours, it seemed, I struggled to get a grip of myself. At last I succeeded in resigning myself to my fate. I allowed my imagination to picture the worst, to picture my skin sagging on my bones as I hung suspended in the box and to picture the horrible twisted skeleton I should eventually be. And then, when I had allowed myself to come face to face with the ultimate end, with thirst and pain, I felt calm and resigned. My restricted circulation caused me great pain. But, now that I had faced the worst and conquered my fear, I knew I could stand it.
For a time I think I lost consciousness. Whether the pain was too great or whether I slept, I do not know. But, when my brain became active again, I knew that some considerable time had passed. By then my nerves had become dulled to the pain and my brain no longer seemed linked to my body. It was active and quite above the physical. It ranged of its own accord around the problem that had got me into this fix. And in a moment, it had seized upon a few small points and leapt to the wildest conclusion.
And the strange thing was that I knew it was the right conclusion. I felt no elation. My mind was too dulled for that. But I was glad that I had at least pieced the bits together and achieved a pattern. It made Sedel and his gang of secret agents seem less terrifying. Even my own terrible predicament seemed suddenly of little importance.
For the past two days my mind had been fed with scraps and had tried to piece those scraps into a whole. There had been Schmidt and the message I had decoded. There had been the man with the scar on his knuckles who had followed me from David Shiel’s studio to my club. There had been Freya and the Cones of Runnel and the boat that had been requisitioned. And then there had been the three Calboyd shareholders – Ronald Dorman, with his sumptuous façade of affluence, John S. Burston, who had been driven over the cliffs below the Belle Toute, and Alfred Cappock. And behind these had been Max Sedel, sleek, well-groomed and efficient, a first-class agent and entirely ruthless.
But none of these mattered. They were the puppets. They were pawns in a game played by a master hand. Behind them loomed the heavy sleepy-eyed figure of Baron Ferdinand Marburg. It was incredible. He was head of the big merchant banking house of Marburg. He was a pillar of the country’s financial system. More, he was reputed to be a member of the shadow cabinet. He was a man of tremendous influence and great power – a man, in fact, above suspicion. But, now I had named him, I did not for a moment doubt that I was right.
Sedel had supplied the link in my mind. It was Baron Marburg who had introduced him to journalism. Once having remembered that, everything else fell neatly into place. His membership of the Junior First National. The golden Marburg eagles on the lapels of the man who had hit me in Cappock’s suite. And the scraps of conversation I had heard on the pavement outside my prison. Marburgs stood on the corner between Old Broad Street and Threadneedle Street. Two clerks coming out of the bank would part company on the doorstep if one were going to the Bank tube station and the other to Liverpool Street. Moreover, it was just across the road from the Stock Exchange. Then again, the depth we had descended in the lift. No building but a bank would have vaults so deep. Besides, there was the method Sedel had chosen of removing me from the Wendover. A deed-box, even of such large dimensions, would excite no curiosity, being trundled from the bank’s own strong room van to the vaults by men in the bank’s own livery.
But I couldn’t for the moment see what the man had to gain by it. Perhaps it was one of the departmental heads and not Marburg who was implicated? But I discarded that theory at once, for no one but Marburg had made over a million pounds available to both Burston and Cappock. Perhaps it was money? But I argued that a man who had a world-wide reputation as a financial genius would have no need to play such a dangerous game to make money. There remained only power as the motive. And to this, the answer seemed clear. He had enough power in this country.
But then I remembered something that Peter Venables of the Foreign Office had told me more than a year ago. Marburg’s position as a power in the shadow cabinet had been checked badly when the Government at last swung round to a policy of rearmament. He had strongly opposed it. He had always been a great advocate of close Anglo-German relations and had favoured a secret alliance against the Soviets. He had demanded censorship of the press to prevent the growing virulence of the attacks on Germany. He had not openly favoured Hitler. But he had argued strongly that it was to England’s advantage to see Germany all-powerful in Eastern Europe. He had emphasised that a strong Germany was our best safeguard against Bolshevism. But apparently other influences had been at work, especially heavy industry, and his position had been seriously impaired.
Supposing that he had then realised that power – supreme power – was not to be obtained by any one man under a democratic system? He was a dynamic personality, I had been told. I had never talked to him myself. But I had seen him, and I could still remember that powerful, rather stocky figure, with the heavy face and sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes. I had heard him speak at a Guildhall banquet once. His deep baying voice had had fire and eloquence. Above all, he believed in himself – believed in his destiny, perhaps.
Suppose that, having realised the futility of our own democratic system as a ladder to power – even by the back stairs of the shadow cabinet – he had received an offer of supreme power from Germany. Suppose Baron Ferdinand Marburg was Britain’s Führer-designate. That would explain everything. I remembered how much to the fore he had been over that Czech gold business, and then earlier there had been much talk of big reconstruction loans by the banking house of Marburg. Unlike some other big international merchant banking houses, the Berlin and Paris houses of Marburg were directly controlled from London. I remembered Schmidt’s phrases about a cancer at the heart of England, and what I had then thought to be melodramatic now seemed to be an understatement. I saw that heavy face with the square, powerful jaw and the high forehead, and those sleepy eyes hooded like a hawk. And I knew that that face spelt doom to Britain – that the influence of that one man, if unchecked, was more serious than the loss of several major battles at the front.
And then suddenly the pain in my head returned, and my brain, which had been working with remarkable clarity for a short time, became dulled again. I don’t know whether I slept or fell unconscious. At any rate, I knew nothing until I dreamed that my tin box and I were being pitched into the Thames and woke in a cold sweat to find the box being tilted backwards and the scratch of keys against the locks. The next instant my eyes were blinded by a glare of light as the lid swung back.
My bonds were undone and I was released from the clamps that held me secure in the box. I was laid
on the cold stone floor and my limbs were so stiff that I could not move them. Then began the agony of returning circulation. I think I cried out with the pain. And when I was not half-screaming with agony I was unconscious.
But the pain gradually lessened and, although the light still hurt my eyes, I was able to take stock of my surroundings. I was sprawled on the floor of what looked like a cellar, it had a vaulted stone roof, black with cobwebs and dirt, and from it, suspended by its flex, hung a naked electric bulb. The walls, too, were of stone – great square blocks that reminded me of London Wall. And at intervals round the walls hung rusty chains. I could almost imagine that I was in one of the dungeons of the Tower. The place was empty save for the tin box, which stood upright against one wall like an instrument of torture on show. The lid had been pulled back like the door of a small safe, and inside I could see the clamps and straps which had held me in position. It was only then that the relief of being out of it flooded through me. And with that relief came an overwhelming and ghastly fear of being imprisoned in it again. The box seemed to fascinate me, for it was not until a voice said, ‘I trust you were not too uncomfortable,’ that I turned my gaze upon the two men who had released me and who were now standing by the half-open door.
One was Sedel and the other was the man with the scar on the back of his hand. It was Sedel who had spoken, and there was something feline about the way he watched me. His lips were swollen and black against the white of his face. Two of his front teeth were missing. But I felt no satisfaction at the damage I had done him. He had me at his mercy and I knew he would repay me a hundredfold for that blow.
The Trojan Horse Page 12