Читать книгу Green Hazard - Cyril Henry Coles - Страница 4

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“I suppose,” said the old colonel sadly, “that one had come to regard Hambledon as practically indestructible.”

“No man,” said the Foreign Office head of department, “is indestructible if he is close to a sufficiently violent explosion at the moment of detonation. Poor Hambledon seems to have been in the middle of this one, according to Denton.”

“He was getting on, you know,” said the colonel, “and he’d lived a pretty trying sort of life. Must have lost his grip a bit, what?”

“I did my best to persuade him not to go,” said Wilcox of the Foreign Office, “but he insisted. He said that (a) he was sick of office work, (b) that it was only Switzerland and nobody could come to any harm there if they were careful to avoid precipices, and (c) there was his beard anyway. You know how he used to talk.”

“Beard,” said the colonel. “Beard? I didn’t know he had one.”

“He grew one,” said the departmental head, “after Dunkirk. You remember Churchill’s defiant speech telling the world that we should go on fighting whatever happened and if we were driven out of the British Isles we should continue the fight from overseas? Yes, I suppose none of us are likely to forget it; it looked too much as though it might come true at any moment. Well, Tommy——”

“It may yet,” said the colonel.

“It may, of course. Tommy said that if that happened, he would be one of those left behind to make himself useful, and the more unrecognizable he was the longer his usefulness was likely to continue. So he grew a beard. He said it was cheaper than having his face remodeled by plastic surgery, and a lot less painful.”

“It grew quite well,” said Wilcox. “It’s a good beard now—that is——”

“Oh, quite,” said the colonel. “But what happened, exactly?”

“He went to Servatsch—that’s a small village between Zurich and Lake Constance—to have a look at a man who was alleged to be making high explosives. We had heard of this fellow, and there seemed to be points of interest about him. Then there was a really startling explosion at a moment when poor Hambledon is known to have been on the premises, and he has not been seen since. I haven’t heard any details yet. We sent Denton out with him and he stayed on to make inquiries. I expect him here this morning.”

“He should be here,” said Wilcox, looking at the clock. At that moment there was a knock at the door and Charles Denton was shown in. He was a tall, loose-limbed man with a habitually languid manner. On this occasion one felt that the languor was not a mannerism but the result of a depression of spirit too heavy to be thrown off.

“Glad to see you, Denton,” said the Foreign Office man.

“Thanks,” said Denton in a tired voice, and shook hands all round mechanically, as one thinking of something else.

“This is a melancholy occasion,” said the colonel.

“Did you have a good journey?” asked Wilcox.

“Oh, much as usual,” said Denton. He threw his hat into a corner of the room and dropped into a chair. “Well, I suppose you want my report.”

“Please.”

“I may as well start at the beginning and go on straight through. As you know, Hambledon reached Servatsch three days before I did. He was staying at a pub called the Trois Couronnes, and I took a room there too. Foul place; I think they knitted their omelets out of catgut.” Denton sighed heavily. “We did not know each other, of course, and we never did more than pass the time of day, as they say. I used to go along to his room in the middle of the night for conferences; he had the end room of a corridor, and the one next his was empty. By the time I got there—to Servatsch, I mean—he had done a certain amount of scouting round Ulseth’s place and got the lie of the land fairly well.”

“Ulseth,” said Wilcox to the colonel, “was the name of the man who was alleged to be making high explosives.”

“ ‘Alleged’ is good,” said Denton grimly. “Ulseth’s place, as I told you before, was a small farmhouse just outside Servatsch on the Zurich road, rather isolated. There was a house and a number of outbuildings all surrounded by high iron railings with barbed wire on the top. Inside this was a wooden fence to prevent rude people from staring in. In fact, the only way to get any view of what was going on inside was to climb one of the local scenic humps and admire the landscape through a pair of binoculars. There was only one entrance—a tall iron gate with spikes on the top. Very private, our Mr. Ulseth.”

“What sort of a chap was he?” asked the colonel.

“Only saw him at a distance of about a mile, through glasses. Shortish, gray or fair hair, usual Continental beard; nothing remarkable about him at that range. He never came outside his fortress, so I did not see him face to face. He was waited upon by a man one saw occasionally who used to come into the village to buy his master’s chops and potatoes and fetch parcels from the station. He didn’t talk either; he was surly and rather stupid. Not a local man; I don’t even know what nationality he was. Everyone talks German there, of course. By the way, those snaps I got of Ulseth with the telephoto lens—were they any good?”

“They came out all right,” said Wilcox’s chief, “but nobody recognized him. They were small, of course, but quite clear.”

Denton nodded. “He didn’t look to me like anyone I’d ever seen before. I did try to get into conversation with his servant, but he was very unforthcoming. He snubbed me and scuttled away.”

“Tell me,” said the colonel, “weren’t you and Hambledon a trifle conspicuous in a small place like that? You know what villages are.”

“Normally we should have been, in which case I should have left at once, or never arrived; but as it happened, we were more or less lost in the crowd. There were quite a lot of people in Servatsch and district taking an interest in our Mr. Ulseth. There were three Swedes, for example. Hambledon got into conversation with them; they were quite friendly. They told him frankly that they represented a firm of armaments manufacturers in Sweden who had backed Ulseth financially on the strength of some demonstrations he had given which had impressed them. Ulseth told them he was on the point of discovering an explosive twenty times more effective than TNT and only wanted some money to complete his experiments, so they had advanced him some. And then some more. Now they wanted to see results, but Mr. Ulseth was never at home when they called, so they were sitting round the place like patient cats round a mousehole, waiting.”

“I suppose they hadn’t any ideas about his formula?” asked the Foreign Office man.

“None whatever. Hambledon thought of that; it would have simplified the job if they had.”

The colonel raised his eyebrows, and Wilcox explained that the British had the formula for an extremely effective explosive, only unfortunately it was so unstable as to be unusable. “Either it won’t go off at all or it detonates spontaneously on practically no provocation, and no means has yet been found of making it manageable. It’s not new; our chemists have been working on it for years without success. Hambledon’s job was to find out if this fellow Ulseth’s explosive was the same or whether he’d really got hold of something fresh.”

“But Hambledon wasn’t a chemist, was he?” said the colonel.

“No, but he went through a short but concentrated course of chemistry before he started, just enough to enable him to recognize the formula if he saw it. I beg your pardon, Denton.”

“Then there were the Swiss police, trying to get damages out of him for destruction of the property of a neighbor—to wit, one cow. Apparently the cow was being taken past his premises one day when there was a sudden bang from inside the fence. The cow was in a delicate state of health at the time, and this startled her so that she bolted for a couple of miles and subsequently died, and the owner wants compensation. Ulseth obstinately denied responsibility; he said he wasn’t a cows’ midwife anyway and she shouldn’t have been walking about in that state, and it was their own fault for bringing her past his place where bangs were liable to occur. So the police wanted to interview him too, as all they’d done so far was to write him polite letters and get rude answers.”

“That’s two lots of people after this fellow Ulseth,” said the colonel.

“There was a third lot,” said Denton, “and I think he was more frightened of them than all the others put together. They came and went in powerful cars or on motorcycles and didn’t talk to anybody, but they were Gestapo all right. In fact, Hambledon is sure he recognized one of them as a man who used to work under him when he was deputy chief of the German police. I gather that Ulseth used to come into the village occasionally before the cow episode, but since these fellows started hanging about no one had set eyes on him. I suppose they were after this formula too, but they weren’t admitted any more than anyone else.”

“Gestapo, eh?” said the Foreign Office chief. “I don’t imagine Hambledon exactly sought their society, did he?”

“Definitely not,” drawled Denton, “but he wasn’t peculiar in that. Nobody did. Quite curious to see the way everyone drifted out of a bar if they came in, even though we weren’t in Germany. Nobody seemed to like ’em.”

“Sons of Ishmael,” said the colonel.

“Sons of Cain. Well, as I was saying, here was this bird Ulseth sitting tight in his nest and all these other people revolvin’ round outside with nothing to do but wonder about each other. Tommy got fidgety and said something would have to be done and he was going to do it. So he took to going for country walks with a long stick like a young pole. You sent it out to him, didn’t you?”

Wilcox nodded. “Looked very Alpine, didn’t it?”

“Very. You pulled out a pin at one end,” said Denton to the colonel, “and the thing sort of dissected itself and turned into a ladder with rungs about six inches wide. You fitted a hook on the top, hung it on any fence or what not you desired to scale, and there you were.”

“Doesn’t sound much like Hambledon, somehow,” said the colonel. “His methods were usually so brilliantly ordinary.”

“Yes, I know, but there wasn’t any alternative. He had managed so far never to meet any of the Gestapo face to face—they made him nervous; he admitted it. But you can’t keep up that sort of thing for long in a place the size of Servatsch even though the Nazis weren’t actually staying there. They used to come and go, as I said, across the frontier. So one night he slipped out with his pole and made an entry over the fences, neither of which was electrified. I went as far as the first fence with him and then awaited developments. He said he was going to reason with Ulseth. I helped him with the first fence, and there was a certain amount of subdued cursing over the barbed wire atop. Eventually he borrowed my coat to muffle the barbs with and threw it back to me when he was over. The second fence—the wooden one—presented no difficulties; it was merely a screen. I could faintly see him going over; it was a very dark night.”

“Nobody saw or heard you, of course?”

“No. I don’t think so. We were on the far side of the place, away from Servatsch, at a point where there weren’t any outbuildings or sheds near the fence on the inside. This fence of theirs enclosed a fairly big area, ten or twelve acres or so. I listened for some time and didn’t hear a sound, so I went back to the hotel and waited. It was about half-past eleven when Hambledon went over.”

“Nothing to be seen? No lights?”

“I shouldn’t have seen it if there had been, on account of the fence. But it must have been all quiet, or Hambledon wouldn’t have gone in. I went back to the Trois Couronnes and sat in my bedroom waiting for him to come back. The arrangement was that he should come straight to my room if he returned before the hotel awoke. So I sat there reading a perfectly foul murder mystery and the Continental Bradshaw, alternately, and getting up every now and then to look out of the window. There was never anything to see; I don’t know why I kept on doing it. It was one of the longest nights I remember, and I began to get fidgety as time went on. Eventually, at about a quarter to five, I was again staring out of my window—with the bedroom light out, of course—when from the direction of Ulseth’s place there came a most terrific flash, obviously an explosion. Never seen anything like it since the Vimy Ridge went up, in the last war. A few seconds later there was a very loud boom; the whole house shook and the glass fell out of my window. I hardly knew what to do. I naturally hoped that it was Hambledon who’d blown the place up and that he would presently arrive, so I stayed put. Lights appeared all over Servatsch. In a few minutes car and cycle lights were rushing up the road in the direction of the château Ulseth. Disturbed noises took place all over the hotel, and there was an indignation meeting in the corridor outside my room. They said that the British had dropped a bomb. I knew that wasn’t right, as I hadn’t heard any aircraft. I waited and waited, and when the coast was clear I went along to Hambledon’s room.” Denton stopped and coughed.

“Have a drink,” said the Foreign Office man sympathetically. Wilcox brought whisky and glasses from a cupboard and administered refreshment.

“Thanks,” said Denton. “Well, here’s luck. I went into Hambledon’s room, and it was completely bare and empty—except for the furniture, I mean. His luggage had gone and all his clothes; there was nothing of Hambledon’s left. Even his attaché case with the Heroas people’s papers in it had gone. There was the hotel’s bill for the week lying on the table with the necessary money lying on it, and,” said Denton emphatically, “the money was Hambledon’s.”

“How could you possibly tell that?” asked the colonel.

“There was a five-franc note among it which was filthily dirty and torn almost across. Hambledon showed it to me only the night before, with a few incisive comments upon foreign currencies, and I mended it for him with stamp paper. I recognized it.”

The colonel grunted, and Denton continued.

“It could not have been Hambledon himself who came to the hotel, or he would have come to me. Therefore it was somebody else making it appear that Hambledon had left, and since he’d got Tommy’s money, something had happened to Tommy. I got out of the hotel and up the road as hard as I could leg it. By the time I got there the place was fair hotching with gendarmery, villagers, and the unfortunate Swedes in leather overcoats over striped pyjamas. I suppose they thought their money had gone up with the bang, and I expect they were quite right, too. The farmhouse was wrecked, the other buildings were damaged, and most of the fence blown flat. They dug the body of the manservant out of the ruins of the house; he was quite dead. The police found Ulseth still partially alive and rushed him off to hospital, where he died later the same day. I did not see him myself, but I see no reason to doubt it. Hambledon simply disappeared completely, and though I hunted round very thoroughly for several days till I was warned off by the authorities, I could find no trace of him whatever. It is true one usually finds something, but not always. If he was close enough to that explosion, one wouldn’t. The only thing I found was his scaling ladder where he left it on the fence. I collected that.”

There was a short space of silence. As no one seemed to have any comment to make, Denton emptied his glass and continued.

“Besides, if Hambledon had survived he would have got in touch with me, or you, or somebody. Nobody else in the district found a body or a wounded man. I made sure of that.”

“It sounds fairly final,” said the colonel with a sigh. “Poor old Hambledon. Not to beat about the bush, I suppose he was one of the most brilliant men who ever served the department.”

“I should say quite the most brilliant,” said the head of the department concerned. “They say that no man is irreplaceable, but I personally regard his death as an irreparable loss. He had a very remarkable career, very remarkable.”

“He lasted longer than most people,” said Wilcox. “Of course he was lost for years in Germany and turned up again. I wish I could think he was likely to do so this time.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Denton.

“What was he ostensibly supposed to be doing in Servatsch?” asked the colonel.

“Merely recuperating after influenza,” said Wilcox. “He was the Herr Theophilus Hartzer, of Swiss nationality, a traveler for the Swiss Heroas Company of railway wagon manufacturers. The firm is quite real; it is actuated mainly by British capital and some of the directors are British subjects. Even those directors who are themselves Swiss are pro-British in sympathy. After all, before the war we took the bulk of their products. They were very helpful. The British directors knew of Hambledon as a British intelligence agent and did all they could: they provided him with all necessary credentials and a wonderful range of literature—complete with pictures, diagrams, and production charts—about their goods. Hambledon, I imagine, merely knew a railway truck when he saw one before he became Herr Hartzer with a perfectly good Swiss passport. If he’d read all their leaflets, handbooks, and folders he must have become quite an expert before he died. I wish he hadn’t,” added Wilcox impulsively.

“A very good cover,” said the colonel. “I wonder what the firm do with their products now they can’t get ’em through to us.”

“Sell ’em to Germany,” said Denton. “What? A firm must live. Besides, Switzerland can’t afford to annoy Germany.”

“Looks like being a complete clear-up of the Servatsch problem, anyway,” said the Foreign Office chief. “Ulseth is dead, his servant is dead, and I imagine his notes and formulas are literally scattered to the four winds. We can write off this item, I think, unless anything very unforeseen turns up.”

“What did the various parties do then?” asked the colonel. “The different people who wanted to interview Ulseth, I mean.”

“The Swiss police immediately swept in and tidied up. They said they thought a claim for the cow might be laid against Ulseth’s estate; there was enough salvage from the wreck to cover that. They are advertising for his heirs and assignees. I wish ’em luck. The Swedes merely heaved deep sighs when they heard Ulseth was dead, packed their bags, and went away. Back to Sweden, presumably; I don’t know. The Gestapo hung around for days, nosing about, asking questions, and picking up any odd scraps of paper they could find scattered over the hillside. I don’t think any of it was any good; I got there first. No, it was a clean sweep. The Servatsch problem is solved—dissolved, in fact.” He sighed.

“I suppose there is nothing more we can do,” said the colonel.

“Nothing, in my opinion,” said the Foreign Office man. “We have, as a matter of routine, circularized our agents everywhere, including Germany, to keep a lookout for Hambledon, alias Herr Theophilus Hartzer, but I should be very surprised if we got any result. Very surprised indeed.”

“Yes,” said the colonel. “But what I want to know is who went into Hambledon’s room, packed his things, and took the luggage away? And paid the bill. Why pay the bill?”

“To make it appear that Hambledon had left suddenly,” said Denton. “To catch the 4.15 A.M. from Servatsch, for instance. I may as well say that I went down to the station and asked if anyone resembling Hambledon left by that train, though I didn’t believe it for a moment. Only one passenger boarded that train, and that was a local Servatsch man well known to the station staff. Various people arrived, but they did not interest me. As for who took the luggage, frankly I don’t know.”

“It must have been taken out before the explosion,” said Wilcox. “I mean, I suppose that somebody could have walked into the hotel unobserved while everyone was running about asking what the noise was; but he wouldn’t have had time to pack before you went along, Denton, would he?”

“No. Certainly not. Besides, someone would have seen him. I should think the only person who didn’t open their bedroom door and leap out was me. No, the packing was done earlier. I asked the porter if anyone came in between midnight, when I returned, and the time of the explosion, and he said no one at all. But he sleeps in his little chair—I’ve seen him—and the front door is never locked. Someone came in and went out again without being seen, that’s all.”

“Someone else staying in the hotel?” suggested the colonel.

“Very few people there. The three Swedes, three or four stray ladies who knitted, Hambledon, and myself. Also I had a look round each of their rooms at a well-chosen moment. Besides, you forget. Whoever it was had been in touch with Hambledon, or he wouldn’t have had that five-franc note.”

“It looks to me,” said the Foreign Office man, “as though Hambledon must have been already dead, since it was necessary to make it appear that he had just gone away of his own accord.”

“Then he didn’t die in the explosion,” said the colonel.

“I don’t know anything at all,” said Denton in an exasperated voice. “Somebody passed twice within a few yards of my bedroom door, and though I was awake and listening, I didn’t hear a sound. I put it down to those Nazi blighters who were always nosing about, but that may be my uncharitable dislike of the Nazis. If it rained on my birthday I should think it was their fault. It’s just possible that the fellow whom Hambledon thought he recognized also thought he recognized Hambledon, so they went through his luggage. That’s reasonable, so far as it goes, but they wouldn’t pack it up and take it away.”

“Nor pay the hotel bill,” said Wilcox.

“No. More likely to rob the till in passing,” said Denton savagely.

“If Hambledon was already dead, who blew up Ulseth?” asked the colonel, but Denton merely shook his head.

“I suppose he blew himself up,” said Wilcox. “Hambledon wouldn’t have done it. He might have hit the man on the head or shot him, but not blow up the whole place, surely?”

“It would have been a good way of concealing the fact that Ulseth had been brained with a poker,” said Denton. He rose impatiently and kicked his chair back. “It’s sheer waste of time sitting here arguing when we don’t know enough to argue about. Somebody outed Hambledon and evaded me and got away with it—that’s all we know. I shall go and put my head in the fountains in Trafalgar Square; perhaps that’ll give me an idea. Good-by.” He walked out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

“If I hear anything,” said the Foreign Office man, “I will let you know.”

“Personally,” said the colonel, “I shall look forward impatiently to the Judgment Day. I don’t think we shall hear anything before that. Poor Hambledon.”

As Denton had said, directly after the explosion the Swiss police swept in and tidied up. There were several of them in the neighborhood, in addition to the local gendarme, because the Zurich police were beginning to take an interest in Herr Ulseth. At the time of the cow episode the police were successful in interviewing him once, though their later efforts to see him were all failures. During that interview they obtained from him, as a matter of routine, particulars about himself and his origins. He was, he said, a Swiss citizen by birth, born in Semione in the pleasant canton of Ticino in 1893, that he was educated in Lucerne and took a science degree in the University of Milan and that he was by profession an experimental chemist. The police looked with natural distaste upon a chemist whose experiments were of so violent a character and sought about for means of persuading him to go and live elsewhere, preferably outside Switzerland. With this in view they checked his statements and found that in the village of Semione, where memories are long, there was no trace of any Ulseth.

“Strange,” said the superintendent in Zurich. “It’s not so long ago, and he said his parents lived there many years.”

“I am not myself surprised,” said the inspector, who came from the south. “I spoke to him in Romansh and he failed to comprehend me.”

“Try the Lucerne school he mentioned,” said the superintendent.

But the Lycée of St. Joseph in Lucerne also disclaimed the budding Ulseth.

“He is a liar, it appears,” said the superintendent. “I wonder who he really is. It would be helpful to have his fingerprints. Go and try to see him again and see if you can get them. I dislike mysterious people who make explosions.”

But Ulseth was not to be seen, and the inspector was giving it up as a bad job when the roar of the chemist’s last experiment brought all Servatsch out of their beds in the chilly hour before the dawn. The inspector collected his gendarmes and rushed up to the scene to find the house turned into rubble round a large hole in the ground and a semi-conscious man, blackened and dirty and much cut up, lying some twenty yards in front of where the door used to be. Around him were the ruins of a chair.

“Which one is this?” asked the inspector, gingerly turning him over. “Ulseth or the servant?”

“It is Herr Ulseth,” said the gendarme from Servatsch. “He has a beard; the servant was clean-shaven.”

“He is still alive,” said the inspector. “Is there a doctor in Servatsch? No, I thought not. Put him in that shed over there and get that big hire car from the village. He’d better go to hospital in Zurich. Gently, now. Get a door or something to carry him on.”

“I have some morphia tablets,” said the Servatsch gendarme, “in case of accidents on the mountains.”

“Give him one. Tell all these people to stand back and get out of the way; the whole village seems to be in the act of arriving. Tell them we expect another explosion at any moment.”

The village recoiled obediently, but certain strangers, refusing to be alarmed, insisted on helping to carry the injured man and asked what was to be done with him.

“Hospital in Zurich,” answered the gendarme surlily, for he disliked these visitors from over the German border. “Thank you for your help; that will do. Best get back out of the way now; there’s no knowing what may happen next.”

The Nazis retired with unexpected readiness, and the police went on searching the ruins by torchlight till the car should arrive. They found the other body in installments, but that was all. The big car arrived from Servatsch, and the wounded man was lifted carefully into the back seat, a gendarme sitting on either side of him. The inspector sat in the front seat beside the police driver, and the car moved off just before a tall man arrived, having run all the way from the Trois Couronnes, and began a vain search for the missing Hambledon.

“Careful over these ruts,” said the inspector to the driver. “Take it slowly till we reach the main road. We do not wish to complete upon Herr Ulseth, by shaking, the work begun by the explosion.”

“No,” said the driver, anxiously trying to avoid the bumps in the road. “He appeared to me to be, in effect, considerably damaged. No Christian would wish to harm the poor man further.”

“That is so,” agreed the inspector. “Besides, when he recovers consciousness I want him to talk. I was looking, only two days ago, through a number of dossiers of international criminals, and the portrait and particulars of one of them reminded me strongly of this man. Only the name on the dossier was not Ulseth.”

“Indeed?” said the driver. “That is interesting, and he must certainly be preserved alive if possible. Though it is a consolation to remember that his fingerprints will be just as good when he is dead.”

The car turned on to the main road and gathered speed, with powerful head lamps lighting up the turns and bends as they came.

“Was the subject of the dossier you mentioned a chemist?” asked the driver.

“No. A swindler. A confidence trickster. His career is fairly well known, and if this is the same man, I shall be surprised to learn that he knows much about explosives.”

“He seems to have been undoubtedly successful on this occasion,” said the driver.

“Any fool with an elementary textbook can make explosives,” said the inspector. “It is when one manages to render them controllable that real success is attained.”

The car rounded a bend in the road and skidded, with complete disregard of its damaged passenger, to an abrupt stop before a barricade hastily improvised from timber which had been stacked at the side of the road. Several men, in civilian clothes but armed with revolvers, appeared suddenly beside the car.

“Halt,” they said imperiously. “No trouble will be made, please. Nevertheless, we are taking possession of your passenger.”

“What is this unwarrantable——” began the inspector, but a revolver pushed against his tunic hushed him as by a spell. The men in the road opened the rear doors of the car and said, “Out, please,” to the two gendarmes sitting beside the casualty.

One of them obeyed promptly, but the other drew his revolver, or attempted to do so. Before he had it clear of the holster a gun cracked in the road and the unfortunate man rolled out of the car in a heap.

“Lift out the Herr Professor,” said the leader, and four men helped Ulseth out of the car and carried him to another which was waiting in the shadows.

“We told you not to cause trouble,” said the leader to the inspector. “You have only yourselves to blame for this,” and he indicated the wounded gendarme who was rolling about in the dust. The ambush party then climbed into the waiting car with their patient and drove away at a high speed in the direction of Germany.

The inspector got out of his car and made several ineffective attempts to speak, but rage choked him. One of the gendarmes suggested telephoning orders for the car to be stopped at the frontier.

“No,” said the inspector unwillingly. “I must obtain authority in Zurich. My poor Heller! Pick him up; we will drive on.”

They removed the barricade and drove to Zurich as fast as the road would let them. Heller was rushed to hospital, but he died half an hour after admission.

“Discretion,” said the superintendent to the sizzling inspector, “discretion. Incidents are to be avoided at all costs. These are our definite orders.”

“Even if the ‘incident’ includes the murder of our own men?”

“Even so,” said the superintendent sadly, “for many more would die if we gave occasion for reprisals—God curse the Germans root and branch! Heller died of an accident, and Switzerland remains at peace.”

So when the newspapers announced next morning that the distinguished scientist Ulseth had died in hospital as a result of the fatal explosion at Servatsch which had also killed his servant, nobody corrected the mistake. Heller’s wife was told of an unfortunate accident at revolver practice, and the newspaper paragraph which reported it was much shorter than the one relating to Ulseth. For peace was bought in many strange currencies in 1941.