The Bat that Flits Page 16

  Chapter XXIX

  Wilton had suddenly taken to cultivating me again. Apparently he couldn’t snap back the spring of a Gordon’s stopper without my image automatically coming into his mind. And with every day that passed Wilton was becoming more embarrassingly intimate. We had passed through a number of successive stages. Complete stranger and complete stranger. Policeman and suspect. Friend and friend. Soak and soak. Father and son. Brother and brother. And finally Darby and Joan. Every time I came into the room I was more than half prepared to have him toss over a pair of socks that needed darning.

  This evening, however, he was unusually moody and silent. About the only sound that came from his corner of the room was the steady sip-sip as the tonic-water went down, and a noise like a piece of firewood snapping when he felt the need for exercise and unfolded his legs, recrossing them left to right. Then I remembered that it was the wife’s place to keep the home cheerful. So I said something.

  “Not getting very far, are we?” I remarked.

  “Far from what?” he asked.

  That showed obtuseness on his part and meant that I had to rephrase things.

  “Other way round,” I explained. “Not much nearer a solution, I mean.”

  Wilton paused. In a sense, he’d been pausing ever since I had come in. From nine o’clock onwards it had been one long uninterrupted pause.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he replied at last.

  Then he sat back again. But by now the liveliness of Wilton as a conversationalist had got me all keyed up.

  “How d’you mean?” I asked.

  “Well,” said Wilton, “we know more than we did, don’t we?”

  “You may do,” I said, remembering my role. “I don’t. You never discuss your work with me nowadays.”

  But this was no use. To-night apparently nothing less than a direct question could coax an answer out of hubby. So I tried again.

  “Are you satisfied about poor old Mann?” I asked.

  I’d had Dr. Mann on my mind rather a lot lately. That was because of a scheme I’d had for keeping up the weekly food parcels for the Berlin relatives.

  “Perfectly, thank you,” Wilton answered, and began opening another packet of twenty.

  “Meaning you think he did it?”

  I couldn’t quite keep the contempt out of my voice. But I could see the shape of things clearly enough. The Wiltons of this world have to produce results like everybody else. And when a red-hot suspect commits suicide while on bail it comes as a godsend for the “Case closed” side of things.

  But Wilton had got the packet open by now, and was able to relax.

  “Meaning that I’m sure he didn’t,” he said. “I’ve eliminated him.”

  “Come to that, he eliminated himself,” I pointed out.

  “Same thing.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “If he’d still been alive there’s quite a lot he could have told you.”

  “Such as?”

  Here I drew in a deep breath. I didn’t mean to. It just came. And I was rather annoyed by it. Because it meant that I was even breathing in cliches by now.

  “Oh, about Dr. Smith,” I said, speaking casually, as though the betrayal of a fellow-worker or two meant nothing to me. “Mann had several very interesting notions about Dr. Smith. Found out that he’d been using the poste restante at Plymouth instead of having his letters sent to the Institute.”

  I knew that in all this I was qualifying for a Class A Cad’s Diploma, Top Grade. But there was a reason for it. I wanted to keep Wilton busy and occupied for as long as possible in other directions while I continued quietly and undistracted with my Padstow researches. I still, however, hadn’t found the right dose for re-energising Wilton.

  “Mann was a bit of an authority on post offices, wasn’t he?” was all he said.

  I smiled.

  “You mean that story about the burglary?” I said.

  Wilton nodded. I found that rather depressing. It meant that all my efforts to make him talk hadn’t been too successful. If we were back to sign language already, the original primal silence might ensue at any moment. But I wasn’t to be beaten all that easily.

  “Silly, wasn’t it?” I said.

  “Very,” Wilton answered.

  “Because, of course, he was in my room all the time.”

  “Why ‘of course?’ You didn’t usually sleep together, did you?”

  This was much better. At last Wilton was really making his own contribution to the conversation. Soon I would be able simply to sit back and listen. And that would have suited me far better.

  “Oh, no,” I said, with the sort of laugh that smoothes out difficulties at big business conferences. “Nothing like that. It was purely coincidence.”

  “It was more than coincidence,” Wilton said. He had shifted himself so far back in his chair by now that he was lying in a practically straight line. His neck was supported on the back of the chair and his feet were propped up against the fender to stop him from slipping. If I hadn’t known him I would have said that he was in the tertiary and final stages of tetanus. But apparently he was comfortable. “It was co-existence,” he went on.

  This shook me.

  “Come again, please,” I asked.

  “Co-existence,” he said. “You know. Astral separatism. Projection of the body through space. Corporeal ambivalence. It’s well attested.”

  The pause was longer this time. It may have seemed longer to me than it did to Wilton. But it evidently seemed quite long enough for him too. Because he turned towards me, and I saw that he was one long wide grin. The fact that he had a cigarette between his lips meant that the grin was also a thin one. It was like a new moon in the middle of his face. But it was still a grin.

  “Don’tcher follow?” he asked.

  “Only a long way behind,” I admitted.

  “Well, you see,” he said, “one half of him was in the post office going through the mail bags while the other half was with you. Therefore, one of them must have been astraloid. I only wondered if you noticed anything strange about him. If you’d touched him, you might have found that he felt cold. They do sometimes when they’re in that state.”

  “But that’s absurd,” I said.

  I wasn’t particularly proud of the remark. I wanted time to think, however, and I had to say something.

  Wilton, I noticed, seemed disappointed in me.

  “Not necessarily,” he replied. “There have been other cases. Psychical records are full of them. You have to consider all possibilities in my job. Even doppelgangers.”

  “Mann never had a double,” I said.

  Wilton exhaled a lot of smoke through his nostrils. Playing dragons was one of his more irritating habits. And it always happened when the other person was impatient about something.

  “That’s my view,” he said.

  “And you still think it was Mann who burgled that post office?”

  “I know it was.”

  “How?”

  By now the grin was wider than ever. It had long since passed the new moon phase. The whole of Wilton’s head looked like a boiled egg with the top ready to come off.

  “I was there too,” he said. “In the corner cabinet. Watched him for about ten minutes through the keyhole.”

  “What were you doing there?” I asked.

  “Wrong track altogether,” Wilton admitted. “I was looking for the culture. Thought it might have been sent by post. Silly of me.”

  I drank the rest of my gin-tonic before answering. In the last few seconds things had taken a rather nasty turn.

  “Then to put it bluntly,” I asked, “you didn’t believe my story about having Mann up in my room all the time.”

  The grin didn’t waver.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he replied. “Why, in those days I scarcely knew you.”

  Chapter XXX

  It must have been because I had been reading one of the magazines that young Mellon had left lying about in the common r
oom that the idea came to me. The magazine had been sent to him from the States, and was one of those immensely knowledgeable and outspoken publications that make you feel while you’re reading them that everyone except the writer, and possibly the editor, has up to now been living right on the outside of things.

  What may have roused me was that this particular piece of outspokenness was directed against the British. The author was evidently a Californian counterpart of our great Dr. Smith. He had been over here, sampled us, found the flavour a bit stale and tasteless, and had returned to warn the rest of mankind against further nibbling. In his eyes the one thing in which we possessed a whole corner was picturesqueness. But there was a scarcely concealed threat behind it all that if the British didn’t pull their socks up and manage things a bit better they would find a United Nations Commission taking the job of preservation over from them. And as for scientists engaged in work of military importance, it was the writer’s view that the time had already come. “According to the F.B.I, files,” the article went on, “British investigation methods are only 43.7 per cent as effective as the American. And Britain’s Harwell”—I don’t think that the Pacific Coast expert had ever heard of Bodmin —“is now the international staging-post for Stalin’s spies playing between Las Vegas and Russia’s Kharkovsk.”

  I read that sentence twice. The first time with a kind of sultry resentment because I suspected the fellow of over calling his hand. And the second time with a great flash of understanding as though one of Pontecorvo’s pills (that was the writer’s phrase, not mine) had gone off right inside me. Perhaps “understanding” is too strong a word. Because at the moment it was nothing more than one big, howling suspicion. But it felt like understanding all right. And I have noticed before that there comes a point in all philosophical systems where the straight hunch is worth any amount of pure reason. Not the least of its advantages is that it is so much quicker.

  I argued it out this way. The U.S.A. is the most violently anti-Communist country in the world. Ergo any American is non-suspect. Nowadays an American could come into Southampton with a hammer under one arm, and a sickle and two H-bombs under the other, and the Customs man would chalk him up to go through the barrier before he had even had time to complain about the coffee.

  Young Mellon fitted perfectly into that picture. You couldn’t see him without liking him. Inside the first five minutes, fully-grown disgruntled scientists and policemen succumbed before the open sunny charm of the campus and the drug-store. And women didn’t even have to wait that long. If Mellon had accidentally sunk the duty destroyer in the Sound the Admiral wouldn’t have thought twice about forgiving him.

  And I saw now the uses to which Mellon had been putting his charm. It had been the master key and passport to everything. Every time his big blue Buick swept down the Institute’s front drive, the older ones, with all passion spent, had sat about shaking their heads sadly over another impending West Country fall. It was significant, too, that whenever the Inspector saw Mellon going by he winked at him—that from an ice-cold eye showed what the Mellon myth could do. And I remembered it was Mellon who had spread the myth. While we had assumed that he was safely rounding up some houri in Okehampton, he could have been half-way to the Soviet Embassy.

  That meant that I now had no fewer than three separate lines of inquiry. I still wanted to know more about Dr. Smith’s poste restante activities in Plymouth. There was an investigation agent’s job to be done watching the disarming little villa in Padstow. And now there was Mellon’s Buick to be trailed. That didn’t promise to be too easy. Even when all my eight cylinders had still been working, Mellon’s Fireball acceleration had always left me somewhere on the wrong side of the level-crossing.

  But I had learnt one thing from Wilton. That was to leave the other fellow to do the talking. And it occurred to me that if I just planted myself on a bar-stool adjacent to Mellon’s and kept the conversation going with an occasional “You don’t say!” or “My, my, isn’t this a small world?” I might be able to find out quite as much as if I bought a T.T. racing-model Norton and went road-hogging after him.

  Starting up the conversation wasn’t difficult. After mine —some way after—Mellon’s thirst was easily the biggest thing in the Institute. Whisky ruined by ice was his tipple. And because he was a nice friendly boy he liked to have someone beside him just to suggest the next round to him. He was there exactly where I expected him to be. And his “What’ll you have?” before I had even got across to the bar made me just a wee bit cautious. It occurred to me that he may have been just as eager as I was to get the other one to do some talking.

  The first thing that I noticed was that he was still intent on establishing his part. He turned the conversation to sex before I got myself properly settled on the high stool alongside him.

  “Say, what are your divorce laws like around here?” he asked.

  I shook my head before answering.

  “Pretty stiff,” I told him. “Adultery’s usually punished by stoning. Both parties.” I paused. “It’s worse up Somerset way,” I added.

  But young Mellon was in no mood for spoiling his own effect by seeming to take things too lightly.

  “Do they still hang you if you kill someone?” he asked.

  “Only if they catch you,” I reassured him.

  “And what about crime passionel?” he went on.

  Here I shook my head again.

  “No use pleading that,” I advised. “If you’d ever seen an English jury you’d know that they’d convict for the passionel part even without the crime. They’re dead against it in our law courts.”

  Mellon still looked worried.

  “Can ya get police protection if you ask for it?” he inquired.

  “You’ve been having it,” I replied.

  “Then I guess I gotta find some other way.”

  It was my turn to stand this round.

  “Who’re you planning to kill?” I asked.

  Mellon pushed his glass away from him. This itself was an unnatural gesture and showed that the internal stresses must have been considerable.

  “Ya got me all wrong,” he said. “I’m the guy that’s on the spot.”

  “Meaning you’re hot?” I asked.

  “Meaning there’s some god-damn fool of a husband who’s after me,” he corrected me.

  I smiled. Only inwardly, I hope. Because I didn’t want Mellon to know what I was really thinking.

  “And what do you propose to do?” I asked.

  I had my fingers crossed at this point.

  “Get outer here,” Mellon answered. “Get outer here before they have to carry me.”

  That meant that my fingers could uncross again.

  “Where to?” I asked innocently. “He’ll find you easily enough if he’s really all that keen. It’s only a small place, Bodmin.”

  Mellon was reaching out for his glass again. Evidently instinct had got the better of panic.

  “Who said anything about Bodmin?” he demanded. “I mean Paris; Paris, France.”

  “Or Rome, Italy,” I suggested.

  “Could be,” he agreed.

  “Then why tell me?” I asked. “I might help to put him on to you.”

  Mellon finished the rest of the drink before answering and called for another as soon as he put the glass down.

  “Because I’m going crackers,” he answered. “How d’you like it yourself if ya just had to sit around here waiting for some crazy guy to come sneaking upter ya?”

  “I see your point,” I said. “Must make ya sorter restless.”

  Altogether it was one of the neatest pieces of sustained strategy that I had so far encountered. And the acting throughout had been admirable. There wasn’t a single one of us in the Institute who wouldn’t have been prepared to go into the witness-box to swear character—Mellon had seen to that. And even if running away from danger wasn’t quite in the best Illinois tradition I felt that Mellon would be able to laugh that one off all right by
the time he got through to Moscow, Russia.

  What was more, now that he had told me everything, he knew that he was perfectly safe. Simple, sun-soaked and boyish, young Mellon may have been. But I felt that since he had arrived here, he had made a pretty accurate reading of English character. He knew that if only you confide in an Englishman you can tell him the date and time of his own assassination with the absolute certainty that he’ll turn up punctually and wait about if necessary.

  The only thing that he didn’t know was how much an Englishman can think to himself without saying anything.

  Chapter XXXI

  1

  The following day I decided to apply something of the Mellon technique on my own account. What I wanted to do was to keep my Padstow appointment that evening. And what I didn’t want was to have Wilton out looking for me.

  “Ouch,” I said very loudly for the third time since lunch.

  “This wet weather plays hell with me. Thank goodness I’m seeing the chiropodist this evening.”

  The fact that I had shown the forethought to be wearing one of my big woolly bedroom slippers on the left foot added just that touch of drama that was needed. And by the time five-thirty arrived both Bansted and Rogers had come round to my side of the bench and advised me to take things easily for a bit. Rogers even had some kind of crack-pot radium-impregnated sock that he wanted me to wear inside the bedroom slippers. But I declined politely and hobbled off to my bedroom with all the dignity of a confirmed sufferer who doesn’t want to have his pain snatched away from him quite that quickly. And five minutes afterwards, having changed into my brogues, I was going pit-a-pat down the back stairs and out across the courtyard towards the car.

  There was no moon that night. And whatever stars there might have been were obscured by a layer of cloud that was still undecided whether to remain aloft or come down and blot out everything. Not that it need have troubled itself. As it was, the night could have put extra shadows into the original Egyptian plague of darkness and still have had some.

  A younger man could probably have gone straight on without falling over anything. But there’s nothing like a combination of alcohol and nicotine for cutting down on the eyesight. With my habits I’d have been disqualified years ago even from shunting engines. I just had to stand where I was waiting for the tired old pupils to adjust themselves. And it was while I was still waiting that I heard someone coming.