“I still don’t like it. How d’ya know eh’s not leaving us in the middle?”
“You turn Charlie and we’ll do ya. Look at da kid. He’s not milky, are ya, Foxy-Poxy?”
It was six-thirty P.M. on Wednesday, and in the Shadwell cellar Foxy’s captors had sprung into activity like a gun’s crew. A trapdoor had been raised; from a cavity beneath, the three men were transferring Sten guns and ammunition to a big laundry basket. The fourth man, who had just returned, was at a grating in the cellar wall, looking out and up. Foxy himself, stupefied by three days of captivity, bad air, meager food, was almost beyond fear now. He knew they were taking him somewhere else; he thought they were not going to knock him off, in spite of Fred’s menaces. Mac, the Clydesider, seemed to have taken a fancy to him; and what Mac said went, though the others might grumble or snarl. Foxy didn’t care what happened, as long as he got out of this cellar. He’d even stopped thinking what he’d to to Fred if ever he had the chance.
The men gagged and bound him, dumped him on top of the weapons in the laundry basket, padlocked the lid. The basket smelled of oil. The guns and ammunition clips ground painfully into his thin body. He felt the basket being carried up the cellar steps, put down, a long pause, then jogging movement, another violent jolt, the sound of an engine starting, a jerk, swaying, rattling motion, the swish of traffic. Foxy felt sick and suffocating. He kicked out at the wicker walls in a frenzy of panic—went on kicking till the lid was lifted. In the gloom of the van’s interior Mac was looking down at him, curiously, fixedly, without compunction, as a child might gaze at a beetle it has shut up in a match box. Presently Mac lifted him out, untied his arms, and propped him against the wall of the van.
Nigel had taken the precaution of hiring the car with the ex-pugilist driver to convey him to the Durbars’. He was surprised to be walking out of the house unhindered, and glad to see the tough driver waiting for him; his knowledge, he felt, must have been written on his face; but no, Sir Rudolf had said good-by most affably, made no attempt to detain him longer. Wherever Bert Hale was now, he had been taken to Stourford Hall first. The Ipswich Inspector had found a recently used paintbox; but old Nanny had a phobia about paints, wouldn’t touch them. And there was the priest’s hole. If the boy had been taken there, it was two to one the gunman, Elmer, had been hidden there too. And, with a nationwide search for those two—with every policeman in Britain on the lookout for them, it was unlikely they have been moved. But they’d have to be moved now, the secret of the priest’s hole being out.
Nigel ordered the driver to go straight to Scotland Yard. Public call boxes were too vulnerable. Besides, if there was going to be an exodus from Stourford Hall, it would hardly take place before dark, since the house was under police observation: that would give Blount the best part of two hours to get Ipswich onto the job. They’d need a fair-sized cordon, and an armed one; for, if Elmer was there, he’d certainly try to shoot his way out.
At this critical moment, things began to go wrong. For once, Blount was not at H.Q. when Nigel arrived: he was in conference with Sir Edward, and on no account to be interrupted. Furthermore, Blount’s second-in-command had suddenly gone sick, and the officer doing duty for him was not au fait with the situation. Red tape began to rear its ugly head; the officer was maddeningly deliberate and inclined to be skeptical about Nigel’s standing. At last, however, he consented to pass Nigel’s information to the Ipswich police. But it was already seven-thirty P.M.
Not till eight-thirty did Blount return. But now, after Nigel said a few words to him, things began to hum. Blount rang Ipswich; and while the call was coming through, blew his overcautious subordinate out of the water with a few well-chosen phrases. A police car was ordered to be in readiness; large-scale maps were fetched; sandwiches and a thermos flask arrived from the canteen.
“… The village constable is at the lodge?… Aye, just so. But this man, Elmer, is a killer: it’ll take more than a village constable to stop him, if he tries to break through…. You’re putting road blocks out? Good, good. Watch the Harwich side particularly…. And the railway stations: good…. We’ll be with you at ten-thirty—a little before, maybe…. No, if I may suggest it, don’t start the search till we arrive; I’m bringing a gentleman who knows how to get into this secret room.”
The lasso was being flung all right; but it would take time to tighten, Nigel reflected, and they might be too late. For that matter, the whole thing might be a gigantic mare’s nest; in which event, the thought of Blount’s reactions would not bear contemplation….
At nine-twenty Police-Constable Hogg was keeping an eye on the window and discussing the culture of chrysanthemums with the Stourford Hall gardener, who lived at the gate lodge. A car engine was heard approaching. Hogg went out, to see a plain van drawing up to the gate. He was not a quick-thinking man; and besides, his orders were to report by telephone if anyone left the Hall—he had no instructions what to do about arrivals. He had hardly opened his mouth in measured, official inquiry before two men leaped from the back of the van, coshed him, trussed him up, and lifted him over the tailboard. A third man ran into the lodge, and holding up the gardener with a revolver, tore out the telephone wire. The gate was opened (its opening automatically rang a bell at the Hall, which explained how Tom was warned of the police car’s approach this morning), and the van bumped along the quarter-mile drive to the house.
As they stopped in the back courtyard, Foxy—bound and gagged again—heard rapid talk between the driver and a man who had come out of the house.
“Where’s the Yank? We’ve come for him.”
“Gone. He took a powder.”
There was a flood of profanity from the driver. It emerged, after a good deal of this, that the Yank had left the house about three hours ago. Telephone instructions had come from the Big Boy, and the Yank had set off on Tom’s bicycle. There was a rough track leading westerly across the park, in the opposite direction to the drive. By this track, it later turned out, Bert Hale had been conveyed up to the house, thus avoiding the notice of the gardener at the gate lodge away on the park’s eastern side.
The four men were all in the courtyard now, arguing furiously.
“Where the hell do we go from here?”
“We’ve been stood up. What did I tell you?”
“Let’s scarper.”
“Whadda we do with the effing bogey?”
Tom’s voice broke in. “Boss’s orders—you’ve gotta get the kid away, and dump him—”
“Another bleeding kid? Gawd’s truth, does he think we’re effing scoutmasters?”
“It’s Bert Hale.”
Foxy just caught the low mutter. His heart leaped up. So good old Bert was here, and alive. At that moment a voice came from beside him in the van: Police-Constable Hogg had recovered consciousness.
“You can’t get away with this, my lads. There are police blocks going up on all the roads hereabouts. You’ve had it, mates, see?”
“Bastard’s bluffing. Let’s load the nipper on and mosey.”
“Take it easy,” came Mac’s voice, a rasp of command in it. There was a hurried colloquy between him and Tom, which Foxy could not catch; then a long pause. Tom had taken Mac up onto the roof. From that vantage point, they saw car headlights approaching to the east along the main road, stopping—two cars; the same westward, where the track debouched into a lane. The bogey had not been bluffing.
“Into the house! Make it fast!” ordered Mac on his return. The other men grumbled; but they were out of their depth now, they obeyed. As Foxy was unlashed and hustled toward the back door by Tom, he saw them lifting the laundry basket and the policeman out of the van. Tom hurried him upstairs—three flights—pushed him into a room, locked the door on him. It was a brightly painted room, such as Foxy had never seen, full of kid’s toys and such, with a wall paper on which romped a pattern of Noah’s arks and animals. Sitting up in the bed was Bert Hale. The stared at each other for a moment.
“Hello,
Bert.”
“Hello, Foxy.”
“Doing yourself well here, aren’t you?”
“You been kidnaped too, Foxy?”
“Yeh. And beaten up,” said Foxy, not without pride. “Take a dekko at my bruises.”
Downstairs in the servants’ hall, while the old Nanny stared at them wild-eyed, the men held a rapid consultation with her nephew. There were four courses open to them. They could hide the arms here, and drive out of the park to be picked up by the police, relatively un-redhanded. They could drive away armed and try to shoot their way past the road block. They could scatter, each man attempting to escape across the fields by himself. Or they could stay put and shoot it out. Two of the men were in favor of the first or third course. But Mac and Fred had too much to lose if they fell into the hands of the law—Fred as an accomplice in the murder of Dai Williams, and Mac for a robbery with violence, whose victim had died of it. Besides, there was the Bert Hale factor. The Boss had sent word on the telephone, said Tom, that at all costs the boy must be kept from the police for another twenty-four hours; after that, it wouldn’t matter; if they brought it off, the Boss would stake them another grand apiece. This inducement, plus the more forceful personalities of Mac and Fred, won the day. They had plenty of ammunition; and if they couldn’t fight off the bogeys for twenty-four hours, they’d deserve to be topped, was Mac’s view. They’d stay here and shoot it out till the next night, then attempt a getaway, each man for himself, under cover of darkness.
“Why don’t we just croak the little bleeder?” asked Fred. “That’d stop him gaffing to the flatties—for more than twenty-four hours.”
“Nark it,” said Mac. “The Big Boy wouldn’t like that sort of talk.”
“Who the hell is he, anyway?” Fred snarled.
“Don’t ask tactless questions, Cuthbert. We don’t know who he is. We do not know, we cannot tell. He’s where the dough comes from. Isn’t that good enough for you?”
“I still say, croak the—nah, croak ’em both.”
“You make me tired. And if you lift a finger at my Foxy-Poxy, you horrible little runt—”
Fred’s hand flashed to his pocket and came out with a razor in it. But Mac had drawn his revolver still faster. The two glared at each other—the reptilian-eyed Fred and the huge Clydesider, dangerous as a rhinoceros. Tom broke the tension.
“For crying aloud! Can’t you see we got a couple of aces in them kids? Hostages. We tell the bogeys if they try to rush us, we’ll hand the kids over—the quickest way—drop ’em off the roof.”
“You’ve got something there,” said Fred. “Sort of stalemate. You want the kid. We got him. O.K., you can have him dead, or we keep him, alive. It’s a sweet thought.”
“You keep your sweet effing thoughts to kiss yourself good-by with,” growled Mac. “The discussion group will now dismiss. What’s the layout of this joint?”
Tom gave him a rapid survey. All the ground-floor windows of Stourford Hall were heavily shuttered. It should be easy enough, from first-floor windows, to pick off any policemen before they could force their way through. The same applied to the main door, in the east face. The back door could be heavily barricaded against an attack from across the courtyard. That left the south and west approaches. Both these sides of the house had French windows, which were shuttered. The eastern end commanded the main drive, the western the only other route by which vehicles could drive up to the house.
Mac and Fred had had experience of house-to-house fighting during the war. They knew that, resolutely defended, a building can be held for a period out of proportion to the size of its garrison, except against tanks. On the other hand, Stourford Hall gave them an uncomfortably broad front to defend, and they had no sandbags to fill up the windows from which they would be firing. What Mac banked on was the difficulty of a night attack for men untrained in such operations; some of the police might be old soldiers; but it was unlikely that any concerted attack would be launched till daylight, particularly if the police—always cautious movers, in Mac’s experience—were given the impression at the outset that the defenses were heavily manned.
Mac’s final dispositions were as follows: one man to cover each side of the house from a first-floor window, while Tom would keep on the move from room to room, to make it appear that the defenders were a numerous body, and also act as a runner for Mac. Mac himself had the advantage of a turret room, at the southeast corner of the house, whose two windows gave him a 90° arc of fire. The van was moved a little to the left of the archway which led out of the courtyard, and placed so that its headlights shone diagonally through it onto the spot where the main drive branched, but would be partly protected by the courtyard wall. Tom’s motorcycle was placed on the southern terrace for its headlight to point southwest. Finally, the unfortunate P.C. Hogg was dumped in a cellar, while the old woman was locked into the nursery with the two boys.
At ten-twenty-five Blount’s car drew up by the police barrier on the main road. It was a dark night, with the suffocating stillness of August. Blount and Nigel were directed to the gate lodge, where the Ipswich Superintendet awaited them. Here they learned that, an hour before, a number of men in a van had driven through to the house after capturing the constable on duty and disconnecting the telephone. The gardener swore that no one had passed out onto the main road between then and the arrival of police reinforcements. Nigel was, on the whole, relieved to hear this; it meant that his hunch had been correct—the enemy had sent an armed party to Stourford Hall, presumably to bring Bert and Elmer away; and they had only missed the trick by a matter of ten minutes or so.
The Ipswich Superintendent, Hallam, had wireless communication between his own car and the two police cars which blocked the other exit from the park, to the west: no one had attempted to get past that way. There remained the north and south. Hallam pointed out on his large-scale ordnance map how the land lay. A hundred yards from the south front of the house, between its lawn and the park proper, he said, there was a ha-ha. Into this he was filtering half a dozen armed policemen. To the north of the house lay a group of outbuildings, with the river running half a mile beyond them. He had sent four men to patrol the stretch of land between outbuildings and river; but he did not think there would be a breakout in that direction, unless the fugitives were prepared to swim.
Hallam then showed them, on a smaller scale map, the railway stations and road junctions which were now being watched. There were some familiar names on this map—Dedham, Flatford.
“I see we’re in the Constable country,” remarked Nigel.
“I could do with fifty more, sir, at this moment,” said Superintendent Hallam. “Well, we’d best be getting along. See if they mean business.”
It was soon evident that they did. As the two police cars moved up the drive, headlight beams bouncing and sliding off the trees that lined it, Nigel saw the roof of Stourford Hall traced dimly against the dark sky, but the lower stories were hidden behind a strong beam of light which struck diagonally across their path.
“By God, they’re going to make a break for it,” said Hallam. “Stop!”
But the beam did not move. It made a pool of light, stationary and sinister, where the drive forked—a pool of light, a moth trap, thought Nigel, as the car crawled ahead once more, almost up to its brink, then stopped. Nigel realized that the police drivers had switched off their own lights.
“‘Is there anybody there, said the Traveler,’” he murmured to Blount, on the back seat beside him. The voice of Superintendent Hallam, calling through the loud-speaker, came as an echo.
“Is there anyone there? We are the police. We are armed. I have a warrant for the arrest of Jameson Elmer. Come out, all of you.”
“Come and get us, flatties!”
The shout was followed instantly by a lucky burst of fire, which knocked an armed policeman from the running board of the first car and shattered the windshield of the second. The police were firing now, from the cover of the two cars; bu
t the diagonal beam obscured their target as effectually as a smoke screen.
“Shoot out those bloody headlights!” shouted Hallam.
So well placed, however, was the van in the courtyard, that it was difficult to get at them without coming into their beam. Another policeman was wounded, attempting to do so; and Hallam, after picking up the casualties, order a retreat.
Up in the nursery, Bert jumped as he heard the burst of fire. He was engaged in drawing accurate maps of the several floors of the house; it was quicker than trying to explain them to Foxy by word of mouth. Foxy was reclining on the bed, ravenously eating chocolate Nanny had brought for Bert. The old woman had, as Foxy put it, fallen apart: she crouched in the rocking chair, plucking her fingers, muttering that she’d never heard of such goings-on, and what was the world coming to, and when would that man give her back her uniform. This last remark the boys interpreted to mean that the gunman had borrowed the old nurse’s clothes as a disguise to help him escape. Between them, they had arrived at a pretty correct picture of the state of affairs; they also guessed its urgency; for Bert told Foxy how he had discovered the meaning of Dai Williams’ message, and tomorrow would be the 12th.
The blatter of the automatic weapon they now heard could only mean that the house was being attacked. Turning to each other, the boys stuck up their thumbs in signal. It was time to put their plan into operation. Bert had written several copies of a statement, giving all the information they had at their disposal. These were to be put inside the paint box, the Noah’s ark and a Chinese puzzle egg, which would be thrown out of the window as soon as the police approached. But, peering downward through the bars, they could see no police—only the night, and the swathe of light which the headlamp of Tom’s motorcycle cut through the darkness. They turned away, disconsolate, unaware that their faces, outlined in the lighted window, had been spotted by one of the policemen entrenched in the ha-ha.