“Don’t be so horribly technical,” said Paddy; but he sounded interested.
“A man to get around and look at things – interview directors, talk to the Stock Exchange wallahs, attend bankruptcy meetings and make a note of who is doing the buying. Well, as a chartered accountant you’ve obviously got the financial qualifications. I know you like scribbling – and – in short – I mentioned your name.”
“Oh, Paddy – a journalist!”
“Well, why not, Jenny. Dash it, it’ll make a change from sitting on my – well, anyway, it’ll be a change from Barrows and Co.”
“There’s this further point,” said Nap, “which I think may have escaped you. In your new job, you’ll be perfectly situated to investigate the affairs of the Stalagmite – unobtrusively.”
“I’m game,” said Paddy. “And – it’s damned decent of you, Nap.”
“There’s one other thing. I mention it as a purely practical point. I don’t think you’re very well situated for either job if you go on living out at Staines. I mean, think of the trailing that head cashier from opium den to opium den along Limehouse Causeway, and then finding you’ve missed your last train home.”
“Curse it,” said Paddy, “of course I want to live in London. Who doesn’t? But there’s nothing to be had except hideous furnished flats in Hampstead at £500 a year.”
“I was going to suggest,” said Nap calmly, “that you came and lived here, with your legal adviser. There’s plenty of room – until the happy event comes off, I mean.”
“Nap,” said Jenny, “you’re a dear.” She rose to her feet and kissed him warmly on the tip of his button nose.
Mr Rumbold accepted the salute with an aplomb which Paddy considered must have been due to his French upbringing, and merely said: “Remember, please, that I also am a respectably engaged young man.”
4
Living together, as Anne of Cleves was once heard to remark, can be a trial to both parties: but the Rumbold–Yeatman-Carter ménage seemed to stagger along very equably on a basis of mutual misunderstanding.
Nap thought Paddy the most typical Englishman of his acquaintance. Athletic, obstinate, straightforward and (once the ice was broken), eminently “clubbable”.
He hadn’t the faintest conception of the real thoughts and ambitions which hived inside his friend’s untidy head: though he had been near to some of them when he had said, “I know you like scribbling.” In fact, Paddy had always wanted to write. He was honest enough to know that he had no flair for creation, but he had a knack of description. Had he not been an accountant he would have made a good reporter.
Paddy, on the other hand, thought Nap pleasant but unstable. Rather French. He had known him when they were lieutenants together in an infantry training battalion in the early days of the war. Nap had not been a good lieutenant. In Paddy’s opinion he had lacked the wholehearted enthusiasm which is the basis of good regimental soldiering. In 1941, when Paddy got his captaincy, Nap had disappeared. Friends had reported from time to time that he held some sort of staff job in London. His duties had seemed to take him fairly frequently to the ‘Salted Almond’ and the ‘Berkeley Buttery’ and he appeared to keep a permanent room at the Savoy.
On the third morning of his stay in the Inner Temple Paddy got down first to breakfast and sorted out the mail. He had a good laugh over this when he discovered a letter addressed to Lieut. Colonel N Rumbold, DSO. “You’ve gone up in the world, my lad,” he said to Nap, who came in at this moment.
Nap opened the letter without comment and looked at the signature. “Silly young goat,” was the only remark he made before starting on his toast.
“Who’s the joker?”
“Burtonshaw, at the War Office. Just a note about some arrears of pay.”
“What’s the idea of – I mean, why did he – good God,” said Paddy, as an awful thought struck him. “You aren’t all that, are you?”
‘‘Certainly not,” said Nap. “And he’d no right to put it. I became plain N Rumbold, Esq., on the day that Group 27 was demobilized.”
“But you were a loot-colonel?”
“Yes – as a matter of fact–”
“And you did get a DSO?”
“I did, yes.”
“It must have been a smashing staff job,” said Paddy. “Where did you put the marmalade yesterday?”
“In the coal-box,” said Nap. “Yes, it was, rather.”
Both young men continued to eat their breakfast, but before the silence could become awkward Nap said, “There doesn’t seem any point in keeping quiet about it at this stage. I mean, I always thought all the hush-hush business was a bit of a mistake, even at the time. As a matter of fact I meant to tell you, if the occasion cropped up.”
“You were in Intelligence?”
“Almost,” said Nap. “I did some of that Maquis stuff. On account of my talking French rather well and having a pack of relatives out there. As a matter of fact I spent the last four months before D-day near Besançon, in the Franche Comté.”
“Blowing up railway bridges?”
“I never achieved a railway bridge. Though I did once blow up a very tiny part of a synthetic oil-plant. Chiefly it was removing lengths of railroad track, cutting telephone wires and playing the fool generally.”
“God,” said Paddy enviously, “the luck some people have. An undeserving fellow like you, Nap. Just because you happened to be able to speak the lingo – being allowed to blow up a synthetic oil-plant. I’ve always wanted to blow up an oil-plant. Never mind – good show all the same. Hello. What’s this?”
The letter lying on his plate bore on its triangular flap a sign which he recognized. The trade mark of the Stalagmite Insurance Corporation.
Hardly knowing what to expect he tore it open and looked first at the signature.
“This is from Tiny Anstruther. I didn’t know that type could write. Must be in answer to a phone call I sent him. Yes – here we are. ‘I have had a good scout round and so has Miss Pocock – etc., etc. – there’s only one bloke who looks anything like your description, so far as we can see, and that’s Brandison, the chief cashier. He has a room next door to Legate’s so it might be the chap you’re after – ’ Good Lord!”
Paddy and Nap looked at each other.
As when two photographs are placed in a stereoscope the images in them grow suddenly in depth and life, so did the figure of the Chief Cashier spring at them out of the shadows.
Not two people, but one.
The man with the broken nose was the Chief Cashier – the Chief Cashier was the man with the broken nose.
“There’s our lead,” said Nap. “We ought to be able to do something about this, now.”
“Keep an eye on the blighter, eh?”
“That’s the sort of thing.”
It occurred to Nap that it was time he acquainted his fiancée with the state of affairs. He would ask her out to dinner the following night. It was her night off. He sat down and addressed a letter to Nurse Patricia Goodbody, at St Erasmus Hospital.
5
Nurse Goodbody was not in the best of tempers. A large, fair, usually good-tempered girl, she was born to minister calmly and competently to the wants of others. Normally she enjoyed making beds and jiggling mysterious things up and down in small jars and talking to patients about themselves.
Today, however, things had gone wrong. This, inevitably, was due to Sister, who had returned that morning from her weekend off duty. Patricia disliked Sister Faith, who returned the feeling with compound interest.
It was nearly 10.30 before she finished in the ward and crossed the square on her way to her quarters. It was a pleasant place in summer with trees and a fountain, but now it was bleak and perishing cold and she clutched her warm cloak thankfully round her shoulders; wondering, as she passed the pond, how the goldfish kept alive when the surface was covered with ice.
At the post office inside the Nurse’s Home entrance she found a letter from Nap and opened it
on the spot. “Wonder what he’s up to,” she thought, “dinner tonight – at the usual place – good.” Dinner with Nap would do her a power of good in her present state of mind – whatever wildcat scheme he might have to discuss with her.
“Nurse Goodbody” – it was the Home Sister.
“Blast,” said Patricia. “Yes, Sister – coming.”
“Telephone call from the ward,” said Home Sister. “Sister Faith wants you to do rounds tonight.”
Patricia’s thoughts on this gratuitous interference with her liberty were fortunately unprintable. “Doing rounds” entailed taking a list of patients to the steward’s office, diet-sheets to the kitchens, a visit to the porter at the main gate, and then over to outpatients. Beginning at 6.30 how could she possibly manage to be finished and out to her rendezvous with Nap by 7.30?
Well, with a short cut here and a bit of skimping there, it might be done – just. And so it would have been, but for an unexpected set of X-ray slips which had to be taken up to the third floor.
As it was, she was a quarter of an hour late and found Nap waiting in the rain like a patient cherub.
Over dinner at Pagnanis he told her the story.
“We shall have to follow this man Brandison,” he said. “Maybe for days. And I expect that I shall have to do most of the following. Paddy’s a dear good chap and as keen on the job as mustard, but the fact of the matter is that his feet are too big.”
“Nap,” said Patricia, “do be careful. I’ve got a feeling that something’s wrong.”
“Of course something’s wrong, sweet. And we’re going to find out what it is.”
“But why should you do all this?”
It was an awkward question, and one which Nap had asked himself several times and to which he had found no very convincing answer. The true grounds of the matter was probably incurable romanticism. However, that would never do for Patricia, who was nothing if not a practical girl.
“I reckon,” he said, “that it’s a sort of public duty. When a person sees that something’s wrong, he ought to try to do his best to put it right.”
“Well, do be careful.”
6
Nap, during his months in France, had been instructed in the arts of street-work by those high-class experts, the French Maquis. Accordingly he trusted, in this case, to his wits and his pedal cycle.
The following day, cutting away early from the office, he changed out of his formal rig into corduroy trousers, a thick polo-necked sweater, a pair of old shoes, and a boy’s blue Burberry, by these simple means reducing his apparent age to something in the neighbourhood of seventeen. Stopping only to check the lights on his ancient push-bike, he made off up Chancery Lane, whistling happily. Five o’clock found him ordering a snack in the milkbar opposite the entrance of the Stalagmite building. At five thirty the employees of that Corporation started to emerge: the first ones furtively, with squash racquets tucked under their arms, or dancing pumps sticking from their overcoat pockets; then a steady stream, which by six o’clock thinned away to a trickle.
At six thirty Nap ordered a third cup of washy coffee and began to wonder whether the Stalagmite might not possess a back entrance.
It was nearly seven o’clock when Brandison appeared. He stood, for a second or two, outside the swing door, gave a quick bird-like look to right and left, and then stepped off with his peculiar jerky stride down Fetter Lane in the direction of High Holborn.
Nap paid his bill which he had already bespoken, mounted his bicycle, overtook Brandison, went fifty yards past him and immediately turned at random down the next street to the right. Taking a left turn he paralleled High Holborn for a hundred yards, turned left again and dismounted at the corner where a glass shop front gave him a point of vantage.
A few minutes passed, and Brandison came into sight again under the street lamps, jerking slowly along. In the interval he had bought an evening paper, which he seemed to find interesting, since he kept it glued to his nose as he walked.
Nap repeated his tactics.
At the end of the third repetition both he and his quarry were a few blocks short of the Tottenham Court Road. Nap propped his bicycle against the kerb, withdrew into the porch of a blitzed house, and waited.
Sure enough, within a few minutes, Brandison came into his line of sight at the end of the road. Here he hesitated for a moment, then crossed the street, and went into one of the shops. It was not easy, at that distance, to see what sort of a shop it might be, but Nap thought it looked like a small barber’s or perhaps a tobacconist’s.
He lit himself a cigarette, huddled down in his raincoat and waited patiently.
A policeman passing on his beat directed a sour and speculative look at him. Nap smiled back happily. The policeman, deciding that his clothes were just sufficiently respectable to pass muster, and that sitting on the top step in the porch of a blitzed house did not, by itself, constitute an indictable offence, went heavily on his way.
It was a quarter to eight when Brandison at last reappeared. Again, almost automatically it seemed, he gave that quick up-and-down look and set off, still westward. Nap allowed him a full fifty yards of start, before taking up the pursuit. Having followed it so long he was confident of recognizing that spare back.
It was the greater surprise, when he reached the open space where Tottenham Court Road meets New Oxford Street, to find that he had missed his quarry. He propped himself on his bicycle for a moment, irresolute, under the Guinness clock. In the Charing Cross Road a figure caught his eye. Surely he recognized that light overcoat, but where was the jerky walk?
As he watched, the figure swung briskly to the right and disappeared. Nap had to make a snap decision. He pedalled quickly down Oxford Street, slipped across the traffic lights, and entered Soho Square from the north. Then, instead of turning left, he moved right-handed and circled clockwise round the square. As he had hoped, this brought him face to face again with the man in the light overcoat.
It was Brandison, all right. But a change seemed to have taken place. He was walking, now, smoothly and firmly. He seemed to have shed his jerky gait. He had the look of a man within distance of his goal.
Nobody, Nap argued, would visit Soho at such a time of night except to eat. It was, therefore, an odds-on chance that the objective was Frith Street or Greek Street.
Greek Street it was, and a minute or two later Brandison had turned in at the doors of the Mogador Club and Restaurant
Here a difficulty arose. Nap felt that his present get-up, admirable though it was for inconspicuous trailing, hardly fitted him for a visit to this particular restaurant. From its gilt frontage and striped awning, its bemedalled doorman and the three or four cars parked outside, it seemed altogether rather a high-hat sort of feeding place.
Happily there stood, immediately opposite, a small café. A glance into its steaming interior reassured him. Here, at least, the standard of his dress would cause no comment. It seemed to be full of out-of-work musicians and their overworked lady friends.
Nap took a seat hear the door, a point from which, through the fronds of a dwarf plant, he could keep a watch on the Mogador and its patrons.
He was feeling peckish himself, by this time, and made a meal of steak (the animal not specified), quantities of greasy chips and a huge mug of surprisingly good coffee. The mug itself was evidently a gift from the Great Western Railway Company.
If the succeeding three hours offered no development of the action, they could yet hardly be described as dull.
Nap never decided whether it was due to his ingenuous appearance or whether it was because he was occupying a particular seat, but the fact remains that during that period he was approached four times by vendors of black-market produce, twice by gentlemen with offers of hashish in cigarette form, and once each by a vendor of suggestive photographs and a motherly looking lady whose offers we shall not here repeat in detail.
All of whom accepted their rebuffs with the greatest of good humour.
/> At eleven o’clock the café put up its shutters and Nap found himself in the street. There were still lights and sounds of activity in the Mogador; but of Mr Brandison no sign at all.
Discovering that both his bicycle lamps had been stolen, Nap wheeled his machine slowly home through the emptying streets.
On reflection, he was not ill pleased with his night’s work.
4
Dinner at the Mogador
It went on like this for three weeks.
Every Friday the Chief Cashier of the Stalagmite followed a routine which was uncannily the same. Observed by Nap, he left the head office, always at the same hour; walked along High Holborn and New Oxford Street; called at the same little shop (subsequent inspection had shown it to be a hairdressing saloon); stayed there about half an hour, then emerged and made straight for the Mogador.
At what hour he left this gilded haunt Nap had as yet been unable to discover, though he waited on the two Fridays following, first in the café opposite and when that closed, in the street, until well after midnight. There was, however, no sign of Brandison on either occasion.
On other nights of the week, the cashier seemed to lead an outstandingly normal existence. Paddy followed him to his suburban home at Warbridge and discovered that he possessed a villa, a garden, a dog and a pallid wife. There were no children in evidence; but there was a maid called Maria, supposed in the neighbourhood to be an Italian. Nap cultivated her acquaintance and spent an evening with her at the Crooked Billet. He soon came to the conclusion that, though her parents or grandparents might have come from Italy, she herself was plain Borough.
It was from her, when a surprising quantity of pink gins had unlocked her pearly lips, that Nap got most of his information about the Brandison household.
It appeared that Mr Brandison was a well-known and respected resident of Warbridge. A vice-president of the Bowls Club and a pillar of the Methodist Church. Later in the evening, becoming more outspoken, she stated openly what she had previously hinted. She did not really like him. He was odd. He had moods. Sometimes very nice, but more often rather “difficult”.
The Doors Open Page 5