The Thirty-Nine Steps (15 page)

He read aloud the number of steps in the different stairs. ‘Thirty-four, thirty-five,
thirty-nine, forty-two, forty-seven,’ and ‘twenty-one’ where the cliffs grew lower.
I almost got up and shouted.

We hurried back to the town and sent a wire to MacGillivray. I wanted half a dozen
men, and I directed them to divide themselves among different specified hotels. Then
Scaife set out to prospect the house at the head of the thirty-nine steps.

He came back with news that both puzzled and reassured me. The house was called Trafalgar
Lodge, and belonged to an old gentleman called Appleton—a retired stockbroker, the
house-agent said. Mr Appleton was there a good deal in the summer time, and was in
residence now—had been for the better part of a week. Scaife could pick up very little
information about him, except that he was a decent old fellow, who paid his bills
regularly, and was always good for a fiver for a local charity. Then Scaife seemed
to have penetrated to the back door of the house, pretending he was an agent for sewing-machines.
Only three servants were kept, a cook, a parlour-maid, and a housemaid, and they were
just the sort that you would find in a respectable middle-class household. The cook
was not the gossiping kind, and had pretty soon shut the door in his face, but Scaife
said he was positive she knew nothing. Next door there was a new house building which
would give good cover for observation, and the villa on the other side was to let,
and its garden was rough and shrubby.

I borrowed Scaife’s telescope, and before lunch went for a walk along the Ruff. I
kept well behind the rows of villas, and found a good observation point on the edge
of the golf-course. There I had a view of the line of turf along the cliff top, with
seats placed at intervals, and the little square plots, railed in and planted with
bushes, whence the staircases descended to the beach. I saw Trafalgar Lodge very plainly,
a red-brick villa with a veranda, a tennis lawn behind, and in front the ordinary
seaside flower-garden full of marguerites and scraggy geraniums. There was a flagstaff
from which an enormous Union Jack hung limply in the still air.

Presently I observed someone leave the house and saunter along the cliff. When I got
my glasses on him I saw it was an old man, wearing white flannel trousers, a blue
serge jacket, and a straw hat. He carried field-glasses and a newspaper, and sat down
on one of the iron seats and began to read. Sometimes he would lay down the paper
and turn his glasses on the sea. He looked for a long time at the destroyer. I watched
him for half an hour, till he got up and went back to the house for his luncheon,
when I returned to the hotel for mine.

I wasn’t feeling very confident. This decent common-place dwelling was not what I
had expected. The man might be the bald archaeologist of that horrible moorland farm,
or he might not. He was exactly the kind of satisfied old bird you will find in every
suburb and every holiday place. If you wanted a type of the perfectly harmless person
you would probably pitch on that.

But after lunch, as I sat in the hotel porch, I perked up, for I saw the thing I had
hoped for and had dreaded to miss. A yacht came up from the south and dropped anchor
pretty well opposite the Ruff. She seemed about a hundred and fifty tons, and I saw
she belonged to the Squadron from the white ensign. So Scaife and I went down to the
harbour and hired a boatman for an afternoon’s fishing.

I spent a warm and peaceful afternoon. We caught between us about twenty pounds of
cod and lythe, and out in that dancing blue sea I took a cheerier view of things.
Above the white cliffs of the Ruff I saw the green and red of the villas, and especially
the great flagstaff of Trafalgar Lodge. About four o’clock, when we had fished enough,
I made the boatman row us round the yacht, which lay like a delicate white bird, ready
at a moment to flee. Scaife said she must be a fast boat for her build, and that she
was pretty heavily engined.

Her name was the
Ariadne
, as I discovered from the cap of one of the men who was polishing brasswork. I spoke
to him, and got an answer in the soft dialect of Essex. Another hand that came along
passed me the time of day in an unmistakable English tongue. Our boatman had an argument
with one of them about the weather, and for a few minutes we lay on our oars close
to the starboard bow.

Then the men suddenly disregarded us and bent their heads to their work as an officer
came along the deck. He was a pleasant, clean-looking young fellow, and he put a question
to us about our fishing in very good English. But there could be no doubt about him.
His close-cropped head and the cut of his collar and tie never came out of England.

That did something to reassure me, but as we rowed back to Bradgate my obstinate doubts
would not be dismissed. The thing that worried me was the reflection that my enemies
knew that I had got my knowledge from Scudder, and it was Scudder who had given me
the clue to this place. If they knew that Scudder had this clue, would they not be
certain to change their plans? Too much depended on their success for them to take
any risks. The whole question was how much they understood about Scudder’s knowledge.
I had talked confidently last night about Germans always sticking to a scheme, but
if they had any suspicions that I was on their track they would be fools not to cover
it. I wondered if the man last night had seen that I recognized him. Somehow I did
not think he had, and to that I had clung. But the whole business had never seemed
so difficult as that afternoon when by all calculations I should have been rejoicing
in assured success.

In the hotel I met the commander of the destroyer, to whom Scaife introduced me, and
with whom I had a few words. Then I thought I would put in an hour or two watching
Trafalgar Lodge.

I found a place farther up the hill, in the garden of an empty house. From there I
had a full view of the court, on which two figures were having a game of tennis. One
was the old man, whom I had already seen; the other was a younger fellow, wearing
some club colours in the scarf round his middle. They played with tremendous zest,
like two city gents who wanted hard exercise to open their pores. You couldn’t conceive
a more innocent spectacle. They shouted and laughed and stopped for drinks, when a
maid brought out two tankards on a salver. I rubbed my eyes and asked myself if I
was not the most immortal fool on earth. Mystery and darkness had hung about the men
who hunted me over the Scotch moor in aeroplane and motor-car, and notably about that
infernal antiquarian. It was easy enough to connect those folk with the knife that
pinned Scudder to the floor, and with fell designs on the world’s peace. But here
were two guileless citizens taking their innocuous exercise, and soon about to go
indoors to a humdrum dinner, where they would talk of market prices and the last cricket
scores and the gossip of their native Surbiton. I had been making a net to catch vultures
and falcons, and lo and behold! two plump thrushes had blundered into it.

Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a bag of golf-clubs
slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis lawn and was welcomed riotously
by the players. Evidently they were chaffing him, and their chaff sounded horribly
English. Then the plump man, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced
that he must have a tub. I heard his very words—‘I’ve got into a proper lather,’ he
said. ‘This will bring down my weight and my handicap, Bob. I’ll take you on tomorrow
and give you a stroke a hole.’ You couldn’t find anything much more English than that.

They all went into the house, and left me feeling a precious idiot. I had been barking
up the wrong tree this time. These men might be acting; but if they were, where was
their audience? They didn’t know I was sitting thirty yards off in a rhododendron.
It was simply impossible to believe that these three hearty fellows were anything
but what they seemed—three ordinary, game-playing, suburban Englishmen, wearisome,
if you like, but sordidly innocent.

And yet there were three of them; and one was old, and one was plump, and one was
lean and dark; and their house chimed in with Scudder’s notes; and half a mile off
was lying a steam yacht with at least one German officer. I thought of Karolides lying
dead and all Europe trembling on the edge of earthquake, and the men I had left behind
me in London who were waiting anxiously for the events of the next hours. There was
no doubt that hell was afoot somewhere. The Black Stone had won, and if it survived
this June night would bank its winnings.

There seemed only one thing to do—go forward as if I had no doubts, and if I was going
to make a fool of myself to do it handsomely. Never in my life have I faced a job
with greater disinclination. I would rather in my then mind have walked into a den
of anarchists, each with his Browning handy, or faced a charging lion with a popgun,
than enter that happy home of three cheerful Englishmen and tell them that their game
was up. How they would laugh at me!

But suddenly I remembered a thing I once heard in Rhodesia from old Peter Pienaar.
I have quoted Peter already in this narrative. He was the best scout I ever knew,
and before he had turned respectable he had been pretty often on the windy side of
the law, when he had been wanted badly by the authorities. Peter once discussed with
me the question of disguises, and he had a theory which struck me at the time. He
said, barring absolute certainties like fingerprints, mere physical traits were very
little use for identification if the fugitive really knew his business. He laughed
at things like dyed hair and false beards and such childish follies. The only thing
that mattered was what Peter called ‘atmosphere’.

If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in which he had
been first observed, and—this is the important part—really play up to these surroundings
and behave as if he had never been out of them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives
on earth. And he used to tell a story of how he once borrowed a black coat and went
to church and shared the same hymn-book with the man that was looking for him. If
that man had seen him in decent company before he would have recognized him; but he
had only seen him snuffing the lights in a public-house with a revolver.

The recollection of Peter’s talk gave me the first real comfort that I had had that
day. Peter had been a wise old bird, and these fellows I was after were about the
pick of the aviary. What if they were playing Peter’s game? A fool tries to look different:
a clever man looks the same and is different.

Again, there was that other maxim of Peter’s which had helped me when I had been a
roadman. ‘If you are playing a part, you will never keep it up unless you convince
yourself that you are it.’ That would explain the game of tennis. Those chaps didn’t
need to act, they just turned a handle and passed into another life, which came as
naturally to them as the first. It sounds a platitude, but Peter used to say that
it was the big secret of all the famous criminals.

It was now getting on for eight o’clock, and I went back and saw Scaife to give him
his instructions. I arranged with him how to place his men, and then I went for a
walk, for I didn’t feel up to any dinner. I went round the deserted golf-course, and
then to a point on the cliffs farther north beyond the line of the villas.

On the little trim newly-made roads I met people in flannels coming back from tennis
and the beach, and a coastguard from the wireless station, and donkeys and pierrots
padding homewards. Out at sea in the blue dusk I saw lights appear on the
Ariadne
and on the destroyer away to the south, and beyond the Cock sands the bigger lights
of steamers making for the Thames. The whole scene was so peaceful and ordinary that
I got more dashed in spirits every second. It took all my resolution to stroll towards
Trafalgar Lodge about half-past nine.

On the way I got a piece of solid comfort from the sight of a greyhound that was swinging
along at a nursemaid’s heels. He reminded me of a dog I used to have in Rhodesia,
and of the time when I took him hunting with me in the Pali hills. We were after rhebok,
the dun kind, and I recollected how we had followed one beast, and both he and I had
clean lost it. A greyhound works by sight, and my eyes are good enough, but that buck
simply leaked out of the landscape. Afterwards I found out how it managed it. Against
the grey rock of the kopjes it showed no more than a crow against a thundercloud.
It didn’t need to run away; all it had to do was to stand still and melt into the
background.

Suddenly as these memories chased across my brain I thought of my present case and
applied the moral. The Black Stone didn’t need to bolt. They were quietly absorbed
into the landscape. I was on the right track, and I jammed that down in my mind and
vowed never to forget it. The last word was with Peter Pienaar.

Scaife’s men would be posted now, but there was no sign of a soul. The house stood
as open as a market-place for anybody to observe. A three-foot railing separated it
from the cliff road; the windows on the ground-floor were all open, and shaded lights
and the low sound of voices revealed where the occupants were finishing dinner. Everything
was as public and above-board as a charity bazaar. Feeling the greatest fool on earth,
I opened the gate and rang the bell.

A man of my sort, who has travelled about the world in rough places, gets on perfectly
well with two classes, what you may call the upper and the lower. He understands them
and they understand him. I was at home with herds and tramps and roadmen, and I was
sufficiently at my ease with people like Sir Walter and the men I had met the night
before. I can’t explain why, but it is a fact. But what fellows like me don’t understand
is the great comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas
and suburbs. He doesn’t know how they look at things, he doesn’t understand their
conventions, and he is as shy of them as of a black mamba. When a trim parlour-maid
opened the door, I could hardly find my voice.