The Whisper in the Gloom

  The two men saw him blunder through the crowd strolling round the pond, and go down oddly on his knees beside a boy in gray shorts and shirt. They started moving fast toward the group which stood behind the boy….

  The Quack, pausing in his brisk walk, bent down to do up a shoelace, and took his opportunity to remove the skewer-like instrument from inside his sleeve and push it deep into the earth with the sole of his shoe. Talk about a needle in a haystack, he muttered, gleefully chuckling inside himself. He had not looked back once at his patient; the operation, though slightly interfered with, could not have been anything but successful. He walked on, out of the Gardens.

  Bert, offering up a prayer, placed his invention carefully in the water, and adjusted the rudder. This was it. Success, or shameful failure. There were people behind him, watching. Then it happened, all in a few seconds. A funny little man, gray-faced, with imploring eyes, was on his knees beside Bert, tearing a piece off a newspaper.

  “Here, sonny,” he said, in a queer, wheezing whisper, “put this in your boat. For luck, see?”

  Luck was what Bert wanted. He took the tiny ball of paper, put it in the boat, replaced the deck, drew a deep breath, and set the engine at full revs. The little man was down on hands and knees now beside him. Just as Bert released the throbbing boat, the man thrust out a hand, pushing its rudder straight. The boat tore off, not in a semicircle, but heading straight across the pond. Bert ran wildly round, cursing the man; either the boat’s power would fail before it reached the other side, or it would dash itself to bits on the far shore before he could get there.

  At the spot where the boat had begun its maiden voyage, Dai Williams remained, lying full length now, his wrists trailing in the water, his arms stretched out as if in longing toward the farther shore.

  “Must be blotto.”

  “A touch of the sun, I reckon.”

  “Better carry him onto the grass.”

  “Get a park-keeper.”

  “Looks like it’s a doctor he needs.”

  “Gave the nipper a bit of paper. Put it in the boat. For luck, he said.”

  While the group of bystanders were discovering that they had a dead body among them, the two men moved round the pond after Bert. They dared not run fast, for fear of calling attention to themselves; but they went at a loping trot, like the owners of model yachts.

  Bert’s speedboat did only too well on its first trial. It crossed the pond in a huff of foam, its engine crackling sweetly, and ran itself right up onto the far bank half a minute before Bert got there. He saw that it needed repairs before it could take the water again; so, annoyed but not disconsolate, he put it under his arm and set off toward the Bayswater Road.

  He had not gone far when two men came up on either side of him, and fell into conversation.

  “Smashed it up, son? That’s a shame.”

  “Went a treat, it did. We seen it.”

  “Oh, it’s not damaged much,” said Bert.

  “You make it yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bloody marvel these kids are nowadays, Fred. Tell you what, son. I’ve got a nipper, about your age, always on at me to buy him a motorboat. What’ll you take for this one?”

  “But I don’t want to sell it.”

  “Look, I’ve taken a fancy to it. I’ll make it worth your while.” The man drew a roll of notes from his pocket, winking at his companion. “Strictly cash transaction. No income tax to pay.”

  “Thanks awfully, but—”

  “Couple of quid do you? Make it five, if you like; among friends.”

  Bert found himself hot with embarrassment. He walked faster. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to sell it.”

  But the man—a jovial, red-faced man—kept on at him; kept on at him a shade too long. Bert was quite old enough to sense something abnormal in this persistence. Though he was beginning to feel frightened, his brain still worked all right. The boat wasn’t worth quarter of the money now being offered. Therefore it couldn’t be the boat they wanted. Therefore they must want the bit of paper that gray-faced man had given him. Bert’s mouth set obstinately; his eyes flickered round on the strolling people, none of them quite near enough, and the children’s playground ahead.

  “Ever seen one of these, chum?” said the man called Fred, withdrawing his right hand, with a brass contraption on the knuckles, from his side pocket, and quickly replacing it.

  Bert, as a matter of fact, had seen one. His friend Copper’s father was a policeman, and possessed such a souvenir.

  “Beauty treatment,” pursued the man called Fred. “A bit of face-lifting might improve your looks.”

  Bert ducked and ran for it. The sauntering couples, the fond parents and larking children beheld a familiar sight—a red-faced man chasing, with jolly cries, a small boy among the trees. Nobody paid any special attention to the cheerful little family scene; nobody remarked how white was the boy’s face. Like Dai Williams only five minutes before, Bert felt the fugitive’s universal mistrust; there might be more of them than just those two men; he dodged and swerved past innocent strollers, then raced into the children’s playground, just ahead of the two men.

  It took him a very short time to realize that what had seemed sanctuary was in fact a trap. The playground, with its horde of children swinging, see-sawing, giant-striding, yelling their heads off, protected him temporarily, no doubt; but it had only two exits, and Bert saw that on the grass, opposite each, one of his pursuers was now sitting.

  His first impulse was to open the boat and look at the paper inside. But this he rejected at once. The men might see him doing it, and he must not give them any inkling that he guessed what they were really after. He looked round desperately for an attendant or a park-keeper, but there was none in sight. Sitting down in the sand pit, he forced himself to think coolly about his predicament. Sooner or later, a keeper would be bound to turn up. Well then, he need only wait. But would any grownup believe his story? Would the hard-faced, skeptical genus of park-keeper believe him? Suppose he threw himself on the mercies of such a one, and then the two men waiting outside swore that he had stolen the boat, or that he was the son of one of them? He couldn’t imagine any keeper believing his story, then.

  So what? Wouldn’t the best plan be to get himself arrested? to do something so blatantly criminal that the two men, however much they protested, couldn’t “rescue” him from it? Bert’s mind ran rapidly over the offenses listed upon the notice board which he had so often studied on entering the Gardens. He recollected, for example, a clause to the effect that:

  No person on horseback shall take into or have in the Gardens any dog.

  This was typical of the general far-fetchedness of the regulations, and of their utter irrelevance to his own dilemma. Indeed, there seemed nothing for it but to await the arrival of Authority, and then commit an all-out assault upon one of the repulsive infants who were mucking about beside him in the sandpit.

  Bert’s meditations were abruptly ended, however, by a new development of the situation. The enemy had decided to break the stalemate. Sauntering amid a group of children, with whom he was affably chatting, the red-faced man entered the playground. Bert found himself being edged away toward its other exit, where Fred and his knuckle-duster were stationed. At this moment, his terror increasing at every step, he all but chucked in his hand. But, as he approached the exit, holding out the boat to Fred in a gesture of surrender, a brain wave came upon him. If the red-faced man could use an escort of children to get in, he could jolly well—

  “Uncle Tom! Hello, Uncle Tom!” Bert yelled to a total stranger who was walking along the path outside the playground. The advancing Fred halted. Bert shot through the gate, ran past him, and hurled himself enthusiastically upon the stranger.

  “I thought you were never coming,” said Bert.

  A pair of very pale blue eyes scrutinized Bert. They seemed to take in, at one glance, himself, his deadly terror and his desperate maneuver.

  “Cou
ldn’t think where you’d got to,” remarked the stranger equably, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder and steering him off down the path. “What’s up?” he said. “Someone frightened you? And—” he lowered his voice—“what is all this about, anyway?”

  “Two men tried to take my boat,” was all Bert could get out at first, his lip trembling. “Are they following us? A red-faced, big man, and a beastly chap with—”

  The stranger stopped dead, turned round.

  “Those two?” he asked, pointing at the men, who had also halted, thirty yards behind.

  “Yes.” Bert gave a small whimper. “Please don’t let’s stop. The other one’s got a knuckle-duster.”

  “Has he indeed?” said the stranger as they moved on. His voice was mild, interested; it gave Bert quite immense confidence that the stranger should so readily accept his story.

  “I know it sounds batty, I didn’t think you’d believe me,” came out with a rush from Bert.

  “They tried to take your boat?”

  “Yes. Well, actually they offered me money for it first. Five pounds.”

  “It’s a nice boat,” the stranger commented seriously, “but hardly worth that much I suppose.”

  “Oh no. Nothing like. I made it myself, you see. From parts, of course.”

  “Why did they want it so much, I wonder.”

  It was on the tip of Bert’s tongue to tell his new friend about the boat’s cargo, the little ball of paper. But he’d had a bad fright, he wasn’t sure that he could trust any stranger. The hand upon his shoulder seemed to tighten, and panic flooded him again. They were at the north gate of the Gardens. A bus, which had stopped at the pedestrian crossing, began to move on. Bert wriggled suddenly from his companion’s grasp, dashed across the pavement, and swung himself into the bus.

  The stranger shrugged his shoulders, then side-stepped as a red-faced man rushed past him through the gate and went pelting after the bus.

  “Well, what is all this about?” thought Nigel Strangeways. It took him only a short time to discover that, whatever the game was, he was involved in it; for he himself was now being trailed by the other man whom the boy had pointed out to him. He shook off this individual with no great difficulty; but he could not shake off the impression made upon him by the white, terrified boy.

  Bert, meanwhile, had spotted the red-faced man pursuing the bus. Luckily there weren’t many taxis in the Bayswater Road on a Sunday afternoon. But Bert was not going to risk the man’s getting one and following the bus. He jumped off at the next traffic lights, took a bus which was going up Church Street, alighted again at Kensington High Street station, and returned to Notting Hill Gate by Inner Circle. When he came to the surface, the coast seemed to be clear.

  He walked home, took the boat into his workshop, locked the door, and opened the boat.

  Nothing that had happened on this eventful afternoon had prepared him for, or could equal, the shock he now got. Smoothing out the crumpled ball of paper, he saw written on it—the indelible pencil marks blurred a bit by the water in the boat’s engine room, but still perfectly legible—his own name, and in figures after it, his age.

  2

  The Martians—and Others—Confer

  “I’VE GOT IT,” said Foxy, snapping his fingers. “It’s a warning. They’re going to kidnap you.”

  “The snatch racket,” said Copper.

  “But why should anyone want to kidnap me?” Bert asked.

  “For your bulging brains, of course. They’re always kidnaping inventors.”

  “Snatch ’em young,” said Copper.

  “The head of the gang,” said Foxy hoarsely, warming to his theme, “is a mad scientist, see? He’s doing a series of experiments. Human vivisection. He’s heard about the Brain. All right. He wants to graft the Brain’s brains onto a monkey, and vice versa, and see what happens.”

  “I could tell him,” put in Copper. “The monkey’d become more of a silly ape than ever.”

  Bert hurled himself upon his friend and brought him to the floor, where Foxy presently joined them in indiscriminate combat. It was the morning after Bert’s experience in the Gardens, and he had summoned an extraordinary meeting of the Martian Society to discuss it. Copper, as the son of a Detective-Sergeant, had expressed considerable skepticism at first about the whole affair; people were always making up stories that they’d been threatened or attacked, he weightily announced, just to get into the Press. He even hinted that Bert himself had done the writing on the piece of newspaper. However, a severe grilling of Bert on the details of his story convinced Copper there was something in it.

  Bert clinched it by borrowing a morning paper from one of his mother’s lodgers. Under the headline, MAN STABBED BY ROUND POND, appeared a brief description which tallied with that of the gray-faced little man he had received the message from. Before his friends arrived, Bert had tested the piece of paper for invisible ink, holding it to the gas fire, breathing on it and rubbing it with dust, treating it with dilute ink, but all to no effect. The Martians were still faced by the total mystery of a dying man’s having written Bert’s name and age on the paper.

  The Martian Society rose from the floor and resumed its conference. Bert maintained the view that the writing was in code; but he had spent much of the previous evening trying to break it down, by every possible application of the figure 12 to the letters of his name, without result.

  “I bet the clue’s in some book. On page twelve. The chap who got stabbed was a Secret Service agent. His organization has arranged for a certain book to look up; they just turn to page twelve, or it may be line one of page two—”

  “What book?” asked Copper dishearteningly. “You going right through the Public Library?”

  “Oh shut up!” said Bert, pushing away the sheets of squared paper on which he had tried to break the code. “Do you want to co-operate, or not?”

  “Playing at spies! Gah!”

  “If you’d been threatened by a thug with a knuckle-duster, you wouldn’t talk about playing.”

  “Copper couldn’t look worse if he did get his face bashed,” said Foxy.

  “Order, order!” cried Bert, beating on the table with a hammer. “I put it to you, gentlemen—when a chap passes a secret message and gets murdered, and when two thugs try to get hold of the message by hook or by crook, it’s not a game. Are we agreed on that, gentlemen?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “O.K., chummie.”

  “Are we agreed, furthermore, that this Society is empowered to take suitable action in respect of the aforesaid situation?”

  “Blow me down! The answer is in the affirmative.”

  “What action?”

  “That is now open to discussion by this meeting.” Bert glanced round authoritatively at his associates. A deepening silence confronted him. “Well, shall we take our information to the police?”

  Foxy spat. Copper pointedly ignored the gesture, and said, “Describe the two men who molested you. Height, weight, color of eyes, how dressed, any distinguishing marks.”

  “Well, one had a red face, he was a big man, and—er—the other was thin, sort of slimy looking, in a drape suit,” Bert uncertainly began, then petered out. He had been far too frightened to take in much of the men’s appearance, nor was physical description ever his forte.

  “You see? Can’t expect the Force to apprehend every suspicious person with a drape suit or a red face. Stands to reason.”

  There was another glum silence. Then Foxy snapped his fingers again. “I’ve got it. Advertise for them.”

  “Don’t be so soft.”

  Foxy’s sharp face, surmounted by a mop of carroty hair, was alight. Foxy knew his way about. His father was a barrow boy in a big way, with a family of red-haired children so numerous that he had lost count of them.

  “No, wait a minute. These two wide boys. They want Bert’s boat, see? For the message inside it. So they want Bert. O.K. They’re looking for him now, shouldn’t wonder. We pu
t adverts in a few stationers’ windows round here. ‘If the gentlemen who wished to purchase a boy’s speedboat in Kensington Gardens on August 1st, ult., will come to—’”

  “Hi, Foxy, I don’t want them coming here.”

  “Quee down!—‘will be outside the Notting Hill Gate G.P.O.—’”

  “Why the G.P.O.?”

  “Because it’s public, you silly goon. We can keep a better watch for them there without being seen ourselves:—‘outside the G.P.O. between seven and seven-thirty any evening, they will hear something to their advantage.’ How’s that?”

  “Out!” said Copper. “It’s crazy. If those chaps are on the crook, they’ll suspect it’s a trap. They’d never come.”

  “Look, they want the message enough to offer Bert here a flim for his boat and then flash a mike at him. They still want it, don’t they? O.K. They’ll send another mob, if they’re windy about coming themselves.”

  “So what do we do? Arrest them for loitering?”

  “We turn up at the rendezvous. Bert keeps out of sight. If he recognizes one of these blokes, he gives us a signal and we follow them home. Find out where they live.”

  “And if they send another bloke?”

  “We’ll spot him, hanging about; he’ll be keeping one eye open for the dicks and the other for an innocent little cheeild who’s thought again about the five nicker.”

  “So we put a tail on him,” said Copper, almost with enthusiasm, “and let him lead us to his confederates?”

  “Listen to his mind working!”

  “But why should they ever read our advertisements?” objected Bert.

  “It’ll get around,” said Foxy darkly. “They’re the wide boys’ notice boards, some of those little stationers. And I know which. Bert’s buddies’ll hear about it soon enough.”

  “It’s an idea,” Copper conceded. “Then we pass the info to the police, and they raid the joint.”

  “It’ll make a nice change,” said Foxy.

  “What’ll your Dad say? Doesn’t he want you on the barrow?”