“And may I ask,” I continued, “whether you ever happened—”
Henry entered, his brow dark with displeasure, to apologise with heavy sarcasm for interrupting the tea party and to inform Basil of the arrival of those attending his next consultation: “Mr. Netherspoon, sir, of Netherspoon and Co. With his client, sir — and you know what His Grace is like if he’s kept waiting. I did remind you this morning, sir, I didn’t think you’d have forgotten again already.”
“I hadn’t forgotten, Henry,” said Basil. “I simply didn’t expect them quite so soon, if punctuality is the politeness of princes, then it seems rather presumptuous of a mere duke to be so ostentatiously on time. Dear me, how extremely tiresome. Colonel Cantrip — Hilary — I’m afraid, as you see, that you’ll have to excuse me.”
Selena had already begun to collect teacups, Ragwort to plump up cushions, and Julia to shepherd the Colonel towards the door.
“Basil, forgive me,” I said, “but I must ask you one further question. Did you ever happen, by any chance, to combine your teasing of the Revenue with your teasing of Sir Arthur Welladay by making him the default beneficiary under such a settlement?”
“Why yes,” said Basil, his attention already almost entirely engrossed by the papers for his consultation. “Yes, Hilary, now that you mention it, I believe I sometimes did. I don’t think I ever mentioned him by name — that would somehow have seemed rather crude. It seemed more elegant to bring him in by way of a class gift.”
“To the descendants of a named individual?”
“Exactly.”
“You would have had to know the name, then, of one of his parents or grandparents.”
“Yes, obviously.” He smiled gently at the notion of this presenting any difficulty. “But everyone knows, of course, that Arthur is a grandson of that very eminent judge, the late Sir Walter Palgrave.”
CHAPTER 12
“I cannot imagine,” I said with some asperity, “how any of you can hope to attain eminence in your profession when you are so shamefully ignorant of matters regarded as common knowledge by those whom you seek to emulate. If someone had told me yesterday that Mr. Justice Welladay was a descendant of Sir Walter Pal-grave…” I was obliged to pause, for I could not immediately think what use it would have been to me to have learnt this a day earlier.
“You would have wasted a great deal of time,” said Selena, taking rather unfair advantage of my involuntary aposiopesis, “trying-to arrange to meet him, when as it turns out he was busy chasing countesses across France and locking people up in cellars.”
We had adjourned by common consent to the first floor, where the Colonel, installed as by right of kinship at the desk usually occupied by his nephew, was continuing his perusal of the telex, chortling from time to time at those passages which evidently gave him particular satisfaction. It appeared, however, that he was not wholly inattentive to our discussion, for he now looked up from his reading.
“I say,” he said, “this Welladay you’re talking about — is he the chap that Mike calls Wellieboots?” We confirmed that he was. “I used to know an Arthur Welladay during the war — bit of a pompous young ass — wouldn’t be the same one, would it?”
Ragwort extracted from the bookshelf behind him the latest edition of Who’s Who. The particulars given there of the judge’s military career established beyond question his identity with the Colonel’s wartime acquaintance.
“Well, I’m damned,” said the Colonel. “What’s young Arthur Welladay doing locking Mike up in cellars?”
“That is indeed, sir, a most interesting question,” said Ragwort. “We had at first assumed that Sir Arthur had simply gone — was merely suffering from the heavy strain of his judicial duties. But in view of the information which we have just elicited from Basil, it may perhaps be suggested that his conduct has more rational and at the same time more sinister motives.”
“I say,” said the Colonel, “you don’t mean Arthur’s the one who’s going round bumping off people who get mixed up with this Daffodil business?”
Thus simply and directly stated, the proposition was at once perceived by the young barristers to be patently absurd. Sir Arthur Welladay was one of Her Majesty’s judges and a member of Lincoln’s Inn. Whatever one might say to his discredit — and Julia at least would have been willing to say a good deal — one could not suppose him capable of killing anyone.
The Colonel looked slightly surprised.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “you can’t say that exactly, can you? I mean, he did the combined ops training at Achnacarry, so he damned well ought to know how to kill people. And you can’t say he’s never actually done it, because of course he has. Funnily enough, I think the first time must have been on Sark — I was there, in a manner of speaking.”
They stared at him, reduced to uncustomary silence.
“Colonel Cantrip,” I said, “I think that you had better tell us the whole story.”
The events which the Colonel now recounted to us had taken place towards the end of February in the year 1944. Though recently wounded in action in North Africa, he had been considered sufficiently fit to return with his unit to England, where expectation was general of the imminent invasion of Normandy. To his evident dismay and indignation, he had found himself incarcerated (as he regarded the matter) in a military hospital in Portsmouth.
“Pretty grim sort of hellhole it was too,” said the Colonel. “The matron had X-ray eyes and could smell alcohol at five hundred yards and the medical officer was a pigheaded Scotchman who wouldn’t pass me as fit until I could dance a Highland fling three times round Ben Nevis.
“So there I was, sitting around with nothing to do except try to make enough nuisance of myself to get chucked out of the beastly place, when Squiffy Bodgem rolled in, with two bars of chocolate and a bottle of whiskey. Old mate of mine — we’d been on the same training course at Achnacarry in ’41. We’d lost touch a bit since then — turned out he’d been Portsmouth-based for quite a while, running his own commando unit. Well, I didn’t think hospital visiting was much in Squiffy’s line, specially with armfuls of whiskey and chocolates, so I asked him what he was after.
“The gist of the story was that he’d got everything lined up for a raid on Sark in ten days’ time — him and another officer and four men. He’d been quite surprised to get the go-ahead for it, because we’d pretty much shut up shop for raiding by that time — saving everything for Normandy. But he’d managed to persuade the powers that be that Sark was a likely place for picking up a few odds and ends that might be useful to the intelligence chaps — or even a prisoner or two, which would be even better of course. Well, Squiffy thought he’d persuaded them — most probably they just reckoned it would be worth making a bit of noise in the Channel Islands and maybe bluffing the Germans into moving a few more men over there from Normandy. Whichever it was, they’d told old Squiffy he could have a go, and of course he’d been as pleased as Punch about it.
“Then he hit a snag. The idea was, you see, to hitch a lift down there on a naval submarine, get as close in as the sub could take them, and finish the journey in a collapsible landing craft. In some places that would leave you with not much to worry about from the point of view of inshore navigation — just get the Navy to point you towards land and Bob’s your uncle. Sark’s a bit different — dodgy currents and a lot of nasty rocks where you wouldn’t expect them, so if you’re landing a boat there in the dark, it’s better to know your way about a bit. No problem for Squiffy, though, because he’d got a Guernsey lad in his unit who’d been a fisherman before the war — got out the month before the Germans landed — and knew the Sark coast like the back of his hand. Then the Guernsey lad goes and makes a nonsense of a parachute jump in some training exercise and puts himself out of action, and there’s Squiffy with no navigator.
“He was just wondering if he was going to have to call the whole thing off when someone told him about me being in Portsmouth locked up in the hellh
ole. He remembered me telling him I’d once spent my school holidays on Sark and done a bit of sailing there, and he thought I sounded like the answer to a maiden’s prayer. He was a bit downhearted at first when he found I still had a leg in plaster, but I pointed out that if I was only navigating I wouldn’t need to do any climbing, so it didn’t make any odds.”
“You hadn’t mentioned,” said Selena, “that your leg was still in plaster. That may perhaps explain the reluctance of the medical officer to pass you as fit.”
“if he hadn’t been so blasted pigheaded, he’d have taken it out of plaster,” said the Colonel. “Anyway, apart from that I was as fit as a flea, so I told Squiffy to count me in on the party, He wanted to make it all official to start with — you know, have me seconded to his unit for the purposes of the operation — but I talked him out of that. ‘Squiffy,’ I said, ‘once we start putting things in writing and signing them in triplicate, what’s going to happen? You know what’s going to happen,’ I said. It’s all going to end up on some chaps desk in War House. And what are the chaps in War House there for? They’re there to find out if any of us have got a bit of fun lined up and put the kybosh on it. If you try to make it official, you can kiss good-bye to me as a navigator, and probably the whole operation. Squiffy,’ I said, ‘don’t do it.’ He saw the sense of it in the end, so I stayed unofficial. Never stir up trouble when you don’t have to, that’s my motto,” said the Colonel virtuously.
Ragwort blinked.
“I managed to sneak out for a couple of training sessions, and that’s when I met young Welladay — he was the other officer in the party. Nice enough lad, just coming up to nineteen and still pretty wet behind the ears — Squiffy was taking him along on this raid to give him a chance to see a bit of life. Terribly keen and serious he was — would keep on about freedom and justice and all that and saying that was why we’d all volunteered for combined ops. I told him I’d done it for the extra thirteen bob a day and the chance of getting eggs for breakfast, but he went all pink round the edges and wouldn’t believe me. So in the end I had to biff him, and after that we got on all right.”
“Oh dear, Colonel,” said Julia, in despairing protest.
Touched by this womanly remonstrance, the Colonel patted her hand.
“The trip down on the submarine was a bit dreary of course — stuffy and smelly and no room to move, you know what submarines are like — and I can’t say young Arthur did much to brighten things up. I was telling Squiffy about my getaway from the hellhole — you know, dodging Matron and the M.O. and giving the chap in the next bed a yarn to spin them when they noticed I was missing — and blow me if Arthur didn’t get in a flap about it. He’d known I was unofficial, of course, but he hadn’t known I was as unofficial as all that, and he started worrying about whether going AWOL from the hellhole made me a deserter within the meaning of subparagraph something or other of paragraph whatever-it-was of King’s Regulations. That’s the kind of chap he was, you see — knew King’s Regulations backwards and took it all seriously.
“I told him if we got back all right they probably wouldn’t shoot me for it, and if we didn’t, getting shot for desertion was going to be the least of my worries, but it didn’t do any good. We were in the blasted sub for the best part of eighteen hours, and he went on about it the whole time, except when we were asleep — I daresay he dreamed about it as well. Nice enough lad, you see, but not a lot of sense.
“The sub came up about a mile off Sark around two in the morning. We got our gear together, blacked up with boot polish, and transferred to the landing craft. The skipper made a few dirty cracks about my chances of finding the right beach — the Navy never think anyone else knows how to navigate — and I told him we’d be back by six and expecting a decent breakfast.
“We got through the rocks all right and made a landing on the western side of the Coupee. There’d been two or three earlier raids on Sark and they’d all landed on the eastern side, up by Derrible Bay, but the latest word was that the beaches there were mined — the last lot had found out the hard way about two months before. So the western side looked like a better bet.
“There’s a path at the northern end of the beach that takes you right up to the top — steepish, but not what you’d call a climb — and I got the landing craft in within a few yards of it. I told Squiffy I was making life a damned sight too easy for him, and off he went with the rest of the chaps.
“The next couple of hours were pretty quiet. We’d picked a night with no moon, of course, so I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, to say nothing of anything else. I couldn’t hear anything either, which was a pretty good sign — if the chaps had run into trouble, there’d have been some noise. So I just sat in the landing craft with nothing to do except wonder what was going on and curse the M.O. for keeping me in plaster. The only thing I was worried about was getting back to the sub on time. It had been pretty decent of the skipper to give us until six — he had to get the sub underwater again by dawn, of course, and it didn’t leave much leeway — so we couldn’t expect him to cut it any finer.
“Then I heard firing — only two or three shots, but it sounded loud enough to wake up every German on the island — and it looked as if things might be going to liven up a bit.
“I made sure we were ready for a quick getaway, and a few minutes later I heard someone slithering down the path, making a good deal more noise than they ought to. It turned out to be Welladay and another chap — tough little Glaswegian called McCormack, straight from the Gorbals — he’d been shot in the shoulder and was bleeding quite a bit. Welladay wasn’t hurt, but he was looking pretty shaken. I helped him haul McCormack aboard the landing craft and asked what the blazes had happened and where the others had got to.
“He said things had gone pretty well to begin with. They’d spotted a German sentry patrolling the Coupee and followed him back to base. That turned out to be a guard hut at the southern end, just inside Little Sark. The sentry was on his own there and not expecting any trouble, so taking the hut was money for old rope. They had him tied up and gagged before he knew what was happening and just shoved him into a corner, meaning to bring him back with them when they were finished. Welladay and McCormack stayed to search the hut and keep an eye on the prisoner while the other three went off to scout round Little Sark.
“You probably think searching a guard hut would be pretty easy, but it wasn’t as simple as it sounds. There was a desk and a cupboard, both full of all sorts of papers — too much to bring the whole lot back — so they had some sorting to do. Trouble was, it was damned difficult to know what was going to be useful from the point of view of intelligence. You couldn’t expect to find something marked ‘Hitler to Goering — Top Secret’; it was local newspapers and letters from girlfriends and things like that that the intelligence geezers got excited about. Toffee papers even — I once knew a chap) in intelligence who claimed he could predict the whole German strategy for the next six months if he knew what they were wrapping their toffees in.
“So Welladay and McCormack were kept pretty busy trying to work out what was worth taking and what wasn’t, with just an oil lamp to see by, and it’s not too surprising that they weren’t taking much notice of the prisoner. Pity they didn’t, though — he must have had a gun stashed away quite near to where they’d left him, and whoever tied him up didn’t seem to have made much of a job of it — so all of a sudden they were under fire.
“McCormack was hit and Welladay fired back — couldn’t do anything else — and the German was killed. After that amount of noise, of course, they had to expect trouble pretty quickly. No more sorting papers — Welladay just stuffed what he could into a sack while McCormack checked the mían was dead and took his gun, and then they got out fast.
“I was still telling young Welladay it was hard luck about losing the prisoner but not his fault, and a damned good thing he’d reacted as fast as he did, when the rest of the chaps came scrambling down the path and into the la
nding craft. We didn’t hang about to swap yarns, and we must have been about a hundred yards from shore and still rowing hard when McCormack said the thing that got us worried.
“I don’t remember it exactly — something about the German having been ‘a braw wee fighter’ and what a fine trick it was to have fired the gun when his hands were still tied behind his back. Welladay said something like ‘Oh, nonsense, McCormack, he must have got free before he starting firing,’ and McCormack said, ‘Oh no, sir, I noticed when I took his gun — his hands were still tied.’ Welladay said, ‘Are you sure?’ and McCormack said, ‘Oh yes, sir,’ as if it was nothing to worry about — if McCormack had ever heard of the Geneva Convention he probably thought it was something to do with football. Welladay said, ‘I see,’ and sounded fairly sick.
“I felt a bit sick myself, because however you added it up, it came out not looking too good. When the Germans found the body it was going to look as if we’d shot an unarmed prisoner with his hands tied, and apart from what they’d make of it on the propaganda side, they were liable to take it out pretty roughly on our chaps in their POW camps.
“Not really young Welladay’s fault — if a chap’s firing at you, you assume he’s got his hands free — but he ought to have checked all the same. I suppose he must have thought so himself — the next thing he said was ‘I’m going back’ and he was over the side and swimming for the shore before anyone could stop him.
“Everyone stopped rowing for a second or two — then Squiffy just shook his head and said carry on. We all knew the lad would be shot if the Germans got him — they didn’t treat commando raiders as prisoners of war — but there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. We were cutting it pretty fine already for getting back to the sub, and we just couldn’t spare the time to hang around on the off chance of picking him up again. So we went on, and that looked like being the end of my acquaintance with young Arthur Welladay.”
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