The Bat that Flits Read online

  What interested me was that Gillett seemed to be expecting that kind of a reception. He used the old familiar oh-my-God-am-I-being-patient-or-am-I kind of voice that all men adopt when talking to women who don’t want to be talked to. And he started in straight away.

  “Please, don’t be like that to-night,” he said. “I only wanted to explain.”

  “There’s nothing to explain. Really there isn’t.”

  That is not an answer that I approve of. It is just un peu trop classique. But it has been going on for a long time, and it obviously has its points. Men who have ever lived with women for any length of time avoid giving any possibility for such a reply.

  “Oh, but there is,” he said, falling into the trap like any newcomer. “And you know that there is. I’ve been waiting for the chance to talk to you. So when I saw you come in here . . . ”

  This was becoming embarrassing. Even if I got up now, I’d heard too much already for either of them to be able to overlook it. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to lie doggo and pretend to be asleep.

  “It’s about Una,” Gillett went on.

  Una was the demure one. Her parents must either have had second sight when they christened her, or they had been re-reading The Faerie Queen.”

  “I don’t want to hear anything about Una, thank you.”

  “You will when I tell you,” Gillett continued, the note of patient reasonableness flaking off his voice in great chunks while he was speaking. “I tell you that she loves me. And it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t love her too. I know that you think that I have just been playing with her. But it isn’t true.”

  Gillett paused for a moment. He was no fool. He must have realised that the speech was unworthy of his profile.

  Anyhow, it was still the girl’s scene. And she was playing it well, too. That is, if she was playing it at all.

  “It doesn’t matter whether I believe you,” she said quietly, “and it doesn’t matter whether you believe it yourself. The only thing that matters is whether Una believes it, and I hope for her sake that she doesn’t.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  There was a slightly longer pause this time, and I could tell that Gillett was getting all ready for his second big moment, the one where he comes down I.c. with the ambers full on him. Then I heard a sound that told me that the red-gold girl was crying. That decided me.

  Gillett had just got as far as: “Can’t a man . . . ” when my first snore interrupted him. It was a good snore, stertorous at the outset and fading away on the down stroke into a low flute-like sibilance. It was the sort of thing that has kept whole Blackpool boarding-houses awake during Wakes Week. Gillett stopped instantly. There was really no alternative. I doubt if he could have made himself heard above it. He turned on his heel—I detected the distinctive squeak of crêpe rubber on polished oilcloth—and came over to my corner.

  I was ready for him. My hands were clasped in the dead crusader attitude and my lower jaw was just supported loosely by the top button of my waistcoat. There was, too, a new confidence in my snoring. Every time I gave vent to one I could feel my whole spine vibrating like a road drill.

  “Who is it?”

  Gillett did not reply immediately. I think that he was waiting for his lip to curl.

  “I’m afraid it’s not a very attractive sight,” he said at last. “It’s Hudson.”

  But attractive or not—and there are two opinions on everything—I had stopped his conversation. And, as it turned out, there was no possibility of his reopening it. That snoring of mine had set up a wave pattern like the one that broke the Tacoma bridge. A moment later the chair back broke clean off at the point where the little brass hinges were screwed into it.

  Chapter VI

  1

  When the Security Officer finally arrived from London, he did not give much trouble to anyone. And it wouldn’t have been worth the while of a temporary typist to resign on his account. For a start, I think he was a bit lower in the order of things than either Swanton or Kimbell had anticipated. They had evidently been fearing some pert and awful little major, with a black brief-case and full access to all the Bodmin files, both private and professional.

  What actually turned up, looking as though he had travelled steerage and the voyage had been a stiff one, was a slow sad sort of man of about sixty, with bad feet. He talked rather vaguely about a dog that he had apparently been expecting to find hanging about Bodmin station waiting for him. And he spent the greater part of his first day simply walking the outer ramparts in a sort of daze, click-clicking his teeth whenever he came up against one of the breaches that we had scooped out of the wire fencing.

  It was obvious from the start that all was not well with our Security Officer. Perhaps the elevation or the subsoil did not agree with him. The first night he got himself locked out while he was making his routine inspection of premises, and he had the whole Institute roused before he had managed to get himself inside again. Then his dog, a big snarling Alsatian, with a nasty patch of what looked like mange somewhere down towards the south end, turned up at the Institute. It had been sent in error to Bodmin Road instead of Bodmin and had been in the luggage room living on the stationmaster’s rations for nearly five days.

  The moment it arrived it caught the spirit of the place to perfection—nerves, bloody-mindedness, frustration, everything. Overjoyed at the sight of its master on the first day, the following afternoon it bit him. Then, having located the rabbit enclosure, it cleared the wire fencing when nobody else was about and turned all lupine and atavistic—bill for new rabbits two-seventeen-six. And the following Thursday —the Security Officer’s half-day—it ran away completely. Reports of sheep-maiming in the Barnstaple district was the only clue that we ever had as to the route that it had taken. Then, mysterious as always, M.I. recalled the Security Officer himself. His next destination, he said, was Top Secret, and with the aid of an A.B.C. we all worked out a good cross-country route to Harwell.

  The very day he left, there was one little incident that was even more screwy than the centrifuge affair. Of all things, the hot air steriliser went wrong. And the steriliser easily the most reliable piece of kitchen equipment in the whole laboratory. It is set permanently at about 160 degrees Centigrade, and is, so to speak, the high grade washing-up machine of the whole department.

  But either our steriliser wasn’t working properly or we had discovered a new strain of bugs with strong Phoenix affinities. The thermostat seemed all right too. And what made it so completely baffling was that the twin thermometers mounted in the top both showed 160 degrees as plainly as the blocks in a nursery alphabet.

  We thought that Dr. Smith had put his pudgy forefinger on it when he suggested midnight power cuts as the source of the trouble. We were all wrong, however, Dr. Smith included. And again it was Gillett who spotted the real cause. Someone or something—we had most of us reached the stage where we were quite ready to believe in Cornish piskies—had reset the thermostat right down to the 110’s. In normal circumstances, that could have been forgotten and forgiven. Any oaf can push the bar of a rheostat back a bit far—that’s why thermometers are fitted. But what no one could swallow was the fact that both thermometers were not only faulty, but faulty in an identical way. With their little fannies shivering at about 112 degrees, their faces were flushed with a hectic 160. It was hanky-panky all right. And, if it hadn’t been for Gillett with his natural flair for factory supervision, we might all have wasted weeks trying to exorcise the jim-jams. As it was, Gillett made a sudden grab at the thermometers. And while Whitehall was waiting, teacup in hand, to hear the latest on the germ-war front, the Bodmin Institute was down to elementary calibration.

  When he had finished his little experiment, Gillett sat back wearing a smirk that for once I was ready to forgive him. He had the two thermometers held at arm’s length between his thumb and forefinger, and he was gloating over them.

  “Absolutely useless,” he said. “Both utte
rly absurd. There, gentlemen, you have a notable example of British post-war workmanship.”

  And as he finished speaking, he gave a rather theatrical little flourish and dropped the pair of thermometers into the enamel waste-bin at his feet.

  The demure one was watching him. In her eyes I saw love, admiration, worship, idolatry, and something else that I could not quite place—fear, possibly. I’d been right, too, about the demure one’s eyes: they were remarkably fine, and not something to be concealed.

  But, as soon as she saw me looking at her, the lids came down again and the display was over. She was just playing mousie-mousie again.

  I found myself next to Gillett at dinner-time. And I had taken one or two extra gins before coming through. That may have been what made me a bit more forthcoming than I usually am when I have a side-face portrait for companion.

  “Pity you busted up those two thermometers,” I said. “You ought to have sent them to our local M.P. He could have asked a question in the House.”

  Gillett smiled. He liked playing the part of the honest, worldly-wise administrator, and this opening was all that he could ever have wished for.

  “When I find something wrong,” he said, “I like to put it right and get on.”

  It must, I reflected, be rather wonderful to be as perfect as Gillett. There was a natural simplicity about him that put me in mind of things like the Parthenon and the Beethoven Quartets.

  I excused myself for a moment in between the shepherd’s pie and the prunes and custard, and persuaded the club bar to open up and serve me another double. I was quick about it, too. By the time I slid back into my seat, Gillett had only got as far as “sailor” with his prune stones, and I don’t think that he had even missed me.

  “It’s my belief there’s been a bit of hanky-panky going on,” I said suddenly. “Thermometers don’t get like that. Somebody faked ’em.”

  Gillett smiled. It was that slow superior smile of his, as bland and reticent as the bloom on old silver.

  “So that has occurred to you, has it? “he asked.

  “You mean . . . ” I began.

  But Gillett shook his head ever so slightly.

  “Not quite so loud,” he said.

  This rather offended me because, up to that moment, I hadn’t thought that I was exactly shouting. But in the next breath he explained himself.

  “There might be someone at this very table,” he went on, speaking under his breath by now, “who would give quite a lot to know whether he’s suspected. That’s why we’ve all got to be so careful.”

  “Mum’s the word,” I said loyally.

  It wasn’t until I said it that I noticed that everyone at the table turned in my direction after I had spoken. Perhaps Gillett was right. I may after all have been bawling just the teeniest-weeniest bit this evening.

  But Gillett was equal to the occasion. He got up in his elegant, rather languid way and linked his arm through mine.

  “Come on,” he said. “We shall be late.”

  As soon as we had got outside he let go of me again.

  “I don’t care to discuss it in there,” he said. “Not with Kimbell and Swanton about. Or with Mann for that matter.”

  My mind was now working like a prosecuting counsel’s. The instant Gillett stopped I made one of those electrifying pounces that would have knocked any defence half silly.

  “So you’ve reduced it to one of those three, have you?” I asked.

  But, honestly, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen anyone more shocked.

  “I’ve done nothing of the kind,” he replied. “I merely mentioned the three who happened to be sitting nearest to us. My very earnest advice to you is not to start accusing people without evidence.”

  2

  Meanwhile, despite the hitches, the lab. side of the work was still progressing pretty smoothly at the speed Nature had intended, and then some. It was not the slightest use, therefore, for a lot of porcelain figures from the Whitehall collection to begin ringing up the Old Man urging him to hurry.

  Anyhow, the Old Man took no notice of their appeals. That was because, thanks to the M-substance, things had just started to move a bit faster down Mellon’s end of the room. He was getting de-sporulation faster than he should have been. And if you have never worked inside a research laboratory you may find it difficult to understand the excitement that comes over the team when they really think they are on to something. About the nearest thing to it must be the emotion running through an Italian village when the priests tell them that their own local miracle has been recognised by the College in Rome.

  Chapter VII

  1

  Then something really queer occurred up at the Institute. And by sheer bad luck I found myself mixed up in it.

  Daylight robbery was at the bottom of it. Somebody outside evidently knew quite a lot about us. And just as evidently the same somebody knew exactly what it was that he was looking for. It was lunch-time when the unknown visitor turned up. And because he was complete with a visitor’s pass—one of the “Valid for one visit only” kind —the doorkeeper let him in just as soon as he could get the padlock undone. The two of them, the commissionaire and the thug, had even chatted pleasantly together, it seemed, on the way across to the main block.

  What’s more, the visitor knew enough to ask how Dr. Clewes had been keeping, and that put all doubts at rest. When the doorkeeper finally went off in search of the Director, he left the stranger sitting on the settee in the front hall. And because we were all busy getting down to the fish pie that the Phoenician was slinging out at us, our visitor had the whole place to himself.

  He must have been pretty well briefed in the geography of the Institute. He only had about five minutes to himself, but during that time he found his way not only up to the labs, but also up to the bench where young Mellon had been working. Inside that five minutes he managed to swipe a whole row of the most promising-looking Agar-slopes and let himself out through the front door again.

  As it happened, the slopes weren’t worth anything. But it was sufficient that someone had taken them. And what made it all so maddening was that Mellon was working on something else at the time, and didn’t miss them until quite late in the afternoon. We’d almost forgotten about the vanished visitor by then, and the doorkeeper couldn’t even give a proper description of him. The only clue that he’d left behind him was his security pass. That was what brought me into it. Because on examination it turned out to be the one that I should have given in the first day I got there. The name K. W. Judson had been carefully typed where mine had been, and there was some rather dainty forgery around the date-line.

  In the result, neither I nor the doorkeeper came out of it at all well. He was told that he shouldn’t ever have admitted me without that pass. And I got it straight—the Old Man was even quite vehement about it—that a man of my education, whatever that meant, ought to have known enough not to leave uncancelled security passes lying about.

  He was right there, of course. And all that I could do was to keep my head hanging down in the shame position. But it was interesting, too. It showed that I hadn’t been mistaken in thinking that somebody had gone through my luggage the first day I had got there.

  2

  It was round about this time—about six weeks after I had turned up in Bodmin—that I picked up a car cheap.

  Considering that it was a 1926 model and that it was 1952 when I bought it, there was no reason why it should have been anything but cheap. But, in any case, it was just the kind of car that I have never been able to resist. Even if I hadn’t needed it, I would still have had it. The appeal that it made was distinctly maniac. The bonnet was long enough for it to have two leather straps across it. The windscreens could be folded flat. The back-quarters were boat-shaped and finished off rather nicely in what looked like undertaker’s mahogany. The exhaust pipe was curved upwards, ending in a wide flat flare like the business end of a vacuum cleaner. And the mudguards were minute crescents mou
nted direct on to the axle brackets.

  The whole chassis was about sixteen feet long from the back light to the headlamps—they didn’t fix bumpers in those days—and there was no hood. Indeed, come to think of it, that side of things was extraordinarily incomplete. There was also no pass light, no reversing light, no spares (I found that out later), no heater, no radio, no traffic indicator, and no door—you simply had to scale up the side and clamber over. But at forty-five pounds it was mine. And I’ve never seen a larger speedometer on any car : it was as large as a soup plate and calibrated in red from the hundred mark upwards.

  I’m very fond of country motoring. My idea of a good time when I’m all healthy and extrovert and the little black demon is hushed up inside me, is to do about two hundred and fifty miles or so through the best country that I can find, and do it as quickly as I can. I regard the countryside of England as second to none in the world. I’m so enthusiastic that I would willingly die for it—and probably shall do one day. And I couldn’t tell you what lies two feet on the other side of any hedge I’ve ever driven past. Obsessional motoring is what my kind is called. And extraordinarily pleasant and invigorating, I’ve always found it.

  I was just coming back from a quick breather and was on the last lap, trying to make the speedometer show red on the Bodmin flat, when I saw the red-gold girl in front of me. She was walking. That was my cue. I cut out and put the brakes on as hard as I could, even clinging on to the beer handle outside to see if that would do anything. And it did. In the result, I shot past at only about fifty-five, and a hundred yards or so up the road there I was, stationary and waiting for her.

  “Can I give you a lift anywhere?” I asked.

  The “anywhere” was put in just to make the whole thing sound as casual and informal as possible. But it was obvious enough where she was bound for. The way she was pointing, she would have to have said “Exeter” or “Salisbury” if it hadn’t been the Institute.