Operation Pax (30 page)

‘If we knew where to go, Miss Appleby, it would take us there in no time. As it is, we’ll try Canonicorum, as you say. They may have quite a line in ambulances, after all.’

‘It’s about three miles ahead, and this lane curves right round to it, skirting a big green patch.’

‘That’s a wood.’

‘Only mixed up with the green there’s a lot that’s uncoloured, and dotted with little circles.’

‘Park and ornamental ground. There ought to be a seat in the middle.’

‘A seat? Oh – I see. And so there is. it’s called Milton Manor.’

‘Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. But, actually, it will be quite dead – or dead so far as the old squirarchal spirit is concerned. Here’s the wall bounding it. Pretty formidable, isn’t it? But there’ll be nothing inside except a district headquarters of the Coal Board, or perhaps a high-class loony bin… That wall would keep anybody in.’ The car was now racing past a seemingly interminable curve of masonry. ‘Look at that sinister little door.’

‘Stop!’ Sudden and unaccountable certainty had flashed upon Jane. ‘It’s the place.’

Remnant threw out his clutch and applied his brakes. ‘The place where the ambulance has gone?’

‘It must be.’ Jane was peering at the map. ‘But go on. I’ve seen where there must be gates and a drive. In about a quarter of a mile. A black spot and then a double line of fine dots through the park.’

‘That will be a lodge and a drive, all right.’ The car moved on again. ‘Are we going to pay a call?’

‘Yes.’

Remnant said nothing. But he was frowning slightly.

‘You don’t mind, do you? I don’t expect I shall be long.’

‘I don’t mind a bit. But, you know, you’ve managed to import an atmosphere of melodrama into this. Yet you don’t look a romancing type. It seems to me you may be running into something uncomfortable… Here we are.’ The car had stopped again at a point where the high wall was pierced by double iron gates. ‘I wish you’d tell me what this is about, and how it began.’

Jane hesitated. The gates were flanked by massive stone pillars supporting eroded and obscure heraldic animals; there was a lodge immediately inside; and from it a well-kept drive curved away through a gloomy belt of woodland. She had never supposed herself to be very sensitive to impalpable things. But even the outer defences of Milton Manor had an atmosphere she greatly disliked. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, it began – or more immediately began – in the Bodleian this morning.’

‘The Bodleian!’ Remnant’s tone might have been elicited by a mention of something as remote as the Taj Mahal. ‘You mean the place where they keep all the books?’

‘Precisely, Mr Remnant.’ Jane looked at the young man suspiciously. But his innocence appeared entire and unflawed. ‘I don’t suppose that your occasions ever drew you there.’

‘Not at all.’ Remnant was indignant. ‘I once took an aunt of mine there. She wanted to see something called King Alfred’s Jewel.’

‘Don’t you think that was the Ashmolean?’

‘Aren’t they the same thing?’

It was borne in upon Jane that the young man, although doubtless not of a studious temperament, was decidedly not a fool, and that idiocy was his way of expressing a profound scepticism as to her proceedings. That this wild goose chase was authentically the consequence of anything that could have happened in Bodley was really too much for him. And small wonder, Jane thought. But she could hardly sit back and try to tell him the whole story now. ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘do you mind if we just get out and nose around? Perhaps I’ll try explaining presently.’

He jumped out, came round the bonnet of the car, and opened the door for her. ‘Very well,’ he said impassively. ‘Provided we nose together.’

They crossed the road and peered through the high iron gates. The lodge showed signs of being tenanted, but there was nobody stirring. Jane shook the gates cautiously, and tried turning a large wrought-iron handle. They were certainly secured. ‘What does one do,’ she asked, ‘when visiting the gentry? They don’t seem to demean themselves by having any sort of doorbell.’

‘Blow the horn, I suppose – and wait for the vassals to come running out, touching their forelocks.’ Remnant’s distrust of their proceedings seemed to have increased, and his voice for the first time held a hint of impatience. He really
did
believe – Jane thought resentfully – that she was a romancing type, after all.

She spoke almost at random. ‘It can’t be empty,’ she said. ‘Everything’s very tidy.’

‘Except for a bit of litter outside.’ Remnant had stooped and automatically picked up a scrap of crumpled paper from just beside the gates. He seemed to be summoning resolution to speak his mind. ‘Now, look here… well, I’m damned!’

Unthinkingly he had smoothed out the piece of buff paper in his hand. It was a blank book slip from the Bodleian.

‘He saw people filling in slips from the catalogue. And he pretended to be doing the same thing – so as not to attract attention.’ Jane spoke absently. She was still staring, wild-eyed, at the small oblong of paper.

‘For goodness sake, woman, explain yourself. Who did?’

Jane paid no attention. ‘And he must have had this one, crumpled in his hand – when it happened. And then – well, when the ambulance stopped for those gates to be opened, and he knew he was on the threshold of the place, he managed, somehow, to thrust it outside. In the desperate hope that it would act as some sort of sign… And it has.’

‘I can see that it is a sign all right. Do you mean that somebody has been taken in here against his will?’

‘More than one person. I’m sure of it now! This wretched little man that I saw for the first time this morning, and – and somebody that I know much better…who is very important to me.’

‘Nothing to do with – with being quite lawfully taken charge of by doctors who believe – rightly or wrongly – that they are insane?’

‘Nothing to do with that.’

‘Good!’ Roger Remnant spoke with decision. ‘Then the whole thing is simplified. Here they are. We’re morally certain of it. And now we have just got to get them out again. We go straight in, Miss Appleby.’

She turned to him gravely. ‘You mean that? You’re helping?’

He answered her gravity with sudden extreme merriment. ‘My dear young woman,
you
are helping. Bulldog Drummond is on the job – but of course you can stand in the corner and hold the sponge and towels. Incidentally, unlike the boneheaded Bulldog, we don’t go
quite
straight in. That might be unhealthy. We send some word of our intentions into the outside world first. That’s sense.
Then
we go right in. That’s what, in the circumstances, a chap – and even a lass – must do.’

This judicious admixture of prudence and personal honour was something that Jane found she highly approved of. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I’ve done that already. I sent a telegram to my brother before I picked you up.’

Remnant grinned. ‘Do you always telegraph your brother before you–’

Jane was mildly confused. ‘Don’t be an ass. And he’ll have got it by now. He’s in Oxford.’

‘An undergraduate?’

‘No, he’s much older than I am. He’s a policeman.’

‘Excellent. We now approach something like social equality.’

‘He’s an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard.’

‘Snubbed again.’ Remnant’s cheerfulness, however, suffered no appreciable diminution. ‘And that suggests something. How do we stand to one another when we do barge in? Great lady and her chauffeur?’

‘You don’t look a bit like a great lady’s chauffeur, Mr Remnant.’

‘I’m not very sure, for that matter, that you look like a chauffeur’s great lady. What about brother and sister?’

‘Very well.’

‘And what’s our business?’

Jane hesitated. She hadn’t considered this. ‘We should really know’, she said, ‘what the place
is
. I mean, what it
pretends
to be. They must know in Canonicorum. Shall we drive on there first, and ask?’

‘Certainly not. I wouldn’t call that going right in. Come on – into the car, face the gates, and sound the horn like mad. Childe Remnant – and faithful page – to the dark tower came.’

‘And trust to luck?’

‘We haven’t much else to trust to, have we?’

Jane said nothing, but climbed into the car.

Remnant backed, swung round to face the gates, and gave a blast on his horn. It was a very loud horn – or here in the silence of the country it appeared so – and he made prodigal use of it.

‘I say,’ said Jane, ‘perhaps you’d better not be so–’

She stopped as she saw the door in the lodge open and a man come out. He walked briskly but without hurry to the gates, and immediately unlocked them and drew them open.

Remnant drove in and stopped. ‘Sorry to make such a row,’ he called cheerfully, ‘but we’ve got an appointment, and we’re a bit late.’

The man had every appearance of respectability, and might have been a retired NCO in the employment of his former colonel. ‘Yes, sir. With the Medical Superintendent or the Assistant Director?’

‘The Medical Superintendent.’ Remnant’s voice held not a hint of hesitation.

‘Very good, sir. Will you drive straight up to the house?’

‘Right – thank you.’ Remnant prepared to let in the clutch.

‘One moment, sir. Have you been here before?’

‘No. This is our first visit.’

‘Then I’d better mention, sir, that there’s an inner fence right round the park. It’s because of the animals, sir; and as some of them are very valuable, the gate across the drive is kept locked. I ring through to the house, and a man comes down at once to open it. You won’t be delayed more than a couple of minutes, sir.’ The man stepped back smartly – the air of the old regular soldier was now unmistakable in him – and turned to close the gates.

They drove on. ‘We’re in,’ Jane said.

‘We’re in – and that reliable retainer is now locking the gates behind us. Presently the same thing is going to happen at an inner barrier. It’s not hopelessly out of the way – but it’s not quite what I’d call natural… Well, we now know that the establishment is a medical one.’

‘That it
pretends
to be one.’

‘Nothing on this scale could be a hundred per cent bogus. You just couldn’t get away with it. We’ll find this is a perfectly pukka sanatorium, or something of that sort, with the dirty work neatly confined to the back stairs.’

‘Perhaps so. And I don’t in the least know what the dirty work is. I only know that they kidnapped a helpless-looking little man from the heart of Oxford this morning, and that weeks and weeks ago they kidnapped somebody I’m going to marry. And he’s not at all helpless.’

‘Then they’re crazy.’ Remnant still spoke with the same composed decision. ‘Listen. We may find ourselves up against what looks like a very formidable set-up indeed. I don’t know – but it’s a guess. Master criminals. Some deep design. A powerful and ramifying organization. The whole bag of tricks – see?’

‘Yes.’ But Jane wasn’t quite sure that she saw.

‘But it will be paper-thin. We just have to put a fist through it and it goes. Just remember that we approach the job in the light of that knowledge.’

‘Very well.’ Jane didn’t at all know whether she was listening to wisdom or folly. But she realized that Roger Remnant was a heartening companion.

‘Here’s the fence – and the valuable animals.’

The fence, constructed of a stout wire diamond mesh, ran off on a convex line on either side of them, and in that arc of it which was visible, the gate now immediately before them appeared to be the only aperture. Just beyond it, a herd of deer, unfamiliar in appearance, was peacefully grazing. The park behind them was dotted and streaked with clumps and groves of trees, amid which there was still no sign of a house.

They were silent for some minutes. The man at the lodge seemed to have underestimated the time they would have to wait here. And the wait was unnerving. Knowing what they did, they were bound to look somewhat askance at the sort of large zoological enclosure into the sinister security of which they were about to deliver themselves.

‘Have you got a plan?’ Jane found that she had uttered the words spontaneously and without premeditation. They seemed to represent a very definite handing of what was, after all, entirely her affair to the young man beside her.

‘Certainly not. Nothing could be more hampering. And you’re not going right in if you have a plan.’

Jane found the
mystique
of this difficult. ‘You mean you just charge head down?’

‘Nothing of the sort. I mean that it’s only useful to think of the current move. Try thinking ahead, and you only clog your mind with preparations for situations that are not, in fact, going to turn out at all as you imagine them… Here the fellow comes.’

‘I don’t know at all about that.’ Jane eyed rather apprehensively the figure now hurrying towards them from the farther side of the fence. ‘For instance, there’s this. We told the man at the lodge that we had an appointment. Probably he has reported that on the telephone. And we
haven’t
an appointment.’

Remnant chuckled unconcernedly. ‘If there’s anything in all this at all, my dear woman, we shall meet rather more considerable embarrassments than that… Good morning. We’re very sorry to trouble you in this way.’

‘Not at all, sir. Sorry to keep you waiting.’ The man now throwing open the wire gates was as respectable as his fellow. ‘It’s this particular herd, sir. We have orders to lock up when it’s grazing in this section of the park. Very rare, I understand these deer to be. It makes things awkward for visitors. But it’s better than having the deer stolen for a black market in venison. You’d hardly believe it, sir, but it’s happened here two or three times.’

‘Kidnapping – eh?’ Remnant shot out the question abruptly.

‘Exactly, sir.’ The man was certainly not disconcerted. ‘Will you drive straight on? You can’t miss the house. And the entrance to the clinic is by the main door, under the portico.’

They drove on. Remnant gave Jane a triumphant nod. ‘There,’ he said, ‘you see? We pick up the facts as we go. Our visit is to the Medical Superintendent of a clinic. What
is
a clinic?’