Traitor's Purse (25 page)

Presently he realized what it was that he found so puzzling. He had known Amanda since she had been a child and yet now there was something new about her. He found out what it was. He was seeing her through some sort of mental curtain. His subconscious mind reached out for this infuriating barrier and drew it slowly aside like a wet page.

The complete picture lay before him.

He saw it all in a single dreadful moment of revelation. The whole kaleidoscopic history of the last thirty-six hours, painted with pitiless clarity and minute detail, unfolded before him in all its stark gravity; a mad, uncomic strip with himself wandering blindfold through it like a lost soul.

Then, as his two minds and personalities merged at last, as the new Campion’s witless discoveries fitted over the old Campion’s certain knowledge, the three-dimensional truth suddenly sprang out in blazing colours. He stood petrified. Good God Almighty! He knew now what the contraband was in those cases which the wretched Anscombe had been bribed to accept as honest Rhine wine! It could only be a counterfeit, the artificially dirtied indetectable counterfeit itself. Millions and millions of pounds’ worth of lies and disruption. Anscombe had been murdered because he was preparing to salve his conscience and to confess to the contents of those packing-cases. Probably he intended to hand over his own small fortune in cash to the Treasury by way of a gesture after his confession.

Then there were the lorries. They were for the distribution, obviously. How this was going to be done, and what the magic password was which would make the sober, suspicious British public accept and spend this dynamite, was still a mystery. But the time, the hour of striking, was not. Anscombe had given that away by mentioning Minute
Fifteen
. Today
was
the fifteenth, and they were not going to wait until tomorrow. The hour was now. Perhaps this very minute. It had all come back to him. He knew where he was. He knew what he had got to do.

The danger was stultifying. His body winced inside. A year, six months, even three months ago such a gigantic project would have been fantastic, but tonight, in this beleaguered England, with all the tides of a new and diabolically astute barbary lapping at her feet, the plan was a sound weapon and it was poised squarely at her heart.

Panic possessed him and all but choked him. The time was almost gone and he was piteously helpless. He pressed his face to the judas-window.

‘Amanda!’

‘Yes?’ She smiled at him quickly, reassuringly.

Campion took careful hold of himself and strove to compress and clarify the message he had to give her. Time had become as precious as a little drop of water in the bottom of a pannikin in the desert.

The clock chiming across the street was pure medieval torture.

‘Look, my darling,’ he said, aware of the state of affairs between them, aware of his loss and its magnitude and thrusting it out of his mind because of the racing minutes and the disaster ahead, ‘I’ve got to get out of here immediately. Listen, Amanda, there was some sort of scrap on the quayside before I got into that hospital. One or two people may have got beaten up in it, but that’s not the point …’

‘’Ere, what are you saying?’ The turnkey was very excited, ‘I’ll ’ave to ask you to repeat that.’

Amanda ignored the interruption. She leant forward to catch anything Campion might have to tell her.

‘Oates was with me then,’ he said distinctly.

He saw her brown eyes widen and a flicker pass over her face.

‘Where is he?’ he went on desperately. ‘I’ve got to get out, Amanda. I’ve got to get out and go down to the Nag immediately.’

‘Yes, I see,’ she said briefly. She turned on her heel at
once
and the turnkey had to hurry to keep up with her. She went so quickly that her going might have been desertion. The turnkey certainly put it down as that.

He came back a moment or so later, carrying a police memorandum. He was inclined to be amused by Amanda’s exit, but very soon the description of the wanted person took up all his time and intelligence. He was a type mercifully rare in the Force, but every great organization had its minor blunders. He sat on the long bench which ran down the corridor wall opposite the cell and spelt out the points line by line. At every fresh item he got up and came over to peer at his victim through the slit. He was studiously deaf to every remark addressed to him and frequently returned to the beginning of his task, having forgotten how far he had got in it.

Campion began to suffer the tortures of the damned. The war, with all its noisy horror as he knew it in the battle zones, was very close to him. He could see and hear it over Britain, not merely as air raids but as invasion, and then, as well as these, he saw the whole country suddenly hit in the wind by an entirely unexpected blow. The magnificent jingle from the end of King John came into his mind: ‘
Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue, if England to itself do rest but true
.’ ‘But true’: there was the talisman, there the strength, and there the danger. ‘But true’. But confident of her own solidarity. ‘But true’…

Oh, God, let him get out! O sweet sanity! O ultimate honesty and the final triumph of the best! O faith in good as a force and an entity, let him get out in time!

The turnkey began to read the description again with cross-references.

‘Yeller ’air … yeller ’air. Six foot two inches … well, just about. Very likely. ’Ere I say you in there, ’ow tall are you?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s a description of me.’ Campion’s voice was shaking with his effort to control it. ‘I admit that. Don’t worry about that any more. Now look here, this is serious. This is a million times more important and more urgent
than
any air raid siren. Either fetch me the most senior officer in the building or let me use the telephone at once. This is vital. Do you understand? It’s so vital and so urgent that if you don’t do it it won’t much matter if you’ve discovered grounds for an arrest on that bit of paper or not. If you don’t bring me someone in authority immediately I don’t think you’ll wake up in the same world tomorrow morning.’

‘Threats, eh?’ said the turnkey with idiot satisfaction. ‘I’ll ’ave to report all that. You want to be very careful what you say, my lad. This may not be the East Coast, but even so you can’t be too careful these days. Fifth Column, that’s what we’re looking out for all the time.’

‘Listen.’ Campion’s hands were sticky on the door of the cell. ‘I want to make a complete statement. I’m entitled to have a detective sergeant to take it down.’

‘In good time. In good time you shall have one of His Majesty’s judges listening to you,’ said the turnkey without stirring. ‘In half a minute I’ll take your statement myself.’

This was a form of torture new to Campion. The Ordeal by Fool might well go down in the calendar, he felt. He swung away from the judas-window and walked down the cell. His agony of exasperation was so acute that it was physical, catching him in the throat and diaphragm, pressing on them until he could scarcely breathe. He sat down on the bunk and stared at the stone floor. His mind began to work over the situation feverishly. There was the plan itself. That was simple and terrible. There was only one last secret there: how was this devilishly convincing counterfeit to be distributed in sufficient quantities and in sufficiently short time to do the work of destruction? It was just possible that this snag had not been entirely overcome. If so, there was just a chance of salvation still. Yet it was madness to hope for a mistake or a weakness in the Enemy. That was absurd. That was criminal.

The clock chimed again. Each note beat through him in shivering pain. Outside in the passage the turnkey had risen and was peering at him through the judas-slit.

‘Slim build …’ he was muttering. ‘Slim build.’

Campion’s mind scurried on, tearing at the knots with nervy, unsteady fingers. His head still hurt him considerably and he felt weak and physically unreliable, but there was still a great reserve of raging nervous energy boiling within him. Everything was startlingly clear. What he did know stood out in bright colours. What he did not know was defined and impenetrably black.

The whole scheme must have been Enemy Alien in the beginning; so much was obvious. The neatness and ingenuity of the arrangements all pointed to the same diabolically competent organization.

He went back to the judas-window and peered out at the policeman. As his eyes rested on that square, well-padded head, with its bald spot and fringe of oiled grey hair, it came to him with an overwhelming sense of finality that there was absolutely nothing he could say or do which would be of the slightest use.

Now that he had the whole picture in his mind he could see his own mistakes standing out like enemy flags on a map. That dash for freedom after they charged him, that had been suicidal. He knew from long experience of the police and their ways that nothing he did after that would make one ha’porth of difference. He knew what they were doing. They were letting him cool off. The more noise he made, the more he argued, the longer they would leave him. It was maddening, like being held at bay by one’s own dog.

He had closed his eyes while he swallowed the inevitable and he stood now with his hands resting high up on the inside of the door and his blank face held to the judas-slit. There was no sound. Nothing concrete disturbed him, yet presently his eyes flickered open eagerly and he stood watching without moving.

The turnkey was sitting on the bench with his head raised and a foolish, startled expression on his face. His eyes were fixed on the farther door, the one which led to the corridor and the charge room, and he too was listening intently.

Campion realized that there was a judas-window in the
farther
door also and someone was watching the pair of them through it. It was a moment of intense excitement. Hope leapt up in him and he forced himself to hold his tongue. After what seemed an age of indecision the turnkey blundered to his feet and went to unlock the door.

Campion’s fingernails cut into his hands and his mouth was dry. So much depended on this silly little question. So much. An Empire? Perhaps a civilization. All depending on who came into a prison corridor.

His first despairing impression was that the man was a stranger. He stooped to pass through the doorway and he was wearing a scarf wrapped round the lower part of his face. As he lifted his head, however, Campion knew him. It was Hutch.

The scarf took Campion off his guard. He knew quite well what it must be protecting but he had not expected it. He had not only never meant to hit so hard but in his present three-dimensional world the whole notion of doing such a thing at all savoured of madness.

It was the clock again which pulled him together. Its fifteen-minute chimes must have been a torture to any prisoner at any time, but to Campion they had become a scourge.

‘Hutch,’ he said softly.

The man came over to the door and looked in through the window. He did not speak and his blue eyes were very bleak.

Campion took a deep breath.

‘I must have a word with you,’ he said quietly. ‘I know there’s a hell of a lot to explain. I’ve been walking around punch-drunk for the best part of two days. However, you shall have chapter and verse for everything in an hour or so. But just at the moment there’s something that’s got to be done. We’ve got to go to Bridge. We’ve got to get to the Nag at once. My dear fellow, you needn’t let me out of your sight.’

Still Hutch did not reply, nor did he alter his expression. Desperation made Campion very quiet and almost conversational.

‘I can give you any bona fides you need,’ he said. ‘My S.S. number is twenty-seven. I’ve been lent to Chief Constable of the C.I.D. Mr Stanislaus Oates. The work we’re engaged on concerns Folio 6B and Minute Fifteen, but it’s so damnably urgent now that I must insist …’

Hutch stepped back from the judas-window.

‘For God’s sake, man!’ Campion’s cry came from his soul and to his relief he heard the lock. The door swung wide and he stepped out to confront the Superintendent, who was still regarding him with a curious expression on the half of his face which showed above his muffler.

Campion opened his mouth to speak but got no farther. Hutch had turned to the wall and was scribbling a line or two on the back of an envelope taken from his pocket. The message was enlightening.

‘Just located Oates. Has been St Jude’s Hospital unconscious since Tues. night. Has been under police guard in error. Was thought to have killed copper in street fight on quay. Police here b. fools. Oates just come round and Doc says thinks out of danger.’

Understanding came to Campion. Of course! That explained it at last. The policeman and the nurse and that incredible conversation he had overheard from his bed in the huge deserted ward. They could never have been talking about himself. They must have been discussing poor old Oates, who was probably lying in a little private room leading off the main ward. Now he had his wits about him that much was obvious. When a police constable watches a man in bed he watches him from a chair at the foot of that bed and does not stand about in a passage. Yet it had all seemed very convincing at the time.

Hutch was still scribbling.

‘Lady A found him. Sent for me. You can leave here when you like. We’ll square this lot. Understand it’s urgent. She’s outside with the car.’

‘Is she?’ Campion leapt to the door. ‘You’ll want twenty or thirty armed men,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Bring them to the Nag at once. It’s desperate. What’s the time?’

‘4.50,’ Hutch wrote the figures and Campion had to step back to look at them.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he demanded as the oddity of the proceeding suddenly occured to him.

Hutch gave him a slow sidelong glance and his hand began to move again.

‘You’ve cracked my ruddy jaw, blast you,’ he wrote. ‘Get on with it. I’m following.’

XX

CAMPION STEPPED OUT
of the comparative calm of the police station into a world of exuberant speed. A tremendous wind had sprung up over the town, and low-lying clouds, like shoals of enormous blue-black sharks, swam across a brilliant sky. There was rain coming and the air felt damp and soft and exciting. Everywhere, from the scraps of waste-paper cartwheeling down the road to the flying patches of alternate sun and shadow which flickered over housetops and pavements, there was an impression of desperate urgency, of superhuman efforts to be quick.