Calamity in Kent, A British Library Crime Classic

by John Rowland

  “I should think the more crucial question is who do you think I am?” he returned. He was not a scrap annoyed, which riled me a little. Nothing, in fact, is more annoying than the man who resolutely refuses to be upset by any sort of insult which one may hurl at him.

  “Is that important?” I asked.

  “We will return to that question in a few minutes, if you do not mind, Mr. London,” he said. “I have some more important matters which you can help me to deal with. I should therefore be very much obliged if you would just answer a few queries which I am going to put to you.”

  There was something very odd about this. The man was talking as if this was an ordinary business conversation. The fact that I was tied to a chair and half-blinded by the light that was shining directly in my eyes seemed to have no influence at all on the way he was speaking.

  “Ask away,” I said, “though, of course, I can’t guarantee that I shall answer all your questions.”

  A kind of silky malice crept into his voice as he replied to that. “Somehow I think that you will, Mr. London,” he said. “You see, we have methods of making people talk, methods that have rarely failed. But I hope that there will be no need to use the more drastic methods against your good self. In fact, I am sure that there will not—you have too much good hard common sense to be under the necessity of driving us to any inordinate lengths in these matters.”

  I didn’t altogether like this. During the war I had heard a few things about the more unpleasant refinements of the Gestapo torture camps. I had no doubt that it was something of that sort at which he was hinting. I hoped that somehow I should be able to stall him off until Shelley arrived—but I knew that to do that would mean wasting a considerable amount of time.

  “I hope that we can get together on these things, too,” I said. “But I can’t really tell about that until you start asking your questions, can I?”

  “Well, my first question is this: who told you about this place, and suggested that it might be worth your while, as a newspaper crime investigator, to come out here?”

  “No one,” I answered.

  “No one? What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you must know, it was a fellow-guest of the boarding-house in Broadgate where I am living,” I said. “But he did not for a moment suggest that it would be of any interest or value to me as a crime investigator.”

  “What did he say? And what was his name?” These queries were rapped out like shots from a gun.

  “His name is Sam Weldon,” I replied, making up a name on the spur of the moment. I knew that they would take time to check up on such points, and I was also aware that if I played my cards correctly, by the time they had found I was not telling them the truth, Shelley would be dealing with them, and therefore I should have no need to do anything about it.

  “And what did he tell you?” snapped my opponent.

  “I was saying to him that I was at a bit of a loose end this evening, that I was getting a little tired of the Broadgate pubs, and that I thought I’d like to drink somewhere else for a change. He told me that this was a pleasant little pub, where the bitter was first-rate, and that he thought…”

  The other man interrupted suddenly: “Are you trying to tell me that you merely came to the Smithy for an evening’s amusement, just to have a few drinks in a new pub which you had not visited before?”

  “That is exactly what I am trying to tell you,” I agreed.

  “And you knew nothing about this place apart from that?” he demanded with a kind of savage intensity.

  “Nothing at all.”

  “It was never suggested to you by anyone that the place might have some features of interest to you in your other capacity as a crime reporter?”

  “Never.”

  He rose to his feet. Yes, I reflected, I was quite right. He was a tall man—six feet two or three, I reckoned. I still couldn’t make out any details of his features.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. London,” he announced in tones that were almost comically reluctant. “But it won’t wash.”

  “Won’t wash?” I said.

  “No; I frankly don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t know how I am to convince you that I’m telling the truth,” I said in what I hoped was a satisfactory imitation of a man thoroughly aggrieved and disgruntled by the way in which he is being treated.

  “Nor do I,” he snapped, sitting down again.

  “Yet I had no idea that there was anything odd going on here at the Smithy,” I said, “and even now I’m not at all sure what it is. The fact that you’ve got me tied up like this convinces me that there is something here in some way connected with the crime that I am engaged in investigating on behalf of my paper. But what the connexion is I don’t know. You have completely mystified me—and that is something that happens very rarely in my life.”

  “I don’t expect that it will happen again in your life, Mr. London,” he said smoothly, and this time there was no doubt about the innuendo.

  “That’s something to be thankful for, anyhow,” I remarked, pretending not to see what he was getting at.

  He suddenly faced me with another question, obviously intended to take me completely by surprise. “Are you sure that you were not put on to this place by your old friend…what is his name?…Inspector Shelley,” he said.

  “Inspector Shelley is merely a man with whom I have been inevitably in contact over my work for The Daily Wire,” I tried to explain. “He has been very good to me, helping me with some information which has provided me with useful background material for my stories in the paper.”

  “Indeed?” This time the sneer was not disguised. There wasn’t even an attempt to disguise it.

  For almost the first time since I had come into that room I felt a spasm of fear. Did this man know too much? Had he some inside source of information? It was not pleasant to think that he might merely be laughing at me, thinking that I was a silly blundering fool, who had pushed my head into a hornets’ nest without even noticing that the hornets could sting? Or did he really not know as much as he pretended? Was he really only bluffing after all? It was impossible, of course, for me to say which was the correct analysis of the position into which, with Shelley’s aid, I had got myself. But I felt, as I say, a definite twinge of fear when I thought that it was possible that I had put myself within the power of a man who knew all about me, had, perhaps observed my work in Broadgate with a smile on his face, knowing that before long I should fall into his hands, to be dealt with at his leisure, and as he thought fit. But, I told myself, it was no good giving way to any sort of despair. I had to face the situation as best I could. If my opponent was bluffing—well, I could bluff also, and maybe I should be able to bluff my way out of this situation, as I had, in the past, bluffed myself out of others that had seemed, if not as awkward, every whit as difficult as this.

  “Anyhow, sir,” I said, as politely as I could, “what do you propose to do with me? You can’t keep me a prisoner here. I should be missed before long. In fact, I might easily be missed by now, since I have not arrived back at dinner.”

  “I’m not as easily taken in as that, Mr. London,” he said, with a chuckle in his voice. “I am aware that, like so many journalists, you are a trifle erratic, shall I say, over the matter of mealtimes. I am quite sure that if you did not turn up for a few hours at your boarding-house the good Mrs. Cecil would be in no way perturbed.”

  Here again there was the suggestion that he had a deep knowledge of my general background. The name of Mrs. Cecil came from his tongue so readily that it at once suggested to me that he had kept me well under observation for some time. The mere fact that he knew her name, in fact, shook me somewhat.

  “But the fact remains, that I shall soon be missed,” I said. “People knew that I was coming here for a few hours.”

  “People?” He at once took up every point, I not
iced.

  “My friend Weldon,” I said hastily, trying to cover up what had undoubtedly been a verbal slip. “And I have no doubt that he will have mentioned it to others. We are a group of friends in the boarding-house, you know.” I thought that I sounded rather like a radio comedian in saying this, but it was the best way, on the spur of the moment in thinking a way out of the difficulty into which my careless talk had landed me.

  The man laughed out loud. “My dear Mr. London,” he said. “You must realise that we are not quite as simple as all that.”

  “No?”

  “No. You were no doubt seen to enter the saloon bar here, but we shall have plenty of witnesses prepared to swear that you stayed for an hour only, that you were then slightly the worse for drink, and that when you left you were seen to stagger down the road towards the bus-stop. Once that is satisfactorily established there should be very little difficulty in proving that you stumbled, when half-drunk, beneath the wheels of a passing lorry, or into the bed of one of the nearby streams that you have no doubt observed passing underneath the road at fairly frequent intervals.”

  This was said in a perfectly friendly fashion. The man might have been discussing the prospects of the cricket season instead of describing a way in which I might be brought to an unpleasantly sticky end.

  I must confess that it took me aback a bit. I tried, however, not to show this, and kept my voice as steady as I could when I replied to him.

  “Then what do you propose?” I asked.

  “I propose to leave you to yourself—shall we say for about half an hour?”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then I shall return and ask you if you have come around to a more sensible view of things. In other words, my dear Mr. London, I shall want to know if you have decided to tell me the truth about what brought you here.”

  “And if I can tell you no more than I have told you up to now?”

  “Then I shall be compelled to apply to you those rather more drastic methods at which I hinted earlier.”

  He melted into the dark distance. I was alone.

  Chapter XXVIII

  In Which I Think All is Lost

  My position now was about as desperate as it well could be. I felt pretty grim. I tried, of course, to tell myself that Shelley would soon rumble that something had gone wrong. But at the same time I knew that he might come to this conclusion too late.

  After all, Shelley had said to me that he thought it would be dangerous for him to embark on a full-scale police raid on the Smithy Inn. He thought that in that case there was a considerable danger that these people might escape. And if he had been thus hesitant when he was briefing me for the job, he would not be at all likely to make the raid when he thought that I was engaged in investigating the place. He would, in other words, tend to hesitate until he was sure that I had either succeeded or finally failed. And final failure might well descend on me before I was able to get in touch with the detective—if, indeed, I ever got in touch with him again.

  Yes; I was a pretty dismal creature in the first few moments after the villain of the piece had left me to think about my problems. He, no doubt, intended that I should go through the mental torture of seeing where everything had gone wrong. He hoped that by facing these facts I might be led to tell him everything that had happened.

  Personally, I was convinced that there was little that I could do about it. To begin with, I was not disposed to tell, but in any event, I knew that if I did so I should gain nothing. The man I was up against was, I knew, in no way scrupulous; the way in which events had gone was enough proof of that. And if I gave him the most exact and truthful account of what had happened, the only result would be that he would kill me at the end, just as he would kill me at the beginning, did I merely refuse to say a word.

  In fact, as I have already said, my position was as grim as possible. I couldn’t see any way out of it. At the same time I thought that there must be some way. Human nature is so resilient that few men will ever admit themselves to be utterly defeated. The eternal obstinacy and optimism of human nature is enough to overcome anything.

  Then there was something which gave me a little basis for my irrational optimism. I had, as I have said, been tied to the chair in such a way that I couldn’t move. I had wriggled and writhed, but not a movement had I been able to make. But now, all suddenly, I felt the ropes that held my hands slip; the man must have tied me not quite as securely as he thought. One of the knots must have given slightly. It made my heart suddenly thump with excitement. If I could get out of these bonds it would mean that I should be able to take the man by surprise when he came back into the room!

  At first I was tempted to pull madly at the ropes that bound me; but a sudden stab of pain from my wrist made me see that this was no way of getting free. My captor had been cunning enough to tie me up so that any sudden jerk would merely tighten the rope around my wrist.

  I therefore moved in a gingerly manner. I could move my right wrist about an inch, I found. I wriggled it very carefully. Of course, I did not know quite what I was doing, since I was totally unable to see just how my hands were secured. Still, I thought, as I twisted the wrist, that the bonds were getting slowly looser. Something had happened that enabled me to loosen the rope still further.

  The sweat poured down my forehead as I struggled. The pain in my wrist was excruciating. Still, I was sure that I was now getting near freedom. That put real joy into my heart. At last, I told myself, my opponent had made a mistake. I did not, at this stage, make up my mind exactly what I was going to do when I had escaped from my bonds. But at the same time I knew that I was a bit nearer to liberty, and, in my desperate position, that was quite enough to make me feel very much heartened.

  More wriggles, more struggles. Now there was a good two inches of play in that loosened rope. It was good to know that I was now on the right lines.

  I persisted, though the muscles of my right arm were already feeling very weary from the unaccustomed effort. Soon I gasped with delight. My right hand was free!

  It was then only a matter of moments before I had freed the other hand. Then the bonds which tied my feet to the legs of the chair were undone.

  I rose to my feet, and nearly collapsed on the floor. I sat down again suddenly, and massaged my ankles. They had been so tightly tied that the circulation had been interfered with. Still, it took only a matter of a few minutes before my feet and ankles felt somewhere near normal. I stood cautiously up, rested my weight first on one foot and then on the other. It was all right. I felt some slight weakness—the sort of feeling you get when an ankle is slightly sprained—but I thought that I was now in sufficient form, if not to win a hundred yards’ sprint, at least to tackle most things that might come along.

  Then I thought it was time to look around me. After all, the man who was responsible for my imprisonment would soon be back. He had said that he was going to leave me for half an hour or so to think things over. That half-hour would soon be over. And I had to work out some way to get the better of him.

  The trouble was that I was not at all sure he would be alone. If he was on his own the matter would be comparatively simple. I should merely have to stand behind the door and clout him with the proverbial blunt instrument as he came in.

  If, on the other hand, he was accompanied, I might find myself faced with the question of how to tackle two or more men at the same time. After all, I was not yet a hundred per cent fit. There were various muscular stiffnesses which I had to overcome, and I didn’t expect that they would wear off by the time the man came back.

  Still, I told myself, it was no use thinking of too many awkward things before they happened. I would work out a scheme that would suffice to deal with the main villain. If it proved that he brought assistance with him, I should have in some way to temporise and hope that the moments as they passed would bring some inspiration.

&n
bsp; The obvious way, as I have already said, to deal with the one man if he came alone, was to dot him over the head, either as he came in, or as he wandered around the room. It would certainly be no good for me to sit peacefully in the chair where he had tied me, for then he would never give me a reasonable chance of hitting him, since he would certainly face me throughout the new interview.

  No; I should have to hide in some way that would give me a chance of taking the fellow completely by surprise. I glanced around me. There was, of course, one obvious place to hide, and that was behind the curtain—the place where my opponent had clearly hidden when I came in. But I thought that was so obvious that he would jump at it as the probable place where I should be—that is, when he saw that I was no longer tied to the chair as he had left me.

  The rest of the room was more or less bare. There were few if any places which looked in any way possible as hiding places. Behind the door. That was about the only spot that seemed to hold out any promise of success. I stood behind it and mentally pictured the man coming in. Yes; that was what I would do.

  Of course, it had the very real objection that if he came in with some of his assistants, I should be at once exposed to their attentions. But I thought that I could lie more or less doggo, at any rate for those first few crucial seconds when their eyes would no doubt be riveted to the chair where they had been expecting to find me.

  The next thing was the choice of a weapon. He had taken away my pistol, or the butt of that would have been ideal. I have had little experience of so hitting a man across the back of the head (that was what I proposed to do) in such a way as to knock him out noiselessly. But I guessed that what was wanted was something heavy and not bulky. One couldn’t expect to hit him at all effectively, for example, with a chair. It would have enough weight, but it would be so unwieldy that it would not hit him in the necessarily vulnerable spot.

  A poker would have been the sort of thing indicated. But there was no poker in the room. There was, indeed, no coal fire. In the empty grate stood an ornate electric fire. I looked at the grate carefully, as I thought that there might be something else in the way of fire-irons. But there was absolutely nothing at all that was likely to prove in any way a satisfactory weapon.