Читать книгу The Fifth Man - Cyril Henry Coles - Страница 10

Table of Contents

Warren and Bagshott left the room and a few minutes later the Chief-Inspector returned bringing another man with him; a brown-haired man of about thirty-five, clean-shaven, of medium height, with a square jaw and a faintly amused expression.

“This is Warren’s rescuer,” said Bagshott. “I’m sorry I can’t introduce him more formally, but he appears to wish to remain anonymous.” He turned to the man and added, “This is Mr. Hambledon of British Intelligence, you can talk to him without misgivings. Well, unless you want me, Hambledon, I’ve got a few things to see to.”

“Carry on, Bagshott. I expect this gentleman and I will be able to entertain each other for a little while.” Bagshott went out, and Hambledon said, “Do sit down. I understand that you had some tale you wished to unfold. Who are you for a start?”

“Really,” said the man coolly, “I’ve been so many different people lately that I must stop and think. What’s more, I doubt if any of my various aliases would convey much to you. In the first place, I’m the man who sent you a note by an escaping R.A.F. officer about four men who were being landed from a German submarine on England’s shores with a view to their acting for German Intelligence. I hope the note reached you.”

“I had a feeling,” said Hambledon, “that this interview was going to be interesting, now I’m sure of it. Please go on.”

“I particularly wanted them to be rescued from Nazi clutches as soon as they arrived. You know, they had no intention of acting for Germany, it was merely a scheme for getting home; but if the German agents did get their claws on them, I’d be sorry for them. Not one of the four would have the least idea how to look after themselves; nice fellows and all that, but scarcely one complete brain between all of them. Not the chess-player’s mind, what? No finesse.”

“No?” said Hambledon. “I’ll remember what you say, I’m sure it’s valuable. About yourself, now——”

“Tanner is at once the best of the bunch and the most helpless. Even deceiving the Nazis gave him a pain in his conscience, believe it or not. But his wife is dying of T.B. and he wanted rather badly to get home. He——”

“You will be sorry to hear,” interrupted Hambledon, “that Lieutenant Tanner was shot dead by patriots in Brussels on his way through. Unfortunately nobody warned them that he was not a genuine renegade.”

The man scowled for a moment. “Pity. Well, accidents will happen.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t know it,” said Hambledon.

“I wonder I didn’t hear it. I suppose they didn’t get the tip in time in Brussels. I was having——”

“Are you sure you didn’t know it?”

“Quite sure,” said the man, and looked Hambledon squarely in the face.

“Now tell me who you are,” said Tommy.

“I am a member of German Intelligence,” said the man with an impish grin. “It occurred to me that since I’ve got away with that, I might be useful to you.”

“You propose to act as a British agent on the staff of German Intelligence,” said Hambledon.

“Exactly. It should be exciting, I think. I’ve been bored stiff for three years and I’m tired of it. I don’t think I’d be bored on that job.”

Hambledon leaned back in his chair and regarded his visitor with a face in which there was no amusement at all.

“Let’s get this straight,” he said. “You are Major Aylwin Brampton, nephew of Sir Oliver Brampton, Member of Parliament for the Rook’s Nest Division of Yorkshire. You were born in 1911 in London, but both your parents died when you were a child and your uncle brought you up at his place, Rock Hall, Rook’s Nest, Yorkshire. You were educated at Rugby and Cambridge; after that you acted as a secretary to your uncle, who was a man of many affairs. Am I right?”

“Please go on,” said his visitor. “Excuse me—May I smoke?”

“Have one of mine,” said Hambledon. “Your uncle was a great admirer of the Nazi party, he was one of many who thought a little more discipline would be good for English youth. He had not only joined the British Union of Fascists, he was a prominent supporter of the Link, that ingenuous organization for encouraging a rapprochement between England and Germany. Many people who thought in the early days as he did, saw their mistake some time before the war actually broke out; not so your uncle. He continued to believe in the innocence of Germany’s intentions——”

“Persistent old cock, wasn’t he?”

“With the result,” continued Hambledon, “that soon after the outbreak of war he was gathered in and interned under Section 18B of the Defence of the Realm Act. He is still interned. Let us revert to you. You joined the Territorials before the war, and in view of your uncle’s well-known views on the subject of Germany, I may say that your army career was watched with interest. However, apart from acting as your uncle’s secretary you did nothing reprehensible as far as we know. On the outbreak of war you were called up, went abroad with your regiment, and were eventually reported missing after Dunkirk, and subsequently as a prisoner-of-war in Germany. Nothing more was heard of you until now, when you pop up bright and smiling with this kindly offer to serve in British Intelligence on the strength of having rescued three British soldiers from the wicked Nazis. Am I right?”

“It certainly sounds pretty dubious.”

“Tell me how you knew when and where those men were going to be landed if the Germans didn’t tell you? Tell me how you knew where to look for Detective-Sergeant Warren?”

“With pleasure. It’s a long story——”

“It would be, and I don’t know that I shall bother to listen to it,” said Hambledon. “Can you suggest any reason why I shouldn’t simply have you shot as a traitor?”

“There’s one quite good reason,” said Hambledon’s visitor with a disarming smile.

“Trot it out and I’ll look at it.”

“I’m not Major Brampton.”

“Oh, come,” said Hambledon. “Can’t you think of a better one than that? Listen. You arrived from your prison camp at the German spy school at Liesensee on October 17th, 1943. In spite of the fact that you can’t speak or understand a word of German—you, Oliver Brampton’s secretary—you came out on top in their end-of-term examinations. Do you still maintain you can’t speak German?”

“Not to you,” said the man in that language. “I just thought it would be useful if the Germans didn’t know it.”

“You are losing your grip,” said Hambledon contemptuously. “The Germans did know it, you have been corresponding with them for years. It was only to your fellow-prisoners that you pretended you couldn’t speak German, and the Nazis for some reason fell in with the idea. You started off with the other prisoners from Liesensee on January the second this year, but you disappeared in Berlin. You turned up two days later in Flushing, where you got into touch with the underground movement and forwarded your note to me by the R.A.F. pilot who was being sent over. You were next seen entering the house of one Willem Geerdts, a Dutchman known to be collaborating with the German authorities. It may or may not be news to you that Geerdts has been carefully destroyed.”

“Good job too,” said the man shortly.

“Why?”

“He murdered a friend of mine.”

“Really,” said Hambledon, “your friends do seem to be unlucky, don’t they? There was Tanner, too, wasn’t there, and it’s difficult to imagine how the other three escaped on that occasion. Abbott, of course, didn’t last long, he was shot through the head in London the day after he reached England——”

“Look here,” said the visitor energetically. “I am a fairly patient man I think, but you are going a bit over the mark—”

“ ‘My patience is exhausted’,” said Hambledon in German, mimicking the Fuehrer.

“I’ve already told you I’m not Brampton; send for your dossier about him, read the description and look at the photograph. I’m not in the least like him, and Brampton is dead anyway.”

Hambledon looked at him for a moment, and then rang the bell and sent for the papers. Till they arrived the two men sat in silence; the visitor lighting another cigarette from the end of the last, and Hambledon busying himself with some letters on his desk. The dossier was brought in, a stout paper cover containing copies of letters, many pages of typescript with notes scribbled in the margin, and a photograph. Two photographs, to be exact, one full-face and one in profile. There were also finger-prints.

Hambledon looked from the photographs to the man in front of him, and back again.

“There is not the slightest doubt about it,” he said. “You are not this man.”

“There are also the finger-prints,” said the man calmly, “but I’d rather you didn’t go into that if you don’t mind. I am a little sensitive on the subject of finger-prints.”

“Who the devil are you?”

“My name is Anthony Colemore, son of the late Roger Colemore, the etymologist.”

“Colemore,” said Hambledon slowly. “The name conveys something—I heard it mentioned only the other day——”

“I was the man who came such a purler over that whisky smuggling case. That’s one reason why I wasn’t anxious to hob-nob with Chief-Inspector Bagshott and Co. You see, I didn’t finish my sentence.”

“You broke jail, didn’t you, if I remember correctly?”

“Yes. I was bored, I hate being shut up. Being locked in at night—ugh!”

“I can, of course, check your identity by your finger-prints,” said Hambledon.

“If you do, I go back to jail,” Colemore pointed out.

“Not necessarily,” said Hambledon. “If I ask for the identification of finger-prints they don’t automatically assume that I’ve got the body.”

“Stupid of me,” murmured Colemore. “ ‘Conscience makes cowards,’ you know. I suppose it’s conscience since I don’t suffer from indigestion.”

“Nor do I necessarily have to hand people over to the police because they happen to want ’em. Let your mind be at rest on that point and tell me how you come to be posing as Brampton?”

“I came across him during the retreat from the Albert Canal. He was pretty badly wounded and I stayed by him just too long, by the time he died I couldn’t get away. It occurred to me that I’d have a better time as a prisoner if the Boche thought I was a British officer, so I changed clothes with him, took his papers and odds and ends, and gave myself up.”

“Did you know him before?”

“No,” said Colemore. “What’s more I knew practically nothing about him till you gave me his life’s history just now. I gathered from the Nazi General or what-not who interviewed me that I had an interestingly peculiar sort of uncle, that was all. As regards being able to talk German, I started off by refusing to understand it mainly in order to annoy them, I’m afraid. Then when this Intelligence fellow implied that I’d been fluent in it for years, I went all mysterious and suggested that it would be to everybody’s advantage if that was kept a secret. He looked puzzled and said, ‘How wise of you.’ What I’d have said if he’d simply asked ‘why?’ I really don’t know.”

Hambledon laughed. “He thought there was some inner meaning he was supposed to see but didn’t, and he wouldn’t admit it. The gentle Nazi to the life. That’s what happens when men are given jobs, not because they’re fitted for them, but because they are deserving party members.”

“It might have some funny results even here if only good Conservatives were admitted to British Intelligence.”

“Heaven forbid. Well, you do seem to have landed yourself into rather a sticky mess, Colemore, what with the police and the Nazis. Suppose you tell me all about it and we’ll see what it all boils down to? Start at the beginning and go right on to the end.”

“What, my boyhood days and all?” Hambledon nodded. “Well, you’ve brought it on yourself.” Colemore settled himself more comfortably in his chair and began.

“My father was rather a weird old bird, but he was a real expert on languages. I don’t mean merely a good linguist, he was interested in the origins of words and how they changed as they were absorbed into the speech of different peoples. He used to hunt words through various cognate dialects with the enthusiasm of a deer-stalker after a fourteen-pointer, only his chases would lead right across Europe. Then he’d come home and read papers to learned societies. I can’t think why he ever married anything more human than a dictionary, but he did. My mother died when I was five, and after that he used to trail me round with him everywhere. We’d go to some place for a week and stay there six months; after a bit he’d look at me as though he’d just remembered I was there and say, ‘School. You ought to be at school,’ and into school I went wherever we happened to be. I remember one year when I had one term in Servia, another in Albania and the third in Greece.”

“What a dreadful idea,” said the horrified Hambledon, once a schoolmaster himself.

“Oh, I don’t know. You learn to stand on your own feet, and how other people think and all that. I learned a lot of languages besides German too, you do when you’re a small boy.”

Etymology is not, it appears, a very highly-paid career, and most of the eminent Roger Colemore’s money came from investments. He thought he was good at foreseeing which industries were going to increase in importance and he changed his investments accordingly.

“Oh, dear,” said Hambledon. “I’ve met people who thought that. One of them cleans my boots every morning.”

“Father wasn’t as bad as that,” said Anthony Colemore. “After the last war, when there was a lot of rebuilding in progress, he said cement was the goods. So he invested our all in cement. We were almost rich for a time and my schools became quite luxurious and exclusive. I was practically hovering on the brink of Harrow when Clarence Hatry fell down. So did our fortunes.”

“After your previous experiences,” said Hambledon sympathetically, “you might have found Harrow a trifle difficult. How old were you then?”

“Sixteen,” said Colemore. “I daresay you’re right—about Harrow, I mean. Well, at that point Father died and the fun really began. We were in England then, as it happened. Kind friends of my father’s rallied round and gave me good advice. You can imagine it. ‘Work, my boy. Honest work never hurt any man.’ All I knew was how to live comfortably anywhere and talk about eight languages. So they found me a job in a City wine-merchant’s office. One of the old-established ones preserved in cobwebs.”

“Talking about wine-merchants,” said Hambledon, “I think a little weak whisky and water won’t hurt us. I keep some here. Don’t let me interrupt you.”

“I should love you to,” said Colemore, “with that. How on earth do you manage it these days?”

“Oh, a spot of blackmail,” said Hambledon airily. “Here’s yours. Please carry on.”

Young Colemore endured the wine-merchant’s office for as long as he could, which was fifteen months, and then left for another post which promised more and performed much less. He went from one job to another, each a little less satisfactory than the last. “Some of ’em didn’t pay too badly, but I just couldn’t stand ’em. I remember once I met a man in a train, rather the Jew-boy type but not a bad fellow. He had a couple of big suitcases with him. He put me up to his line of business, which was buying cheap lines in the East End and peddling them from door to door in places like Surbiton or Esher. ‘Superior novelties, my boy,’ he said. ‘Small profits and quick returns.’ So I got a pedlar’s certificate and tried it; you’d be surprised what a paying game it is. But what a life! I stuck it out for eight months, by which time I’d got suitcase-carrier’s shoulder, bell-pusher’s thumb, hawker’s brass-face and a chronic ingratiating manner. So I left that alone for ever.”

“I thought I’d done a few odd jobs in the course of my mis-spent life,” said the amused Hambledon, “but you beat me. Carry on, please.”

“Sure this isn’t boring you? Well, there’s no accounting for tastes, and, d’you know, it’s rather fun telling it all. I’ve never done so before,” said Colemore.

He travelled to Southampton in 1930 to try for a job on the harbour works and went into a public-house in the dock area for a glass of beer and a couple of sandwiches; funds not permitting of a more spacious meal. At the bar he fell into conversation with a tall thin man in a blue-and-white-striped cotton monkey-jacket which young Colemore recognized as the undress uniform of a ship’s steward. The thin man said that he was a dining-saloon steward on the R.M.S.P. liner Orbita, at present on the Western Ocean run. New York to Hamburg, calling at Southampton en route.

“Got long in Southampton?” asked Colemore.

“Only four hours. We have five days at New York and a fortnight at Hamburg, they’re the real ends of the run, you see, though this is our port of registration. Besides, repairs and overhaul come cheaper in Hamburg.”

“Doesn’t seem long to spend in your home-land,” suggested Colemore.

“Hamburg’s more like home to most of us stewards. We don’t go ashore in New York much,” said the steward.

“Why not?”

“Too expensive.”

Colemore gathered by degrees that it was a dog’s life with compensations. The hours were long and trying and the pay was not extravagant, but the tips made up for many shortcomings, especially if you were a B.R.

“What’s that?”

“Bedroom Steward.” This voyage was going to be worse than most because they were short-handed. “We shall be one at a table ’stead of two if we don’t look out. Some of our chaps went on the ran-tan in Hamburg and got left on the beach.”

“Come again?”

“Missed the ship.”

“I say,” said Anthony Colemore, “do you think there’s a chance of my getting a job on the Orbita?”

“Ever been a waiter?”

“No. But I can speak a lot of different languages.”

“Can you really? But surely you don’t want a job like that, then.”

“Don’t I?” said Colemore. “I was going along to the new harbour works to ask for a navvying job.”

“Oh lor’. Well, we’re better than that. You might manage it if you don’t mind doing a dock-head jump. Come along,” said the steward, glancing at his watch and sliding hurriedly off his high stool, “what you want is the Providore’s Department. Come on, I’ll take you.”

So they interviewed a man in an office who looked at young Colemore without any particular enthusiasm but eventually said he could have a try at it and they’d see how he shaped. “Do you want an advance?”

The steward nudged him and whispered, “Say yes,” so Colemore said, “Yes, please,” and received two pounds in advance.

“Now,” said the steward, leading the way out at a rapid pace, “we’ll take a cab and dash up to Baker’s to get your slops.”

“Wouldn’t it be quicker if we took a taxi?”

“No. We always take a cab. By the way, they call me The Colonel.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I expect it was because I was a temporary gentleman in the last war.”

Colemore stayed for five years with the Royal Mail Line and saved quite a fair sum of money. He made one friend in Hamburg, a young man in the Company’s office who happened to be a Dutchman. In fact, they became friendly in the first place because Colemore could speak fluent Dutch and Van Drom liked to use his native tongue in his hours of ease. He regarded German as a debased dialect and the Germans as mediæval barbarians incapable of the higher civilization, which is to live peaceably with one’s neighbours.

“Sometimes I didn’t see him for a year or more, when I was on the South American run,” said Colemore. “But we stewards always like to get on the Western Ocean run in the winter, and whenever I went to Hamburg I used to look him up.”

In the early spring of 1935 Van Drom said that when he was at home—which was Flushing—for Christmas, some men he knew made a suggestion to him. It was a scheme by which Scotch whisky, sent overseas in bond, should be acquired from the warehouses in Holland and smuggled back into England. “There was a lot of money in it,” said Colemore, “and Van Drom always had expensive tastes, especially for a Dutchman. You see, whisky in itself is cheap enough, it’s only the excise duty which makes it so dear in England. So if we could buy it abroad without the duty having to be paid on it, we could afford to sell it in England a lot cheaper than anyone could buy it anywhere else, and still make a big profit. Besides, whisky made for export is ten or twenty per cent. overproof, that’s a lot stronger than ordinary stuff, so any publican who bought it for resale could water it down and no harm done. In fact, he’d have to, or somebody would spot it for export whisky and ask awkward questions about its origin.”

Van Drom and his friends formed a sort of syndicate. “I never knew how they managed the Dutch end,” said Colemore. “Getting hold of the whisky, I mean. I thought it more tactful not to enquire. No business of mine.” What they wanted was an English partner who would run it across for them and arrange for its disposal in England. Somebody with a fast cabin cruiser who could look like an enthusiastic and not too intelligent amateur yachtsman, with more money than sense. “Always blowing ashore at places like Harwich and Sandwich and Rye and Littlehampton and Lymington, all togged up to the nines to give the girls a treat.” The real business would be done in smaller nooks and inlets of the coast, where elderly boatmen would row out to where the cabin cruiser had dropped her mud-hook, and return ashore with cases tactfully draped with tarpaulin. “You’d be surprised how easy it was,” said Colemore. “Do you know, I’ve actually landed cases on the beach at Hayling Island in broad daylight and dumped them in a bathing-box to be collected by lorry after dark? It’s a fact.”

Colemore explained that the business was, of course, only run in the summer, but it was so profitable that he could live comfortably on the proceeds throughout the winter months “and even put a bit by for my problematical old age.” When the fashion came in for small but highly efficient cameras and an import duty was put upon foreign-made ones, he took to smuggling Leica cameras too. “They were quite safe unless you wanted to take one abroad with you, when you had to declare its number. Then, if the officials looked it up and found it wasn’t one of the numbers listed as having passed through customs, there was trouble. Otherwise it was all sigarney, as Dad used to say. One of his sample words, though I don’t know what it was a sample of.”

All things, however, draw to evensong sooner or later and so did Colemore’s profitable trade. “It all started with a publican in a Hampshire market town who didn’t bother to break down the whisky to the right strength. He got quite a reputation for his wonderful whisky, I believe, and other publicans bought their supplies from him. All went well till the excise man turned up with his little hydrometer and tested the whisky. Our friend had been in trouble once before for watering his stuff and the excise man was naturally hopeful that it would happen again. This time the mistake was on the other foot, as it were, the hydrometer nearly jumped out of the glass because the whisky was too strong instead of too weak.”

Colemore at that time was running a big consignment across in two lots and was delayed in Holland with engine trouble. He had the boat’s engines overhauled in Rotterdam and came into Bosham harbour one fine summer’s morning a fortnight after his first delivery instead of only two or three days. The police had spent the intervening fortnight making enquiries, and whisky had been popping up all over the place. “Cases under beds, cases in out-houses hidden under sacks, cases sunk in ponds—even left on roads when the owners didn’t dare to keep ’em. I must say I think somebody might have warned me, but they didn’t. I slid into Bosham with the engine just ticking over and my heart singing. I’d just dropped anchor when small boats with large men in them came upon me from every side. My heart left off singing and started sinking instead, I hadn’t a chance to make a bolt for it. I argued, but it was no good. The bottles even had the export labels on ’em, you know, stamped perforations.”

Colemore came up for trial but the result was a foregone conclusion and he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of three times the value of the goods.