A sudden panic seized me. I cried out. I screamed. I struggled. It was like one of those awful nightmares in which you cannot move. At length I lay still, exhausted. And it was only then that I realised that I was bound and that there was a gag in my mouth. I tried to move my head, but found I could not. And then I remembered the tin box, and for hours it seemed I struggled with a terrible hysteria. But though I eventually calmed myself, I had a horrible fear that I might never be let out. And then I began to develop cramp. I don’t know which was worse, the physical pain in my joints or the mental horror of being shut up in that tin box for ever. And the strange thing was that I could not move my arms, legs or head the fraction of an inch. I was fixed to that tin box as though I were a dummy clamped into position.
At length the car stopped and there was much scraping of boots on the floor. The doors were opened just near my head and the familiar sounds of the London streets became suddenly clear. I heard a news-vendor crying the late night final and the murmuring shuffle of countless feet. I guessed that it must be rush-hour. My box shook violently and I heard the sound of a man’s breathing. And then I toppled over on to my side. Instinctively I tried to break my fall. But I could not move my hand. And anyway there was no fall. A second later I was on my head. The tin box grated on the road surface, and then I was righted and laid down on a little trolley. The iron wheels rang as it was pulled up the kerb. For a moment we were held up on the pavement. Quite plainly I heard one passer-by saying, ‘I was just speaking to old Jessop in the House and he told me …’ The rest was lost. But the word ‘House’ had given me a clue to my whereabouts. And this was confirmed when I heard another voice say, ‘… you were coming. You’re going to Liverpool Street, aren’t you? Well, I’m going to the Bank. Cheerio.’ I was in the City. ‘House’ meant the Stock Exchange.
I tried to attract the attention of those countless office workers, who hurried past my tin coffin to their firesides in the suburbs. I struggled and screamed. But I made no audible sound. The wheels rumbled across the pavement and bumped a step. Then we were crossing stone again, but the sound was different, and I knew we were inside a building. Then we stopped, and I heard a thick voice cursing the lift. When my carriage was manoeuvred into it, we went down, not up — and down a long way, it seemed. Then more stone passages that had an echoing ring like vaults.
At last came the moment when my box was lifted off the trolley. The journey was over and I felt an indescribable longing to see something and to move. ‘Is he right way up?’ I heard a voice ask. The answer was a grunt. ‘Wouldn’t do to let him die of apoplexy, would it?’ the voice said. There was a chuckle at that, and then footsteps sounded on a stone floor. They were going away from me. They were leaving me. I cried out and struggled. I felt I should stifle. Then I heard the soft thud of a heavy door closing, and suddenly I went limp.
The practice of the Spanish inquisitors — and others before and since them — of walling people up has always had for me a particular horror, and, like all horrors, a particular fascination. I had often thought about that death and how terrible it must be. I know now just how terrible it can be. And I also know that that terror has its limitations. When that door closed, I really believed I was as near to madness as a man ever can be without actually going mad. The stillness, the sense of being deserted, the utter loneliness filled me with a childish terror. Suppose I were in an old river tideway? I was in the City and deep underground. Suppose I had been left here to drown as the tide slowly rose? I could hear small sounds that I knew instinctively to be rats. But the sound of the boots on the floor had been the sound of leather on dry stone.
It was not drowning I feared. And the more my imagination ranged, the more I began to wish that I had been placed in a tideway. At least it would be a quick death. As the alternative, I saw myself crouching in that tin box, immovable for days, whilst starvation and the intolerable ache of my limbs drove me mad. I did not fear death then. Death, I knew, would be the release. But I did fear madness. And for hours, it seemed, I struggled to get a grip of myself. At last I succeeded in resigning myself to my fate. I allowed my imagination to picture the worst, to picture my skin sagging on my bones as I hung suspended in the box and to picture the horrible twisted skeleton I should eventually be. And then, when I had allowed myself to come face to face with the ultimate end, with thirst and pain, I felt calm and resigned. My restricted circulation caused me great pain. But, now that I had faced the worst and conquered my fear, I knew I could stand it.
For a time I think I lost consciousness. Whether the pain was too great or whether I slept, I do not know. But, when my brain became active again, I knew that some considerable time had passed. By then my nerves had become dulled to the pain and my brain no longer seemed linked to my body. It was active and quite above the physical. It ranged of its own accord around the problem that had got me into this fix. And in a moment, it had seized upon a few small points and leapt to the wildest conclusion.
And the strange thing was that I knew it was the right conclusion. I felt no elation. My mind was too dulled for that. But I was glad that I had at least pieced the bits together and achieved a pattern. It made Sedel and his gang of secret agents seem less terrifying. Even my own terrible predicament seemed suddenly of little importance.
For the past two days my mind had been fed with scraps and had tried to piece those scraps into a whole. There had been Schmidt and the message I had decoded. There had been the man with the scar on his knuckles who had followed me from David Shiel’s studio to my club. There had been Freya and the Cones of Runnel and the boat that had been requisitioned. And then there had been the three Calboyd shareholders — Ronald Dorman, with his sumptuous façade of affluence, John S. Burston, who had been driven over the cliffs below the Belle Toute, and Alfred Cappock. And behind these had been Max Sedel, sleek, well-groomed and efficient, a first-class agent and entirely ruthless.
But none of these mattered. They were the puppets. They were pawns in a game played by a master hand. Behind them loomed the heavy sleepy-eyed figure of Baron Ferdinand Marburg. It was incredible. He was head of the big merchant banking house of Marburg. He was a pillar of the country’s financial system. More, he was reputed to be a member of the shadow cabinet. He was a man of tremendous influence and great power — a man, in fact, above suspicion. But, now I had named him, I did not for a moment doubt that I was right.
Sedel had supplied the link in my mind. It was Baron Marburg who had introduced him to journalism. Once having remembered that, everything else fell neatly into place. His membership of the Junior First National. The golden Marburg eagles on the lapels of the man who had hit me in Cappock’s suite. And the scraps of conversation I had heard on the pavement outside my prison. Marburgs stood on the corner between Old Broad Street and Threadneedle Street. Two clerks coming out of the bank would part company on the doorstep if one were going to the Bank tube station and the other to Liverpool Street. Moreover, it was just across the road from the Stock Exchange. Then again, the depth we had descended in the lift. No building but a bank would have vaults so deep. Besides, there was the method Sedel had chosen of removing me from the Wendover. A deed-box, even of such large dimensions, would excite no curiosity, being trundled from the bank’s own strong room van to the vaults by men in the bank’s own livery.
But I couldn’t for the moment see what the man had to gain by it. Perhaps it was one of the departmental heads and not Marburg who was implicated? But I discarded that theory at once, for no one but Marburg had made over a million pounds available to both Burston and Cappock. Perhaps it was money? But I argued that a man who had a world-wide reputation as a financial genius would have no need to play such a dangerous game to make money. There remained only power as the motive. And to this, the answer seemed clear. He had enough power in this country.