The Trojan Horse (5 page)

I heard him saying once more, ‘Will you go round to my lodgings and take
The Face from the Barbican.'
Well, there had been nothing phoney about that.
The Face from the Barbican
had been there all right and, what was more, his rooms had been searched. But then Leinster might have searched them for valuables. I was beginning to feel drowsy. My brain, tired with the excitement of the evening, was beginning to think in circles. What had Schmidt said then? ‘You are clever. You will understand.' And then—

Suddenly I was wide awake. I jumped out of bed and hurried into my dressing-gown. I switched on the light and the electric fire and went out into the hall, where my overcoat lay over a chair. I pulled the photograph that David had given me from the pocket and hurried back into my bedroom. Then, huddled over the fire with a pencil and paper, I tried the Playfair Code.

What Schmidt had said was, ‘The clue is cones of runnel.' Why cones of runnel, I did not know. It had always seemed a bit daft and for that reason, probably, had not fixed itself in my memory. But the essence of the Playfair Code was a key-word or words, and here it was. I wrote down CONES and underneath FRUL, which were the letters in ‘of runnel' which had not already been given in ‘cones'. Then I added A to that line and continued with the letters of the alphabet that had not already been used, setting them down in blocks of five, leaving out Y, which, I remembered, was regarded as i. This was the result:

I then jotted down the opening letters of the message in pairs, thus: SD GM ED OL IR BX ON SO VC. Starting at the beginning, I took the rectangle made in the code formed by SD and transposed the vertically opposite letters of the rectangle, getting 10. GM, being in a vertical line, I took the nearest letters to each, making uw, ED made HO, OL made RE, and soon.

The resulting letters I put down without gaps, and not as they had been in the code. The result was: IOUWHOREADTHESENOT. My excitement was tremendous. Reading Y for i, I found I had got, ‘You who read these not—'

I then settled down to the job in real earnest, and after half an hour's steady work I had decoded the whole of that first page. I sat back and read through the result.

‘You who read these notes,' it ran, ‘must decide for yourself whether or not there is sufficient evidence for the matter to be placed in the hands of the authorities. I fear, however, that I shall not live to complete my case.' That, I remembered, was what he had told me last Monday. ‘I am being watched now and it is only a matter of time. Why did I not go to the authorities myself? I was wanted for murder. If I
had gone to them and said the Calboyd Diesel Company is controlled by Germany and the murder was committed by their agents, I should have been considered mad. But day by day I shall add to these notes, and as my inquiries reveal new facts, I shall hope that, by the time this comes into your hands, there will at any rate be sufficient evidence to convince you of my sanity and of the seriousness of the position I have discovered.

‘I shall probably have explained to you how I was discredited at the Air Ministry by Calboyds. This should not be difficult to verify. When I tell you that the diesel engine on which I have been working and which has now reached the stage of final tests is a third of the weight of the ordinary diesel and develops nearly twice the power of present engines at five hundred revolutions, you will begin to appreciate its importance in war-time. I can confidently state that whichever side first obtains this engine and produces it on a large scale will have air superiority. These claims were presented to the Air Ministry last July. Calboyds told them I was a crank. They had been trying to get me to reveal the secret of the special alloy and the design. Those who control the company wanted the engine for Germany.

‘You will say this is fantastic. But I have heard that in the early summer of this year Britain is going over to diesel engines on a large scale. The Calboyds factories are being extended for this purpose and two shadow factories are being built for the company. They will be the sole producers and the engines will
be of their own design. The design is superior to that used in the Heinkels and Dorniers at the present time. But it is definitely inferior to the engines that are being fitted to the latest German bomber and fighter aircraft, which have not yet taken the air. I believe that an order for ten thousand of their diesel engines will be given to Calboyds within the next few months. If that order goes through and Calboyds are allowed to start production Britain will be …'

I put the paper down. The rest would have to wait till tomorrow when David would have the prints of the remaining pages. But what I had read was enough to set me thinking. The man might be mad, but if Calboyds were really controlled by Germany— It didn't bear thinking about. One thing I could check up on and that was whether or not Calboyds were to receive a big order for diesel aero engines. Crabshaw of the Ministry of Supply could tell me that. But it was fantastic. Schmidt was right when he had said he would have been considered mad if he had approached the authorities with a story like that. It was too incredible. Old Calboyd was an industrial figurehead. Supposing I told the story to Crisham or wrote to the Prime Minister? They'd think I was going off my head, even though I had led a perfectly blameless life. And why had Llewellin been murdered? It was stupid to frame a man by murdering another.

I gave it up and went back to bed, putting the photograph and the paper on which I had decoded it in the pocket of my jacket.

My man woke me as usual at eight. I had a shower
and, after a hurried breakfast, took a taxi round to David's studio. His secretary, Miriam Chandler, opened the door to me. David I found already at work on some stills. ‘Have you got the other prints?' I asked. I was eager to decode the rest of the message.

He said, ‘Sorry, you're a good deal earlier than I expected. The fact is I've got to take them all again. I left that negative on the desk over there. I didn't notice it, but there was a bottle of hydrochloric just by it. I came in this morning to find it tipped on its side. Awful mess. Look at the linoleum there, and the negative of course was completely destroyed. It was that bloody cat, I expect.' He indicated a shabby tortoisehell curled up placidly on the couch. ‘It keeps the mice down, but it's always upsetting things in the process. I shan't be long though. Give him a cigarette, Miriam, and stroke his fevered brow, he looks as though he's had a bad night. Did you dream of codes and jumbled letters like I did all night?'

‘No, I solved it,' I said triumphantly.

He swung round from the big sink. ‘You solved it? Well, grand – good for you. How did you get at it?'

I told him and he cursed me good-humouredly. ‘Why the hell didn't you say the fellow had said that? May I have a look at it?'

I shook my head. ‘No,' I said. ‘Wait until you've got the other prints out and I've decoded the rest, then maybe I'll tell you the whole story.' I had an idea that his resourcefulness might be an asset if I found it necessary to make further inquiries on my
own before handing over to the authorities.

He said, ‘You're enough to drive a person crazy.' Then he went into the big dark-room, taking
The Face from the Barbican
with him. I had suddenly remembered that I had promised to help him extract money from Calboyds, and I asked Miriam to produce the correspondence. When I had run through it, my mind was made up. Providence isn't always kind enough to hand things to you on a platter. This would make a good excuse for going up to Oldham and seeing Calboyds for myself.

David suddenly emerged from the dark-room. ‘Funny,' he said. ‘These pages seem absolutely blank now.'

I crossed the room and went into the dark-room. The blank pages of the book lay under the light, but there was no fluorescence. They were just blank. He turned to another page. It was blank. ‘Is it the same lamp?' I asked.

‘Certainly.'

I had a sudden sense of uneasiness, the sort of feeling a man has when he has mislaid a Treasury note and knows it was just plain carelessness. I ripped the book from the stand to which it was clamped. The back of it was smeared with mud, but when I ran through the pages, looking for the passage I had marked, I could not find it. After careful searching through the chapter I knew it to be in, I eventually found the passage. But there was no pencil mark against it.

I turned to David. ‘This isn't my book,' I said.

‘Don't be silly,' he replied. ‘It's got
The Face from the Barbican
at the top of every page.'

‘Yes, but it's not my copy.' I explained about the pencil marking and showed him the passage.

‘Are you certain?' he asked. ‘You were awfully sleepy last night.'

‘Yes, I'm certain all right,' I said. ‘This isn't my copy. And that bottle of hydrochloric wasn't tipped over by the cat. Where did you put the negatives when you went to bed?' I asked him.

He frowned. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Where I found them this morning, I think.'

‘And what about the hydrochloric – was that just beside them?'

He shook his head. ‘Honestly, old boy, I don't know.' He went to the door of the dark-room. ‘Miriam,' he said, ‘can you remember whether that bottle of hydrochloric was on the table there last night?'

‘I don't know,' she replied. ‘Depends on whether you used it after I'd gone yesterday. I tidied up as usual and left it on the shelf over there, where it belongs.'

‘And I didn't have it out.' He swung round on me. ‘No, I didn't use it last night. You're right – somebody moved that bottle from the shelf over by the window there and deliberately spilt the contents over those negatives.'

I knew where I was then. Schmidt's story, fantastic as it seemed, was true. There was no longer any doubt of that. ‘How did they get in?' I asked. My voice sounded flat. I was thinking of the four other pages.

‘From the roof, I expect,' said David. ‘If you're prepared to take a few risks you can get the whole length of the block.' I followed him out into the passage. He opened the door at the end and climbed rough wooden stairs to another door. He turned the key in the lock and we went out on to the roof. Then he bent down and examined the lock on the outside, and I looked across the rooftops to the dome of the Globe Theatre. The roofs were all joined and an agile man could have come from any one of the buildings in the block.

‘I thought so,' said David. ‘Look!' I bent down. ‘See that mark where the metal is bright, on the inside edge of the keyhole? That's where our friend's pincers
scraped as he grasped the end of the key and turned it.' He straightened up. ‘I expect he came by way of that house with the tall chimneys. It's a brothel. They had a burglary next door a few months back and the police sergeant told me that the burglars probably got on to the roof that way. They couldn't prove anything, of course. The girls aren't going to split. An extra quid or two comes in handy with nothing to do for it but let a fellow on to the roof. Come on, let's go down, and then perhaps you'll tell me something about this business.'

When we reached the corridor I said, ‘Do you mind if we go into your room?' I had decided to tell him the whole story. I had to have someone to argue it out with. For answer he pushed open the door. ‘Make yourself comfortable,' he said. ‘I'll just tell Miriam to hold the fort.' He was back in a moment with two tankards of beer. ‘Now,' he said, as he subsided into an easy-chair and began to fill a big curved briar, ‘I hope you're going to play ball. Can I see the results of your midnight labours, or is that a deadly secret?'

I said, ‘I think we'd better take things in their proper order.' Then I told him how Schmidt had come to see me on Monday of the previous week and how he had pushed his way into my office just as I was refreshing my memory about the facts of the case. As I sat there, drinking beer and looking out across the chimney pots of Soho, I saw once again that elderly, tired-faced Jew, sitting opposite me across my desk, with the firelight flickering on his lined face. And I
heard once again his quiet voice telling me his story.

I told it to David just as he had told it to me. ‘My father's name was Frederick Smith,' he had begun. ‘Both he and my mother were English – he was a Jew, you understand. Shortly after their marriage, my father went to Austria as an agent for the Western Aluminium and Metal Alloy Company. I was born in Vienna in the winter of 1882. Soon afterwards my father, having bought an interest in a local metal concern, decided to establish himself in Vienna and was naturalised. He became Frederick Schmidt and I, who had been given the name Frank at birth, became, as I am now, Franz Schmidt. My father grew to be quite a big man in the metal business and this influenced me to make engineering my career. After my apprenticeship, I entered my father's business. In the eight years before 1914, I was responsible for the discovery of several durable alloys and travelled all over the world for the group. I spent nearly a year in England, where I met a Welsh girl, and though she was not of my race I married her. I remember my father was furious when he heard, but she was lovely and gay and irresistible. She died four years ago. We had one child, a girl. She was born in 1913. Then came the war. My father sold the business and went to live in Italy in the days when Italy was still neutral. The war was a great blow to him. He died two years later.