It was exactly half past two in the morning when I was shown into the library of the General's West End flat. The General welcomed me in a red quilted dressing-gown and waved me to a seat. He hadn't been to bed — I could see that — the dressing-gown meant nothing, he invariably wore it inside the house.
Six foot three and built to match, the General would never see seventy again, but his back was as straight, his complexion as fresh and his eyes as clear as a man thirty years his junior. He had thick iron-grey hair, iron-grey trimmed moustache, grey eyes and the cleverest brain of any man I'd ever met. I could see he had been doing some thinking with this brain and wasn't any too pleased with the conclusions he'd arrived at.
"Well, Cavell." His voice was clipped, incisive, vaguely military. "You've made a pretty mess of things."
"Yes, sir." He was the only man in the world who rated a "sir" from me.
"One of my best operatives, Neil Clandon, is dead. Another as good, Easton Derry, is probably also dead, though only listed missing. Dr. Baxter, a great scientist and a great patriot — and how badly we need both — is dead. Whose fault, Cavell?"
"Mine." I looked at a convenient decanter. "I could do with a drink, sir."
"There rarely has been a time when you couldn't," he said acidly, and then, just one degree less acidic, "Leg acting up?"
"A little. Sorry about this hour of night, sir. It was essential. How do you want it — the story?"
"Straight, quick and from the beginning."
"Hardanger turned up at 9 a.m. Sent in an Inspector Martin, heavily disguised as God knows what, to test my loyalty first. I suppose you thought that one up too. You might have warned me."
"I tried to," he said impatiently. "I was too late. The news of Clandon's death reached General Cliveden and Hardanger before it did me: I rang you up but your home and office phones were out of order."
"Hardanger did that," I nodded. "Anyway I passed the test. Hardanger was satisfied and asked me to come to Mordon. Said he'd suggested it to you and you'd been reluctant. It must have taken quite a bit of doing to suggest something to Hardanger and leave him with the impression that he'd thought it up himself."
"It was. Never underestimate Hardanger. An outstanding policeman. He has no suspicions? You're sure?"
"That this was a put-up job? That it was you who engineered me out of the Special Branch and into Mordon, and then out of Mordon again? He has no suspicions. I guarantee."
"Right. The story."
I didn't waste words. That was one of the very first things an agent learnt about the General — never to waste words with him. In ten minutes he'd all the relevant facts and he'd never forget one of them.
"Almost word for word with Hardanger's reports that have already been filed with me through official channels," he commented. "Almost, I said. Good policemen concentrate only on relevancies. Your conclusions, Cavell?"
"What about the investigation I asked to be made down in Kent, sir?"
"Negative." I swallowed some more whisky. I needed it.
"Hardanger suspects Dr. Baxter to be a case of the biter bit," I said. "You know that already — he phoned asking for a security check on Baxter. He suspects Dr. Baxter, probably accompanied by another man, broke into Mordon and that thieves fell out as a result of which Dr. Baxter met his death at the hands of his fellow breaker and enterer, an action that may have been either spur-of-the-moment or premeditated. What Hardanger doesn't know is that it was Dr. Baxter who first reported to Easton Derry, directly and privately, that minute amounts of rare and valuable viruses were disappearing from Mordon and asked for an investigation, or that it was Baxter who, as a result of our requests, had me removed from Mordon so that I could carry on investigations in London under cover of a private detective's business."
"Hardanger is wrong on both counts. Dr. Baxter didn't break into Mordon that night for the sufficient reason that he hadn't left it earlier that evening. The man behind this killing — a man working with a considerable organisation, I should say — has kidnapped the children of Bryson and Chipperfield, the farm managers. The fact that the kids are not where their parents say they are, with their grandmother in Kent, is all the proof I want. Bryson and Chipperfield were given their choice — co-operation or dead children. They co-operated. They carried crates of animals into number one lab on the afternoon of the killings. They were old regulars — the guards would never have thought of inspecting the crates. Inside two of these crates were two men fairly skilfully made up to resemble Dr. Baxter and someone we can call X."
"Eight crates were carried in that afternoon and Bryson and Chipperfield followed their usual practice of not disturbing the lab work too much by bringing in all the crates first and leaving them in the corridor, just outside the lab, before carrying them all in. This, of course, is conclusive proof of highly-detailed inside information. While the crates were there, one of the men inside — the one disguised as X— nipped smartly out into the adjoining cloakroom used by the scientists and technicians in number one. He probably hid in a locker. The other man — the one disguised as Baxter — was carried into the animal room. A dozen places where a man could hide there."
"Our enquiries show that the scientists and technicians drifted off singly that evening — they usually did. One of them — X—takes his chance of going into a momentarily empty cloakroom and changes over places with the impostor to whom he hands his security tag. The fake X now leaves by the main gate, handing in his tag and forging the name. It was a pitch dark night and he'd only be one of hundreds crowding out. He was pretty safe."
"X goes back into the lab when the coast is clear and sticks a gun into Baxter. More likely this has already been done by the man dressed to impersonate Baxter. Anyway it doesn't matter. Baxter was always the last to leave, he was responsible for setting the combination and so they nailed him. By and by the imposter 'B' takes off and hands in Baxter's card at the gate."
"X, of course, can't just pocket the viruses, knock off Baxter and remove himself. As far as the gate guard is concerned, X has already checked out. He can't check out a second time. He knows it won't be safe to move until the last of the security rounds have been finished at 11 p.m. He waits till then, takes the viruses, belts Baxter over the head with his gun-butt and leaves, throwing a virus toxin at the unconscious man. He has to kill Baxter, because Baxter knew who he was. He didn't know, as we did, that Clandon was keeping a binocular watch every night on the corridor in 'E' block, but it's highly likely that he suspected he might. He's not the man who would leave anything to chance. He must have known that this was the one possibility that might upset his plans. Hence the cyanide sweet. When Clandon came up after X had shut the door, X must have spun some yarn and got Clandon to accept the sweet. He obviously knew Clandon well and Clandon knew him."
The General rubbed his moustache thoughtfully. "Ingenious, if nothing else. Basically, you must be right. But there's something wrong about that cyanide business. Far wrong. Clandon was looking for a man that had been stealing virus supplies and he must have suspected that X was the man. I just don't see Clandon accepting this butterscotch. Besides, X was carrying a gun, probably silenced. Why not that? Why the cyanide?"
"I don't know, sir." I felt like adding that I hadn't been there.
"How did you get on to this in the first place?"
"The dog, sir. It had a couple of barbed wire tears in its throat. It seemed likely that there might be blood on the wire itself. There was. It took me an hour to find it. On the inner wire. No one broke into Mordon that night: someone broke out."
"Why didn't Hardanger discover this?"
"He'd no reason to suspect what I did. I knew that Baxter hadn't broken in and a check with the gate guard showed that Baxter had his face covered with a handkerchief and talked thickly through a cold when he left. That was enough.Besides, Hardanger's men did get around to examining the wires. They concentrated on the outside one for an hour or so and then moved to the inner fence."