Authors: Alistair MacLean
"You flatter yourself, my friend," Hardanger said in his gravelly voice. "
You're only a pawn, the call wasn't made to the police but to your wife at the Waggoner's Rest, telling her that if the General—he gave his full name, rank and address—didn't pull in his horns then she, Mary, would receive a pair of ears in the mail to-morrow. The caller said that he was sure that though she had been married only a couple of months she would still be able to recognise her husband's ears when she saw them."
I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck and that had nothing to do with any imagined sensation of ear-cropping. I said carefully, "There are three things, Hardanger. The number of people in those parts who know we have been married only two months must be pretty few. The number of people who know that Mary is the General's daughter must be even fewer. But the number of people who know the General's true identity, apart from yourself and myself, can be counted on one hand.
How in God's name could any criminal in the land know the General's true identity?"
"You tell me," Hardanger said heavily. "This is the nastiest development of the lot. This man not only knows who the General is but knows that Mary is his only child and the apple of his eye, the one person in the world who might be able to bring pressure to bear on him. And she'd bring the pressure, all right: the abstract ideals of justice don't matter a damn to women when their men's lives are in danger. The whole thing stinks, Cavell."
" To high heaven," I agreed slowly. " Of treason—and treason in high places."
" I don't think we'd better talk about it over the phone,'' Hardanger said quickly.
"No, Tried tracing the call?"
" Not yet. But I might as well waste time that way as any other."
He hung up and I stood there staring at the silent telephone. The General was a personal appointee of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. His identity was also known to the chiefs of espionage and counter-espionage—it had to be. An Assistant Commissioner, Hardanger himself, the Commandant and security chief at Mordon—and that ended the list of those to whom the General's identity was known. It was an ugly thought. I wondered vaguely how General Cliveden was going to enjoy the next couple of hours—I didn't require any powers of telepathy to know where Hardanger would be heading as soon as he had put down that phone. Of all our suspects, only Cliveden knew the General's identity.
Maybe I should have been paying more attention to General Cliveden.
A shadow darkened the hall doorway. I glanced up to see three khaki-clad figures standing at the head of the outside aeps. The man in the centre, a sergeant, had his hand raised to the bell-push but lowered it when he caught sight of me.
" I'm looking for an Inspector Gibson," he said. " Is he here?"
"Gibson?" I suddenly remembered that was me. "I'm Inspector Gibson, Sergeant."
"I've something here for you, sir." He indicated the file under his arm. "
I've been ordered to ask for your credentials first of all."
I showed them and he handed over the file. He said, apologetically, " I'm under orders not to let that out of my sight, sir. Superintendent Hardanger said it came from Mr. Clandon's records offices and I understand it's highly confidential."
" Of course." Followed by the sergeant who was flanked by a couple of hefty privates, I walked into the living-room, ignoring the outraged glare of Mrs. Turpin who had belatedly appeared on the scene. I asked her to leave and she did, glowering savagely.
I broke the seal and opened the file. It contained a spare seal for resealing the cover and a copy of Dr. MacDonald's security report. I'd seen the report before, of course, when I'd taken over as head of security from the vanished Easton Derry, but had paid no particular attention to it. I'd had no special reason to. But I had now.
There were seven pages of foolscap. I went through it three times. I didn't miss a thing the first time and if possible even less the next two.
I was looking for even the tiniest offbeat jarring note that might give me even the most insubstantial lead, Senator McCarthy sniffing out a Communist had nothing on me, but I found not the slightest trace of anything that might have been helpful. The only odd thing, as Hardanger had pointed out, was the extremely scanty information about MacDonald's Army career, and to information Easton Derry—who had indeed compiled the report—must have had access. But nothing, except for a remark at the foot of a page that MacDonald, entering the Army as a private in the Territorials in 1938, had finished his Army career in Italy as a lieutenant-colonel in a tank division in 1945. The top of the following page held a reference to his appointment as a government chemist in north-east England early in 1946. This could have been just the way Easton Derry had compiled the report: or not.
With the blade of my penknife, and ignoring the sergeant's scandalized look, I pried open the buckram corner holding the top left hand corners of the pages together. Under this was a thin wire staple, the kind of staple that comes with practically every kind of commercial stapler. I bent the ends back at right angles, slid the sheets off and examined them separately. No sheet had more than one pair—the original pair—of holes made by the stapler. If anyone had opened that staple to remove a sheet, he'd replaced it with exceptional care. On the face of it, it looked as if that file hadn't been tampered with.
I became aware that Carlisle, the plain-clothes detective-sergeant, was standing beside me, holding a bundle of papers and folders. He said, "
This might interest you, sir. I don't know."
"Just a moment." I clipped the sheets together again, pushed them into the file-holder, resealed it and handed it back to the army sergeant who took himself off along with his two companions. I said to Carlisle, " What are those?"
"Photographs, sir."
"Photographs? What makes you think I’ll be interested in photographs, Sergeant?"
" The fact that they were inside a locked steel box, sir. And the box was in the bottom drawer—also locked—of a knee-hole desk. And here's a bundle found in the same place— personal correspondence, I would say."
" Much trouble in opening the steel box?"
" Not with the size of hacksaw I use, sir. We've just about tied it all up now, Inspector. Everything listed. If I might venture an opinion, you'll find little of interest in the list."
"Searched the whole house? Any basement?"
" Just about the filthiest coal-cellar you ever clapped eyes on." Carlisle smiled. "From what I've seen of Dr. Mac-Donald's personal tastes he doesn't strike me as the type of man who would keep even coal in a coal-cellar if he could find a cleaner and more luxurious place for it"
He left me to his finds. There were four albums. Three of them were of the innocuous squinting-into-the-sun type of family albums you can find in a million British homes. Most of the photographs were faded and yellow, taken in the days of MacDonald's youth in the twenties and thirties. The fourth album, of much more recent origin, was a presentation given to MacDonald by colleagues in the World Health Organization in recognition of his outstanding services to the W.H.O. over many years—an illuminated address pasted to the inside front board said so. It contained over fifty pictures of MacDonald and his colleagues taken in at least a dozen different European cities. Most of the photographs had been taken in France, Scandinavia and Italy, with a sprinkling from a few other countries. They had been mounted in chronological fashion, each picture with date and location caption, the last having been taken in Helsinki less than six months previously.
The photographs in the album didn't interest me: what did interest me was one photograph that was missing. From its place in the album it had almost certainly been taken about eighteen months previously. Its caption had been all but obliterated by horizontal strokes made in the same white ink used for all captions. I switched on the light and peered closely at the obliteration. No question but that the place name had once started with a T. After that it was hard to say. The next letter could have been either an O or a D. O, I felt sure—there was no city in Europe beginning with TD. The remainder of the word was completely obliterated. TO . . . About six letters in length, possibly seven. But none of the letters projected below the line, so that cut out all words with p's and g's and j's and so forth.
What cities or towns in Europe did I know beginning with the letters TO
and six or seven letters in length? Not so very many, I realised, at least not of any size, and the W.H.O. didn't hold its meetings in villages.
Torquay—no good, letters projecting below. Totnes—too small. In Europe? Tornio in Sweden, Tondor in Denmark—again both relatively insignificant. Toledo, now—no one could call that a village: but MacDonald had never been to Spain. The best bets were probably either Touraai in Belgium or Toulon in France. Tournai? Toulon? For a moment or two I mulled the names over in my mind. I picked up the bundle of letters.
There must have been thirty or forty letters in the Bundle, faintly scented and tied, of all things, with a blue ribbon. Of all the things I would have expected to find in Dr. MacDonald's possession, this was the last. And, I would have bet a month's salary, the most useless. They looked like love letters and I didn't particularly relish the prospect of making myself conversant with the good doctor's youthful indiscretions but just at that moment I would have read Homer in the original if I thought it would be any good to me. I untied the bow on the ribbon.
Exactly five minutes later I was speaking on the phone to the General.
"I want to interview a certain Mme. Yvette Peugot who was working in the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1945 and 1946. Not next week, not tomorrow, but now. This afternoon. Can you fix it, sir?"
" I can fix anything, Cavell," the General said simply. " Less than two hours ago the Premier put the entire resources of all the services at our disposal. He's as windy as hell. How urgent is this?"
" Maybe life-or-death urgent, sir. That's what I've got to find out. This woman appears to have been on very intimate terms with MacDonald for about nine months towards and after the end of the war. It's the one period of his life about which information is lacking. If she's still alive and traceable she may be able to fill in this period."
"Is that all?" The voice was flat, disappointment barely concealed.
"What of the letters themselves?"
" Only read a couple so far, sir. Seem perfectly innocuous though not the sort of stuff I'd care to have read out in court if I had written it."
" It seems very little to go on, Cavell."
" A hunch, sir. More than that. It is possible that a page has been abstracted from the security dossier on MacDonald. The dates on those letters correspond to the missing page— if it is missing. And if it is I want to find out why."
"Missing?" His voice crackled sharply over the wire. "How could a page from a security dossier possibly be missing. Who would have—or have had—access to those dossiers?"
" Easton, Clandon, myself—and Cliveden and Weybridge."
" Precisely. General Cliveden." A significant pause. " This recent threat to Mary to let her have your head on a charger: General Cliveden is the only man in Mordon who knows both who I am and the relationship between myself and Mary. One of the only two men with access to security dossiers. Don't you think you should be concentrating on Cliveden?"
" I think Hardanger should be concentrating on Cliveden. I want to see Mme. Peugot."
" Very well. Hold on." I held on and after some minutes his voice came again. " Drive to Mordon. Helicopter there will fly you to Stanton airfield.
Twin-seat jet night-fighter there. Forty minutes from Stanton to Paris.
That suit you?"
" Fine. I'm afraid I've no passport with me, sir."
" You won't require it. If Mme. Peugot is still alive and still in Paris she'll be waiting for you in Orly airport. That I promise. I'll see you when I return—I'm leaving for Alfringham in thirty minutes."
He hung up and I turned away, the bundle of letters in my hand. I caught sight of Mrs. Turpin by the open door, her face expressionless. Her eyes moved from mire down to the packet of letters in my hand, then met mine again. After a moment she turned and disappeared. I wondered how long she had been there, looking and listening.
The General was as good as his word all the way through. The helicopter was waiting for me at Mordon. The jet at Stanton took exactly thirty-five hair-raising minutes to reach Orly airport. And Mme. Peugot, accompanied by a Parisian police inspector, was waiting for me in a private room there. Somebody, I thought, had moved very fast indeed.
As it turned out, it hadn't been so difficult to locate Mme. Peugot—now Madame Halle. She still worked in the same place as she had done in the later months of her acquaintanceship with MacDonald—the Pasteur Institute—and had readily agreed to come to the airport when the police had made plain the urgency. She was a dark, plump, attractive forty, and had readily smiling eyes. At that moment she was hesitant, unsure and slightly apprehensive, the normal reaction when police start taking an interest in you.
The French police officer, made the introductions. I said, wasting no time, "We would be most grateful if you could give us some information about an Englishman whose acquaintance you made in the middle forties—
"45 and '46, to be precise. A Dr. Alexander MacDonald."
" Dr. MacDonald? Alex?" She laughed. " He'd be furious to hear himself described as an Englishman. At least, he would have been. In the days when I knew him he was the most ardent Scottish—what do you call it?"
"Nationalist?"
" Of course. A Scottish Nationalist. Fervent, I remember. Forever saying, ' down with the old enemy'—England—and 'up with the old Franco-Scottish alliance.' But I do know he fought most gallantly for the old enemy in the last war, so perhaps he was not so terribly sincere." She broke off and looked at me with an odd mixture of shrewdness and apprehension. "He—he's not dead, is he?" " No, madame, he is not."