It was at this moment that the Great Inspiration came to Mr Budd.
As he fetched a bottle from the glass-fronted case he remembered, with odd vividness, an old-fashioned wooden paper-knife that had belonged to his mother. Between sprigs of blue-forget-me-not, hand-painted, it bore the inscription ‘Knowledge is Power’.
A strange freedom and confidence were vouchsafed to Mr Budd; his mind was alert; he removed the razors with an easy, natural movement, and made nonchalant conversation as he skilfully applied the dark-brown tint.
The streets were less crowded when Mr Budd let his customer out. He watched the tall figure cross Grosvenor Place and climb on to a 24 bus.
‘But that was only his artfulness,’ said Mr Budd, as he put on his hat and coat and extinguished the lights carefully, ‘he’ll take another at Victoria, like as not, and be making tracks from Charing Cross or Waterloo.’
He closed the shop door, shook it, as was his wont, to make sure that the lock had caught properly, and in his turn made his way, by means of a 24, to the top of Whitehall.
The policeman was a little condescending at first when Mr Budd demanded to see ‘somebody very high up,’ but finding the little barber insist so earnestly that he had news of the Manchester murderer, and that there wasn’t any time to lose, he consented to pass him through.
Mr Budd was interviewed first by an important-looking inspector in uniform, who listened very politely to his story and made him repeat very carefully about the gold tooth and the thumbnail and the hair which had been black before it was grey or red and was now dark-brown.
The inspector then touched a bell, and said, ‘Perkins, I think Sir Andrew would like to see this gentleman at once,’ and he was taken to another room, where sat a very shrewd, genial gentleman in mufti, who heard him with even greater attention, and called in another inspector to listen too, and to take down a very exact description of – yes, surely the undoubted William Strickland as he now appeared.
‘But there’s one thing more,’ said Mr Budd – ‘and I’m sure to goodness,’ he added, ‘I hope, sir, it is the right man, because if it isn’t it’ll be the ruin of me—’
He crushed his soft hat into an agitated ball as he leant across the table, breathlessly uttering the story of his great professional betrayal.
‘Tzee – z-z-z – tzee – tzee – z-z – tzee – z-z—’
‘Dzoo – dz-dz-dz – dzoo – dz – dzoo – dzoo – dz—’
‘Tzee – z – z.’
The fingers of the wireless operator on the packet
Miranda
bound for Ostend moved swiftly as they jotted down the messages of the buzzing mosquito-swarms.
One of them made him laugh.
‘The Old Man’d better have this, I suppose,’ he said.
The Old Man scratched his head when he read and rang a little bell for the steward. The steward ran down to the little round office where the purser was counting out his money and checking it before he locked it away for the night. On receiving the Old Man’s message, the purser put the money quickly into the safe, picked up the passenger list and departed aft. There was a short consultation, and the bell was rung again – this time to summon the head steward.
‘Tzee – z-z – tzeez-z-z – tzee – tzee – z – tzee.’
All down the Channel, all over the North Sea, up to the Mersey Docks, out into the Atlantic soared the busy mosquito-swarms. In ship after ship the wireless operator sent his message to the captain, the captain sent for the purser, the purser sent for the head steward and the head steward called his staff about him. Huge liners, little packets, destroyers, sumptuous private yachts – every floating thing that carried aerials – every port in England, France, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, every police centre that could interpret the mosquito message, heard, between laughter and excitement, the tale of Mr Budd’s betrayal. Two Boy Scouts at Croydon, practising their Morse with a home-made valve set, decoded it laboriously into an exercise book.
‘Cripes,’ said Jim to George, ‘what a joke? D’you think they’ll get the beggar?’
The
Miranda
docked at Ostend at 7 a.m. A man burst hurriedly into the cabin where the wireless operator was just taking off his headphones.
‘Here!’ he cried; ‘this is to go. There’s something up and the Old Man’s sent over for the police. The Consul’s coming on board.’
The wireless operator groaned, and switched on his valves.
‘Tzee – z – tzee –’ a message to the English police.
‘Man on board answering to description. Ticket booked name of Watson. Has locked himself in cabin and refuses to come out. Insists on having hairdresser sent out to him. Have communicated Ostend police. Await instructions.’
The Old Man with sharp words and authoritative gestures cleared a way through the excited little knot of people gathered about First Class Cabin No. 36. Several passengers had got wind of ‘something up’. Magnificently he hearded them away to the gangway with their bags and suitcases. Sternly he bade the stewards and the boy, who stood gaping with his hands full of breakfast dishes, to stand away from the door. Terribly he commanded them to hold their tongues. Four or five sailors stood watchfully at his side. In the restored silence, the passenger in No. 36 could be heard pacing up and down the narrow cabin, moving things, clattering, splashing water.
Presently came steps overhead. Somebody arrived, with a message. The Old Man nodded. Six pairs of Belgian police boots came tip-toeing down the companion. The Old Man glanced at the official paper held out to him and nodded again.
‘Ready?’
‘Yes.’
The Old Man knocked at the door of No. 36.
‘Who it is?’ cried a harsh, sharp voice.
‘The barber is here, sir, that you sent for.’
‘Ah!!’ There was relief in the tone. ‘Send him in alone, if you please. I – I have had an accident.’
‘Yes, sir.’
At the sound of the bolt being cautiously withdrawn, the Old Man stepped forward. The door opened a chink, and was slammed to again, but the Old Man’s boot was firmly wedged against the jamb. The policemen surged forward. There was a yelp and a shot which smashed harmlessly through the window of the first-class saloon, and the passenger was brought out.
‘Strike me pink!’ shrieked the boy, ‘strike me pink if he ain’t gone green in the night!’
Green!!
Not for nothing had Mr Budd studied the intricate mutual reactions of chemical dyes. In the pride of his knowledge he had set a mark on his man, to mark him out from all the billions of this overpopulated world. Was there a port in all Christendom where a murderer might slip away, with every hair on him green as a parrot – green moustache, green eyebrows, and that thick, springing shock of hair, vivid, flaring mid-summer green?
Mr Budd got his £500. The
Evening Messenger
published the full story of his great betrayal. He trembled, fearing this sinister fame. Surely no one would ever come to him again.
On the next morning an enormous blue limousine rolled up to his door, to the immense admiration of Wilton Street. A lady, magnificent in musquash and diamonds, swept into the saloon.
‘You
are
Mr Budd, aren’t you?’ she cried. ‘The
great
Mr Budd? Isn’t it
too
wonderful? And now,
dear
Mr Budd, you
must
do me a favour. You must dye my hair green,
at once. Now
. I want to be able to say I’m the
very first
to be done by
you
. I’m the Duchess of Winchester, and that awful Melcaster woman is chasing me down the street – the cat!’
If you want it done, I can give you the number of Mr Budd’s parlours in Bond Street. But I understand it is a terribly expensive process.
BLOOD SACRIFICE
If things went on at this rate, John Scales would be a very rich man. Already he was a man to be envied, as any ignoramus might guess who passed the King’s Theatre after 8 o’clock. Old Florrie, who had sat for so many years on the corner with her little tray of matches, could have given more than a guess, for what she didn’t know about the King’s was hardly worth knowing. When she had ceased to adorn its boards (thanks to a dreadful accident with a careless match and gauze draperies, that had left her with a scarred face and a withered arm) she had taken her stand near the theatre for old sake’s sake, and she watched over its fortunes, still, like a mother. She knew, none better, how much money it held when it was playing to capacity, what its salary list was like, how much of its earnings went in permanent charges, and what the author’s share of the box-office receipts was likely to amount to. Besides, everybody who went in or out by the stage-door came and had a word with Florrie. She shared good times and bad at the King’s. She had lamented over lean days caused by slumps and talkie competition, shaken her head over perilous experiments into highbrow tragedy, waxed tearful and indignant over the disastrous period (now happily past) of the Scorer-Bitterby management, which had ended in a scandal, rejoiced when the energetic Mr Garrick Drury, launching out into management after his tremendous triumph in the name-part of
The Wistful Harlequin
, had taken the old house over, reconditioned it inside and out (incidentally squeezing two more rows into the reconstructed pit) and voiced his optimistic determination to break the run of ill-luck; and since then she had watched its steady soaring into prosperity on the well-tried wings of old-fashioned adventure and romance. Mr Garrick Drury (Somerset House knew him as Obadiah Potts, but he was none the less good-looking for that) was an actor-manager of the sort Florrie understood; he followed his calling in the good old way, building his successes about his own glamorous personality, talking no nonsense about new schools of dramatic thought, and paying only lip-service to ‘team-work’. He had had the luck to embark on his managerial career at a moment when the public had grown tired of gloomy Slav tragedies of repressed husbands, and human documents about drink and diseases, and was (in its own incoherent way) clamouring for a good, romantic story to cry about, with a romantic hero suffering torments of self-sacrifice through two-and-three-quarter acts and getting the girl in the last ten minutes. Mr Drury (forty-two in the daylight, thirty-five in the lamplight and twenty-five or what you will in a blond wig and the spotlight) was well fitted by nature to acquire girls in this sacrificial manner, and had learnt the trick of so lacing nineteenth-century sentiment with twentieth-century nonchalance that the mixture went to the heads equally of Joan who worked in the office and Aunt Mabel up from the country.
And since Mr Drury, leaping nightly from his Rolls saloon with that nervous and youthful alacrity that had been his most engaging asset for the past twenty years, always had time to bestow at least a smile and a friendly word on old Florrie, he affected her head and heart as much as anybody else’s. Nobody was more delighted than Florrie to know that he had again found a winner in
Bitter Laurel
, now sweeping on to its 100th performance. Night by night she saluted with a satisfied chuckle each board as it appeared: ‘Pit Full’, ‘Gallery Full’, ‘Dress Circle Full’, ‘Upper Circle Full’, ‘Stalls Full’, ‘Standing Room Only’, ‘House Full’. Set to run for ever, it was, and the faces that went in by the stage door looked merry and prosperous, as Florrie liked to see them.
As for the young man who had provided the raw material out of which Mr Drury had built up this glittering monument of success, if he wasn’t pleased, thought Florrie, he ought to be. Not that, in the ordinary way, one thought much about the author of a play – unless, of course, it was Shakespeare, who was different; compared with the cast, he was of small importance and rarely seen. But Mr Drury had one day arrived arm-in-arm with a sulky-looking and ill-dressed youth whom he had introduced to Florrie, saying in his fine, generous way: ‘Here, John, you must know Florrie. She’s our mascot – we couldn’t get on without her. Florrie, this is Mr Scales, whose new play’s going to make all our fortunes.’ Mr Drury was never mistaken about plays; he had the golden touch. Certainly, in the last three months, Mr Scales, though still sulky-looking, had become much better dressed.
On this particular night – Saturday, 15th April, when
Bitter Laurel
was giving its 96th performance to a full house after a packed matinée – Mr Scales and Mr Drury arrived together, in evening dress and, Florrie noted with concern, rather late. Mr Drury would have to hurry, and it was tiresome of Mr Scales to detain him, as he did, by arguing and expostulating upon the threshold. Not that Mr Drury seemed put out. He was smiling (his smile, one-sided and slightly elfin in quality, was famous), and at last he said, with his hand (Mr Drury’s expressive hands were renowned) affectionately upon Mr Scales’s shoulder, ‘Sorry, old boy, can’t stop now. Curtain must go up, you know. Come round and see me after the show – I’ll have those fellows there.’ Then he vanished, still smiling the elfin smile and waving the expressive hand; and Mr Scales, after hesitating a moment, had turned away and came down past Florrie’s corner. He seemed to be still sulky and rather preoccupied, but, looking up, caught sight of Florrie and grinned at her. There was nothing elfin about Mr Scales’s smile, but it improved his face very much.