The Sword of Fate (31 page)

“It’s the front door!” exclaimed Daphnis, as we started apart. “Do you think it can be the police already?”

Only a moment before I had noticed that it was a quarter past three by the clock on the mantelpiece, so Cozelli had already had over an hour to examine the contents of the suit-case—ample time to compile a list of names and despatch a score of agents to different addresses.

“It must be,” I answered swiftly. “And if they find me here they’ll guess that I got you out of bed to prepare you for their visit.”

“That would never do if I’m to plead innocence. You must go out the back way.” As she spoke Daphnis ran across to a big table desk, pulled out a drawer and, snatching up a key, thrust it into my hand.

The bell shrilled again. “Quick!” I cried. “Get along to your mother and warn her not to give the game away by letting the police know that I’ve been here.”

Daphnis already had the library door open. As she turned towards the front of the house she pointed in the opposite direction. “The garden door’s just along there and it’s only bolted
on the inside. The key belongs to the gate in the wall. Bless you, darling!”

“Bless you, my sweet,” I called back, then she ran one way and I the other.

When I had drawn the heavy bolts of the back door of the house it opened almost silently. Closing it carefully behind me, I tiptoed down the steps, past the fountain and the stone bench, and between the three palm trees of that well-remembered garden.

The moon was just entering its last quarter, and without being brilliant gave enough light to see by. The heavy key turned easily in the lock of the postern door, and I swung it open. As a stepped through it into the street two men who had been lurking there in the shadows of the wall closed in on either side of me.

I started back, but one of them seized my arm, and by the pale light I recognised him as he said, “Mr. Day, I must ask you to come with us.”

It was the Levantine police inspector who had been at Ambassador Court. With an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach I realised that I still had Daphnis’ letters in my pocket.

“You’re not going to give us any trouble, are you?” the Inspector purred, and I knew that now he actually had hold of me it was useless for me to endeavour to break away from two of them. Yet I was most hideously anxious to unload that incriminating packet.

“You have no right to detain me unless you produce a warrant,” I said firmly.

“Do you refuse to come to Headquarters at our request?” asked the Levantine.

That was a nasty one, but I faced it boldly.

“Yes, I’ve had one hell of a night, and I’m tired out. I’ll answer any questions Major Cozelli wishes to put to me in the morning.”

“It’d be a pity if we had to use force,” said the Inspector. “The Major wants to see you at once so, warrant or no warrant, I’m going to take you to him. Come on, now.”

He pulled sharply at the arm he was holding, and the burly native policeman who was with him laid a great paw on my other elbow.

“All right,” I conceded, seeing that resistance was hopeless, and they led me between them to a waiting car which had a third policeman at its wheel. The three of us got into the back, and the car moved off.

The ride was not a long one, and during it my thoughts were
racing. Like a squirrel in a cage they went round and round the same awful question. Should I retain those incriminating letters or make some effort to get rid of them? Even seated between the two policemen as I was I could probably get them out of my pocket unobserved, but if I stuffed them down the back of the seat it was almost certain that they would be found there sooner or later by one of the police chauffeurs. Again, if I suddenly leant forward I could throw the fat packet a good way out of the window, but the chances of being able to dispose of it permanently that way seemed to me very slender. The car would be pulled up and the local patrolmen summoned by whistles. They would then be set to the task of hunting for the thing that I had thrown out of the car, and the odds were a hundred to one that by daylight, if not before, they would find it. On the other hand, if I took no such crazy risks, but kept my head and retained the papers in my pocket, I thought it unlikely that things had got to the point where I might be forcibly searched, so I would probably have an opportunity of disposing of them later.

That was my decision, and looking back on it I think that it was justified by the situation in which I found myself, but I was proved entirely wrong in my optimistic belief that they would not search me.

Immediately we arrived at Police Headquarters I was taken to a room where there was an elderly Scottish chief warder. He greeted me politely and said at once: “I’m very sorry, sir, but I have orders to search your person. Do you mind turning out the contents of your pockets, and making it as easy for us as possible?”

Now that I was inside my chance to fight had gone. As casually as I could I produced the packet of letters about half-way through the process of emptying my pockets, then at the warder’s request I stripped while he and his assistants went carefully through every article of my clothing.

When I had dressed again I was taken along to a cell and locked up in it. I knew now that, for the time being, it was quite useless to protest. I would have to reserve anything of that kind until Major Cozelli had done with me. About twenty minutes later my cell was unlocked, and I was taken up to Cozelli’s room. At a glance I saw that the bundle of Daphnis’ letters had been untied and several of them lay spread out before him. He did not ask me to sit down, but just sat there staring at me, his dark eyes burning in his cadaverous, olive-complexioned face.

A good two minutes passed without his uttering a single word and his bright eyes never left mine.

“Well?” I said sarcastically at last. “What do you find so interesting about my appearance?”

His answer came slowly and each word cut as though he had slashed me across the face with a whip.

“I’m interested in criminal types, and I was studying your physiognomy. It is not often that one has the opportunity of encountering a British officer who is actively engaged in assisting his country’s enemies.”

“What the hell do you mean?” I roared. “You may be my senior officer but I’m damned if I’m going to stand here and let you insult me. You had no right to have me arrested without a warrant. You had no right to have me stripped and searched. Who the hell do you think you are?”

He remained entirely unperturbed, and said with a little shrug of his lean shoulders: “Take it easy now, young man. I haven’t even started on you yet, and with luck I shall end up by producing evidence upon which you will be shot. You see I happen to know your past record … Mr. Fernhurst.”

“But this is fantastic!” I burst out. “The fact that I changed my name is not a crime. Besides, in that old business there was not one atom of proof against me.”

“Indeed!” he said coldly. “On the other hand there was not one atom of proof to show that you were not in league with your country’s enemies at that time. The verdict of the Foreign Office was ‘Not Proven’. You were given the benefit of the doubt because there was not sufficient evidence to bring you to trial, but they dismissed you with ignominy from the Diplomatic Service.”

“So it’s simply a case of ‘give a dog a bad name and hang him’,” I cried bitterly.

“And hang him,” the saturnine Major repeated softly. “I congratulate you upon your apt choice of phrase.”

“You can’t use anything that happened in the past against
me,” I blustered. “And you’ve no right to let it influence you. It’s not fair. It’s not just.”

“I don’t need to,” he shrugged. “I have all the proof I require in the present instance to frame charges against you which you’ll find it extremely difficult to answer.”

I tried to control my temper and my growing apprehension as I said: “Now look here, sir. It really is utterly absurd to suggest that I’m an enemy agent. After all, it was I who telephoned the police tonight to tell them that the Grand Mufti was at that flat and to try to get those other crooks arrested.”

“True. I suppose they refused to give you what you considered a large enough cut for some piece of dirty work, so you ratted on them.”

Even as a hot retort rose to my lips I checked it, realising that he was deliberately endeavouring to make me lose my temper in the hope that I would give something away.

“That’s sheer nonsense,” I said after a moment. “If I’d been trying to sell the others out is it likely that I should have telephoned from the flat while they were still in it and given them the chance to try and shoot me?”

“Why not? Perhaps the shooting started first and you telephoned only when you found yourself trapped there and knew that the one chance you stood of escaping from the place alive was to get the police in.”

“But, hang it!” I cried in desperation. “That’s sheer irresponsible guesswork, without the least foundation of fact and not a tittle of evidence to support it.”

“I don’t agree. My theory that tonight’s little party arose out of a quarrel among thieves is a perfectly sound one. We know that you had been associated with Mondragora and his crew before. If you weren’t in this thing with him up to the neck, what were you doing with him in his flat in the middle of the night in the company of a German Intelligence officer, a traitor Egyptian General and that anti-British firebrand, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, all of whom were there according to your own statement?”

“I broke into the place and found them there, as I’ve already told you. I hadn’t seen Mondragora since that old business years ago—until tonight. I followed him back from the Cecil. If you want the truth I’ve sworn to be revenged on that swine and I meant to murder him.”

“So you’re a killer, eh? Or that’s what you’d have us believe. For something which happened in the distant past you were quite
prepared to run the risk of sacrificing the present. You have made a new identity for yourself, and under it acquired a circle of friends who know nothing of your past; you have received the King’s Commission, and are, so I’m told, engaged to a good-looking young woman with whom you’re very much in love, and that young woman is the step-daughter of a millionaire. Yet you were ready to let all that go west and swing for murder, if need be, in order to get even with someone who had done you an injury years before the war. No, I don’t believe one word of it, and neither would any jury.”

I saw then that I had blundered in admitting what my real intention had been when I left the Cecil that night. No jury
would
believe that a young man of twenty-six who was just about to marry a rich and beautiful girl would be crazy enough to jeopardise everything that the future held for him to settle an old grudge, however bitter.

A telephone rang on the Major’s desk, and he muttered a few monosyllables into the mouthpiece. Then he hung up, pressed a buzzer on his desk and turned back to me.

“I have other matters to attend to now, so we’ll continue this conversation tomorrow, or rather later today. In the meantime let me tell you, Fernhurst, Day, or whatever you call yourself, that you’re in a very sticky position. Your one chance of being dealt with lightly is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when you’re brought before me tomorrow.”

An orderly had appeared in response to the buzzer, and with my brain whirling I was taken down to a cell on the ground floor. It was quite a fair size, spotlessly clean, and its sparse furniture included a narrow iron bed, which was already made up.

Once I was alone I tried to sort things out in my mind and get them into proper perspective. After a little I decided that much of the time the Major had been simply bluffing and that his threats were only thrown out to scare me. As I had never committed any act of espionage or communicated with any enemy agent, I did not see how they could possibly bring me to trial as an enemy agent myself; yet on second thoughts I had reluctantly to admit that, although I did not regard Daphnis as an enemy agent, Major Cozelli very definitely did, and I had certainly been in communication with her. The events of the latter part of that night were certainly going to take a lot of explaining, and the most unfortunate thing of all was that Cozelli had dug up my past association with Mondragora, as that
naturally contributed in a most marked degree to blacken the suspicion against me.

I am quite certain that there could have been no more worried a man in Alexandria than myself when, about five in the morning, I climbed into the narrow bed. But nevertheless, owing perhaps to the strain I had been through, I dropped off to sleep almost at once.

It was about half past ten before Cozelli sent for me. Once more he did not offer me a seat, so I stood in front of his desk, but I had made one firm resolution before entering the room. This time, whatever he said, I would not lose my temper, and not once did I raise my voice during the whole interview.

He favoured me again with that beastly stare of his for quite two minutes without speaking. Then he said:

“I hope you’ve made up your mind that only the truth is going to save you from having to face a firing-party. Now forget everything you’ve told me before and give me again the full story of what you did last night from the time you left your fiancée’s house, round about eleven o’clock, after having dined there. We’ve checked up on that, so we know that it’s right.”

I told him then clearly and concisely about my having recognised Mondragora in the lounge of the Cecil and all that had followed. I did not retract my previous statement that I meant to kill him because I knew that if I did I would probably be led into telling other lies, and it was very important that I should tell as few as possible in order to minimise the likelihood of my being found out. Some lies I should have to tell, but those were necessary to protect Daphnis.

When I got to his own arrival at Mondragora’s flat I wound up the story with a cheerful shrug. “There you are! That’s the whole truth and you know the rest.”

“Oh no, I don’t!” he said. “What happened after you pretended to be ill, and I said you might go home?”