Part 12 (1/2)
”Unless you yield to an irresistible compulsion to indulge in violent gymnastics,” the doctor said dryly, ”we need not concern ourselves with the possibility of you stabbing yourself to death. What does concern me is the likelihood of pneumonia-broken bones plus the exhausting, unpleasant and very wet time you've been through provide an ideal breeding ground. Pneumonia together with broken ribs make for a very nasty condition. Cemeteries are full of people who could once have testified to that fact.”
”Make me laugh some more,” I said sourly.
”Mrs. Cavell.” He ignored me and looked at Mary, sitting still and pale on the other side of the bed. ”Check respiration, pulse, temperature every hour. Any upward change in those- or difficulty in respiration-and please contact me at once. You have my number. Finally I must warn you and those gentlemen here ”-he nodded to Hardanger and Wylie-”that if Mr. Cavell stirs from his bed inside the next seventy-two hours I refuse to regard myself as in any way medically responsible for his well-being.”
He picked up his tool-bag and took off. As the door closed behind him I swung my legs off the bed and started to pull on a clean s.h.i.+rt. It hurt, but not as much as I expected it would. Neither Mary nor Hardanger said anything and Wylie, seeing that they had no intention of speaking, said, ”You want to kill yourself, Cavell? You heard what Dr. Whitelaw said. Why don't you stop him, Superintendent?”
”He's off his rocker,” Hardanger explained. ”You'll observe, Inspector, that not even his wife tries to stop him? Some things in this life are a complete and utter waste of time and making Cavell see sense is one of them.” He glared at me. ”So you've been coming all over clever and lone-wolfish again, haven't you? And you see what happens? Look at the b.l.o.o.d.y mess you're in now. Literally. Look at it. And nothing to show. When in G.o.d's name are you going to realise that our only hope lies in working together? The h.e.l.l with your d'Artagnan methods, Cavell. System, method, routine, co-operation-that's the only way you ever get anywhere against big crime. And d.a.m.n well you know it.”
”I know it,” I agreed. ”Patient skilled men working hard under patient skilled supervision. Sure, I'm with you. But not here. No room for patience now. Patient men take time and we have no time. You've made arrangements for an armed watch to be kept on this house I was in and to have your sleuths examine the footprints?”
He nodded. ”Your story. Let's waste no more time.”
”You'll have it. Just as soon as you tell me why you haven't bawled me out for wasting valuable police time in searching for me and why you haven't tried to use your authority to make me stay in bed. Are we worried, Superintendent?”
”The newspapers have the story,” he said flatly. ”About the break-in, the murders, the theft of the Satan Bug. We didn't expect that last thing. They're hysterical already. Screaming banner headlines in every national daily.” He pointed to a pile of newspapers on the floor beside him. ”Want to see them?”
”And waste more time? I can guess. That's not all that's worrying you.”
”It isn't. The General was on the phone-he was looking for you-half an hour ago. Six Gestetner duplicated letters delivered by special messengers this morning to the biggest concerns in Fleet Street. Character saying that his previous warning had been ignored: no acknowledgement of it on the 9 a . .m. B.B.C. news. The walls of Mordon still stood, some rubbish like that. Said that within the next few hours he would give a demonstration proving (a) he had those viruses and (b) he was willing to use them.”
”Will the papers print it?”
”They'll print it. First of all they-the editors-got together and contacted the Special Branch at Scotland Yard. The a.s.sistant Commissioner got in touch with the Home Secretary and I gather there was some kind of emergency meeting. Anyway a Cabinet order not to print. Fleet Street, I gather, told the Government to take a running jump to itself and told the Government that it is the servant of the people and not vice versa, and that if the nation stood in deadly peril-and that on the face of it they certainly seemed to-the people had the right to know. They also reminded the Government that if they put one little foot wrong in this matter they would be out on their ears overnight. The London evening papers will be on the streets about now. I'll bet the headlines are the biggest since VE day.”
”The ball's up on the slates,” I nodded. I watched Mary, her face expressionless and carefully not looking at me, b.u.t.ton my s.h.i.+rt-cuffs-with both wrists bandaged and my fingers heavily scratched it was a bit much for me-and went on, ”Well, it'll certainly provide the British public with a conversational change from the football pools, what so-and-so said on TV last night and the latest rock and roll sensation.” I went on to tell him of what happened during the night, omitting my trip to London to see the General.
At the end Hardanger said heavily, ”Very, very interesting. Are you trying to tell me that you woke up in the middle of the night and-without telling Mary-started chasing and phoning around Wilts.h.i.+re?”
”I'm telling you. The old secret police technique-and you can't beat it: get them at their sleepiest and most apprehensive and you're already half-way there. And I didn't go to sleep in the first place. I went without telling because I knew d.a.m.ned well it would go so much against all your training and instincts that you wouldn't hesitate to use force to stop me.”
”If I had,” he said coldly, ”you might have a full set of ribs right now.”
” If you had, we wouldn't have narrowed this list so much. Five of them. I let drop to all of them that we were getting pretty close to an answer and one of them was scared enough to panic and try to stop me.”
”You a.s.sume.”
”It's a d.a.m.ned good a.s.sumption. Got a better? For a starter I suggest we haul in Chessingham straight away. There's plenty on him and--”
”I forgot,” Hardanger interrupted. ”You phoned the General last night--”
”Yes.” I didn't even bother to look shame-faced. ”Wanted authority to hash about in my own way-knew you wouldn't grant it.”
”Clever devil, aren't you?” If he guessed I was lying there were no signs of it in his face. ”You asked him to check on this fellow Chessingham, his service career. Seems he was a driver in the R.A.S.C.”
”That's it then. Going to pull him in?”
”Yes. His sister?”
”She wouldn't be guilty of anything other than covering up for her own flesh and blood. And the mother is in the clear. That's for sure.”
”So. That leaves the four others you contacted this morning. You'd put them all in the clear?”
”I would not. Take Colonel Weybridge. The only certain facts we know about him are these: he has access to the security files and so would be in a position to blackmail Dr. Hartnell into co-operating--”
”You mentioned last night you thought Hartnell was in the clear.”
”I said I'd reservations about him. Secondly, why didn't our gallant Colonel, like his gallant commanding officer, volunteer to go into the lab instead of me? Was it because he knew knew the botulinus virus was loose in there? Thirdly, he is the only one without an alibi for the time of the murder.” the botulinus virus was loose in there? Thirdly, he is the only one without an alibi for the time of the murder.”
”Good lord, Cavell, you're not suggesting we pull in Colonel Weybridge? I can tell you we had a pretty nasty time from both Cliveden and Weybridge when we insisted on fingerprinting their quarters this morning. Cliveden actually phoned the a.s.sistant Commissioner.”
”And got his head in his hands?”
”In a gentlemanly sort of way. He hates our guts now.”
”That helps. This fingerprinting of the suspects' houses. Anything turned up yet?”
”Give them a chance,” Hardanger protested. ”It's not one o'clock yet. Be a couple of hours before they finish tabulating their results. And I can't can't pull in Weybridge. The War Office would have my scalp in twenty-four hours.” pull in Weybridge. The War Office would have my scalp in twenty-four hours.”
”If this lad with the Satan Bug starts chucking it around,” I said, ”there won't be any War Office in twenty-four hours. People's feelings have ceased to be of any concern. Besides, you don't have to throw him in the cooler. Confine him to his quarters, open arrest, house arrest, whatever you call it. Anything turned up in the past few hours?”
”A thousand stones and nothing under any of them,” Hardanger said grimly. ”The hammer and pliers were definitely the ones used in the break-in. But we'd been sure of that anyway. Not a single useful print in the Bedford decoy van. The same for the telephone box which was used to make the call to Reuter's last night. We've put your money-lending friend Tuffnell and his partner through the mill and had the Fraud Squad examine their books until we know as much about their business as they do themselves: we could have them both behind bars in a week but I just can't be bothered. Anyway, Dr. Hartnell is definitely their only customer from number one lab. The London police are trying to trace the man who sent the letters to Fleet Street, if we're wasting our time down here they might as well waste their time up there. Inspector Martin has spent the entire morning questioning everyone in number one lab about their social relations with each other and the only thing he has turned up so far is that Dr. Hartnell and Chessingham were on visiting terms. We already knew that. We're having a check made on every known movement of every suspect in the past year and we have teams of men checking with the occupants of every house within three miles of Mordon to see if they noticed anything strange or out of the way on the night of the murders. Something is bound to turn up sometime. If you spread the net wide enough and the meshes are small enough. It always does.”
”Sure. In a couple of weeks. Or a couple of months. Our friend with the Satan Bug has promised to do his stuff in a few hours. d.a.m.n it, Superintendent, we can't just wait for something to turn up. Organisation, no matter on how ma.s.sive a scale, won't do it. Method number two, lighting a meerschaum and making like Sherlock, isn't going to get us far either. We have to provoke a reaction.”
”You already provoked a reaction,” Hardanger said sourly. ”See where it got you? You want more reactions. How?”
”As a starter, investigate every financial transaction and every bank book entry of everyone working in number one, every entry in the past year-and don't forget Weybridge and Cliveden. Let the suspects know. Then squads of policemen to every house. Search each house from top to bottom and have the searchers list every tiniest thing they find. This will not only worry the man we're after-it might actually turn up something.”
”If we're going to go that far,” Inspector Wylie put in, ”we might as well throw the lot of them in the cooler. It's one sure way of taking our man out of circulation.”
”Hopeless, Inspector. We may be dealing with a maniac but he's a brilliant maniac. He'd have thought of that possibility months ago. He's got an organisation-n.o.body in Mordon could possibly have delivered those letters in London this morning-and you can bet your pension that the first thing he'd have done after getting the viruses would be to get rid of them.”
”We'll try stirring things up,” Hardanger said reluctantly. ”Though where I'm going to find all the men to--”
”Pull them off the house-to-house questioning. It's a waste of time.”
He nodded, again reluctantly, and spoke at length on the phone while I finished dressing. When he put the phone down he said to me, ”I'm not going to waste my breath arguing. Go ahead and kill yourself. But you might think of Mary.”
”I'm thinking of her all right. I'm thinking that if our unknown friend gets careless with the Satan Bug there'll soon be no Mary. There'll be nothing.”
This seemed to be a pretty effective conversation stopper but after some time Wylie said thoughtfully, ”If this unknown friend does give a demonstration I wonder if the Government really would close down Mordon.”
”Close it? Our pal wants it flattened to the ground. It's impossible to guess what they will do. Things are only at the badly-scaring stage so far-no one's out and out terrified.”
”Speak for yourself,” Hardanger said sourly. ”And just what are you thinking of doing now, Cavell? If you'll be kind enough to tell me,” he added with heavy irony.