Down at the police station next morning nobody would say anything.
“What about bail?” I asked. “I’m afraid I’ve never been mixed up in anything like this before.”
The sergeant merely shook his head at me.
“All in good time, sir,” he said. “Bail’s a matter for the Court, bail is.”
“And when do you expect the case to come up?” I persisted. “I take it that habeas corpus still obtains within the Duchy.”
The sergeant, however, didn’t seem to be any too anxious to commit the Duchy to anything.
“If you care to look in this afternoon, sir,” he said, “the Inspector’ll be back by then.”
“That’s nice of you,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ll bother. We seem to have been seeing so much of each other.”
Just as I was going out, I met Swanton. He had cycled down. There was a piece of sticking-plaster on the corner of his mouth where I had hit him, and I felt rather ashamed when I saw it.
“It’s no use,” I said. “They won’t let you see him.”
Swanton looked a bit dashed. I think that he had pictured himself thrusting files and hacksaw blades in through the grille of the cell door.
“And they won’t say when he’s going to be charged,” I told him.
Swanton pulled the corners of his mouth down, and shook his head disapprovingly. Then he pushed past me.
“Where are you going,” I asked.
“Just to see if you’ve been telling me the truth,” he said. “Nothing personal about it.”
Altogether I was getting quite fond of the boy.
“Pity you’ve got your bike,” I replied. “I’d like to have offered you a lift.”
I cut a pretty good figure at the breakfast table. That was because I was the only one who had actually been down to the station to inquire about our poor brother. Rogers was the first to say anything.
“I must say I’m not surprised,” he remarked. “I always had my doubts about him. Nothing definite, you know. Just doubts.”
This brought an approving nod from Bansted. He was in one of his more severe, must-reduce-your-overdraft moods this morning.
“Never did approve of having foreigners on this kind of a job,” he said. “Stands to reason they haven’t got the same loyalties.”
Dr. Smith gave a slow, unhumorous sort of smile.
“I suppose you’ve overlooked the fact that our friend Mellon here is a foreigner,” he said. “Does that mean that you don’t approve of Mellon?”
Satisfied that he had said something to embarrass someone, he stuffed another piece of toast into his mouth and went on eating.
But nerves were a bit frayed all round. And it was Mellon and not Bansted who answered.
“Say, why are you always picking on me?” he asked. “Just because you’re a bum lecturer over on our side you don’t have any cause to wash other people’s heads for them.”
“And I object most strongly,” Bansted replied. “I had no thought of Mellon when I was speaking. I don’t regard Mellon as a foreigner. I was referring to Mann, and to Mann alone.”
I could understand Bansted’s feeling of bitterness towards Mann. After all, it had been Mann who had seen him go out on to the moors with that pop-gun of his.
But before anyone else could answer Mellon spoke up the way his father’s people would have liked to hear him.
“Well, I’m sorry for Mann,” he said sweetly. “You show me a refugee, and I’ll show you someone who’s taken a pretty tough hiding.”
Then Gillett said something. He had been rather more silent than usual, I thought. It may have been that with a profile like that he couldn’t risk spoiling things by talking with his mouth full.
“I’m glad for his sake that this is England,” he remarked. “At least he can be assured of a fair trial.”
But this last remark was too much for Kimbell. He got up so suddenly that he nearly overturned his chair.
“Of all the bloody rot,” he said. “Do you imagine that a refugee ever gets a fair trial? Can you imagine any jury that wouldn’t rather convict a foreigner? I can’t, if you can.”
And with that Kimbell left us. In the doorway he nearly collided with Swanton, who was just coming back from his early morning cycle ride. It only occurred to me later that it was highly significant that Kimbell and Swanton should have been going in opposite directions. They hadn’t even stood shoulder to shoulder when Mann had been arrested.
But it could hardly have been that one of them had discovered something about the other. My guess was that they both knew everything already.
Dr. Mann was charged the following morning. And we couldn’t any of us have been more astonished if it had been a bicycle that he was supposed to have pinched . . . “that between the 20th and the 27th November he did steal 1,000,000 international units of penicillin and did unlawfully attempt to transmit them to a foreign country in contravention of . . . ” was how the charge read.
We all went down to the court house in a body to hear it read. And right up to the moment when the doors opened, Swanton was convinced that the case would be heard in camera. He clearly suspected trickery somewhere when we were all invited inside, and a policeman asked if we would like to have the window closed.
But as soon as little Dr. Mann appeared in the dock, we could all see what the poor fellow must have been through. He was completely tallow-coloured. And, from the circles under his eyes, he didn’t look as though he had been having a particularly good sort of night. But it was the eyes themselves that were the most remarkable thing about him. There was a quality of—this is the only way I can put it—defiance about them.
But if the charge itself had come as a surprise, there was a bigger surprise waiting for us. And it was Gillett who sprang this one. He had been unusually restless for him ever since he had been in court. Twice he took out his Eversharp and got ready to scribble something down on the little loose-leaf jotter that he always carried. And twice he put it away again. But the third time he went right ahead. And when he had finished what he was writing, he beckoned to one of the policemen. Even in this small particular there was an air of distinction about Gillett. The way he called the policeman over was like a restaurant regular snapping his fingers at a rather slow waiter.
I watched the passage of the piece of paper. It went from the policeman to the Inspector, from the Inspector to Wilton, from Wilton to the magistrate’s clerk, and from the magistrate’s clerk to the magistrate. And, wherever the little piece of paper went, whispering broke out all round it.
Altogether it was obviously being a big morning for the bench. The magistrate was a bald, retired builder, who wore a stiff, white shirt front with the ends of the narrow black tie tucked in underneath the collar. He had the air of a puzzled double-bass player who is anxiously trying to discover where the horns have got to. Finally, he called Wilton over to him and they went through the score together. That settled it.
“The prisoner has applied for bail,” the double-bass player announced at last, “and the court sees no reason to oppose it. Bail has accordingly been arranged in the sum of one hundred pounds and the prisoner is free to leave the court.”
“Good,” said Gillett. “I wasn’t sure they’d allow it.”
“You paying?”
Gillett smiled.
“Not exactly. He won’t run away.”
A man on bail is always in a rather curious position. He is like a person going about in quarantine for measles. Some people naturally sheer off him. Bansted, for example, could obviously see the spots every time Dr. Mann approached. And Rogers and the great Dr. Smith were both clearly looking out for any signs of scratching. Even Gillett took no steps to make life any easier for Dr. Mann. From his whole manner it was obvious that, having done the decent thing by arranging bail, that was where his intervention ended. And Mellon, who had just been reading the latest batch of magazines from America, was convinced that the entire British Commonwealth was being purely frivolous in the matter of counter-espionage. Martyr or not, Dr. Mann in his view, should have been kept in the cooler for safety’s sake.
This meant that I saw rather a lot of Dr. Mann. He came bearing down on me full of inspissated Teutonic gloom.
“It is because you have all been so good to me that it is so terrible,” he began.
There wasn’t very much that I could say in answer to that. So I asked him to have a drink. But even that didn’t work any longer. He shook his head at me and pursed his lips together.
“No. That would be wrong,” he said. “I have no right to drink any more. In prison I shall have my drinks brought to me every day, no?”
I think that it was the first joke that Dr. Mann had ever attempted. But it wasn’t very successful.
“So you did really pinch it?” I asked.
Dr. Mann went that pale tallow colour again.
“It was in order to save life,” he said simply.
“Any luck?”
“Not now the police have stopped it,” he replied, shaking his head again. “They are murderers only they are too stupid to understand. Stupid people are always the most cruel.”
Any conversation carried on in generalisations inevitably gets me down. It is one of the bad continental habits like not covering up the works on their locomotives.
“How did you try to get it out?” I asked.
Dr. Mann spread his hands in the international gesture that is intended to convey that the speaker is holding nothing back.
“In the fountain pen for my mother,” he said. “I removed the rubber sac and refilled it. If it had not been for the theft of the culture no one would ever have known. But then, of course, they examined everything. It was like Germany again.”
“That’s about the way the culture could have been got out, too, isn’t it?” I asked casually. “A fountain pen’s just about the right size.”
Dr. Mann nodded.
“Exactly right,” he said.
“Was that why you burgled the post office?”
“Which were you looking for,” I asked, “the penicillin or the culture?”
“The penicillin,” Dr. Mann answered. “The culture had gone long ago. But I was too late. And now there is nothing more that I can do. My sister’s fiancé will surely die.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked. Even though we were alone, Dr. Mann dropped his voice as he told me.
“That’s certainly tough on your sister,” I agreed with him.