“It’s for you,” she said to Tabor. “Someone from London.”
Tabor followed her out into the hall. Mr. Behrens put the last of the coal onto the fire and tried to shake off a sense of impending disaster.
It was a long five minutes before Tabor came back into the room. When he did so, Mr. Behrens knew before he even opened his mouth, that something of decisive importance had happened.
Tabor said, “This evening your police, your trustworthy, nonpolitical, judicially controlled police, arrested Professor Mann on a trumped-up charge of smuggling. He’s in a cell in Cannon Row police station now.”
Mr. Behrens could think of nothing to say.
“It looks as if I shall have a busy day tomorrow. I’m going to bed.” Tabor went out again, shutting the door quietly but firmly behind him.
Mr. Behrens sat for a long time by the dying fire. He had no idea how it had been worked, but it seemed to him that the opposition was still a step ahead of them.
Presently, he heard the sound which he had been unconsciously waiting for. The telephone was ringing. It was Mr. Fortescue.
“Has Tabor heard the news?”
“About Professor Mann? Yes.”
“Somebody telephoned him?”
“About half an hour ago. It came at a most unfortunate moment.”
“It was a clever piece of timing,” said Mr. Fortescue. He sounded as if he were discussing the French defence to an attack on the Queen’s rook side.
“It was certainly effective,” said Mr. Behrens. “How did they do it?”
“Someone from their embassy telephoned Scotland Yard and told them that Professor Mann had offered one of their embassy servants eight ounces of cocaine, for payment in dollars. And that he was leaving England by air tomorrow. They had to do something, of course. The professor was uncooperative. I believe he spat in the superintendent’s eye. So they pulled him in. He’ll be released first thing tomorrow morning – with an apology, of course.”
“I’m afraid the harm will have been done,” said Mr. Behrens. He was tired, more tired than he could ever remember feeling in his life before, and something of this must have reached Mr. Fortescue.
“I am sure you have done all that anyone could have done,” he said and then, as if embarrassed by this unusual display of sentiment, rang off.
Mr. Behrens crept upstairs to bed. There were only two guest rooms. He had to pass Tabor’s door to get to his own. The door was ajar, and Mr. Behrens could not help seeing, in the bright moonlight which was streaming through the window, that Tabor’s bed was empty and unused.
“He can’t have gone already,” he thought. “Or if he has, he won’t get very far in this snow.”
But he was too tired to worry any further about it. He fell into bed and to sleep. . .
When Mr. Behrens woke next morning the sun was shining. He crept out of bed and hobbled to the window. He felt as stiff as if the long struggle he had engaged in the night before had been physical.
Outside he looked at a white world. Five miles away the Ravenshoe Refinery stood out black and sharp against the snowy hillside. He could even see, in clear silhouette, the curious outline of the catalytic cracker. It seemed to be grinning at him.
As he turned away, there was a knock at the door. Behrens snatched up a dressing gown and shouted, “Come in.”
It was Ruby.
“It’s nearly ten o’clock,” she said. “Dad sent me up to see if you wanted any breakfast.”
“I’ll be down in five minutes,” said Mr. Behrens. “Is Mr. Tabor up yet?”
When Ruby failed to answer, Mr. Behrens looked up and saw that her face was scarlet.
He said, “I’m afraid we sat up very late last night. I’m sorry if we kept you up as well.”
Ruby sat down on the bed and started to cry, softly, Mr. Behrens, being a sensible man, said nothing. He sat down beside her, and put his arms around her.
“Extraordinary,” said Mr. Fortescue.
“It was the catalytic process,” said Mr. Behrens. “Tabor explained it all to me that day at the refinery. A substance will stand up to any amount of heat and pressure by itself. But add one simple outside ingredient and it will dissolve at once. In an oil refinery, I understand, the thing they use is china clay.”
“And in this case, it was Ruby.”
“She’s a very nice girl,” said Mr. Behrens. “They’re getting married next week, and I’ve promised to be best man. He’s taking back his job at the refinery until he can get some research work.”
“And he’s entirely changed his mind about leaving us?”
“Oh, entirely. Ruby doesn’t approve of Europe.”
“I see,” said Mr. Fortescue.
“You can book straight through to Heidelberg,” said Mr. Leonard Caversham, “but it’s a long and tiring journey, and I’d suggest that you break it at Cologne. You can go on next morning.”
“I’ve never been to Germany before,” said the man. “Matter of fact, I dropped quite a few bombs on it during the war.”
“It might perhaps be wiser not to mention that when you get there,” said Mr. Caversham with a smile.
“Could you book me a room in a hotel at Cologne?”
“Certainly. It will take a couple of days to arrange. If you come back at the end of the week, I should have the tickets and reservations all ready for you.”
“And if I am going to stop the night at Cologne, I suppose I ought to notify the hotel in Heidelberg that I shall be a day late.”
“We could do that for you, too,” said Mr. Caversham.
Before he had come to work at Trembling’s Tours, Mr. Caversham sometimes wondered why anyone should employ someone else to do a simple job like booking a ticket or making a reservation. Now he was beginning to understand that such a simple assignment could be stretched to include quite a number of other services. He had spent the previous afternoon telephoning four different hotels in Amsterdam in one of which a lady was certain she had left her jewel case. (It was found later in the bottom of her husband’s suitcase).
As the ex-bomber pilot departed, Roger Roche came through from the back office. He looked dusty, disorganised and depressed. In the last two respects, as Mr. Caversham knew, appearances were deceptive. Roger had shown himself, in the short time he had been with Trembling’s Tours, a competent and irrepressibly cheerful courier.
“What a crowd,” he said, running his stubby fingers through his mop of light hair. “What a bleeding marvellous collection.”
“Were they worse than the last lot, Roger?”
“Compared with this crowd, the last lot were a school treat. We had a dipsomaniac, a kleptomaniac, five ordinary maniacs, and two old women who never stopped quarrelling. What bothered ‘em most was who sat next to the window. ‘On my right,’ I said, ‘you will hobserve the magnificent Tyrolean panner-rammer of the Salzkammergut.’ ‘
I told
you it was going to be extra-special today, Gertrude. I can’t think why I let you have the window. We’ll change at lunchtime.’ ‘You had it all yesterday.’ ‘
Yesterday
was just forests.’”
Mr. Caversham laughed. He noticed that when Roger was reporting his own remarks he lapsed into exaggerated cockney, while the observations of his passengers were reproduced in accurate suburbanese.
“You get well tipped for your pains,” he said. “The last lot were mad about you.”
“Ah! There was a girl on the last lot – and when I say a girl, I mean a girl. Nothing in this bunch under ninety.”
The bell sounded behind the counter.
“I’m wanted,” said Mr. Caversham. “You’ll have to hold the fort.”
“I was going to have lunch.”
“It’ll only be five minutes.”
Mr. Caversham went through the door behind the counter and along the passage. He was of average height, and he moved with deliberation.
The room at the end of the passage was still known as the Founder’s Room, having belonged to Mr. Walcott Trembling, who had organised and accompanied tours at a time when a visit to the continent was an adventure, when a tourist expected to be swindled from the moment he arrived at Calais, and a careful family carried its drinking water with it.
Arthur Trembling, his great-grandson, rarely found time to visit the continent himself, being, as he told his friends, ‘snowed under’ with the work of the agency, the largest in Southampton and still one of the best known in the country.
Mr. Caversham looked at him inquiringly.
Mr. Trembling said, “I believe you’ve got a car here, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Caversham. He drove into Southampton every day from the furnished cottage he had rented on the fringes of the New Forest.
“I wouldn’t bother you, but my car’s tied up at the garage. I wondered if you could run a parcel round to my brother Henry’s shop.”
“No trouble at all,” said Mr. Caversham. “The only thing is that it’ll leave the front office empty. Mr. Snow is away this week, and Mr. Belton’s having lunch.”
“Who’s there now?”
“I left Roger holding the fort.”
“He can go on holding it. It won’t take you more than ten minutes.”
“Right,” said Mr. Caversham. “Where’s the parcel?”
Mr. Trembling had the grace to look embarrassed.
“I’m afraid I assumed you’d say yes. The parcel’s in the boot of your car already. It’s quite a big one.”
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Caversham. He was placid and obliging – qualities which, in the few weeks he had been there, had already endeared him to his employer.
His ancient Standard was in the corner of the yard, outside the garage (in which, when they were not speeding down the motorways of Europe, the Trembling forty-seater touring coaches were housed). Mr. Caversham glanced into the trunk compartment of his car. In it was a large square parcel wrapped in brown paper and well corded. It would, he guessed, be books. Henry Trembling, Arthur’s brother, was a second-hand book-seller.
Mr. Caversham drove slowly and carefully. He was not sorry to be out of the office. His course took him along the quays, outside the ramparts of the old town and into the modern area of shops clustered round the railway station. Henry, a stouter, whiter, more paunchy version of his brother, helped him take out the parcel. It was surprisingly heavy – but books always weigh a lot. Henry pressed a pound note into Mr. Caversham’s hand.
“For your trouble and your petrol,” he said. It seemed generous payment for a quarter-mile run, but Mr. Caversham said nothing. As he drove back to the office he whistled softly between his teeth.
He was thinking of Lucilla.
Lucilla was something of a mystery in the office. She was Arthur Trembling’s secretary. She had been there longer than any other member of the staff – which was not saying a great deal, for Trembling’s paid their employees badly and parted with them rapidly. But it made Lucilla all the more inexplicable, for she was not only competent, she was positively beautiful.
The only theory which made sense to the other employees of Trembling’s was that she was Arthur’s mistress.
“Though what she can see in him,” as Roger said to Mr. Caversham, “beats me. I should have said he had as much sex in him as a flat soda-water bottle.”
Mr. Caversham had agreed. He agreed with almost everybody.
When he got back, he found Lucilla in the front office dealing with a lady who wished to take four children and a Labrador to Ireland. He thought she looked worried and, for a girl of her remarkable poise, a little off balance.
When she had dealt with the customer, she came across to him.
“I suppose Roger wouldn’t wait any longer for his lunch,” said Mr. Caversham.
“The poor boy, yes. He was hungry. Where have you been?”
“Running errands for the boss,” said Mr. Caversham. He was an observant man, and now that Lucilla was close to him he could read the signs quite clearly – the tightening round the mouth, the strained look in her eyes; he could even see the tiny beads of perspiration on her attractive, outward-curving upper lip.
“What’s up?” he said.
“I can’t talk now,” she said. “I’ve got to go back – to him. Can you get out for half an hour at teatime?”
“Should be all right,” said Mr. Caversham. “Four o’clock. Belton can carry things for half an hour. Well go to the Orange Room.”
Lucilla nodded, and disappeared. Mr. Caversham reflected that it was girls who were cool and collected most of the time who really went to pieces when trouble came. And trouble was coming. Of that he had been certain since the previous day when he had heard Lucilla screaming at Arthur Trembling in his office.
The Orange Room was one of those tea shops which shut out the sunlight with heavy curtains, and only partially dispel the gloom with economy-size electric bulbs. A table in the far corner was as safe a place for the confessional as could have been devised.
Lucilla said, “He’s a beast, a vile beast. And speaking for myself, I’ve stood it long enough. For over a year he’s been stringing me along, promising to marry me. First he was ill. Then his mother was ill. His mother! I ask you. What’s she got to do with whether he gets married or not?”
Mr. Caversham grunted sympathetically. It was all he felt that was expected of him.
“If he thinks he’s going to get off scot-free, he can think again,” said Lucilla. “He’s up to something, something criminal, and I’m going to put the police on to him.”
Mr. Caversham leaned forward with heightened interest and said, “Now what makes you think that?”
“It’s something to do with the tours. Every time a tour comes back, there’s a big parcel in his office. It’s something he pays the tour drivers to bring back for him.”
“All of them?”
“I don’t expect all of them. Maybe there’re some he can’t bribe. But Roger’s one of them. There’s a secret compartment in each of the coaches.”
“Did Roger tell you that?”
“No. Basil told me.”
Mr. Caversham remembered Basil – a black-haired boy with buck teeth, who had been very fond of Lucilla.
“What is it? Watches? Drugs? Perfume?”
“Basil doesn’t know. It was just a big heavy parcel. But I’m going to find out this evening. He’s leaving early – there’s a Rotarian meeting.”
“The parcel isn’t in his office now. I took it down to his brother’s bookshop.”