The last few minutes had made me forget all about that little screw of paper in the waste-bin. But there was something else that I was forgetting, too. Young Mellon had simply been left there with nothing but his blood-counts and his curiosity. Before I had been out of the room five minutes he had come round to my side of the bench and begun routing about among the junk. And the idea of cryptic messages was evidently something that stirred up quite a lot inside him. He couldn’t have been more excited if he had found a blonde in the waste-bin.
In the result, he was giving quite a party. They were all there gathered round him—Bansted and Rogers and Gillett. And Mellon had just passed the piece of paper over to Gillett, who was examining it. Dr. Smith had come into the room since I left. But he was getting on with his own work despite the chatter. He was even being rather self-consciously isolationist, I thought.
Gillett appeared to be enjoying himself. He was in one of his aggressively efficient and fact-finding sort of moods.
“Shouldn’t be difficult to establish the typewriter it was done on,” he said, with an air of having been engaged on typewriter detection cases ever since he had qualified.
I pitied him. If it ever came to the point of accusation and counter-accusation between Gillett and the Director’s secretary, I was prepared to back the secretary. Those teeth could make nonsense of any profile that came within snapping distance.
As soon as he saw me, Gillett came over.
“Can you make head or tail of this?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Me no savee.”
“Do you think it’s specially meant for you?”
“Could be,” I said. “But it still doesn’t make sense.”
“Then that would rather suggest that it isn’t for you at all,” Gillett went on. He broke off for a moment. “Have any of you chaps,” he went on, “ever received anything of the same sort as this”—here he waved my little slip of paper rather tantalisingly under their noses—“yourselves?”
The technique of the questioning was very nearly perfect. Without the use of the word “chaps” it might have sounded just a shade too much like question time in the Army Education Corps. After all, Gillett wasn’t actually in charge of us. It only seemed that way.
But apparently Bansted and Rogers both loved being asked questions. Or, at least, they appeared to like being able to say “no” to this one. It was only Mellon who wasn’t so sure.
“I had a coupla post-cards from some dame I’d never heard of,” he said, unable to keep the note of regret out of his voice. “She didn’t give no address. Just asked why I’d cut the date with her. But that was last summer. Said she’d look me up here some time. Only she never came.”
Gillett shook his head. It was obvious that he was in no mood for comforting young Mellon for his one lost opportunity.
“Sorry,” he said. “She’s not the one we’re looking for.”
As he said it, he turned and faced Dr. Smith. I may have been wrong. But it still seemed to me that Smith took an unnaturally long time to realise that he was being looked at.
“Smith,” Gillett said finally in his clear hi-waiter kind of voice, “have you ever had one of these?”
Even then Dr. Smith did not reply immediately. He finished what he was doing, or what he was pretending to be doing, and looked up wearing his G.C.M.G.-O.M.-F.R.S. expression.
“One of what?” he asked.
It was only then that I realised what an excellent pokerface all really young babies naturally have. The chubby folds and unwrinkled forehead of Dr. Smith revealed absolutely nothing. But at least he condescended to walk over towards us.
“You have something to show me?” he asked, when he had finally got there.
Gillett, I noticed, didn’t actually give him the piece of paper. He merely showed it to him. Not that Dr. Smith seemed to mind. Rocking backwards and forwards on his heels, he scarcely glanced at it.
“Isn’t there being rather a lot of excitement about nothing?” he asked.
That annoyed Gillett. The events of the past few weeks had rubbed quite a lot of the gloss off him already. I’d been watching him change before my eyes from French polish to ordinary fumed oak. And the way things were going he’d be antique finish before we were through with him.
“You call this nothing?” he asked.
Dr. Smith allowed his eyelids to fall for a moment.
“Not exactly nothing,” he corrected himself. “Merely nothing of importance. It could, for example, merely be a mistake. Or a hoax. Or it might be intended as a perfectly straightforward and honest warning. I have seen similar notices exposed over switch-rooms in the States. The wording is—er—distinctly American.”
“Say, what exactly do you mean by that?” Mellon demanded.
Dr. Smith put up his round fat hands as if to protect himself.
“Merely what I have said,” he replied. “I was not seeking to attach any particular significance to it. Indeed, I have hardly considered the matter. If our friend here” —Dr. Smith broke off long enough to indicate Gillett, and in this gesture he contrived somehow to make him look like the Institute’s No. 1 scare-monger—“hadn’t invited me, I wasn’t proposing to give an opinion at all. It is not a habit of mine to give opinions when I am totally ignorant of the facts.”
“Would it alter your view in any way if I told you that this wasn’t the first that had been received?” Gillett asked.
He had himself completely under control by now, and was fighting hard to regain his own position. No one with that jaw-line could possibly afford to have himself publicly debunked by a colleague who looked like a Glaxo advertisement.
But Dr. Smith was fighting hard by now.
“It might, or it might not,” Smith replied. “That would depend on the nature of the message. By whom received. And in what circumstances.” He paused. “Have you been asked to keep out, too?”
This was Gillett’s opportunity. And he took it.
“I don’t think that there is any need to go into what the messages——”
“So you received more than one, did you?” Dr. Smith asked. “May we ask how many? Frequency could be almost as important as content.”
“I am not saying how many I have received,” Gillett replied. “At least not here. Merely that an unknown correspondent has chosen an unusual means of getting in touch with me.”
“Through a test tube?” Dr. Smith asked.
Gillett smiled.
“As a matter of fact, the particular message to which I am referring was left for me clipped under the blade-guard of my electric shaver.”
“And have you still got the message?”
Gillett shook his head.
“I took it straight along to Wilton,” he said, getting out of his chair as he was speaking. “And that is where this one is going, too.”
This was my cue.
“Hi, mister,” I said. “That’s my message. How do you know I wasn’t expecting it?”
He had got almost as far as the door when I caught up with him. And when we reached it I noticed a curious thing. The door was about six inches ajar. And disappearing down the corridor away from us was the figure of Dr. Mann. There was no other door at our end of the corridor, and something must have made Dr. Mann change his mind rather suddenly.
He was almost running.
Gillett had noticed it, too, and for a moment his eyes caught mine.
“Pardon me,” I said, as I removed the piece of paper from between his fingers. This is part of the Hudson bequest.”
Gillett seemed reluctant to give it to me. But then he let go. It may have been simply that he didn’t want the paper to get torn. At any rate, we changed roles and I became bearer. We both understood the position perfectly. I was accompanying him to see whether he had really given Wilton any previous messages. And he was accompanying me to see whether I was going to hand over this one. From the mood of mutual confidence we might have been two Foreign Ministers walking into a Peace Conference together.
But so far as I could see everything was open and above board. Gillett barged in on Wilton without even knocking and waiting for the “Come in.” As for Wilton, he was doing exactly what I had come to expect of him. That is precisely nothing. He was standing at the window looking at the clouds. From his interest in clouds he might have been thinking of drawing them, or writing a book about them, or even having a shot at making some of them. He didn’t turn round when we entered. Just went on sky-gazing.
“Now Hudson’s had one of them,” Gillett said, without attempting to keep the note of jubilation out of his voice.
“He’s got it here.”
“One of what?” Wilton asked.
He swivelled his head round as he said it, and I showed him the screwed-up piece of paper. I could see now why he hadn’t moved immediately when we came in. He was standing on only one leg like an Indian adjutant, and the other was hoisted up on to the window-sill. Getting himself facing in our direction was like resetting a pair of folding steps.
“What’s it say this time?” he asked.
“It says ‘KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU,’” I told him.
“Does it make sense?”
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
“Where d’you find it?”
“Bunged down inside a test tube.”
“Your test tube?”
“Could have been anybody’s.”
“Ever had one before?” he asked.
I paused. This seemed to me to be a good opportunity for doing a little Gillett-reducing on my own account.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have,” I replied. “Three of them. But I didn’t see why I should say so in front of everyone. In my view there’s been too much talking already.”
“Three, d’you say?” Gillett asked.
I got the impression that he didn’t like being outbid in the matter of secret messages. Also, that he didn’t entirely believe me.
“Three’s the number, brother,” I replied.
And taking out my notecase I unfolded all the earlier specimens. They were a bit creased by now, and looked rather as though I had been sleeping in them. But the typing still showed up black and clear against the obviously inferior-quality paper that the unknown typist had been using.
Wilton took the piece of paper and began to examine it. Not very professionally either. He merely tilted back the shade of the desk-lamp and held the paper up against the naked bulb.
“Mind,” I warned him. “Don’t scorch it.”
But either Wilton hadn’t heard me or he always looked at pieces of paper that way.
“It is German,” he said at last. “There’s a bit of the watermark in this piece.”
Gillett stepped forward as though he were on parade-ground. But, after all, it was my piece of paper, and I cut in front of him.
“Me first,” I said.
There wasn’t very much to see. For a start, it was right down in the corner. All that I could make out was what might have been an eagle’s head and a scroll with some writing on it. The trouble was that the scroll was half-cut off, and the letters “ . . . HE PAP . . . IND . . . ” didn’t convey very much to me. Wilton must have seen the expression on my face.
“Deutsche Papier Industrie Gesellschaft,” he explained.
That certainly seemed to fit well enough. My respect for Wilton went up again. It isn’t everyone who can read about one-sixth of a foreign watermark.
But Wilton didn’t seem particularly excited about his discovery.
“Not that it gets us very far,” he said. “They used to make about three-quarters of all the paper in Europe.”
“But not three-quarters of all the paper in Bodmin,” Gillett observed.
Wilton smiled. It was not much of a smile. A mere slackening among the muscles. Practically a paralysis. And because it added to the general air of limpness Wilton looked rather sadder when he was smiling.
“It’s still three-quarters of all the European paper,” he said. “And there are letters coming through the whole time. There’s Kimbell’s chess. And Swanton’s League of Free Scientists. And Bansted’s been fixing up for a holiday in the Tyrol. And there’s you.” Here Wilton jerked a thumb in Gillett’s direction. “You’re going to Switzerland. There’s paper like this pouring in all the time.”
“Not in blank sheets,” Gillett observed.
I noticed that he sounded rather defiant about it. And I wasn’t altogether surprised. I wasn’t ready to say that his theory, whatever it was, had anything in it. But, at least, it was a theory. And he was trying hard to push it. It must have been pretty depressing for a man of Gillett’s energy to have to deal with someone about as nimble and enthusiastic as a used bath-towel. But if Wilton thought that Gillett was going to leave it there, he had underestimated him.
So had I. We were both of us completely unprepared for the Gillett pocket-model H-bomb that he suddenly produced. He had stepped back and was facing us with a ram-the-enemy-if-your-guns-are-jammed kind of expression on his face. His hands were shoved down hard in the pockets of his jacket, and his feet were planted firmly in readiness for the head-on collision.
“If you won’t take any action, I will,” he said.
“What sort of action?”
Even now, Wilton seemed to be not much more than casually interested. He was scratching the part of his leg where the suspender should have been.
Gillett paused. It was quite obvious that the pause was purely for effect. But what he had to say justified it. He didn’t want there to be the slightest misunderstanding anywhere.
“Action that will lead to the arrest of Dr. Mann on a charge of attempting to murder my fiancée,” he said, clearly and distinctly.
Wilton looked up. There was no pause this time.
“I suppose you’re aware that it’s a serious charge you’re making?” he asked.
“It’s because it’s a serious charge that I make it in front of a witness,” he said. “I don’t want there to be any backing out this time.”
“And if I tell you you’re wrong?”
“I shall go into Bodmin and lay in my information before the nearest J.P.,” Gillett answered. “I’m bloody well sick of policemen.”
It was certainly plain speaking. And Wilton seemed to understand it. He started creaking and came slowly to the upright position.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” he asked wearily.
“I want you to come with me and collect the weapon that Dr. Mann used when he fired first at me and then at Una.”
“Is it far?” Wilton asked.
He had narrowed his eyes down and was looking hard at Gillett. There was something characteristic about the attitude, and I realised what it was. Whenever Wilton was really looking hard at anyone it was never full-face. Always from the side.
“I suggest to you that it is hidden in Mann’s room at this moment,” Gillett replied. “And I suggest that if it isn’t taken away from him he’ll use it again. It isn’t your life that’s in danger, remember. It’s mine.”
“And Una’s,” I put in.
But I don’t think he heard me.
“Why should yours be?” Wilton went straight on.
“Because he knows I suspect him,” Gillett replied.
“How does he know that?”
There was another of those little pauses. Though whether it was for effect or not this time I couldn’t say.
“I told him,” Gillett answered.
Wilton paused with an unlit cigarette between his lips and the stub of the old one raised half-way towards it.
“When?” he asked.
“To-day,” Gillett said. “After coffee. I couldn’t stand another damn minute of it. He was sitting there like some bloody little Buddha talking about international brotherhood and nation-shall-speak-peace-unto-nation and all that rot, and I suddenly had enough of it. There were just the two of us. And I told him what kind of a swine I thought he was. . . . ”
I suppose that if you conserve your energies the way Wilton always did, you have more to draw on in an emergency. But whatever the explanation, Wilton certainly had something there. He was off in a burst that any ostrich would have envied.
“Where are you going?” Gillett asked as soon as we had caught up again.
“See Dr. Mann,” Wilton answered.
The speed with which things were happening seemed to have shaken Gillett a bit.
“Don’t . . . don’t you want a warrant or anything?” he asked. But by then Wilton had gone too far down the corridor to answer.
When we got to Dr. Mann’s room it was empty. And tidy. I don’t mean to say that the other rooms along that corridor weren’t tidy, too. There was a cousin or something of the Phoenician who played the part of bedder; and wastepaper baskets and hair-tidies were all regularly emptied by nine-thirty. But there was a neatness about Dr. Mann’s room that was a straight projection of his own precise and systematic soul. The safety razor with which he had replaced the cut-throat I had stolen, hung from two little nails that he had driven into the woodwork. And even his dressing-gown was on a hanger. It was just the sort of room that any housemaster hopes to find when he is taking round a new parent.
I could see that Wilton had searched a room before. And that wasn’t surprising. There must have been a period when he had been forced to get down to things and not merely stand around cloud-gazing. He started with the chest-of drawers, and worked very efficiently from the bottom upwards so that he didn’t have to waste a lot of time shutting the drawers before getting to work on the next one. But he was just wasting his time: I could see that as soon as he started. The only thing that was the slightest bit unusual was a cardboard box in one of the drawers. It contained three bars of milk chocolate, a tube of toothpaste, two lengths of elastic, some safety-pins, and a tin of Lyons’ coffee. It was obviously the beginnings of another of Dr. Mann’s gift parcels, and I remember wondering whether it would ever get there.
I caught Gillett’s eye while Wilton was going through it. But he quickly looked away again. I don’t think that at this particular moment any of us wanted to be reminded of the dependence of Dr. Mann’s female relatives. But ordinary human feelings didn’t seem to play a large part in Wilton’s make-up. By now, he was already going through the clothes in the wardrobe. And he was working quickly and methodically, patting the pockets and the seams as he worked over them one by one. When he had finished, he turned to Gillett.
“Give me a hand with that trunk, will you?”
It was easily the most solid piece of furniture in the room. And it looked as though it had been in Dr. Mann’s family for a long time. Members of the Hanseatic League must have transferred their valuables in trunks like this one. The lock alone would have needed a hammer and cold chisel to break it open. It came as something of an anticlimax, therefore, when Wilton put his fingers into the catch and the hasp flew open. Somehow I couldn’t see any man hiding a revolver in a tin trunk without a key. And I was right, too. That trunk was as innocent as a case of new-laid eggs.
Wilton turned towards Gillett.
“Satisfied?” he asked.
I don’t think that it was the wasted effort he minded so much as the stooping. For the last five minutes he had been bent over double. And at this moment he was reaching the upright in a series of jerks and creakings. But it wasn’t at Wilton that I was looking. It was at Gillett. He was standing in the doorway, his hands still thrust into his jacket pockets and his jaw sticking out farther than he usually carried it.
The air of cocksure jauntiness had completely gone, however. He didn’t even look up when he answered.
“I suppose so,” he said.
“Quite sure?”
Gillett nodded. This time he didn’t even bother to say anything.
But Wilton had been put to a lot of trouble in the past few minutes. And it was obvious that he didn’t like being put to trouble. There was a mean side to his nature, and it came out now.
“No afterthoughts?” he asked.
Still no reply. Just a sad, sullen headshake.
Wilton, however, had no intention of letting Gillett off as lightly as all that. He just stood there giving the screw an extra turn or two for good value.
“Absolutely and completely satisfied?” he asked again.
As with banns it was the third and last time of asking. And this time Gillett couldn’t stick it any longer.
“I’ve said so, haven’t I?” he replied.
Wilton grinned. It was a wide, unpleasant schoolboy grin with Wilton’s two large ears on the outer ends.
“Well, I’m not,” he said.
There was only one other article of furniture in the whole room—the laundry basket. Wilton went across to it. Every cubicle had its own laundry basket. It was a wicker affair like the chair; and, also like the chair, it was painted rose bud pink.
I could have told him what he would find in it. At least, at the start I could. Out came two dirty shirts, one of them a bit patched round the tail in a rough, amateurish kind of way as though Dr. Mann had been doing his own needlework. Next there was a pair of socks, ditto, with some fancy cross-stitching round the toes and the heels. And a pyjama suit with trousers that didn’t match the jacket. About averagely sordid was how I would have described that basketful.
I even had a feeling that I was being a bit disloyal to Dr. Mann, just standing there rubber-necking while a high-grade army nark went through the wash-bag. But Wilton might have been sorting soiled undies all his life. And when he came to the end began battering the poor basket on its head. The bottom fell clean away. But it was a false bottom. Cut the same shape as the basket, it fitted neatly round the sides and left a space of about four inches underneath it. And the first thing that came tumbling out of that space was an old Luger holster—empty.
This was Gillett’s moment. His eyes were shining, and he uttered a deep, long-drawn-out “Ah” as he saw it.
But it was also my moment too. Because there was more than a revolver-case in that little cavity. There was a whole collection of pieces of very inferior-looking paper all neatly typed with letters in heavy black capitals. And the one that I was staring at had a sort of crazy logic that was all its own.
“RELAX NOW. THE BIRD HAS FLOWN,” was what was written there.