I picked up the whole pad and went to the mirror over the fireplace. And, in small finicky handwriting, in English, and in as flat terms as could have been used, was the following barefaced message:
fast planes. I will make the attempt to-night, and I assure Your Excellency that I have every hope of success. The envelope is in the upper right-hand pigeon-hole of Keppel's desk at the Cabot Hotel, Bristol. Perhaps it would have been wiser, in view of Keppel's doubts, to have had two reliable men hero. But if I succeed in obtaining possession of the envelope we shall be in possession of knowledge which….’
Here it crossed another trail, and became indecipherable. I looked at it, yet I could not believe it. It was too stark and simple. "You will find the pirates' treasure buried under the old elm-tree in the archbishop's garden": it had the same sort of hissing melodrama. It was as casual as an invitation to dinner. It lay on a blotting-pad as openly as though somebody had drawn an arrow to indicate it. And, above all, it was in English.
But why not? Round the Service there has grown up a phantom legend of codes and ciphers and secret passwords and similar flummery. Its members do not in reality go about hissing at each other, nor does the cipher exist which C2 department cannot solve. I can still remember the disappointment I once felt to learn that King's Messengers are not accustomed to traveling in wigs, with a couple of forged passports: they travel in a railway compartment labelled, Reserved for the King's Messenger. When a man has something to say, he usually says it straight out. This was not wartime. There was no reason why even the Post Office, let alone the War Office, should ordinarily be curious about letters written from a neat little villa in a neat little suburb not far from the sea.
"It looks terribly official," said Mrs. Antrim after a pause. She spoke uneasily. "I say, you don't suppose?’
I looked at Bowers. "You never saw the names of any of the people he wrote letters to?"
"No, I didn't. All I know is that they weren't letters to anybody in a European country."
"How do you know that?"
"Stamps," said Bowers instantly, and with some shrewdness. "I collect stamps, and that's 'ow I notice sometimes. You ought to know that postage to here or to America is three-halfpence to European countries it's more, see? Every letter the governor sent out, or at least every letter I ever noticed, had a brown three-halfpenny stamp. - 'Ullo!"
He turned round. I had picked up the newspaper, and as a sort of official gesture was wrapping up the blotting-paper in it, when back came those confounded dogging footsteps in the alley behind the house. They must just have been passing the rear gate, evidently still unsuspicious, when near at hand there was the sharp crack of a window being raised. It was not difficult to identify it as the window of the house next to this, from which the irate female had addressed me a while ago. This time the female, evidently to attract the attention of the searchers in the alley, made a noise like a soda-water syphon.
"Have you got him yet?" she bawled in a hoarse stage-whisper.
There was a silence. "Not yet, Mrs. M'Corseter," answered the voice of the sergeant who had arrested me. "But we'll get him: don't worry. The neighbourhood is patrolled. He can't get away."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," said Mrs. M'Corseter fiercely, "great big hulking fellows like you! It's a shame, that's what 1 call it, it's a downright shame if decent people can't sleep in their beds at night without having homicidal maniacs running loose-"
"Eh?"
Mrs. M'Corseter proceeded to describe a butchered neighbourhood in a way which would have made anyone's flesh creep.
"Here, now!" said the sergeant, flustered. "There's no homicidal maniac, ma'am. It's only "
"Don't you try to deceive me," said Mrs. M'Corseter. "I'm a taxpayer, and I won't have it. It was a policeman that told me it was a nasty, dangerous crazy-man, with a razor all over blood; so don't you try to deceive me, young man! What's more, your policeman took very good care he didn't run up against any nasty, dangerous crazy-man. He didn't take any chances; not him! He went into `The Larches' next door, and he hasn't come out yet, and what he's doing there all this time I don't know
Again there was a thunderous pause.
"But I know," said the sergeant. "In you go, Dennis!"
There was a rush of feet, a creak as the back gate swung open, and then another holocaust of flying bottles. My two companions very slowly turned to stare at me.
CHAPTER SIX
The Hundred-pound Newspaper
Dowry came the hounds, bottles or no; my sanctuary was now one with Nineveh and Tyre; and ahead loomed an imminent prospect of clink. There was no time to argue or explain.
"Excuse me," I said, and cut for it again.
It would have been a simple matter, since I was nearest the door, to have closed the door behind, pulled out the loose spindle, and left my two companions imprisoned there. But I didn't want to do that. The door must be left as wide open as possible, for it was conceivable that the sight of a very unusual corpse would stop my pursuers long enough to give me a few seconds' lead.
Those policemen — there seemed to be two of them, right enough-could cover ground. I was myself no laggard about getting out into the hall, but they were within a step of the back door when I reached the front one. But I did not go out the front door: games like this had been played in the old days. I switched off the lights in the hall, opened the door, and closed it with a slam. Then I ducked across the dark hall into the half-open door of a room on the right-hand side, fronting the street.
It was a dark, stuffy, waxy little room, with the ghosts of antiquated furniture showing in the gleam of a street-lamp through the window. In my hands, carried automatically, was the newspaper in which I had been wrapping up the blottingpad: and it suggested an idea even as the law burst in at the back door. I had not expected Mrs. Antrim to scream, since she did not appear to be of the screaming sort, but it is not to be denied that at the entrance of the law she let out an appalling yip which at least served to direct their attention to the body. As fast as possible I was climbing out of the tunic, the helmet, and the belt. Perhaps they should have been tossed aside altogether, but I was reluctant to do that, having seen how useful a passport they were anywhere. My own coat I had been compelled to leave behind at the police station. So I took off my waistcoat, rolled up my sleeves, and tucked the shirt under at the neck, thus presenting a picture of a suburbanite taking the air en deshabille on a summer night. The rest of the stuff I rolled up in the newspaper, tucking under its edges, just as the sergeant was calling hoarsely out in the hall, and somebody pelted for the front door.
I went to the window and peered out cautiously behind the lace curtain. The street-lamp was feeble enough, and one larch threw a dense shadow at one side of the window. The front door opened. It was not the sergeant who came out; so far as I could make out, when he stopped briefly to flash his light round into the front yard, "Dennis" was one of the men who had been tinkering about with the Austin back at the police station. He had never seen my face. Dennis limped a little, and pressed one hand to the knee of his trousers.
When he twitched round, his face wore a malignancy which is never permitted to members of the Force, but which was justifiable. And he was not to be gulled by any such kid's trick as I had played. He ran out into the street, looked left and right along an empty road, made a brief play with his light into front gardens, and then swung back to the house. He knew I was still inside. You could tell it by the expression on his face under the street-lamp. I ducked back just in time, as the beam from his lamp flashed into my window, then across at the window opposite, and up. He hurried up the walk, and I heard him speaking to the sergeant just inside the front hall.