The Day of Disaster

by John Creasey

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  1

  The Fugitive

  He was a youth, no more than twenty, but the fear of death was in his eyes.

  He crouched in a ditch at the side of the road, grateful for the inky darkness as the convoy roared and rumbled past. The ditch was clammy from recent rain; the April night bitterly cold. The only light came from the dimmed headlamps of motor-cyclists weaving in and out of the heavier vehicles; demons of light and speed whom the fugitive feared, that night, beyond all things.

  The youth had been in England before, but only in time of peace. Since then, he had learned the bitter way, how differently a stranger was received by a country and people swept by breath of war. Crouching there in his hiding-place as the ground quaked and trembled beneath the wheels and tractors of the machines of violence, he re-lived a night impossible to forget. A night when the men in the machines had been clad in field-grey, and the roadside and the hedges had been littered with the dead and dying.

  A part of the British army was on manoeuvres, but this he did not know, unable to associate this unceasing roar with anything other than murder and pillage and the cursing of the wounded. Lying there he heard those sounds again, throbbing through his mind, his heart, his very being.

  There came a time when no tanks or lorries or motorcycles passed him. As their noise faded slowly into an unknown distance he dared to stand up, gasping as cramp shot through his limbs, causing him to fall helplessly over the lip of the ditch. He straightened up slowly, the agonising contraction of his muscles giving way to the lesser pain of cold and hunger.

  He was obsessed, his mental vision distorted by privation and hardship.

  He had spent two months in Belgium and another in France representing himself as a refugee from Alsace, and thus gaining sympathy, and enough food and drink to get him to the coast. In a small motor-boat with three Frenchmen he had set out for England, but a Messerschmitt had sighted them. The boat had been riddled with bullets, overturned and sunk.

  He alone had survived, and with the help of a lifebelt drifted towards the English coast. Exhausted and unconscious, he had been thrown ashore. Coming slowly to life again, he had found himself repeating one name, monotonously, incessantly.

  Loftus.

  He had heard it from the lips of a man dying in a fever, and he remembered the other words, which made sense only in phrases.

  ‘Loftus. Spell it backwards. S-u-t-f-o-l. Spell it backwards. See you through. Tell him anything you know. See you through. Loftus.’

  The man who had uttered these words had befriended the fugitive. A burly, gruff-voiced socialist-Frenchman, he had behaved like most of his countrymen, cursing the Nazis and blessing the English, careful not to be overheard.

  Then it had been said that this Frenchman was a spy.

  He had been shot at and wounded by the Germans, and the fugitive had helped him get away. Beyond recovery he had lapsed into feverish rambling, muttering of England, always England. Then suddenly, in startlingly clear tones, the dying man had cried:

  ‘Loftus. Spell it backwards.’

  When it had seemed that he was on the point of death, a letter for him had reached Emile, since there were ways in which letters could be delivered without passing through German hands.

  The spy, if spy he was, had read the letter, then fallen back, staring towards the sky.

  ‘Emile—dare I trust you? This letter—get it to England, to——’

  A warning had been brought, then, by a child from the town; the Germans were searching for Communists in the woods and the fields; Emile and his friend must be quite silent until the searching was over. It had lasted most of the day, dark field-grey uniforms had been close by very often. A dozen times the dying man had started to mutter, and Emile had thrust a hand across his mouth until the urgent danger had gone. When at last he had died, Emile had left him, not knowing whether his words had been a solemn trust to be honoured, or the outcome of delirium. More than anything else he remembered: ‘Loftus. Spell it backwards.’

  There had followed the journey across France and the Channel, until the moment when he had awakened on the sandy beach of an English cove. Later he had been able to find a gap in the barbed wire which ran along the coast, and reach the safety of the wooded land nearby, remaining hidden until nightfall.

  He wanted to find Loftus.

  He did not know where Loftus lived, nor how he could discover it. His mind would not let him face the difficulties, the virtual impossibilities; he was driven on by the obsession to find Loftus, doggedly determined to avoid capture.

  He did not hear the movements on either side of the hedge.

  He did not see the figures until they sprang upon him, crowding his vision with rifles, vague shapes of bodies, the white blur of faces. He uttered a shriek which carried itself into the bitter wind. A gruff voice said:

  ‘Hold the blighter.’

  ‘Stop it, you ruddy fool.’

  He struck out wildly but weakly, while hands gripped him. The gruff voice spoke again: ‘He’s shivering like hell!’

  A torch shone on his face, half-blinding him.

  ‘Why, he’s only a kid.’

  ‘Kid or not, don’t let him go,’ said the first speaker.

  ‘But who the blazes would have thought we’d been searching all day for this brat!’

  The exchange passed over Emile’s head. He tried to find words of English but he could not, until suddenly he shouted in a high-pitched voice:

  ‘Loftus, Loftus! Spell it backwards, spell it backwards !’

  ‘He’s trying to be funny,’ opined the man with the gruff voice.

  ‘He’s not,’ said the other sharply. ‘He’s all in. Let’s get to Teddy’s place, if we get him warm we might learn something. All right, old chap, we’re not going to knock your head off even if you are a ruddy Hun.’

  They were friendly; that forced itself through the barrier of fear in Emile’s mind. They were kindly, they did not hurt him, they talked of getting him warm. He stared at their vague shapes, barely discernible against the lowering sky; and then he pitched forward. He would have fallen but for their restraining hold, and he had no knowledge of being lifted over a man’s shoulder and carried along the road towards a cottage not far from the Dorset coast.

  Bill Loftus was learning to walk.

  It was no easy matter, although after four months in bed, he had grown used to the idea that a man in the middle thirties who, until the fight in a Southampton hotel, had been more active than most, would have to learn to walk again.1

  During the convalescence, after the amputation of his leg, he had experienced spells of acute depression. There had been brighter intervals, however, helped by his many friends and by the normal optimism of his nature, and when he had first started to use the aluminium leg he had found it amusing as often as not. When it no longer made him laugh it made him angry; getting angry with his own leg eventually amused him again. On the whole it was not a gloomy convalescence.

  He was in a nursing-home in Surrey.

  ‘Nursing-home’ was the word used for it, although in fact it was a rather beautiful house reserved for the personnel of Department Z exclusively, and was run by Bob Kerr, himself handicapped by an artificial arm, and one of the earliest victims of the dangers of the Department’s work.

  Before losing his leg Loftus had been a vast man. He remained tall, two inches or more above six feet and five inches taller than Kerr, but his flesh had wasted. Now his lounge suite flapped about him in a wind which was warm even for A
pril; it seemed to him that it slapped about his aluminium leg more than his flesh and bone one.

  On the lawn which spread round the gracious Elizabethan house, in the shade of a gigantic Cedar, Loftus was standing quite still. Kerr stood ten feet away from him.

  ‘Two to one you don’t make it,’ Kerr said. He was smiling; a rugged-faced, not particularly handsome man, very broad at the shoulders, and thick-set.

  ‘Taken, in cigarettes,’ said Loftus promptly. ‘Packets of twenty.’ He carried a stout stick in his right hand, raised it off the ground, and took a slow, careful step forward. He swayed; the stick went perilously close to the ground, but did not touch it. After balancing on both legs again he went forward more cautiously.

  ‘We ought to set a time limit,’ said Kerr.

  ‘Shut up, you ass.’ Loftus kept his mouth tightly closed, looked steadily ahead of him, and made two more steps. He was halfway to Kerr.

  ‘Careful now, careful,’ counselled Kerr. ‘Bear a little to the left—I mean the right.’ He stood unmoving, a hand ready to support Loftus if the latter failed at the last minute. Slowly, resolutely, Loftus advanced, until at last he gripped Kerr’s shoulder with his free hand.

  ‘That’s forty cigarettes!’ he said exuberantly. He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and wiped his forehead. ‘By George, for the first time in my life I really feel sorry for a toddler beginning to walk! Seriously, how did I do?’

  ‘Within a week you’ll be running,’ said Kerr. ‘I’m not sure that it isn’t a record. Tubby Simm walked on his own after seven days, but he only had metal below the knee.’ Kerr took out a cigarette case. ‘This goes off the forty,’ he added, ‘I can’t afford to give ‘em away as well as lose ‘em. What about a drink?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking of it,’ said Loftus, as they moved slowly towards the house. Inside the porch he rested for a moment, then stepped cautiously on to the parquet flooring. ‘I wish the girls were here,’ Loftus added, a trifle wistfully. ‘It calls for a celebration. What time will they be back?’

  ‘They’re catching the four o’clock bus,’ said Kerr. ‘Can’t be back before five. We’ll have lunch, and then a couple of hundred up,’ he went on. ‘I suppose——’ he hesitated—‘I suppose you’ll want to get back to London as soon as you feel sure of yourself?’

  ‘Ye—es,’ said Loftus. He looked at Kerr keenly. ‘Why don’t you come up for a few weeks? Craigie could find you plenty to do.’

  ‘It’s an idea, and I’ve often hankered after it, but I’ve got used to being down here. I’m afraid of getting unsettled if I start real work again.’ He was frowning as he led Loftus into the low-ceilinged dining-room.

  Moving across to a sideboard he took out whisky and soda. Loftus accepted a glass in silence, his eyes shadowed. He knew what Kerr implied, and he wondered whether he, himself, would feel the same in a few years’ time. What Kerr really meant, of course, was that the office work which was all Department Z could really offer would not be satisfying. What work Kerr did for Craigie, the Department’s Chief, he did at the nursing-home; he had not said so in as many words, but Loftus knew that he felt less dependent on others that way. It was even more than that; it was a way of avoiding constant contact with the more active agents. There must be times when Kerr yearned after the days when he had been Craigie’s leading agent.

  Kerr said: ‘Bill, it gets under my skin sometimes. I can fly a ‘plane as well as the next man, and God knows I want to. There are one-armed men in operating squadrons. I——’ he paused and then went on abruptly: ‘I applied for a job with the R.A.F. I was turned down, told I was doing more useful work. Useful!’

  Loftus smiled ruefully.

  ‘Aren’t you? You’ve been a godsend to me, and I don’t mean that tritely.’ He took a drink. ‘Bob, I’ve a feeling you’ve developed a Department complex. You’ve been looking after this place for years, but now the tempo of the war has increased. Last Autumn’s Russian and Libyan campaigns made you feel like a million dollars, absolute seething because it seemed we weren’t doing a damned thing.’

  ‘The difference being that you were doing something,’ Kerr amended.

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Loftus. ‘I was doing Department work. It’s peculiar——’ he paused, searching for the right words, ‘it’s peculiar because it’s one of the few things where each agent can feel he is doing, individually, a constructive job of work. Once we’ve done that, nothing else is really satisfying.’

  ‘If you’re trying to say it’s an outlet for individualism, you’re right,’ put in Kerr, ‘but the same applies to fighter pilots, they’re quite on their own.’

  ‘Only in the air,’ said Loftus. ‘They’re subject to control when they’re at the base. The discipline’s there, although it’s not so obvious. But damn it, why are we talking like a brace of blimp philosophers? We want something to do, we know what we want, and we know we can’t do it. I found myself thinking one day last week I wished I’d never heard of the Secret Service.’ He smiled a little, his lips curving wryly. ‘I’ve been out of it for six months, and even now the very words sound unreal. Secret Service? I don’t believe in it!’ He laughed shortly. ‘This I suppose is the natural swing of the pendulum after the walking triumph. Bound to come. Anyhow, here’s something to eat.’ He heard a maid approaching, wheeling a dinner wagon. ‘Every time I sit down to a meal I think it’s time I stopped brooding and realised my luck.’

  Kerr smiled. ‘Shouldn’t we all? But between you and me, I’d rather go on short rations and be abroad.’

  ‘How many men have you had here for convalescence?’ asked Loftus. ‘In the past year, I mean.’

  ‘About thirty,’ said Kerr.

  Loftus stood up carefully, and went to the table.

  ‘All right, Bessie,’ said Kerr, ‘we’ll serve ourselves.’ He smiled, and the maid beamed back as she wheeled her trolley ahead of her, closing the door.

  ‘I was going to say,’ went on Loftus as Kerr served vegetables, ‘that you’ve put thirty of our men back on the job, and with one or two exceptions, like me, they’ve started work again fairly quickly. It’s a job absolutely worth doing. It’s your person and individual effect on ‘em that does it. Craigie knows it. I’ve always known it. Can’t you get that into your head?’

  Kerr shrugged. ‘All the same I’d like to be at something more definite, more—hallo, what’s that?’

  He broke off at the sound of a sharp knock on the front door. Moving towards it, he saw a youth in postman’s clothing holding out a single letter.

  ‘Mornin’, sir, this be overlooked like on the mornin’ round.’

  The letter changed hands and the youth touched his forehead and turned away. Kerr glanced at the envelope, which was addressed to Loftus, and went back to the dining-room.

  Loftus said quietly:

  ‘That’s Craigie’s writing.’ He took it swiftly and opened it with a sharp, decisive movement. Kerr, watching him, knew from his manner how much he was depending on finding work again with Craigie. Kerr’s pulse was beating fast with vicarious excitement.

  Loftus read swiftly, his eyes beginning to shine. He looked up half-way through and said abruptly: ‘This is for you as well as for me. I’ll read it aloud.’

  ‘I’ll read it over your shoulder,’ said Kerr, reaching his side quickly.

  The letter was headed ‘Whitehall, April 11th;’ and was written in Craigie’s small, neat writing.

  Dear Bill,

  I haven’t much time to do more than just run through the outlines of this, and I’ll leave you to work out the approach to it. A young Frenchman—he might be Belgian, or he could be a German acting the part—was seen coming ashore near Lyme Regis one day last week. The Home Guard found him after about fifteen hours. He was in a state of exhaustion, and was taken to hospital. He’s still there—in Weymouth—and I can’t get down to see him myself.

  Apparently he’s physically on the mend, but mentally unbalanced—that’s the word given t
o me; I don’t know what it implies. At all events, he’s been repeating your name, thus ‘Loftus, spell it backwards’. The last three words speak for themselves; obviously he’s been in contact with one of our men.

  You and Bob had better go and see him. He’s fit enough, I’m told, for removal to the nursing-home, and you can keep him under your eye there. I don’t know a thing more than I’ve told you, except that the only name he gives himself is Emile.

  If you can’t do anything about it yet, let me know quickly, and I’ll try to get to Weymouth. One way and the other I’m so busy I want to avoid it if I can.

  How’s the leg? Christine tells me you’re doing wonders with it already.

  There were the initials ‘G.C.’ at the foot of the letter, but even before reading the last paragraph Kerr and Loftus were looking at each other eagerly.

  Loftus said: ‘How long will it take us to get to Weymouth?’

  ‘About three hours,’ said Kerr. ‘I’ll tell Barney to bring a car round. I’d better drive, we won’t want anyone else with us. And you’d better scrawl a note for the girls and tell them we’ll be late. Bessie can get a room ready.’ He hurried out.

  All interest in food gone, Loftus stood up. He hardly noticed, as he went into the morning-room to write the note, that it was the first time he had walked unthinkingly on his new left leg.

  1 Read Go Away, Death, by John Creasey.

  2

  Loftus Sings

  Loftus sang.

  He started when the Bentley, which Kerr nurtured as carefully as a hen protecting her chicks, was some ten miles from the nursing-home. Until then the journey had been silent, for neither man felt talkative, and neither was by nature inclined to talk for the sake of it.

  But presently Loftus’s lips had begun to curve at the corners, as if he saw a joke too precious to share. Then he begun to hum. Gradually he put snatches of words into his humming. Finally he raised his voice and threw his head back.

  Kerr shot him a quick, sideways glance.

  ‘For the first time since you’ve been up I wish you were in bed with the door shut,’ he said pointedly.