Tender to Danger

Five

After the first twenty-four hours London seemed curiously empty. Andrew was still doing the things he had long dreamed of doing; seeing the places that, in Thessaly, had sometimes appeared as remote as Everest or Xanadu. To cross Piccadilly Circus had become an enormous ambition; let him but see Charing Cross Station again and stout Cortez could have the Pacific. But, of course, the reality was less satisfactory. The joys of homecoming were somehow superficial. He felt restless and vaguely uneasy. Never before had he had with quite such intensity the feeling that there was something missing.

If this was to be the mood of the maturer Maclaren, he could regret the loss of the more youthful exuberance that had sent him to his European experiences without a thought for his own interests. Of course, he was alone in the world; but then, he always had been. Now it was like coming back to search among scattered ruins for a lost past and discovering that after all there was nothing to be retrieved.

There had been no relatives on hand to greet him. His mother had died while he was still a student at Edinburgh. His father had accepted an important medical post in the Pacific during the war and had stayed on out there to continue research in tropical diseases. He had some uncles and aunts and innumerable cousins, but, even if he had been interested in them, none was in London.

He had good friends who were delighted to see him again and eager to help him. He had arranged to stay with one of them until he found accommodation, but the expected meeting had been postponed. Roger Lang had rushed off to America, leaving a hurried note and the keys of his flat in Holland Park, but this disappointment had nothing to do with his mood. He had other friends and they welcomed him warmly enough. Some of them frankly envied him; and really he had to admit that he was not out of luck. Home again, a comfortable flat to live in, a month of freedom, and then work that he wanted to do, with the promise of a specialist’s career in the future.

There had been a note awaiting him, asking him to call up Dr. Jeffrey at the Kingsland Road Eye Hospital as soon as he arrived.

The old man said: “Hello, son! Got in a day late, didn’t you? What put this bee in your bonnet about glaucoma?”

“It was thrown at me, sir. Quite a few cases in some parts of Greece.”

“Carotene deficiency. Xerophthalmis breaking out all over the place. They will have their damn silly wars.”

Andrew smiled. “It’s wonderful to think I’ll be working with you, sir.”

“Save that for a few months. Wait till you find out what it’s like to be a registrar at this madhouse.”

“I’m grateful to you for the job.”

“You wouldn’t have got it if I hadn’t thought I could use you. Don’t run away with the notion that you’ve been favoured because of your father. What you wrote about intraocular pressure happened to interest me. Look in on me next week sometime. We’ll discuss procedure. You’ll have every opportunity to work out your ideas. Meanwhile, enjoy your holiday.”

After three days of it the month ahead of him began to look like eternity. He thought of asking old Jeffrey if he couldn’t start work earlier, but he suspected it would be impossible. The hospital had been emphatic about the date of the vacancy. Another man was moving on. Andrew would have to wait till the discarded shoes were ready for him.

Nothing to do on a sunny morning but shop for socks and a couple of preposterously expensive shirts. The prices of clothes depressed him. Or something did. He wished he hadn’t come home. He wished he had stayed in Larissa another week or so. If he had put off the trip till a more reasonable date, he wouldn’t have encountered Pyotr Grigorievitch Kusitch or be wandering along Bond Street on this bright day plagued by anxiety about the little man. Anxiety? Or simply the tantalising probability that he would never know for certain whether the little man had been the central figure in a melodrama or just plain mad?

He turned left into Oxford Street, descended the stairway of the first underground station, bought a ticket, and stepped onto the escalator. He did it all reluctantly, under some inward protest. His mood went down, down, down with the moving stairway. Then he touched bottom, and his mind suddenly cleared. He walked round and stepped onto the ascending escalator. He thrust his ticket into the hand of the collector and hurried on, afraid that the man might challenge him. He hadn’t used a train, yet he had a feeling of guilt, as if he had broken a contract with the London Transport Executive. He hurried away from the scene of the crime towards the telephone booths. He took up the directory A-D, and flicked over the leaves. Bla… Blan… Blandish! His moving finger halted. He made a mental note of an address and walked out into the sunlight again.

For the first time since his homecoming, he felt like a man with a purpose. He swung round one corner, strode on, turned another corner, and slowed a little, noting the numbers. The odds were on one side, the evens on another. He crossed the road. A few more paces and he was there.

The Blandish Gallery had an elegant front. It had a beautiful door of burnished bronze and one small Dufy in a large window. A hand-lettered placard in a bronze frame announced an exhibition of water colours by Christophe Chambord.

Andrew Maclaren had the sensation of something inside him dropping with the gravitational abandon of a plummet. It was something extraphysical, something completely unscientific and quite beyond material diagnosis. You could approach it only through the figurative. It was as the falling stick of a spent rocket. It was the dead meteor hope.

The exhibition of sculptures by Ruth Meriden was over. The press notice preserved by Kusitch might have been clipped a month ago or a year ago; it was all the same now. Andrew went back gloomily to the tube station and bought another ticket.

When he let himself into the flat, he saw the Green Line Coach Guide lying on Roger Lang’s desk. He picked it up and threw it into Roger Lang’s wastebasket.

That was that!

He almost spoke it aloud to put the finality of it beyond question. He was finished with Kusitch; Ruth Meriden was expunged from his mind. He poured himself a drink to celebrate the liberation. After a second drink he crossed to the wastebasket and recovered the Coach Guide. He opened it at the marked page and stared at the cryptogram, but all he found in it was a resolute determination to be meaningless. He was sure it was something simple, possibly absurdly simple. The trouble was he had no knowledge of such things. They were a special study. They required an unusual aptitude, a sort of…

And then inspiration came.

Charley Botten!

He blinked. He looked up another telephone number and then realised that he could do nothing about it till after office hours. He paced Roger Lang’s carpet till darkness came. At the first feasible moment he dialled the number, and miraculously the receiver at the other end was lifted.

“Charley?” he demanded. “This is Andrew Maclaren; remember? I’ve just got back from Athens.”

Mr. Botten said: “How are things in Greece?” He didn’t sound as if he cared.

Andrew decided that the question was not one he need answer. He asked: “Are you still in M.I. five?” “Resigned years ago,” Charley answered. “I’m in business. Anyway it wasn’t M.I. five.”

“What I really mean is do you still go in for ciphers and puzzles and things?”

“Certainly. I’m a stockbroker. What can I do for you?”

“I want to see you urgently. May I call? I’ve got something I can’t make out.”

“So have I. I think it’s ulcers but it may be a delayed hangover. Come along at once.”

Face to face with his caller, Mr. Botten was more cordial. He listened to some account of Mr. Kusitch and then examined the enigma in the Coach Guide. He was an expert of experts; he had volumes of information in his head and quite a small library within reach, but he shook his head over that SS 729.

“You say this fellow Kusitch tracks down war loot?” he said. “If that’s true, this sequence may be merely the catalogue number of a museum piece.”

“I don’t know,” Andrew answered. “I think there’s more to it. I think it’s the thing he wanted to hide, though why he should write it down if it means anything dangerous, I can’t make out. He could have memorised it.”

“Probably no head for figures.” Mr. Botten laughed with the good-natured tolerance of those who have no heads for anything else. “Let’s look at it this way. He makes these notes in the Guide, thinking they’ll be safe enough in the normal course. Then he is forced off the normal course when he has to spend the night in Brussels. Suddenly, while you’re preparing to go out to dine, he remembers the Guide, gets a bit nervous about it, and shoves it under the carpet. It may not be all that important, but he doesn’t want to carry it on him or have anyone fool round with it while he’s absent. Didn’t he give you any hint about it in his talk?”

“Nothing that I can remember, except that he lives in Dubrovnik, or did.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“Probably nothing. Dubrovnik’s a port.” “I’m quite aware of that. Where’s the connection?”

“I did think at first that the SS might stand for steamship.”

“It might stand for Schutzstaffel. The figures could represent a unit or a regimental number. It ties up with the Nazis and their loot.”

Andrew objected. “I’ve an idea it has something to do with this country; that it ties up with the address and the timetable.”

Charley Botten wrote the symbols down on the back of an envelope and glared at them.

“I can’t get the idea of this search for loot out of my head,” he said. “The catalogue number is quite feasible. The SS could be a sign for sculptures. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He had not said anything about Ruth Meriden or the review of her show, and he was reluctant to start on further explanations. “You’re probably right,” he said. “No doubt Kusitch had to deal with sculptures.”

“He also had to deal with thugs. If I were you, chum, I’d forget all about the business. If something has happened to your pal Kusitch you don’t want it happening to you.”

Andrew laughed. “You were too long with M.I. whatever-it-is. If you’re not careful, you’ll be seeing cloak-and-dagger men round every dark corner.”

“A few days ago you were seeing them in Brussels in broad daylight.”

“They gave up when I went to the police.”

“That’s what you think. I wouldn’t be too sure.”

“Anyway, that was Brussels.”

“And this is London. Splendid! If the prospect doesn’t appal you, let’s go out and sample some English cooking. Unless you’d prefer a moussaka? You’re dining with me.”

It was after eleven when the two parted and Mr. Botten’s hangover had been treated. Andrew took the Central Line to Holland Park, and came up in the lift with quite a crowd of passengers. He liked the underground. It was home, it was London. For the first time since his return he had the feeling of being absorbed by the throng. These people who pressed into the lift were Londoners. They couldn’t be anything else. They conveyed to him a friendliness from which he had been away too long. Charley Botten would say it was all imagination, or sentimentality. He would deny that London was any safer than Brussels, but Charley had become cynical. That war job of his had warped him, distorted his perspective. How could one not feel safe among these friendly people? Of course they might murder one another occasionally, but not in the underground, not in crowded lifts or busy streets. Not very often, anyway. This was London.

Andrew maintained the lyrical mood for a couple of hundred yards along Holland Park Avenue. Then, as he waited to cross the road, he had a twinge of uneasiness. There was a man on the curb a few yards away from him, and Andrew could have sworn that he had seen the same fellow in the lift. One of the friendly ones; a jolly-faced man of forty-five or so with smiling eyes; a small man, getting portly. When the traffic lights changed, he crossed the road behind Andrew, but surely there was nothing in that to worry about? It was a free road. Anyone could choose which side he walked on.

The friendly one loitered at a bus stop for a moment or two, but merely to light a cigarette. When Andrew looked back, he was about fifty yards behind. Andrew turned off the main road. Instead of going on along the avenue, Jolly-Face turned, too, and, by the time he rounded the next corner, he had closed the gap a little.

It was absurd to think there was anything in it. Plenty of people lived in Holland Park; quite a lot in Pemberley Crescent, and Jolly-Face could be one of them.

This was London. Unworthy suspicion must be banished. It arose, of course, as a result of the Brussels incident and the melodramatic nonsense of Charley Botten.

Andrew tried to clear his mind of the nonsense, but every time he looked back the man was still there, and there was no one else in sight. Not another soul in all the long street.

A few more yards and Andrew could no longer frame arguments to counter his uneasiness. A few more and the situation was no longer merely odd; it was a little frightening. There was a stretch now where a street lamp had failed. There were shadows under overhanging trees. There were lightless houses and dark, ominous gardens behind closed gates. Andrew fought against a desire to accelerate his pace. He heard the footsteps coming along behind him, keeping an even distance. One shoe rasped slightly with each step as if a metal protector had been driven into the sole. Except for their footsteps, the two progressed in a pocket of silence. The noise of traffic along Holland Park Avenue was a distant murmur, and the two moved on into deeper silence. Not a single car came round the curve of Pemberley Crescent. The next time Andrew looked back he saw the man throw away his cigarette. It tossed up a little spray of sparks when it hit the roadway.

Then Jolly-Face began to whistle a tune, and he repeated it over and over. At first Andrew could not identify it; after a few repetitions he recognised it as a phrase from Till Eulenspiegel. The whistler was trying to work it up into something, but he was not very musical.

The tension in Andrew eased. That human trick of whistling seemed to make the fellow less formidable. And Andrew was also comforted by the thought that there were only a few more yards to go. Then, with an accession of confidence, he wondered if he should go on, past the house. If the whistler were really following him, it must be to mark where he lived, for the man had made no attempt to catch up with him.

For a moment Andrew thought of going back to Holland Park Avenue and leading the fellow a chase by bus and tube and taxi with the object of throwing him off. He was in front of the house now. He hesitated. Light from the hall came dimly through the ribbed glass panels of the heavy door. Shadows moved in front of the panels and two men came down the steps. There was no longer any choice for Andrew. He knew the taller of the two men at once, and the recognition left him rigid, momentarily incapable of movement. He stood with one foot advanced, waiting, staring. Inspector Jordaens wore a sparely cut raincoat that had the effect of emphasising his leanness, and his hat-a black felt with a high crown and a very narrow brim-conveyed an immediate suggestion of something alien. He raised it courteously.

“Good evening, Dr. Maclaren. We have been waiting for you for some time.”

As Andrew moved forward Jolly-Face passed. He stopped whistling and glanced at the three figures on the steps. Then he was gone. A few yards beyond the house he resumed his musical experiment. The rhythmic theme from Till Eulenspiegel died away in the distance.

Inspector Jordaens introduced the shorter man. “This is my friend Detective-Sergeant Stock of Scotland Yard. We have been trying to make contact with you all the evening, Dr. Maclaren.”

It did not take any special gift to know what was coming. Andrew could have shaped the answer for himself as he asked the obvious question.

“What do you want with me?”

“Perhaps you will be good enough to invite us inside. It is about your friend Kusitch. His body was found in the Bois de la Cambre early this morning. I have been studying very closely the statement you gave me in Brussels. I wish to ask you some more questions.”