The Satan Bug

CHAPTER EIGHT

It wouldn't be accurate to say that I woke up. The term "waking up" implies a fairly rapid and one-way transition from a state of unconsciousness to that of consciousness and there was nothing either rapid or one-way about my progress through the twilight zone that separates those. One moment I was greyly aware that I was lying on something hard and wet, the next the awareness was gone. How long a time elapsed between the intervals of greyness I'd no means of knowing and even if I had my mind would have been too fuzzy to appreciate it. Gradually the spells of awareness became longer and longer until, eventually, there was no more darkness but I wasn't all that sure that this was in any way an improvement or a desirable state of affairs for with returning comprehension came an all but paralysing pain that seemed to hold my head, neck and right hand side of my chest in an immense vice, a vice with some burly character inexorably tightening the handle. I felt the way a grain of wheat must feel after it had passed through a combine harvester.

Painfully I opened my good eye and swivelled it around until I located the source of the dim light. A grilled window high up on one wall, just below the roof. I was in a cellar of some kind, of the semi-sunk basement type featured in Chessingham's house.

I'd made no mistake about the hardness of the floor. Or the wetness. Rough unfinished concrete with shallow pools of water on it and whoever had left me there had thoughtfully dumped me right in the centre of the largest puddle.

I was lying stretched out on the floor, partly on my back, partly on my right hand side with my arms behind my back in a ridiculously strained and uncomfortable position. I wondered vaguely why I chose to lie in this awkward position and found out when I tried to change it. Somebody had made a very efficient job of tying my hands behind my back and from the numbness in my forearms it was a fair guess that he'd used considerable weight in the tying of the knots.

I made to gather my legs under me to jerk myself up to a sitting position and discovered that they wouldn't gather. I just couldn't move them. I used their immobility to lever myself upwards to a sitting position, waited until the coruscating lights dancing before my eyes faded and vanished then peered forward and down. My legs were not only tied at the ankles, they were secured to a metal upright of a wine-bin which took up practically the entire length of the wall beneath the window. And not only was I tied, but I was tied with PVC plastic flex. If I'd needed any confirmation that a professional had been at work, I didn't any more. Even a gorilla couldn't snap PVC and nothing less than a pair of hefty pliers could possibly undo the knots: fingers were quite useless for the job.

Slowly, carefully — any rash movement and my head would have fallen off — I looked around the cellar. It was as featureless and just about as empty as any cellar could ever be— the window, the closed door, the wine-bin and me. It could have been worse. No one pouring in water to drown me, no one flooding the confined space with a lethal gas, no snakes, no black widow spiders. Just the cellar and me. But bad enough.

I hitched myself forwards towards the wine-bin and tried to snap the wire securing me to it by jerking my legs back as violently as I could but all I did was to add another pain to the overfull quota I had already. I struggled to free my hands, knowing before I began that I was only wasting my time, and gave up almost as soon as I had started. I wondered how long it would be before I died of starvation or thirst.

Take it easy, I said to myself. Think your way out of this, Cavell. So I thought, as best I could without my head hurting the way it did, but it didn't seem to do much good, all I could think of was how sore and uncomfortable I was.

It was then that I saw the Hanyatti. I blinked, shook my head and cautiously looked again. No doubt about it, the Hanyatti, the top of the butt just visible three or four inches below and to the side of the left-hand lapel of my coat. I stared at it and it still didn't go away. I wondered dimly how the man — men, certainly — who had dragged me there had missed it and it slowly came to me that they hadn't missed it because they hadn't looked for it in the first place. Policemen in Britain don't carry guns. I was — more or less — a policeman. Hence I didn't carry a gun.

I hunched up my left shoulder and reached my head as far down and to the left as possible, at the same time pushing the lapel away with the side of my face. On the third try got my teeth to the butt but they just slipped off the rounded surface when I tried to get a purchase and lift the gun from its holster. Four times I repeated this manoeuvre and after the fourth attempt I gave up. Contorting my neck into that strained and unnatural position would have been uncomfortable enough in any event: added to the effects of the blackjack the only result this contortion was having was to make the cellar swim dizzily around me. At the same time the manoeuvre brought a sharply piercing pain to my right chest and I wondered drearily whether any of my ribs had been broken and were sticking into a lung. The way I felt I was prepared to believe anything.

A brief rest, then I had twisted up until I was in a kneeling position. I bent sharply from the waist, my head coming close to the concrete floor to give gravity an assist in freeing the Hanyatti from the holster. Nothing happened. I tried again, overdid the violence of the forward jerk and fell flat on my face. When my head finally cleared I repeated the process and this time the gun finally slid from the holster and clattered to the floor.

In the poor half-light of the cellar I knelt and peered anxiously at the gun. A character with a sadistic enough turn of mind might have considered it highly amusing to empty the gun and replace it in the holster. But I'd been spared the humorist. The loading indicator registered nine. The magazine was full.

I squirmed round on the floor, picked up the Hanyatti with my bound hands, slipped the safety catch and dragged the gun around to my right side as far as the unnaturally twisted position of my left shoulder would allow. The folds of my jacket kept getting in the way of the automatic but I strained and pushed until I could see about three inches of the barrel protruding beyond my side. I bent my knees and hitched myself forward until my feet were within fifteen inches of the muzzle.

For a brief moment I considered trying to shoot through the PVC that bound my ankles. But only for a brief moment. Buffalo Bill might have done it, but then Buffalo Bill had had binocular vision and I felt pretty certain he'd never performed any of his sharp-shooting feats in dim half-light with numbed hands bound behind his back. The chances were a thousand to one that the net result achieved would be the anticipation of those two London surgeons who wanted to remove my left foot. I decided to concentrate instead on the eighteen inch length of four twisted strands of PVC that attached my legs to the wine-bin.

I sighted as best I could and squeezed the trigger. Three things happened, instantaneously and simultaneously. The recoil from the gun together with the unnatural position in which I was holding it, made me feel as if my right thumb had broken: the reverberation of the sound in that confined space had the same effect on my eardrums: and I felt a wind ruffle my hair as the ricocheting bullet, soundless in flight in that echoing intensity of sound, came within half an inch of ending my problems for good and all. And a fourth thing happened. I missed.

Two seconds later I fired again. No hesitation. If there was a watchdog upstairs taking his ease he'd be charging down the cellar steps in a matter of moments to find out who was breaking up his happy home. Not only that, but I knew if I stopped to consider the chances of the ricochet being that half inch lower this time I never would get around to pulling that trigger.

Again the close thunder of the explosion and this time I was sure my right thumb had gone. But I hardly cared. The wire binding me to the wine-bin was neatly severed in half. Buffalo Bill couldn't have done it any better.

I twisted, grabbed one of the wine-bin supports with my all but useless hands, hoisted myself shakily to my feet, rested my left elbow on a convenient shelf and stood there waiting, staring at the door. Anyone coming to investigate would have to pass through that door and, as a target, a man at six feet was going to be a much simpler proposition altogether than a wire at eighteen inches.

For a whole minute I stood there motionless apart from the trembling of my legs, straining to the utmost what little the gunshots had left me of my hearing. Nothing. I risked a couple of quick hops out to the centre of the cellar and peered up through the high window in case my gaoler was playing it careful and smart. Again nothing. Another couple of hops and I was by the door testing the handle with my elbow. Locked.

I turned my back on the door, scrabbled around with the muzzle of the Hanyatti until I'd found the lock, and pulled the trigger. With the second shot the door gave abruptly beneath my weight — it says much for the state of mind that I'd never even checked the position of the hinges to see whether the door opened inwards or outwards — and I fell heavily through the doorway on to the concrete passageway outside. If there was anyone waiting out there with the hopeful intention of clobbering me, he'd never have a better chance.

No one clobbered me because there was no one waiting there to clobber me. Dazed and sick I pushed myself wearily to my feet, located a light switch and clicked it with my shoulder. The naked bulb, hanging at the end of a short flex above my head, remained dead. It could be a dud lamp, it could be a blown fuse, but my guess was that it meant no power at all: the air in that cellar had the musty lifelessncss that bespoke long abandonment by whoever had once owned the house.

A flight of worn stone steps stretched up into the gloom. I hopped up the first two steps, teetered on the point of imbalance like a spinning top coming to rest but managed to twist round quickly and sit down before I toppled. Once down, it seemed the safe and prudent thing to do to keep my centre of gravity as low as possible by staying there, and I made it to the top of the stairs by jack-knifing upwards on the seat of my pants and the soles of my shoes.

The door at the head of the cellar stairs was also locked but it wasn't my door and I still had five shots left in the Hanyatti. The lock gave at the first shot and I stumbled out into the hallway beyond.

The hallway, high, wide, and narrow, featured what estate agents euphemistically call a wealth of exposed timbering— black, ugly, adze-cut oaken beams everywhere. Two doors on either side, both closed, a glass door at the far end, another beside me leading presumably to the rear of the house, a staircase above my head and an uneven parquet floor thickly covered with a dust streaked by the confused tracks of footprints leading from the glass door to the spot where I was standing. The finest feature of the hall was the fact that it was completely deserted. I knew now I was alone. But for how long I didn't know. It seemed a poor idea to waste even a second.

I didn't want to smear the tracks in the hall so I turned to the door beside me. For a change it was unlocked. I passed into another passage that gave on the domestic quarters — larder, pantry, kitchen, scullery. An old-fashioned house and a big one.

I went through those apartments, opening cupboards and pulling drawers out on to the floor, but I was wasting my time. No signs here of hasty abandonment like the keepers skipping out from the Flannan Isle lighthouse, the ex-owners had cleaned out the lot when they lit out. They hadn't left as much as a safety pin, not that a safety pin would have been found of much value in cutting the PVC that bound hands and ankles.

The outside kitchen door was unlocked. I opened it and hopped out into the still heavily falling rain. I looked around me, but I could have been anywhere. An acre of overgrown garden completely run to seed, ten foot high hedges that hadn't felt a clipper in years, and dripping pines and cypresses soughing under a dark and weeping sky. Wuthering Heights had nothing on it.

There were two wooden buildings not far away, one big enough to be a garage, the other less than half the size. I hopped my way towards the latter for the sound reason that it was the nearer of the two. The door hung crazily on twisted hinges and creaked dismally as I put my shoulder to the splintered wood.

It was a shed that had been obviously used as a workshop — to one side, below the filthy window, stood a massive workbench with a rusty vice still bolted in position. If it wasn't too rusted to turn and if I could find some cutting tool to jam into it, that vice would be useful indeed. Only, as far as I could see, there were no cutting tools of any description, no tools of any kind: as in the house, so here — the departing owners had been nothing if not thorough when it had come to the removal of their goods and chattels. The walls were completely bare.

They had left only one thing, and that because it was quite useless — a square plywood box half full of rubbish and wood-shaving. With the aid of a piece of wood I managed to tilt the box and spill its contents on the floor. With the stick I stirred the jumble of odds and ends — pieces of wood, rusty screws, bent pieces of metal, twisted nails — and, at last, a very old and rusty hacksaw blade.

It took me ten minutes to jam the blade into the vice — my hands were numbed to the point of almost paralytic uselessness — and another ten minutes to saw my way through the PVC binding my wrists. I could have done it in far less time but as with my hands behind my back, I could'nt see what I was doing, I had to go easy: I could have sawn through an artery or a tendon just as easily as through a wire and I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. My hands were as lifeless as that.

They looked pretty lifeless too, when I'd severed the last PVC strand and brought them round to the front for examination, swollen to a size half as much again as normal with smooth, bluish-purple distended skin and the blood swelling slowly from torn skin on the inside of both wrists and most of my fingers. I hoped that the dark flaking rust on the blade of the hacksaw that had caused those cuts wasn't going to give me blood-poisoning.

I sat on the side of the box for five minutes, cursing savagely as the mottled purple of my hands slowly began to vanish and the circulation to come pounding back with the almost intolerably exquisite agony of a thousand barbed needles tearing at the flesh. When I could at last hold the hacksaw blade in my hands, I cut the PVC on my ankles and cursed some more, just as colourfully as before, till the blood supply in my feet came back to something like normal. I pulled up my shirt to have a look at the right-hand side of my chest and just as quickly and roughly stuffed the shirt back under the waistband of my trousers. A prolonged inspection would only have made me feel twice as ill as I was already: in the few clear patches in the thick crust of blood that covered almost all of the side of my body the grotesquely swelling bruises were already turning all the kaleidoscopic colours of the rainbow. I thought sourly that if the man who had used me for football practice had chosen the left instead of the right side of my chest he'd have broken all his toes on the Hanyatti. It was as well that he hadn't.

I had the Hanyatti in my hand as I left the tool-shed, but I didn't really expect to have to use it. I didn't go near the house — I knew I'd find nothing there except the footprints and that was a matter for Hardanger's experts. From the front of the house a driveway curved away between dripping pines and I limped off down the weed-grown gravel. It would have to lead to a road of sorts.

A few paces then I stopped and tried to think as best I could with my thinking equipment in the poor shape it was. Whoever had clobbered and tied me up might want it to be known that I had been temporarily removed from the scene: it was just as possible, for all I knew to the contrary, that he didn't. If he didn't then he couldn't have been able to afford to leave my car where it had been and would have removed it. Where? What simpler and more logical than to hide Caveil's car where he had hidden Cavell? I headed back to the garage.

The car was there. I got in, slumped wearily back on the cushions, sat there for a few minutes, then climbed as wearily out again. If someone thought it would be to his advantage not to have people know I was out of commission, then it might equally well be to my advantage not to have that someone know that I was back in commission again. How this would be to my advantage I couldn't even begin to guess at the moment, my mind was so gummed up by weakness and exhaustion and the beating I had taken that coherent thought was beyond me. All I knew was that I was dimly aware that it might be to my advantage and with the shape I was in and considering the lack of progress I was making I needed every advantage I could get. The car would be a dead giveaway. I started walking.

The driveway led to a road that was no more than a rutted track deep in water and viscous mud. I turned right, for the good enough reason that there was a long steep hill to the left, and after perhaps twenty minutes I came to a secondary road with a signpost reading "Netley Common: 2 miles." Netley Common, I knew, was on the main London-Alfringham road, about ten miles from Alfringham, which meant I'd been taken at least six miles from the A.A. box where I had been laid out. I wondered why, maybe that had been the only deserted house with a cellar within six miles.

It took me over an hour to cover the two miles to Netley, partly because of the shape I was in anyway, partly because I kept hopping into bushes and behind the cover of trees whenever a car or a cyclist came along. Netley Common itself I bypassed by taking to the fields — empty of all signs of life on that teeming and bitter October morning — and finally reached the main road where I sank down, half-kneeling, half-lying, in a ditch behind the screen of some bushes. I felt like a water-logged doll coming apart at the seams. I was so exhausted that even my chest didn't seem to be hurting any more. I was bone-chilled as a mortuary slab and shaking like a marionette in the hands of a frenzied puppeteer, I was growing old.

Twenty minutes later I had grown a great deal older. Traffic in rural Wiltshire is never up to Piccadilly standards at the best of times, but even so it was having an off-day. In that time only three cars and a bus had passed me and as they were all full or nearly so none of them was any use to me. What I wanted was a truck with only one man in it or, failing that, a car with just the driver, although how any man alone in a car would react when he saw the wild dishevelled figure of a lifer on the lam or a refugee from a canvas jacket was anybody's guess.

The next car that came along had two men in it but I didn't hesitate. I recognised the slow-moving, big, black Wolseley for what it was long before I could see the uniforms of the men inside. The car braked smoothly to a stop and a big burly sergeant, relief and concern in his face, was out and helping me to my feet as I stumbled up the bank. He had the arm and the build to carry weight and I let him take most of mine.

"Mr. Cavell?" He peered closely into my face. "It is Mr. Cavell?"

I felt I'd changed a lot in the past few hours but not all that much so I admitted I was.

"Thank God for that. There's been half a dozen police cars and heaven only knows how many of the military out looking for you for the past two hours." He helped me solicitously into the back seat. "Now you just take it easy, sir."

"I'll do just that." I eased my squelching, sodden, mud-stained figure into a corner. "I'm afraid this seat will never be the same again, Sergeant."

"Don't you worry about that, sir — plenty more cars where this one came from," he said cheerfully. He climbed in beside the constable at the wheel and picked up the microphone as the car moved off. "Your wife is waiting at the police station with Inspector Wylie."

"Wait a minute," I said quickly. "No hullaballoo about Cavell returning from the dead, Sergeant. Keep it quiet. I don't want to be taken anywhere I can be recognised. Know of any quiet spot where I could be put up and stay without being seen?"

He twisted and stared at me. He said slowly, "I don't understand."

I made to say that it didn't matter a damn whether he understood or not, but it wouldn't have been fair. Instead I said, "It is important, Sergeant. At least I think so. Any hideaway you know of?"

"Well." He hesitated. "It's difficult, Mr. Cavell—"

"There's my cottage, Sergeant," the driver volunteered.

"You know Jean's away with her mother. Mr. Cavell could have that."

"Is it quiet, has it a phone, and is it near Alfringham?" I asked.

"All three of them, sir."

"Fine. Many thanks. Sergeant, please speak to your inspector. Privately. Ask him to come to this cottage as soon as possible with my wife. With Superintendent Hardanger, if he's available. And have you — the Alfringham police, I mean — a doctor they can rely on? Who doesn't talk out of turn, I mean?"

"We do that." He peered at me. "A doctor?"

I nodded and pulled back my jacket. The rain of that morning had soaked me to the skin and the blood seeping through from the bruises, much diluted, had covered most of the shirt-front in a particularly unpleasant shade of brownish-red. The sergeant took a quick look, turned and said softly to the driver, "Come on, Rollie boy. You've always wanted to make like Moss and now's your chance. But keep your finger off that damned siren."

Then he reached for the microphone and started talking in a low urgent voice.

"I'm not going into any damned hospital and that's final," I said irritably. With a couple of ham sandwiches and half a tumbler of whisky inside me I was feeling much more my old nasty self again. "Sorry, Doc, but there it is."

"I'm sorry too." The doctor bending over me in the bed in that police bungalow was a neat, methodical and precise man with a neat, methodical and precise voice. "I can't make you go, more's the pity. I would if I could, for you're a pretty sick man in urgent need of radiological examination and hospital care. Two of your ribs seem cracked and a third is definitely fractured. How badly and how dangerously I can't say. I don't have X-ray eyes."

"Not to worry," I said reassuringly. "With the way you've strapped me up I can't see any broken ribs sticking into a lung, or out through my skin for that matter of it."

"Unless you yield to an irresistible compulsion to indulge in violent gymnastics," the doctor said dryly, "we need not concern ourselves with the possibility of you stabbing yourself to death. What does concern me is the likelihood of pneumonia — broken bones plus the exhausting, unpleasant and very wet time you've been through provide an ideal breeding ground. Pneumonia together with broken ribs make for a very nasty condition. Cemeteries are full of people who could once have testified to that fact."

"Make me laugh some more," I said sourly.

"Mrs. Cavell." He ignored me and looked at Mary, sitting still and pale on the other side of the bed. "Check respiration, pulse, temperature every hour. Any upward change in those— or difficulty in respiration — and please contact me at once. You have my number. Finally I must warn you and those gentlemen here " — he nodded to Hardanger and Wylie—"that if Mr. Cavell stirs from his bed inside the next seventy-two hours I refuse to regard myself as in any way medically responsible for his well-being."

He picked up his tool-bag and took off. As the door closed behind him I swung my legs off the bed and started to pull on a clean shirt. It hurt, but not as much as I expected it would. Neither Mary nor Hardanger said anything and Wylie, seeing that they had no intention of speaking, said, "You want to kill yourself, Cavell? You heard what Dr. Whitelaw said. Why don't you stop him, Superintendent?"

"He's off his rocker," Hardanger explained. "You'll observe, Inspector, that not even his wife tries to stop him? Some things in this life are a complete and utter waste of time and making Cavell see sense is one of them." He glared at me. "So you've been coming all over clever and lone-wolfish again, haven't you? And you see what happens? Look at the bloody mess you're in now. Literally. Look at it. And nothing to show. When in God's name are you going to realise that our only hope lies in working together? The hell with your d'Artagnan methods, Cavell. System, method, routine, co-operation — that's the only way you ever get anywhere against big crime. And damn well you know it."

"I know it," I agreed. "Patient skilled men working hard under patient skilled supervision. Sure, I'm with you. But not here. No room for patience now. Patient men take time and we have no time. You've made arrangements for an armed watch to be kept on this house I was in and to have your sleuths examine the footprints?"

He nodded. "Your story. Let's waste no more time."

"You'll have it. Just as soon as you tell me why you haven't bawled me out for wasting valuable police time in searching for me and why you haven't tried to use your authority to make me stay in bed. Are we worried, Superintendent?"

"The newspapers have the story," he said flatly. "About the break-in, the murders, the theft of the Satan Bug. We didn't expect that last thing. They're hysterical already. Screaming banner headlines in every national daily." He pointed to a pile of newspapers on the floor beside him. "Want to see them?"

"And waste more time? I can guess. That's not all that's worrying you."

"It isn't. The General was on the phone — he was looking for you — half an hour ago. Six Gestetner duplicated letters delivered by special messengers this morning to the biggest concerns in Fleet Street. Character saying that his previous warning had been ignored: no acknowledgement of it on the 9 a .m. B.B.C. news. The walls of Mordon still stood, some rubbish like that. Said that within the next few hours he would give a demonstration proving (a) he had those viruses and (b) he was willing to use them."

"Will the papers print it?"

"They'll print it. First of all they — the editors — got together and contacted the Special Branch at Scotland Yard. The Assistant Commissioner got in touch with the Home Secretary and I gather there was some kind of emergency meeting. Anyway a Cabinet order not to print. Fleet Street, I gather, told the Government to take a running jump to itself and told the Government that it is the servant of the people and not vice versa, and that if the nation stood in deadly peril — and that on the face of it they certainly seemed to — the people had the right to know. They also reminded the Government that if they put one little foot wrong in this matter they would be out on their ears overnight. The London evening papers will be on the streets about now. I'll bet the headlines are the biggest since VE day."

"The ball's up on the slates," I nodded. I watched Mary, her face expressionless and carefully not looking at me, button my shirt-cuffs — with both wrists bandaged and my fingers heavily scratched it was a bit much for me — and went on, "Well, it'll certainly provide the British public with a conversational change from the football pools, what so-and-so said on TV last night and the latest rock and roll sensation." I went on to tell him of what happened during the night, omitting my trip to London to see the General.

At the end Hardanger said heavily, "Very, very interesting. Are you trying to tell me that you woke up in the middle of the night and — without telling Mary — started chasing and phoning around Wiltshire?"

"I'm telling you. The old secret police technique — and you can't beat it: get them at their sleepiest and most apprehensive and you're already half-way there. And I didn't go to sleep in the first place. I went without telling because I knew damned well it would go so much against all your training and instincts that you wouldn't hesitate to use force to stop me."

"If I had," he said coldly, "you might have a full set of ribs right now."

" If you had, we wouldn't have narrowed this list so much. Five of them. I let drop to all of them that we were getting pretty close to an answer and one of them was scared enough to panic and try to stop me."

"You assume."

"It's a damned good assumption. Got a better? For a starter I suggest we haul in Chessingham straight away. There's plenty on him and—"

"I forgot," Hardanger interrupted. "You phoned the General last night—"

"Yes." I didn't even bother to look shame-faced. "Wanted authority to hash about in my own way — knew you wouldn't grant it."

"Clever devil, aren't you?" If he guessed I was lying there were no signs of it in his face. "You asked him to check on this fellow Chessingham, his service career. Seems he was a driver in the R.A.S.C."

"That's it then. Going to pull him in?"

"Yes. His sister?"

"She wouldn't be guilty of anything other than covering up for her own flesh and blood. And the mother is in the clear. That's for sure."

"So. That leaves the four others you contacted this morning. You'd put them all in the clear?"

"I would not. Take Colonel Weybridge. The only certain facts we know about him are these: he has access to the security files and so would be in a position to blackmail Dr. Hartnell into co-operating—"

"You mentioned last night you thought Hartnell was in the clear."

"I said I'd reservations about him. Secondly, why didn't our gallant Colonel, like his gallant commanding officer, volunteer to go into the lab instead of me? Was it because he knew the botulinus virus was loose in there? Thirdly, he is the only one without an alibi for the time of the murder."

"Good lord, Cavell, you're not suggesting we pull in Colonel Weybridge? I can tell you we had a pretty nasty time from both Cliveden and Weybridge when we insisted on fingerprinting their quarters this morning. Cliveden actually phoned the Assistant Commissioner."

"And got his head in his hands?"

"In a gentlemanly sort of way. He hates our guts now."

"That helps. This fingerprinting of the suspects' houses. Anything turned up yet?"

"Give them a chance," Hardanger protested. "It's not one o'clock yet. Be a couple of hours before they finish tabulating their results. And I can't pull in Weybridge. The War Office would have my scalp in twenty-four hours."

"If this lad with the Satan Bug starts chucking it around," I said, "there won't be any War Office in twenty-four hours. People's feelings have ceased to be of any concern. Besides, you don't have to throw him in the cooler. Confine him to his quarters, open arrest, house arrest, whatever you call it. Anything turned up in the past few hours?"

"A thousand stones and nothing under any of them," Hardanger said grimly. "The hammer and pliers were definitely the ones used in the break-in. But we'd been sure of that anyway. Not a single useful print in the Bedford decoy van. The same for the telephone box which was used to make the call to Reuter's last night. We've put your money-lending friend Tuffnell and his partner through the mill and had the Fraud Squad examine their books until we know as much about their business as they do themselves: we could have them both behind bars in a week but I just can't be bothered. Anyway, Dr. Hartnell is definitely their only customer from number one lab. The London police are trying to trace the man who sent the letters to Fleet Street, if we're wasting our time down here they might as well waste their time up there. Inspector Martin has spent the entire morning questioning everyone in number one lab about their social relations with each other and the only thing he has turned up so far is that Dr. Hartnell and Chessingham were on visiting terms. We already knew that. We're having a check made on every known movement of every suspect in the past year and we have teams of men checking with the occupants of every house within three miles of Mordon to see if they noticed anything strange or out of the way on the night of the murders. Something is bound to turn up sometime. If you spread the net wide enough and the meshes are small enough. It always does."

"Sure. In a couple of weeks. Or a couple of months. Our friend with the Satan Bug has promised to do his stuff in a few hours. Damn it, Superintendent, we can't just wait for something to turn up. Organisation, no matter on how massive a scale, won't do it. Method number two, lighting a meerschaum and making like Sherlock, isn't going to get us far either. We have to provoke a reaction."

"You already provoked a reaction," Hardanger said sourly. "See where it got you? You want more reactions. How?"

"As a starter, investigate every financial transaction and every bank book entry of everyone working in number one, every entry in the past year — and don't forget Weybridge and Cliveden. Let the suspects know. Then squads of policemen to every house. Search each house from top to bottom and have the searchers list every tiniest thing they find. This will not only worry the man we're after — it might actually turn up something."

"If we're going to go that far," Inspector Wylie put in, "we might as well throw the lot of them in the cooler. It's one sure way of taking our man out of circulation."

"Hopeless, Inspector. We may be dealing with a maniac but he's a brilliant maniac. He'd have thought of that possibility months ago. He's got an organisation — nobody in Mordon could possibly have delivered those letters in London this morning — and you can bet your pension that the first thing he'd have done after getting the viruses would be to get rid of them."

"We'll try stirring things up," Hardanger said reluctantly. "Though where I'm going to find all the men to—"

"Pull them off the house-to-house questioning. It's a waste of time."

He nodded, again reluctantly, and spoke at length on the phone while I finished dressing. When he put the phone down he said to me, "I'm not going to waste my breath arguing. Go ahead and kill yourself. But you might think of Mary."

"I'm thinking of her all right. I'm thinking that if our unknown friend gets careless with the Satan Bug there'll soon be no Mary. There'll be nothing."

This seemed to be a pretty effective conversation stopper but after some time Wylie said thoughtfully, "If this unknown friend does give a demonstration I wonder if the Government really would close down Mordon."

"Close it? Our pal wants it flattened to the ground. It's impossible to guess what they will do. Things are only at the badly-scaring stage so far — no one's out and out terrified."

"Speak for yourself," Hardanger said sourly. "And just what are you thinking of doing now, Cavell? If you'll be kind enough to tell me," he added with heavy irony.

"I'll tell you. Don't laugh, but I'm going to disguise myself." I fingered the scars on my left cheek. "A little assistance from Mary and her war-paint and these will be gone. Horn-rim spectacles, a pencil moustache, grey suit, credentials identifying me as Inspector Gibson of the Metropolitan Police and I'm a changed man."

"Who's going to supply the credentials?" Hardanger asked suspiciously. "Me?"

"Not necessary. I always carry them around with me, anyway, just in case." I ignored his stare and went on, "And then I'll call again on our friend Dr. MacDonald. In his absence, if you understand. The good doctor, on a modest salary, manages to live like a minor Eastern potentate, everything except the harem, and maybe he discreetly keeps that somewhere else. Also drinking heavily because he's worried stiff, about the Satan Bug and his own personal safety. I don't believe him. So I'm calling on him."

"You're wasting your time," Hardanger said heavily. "MacDonald is above suspicion. Long, distinguished and spotless record. Spent twenty minutes this morning going over it."

"I've read it," I said. "Some of the star turns in the Old Bailey over the past few years have had immaculate records — until the law caught up with them."

"He's a highly respected character locally," Wylie put in. "Bit of a snob, associates only with the very best people, but everyone speaks very well of him."

"And there's more to his record than you've read, Cavell," Hardanger went on. "In the report there's only a brief mention of his wartime service in the Army but it so happens I'm a personal friend of the colonel who commanded MacDonald's regiment in the last two years of the war. I rang him up. Dr. MacDonald, it seems, has been strangely reticent about himself. Did you know that as a second lieutenant in Belgium in 1940 he won the D.S.O. and the bar, that he finished up as a lieut-colonel in a tank regiment with a string of medals as long as your arm?"

"I didn't and I don't get it," I admitted. "He struck me as a phoney-tough type, who, if ever he'd done any valorous deeds, wouldn't have been backward about admitting them. He wanted me to think he was afraid: he didn't want me to think he was brave. Why? Because he knew he had to justify his heavy drinking so he put it down to personal fear. But, in view of his record, it almost certainly wasn't that. Queer item number one. Queer item number two — why wasn't all this listed in his security report. Easton Derry compiled most of those dossiers — and Derry would be unlikely to overlook so large a gap in a man's history."

"I don't know about that," Hardanger admitted. "But this much is certain — if the report I had on MacDonald is correct then on the face of it it seems highly unlikely that a man so brave, selfless and patriotic could possibly be mixed up in anything like that."

"This colonel of MacDonald's regiment who told you about him — could you get him down here immediately?"

Hardanger let me have his cool speculative look. "Thinking he's a phoney in every sense? That this man's been substituted for the real MacDonald?"

"I don't know what to think. We must have another squint at his record card and check that Derry really did compile it."

"We can soon fix that," Hardanger nodded. This time he was on the phone for almost ten minutes and when he'd finished with that so had Mary with my face and I was all ready to go. Hardanger said, "You look bloody awful but I wouldn't recognise you if I saw you in the street. The file's in the safe in my hotel. Shall we go there?"

I turned to leave the room. Hardanger took a look at the palms and fingers of my hands, still slowly welling blood from the hack-saw scratches. He said irritably, "Why didn't you have the doctor bandage your fingers as well? Want to get blood poisoning?"

"Have you ever tried to use a gun with your fingers bandaged together?" I asked sourly.

"Well, man, a pair of gloves then. That's ridiculous."

"Just as bad. Couldn't get a finger through the trigger guard."

"Rubber gloves," he said impatiently. "Plastic."

"It's a point," I agreed. "Certainly it would hide those damn scratches." I stared at him without seeing him then sat down heavily on the bed. "Hell's bells!" I said softly.

I sat very still for a few seconds. Nobody spoke. I went on, speaking more to myself than anyone else, "Rubber gloves. To cover the scratches. Then why not elastic stockings? Why not?" I looked up vaguely and saw Hardanger glancing at Wylie, maybe thinking that they had let the doctor go too soon, but Mary came to my rescue.

She touched my arm and I turned to look at her. Her face was set and the big green eyes wide with apprehension and the birth of an unpleasant certainty.

"Mordon," she whispered. "The fields round it. Gorse, they're covered with gorse. And she was wearing elastic stockings, Pierre."

"What in heaven's name—" Hardanger began harshly.

"Inspector Wylie," I interrupted. "How long would it take you to get an arrest warrant? Murder. Accessory."

"No time at all," he said grimly. He patted his breast pocket. "I have three of them here already signed. Like you said yourself, there are times when we can't wait for the law. We fill 'em in. Murder, eh?"

"Accessory."

"And the name?" Hardanger demanded. He still wasn't sure that he shouldn't be calling the doctor.

"Dr. Roger Hartnell," I said.