Marazan (25 page)

‘If you could be sure of that,’ said Norman, ‘it certainly might be possible to get in touch with the machine.’

‘You can’t be sure about it,’ I said. ‘But that’s what I should do if I had the job. Whether I should go up the north coast or the south depends on where I was heading for. Whichever coast I went by, I should leave it as soon as it became light enough to see my way, and head straight inland for wherever I was going. I should fly higher then if I wanted to keep out of sight.’

Sir David interposed a question. ‘Suppose that you could pick up the seaplane and follow it, and saw it land. It would still be very difficult to effect any arrests. I imagine that it would be out of the question to carry any considerable force of police in the following machine?’

‘One or two at the most,’ I said. ‘No, the arrest would
have to be carried out from the ground. The part of the following machine could only be to keep in touch with the ground by wireless telephony, to tell the police where the landing is taking place and to keep an eye on any of the cars that got away.’

‘The difficulties would be enormous,’ muttered Norman.

I fully agreed with him there. At the most there would be perhaps twenty minutes in which to make the arrest from the time of landing till the agents were well away from the landing ground in their cars. If there were only one car the aeroplane could follow it and keep it in sight; if there were more than one, all but one would have to be let go.

‘Of course we might be able to get some help there with additional machines from the Air Force,’ said Norman.

We wrangled over the details of the scheme for a bit. At last Sir David pulled out his watch.

‘Get it worked out,’ he said to Norman. ‘If it comes to the worst we may have to try something of the sort. But push ahead with the elimination and inquiry for the clearing-house.’ He turned to me. ‘I am afraid, Captain Stenning, that I am sufficiently old-fashioned to prefer the conventional methods.…’

He rose to go.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘we seem to stand a pretty fair chance of getting at Mattani, one way or another.’

For a moment a wintry smile chased across his features. ‘I could view that prospect with more enthusiasm, Captain Stenning,’ he said, ‘if the House were not in session.’

With that he took up his hat from the table, bowed to us, and went out.

I lunched with Norman, and after lunch we returned
to the Yard and settled down to the aeroplane scheme in earnest. When we came to put it down in black and white it didn’t seem to be so impossible after all. I discovered that the resources of the Yard are simply enormous. The chief difficulty that I could see was that of getting into touch with the seaplane at all in the early dawn. It seemed to me that the following machine would have to wait in the air on patrol somewhere about the middle of Devonshire, waiting for news by wireless from ground observation stations along the coast.

From Norman’s point of view, the chief difficulty would come after the seaplane had landed. Assuming that from the following machine I could wireless the point of landing directly I saw the seaplane put down, there would be an incredibly short space of time in which to effect the arrest. The place of landing would be quite unknown. Though I could keep in wireless touch with the ground during the flight and tell them in which direction the chase was heading, the most that could be done would be to concentrate a few police in various towns and trust to luck in being able to rush them to the spot before the cars meeting the seaplane had time to disperse. If, however, the cars dispersed before the arrival of the police, they must be followed as well as possible from the air; it was here that Norman was counting on the co-operation of the Air Force. It should be possible, I thought, for one or two aeroplanes to join in the pursuit, keeping well astern of me.

I didn’t think that there was much danger of the pilot of the amphibian getting to know that he was followed.

‘But the whole thing depends upon our having decent weather,’ I said.

I went back to my flat and rang up Joan at Stokenchurch.

‘Good-afternoon, Miss Stevenson,’ I said. ‘Stenning speaking.’

There was a sort of bumble on the line. I shook the receiver.

‘I’m so glad you’re back all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve been—I mean—how did you get on? Did you find out anything?’

‘A certain amount,’ I said. ‘I had quite a good time, really—a very easy trip. But what I rang up for was to find out if you’d care to come and have lunch with me one day. Are you doing anything to-morrow?’

‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘I’ll come up to Town. Where shall we meet?’

‘Not in Town,’ I said. ‘Don’t like London—too many Dagoes in the restaurants. Give me cold feet. Let’s have lunch in the country somewhere. I say—you know the Hornblower? That pub at the bottom of Aston Rowant hill. They give you a corking good lunch there.’

I heard her laugh. ‘That’ll be splendid,’ she said. ‘I can drive over there in the Cowley.’

‘Right you are,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive down from Town. I’ll probably be there at about half-past twelve.’

I drove down there on the following morning and lunched with her at the pub. I didn’t like to talk about the Mattani business at table; I remember that I was mortally afraid of anything getting out. They gave us a rattling good lunch—the sort of thing one dreams about. It was a bright, sunny day with a little wind that rustled the flowers on our table by the window. I remember that we talked about flowers and beechwoods and red squirrels and things, and when I remember that I cannot help wondering a little. Queer subjects for me in those days.

We walked out a little way on to the hills after lunch,
at my suggestion. I wanted to get away from the waiters and people at the hotel before launching out on my story. We walked slowly—she because it would have been rude to outwalk me, and I because I had lunched too well to hurry. And as we went I told her all about Italy and da Leglia.

There was a gate at the top of the hill leading into a spinney. We didn’t go in, but sat on the gate and looked out into the blue hazes over Oxfordshire. I finished my yarn there, and told her about the scheme for following the amphibian that we’d been getting out.

‘Will you be flying that machine?’ she asked.

‘With any luck,’ I said. ‘It would be a pity not to be in at the death.’

‘It all turns on the smuggling now, then,’ she said a little later. ‘There’s no question of arresting Roddy for the present, is there?’

‘Not much,’ I said ruefully. ‘He’s rather faded into the background. You see, it’s going to be most frightfully hard to make out a case of murder against him. We may get some decent evidence if we succeed in capturing the ship or the launch, but at present we haven’t got a case against him that will hold water—on the murder charge.’

‘I’m rather glad of that,’ she said quietly. ‘It would be a dreadful thing for him to stand his trial in England.’

I knocked my pipe out sharply on the top rail of the gate. ‘It was a dreadful thing when Compton got it,’ I said curtly. ‘He’s going to stand his trial for that, one of these days. We’ll see to that.’

She sighed. ‘I don’t believe he meant it,’ she said. ‘I never did. He—oh, he was different. Roddy wasn’t like that. He couldn’t have done a thing like that.

‘I went down and saw his mother,’ she said, ‘the day after I met you. She’s too old to understand.’

I glanced at her. ‘This is a pretty miserable show for you,’ I said.

‘It’s like the sort of thing one reads about in the papers,’ she said vaguely, ‘the sort of thing that happens to other people.’ She turned and looked up at me. ‘Why do you say it’s miserable for me?’ she asked. ‘You’ve had as much to do with it as I have—much more.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. ‘They’re your people, for one thing,’ I said. ‘You know Mattani, and you knew Compton.’

She nodded slowly. ‘I don’t know what we should have done without you—by ourselves, just me and Denis,’ she said unexpectedly. She was silent then for a bit. I remember that I sat looking at her, at the soft lights in her hair, at her slim grace. She reminded me of the drawings of a man who used to do things in
Punch
, a man called Shepperson or some such name. She was just like that.

She continued: ‘I can’t think what we should have done by ourselves. You don’t know what a help you were—in every way. You braced up Denis so.’ She laughed. ‘You know, we were both dreadfully afraid of you. You looked dreadful with that cut over your eye, all bandaged and dirty. And your coat made you so big.… Did you know you drank nearly a bottle of whisky that night? Denis was awfully afraid you were getting drunk, and it didn’t have the least effect. I don’t know what we should have done without you. You came along, sort of grim and efficient, and took everything on your shoulders.’

‘I suppose I’m more used to this sort of thing,’ I said at last.

I looked down, and saw her grey eyes fixed on me. ‘How do you mean?’ she said.

I laughed, and then wished I hadn’t. I didn’t like the sound of it.

‘Birth, education, and upbringing,’ I said, a little bitterly. ‘I was much better fitted for it than either of you.’

She looked at me queerly, and I went on to tell her all about myself, about my father who died on the China Station and my mother that I never remember to have seen. I didn’t dwell very much on my life before I was sixteen because I don’t very often think of it myself; to me it now seems inconceivable that any well-meaning people could have given a boy such a rotten time. But I told her how I cut away from such relations as I had—about the wisest thing I ever did—and how I got a job as odd boy in a motor garage, years before the war. After that I was a chauffeur for a bit, at a place in Herefordshire. And then I told her how Pat Reilly and I started a garage on our own with a capital of forty-one pounds, and how we produced a cycle-car that was the hottest thing in its class for six months—the Stenning-Reilly car. I told her what a corking little car it was, and how proud we were of it, and how it was going to make our fortunes. I still think we could have done it. Then came the war, and I told her how we had chucked it at the beginning of 1915 and joined up. I told her something of what that had meant to us, just as we had got the capital promised for setting up a little factory, just as we were beginning to book orders for the car.

Then I went on to tell her how we had both got commissions before very long, and I told her the story of how Pat was surrounded in his Tank in 1917, and killed. I told her how I had gone on flying all through the war with hardly a scratch. I told her about the life in France, too, where between the patrols I learnt golf from one of the St. Andrews caddies and boxing from an ex-welterweight champion; and I told her of the hectic, miserable leaves from France, when a dozen of
us used to come over and plant ourselves at the Regent Palace—never entirely sober from one day to the next. Then I told her how I was sent home early in 1918 as an instructor, and how for me that proved to be the end of the war. I went on and told her about my life after the war—my piloting, my golf, and my little speculations.

I got tired of the sound of my own voice at last, and we stood leaning against the gate for a bit looking out into the fields. Below us the road to Oxford ran down the hill, the road that we had driven on that first morning of all, when she was driving me to Abingdon on the first stage of my run. I was about to remind her of this when she spoke again.

‘You’ve had a very full life,’ she said quietly. ‘You don’t regret that, do you?’

I thought for a minute. I’d never looked at it like that.

‘No,’ I said at last, ‘I don’t. I’ve had a pretty good time, taking it all round, and I don’t know that I’d change it. But if it has been a full life, it has been because I hadn’t the wit to make it otherwise.’

‘How do you mean?’

I glanced at her. ‘Did you know that I had been in prison?’

She looked up at me, and smiled.

‘Yes,’ she said simply.

I didn’t expect that, and it put me badly out of gear. ‘Who told you that?’ I asked.

For a moment I thought that she was going to laugh outright. ‘Sir David Carter,’ she said.

I tried to adjust my ideas a bit.

‘Did he tell you anything else about me?’ I asked weakly.

She nodded. ‘Lots of things that you’ve left out—all the really interesting things.’

I looked at her steadily for a moment, and then towards the path that led down to the hotel. It was what a man like me had to expect, I thought—and I can’t say I found the reflection sweet. It was natural that they should have found out all about me at the Yard. It was natural that Sir David should have told his daughter’s friend something about me when he saw the way the wind was blowing, but—it was bad luck.

I looked at my watch. ‘I’m afraid we ought to be getting back,’ I said evenly. ‘I’ve got to meet a man in Town at six.’

‘Oh …’ She remarked. ‘Sir David didn’t tell me anything as bad as that.’

I swung round, and saw her still sitting on the gate and laughing at me. That stung me up a bit.

‘I don’t suppose he did,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to tell. He probably told you that I’ve been thrown out of half the theatres in London in my time. He may have told you about that business at the Metropole, and I dare say he told you about the row I had at Les Trois Homards. If he told you about that he probably told you about the girl, and how she died.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘He told me about that.’

I turned away.

‘Well, there you’ve got it,’ I said bitterly. ‘There’s nothing sensational—I don’t go in for chicken butchery. I’ve never had anyone to think about except myself. If you like, it’s a record of a mean life, meanly lived. You know how I started. Did you expect any more?’

I knew that I had hurt her. She slipped down from the gate and came and stood beside me.

‘Philip,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t be so sensitive. You know I didn’t mean all those silly little things. You know they don’t matter two hoots.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What did you mean?’

She glanced up into my face. ‘The other things,’ she said. ‘The things you haven’t told me about even yet. About your D.S.O., and why they gave you the Military Cross.’