CHAPTER III
THE EPISODE OF THE DETECTIVE’S UNCLE
“. . . AND YOU SAY these cases looked heavy?”
“Well, it took a couple of the ragged rascals to tote each of them,” Georgia replied.
Sir John Strangeways raised one bushy eyebrow at his nephew. “That about settles it, I think,” he said.
The three of them were sitting in the flat which Nigel and Georgia had kept as a pied-à-terre for their visits to London. It was three days after the night-manœuvres at Yarnold Farm. On the following morning, Nigel had gone up to town, leaving Georgia to consume her own curiosity and impatience as best she could. Later he had rung up asking her to follow him, but had firmly rung off when Georgia began to ask questions. Even after her arrival he would say nothing, and the subdued excitement which she sensed beneath his calm had worked her up into a high fever of curiosity. Then, this evening, his uncle had turned up and made her repeat exactly what she had seen from behind that hedge; and, in the very act of repeating it, she saw light.
“And now,” she said, grinning mischievously at Sir John, “perhaps the two clams will open up. Or shall we just see if there isn’t a masked man outside with his ear clamped to the keyhole?”
She stalked with exaggerated stealth to the door and flung it dramatically open. A broad, mackintosh-clad back confronted her.
“Oh!” she cried, slamming the door, “there—there is a m-man there!”
“Yes,” said Sir John. “He’s one of my men, as a matter of fact.”
Georgia sat down rather suddenly, and gaped at him in bewilderment. Sir John Strangeways looked less like an official personage than one could believe possible. Curled up in the deep arm-chair, he resembled an intelligent, shaggy-haired terrier. “Inoffensive” seemed the best word to sum him up. Whenever Georgia set eyes on that draggled, sandy moustache of his, the shapeless, drab overcoat, the corn-cob pipe that fumed like Gehenna, she received once again the illusion that here was a suburban householder—a retired grocer, say—who had just returned from pottering about in his garden, thrown off his gardening-gloves, and settled down to listen to a talk by Mr. Middleton. It needed a positive physical effort to remind herself that Sir John was in fact head of the C. Branch of Scotland Yard. Only when you noticed his eyes—a deeper blue than Nigel’s, far-sighted, dreamy, suddenly focusing into alert interest or quizzing you with a humour that drew a network of wrinkles at their corners—did you begin to perceive his quality.
“Well, anyway,” said Georgia, recovering herself, “I know what it’s all about.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Sir John removed the pipe from between his discoloured teeth and tickled his ear with its stem.
“Yes, I do. Smuggling.”
There was a short pause.
“Smuggling? Smuggling what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What do people smuggle nowadays? Silk?—no, the cases were too heavy. Dope?—no, too big. Brandy perhaps; that must be it.”
“Why not—er—machine-guns?”
Georgia giggled. “Why not? Or howitzers. Or tanks.”
“No, machine-guns will do,” said Sir John, so seriously that she half-believed he could not be pulling her leg after all.
“Well, I know we’re going in for rearmament, but it does seem to me rather a roundabout way to do it,” she said.
“Now, if you’ll stop chattering, I’ll tell you something,” Sir John replied. He pointed his pipe-stem at the door. “You’ll realise that man is not outside there for fun. This has to be confidential. Do you remember the Cagoulards in France?”
“The Hooded Men? Yes, I remember vaguely—a few years ago——”
“It was a conspiracy to overthrow the Popular Front Government and set up a Fascist dictatorship in France, aided, it was alleged, by arms and money from two European powers. Arms dumps were discovered in Paris and other big cities, plans for kidnapping ministers and occupying strategic points. It nearly came off. None of your comic-opera plots—that one was. I advise you to read it up.”
“But—but you’re not suggesting?—not in England?”
“That’s what they all say,” Sir John remarked dryly. “I suppose you won’t take my word for it, so I’ll have to give you a short political lecture.”
Georgia never forgot the scene, though the dramatic events that were to follow it might well have chased it out of her head: the distant surge of traffic, a newsboy crying like a seagull in the street below, Nigel standing by the mantelpiece with an air of polite inattention that did not for a moment deceive her, and Sir John mildly gesturing with his pipe stem—outlining in his most matter-of-fact voice a theory which, from any other mouth, would have seemed as incredible as one of Scheherezade’s fantasies.
“So there it is,” he concluded. “The gist of it is that this conspiracy is already under way, and we’ve got little to work on and very little time to work in.”
Stumping over to the fireplace, he shook out his pipe.
Georgia set her bewildered mind to grasp the implications of what he had said. She had a queer feeling that they had just come through an earthquake which had shaken down the wall of the house, tumbled down all the houses around, left her staring out at a shattered, unfamiliar prospect. Like the footsteps of a rescue squad, his phrases echoed hollow and sombre in her head. Even now, it took an effort to make sense of them. A General Election before long. An all-party government coming into power which would reverse the policy of appeasement, stand up to the European dictators. The growing indignation amongst the British people against being bluffed and bullied into concessions. And, on the other hand, a conspiracy organised by the friends of Fascism in the country to discredit this government and overthrow it by armed force—the last, desperate throw of those who saw the future slipping out of their hands.
“But I don’t see——” Georgia said weakly. “You mean, Major Keston is one of them?”
“I’ll come to that in a minute. My department and the Secret Service had had wind of this underground movement for some time. But we’re badly handicapped. In the first place, there’s any amount of money behind it—just as the rich families in France were behind the Cagoulards: we don’t know who they may have bought over, in the police, the army, the Civil Service. We don’t know ”—Sir John’s sober voice set her nerves quivering—“we don’t know who we can trust. The other thing is—we don’t know who the leaders are: we’ve got on to some of the subordinates, they’re being watched, but so far they’ve given us no lead to the people at the top. I’ll tell you frankly, we’ve not even got a suspicion. A few months ago, for instance, we found an arms dump beneath an empty house in Maida Vale. At first we assumed it was a left-over from the I.R.A. bombings in 1939. That’s what they intended us to think. Oh, yes, we even had the last tenant of the house—when we’d rounded him up—admitting it, producing evidence that he was a member of the I.R.A. We’d not have thought twice about it if we hadn’t discovered that the bombs were of German manufacture, and if the chap hadn’t been a touch too eager to confess his association with the I.R.A. There’ve been other things, too. They’re a clever lot, wonderfully organised—their organisation must be in watertight compartments. You break through into one, but you’re still very far away from the centre.”
After a long pause, Georgia asked him point-blank, “Why are you telling me all this?”
Sir John Strangeways glanced up from the bowl of the pipe he was lighting—one of those placid, homely glances which so endeared him to her and seemed to make dream-nonsense of everything he had been saying.
“Have you ever heard of the English Banner?” he inquired with apparent irrelevance.
“No. English Banner? What’s——? Oh, E.B. The E.B. printed on the flag we found in that locket?”
“Holed out in one. The English Banner is a queer sort of semi-mystical society, which flourishes mainly in country districts. They believe in the natural aristocracy of the landowning class, and of course they let in a few sele
cted hangers-on—game-keepers and the like—to give the thing a more catholic appearance. The idea,” Sir John added dryly, “is that they are really the best people in the country and therefore ought to be its rulers. They’re quite harmless.”
“But if they’re harmless——”
“The point is that they wrap themselves in mystery as well as in mysticism. They’re a secret association—a freemasonry without aprons and lodges. Now just consider: if you wanted a good cover for a dangerous secret organisation, what could you find better than a harmless ditto. Take smuggling: a false bottom to your suitcase which is fairly easily disclosed: nothing in it: let off with a caution: but, beneath that, another false bottom. Which of course brings us to your military friend.”
“Has Major Keston a false bottom?” Georgia asked dazedly. “Or two false bottoms? You’re getting me a bit groggy.”
Sir John grinned at her. “Major Keston is a man with a grudge and considerable organising talent. As you know, he was politely sacked from the Indian Police. He’s just the kind of material the big people in this movement can use. Don’t underestimate him and his like. They’re probably quite sincere. Nothing easier than to turn a personal grievance the other way up and see it as patriotism.” He glanced at Georgia a little guiltily: there were few things Sir John Strangeways more disliked than to be caught making generalisations. Georgia, however, was only concerned with the truth of what he had said.
“I quite see that,” she replied. “But have you any evidence for connecting——?”
“Oh, yes.” Like his nephew, Sir John had an uncanny gift of anticipating one’s argument. “The really interesting thing is that the disk you found in the locket—the Union Jack with E.B. on it—is not one of the English Banner’s properties. We’ve got one or two people inside the English Banner, just to see they’re keeping out of mischief, and I asked about it when Nigel came along with his story. They report that there is no such membership token. You see the implication? It means that this token is only in use among an inner circle of the E.B. But, if the inner circle is as harmless as the rest of the organisation, why don’t the ordinary members know about it?”
“What are the disks for, then?”
“I suggest they are the means of identification by which the leaders of this conspiracy make themselves known, when necessary, to its subordinate officers. That’s only a guess, of course. But, if one of the disks was seen by the wrong person, its owner could always in the last resort explain it away by a reference to the English Banner. That’s the advantage of working under cover of a semi-secret organisation.”
“It all sounds absurdly melodramatic to me.”
“Conspiracies are melodramatic, my dear, especially when they’re made by rich people with too much money and time on their hands. Look at the Cagoulards conferring together in white hoods. It doesn’t necessarily stop them being efficient, though. Wish it did. I’m worried to death about this, and I don’t mind saying so.”
“Dear Uncle John! I’m sure they’d be much more worried if they knew you were sitting on their tail. . . . But honestly, I can’t believe it yet. What proof on earth have you that Major Keston was smuggling arms, for instance?”
“Better ask Nigel. He worked it out. Here, boy, give me something to drink: I’ve talked myself dry.”
Nigel poured out drinks for them. As he talked, he moved about the room, setting down his own glass precariously on the extreme edge of any piece of furniture that was handy. Georgia had never become quite used to this unnerving habit of his: this evening, however, what he had to say kept her mind off household breakages.
“The tramps gave me the clue,” he began with unusual abruptness. “Obviously the major was smuggling something. Well, you don’t smuggle any of the ordinary things—silk, drugs and so on—in heavy cases. It might conceivably have been liquor of some sort. But, if so, why drag a lot of bogus tramps into it? Why tramps?—that’s what kept tapping on my bump of curiosity. As you remarked, Georgia, why shouldn’t the major’s assistants roll up in expensive cars?—or plain vans at the least? Of course, there was only one explanation.”
“Of course,” said Gerogia acidly. “Don’t stand there leering at me as if I was a half-wit village maiden.”
“The only reason why people should disguise themselves as tramps and plod all the way to Yarnold Farm is that they were local people who otherwise might easily be recognised and couldn’t afford to be recognised. Now one can’t imagine a set of local bigwigs engaged in running liquor on that scale: unfortunately, the political situation being what it is, one can only too easily imagine them running arms. No doubt they’ve been convinced that the next government will be bright Red, take all their possessions away and murder them in their beds. The tramp disguise safeguarded them in several ways. When you see a tramp, you think of milestones, don’t you?—you naturally assume that he has no home and comes from a distance.”
“But why couldn’t the major have just invited them to a dinner-party that night, all apparently open and above board?”
“Because, if anything happened to the consignment of arms on the way, if any suspicion arose about the transactions of that night—and you know how rumours do fly in the country—they’d all be in the cart. Besides, disguise is second nature to those sort of people where anything touching their respectability is concerned. Their conscience, so to speak, allows them to betray their country in white hoods but not in dinner-jackets.”
“If they were so terrified of being recognised, why didn’t they get a gang of weight-lifters from somewhere else?”
“It’s not so easy to import a gang of strangers into a remote country place without rousing talk. In fact, it’s next door to impossible. Major Keston had done it once, you remember, when he was building an ‘addition to his house’ as Harry called it. I bet that addition was his workshop and a cosy underground chamber—the workmen were probably told it was for a wine-cellar—where the arms could be stored. There is also the point that this conspiracy is decentralised—in watertight compartments, Uncle John called it. The Keston Regional, if I may so refer to the major’s little set-up, does all its own work as far as possible; thus, if an accident should happen, the damage would be localised, and no lead given to other centres of the plot.”
“They certainly must have packets of money behind them, building that house and everything.”
“Yes. That’s another significant point. There’s not much doubt where Major Keston’s ‘legacy’ came from. Yarnold Farm was chosen for its strategic position, near the sea, remote from other dwellings. Cathole Cove is a deserted place, like the downs above it. A cargo of arms could easily be landed there, loaded on to the lorry by the people who brought them, unloaded by the major’s chaps. If any one came across the lorry-driver on the road to Cathole Cove, he could say he’d been half asleep and taken the wrong fork off the main road. But the chances were a thousand to one against it at that time of night. The lorry’s number-plates were false ones, by the way, Georgia, so we’ve got no further in that direction. No doubt the locket belongs to one of the leaders of the conspiracy, who visited Yarnold Farm last year to make arrangements, and had it pinched somehow by a magpie. Maybe he was sunbathing. I wonder would that give us a clue,” said Nigel dreamily.
“I should have thought the simplest thing would be to get a posse and burst into the major’s cellarage.”
“No, no,” said Sir John briskly. “Don’t want to put ’em on their guard yet. Just stop ’em landing any more arms for the present.”
“And how do you propose to do that? Lay a minefield in Cathole Cove?”
Sir John’s eyes twinkled. “No need for anything so drastic. I’ve tipped off Jimmie Blair—you know the fellow, he’s doing that ‘Some Spooks I have Met’ series for the Daily Post. He’ll write up the Yarnold Cross ghost, and that’ll bring a horde of sightseers and psychic researchers up to the farm. They’ll have to withdraw their sentry till it blows over—and by that time——”
Sir John broke off. Georgia became aware of a certain tension in the air. Nigel and his uncle studiously refrained from looking at each other. They were like two children, she thought, who share a guilty secret: it was as if, about to spring some practical joke upon her, they were not sure how she would take it. When Sir John spoke again, however, his words seemed innocent enough.
“Our real problem is to find out who the leaders of this movement are. The smaller fry can take care of themselves for the present. Young Nigel has an idea.” His voice trailed off.
“It’s entirely theoretical, of course,” said Nigel. “But here it is, for what it’s worth. Granted this movement to set up some kind of dictatorship in Britain. Now, if there’s one thing the British people wouldn’t stand for, it’s dictatorship by any of the ordinary politicians. No doubt the conspirators mean to work up a state of crisis, lawlessness, bloodshed and the rest, which will justify the Strong Hand at the Helm. Temporarily. We’d not submit to it once the trouble had been cleared up, unless the Strong Hand was someone of national popularity—not as a politician, but as, well, as a chap.
“There are a few people in the country who have caught the popular imagination—the Englishman still has a sneaking affection for the highly-coloured, dynamic, adventurer-type—we’re descendants of Drake, after all. If the conspirators are as clever as we believe them to be, they’ll have chosen someone who can appeal to the ordinary Englishman’s romanticism and hero-worship.”