Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 73, No. 3. Whole No. 424, March 1979

Waiting for Mr. McGregor by Julian Symons[19]

Julian Symons is one of the finest writers of crime and detective stories, both long and short, in our time. So you can imagine our delight when Mr. Symons advised us that he had written a new series of four contemporary short stories. You will find the stories different in theme, background, and storyline, but alike in reflecting Mr. Symons’ approach to the modern mystery story, alike in revealing Mr. Symons’ writer’s-eye-and-mind, with characterization as important in the scheme of things as suspense and the sequence of events.

“Waiting for Mr. McGregor” will appear in an anthology titled verdict of thirteen, edited by Julian Symons, to be published by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom and by Harper & Row in the United States.

Now, meet Hilary Engels Mannering and his BPB — his Beatrix Potter Brigade — and attend one of the strangest trials by jury on unofficial record...

Even in these egalitarian English days nannies are still to be seen in Kensington Gardens, pushing ahead of them the four-wheeled vehicles that house the children of the rich. On a windy day in April a dozen perambulators were moving slowly in the direction of the Round Pond, most of them in pairs. The nannies all wore uniforms. Their charges were visible only as well-wrapped bundles, some of them waving gloved fists into the air.

The parade was watched by more people than usual. A blond young man sat on a bench reading a newspaper. A pretty girl at the other end of the bench looked idly into vacancy. A rough-looking character pushed a broom along a path in a desultory way. The next bench held a man in black jacket, striped trousers, and bowler hat, reading the Financial Times, a man of nondescript appearance with his mouth slightly open, and a tramp-like figure who was feeding pigeons with crumbs from a paper bag. Twenty yards away another young man leaned against a lamppost.

A pram with a crest on its side approached the bench where the blond young man sat. The nanny wore a neat cap and a blue striped uniform. Her baby could be seen moving about and a wail came from it, but its face was hidden by the pram hood. The pram approached the bench where the man in the black jacket sat.

The blond young man dropped his newspaper. The group moved into action. The young man and the girl, the three people at the next bench, the man beside the lamppost, and the man pushing the broom, took from their pockets masks which they fitted over their faces. The masks were of animals. The blond young man was a rabbit, the girl a pig, the others a squirrel, a rat, another pig, a cat, and a frog.

The masks were fitted in a moment, and the animal seven converged on the pram with the crest on its side. Half a dozen people nearby stood and gaped, and so did other nannies. Were they all rehearsing a scene for a film, with cameras hidden in the bushes? In any case English reticence forbade interference, and they merely watched or turned away their heads. The nanny beside the pram uttered a well-bred muted scream and fled. The child in the pram cried lustily.

The blond young man was the first beside the pram, with the girl just after him. He pushed down the hood, pulled back the covers, and recoiled at what he saw. The roaring baby in the pram was of the right age and looked of the right sex. There was just one thing wrong. The baby was coal-black.

The young man looked at the baby disbelievingly for a moment, then shouted at the rest of them, “It’s a plant. Get away, fast!”

The words came distorted through the mask, but their sense was clear enough, and they followed accepted procedure, scattering in three directions and tearing off the masks as they went. Pick-up cars were waiting for them at different spots in the Bayswater Road, and they reached them without misadventure except for the tramp, who found himself confronted by an elderly man brandishing an umbrella.

“I saw what you were doing, sir. You were frightening that poor—”

The tramp swung a loaded cosh against the side of his head. The elderly man collapsed.

The baby went on roaring. The nanny came back to him. When he saw her he stopped roaring and began to chuckle.

Somebody blew a police whistle, much too late. The cars all got away without trouble.

“What happened?” asked the driver of the car containing the blond young man and the pretty girl.

“It was a plant,” he said angrily. “A bloody plant.”

Hilary Engels Mannering liked to say that his life had been ordered by his name. With a name like Hilary Mannering how could one fail to be deeply esthetic in nature? (How the syllables positively flowed off the tongue.) And Engels, the name insisted on by his mother because she had been reading Engels’ account of conditions among the Manchester poor a day or two before his birth — if one was named Engels, wasn’t one almost in duty bound to have revolutionary feelings?

Others attributed the pattern of Hilary’s adult life to his closeness to his mother and alienation from his father. Others said that an only child of such parents was bound to be odd. Others still talked about Charlie Ramsden.

Johnny Mannering, Hilary’s father, was a cheerful extrovert, a wine merchant who played tennis well enough to get through the preliminary round at Wimbledon more than once, had a broken nose and a broken collarbone to show for his courage at rugby, and when his rugby and tennis days were over became a scratch golfer. To say that Johnny was disappointed in his son would be an understatement. He tried to teach the boy how to hold a cricket bat, gave Hilary a tennis racquet for his tenth birthday, and patted the ball over the net to him endlessly. Endlessly and uselessly.

“What I can’t stand is that he doesn’t even try,” Johnny said to his wife Melissa. “When the ball hit him on the leg today — a tennis ball, mind you — he started sniveling. He’s what you’ve made him, a sniveling little milksop.”

Melissa took no notice of such remarks, and indeed hardly seemed to hear them. She had a kind of statuesque blank beauty which concealed a deep dissatisfaction with the comfortable life that moved between a manor house in Sussex and a large apartment in Kensington. She should have been — what should she have been? A rash romantic poet, a heroine of some lost revolution, an explorer in Africa — anything but what she was, the wife of a wealthy sporting English wine merchant. She gave to Hilary many moments of passionate affection to which he passionately responded, and days or even months of neglect.

In the nursery years that many psychologists think the most important of our lives, Hilary was cared for by big-bosomed Anna, who washed and bathed him, wiped his bottom when he was dirty, and read to him endlessly the stories of Beatrix Potter. Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, and Samuel Whiskers, Pigling Bland and Jeremy Fisher, became figures more real to the small boy than his own parents.

And brooding over all these nursery characters, rather as Hilary’s father brooded with angry discontent over his unsatisfactory household, was the farmer Mr. McGregor, who had put Peter Rabbit’s father into a pie, and whose great foot could be seen in one illustration about to come down on Peter. Anna read and Hilary shivered, finding in the figure of the farmer an image of his own frightening father.

Childhood does not last forever, but there are those who cling to childish things rather than put them away. Hilary went up to Oxford — which to Johnny Mannering was still the only possible university — in the early Sixties, just before the days of the Beatles and permissiveness. There he displayed the collected works of Beatrix Potter on his shelves beside books more fashionable for an undergraduate.

“But, my dear, these are the existential masterpieces of the century,” he said in his pleasant, although thin and slightly fluting voice. “The passions, the deceits, the poignancy of it all — really Proust and Joyce are nothing to it.” Beatrix Potter gave him the only celebrity he achieved at Oxford. He joined two or three radical groups and left them within a few weeks, did a little acting but could not remember his lines, had three poems published in a little magazine.

He had just one friend, a broad-shouldered blond puzzled-looking Rugger blue named Charlie Ramsden, who had been at Hilary’s public school, and had always regarded him as a genius. This view was not changed when Hilary took as poor a degree as his own, something they both attributed to the malice of the examiners. Hilary, on his side, treated Charlie with the affectionate superiority one might give to a favorite dog.

“You must meet Charlie,” he would say to new acquaintances. “He’s terribly good at rugby football.” Charlie would smile ruefully, rub his nose, and say, “’Fraid I am.” They were really, as the acquaintances remarked with astonishment, almost inseparable. Not long after he came down, Hilary surprised his friends, not to mention his parents, by marrying a girl he had met in his last year at Oxford. Joyce was the daughter of an old and enormously rich family, and the wedding got a good deal of attention from gossip writers. Charlie Ramsden was best man.

The marriage was six months old when Johnny Mannering, driving home with Melissa after a party, skidded on an icy road and went over the central barrier into the lane of oncoming traffic, where his car was hit head on by a lorry. Both Johnny and Melissa were killed immediately. At the age of 25 Hilary found himself the distinctly rich owner of the family business. Within another six months his marriage had ended.

Hilary never told anybody what was in the note that Joyce left on the drawing-room mantelpiece of their house in Belgravia, beyond saying that she had done the boringly conventional thing as usual. There was no doubt, however, that she had gone away with a man, and his identity did cause surprise. The man was Charlie Ramsden.

Hilary divorced Joyce, she married Charlie, and Joyce and Charlie settled in South Africa where he became a farmer. Those closest to Hilary (but nobody was very close to him) said that he recovered from the loss of Joyce, but that he never forgave Charlie Ramsden. He never mentioned either of them again.

In the years that followed he gathered the biggest collection of Beatrix Potter manuscripts, first editions, and association copies in the world, put up money for a radical magazine with which he became bored after a couple of issues, and for two plays both of which were flops. He traveled abroad a good deal, sometimes in the company of young actors who appeared in the plays. In Amsterdam, on one of these trips, he met Klaus Dongen.

Klaus was half Dutch, half German, a revolutionary terrorist who believed that destruction of all existing national states must precede the advent of a free society. His group, the NLG or Netherlands Liberation Group, claimed credit for half a dozen assassinations including one of a prominent Dutch politician, for a bomb that blew up in a crowded restaurant, and another in a shopping center that killed 20 people and injured twice that number.

Klaus was not interested in Hilary’s ideas, but in his money. Hilary was not interested in Klaus so much as in his NLG associates who seemed to him as fascinatingly dangerous as panthers, perfect associates for somebody named Hilary Engels Mannering. It was through Klaus that Hilary got in touch with young men and women of similar beliefs in Britain. He did not take them on trust. Each of them was required to perform an illegal act — arson, theft, violent robbery — before acceptance into the BPB. What did BPB stand for? The Beatrix Potter Brigade.

It was Hilary, of course, who had chosen the ludicrous name, and he had gone further, giving members of the group names of characters in the stories and insisting that they should wear appropriate masks when carrying out group exploits. Among their achievements were a bomb planted in a Cabinet Minister’s house (it exploded, but everybody was out), a fire bomb that had burned down most of a large London hotel, and a payroll robbery from London Airport.

Hilary himself stayed in the background, interviewing possible new recruits and setting them tests which some refused to undertake. He would then explain that he was a theatrical producer who had been testing their reactions (which was true enough in a way), and pay them off with ten-pound notes. The enterprise had the elements of theatrical childishness that he loved, and for three years now it had completely absorbed him.

On the afternoon of the unsuccessful attempt in Kensington Gardens the members of the group gathered in an extension of Mannering’s wine cellars that ran below the Thames near London Bridge. They entered by a door in an alley, which led to a passage and a storeroom. In the storeroom a perfectly camouflaged door led to a single large windowless room.

There were wine racks along two walls with dusty bottles in them. On the other walls were prints of Beatrix Potter characters — the cat Simpkin buying food for the tailor of Gloucester, Mrs. Tiggy-winkle the hedgehog in her kitchen, Pigling Bland on the way to market, and of course Peter Rabbit who was shown escaping from Farmer McGregor’s attempt to catch him with a sieve. The ceiling was low and the lighting came from lamps invisibly sunk into it, so that the effect was one of mysterious gloom. There was only one visible door, which was said to lead directly to the Thames.

“It’s romantic,” Klaus Dongen had said when he saw it. “And ridiculous.”

“And safe,” Hilary had replied.

There were ten of them besides Hilary, and he waited until they all arrived, refusing to listen when both Peter Rabbit and Simpkin tried to tell him what had happened. Hilary was now in his late thirties, a tall thin man with a sharp nose and a mouth perpetually turned down at the corners as though he had just tasted something bitter. He was older than the rest of them, and although his fluting voice had something absurd about it, he seemed in some indefinable way dangerous. His restlessness, his jerky movements, the sudden grimaces intended as laughs, all gave the impression that he was inhabited by some violent spirit which he was only just able to keep under control.

“Now that we are all here,” he said at last, “I should like a report on what happened. Peter, you were in charge of the operation.”

The thickset blond young man said, “It was a plant. They must have been on to it the whole time. It’s a bloody miracle we all got away.”

Hilary sighed gently. “That is hardly the way to present a report, Peter—”

“My name’s not Peter. I’m sick of playing kids’ games.” There was a murmur of agreement. “If you’d set this up properly—”

“Is that the way it goes? You’re blaming me, yet you are incapable even of presenting a report on what went wrong.”

“How can you present a report on a disaster?” He stared down at the table as though he were a discontented schoolboy, looking remarkably like Charlie Ramsden.

Hilary pinched out the end of a Russian cigarette, used a long narrow lighter, and puffed blue smoke. “Since you are unable or unwilling to present a report I must do so myself.”

“You weren’t there,” said the tramp who had been feeding pigeons.

“Really, Squirrel Nutkin? Would you like me to describe the man you hit when you got away?” The tramp looked at him unbelievingly. “I was on the seventh floor of a building almost opposite, watching through binoculars.”

“But not present,” somebody said.

“Not present, as you say. The directing mind should be separate from the executive hand. But let us examine the affair from the beginning. It was suggested by a foreign colleague that we should take the son of the Duke of Milchester and hold him for ransom. The sum asked would be a quarter of a million pounds, which the Duke could comfortably have paid by selling a couple of pictures. Now let me tell you the object of this — to use a piece of deplorable American slang — snatch. Why do we want the money? It is to give financial backing for a project to be undertaken from overseas by a very very famous person. Can you guess?”

“The Wolf.” The pretty girl who had sat on the bench with the blond young man breathed the words reverently. And reverence was in order. The Wolf was the most famous terrorist in the world, a man who killed with impersonal detachment, and had never been known to refuse a job if the fee was big enough.

“Well done, Pigwig.” Hilary smiled, but even his smile was acid. “But it is not wise to use that name. I shall call him Mr. McGregor, the ruler of all the little flopsy bunnies and squirrels and mice and pigs. And do you know Mr. McGregor’s target, his projected target?”

“One of the newspaper owners,” Squirrel Nutkin suggested.

“A politician? The Chancellor, the Prime Minister?” That was Pigwig.

Hilary shook his head. “Look higher.”

“You don’t mean—”

“Oh, but I do. Mr. McGregor will be aiming at, what shall I call it, the highest in the land.”

There was a gasp around the table. Again Hilary gave them his acid smile. Then the blond young man said, “But it all went wrong — we couldn’t even get the kidnaping right. Why should the Wolf think we can set up an almost impossible job when we’ve fallen down on this one?”

“The Wolf — Mr. McGregor — sets up his own jobs, as you call them. We should be his paymaster, nothing more. But, as you say, this exercise went wrong. We had not one but two dress rehearsals, and you knew exactly what the nanny looked like. So what happened?”

“The baby wasn’t the Duke’s. It was pitch-black.”

“That’s right. I looked into the pram, I saw it.” Pigwig nodded agreement.

“They knew what we were doing and substituted the black baby. And you can see what that means.” The thrust of his jaw, the jutting of his chin, were really very reminiscent of Charlie Ramsden.

Hilary rose, walked quickly and silently over to a cupboard above the wine racks, and opened it to reveal glasses, and, in a refrigerated section, several bottles of champagne. This was a ritual. When they assembled at the cellars there would always be champagne in the cupboard, and it was always Moet and Chandon of a good year. Pigwig, one of the group’s newer members, had thought of saying that she would prefer whiskey, but had decided against it.

The corks came out, the champagne was poured. Hilary raised his glass.

“I drink to Mr. McGregor. And to the success of his mission. When he comes.”

“But he won’t be coming now, will he? As you said, he only works for cash.” That was the man in the black jacket and striped trousers, an unnoticeable sandy fellow with a toothbrush mustache.

“Very true, Simpkin. But in the meantime we have a problem. The conclusion from what happened is simple and unmistakable.”

“Somebody grassed.” It was the only other woman round the table who spoke. She was in her late twenties, had a knife scar on her cheek, and a heavy ruthless face. It had been a touch of irony on Hilary’s part to name her after the genial hedgehog, Mrs. Tiggy-winkle.

“Again I deplore the use of slang, but it expresses a truth. Traitor, Judas, grass — it does not matter what name we use. The fact is that one of us must have told the authorities. Or told somebody else who gave us away. Did any of you tell a friend, a lover, a wife, a husband?” Nobody spoke. “Just so. It is as I feared.”

“There’s one queer thing,” Simpkin said. “If the counterespionage boys were tipped off, why weren’t they all over the place, why let us get away? Isn’t it possible that it was a genuine change of plan, and we were just unlucky?”

“With a black baby, Simpkin? I should like to think that was true. No, somebody was playing a joke on us.”

“I know who it was,” Peter Rabbit said. He pointed across the table at Simpkin. “You.”

“And how does Peter Rabbit make that out?” There was an undercurrent of mockery in Hilary’s voice, but he did not fail to notice that Simpkin was left sitting at one end of the table, the others drawing away as though he had an infectious disease. Simpkin himself seemed unaffected. He drained the glass in front of him and refilled it from one of the bottles on the table.

“I’ll tell you how I know,” Peter Rabbit began in a low furious voice. Hilary stopped him. His eyes were bright with pleasure.

“We must do this according to law. There was no trial in any Beatrix Potter story—”

“Sod the Beatrix Potter stories,” said the man who had been leaning against the lamppost, a youth whose spottiness was partly hidden by his thick beard.

“Now then, Samuel Whiskers, no bad language if you please,” Hilary said indulgently. The young man who had been pushing a broom spoke. He was another recent recruit, a broad-shouldered man with a round ruddy face and a snoutish vertical-nostriled nose that had led Hilary to christen him Pigling Bland. Like all of them except Peter Rabbit and Hilary himself, he spoke in the mid-Atlantic accent that denies the existence of English class distinctions.

“He’s right. We don’t want any playing about. If there’s a grass we’ve got to know who it is.”

“Precisely, Pigling. But let us do it by considering evidence rather than by simple accusation. Simpkin, you are the accused — you may remain where you are. Peter Rabbit, you will be prosecutor — you should go to the other side of the table. The rest of you will serve as the jury and should group yourselves at the end. Thank you. I will serve as judge, summing up the evidence, although the verdict will be yours. I think I should sit away from you. Over here, perhaps.” He placed his chair beside the door. “If you wish, Simpkin, you may ask one of the jury to defend you.”

“I’ll defend myself,” Simpkin said. Of all the people in the room he seemed the least moved.

“Very well. Prosecuting counsel, begin.”

The blond young man did not look at Hilary. “I should like to say that this is a stupid way—”

Hilary tapped on the arm of his chair with the lighter he was using for another cigarette. “Out of order. Produce your evidence.”

“All right. Simpkin joined the group four months ago. Since then he’s been concerned in three jobs. The first was leaving a bomb in an Underground train. He did that himself. At least he says so, but the bomb never went off. Did he ever leave it?”

Simpkin intervened. “Can I answer that?”

“Not now. You’ll have your turn.” Hilary’s eyes had been closed, and now he shut them again. With eyes closed Peter Rabbit’s voice sounded exactly like Charlie Ramsden’s.

“Two. Simpkin was one of the people who planned to get a comrade out of Brixton Prison. Almost at the last minute the comrade was moved to Parkhurst. Coincidence? Perhaps. Three. A couple of weeks ago we should have had an open-and-shut job, getting documents out of a Ministry file. They’d have been very useful to us. You, Jeremy Fisher—” He nodded at the man who had been driving one of the getaway cars. “—I don’t know your name, so I have to call you that — you set it up, you had a friend on the inside. Simpkin is suppose to know the Ministry layout, which is why he was involved so closely. The job went through all right, but the papers weren’t in the file.

“And four, the job today. You were the grass.”

He stopped. Hilary opened his eyes. “Is that all?”

“No. But I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

Simpkin’s features were watchful; he really did look a little like the cat he was supposed to represent. “No need to say much. One, I left the bomb. The mechanism was faulty, it was reported in the press.”

“Of course. You fixed a cover story.”

Simpkin shrugged. “Number two was a coincidence, must have been. Number three, maybe the papers had been taken out months earlier. Anyway why pick on me, why not on Jeremy Fisher?”

“He wasn’t in on the other jobs. You were.”

“So were you.” Simpkin permitted himself a brief catlike smile. “And if you remember, I was against this snatch. I thought it was too risky.”

“I’m an old member, not a new one. We’ve made mistakes before, but it’s since you joined us that things have been going wrong persistently. And of course you’d be against the snatch, that was another bit of cover.”

Hilary moved in his chair. “You said there was something more.”

“Yes. Some of you know that I have — that I see people—”

“We know about your social position,” Mrs. Tiggy-winkle said in her harsh voice. “We know you meet the best people. I’ve seen your name in the papers.”

“All right,” Peter Rabbit said. “Through my position I’ve been able to get a good deal of information. You know that,” he said to Hilary, who nodded and smiled his acid smile. “Last Wednesday I had dinner at Morton’s, which is a small luncheon-and-dining club with a very restricted membership. Top people in the services and the Ministries, a few members of the Government and so on.”

“Top people, period,” Mrs. Tiggy-winkle said. “Nice company you keep.”

The young man ignored her. “Morton’s has a couple of rooms where you can take people for dinner if you’ve got something extremely private to discuss. On this night — it was fairly late, very few people in the Club — three people came out of one of these rooms. One was Giles Ravelin, who’s an assistant head in MI 6. He’s a member of Morton’s, and the two others must have been his guests. One was Sir Llewellyn Scott who acts as a sort of link between the police and the counterespionage agencies. And the third was Simpkin.” He paused. “I want him to explain how he came to be there. If he can.”

It was for such moments as these that Hilary lived, moments of excitement outside the routine of life. Revolutionary intrigue he had found for the most part boring, a matter of dull little men discussing how to obtain power over other dull little men. But the possible visit of the Wolf, the fun of calling him Mr. McGregor, the tension in this long low windowless room with its hidden light that made every face look ghostly pale — oh, these were the moments that made life worth living, whatever their outcome. How would Simpkin react to Charlie Ramsden — no, to Peter Rabbit? What would he say?

The silence was total. All of them were staring at Simpkin, waiting for Simpkin. At last he gave a faint catlike cough. “What was the light like?”

“The light?” Then he realized the question’s purpose. “A good deal better than it is here. Good enough to recognize you.”

“How near were you to this man?”

“I was four feet away or less, sitting in an alcove. You didn’t see me, or I don’t think so, because I was partly hidden. But I had a good view of you.”

“You saw the man for — how long? Two seconds?”

“Long enough. It was you. I’ll ask you again. What were you doing there, whom do you work for?”

From the rest of them, those appointed as a jury, there came a murmur, an angry dangerous sound. “Answer him,” Samuel Whiskers said. “If you don’t, we’ll know what to think.”

“I can’t answer,” Simpkin said flatly. “I wasn’t there.” There was a moment’s pause while they digested this. “I was never inside that place in my life, never heard of it. I gave him a chance to say he was mistaken, but he didn’t take it. He’s lying.”

The two men looked at each other across the table. “You damn Judas, you won’t get out of it like that,” Peter Rabbit said.

Hilary steepled his fingers and offered a judge’s comment. “It comes to this then, that we have an accusation but no proof.”

“You said it was last Wednesday. What time did this meeting take place?” the pretty girl known as Pigwig asked.

“Between ten and ten thirty at night.”

“You’re sure it was Wednesday, certain that was the day?” Pigwig insisted.

As Peter Rabbit said he was sure, Simpkin seemed suddenly to wake from a brown study and showed his first sign of emotion, almost shouting at her to keep out of this, it wasn’t her affair. She disregarded him.

“Last Wednesday, Bill—”

“You are not to use personal names,” Hilary cried. “Pseudonyms must be preserved.”

“What stupid game are you playing, who do you think you’re kidding?” she screamed at him. “Half of us know who the others are and what they do, and those who don’t could easily find out. At ten o’clock last Wednesday, Bill wasn’t at any Morton’s Club or whatever it’s called. He was in bed with me, had been all evening. Around eight I got up and made scrambled eggs, then we went back to bed.”

“Is that true?” Hilary asked Simpkin, who shrugged and then nodded. “Two different stories. They can’t both be right.”

The round-faced young man called Pigling Bland said, “No, they can’t. And I know who’s telling the truth. A couple of days ago I saw him — Peter Rabbit — walking along Piccadilly. He was with somebody who looked familiar, though I couldn’t place him. But I knew who it was as soon as I heard his name today, because I’ve seen his picture in the papers often enough. It was this Scott, Sir Llewellyn Scott.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can’t prove it, can I? But yes, I’m sure.”

“Does anybody else wish to speak? Very well. You have heard the evidence, and I don’t think there’s any need for a judicial summing up. Members of the jury, will those of you who find Simpkin guilty put up your hands.” No hand was raised. “Simpkin, you are acquitted.”

“That’s not the end of it,” Mrs. Tiggy-winkle said. “He’s the grass.” She pointed at Peter Rabbit, who seemed suddenly as isolated as Simpkin had been.

“He was lying. He must be the grass, stands to reason.” That was Samuel Whiskers.

“Do you wish to pass a verdict on Peter Rabbit?”

“I certainly do. Guilty.” Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’s face was grim. The scar on it pulsed red.

“How many of you agree with her? Put up your hands.” They all went up except Simpkin’s. “Simpkin?”

“I just think he made a mistake. No need to suppose anything else.”

“Then who do you think grassed on us?” Samuel Whiskers shouted. Simpkin gave one of his characteristic shrugs.

“Peter Rabbit, you have been found guilty without a single dissenting vote. Have you anything to say?”

The blond young man passed a hand through his hair in a gesture intolerably reminiscent of Charlie Ramsden, and cried out in bewilderment. “I don’t know what’s happening — this is all crazy, Hilary. You know me, you know it is.”

“No names, Peter. You know the rules,” Hilary said gently. He got up from his chair, walked over to the young man, and held out his pack of Russian cigarettes. “Let’s talk about it.”

“I’ll smoke my own.” Peter Rabbit shook one from a pack and put it in his mouth.

“Here’s a light.” Flame shot up from the long narrow lighter, and smoke came from the cigarette. Peter Rabbit looked at Hilary in total astonishment. He put a hand to his neck. The cigarette fell out of his mouth. He dropped to the floor.

Simpkin stood up. Somebody gave a cry, sharply cut off. Hilary giggled and held up the lighter.

“I got it from one of the NLG boys. An ordinary lighter, you’ve seen me using it. But if you press a button at the bottom a dart comes out.” He pressed it and a tiny thing, hardly thicker than a needle, buried itself in Peter Rabbit’s body. “Very effective.”

“Nobody said kill him,” Samuel Whiskers said.

“The verdict was yours. There was only one possible sentence.”

“But he’d been in the group as long as me, as long as any of us.”

“There are no medals for long service.” Hilary gave his acid smile. “This door leads to a chute that will deposit Peter Rabbit in the Thames. If one of you will give me a hand, we can dispose of our grass. Then I suggest that we sit down and consider some new plans for raising the necessary cash to bring Mr. McGregor over here.”

Simpkin helped him out with the body. They stood together while it slid down the chute and vanished. When they returned, an obituary on Peter Rabbit was pronounced by Mrs. Tiggy-winkle.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” she said.

Just after three o’clock on the following afternoon Simpkin, whose name was Bill Gray, entered an office block in Shaftesbury Avenue, took the lift up to the third floor, and went through a frosted-glass door lettered Inter-European Holidays, Travel Consultants. He nodded to the girl in reception and walked down a corridor to a room at the end. There, in a small office with three telephones in it, including one with a direct line to Giles Ravelin, he found Jean Conybeare and Derek Johnson — alias Pigwig and Pigling Bland — waiting for him.

“My God, what a shambles,” Derek said.

“Macabre.” Jean shivered. “He enjoyed it, that Hilary Mannering. He’s a real creep.”

“It was a bad scene,” Derek went on. “If it hadn’t been for Jean here, I don’t know what might have happened. ‘He was in bed with me, had been all evening,’ ” he said, falsetto. “Wonderful.”

“You provided the clincher, Derek, with that story about meeting him in the street.”

Derek Johnson shook his head. “Poor bloody Peter Rabbit, it was a clincher for him all right. It was just his bad luck, Bill, that he saw you coming out of that room with Ravelin and Scott.”

Bill Gray was at his desk looking through papers about Operation Wolfhunt. Now he looked up. “No need for tears. He was just an upper-class twit who got himself mixed up with a gang of thugs.”

“Mannering isn’t a thug, he’s a psychopath,” Jean said. “The pleasure he took in using that lighter — I hate to be in the same room with him.” She asked curiously, “Did you know he’d seen you at Morton’s?”

“I was afraid he might have.”

“So what would you have done if I’d not come up with that story?”

“Shot it out. But that would have wrecked the operation.”

“Mannering should be in a padded cell.”

“No argument. But let me remind you that if we take in his crackpot Beatrix Potter Brigade we lose a chance of catching the Wolf. That’s the object of the operation, remember? Now, we couldn’t let them get away with kidnaping a Duke’s son, though I was able to make sure everybody got clear. They still have to raise funds to get the Wolf over here, and we’ve got to help.”

They waited. Bill Gray’s catlike features were intent, he might have been about to pounce. “I think this is going to come best from you, Derek. You’ve got a friend who’s a watchman in a bank in Cheapside. He’ll provide duplicate keys. There’s wads of money in the vaults. We knock out the watchman and pay him off, collect the cash. The money will be slush, but they won’t need to use much of it until they pay out the Wolf, and I’ll put the word around so that in the meantime anything they use will be honored.

“We’ll talk about the details, Derek, after I’ve set it up. Then you can go to Mannering and talk about it. The Wolf’s said to be in the Argentine at the moment, but he’s in touch with an NLG man there and we have some contacts with him. When he knows that his fee’s going to be paid he’ll come over.”

“And until then?”

A smile touched Bill Gray’s face and was gone like winter sunshine. “Until then we’re waiting for Mr. McGregor.”