The Cummings Report

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Prescott-Healey entered, with Alice, after I had been waiting not more than two minutes. They said nothing when they came in, and I feared the worst.

  He walked briskly to his desk, and motioned me to sit opposite. Alice sat in an armchair farther away.

  “Sign that!” he commanded, pushing a piece of paper towards me.

  “What is it?” I demanded, rather belligerently.

  “A copy of the Official Secrets Acts, with Improvements,” he said.

  I had expected a confession. I duly put my name to it.

  He blotted it carefully, then put it in a drawer and didn’t mention it again.

  “You were clever,” he said, “very clever, for an amateur. But then, we are not contemptuous of amateurs here. We find they have a lot of imagination. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  “A song-writer.”

  “What have you written?”

  “Mostly shows.”

  “I mean, what songs?”

  “Tired of Love,Another Heart ...

  “Another Heart. My wife has a record of it. By Hutch I believe.”

  “Hutch made a very good record of it.”

  He changed the subject. “You had a nervous illness. How are you now?”

  “I vary.”

  “Still have attacks of some sort? Tell me about them.” I explained as briefly as possible, and added: “It doesn’t mean much, actually. Just a kind of release. The tension builds up and it has to come out somewhere. Of course, it’s fairly unpleasant at the time.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking at me hard, “I should think it must be.” He closed the file abruptly. “The point is, Mr. Cummings, that we can use you — I mean, on an official basis. We alreadyhave used you, as you know, in so far as you noticed something that a professional man did not. Mark you, we can’t blame him; different minds are good for different things.” His expression relaxed a little. “That was quite a show you put on at the station. You have a dramatic turn of mind, Mr. Cummings!”

  “You mean it could have been done some other way?”

  “There are always several ways of doing things: that was the right one for you. I don’t mean to imply any criticism. Perhaps a professional man would have simply tried to follow him in the usual way. Still, you succeeded in getting his name: Eric Stutyen — he gave it quite openly to your policeman friend. You say this is definitelynot the same man who phoned the police?”

  “Can I hear the record again?”

  “Yes. I have it here.”

  He had his own machine, which was built into a section of the bookcase. “I use this,” he explained, “to record my conversations. It’s surprising how much more you can tell about someone you have just been talking to when you hear the conversation a second time.”1984 again.

  It was necessary to run the tape for only a few seconds before I knew beyond doubt that this was not the same man.

  “Even an actor, trying to disguise his voice,” I observed, when Prescott-Healey had switched off the machine, “could not have changed its character as much as that. This was the other man.”

  “Oranother man. Mustn’t jump to conclusions.” He turned quizzically to Alice. “What does the feminine intuition say?”

  Alice had been so quiet I had almost forgotten she was there. I never ceased to find out new things about her; and now I could see why this impressive, military-looking man did not mind having a woman at his right hand: this one didn’ttalk. Unless she had something to say ...

  “I think Joel is probably right; our friends would probably consider it safe to use the same team all the time to brief the ‘go-betweens’. They wouldn’t reasonably expect to be discovered. It was very bad luck that we found out about Eldemore. Bad luck, or ... She left the sentence deliberately in the air; but Miles didn’t take her up on the hint of a question.

  He walked over to the window, and peered unseeingly at the traffic below. “Let’s recap — as they say onTwenty Questions — and review the situation as we know it so far. An unpleasant gentleman, whose name and function we don’t know, telephones from Paddington and tips us off about a meeting that is to take place at a news theatre in Oxford Street. For some reason he has changed sides, but we don’t know why. But we surmise from his tone of voice that he is a disappointed, rather embittered man.

  “We send a man to intercept, but he draws a blank. By chance, however, you tag along and jump to a most fantastic conclusion — that turns out to be quite right. You identify beyond doubt one of the communicating parties (Daphne Eldemore and a lady who calls herself ‘Gertrude’) and suspect the other (the married couple with a child) whom we so far have not traced. Subsequently, by a process of brilliant detection or sheer chance — let us call it brilliant detection — you discover a further link between the two women and the man who is briefing them, Eric Stutyen. This ties up with Paddington Station and it is more than probable that Stutyen was the man whom our nasty-voiced informer was with when he first rang us up. This suggests that they have used Paddington as a meeting place before.

  “Now, at the moment there is no evidence to connect all this with the disappearance of Delanez, other than the remark made on the telephone. But, if there is a connection, then one of the parties meeting at the cinema must be in touch with Delanez, and the other with those who have some unknown Course of Action to take regarding him.”

  Miles scratched his chin thoughtfully. “If only we had a bit more to go on,” he continued. “For instance, who is this informer, and what is he up to? All we get is one mysterious phone call, then he disappears off the face of the earth. What does he hope to get out of that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but if this were one of those mystery stories he’d ring up right now, while we were all sitting around getting brain fever.”

  He didn’t, but the door-buzzer sounded instead. The man who sought admission to this holy of holies was an American. In his late thirties, he had a crew-cut and wore heavily rimmed spectacles that magnified his humorous, poker-player’s eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said in a voice that gave away nothing except self-assurance, “I appear to be crashing a party.”

  “Come in, Harford,” said Miles, “you may as well meet our latest acquisition. This is Joel Cummings.”

  He nearly wrenched my hand off in one of those transatlantic handshakes. “You’re the song-writer guy, aren’t you? You should have stayed with it, Mr. Cummings; this place is even worse than television. Hallo, Alice!” He handed Miles a dispatch. “Hot from the Embassy, Miles, and not been touched by the human hand. We thought you might be interested.”

  “Found him in a plane, did they?” observed the Englishman, after rapidly reading the missive. “Are they sure he was dead when he got there?”

  “They’ll not be certain until the post-mortem,” said Cy Harford. “Of course, it could be carbon monoxide poisoning. They didn’t find him till they’d landed in Germany. You get a lot of exhaust gases in that part of the ship.”

  “What makes them think he’s our man?”

  “He’s got a political past. His name’s Fenton — Adrian Fenton. He was an actor, you know — with overtones.”

  “An actor?”

  “Yeah, the case is lousy with them, isn’t it! You think there could be a connection?”

  Alice said: “There must be, I can’t believe the whole of the acting profession is involved in political intrigue.”

  “If I may make a suggestion,” put in Harford, “this character could have been one of the king-pins. He was a known member of the Communist Party until recently. Maybe he was Eldemore’s brother.”

  “No!” I said. “Not Eldemore’s — ‘Gertrude’s’. Daphne Eldemore has no living relatives; we know that.”

  “Well,” said Miles quietly, “that gives us a line on Gertrude. It’s worth checking up on a Gertrude Fenton — or any other actress called Fenton. Do that.”

  “Sure I will. But we don’t know this guy is the one you want. However, there is
a way of finding out. We know the hotel at which he was staying; their label was attached to his bag. Somebody there would be sure to recognize his voice.”

  “You mean, this might be the helpful character who phoned us from Paddington?” I put in.

  “And paid for his co-operation,” added Miles. “Get on to it immediately, will you? This may give us a lead in other directions.”

  “One of the boys has gone down there with a copy of the recording,” observed Harford, with no sign of the smugness I would have displayed if I had anticipated events so well. Nor did Miles betray any reaction. He expected this kind of service — and usually got it. Cy Harford would have considered it patronizing to be congratulated on doing his job.

  This was one of Miles’ secrets of success. Every man or woman who worked under him really worked with him. They had powers of decision far in excess of their position in the hierarchy of government service. When they made mistakes he supported them. When they excelled he gave them the credit. No one here was afraid of taking chances, and, curiously, no one in his department had ever been fired. He inspired them with too much confidence to permit them to make too many disastrous mistakes.

  “There’s a piece in the lunch edition of theStandard you may like to see,” said Harford, handing the paper to Miles. “It gives a bit of the background on this guy — nothing we don’t already know, of course, except that he died, according to this, several days earlier than we thought. This plane makes more or less daily trips to Munich, but it looks as if this man made the trip more times than he intended,” he said in his dry voice. “Wouldn’t be surprised if he died the day we got the recording, and for some reason they shoved him in the plane. After all, they had to stick the body somewhere, and why not there? The autopsy will show when he really joined the choir invisible.”

  I glanced at the article in the paper. It was reported in a brief half-column at the bottom of the front page, and referred to the‘unidentified body’that‘did the milk-run to Germany after death.’

  “I’ll let you know when we get the dope on that hotel,” said Cy. He directed his spectacled, drily humorous eyes in Alice’s direction. “Bring your Earl to dinner, will you? Denise is just bursting to try out her English on something really British. Don’t worry though; it still sounds like good, solid Jersey City to me.”

  “He isn’t an Earl, but I’ll bring him if you insist.”

  “Do that. And make sure he wears his monocle; then you’ll get the real performance!” He grinned at us and left.

  “Listen,” said Miles, once the door was closed, “it’ll be no surprise to you that the Foreign Office are screaming for action, as usual, without doing anything else about it. Confidentially, I think they’re pretty frightened of Washington over this. So if we can get something concrete soon it will lower their blood pressure. And I’m all for that. Any questions?”

  He threw us out, and Alice and I went for an early lunch, laced with a bottle of hock. After all, I had something to celebrate. I had a job.

  *

  In the evening I was annoyed to find a typewritten message from Alice in my letter-box. The gist of it was that she had received some direct information about the man with the toupée which had led her down to Rimsworth, and would I meet her at the all-night café there? I was annoyed because it meant cancelling a date with Jill.

  The only consolation was that I thought I detected a distinctly disappointed tone in Jill’s voice when I rang her up about it. I called her ‘darling’ and she called me ‘darling’ and it seemed that it wasn’t merely a slip of the tongue this time. The end of the conversation was noteworthy.

  “Now, don’t go and get yourself into trouble again, will you?” she said. “I still don’t know how you got away with that Paddington Station business.”

  “Alice will keep me in order,” I said, “but I appreciate the warning.” I managed to convey what I wanted to in this simple statement.

  She remained serious. “Just pretend you’re at a level crossing,” she said. “Stop, look and listen. And don’t be rude to policemen.”

  “Anything else?” I asked. “Anything else while you’re about it?”

  “Only,” she replied, “that I was glad to hear your voice on the phone — in spite of the cancelled date.”

  “Was there a reason?” I asked.

  “You’ve had your ration of questions!” she said, but added: “Take care of yourself, you great big idiot!”

  *

  A blind man could have found that café without any difficulty, since the juke-box was always screaming its dubious welcome. Like a homing device for an aircraft landing in thick fog, it left you in no doubt, by the time you were within a hundred yards of it, that you were on the glide-path.

  By the time I reached the parking space outside the volume of sound was almost unbearable. However, as it turned out, I didn’t have to bear it for long.

  CHAPTER 10

  CONTRARY to popular belief, if somebody slugs you over the head with that well-tried device, the Blunt Instrument, you are quite incapable of giving a blow-by-blow account of it on recovering consciousness.

  Never before have you been the victim of hallucinations; yet the scene that gradually comes into focus now must surely fall into that category. You are in a darkened room. No, it can’t be a room in the ordinary sense, for it appears to be moving. Not with just a forward motion, as in a fast-moving motor-car, nor with the smoothly undulating path of a ship. Everything around you seems to jolt and tip over in a series of jerks, both in the vertical and the horizontal plane ...

  Plane. Yes, it must be an aircraft, flying through very bumpy air. That accounts for the steady droning sound that seemed at first to come from inside your head. There must be two motors, for you can hear them beating against each other because they are not exactly synchronized.

  “The Milk Run,” I guessed intuitively.

  *

  I must have spoken aloud, for the man peering at me turned to someone I couldn’t see and said: “Mr. Cummings appears to be with us again.”

  For some reason I wasn’t particularly surprised that the voice belonged to Adrian Fenton, who was supposed to have been found dead in the tail section of a freight plane. Rather I was much more concerned about the fact that if I was to be kidnapped for any considerable period of time I would be starved of the drug that kept me more or less sane. It did not occur to me that I was to be killed; and in this guess I was right, though I was wrong about the Milk Run.

  “I would be immensely grateful,” I managed to say, “if you would get me a glass of water! Or better still, brandy.”

  This was provided, and my head began to clear. Not entirely, however; and I hazarded a guess that I had been doped as well as slugged. With the result that I was, at this stage, incapable of feeling any fear.

  “Would it be too much to ask,” I demanded, “which particular reel of your absurd picture I have landed in?”

  “The one,” said Fenton, in his precious, mincing tones, “that follows your equally absurd performance on Paddington Station.”

  “And you’re the Body that isn’t really dead?”

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “Only the rather slow-witted audience does not, I am glad to say, realize that yet.”

  Something clicked into place. “How would you look in a toupée?” I asked.

  He smiled. I liked him even less when he smiled. “A clumsy disguise, I admit,” he said. “But it served its purpose. You see people are apt to assume that if you wear a wig, you must be bald. As you see. I’m not; but theywill jump to conclusions, won’t they? It has proved invaluable from time to time.”

  “But the voice ...”

  “I am an actor, Mr. Cummings. I use a number of voices. For instance, if you heard me while I was at work at the Rimsworth factory, you would have sworn I came from Ipswich.”

  “So you were in Rimsworth while I ...”

  “Precisely. While you were in Murtha House. In that way I was able
to kill two birds with one stone. You see, I had vital work to do down there — nothing to do with the present little adventure, but I shall go back to complete the job shortly.”

  “May I ask what goes on in that factory? I’ve often wondered.”

  He looked at me expressionlessly; and I saw then why I was unable to describe him to Alice. There was nothing in the face to describe. “It’s a plutonium factory,” he explained. “I thought everyone knew that; the security arrangements are appalling.”

  “You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of our Counter Intelligence,” I observed, as Fenton solicitously handed me a cigarette.

  “On the contrary, my good friend! The Rimsworth factory is one of their few weaknesses. In fact, it is because we have an exceedingly high opinion of them that we took such care to lead them, as they say, up the garden path.”

  “Then the telephone call was, so to speak, a plant — if we must talk exclusively in gardening terms,” I parried.

  “Yes, I was really rather pleased with that,” said the precious young man smugly. “Though I confess I didn’t expect such fast results. Nor did we anticipate that an amateur would catch on to our little entertainment in the news theatre, where the professional failed.”

  “Then all that business about Delanez ... ?” My mind was reeling slightly at this turn of events.

  “... was a little entertainment designed for the benefit of your Mr. Prescott-Healey, who swallowed the bait most beautifully. It was a pleasure to watch.”

  “I’m afraid the British Secret Service have made rather fools of themselves; and I take the prize for the Best Supporting Role.”

  Unhurriedly, Fenton placed a cigarette in an outrageously long holder. “The Delanez enterprise,” he continued, “was, as you now no doubt realize, merely a cover plan. If it gives you any satisfaction the old dodderer is safely back in his New Forest home, probably watering the garden. He wasn’t the slightest use to anyone, anyway. The rebellion in that rather insignificant Satellite State is now well in hand. It was inconvenient at the time; though, of course, quite the reverse so far as our plans in the United Kingdom were concerned. We got what we wanted, as a result, without any difficulty at all.”