The Bat that Flits Read online

  Wilton blew his whistle twice. Once was because Rogers had fallen into a ditch with water at the bottom of it and seemed to be having some difficulty in getting out again, and once because Bansted thought that he had heard something. It had been like voices, he said, and had come from somewhere on the left. Nobody took it very seriously. But at least Wilton decided to wheel round in that direction. Heads down so that we could see what was underneath our feet, we went plunging on through the mist and into the darkness.

  Then everyone of us heard the sound that we’d been afraid of hearing. It came from farther on the left still, right from the very heart of the blackness. And there were two parts to the sound. The first was the high-pitched report of a Luger. And the second was a scream. Una’s scream.

  The scream itself was not so loud because it was mingled with the throb of Wilton’s police whistle. But it was loud enough for Gillett to hear. And forgetting everything that he had been told about standing still, Gillett was off in that direction like a gazelle. But gazelles, like racing cyclists, need clear weather. And Gillett had to pass close beside Wilton. Too close it turned out. Because Wilton was just getting himself under way at that moment and his long legs were straddled out all round him. There seemed to be more of them than usual. And he was as evenly distributed as a camera tripod. Gillett accidentally got one foot entangled and went flying. I heard him land with a loud crunch of wet crushed heather. But by then Wilton was off on his own account. And I was following, even though I still couldn’t see anything.

  That was where Wilton’s deployed formation came in useful. And, actually, it was Kimbell who was the first to get there. His loud, corncrake yell sent us swerving round still farther. In the ordinary way, mist does a lot of funny things to noises. It seems to twist them up into kinks in the middle before handing them on to the next patch. But Kimbell’s pure Manchester proved superior. No power on earth could give that accent a kink that wasn’t there already. It came through the mist as straight and sharp as a skewer. And I don’t think that I have ever heard any voice quite so shrill or so urgent.

  I wasn’t surprised when I saw why. There was Una with her two hands covering up her eyes. And Kimbell was on his knees, bending over something on the ground. It was wearing Dr. Mann’s German mackintosh. And it had Dr. Mann’s little pink hand protruding from the sleeve. But where the two big flaps of the collar came together something was missing.

  There was a gap where the top of his head should have been.

  Chapter XXVIII

  1

  The inquest, the verdict and the funeral blotted out everything else. About the only consolation was that the coroner’s jury finally decided on “Suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed, etc., etc.” And here it was Una’s evidence that avoided the bleak mediævalism of burial at the cross-roads or wherever it is that Cornwall chooses to inter her alien and unhallowed dead.

  It seemed that she had been out on the moor walking by herself when the mist had suddenly grown thicker. Then, just when she had reached the stage of beginning to wonder whether to turn left or right to get back to the Institute, she had bumped into Dr. Mann. And immediately he had produced his revolver and pointed it at her. Then he had said either “I shall kill you” or “I am going to kill you.” Una could not remember which.

  And this seemed to me a pity because the two phrases aren’t really interchangeable. “I am going to kill you,” is complete as it stands. But even though “I shall kill you” has got everything that the grammar book says a good sentence needs, there is still something unfinished about it. There is just the suggestion that given time to develop it might go on: “ . . . unless you do something or other.” That line of reasoning, however, contained its own kernel of lunacy. Because, even allowing for some slight deficiency in Dr. Mann’s English syntax, the simple fact remained that either way he hadn’t meant what he said. She hadn’t done anything, and he still hadn’t killed her.

  Then there was something else that added chaos to confusion. And again it was only Una’s word that we had for it.

  “The hunt has been too long,” she said, was the second remark that Dr. Mann had addressed to her. And, naturally not wanting to have her brachial artery severed twice during the same calendar month, Una had ducked down behind the nearest clump of heather as soon as she heard. But there, again, there was the same contradiction. A Luger bullet can penetrate a few tufts of West Country heather without getting noticeably held up on the way. And still Dr. Mann had not fired. That was all part of the higher nonsense of the whole affair. And it was only by putting everything into reverse with Dr. Mann as the hunted and not the hunter that the answer to that part even began to come out right.

  It could have been a note of despair that he was uttering and not a threat. At least that would explain the suicide.

  But it still left the other two shootings unaccounted for. And there the law of averages came in. Because, even trying my hardest, I still could not believe that there were several different people all armed with German Lugers wandering about Bodmin Moor and taking a pot-shot at people as soon as the weather turned a bit humid.

  The person who was most cut up about the shooting was Rogers. This was understandable. It tends to impress it on your memory when you turn a man over to look at a face that isn’t there. I knew, because I’d done it. But Rogers simply wouldn’t stop talking about it.

  “Mind you, I’ve met plenty of poor old Mann’s type before,” he kept saying. “My wife’s friends were all that sort. Brilliant woman, my wife in her way.” That was the signal. I gripped the sides of my chair waiting for what was to come. “Ph.D. and all that,” he went on. “But there’s no real solidity in the type. Just pink intellectuals. That’s what I used to call her lot. Many’s the time I’ve said that if they really felt that way the best thing they could do would be to blow their brains out.” He paused. “But I didn’t know what I was saying. When I turned back the collar of his coat . . . ”

  There was one other person who seemed to think that it was pretty horrible. That was Gillett. By the time he had picked himself up out of the wet heather he must have been about fourth on the scene. But from the fuss he was making he might have got there before Rogers.

  “By God,” he said, “it was ghastly. I keep on remembering it just when I’m going off to sleep.”

  That moved me deeply. There is so much unhappiness in this world already that I couldn’t bear to think of more of it than is absolutely necessary.

  “You’ve got nothing with which to reproach yourself, pal,” I said. “It’s none of it your fault. After all, you didn’t actually kill him. You only drove him to it.”

  2

  I kept on going over the Mann business all the way to St. Lothiel.

  It was only twenty-two miles to the Isolation Hospital. And in the ordinary way half an hour would have been plenty to take care of the built-up stretch through Bodmin, the cattle-crossing notices and the double horseshoe as you get down on to the St. Lothiel level. But some of the Institute gremlins had started colonising in the car engine. Of the eight cylinders, about six and a half were working as the original designer had intended, and my right arm had developed its own variant of tennis-elbow by having to wave on Austin Sevens and Morris Minors as soon as we came up against a rise in the road.

  That meant that I had plenty of time to think. Too much, in fact. I won’t go over the Una part of it. It had been difficult enough while it was still all party manners between Gillett and myself. But now that he knew my real feelings about him, it can’t have made matters any easier for Una. Gillett wasn’t the sort of man to sit by and watch his fiancée talking to the enemy.

  It wasn’t Una, however, who was worrying me. It was Hilda. She had somehow become separated from the rest of us. She didn’t mix any longer. She was a figure suspended in space: a presence, rather than a real, live human being. If you spoke to her, you didn’t always get an answer. And when you did get it, it was as though she had recalled her
self from a long distance. Nowadays, she had to make a real effort to become one of us again.

  I couldn’t help remembering something that Wilton had once let slip during the course of one of our long gin evenings. “Nine times out often,” he had remarked, “the Communist who is planted in a government department sets an example for quiet, unostentatious efficiency. He has to. Otherwise, he may lose the job. And if he loses it, he stops being useful. On the other hand, he can’t afford to shine too much. Because then people begin noticing him. Which is just what he doesn’t want. The quiet type without any friends, that’s what we generally look for. And it’s just as likely to be a woman as a man. . . . ”

  I could still hear Wilton saying it as I went down to second to get over a nasty stretch of about one in two hundred. The description certainly fitted Hilda. And there was more to it than that. A girl doesn’t suddenly start a Communist reading course and change her lodgings and stop going to church unless a bomb of some sort has gone off inside her. I didn’t attach very much importance to the fact that her compact-case had been picked up at just about the spot where whoever it was must have stood to take the shot at Una. After all, Hilda was out on the moor in all kinds of weather. It was that dream of mine that was still worrying me. I hate doubts in the subconscious.

  The matron had laid on tea for me before the lecture. And I feared her at sight. She was one of those hard, masterful women who make grown men feel small fragile creatures, who have to take an occasional teeny-weeny double brandy simply because otherwise they couldn’t get through things. She had a way of pouring out the tea that reminded me of boiling lead going down on to the heads of a storming party. And I rather think that the Phœnician must have arranged to get a message along the Bodmin bush telegraph: “Doctorman likee char velly velly milky.” It was the top of the milk, practically pure cream, she confided, as she slugged a great gobbet of the pale yellow stuff into the thick hospital teacup.

  The nurses themselves might all have been illegitimate daughters of the matron by different fathers. They had the same wild vocational look about the eyes. Offer any one of them Danny Kaye at the Palladium and supper at Quaglino’s afterwards, or a fresh case of cow-pox and a cup of County Council cocoa and she would have plunged unhesitatingly for the cow-pox and cocoa. I have never looked so closely on eight young female faces and felt so gloriously immune from all temptation. What was worse, they were fiendishly knowledgeable. I don’t wonder. The only men they ever saw were spotty ones. And there was certainly nothing else in St. Lothiel to distract them. There wasn’t anything for those poor girls to do but work. In consequence, they had all done their homework to perfection. And what they didn’t know about B. typhosus I couldn’t tell them. There was even one ghastly little orphan-like creature in the front row who prompted me in a lisp when I couldn’t remember something on the symptoms side.

  “Ithn’t that becauth the bathiluth thirculathes in the blood-thream?” she had asked on one occasion when I was peculiarly far from centre. And if there had been a power-cut I could have kissed her then and there simply for reminding me of what I was supposed to be talking about.

  When it was over—and to the mutual relief of all ten of us it came out about ten minutes on the short side—the matron asked if I would like another cup of tea. But, even if I had wanted it, I would still have refused. There was a distinctly nasty look in her eyes that had nothing to do with vocationalism. I had the impression that this time she would probably lace up the Cornish cream with a little native hemlock. The one thing that I wanted to do was get away. And as I clambered like a nuthatch up the woodwork into the driving seat I reminded myself that even medium bad lecturers must sometimes have a total flop just to keep their average from rocketing.

  The real trouble, of course, had simply been that I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying. When I should have been concentrating on MacConkey’s medium and Peyers’ patches, I was going over Hilda’s peculiar behaviour pattern. And it kept on coming as a surprise to me to see those hungry fanatical eyes all staring at me and praying that they could somehow keep awake long enough to learn something. The funny thing was that if I had gone back now I could have delivered a perfect discourse. Because somewhere in the shame of my departure I had completely forgotten about Hilda.

  So completely, in fact, that there must have been a five-or ten-seconds’ time lag before I realised that I was looking at the dwindling back number-plate of her car. But there it was all right—WWW972. And there, also, through the rear window of the little Singer I could see Hilda—though why on earth she should be out in this part of the country I couldn’t imagine. And still less could I imagine when she took the Padstow branch when she came to it.

  It was then that I decided to follow her. I still didn’t like to think of Hilda’s being mixed up in anything. But it certainly looked pretty fishy. She had told me herself that she hadn’t any friends in that part of Cornwall. And less than a couple of hours ago I had heard her telling the Old Man that she was going off early so that she could get to bed because of her headache. The way she was driving she had got rid of that headache long ago.

  And now that she was on the straight she put her foot down. The car that she was driving was a 1928 model with marked curvature of the main shaft and thrombosis in the petrol feed. It was the sort of car that only a woman could have driven without realising that the whole history of mechanics was against her. And if she had let me be nicer to her I would have taken the engine and the transmission right down just so that the souls of the original fitters could rest in some kind of peace. But so far as engines are concerned, there is a brutality in the female sex that is equalled only by the Italian’s love for the horse. She was perfectly content with everything as it was, she said. By now the little medallion of St. Christopher that the dealer had supplied with the car had a mysterious dark stain across it that might have been blood. Or sweat. Or tears.

  At the moment, she was knocking a full forty out of the thing and the shaft must have been turning like a skipping rope. For my part, I was following flat out at about 38.5. It was like a Hollywood car chase in slow motion, and it would have sounded fastest over the radio. Both cars were acoustically very impressive, and old men and little frightened children crowded to cottage windows to see which way the tank convoy was going.

  By sheer bad driving and cutting off the corners with a ruler, I kept her in sight all the way. And apparently she knew exactly where she was going. Padstow isn’t an easy town. Nothing that is built on the side of a hill with a harbour at the bottom ever comes out that way. There was even one moment when I thought I’d lost her. But it was all right. It was simply that Hilda had made one of those astonishing right-angle turns of which no man has ever found the secret. At one moment she was roaring up the hill with a plume of oil like a destroyer smoke-screen pouring out behind. And, at the next, without any indicator or hand sign or brakes, she had parked herself about twenty-five yards up a side turning. By the time I had followed she was already getting out of the car and going towards a small dark house that was so ordinary looking and respectable that the local agents could have charged Moscow almost any premium that they cared to ask.

  What was significant was that somebody had evidently been expecting her. The light in the little hall had come on already, and the door was open. Over her shoulder I could even see the head of the man who had come to the door to meet her. The gaslight shone full down on him as though he were an exhibit in the waxworks: I could see the thin, greasy hair that had been brushed right across to cover up the bald part. But it wasn’t until he raised his face that I recognised him. Then I saw that he was the dago who had been walking with Hilda on the moor.

  There wasn’t the slightest possibility of mistaking him. Cornwall is full of dark, swarthy people with features like fish-hawks. In some villages you could stage a whole Old Testament pageant simply by getting the Parish Council together. But this was something else. There was nothing vulturine in that face. It wa
s a flat, blank face with smooth gentle curves where there should have been angles and hard ridges. It takes wine and olive oil to make a face like that. Sharp cider and national mark margarine produce an effect that is quite different.

  Then the door shut. And I was left out there in the darkness of the Padstow night with the wind coming up from the Bristol Channel with the keenness of a band-saw.

  I didn’t like the idea of the white and red-gold Hilda being shut up in that house with the black and olive foreigner. And it was only because I told myself that Wilton wouldn’t approve, that I didn’t go straight across and start kicking the door down. Not that I was really Wilton’s man in all this. Not any longer. I was determined to have a nice long talk with Hilda before Wilton, with that tired, bored grin of his, could slip the handcuffs on to her. If necessary, I was prepared to spend the whole night out there on the pavement just to be certain of getting my word in first.

  It was the approach of a stalwart of the Cornish Constabulary that interrupted me. A large man who seemed to take his breathing seriously the way some people take singing, he came up to me to see if I knew anything about an open sports car with no lights on that was parked slantwise across the junction of Prideaux and Park Streets.

  “Quite impossible, officer,” I said politely as I walked back with him. “It just couldn’t be mine.”

  It was while I was explaining to him that the lights weren’t really off and that it must have been simply that I had kicked the switch with my foot as I got out, that I heard a sound that I didn’t want to hear. It was the sound of Hilda’s car starting up. And while I was still trying to convince the policeman that summoning me would merely be penalising the wrong social bracket, Hilda shot past me.