Dictator's Way (25 page)

“Anyhow she cared what happened and that's a jolly sight more than the rest of you did,” retorted Bobby with some heat, and then: “What's going to happen to her? Can't you do something –?”

“What?” asked Peter. “She's got to take her chance with the rest of us. Why not? She knows what happened to her mother. After Olive's own father died, her mother married an Etrurian. Olive's English but she was brought up in Etruria. Her step-father was trying to get trade unions going in Etruria. So he was one of the first who was to be arrested, but they couldn't find him so they took his wife – Olive's mother – to headquarters for questioning. She wouldn't tell them anything. She was released after a time but she died within a day or two. She was never conscious so she couldn't say what had happened. Perhaps it was just shock and excitement. She was going to have a baby so probably wasn't up to the sort of questioning the destroying angels go in for. We did hear afterwards that the Redeemer of his country had expressed regrets and issued orders that pregnant women were to be treated gently – when possible.”

“I take it,” Bobby said, ‘‘you realize I shall have to report all this?”

“My dear chap,” answered Peter, “that entirely depends on whether you get the chance.”

“I suppose there's that,” agreed Bobby, aware of a slightly chilly sensation in the pit of his stomach at this intimation of how Peter regarded the position.

“Besides,” added Peter quite cheerfully, “I don't flatter myself I've told you anything your Special Branch people don't know already – except perhaps how advanced our preparations really are for the rising in Etruria. And they'll know that soon enough, all the world will know it. There's about me as well. I don't think they knew I was part of the show. We tried our best to keep that quiet – me, I mean. But I'm very much afraid they know it now – couldn't help very well after the Macklin business.”

“Did you kill him?” Bobby asked.

Peter nodded.

There was something almost terrifying about that quiet nod, so cool, so unconcerned, so grimly resolute. Bobby had expected prompt denial, perhaps ‘avoidance and delay' as the lawyers say, anything indeed but that simple nod of affirmation and agreement. He found himself looking sideways at Peter, as at someone he had never seen before, and Peter looked back at him with his old friendly, frank, sympathetic smile.

“Sorry,” he said. “I know just how it is you feel. But there it is.”

Olive came back once more to the door of the cabin.

“You're wanted,” she said to Peter.

“Right-ho,” he answered and went away, but behind him left the cabin full of all that simple nod had meant.

It was some time before either of them spoke and then Olive said:

“Peter's been telling you, hasn't he?”

Bobby tried to answer but somehow the words would not come. Olive continued:

“We both felt we had to get married. It was too difficult as things were.” She might almost have been defending herself. “In a way it was settled years ago when we were babies. Everything's fixed up now.”

“Yes, he said so, too,” Bobby muttered, and once again he seemed to see the simple nod of affirmation which in that one quiet gesture had conveyed so much.

She was still standing by the cabin door, her gaze directed through the open porthole as though she could not bear it should be confined by the strait walls of the cabin. She said presently:

“I'm sorry about last night.”

“Oh, that's all right,'' he mumbled awkwardly.

“It was feeling what I had said might ruin all our plans,” she went on. “I expect Peter's told you about the rising there's to be in Etruria – one of the Army divisions is going to move. If anything had got out beforehand it would have meant hundreds of men arrested and shot, and it would have been through me and thinking about it made me go all funny in the head.''

“It's all right, nothing happened,” Bobby repeated.

“I meant to do it,” she said with a sombre intonation in her voice. “I suppose no one ever knows what they mightn't do. It doesn't matter now. I wonder what it's like to drown – they say it's easy but I don't think it can be. Do you?”

“If there's any real danger, can't you send out an S O S?” Bobby demanded. “There must be something –” he said with a gesture almost of despair.

“Peter says we must wait till it's dark and then we ought to have as good a chance of avoiding them as they will have of finding us. If we tried to send out an S O S, they would pick it up first, and ram us at once, and in the daylight we shouldn't stand a chance of getting away. Peter thinks most likely they don't know we know who they are, and they'll expect we shall show lights as soon as it's dark, and then it will be easy.”

They heard Peter's step outside. He came back into the cabin and laughed.

“All our chaps want to do something,” he said. “I think they would feel better if we all sat in a row and made faces – some sort of action. Our only chance really is just to do nothing – yet. Then our friends will think we don't suspect anything and that when it's dark and we hang our lights out, then we shall be an easy mark – sitters. But we shan't show any lights, and the dark will give us a chance to run, and anyhow we've got to get our messages off at the time arranged or things may get upset. If it doesn't all go like clockwork, the rising may never come off at all, with everyone waiting for the other fellow to begin, and then the Redeemer's destroying angels will be able to get in their shootings and hangings at their leisure. I say, Olive, what about some grub?”

‘‘I'll go and see about it,” she said and went away. Peter sat down and lighted a cigarette.

“Tough job, waiting,” he said. “Especially for our people – we are a bit of an excitable race, I suppose. Not so much when it comes to action but when it's waiting we do get the fidgets.”

“Why did you tell me about Macklin?” Bobby asked. “You know I'm a policeman.”

“My dear chap,” Peter answered with his friendliest smile, “you've got no proof, have you? You tell your bosses what I said as much as you like, only you can tell 'em at the same time I shan't admit it to them. Besides, I've got a perfect alibi. I can produce a dozen responsible witnesses to swear I was in their company that afternoon.”

“But you told me –”

“Not in writing,” Peter pointed out. “I don't mind telling you as much as you like, because I think you know it all already. But of course I shall deny it to anyone else. I've arranged for my alibi, or rather a lawyer pal of ours who is in with us, has one arranged for me. Your Special Branch will know better but they won't dare to prosecute, not against my alibi. Besides, we can do a spot of blackmail on our own, if we have to. We've given your Special Branch quite a lot of information about the activities of all the different dictators in England – the whole lot of them. They won't want that to come out. Make an awful stink. Most embarrassing for your Government when it's trying so hard to pretend everything in the garden's lovely.”

“It wouldn't be allowed to come out,” Bobby said. “You don't know how things can get hushed up.”

“You're thinking of the Basilisk affair, and the torpedo that wasn't fired, and the depth charge that wasn't dropped, and the submarine that wasn't there and so it wasn't sunk?” Peter asked smiling. “Oh, yes, I know you English have a genius for saying nothing – most annoying, too.”

“It's not only that,” Bobby said. “Murder is murder. I know you can pull a lot of strings in England, but not, I think, about murder. What made you kill Macklin?”

“He was in the pay of the Etrurian Government. He had a list of all the Etrurians in England in touch with the People's Party. If he had got that into the hands of the Etrurian Government, it would have meant utter ruin, prison, death perhaps, for all the friends and relatives in Etruria of the people whose names were on it. You don't understand, you can't in your safe, secure England, you can't imagine quiet, harmless people, business people, a lawyer perhaps in ordinary practise, or a doctor, or a University professor thinking of nothing but their own private affairs – their next course of lectures or how such and such of their patients are going on – and then in the middle of the night, because it's generally at night, there are armed police knocking at the door. Next day the neighbours ask no questions, and the tradespeople don't call, and the doctor or professor or whoever it is doesn't come back till the friend or relative abroad has come to heel. And if he doesn't – well, they don't. The little ways dictators have, you know.”

“And it was because of that –”

“It was because of that I killed him,” Peter Albert said slowly.

For a long time they were both silent. Bobby thought to himself that it was a duty and a right to track down those who themselves had declared war on society, a secret war that had to be combatted and repressed if society was to endure and decent people sleep secure in their beds. But this was different and yet it was the same – entirely different and yet so precisely the same.

Indeed to the complications that life may offer, there can be no end. 

Yet none the less, must they be met and faced and straightened out.

“You're thinking you've your duty to do and you've got to do it,” Peter said presently. “That's all right – it's one of the reasons why you English are a great people, because so often you put duty first. Only don't call it murder what I did. It was no more murder than it was murder in the war when your officers, as I have read in a book written by one of themselves, shot down any of their men who showed signs of breaking under an unbearable strain. Their duty, I suppose, and it may be your duty to get me hanged – though you won't find that so easy – and in the same way my duty to do what I did.”

“You ought to have come to us,” Bobby said, but only weakly. “Anyone in the country has a right to police protection.”

Peter shook his head, smiling a little.

“What could you have done?” he asked. “The list of names Macklin had was what was important – and for you what was it but a list of names? What harm is there in a list of names? – especially one headed as this was: ‘to be asked to subscribe to the Etrurian Hospital Rebuilding Fund.' But we knew what would happen if that list got to its destination. There was an old Professor of the Etrurian National University – a member of half the learned societies in Europe. He was connected with both Olive's step-father's family and mine – her step-father and my mother were some sort of cousin. He was busy with a work on Moral Philosophy – been writing it all his life, more or less. His nephew got mixed up with what in Etruria is called Communistic propaganda – really just about what the Chartists in England were agitating for a hundred years ago. But in Etruria they label it Communism because they know you only have to whisper the word ‘Communism' in English middle-class circles and all argument ceases automatically. Look at your Foreign Office. Someone murmurs ‘Bolshevism' and at once all there run round in circles screaming in terror. Nervous wrecks, in fact. When they've recovered a bit they wipe their perspiring brows and say: ‘Thank God for Mussolini, he may be trying to chuck us out of the Mediterranean but at least he's fighting Bolshevism. Thank God for Hitler, he may want our colonies but at least he's fighting Bolshevism.' I don't know if they thank God for Oswald Mosley, too. Perhaps nobody could go quite that far.”

‘‘That's all just politics,” Bobby said moodily. “A man can't give himself the right to kill.”

‘‘Why not? What right for that matter has any man to deny another's right? Are you God to say this is right and that is wrong, to lay down commandments on tablets of stone? Not that I meant to kill. But we knew Macklin had the list and we knew he was going to hand it over to a go-between for the Etrurian Ambassador. But we didn't know where the meeting was to take place and we didn't know who the go-between was. We watched Macklin and we had observers posted at what we thought likely meeting-places. I was assigned The Manor, Judson's place – and that was where Macklin turned up. I was waiting and I followed him into one of the rooms and asked him for the list. He drew a revolver. I was ready for that because we knew he had bought one from Troya, the little man who keeps ‘the Twin Wolves'. Troya had a police permit for a pistol. It's been stolen twice – if you ask me, it wasn't stolen at all but sold. Troya got away with it, though, and we knew about the pistol, and I knocked it out of Macklin's hand before he had time to get to using it. He whipped out a knife then and went for me so I knocked him out. He was pretty badly hurt.

I caught him with the knobby end of my walking-stick and it's a nice bit of ash. I wasn't going to touch him again.

I didn't think there was any need after I got the list of names. I was pretty sure there was no copy and without the list, and the notes of evidence Macklin had got together even the Etrurian Government couldn't pay much attention to his report. I said something like that to him and he began to laugh. He was bleeding where I had hit him and the blood ran down his face while he was laughing. He said he had half a dozen copies but I didn't believe him. He was crawling along the floor, trying to get to the 'phone. I watched him. I thought he was going to call up the police and I didn't care. I had my answer. We had it all fixed up what to say. I should have told the police it was a confidential list of business clients Macklin had stolen to sell to a trade rival and he could prosecute if he liked.

We knew he wouldn't dare. Too much would have come out. It was awfully quiet up in that room. I had never even seen a dead man. What was I saying? Oh, yes, he was crawling to the 'phone and I watched him. He got hold of the receiver. He said over his shoulder: ‘I know all the names by heart. I know every one. I know it all off pat. I'll ring them at the Embassy and tell them they shall have it written out fresh first thing tomorrow.' You know, that was a silly thing to say. He shouldn't have said that, should he? After that it all happened very quickly. I got hold of him by the collar and pulled him away. I knew I had to kill him, but I didn't know how. Funny how difficult it is to kill a man. We were rolling on the floor. There was the pistol I had knocked out of his hand but it had gone under a book-case somewhere. He had his knife and he was jabbing at me with it. He cut my hand a little through the glove I was wearing. I had put on gloves because of finger-prints, you know. There was a cushion on one of the chairs and I took it and held it over his face. I pressed it down. Funny how easy it is to kill a man.”