Game Without Rules (17 page)

He had known that Sir Frederick would come. His arrival had been part of a ritual. How often, he wondered, had these three men met together in this way, in this place, at this hour of night?

Mr. Calder shifted in his seat, and felt the weight of the silenced automatic pressing against his stomach.

“I think we could all do with another drink,” said Sir Frederick. “What would you like? Port or brandy? George? General? And you, sir?”

“It’s too late for formal introductions,” said the general. “But this is Mr. Calder. He’s an old friend of mine. And he knew John Craven very well indeed.”

The diplomat bowed very slightly toward Mr. Calder and said, “A sad business. All the same, when it happens, it’s not a bad way out, is it?”

Mr. Calder felt three pairs of eyes upon him, and his lips were dry.

He said, “I suppose not, no.”

“In the open air,” said the general. “On a Sunday afternoon walk. Quite suddenly. I’d settle for that myself, eh?”

“If I am destined to die quite suddenly,” said Sir George, “I think I should like it to be when I was in the box of the House of Commons at question time. Imagine the look on the Minister’s face—”

The three men laughed.

Sir Frederick, still standing, said, “May I have your orders, gentlemen?”

Sir George and the general said, “Brandy,” in perfect unison.

Mr. Calder said, “At this time of night, I’m very fond of a half pint of bitter.”

“An excellent choice,” said Sir Frederick, and rang the bell. “In certain circumstances, the grain and the grape go very well together. I can only suggest one amendment. You should have a pint, not a half pint.”

“I will fall in with your suggestion,” said Mr. Calder.

The benign figure of Barlow appeared out of the gloom. Sir Frederick gave the order.

“I sometimes wonder,” said the general, “if Barlow ever goes to bed. If you want a drink at any time between ten o’clock and four in the morning, he always brings it himself.”

“He sends the younger waiters home,” said Sir George, “and sits, in solitary splendour, in a great padded chair in a sort of pantry next to the kitchen. On one occasion, when the electric bell was out of order, I penetrated to his lair.”

“I picture him,” said the General, “as leading a Regency life, going to bed at six in the morning and getting up at lunchtime—”

This speculation was cut short by the reappearance of Barlow. He was bearing, on a silver salver, three glasses of brandy and a half pint tankard of beer.

“Barlow,” said Sir Frederick, “that’s the first time in twenty years I have known you make a mistake. I said a pint.”

Even in the gloom Mr. Calder could see the man flush. He said hastily, “That’s quite all right. Don’t think of changing it. It’ll do me very nicely.”

In truth, he had only one idea now – to get the three men out of the club. Patience, patience and still more patience. Mr. Calder, who had played many waiting games in his life, had rarely been tried higher than he was that night.

But all things must have an end, even Sir Frederick Lake’s anecdotes. Two o’clock was striking as Mr. Calder followed his three hosts down the steps of the Hambone Club, past the empty porter’s hutch, through the great doors and out into the street.

There were three cars there. Mr. Calder said, “I won’t trouble any of you for a lift. My flat is only ten minutes away, and I’d welcome the walk. And thank you, General, once more, for a most enjoyable evening.”

As soon as he had turned the corner he paused, drew into a doorway and waited. He could hear the three voices; a laugh, a shouted good night; the slamming of car doors; three separate cars starting and driving away. Then silence returned.

While they had been sitting in the club, the mist had thickened. Since he had to move, and more quickly now, mist might be a useful ally.

He turned about and walked back the way he had come. The porter’s hutch was still empty. One of Barlow’s self-imposed duties would be locking up when the last member had taken himself home to bed.

The lights in the inner hall had been reduced to one reading lamp. From the walls the pictures of actors and actresses looked down from their heavy gold frames. Their incurious eyes followed Mr. Calder as he tiptoed across the floor.

A melodrama, thought Mr. Calder. In three acts. Act one, a deserted farmstead. Act two, a barrister’s chambers. Act three, a London club.

He pulled on a pair of cotton gloves before opening the baize-covered door. His rubber-soled shoes hissed softly on the flagstones.

The club kitchen lay at the end of the passage. The door was open, and from a room leading off it a light showed. Mr. Calder drifted across, breath held, silent as thistledown. He pushed the door open with his gun.

Barlow was not sitting in the great padded chair which the general had described. He was standing beside it, working at the leather upholstery.

“Good evening, Headmaster,” said Mr. Calder.

“I recognised you when you came here this evening.”

The voice was harsh. The tones of the well-bred club servant had disappeared with the deferential smile. The face was grinning. But it was the grin of a death mask. “I should have taken steps at once. First Craven, then you.”

“I suppose it’s no use me telling you that Craven suspected nothing. That you killed him to no purpose.”

“I could not afford to take a chance.”

Mr. Calder said, “I imagine there is some sort of concealed microphone in the coffee room, behind where the eminent gossips sit over their brandies? And a listening apparatus in this room?”

“You imagine correctly. The microphone and receiver are removable. Only the wiring is permanent.”

“And the receiver is somewhere in that chair?”

“It was. I have removed it. In ten minutes, I should have had the whole apparatus dismantled.”

“It is interesting to reflect,” said Mr. Calder, “that had Sir Frederick Lake indulged in one more reminiscence, you would have got away with all this.”

“I should like to know how you found out.”

“Oh, it was a stupid thing,” said Mr. Calder. “You brought me the half pint of beer which you
overheard
me asking for, instead of the pint which Sir Frederick actually told you to bring. An incredible mistake for an experienced club servant.”

“Ah!” said the man.

He raised his hand, without haste, to his mouth. The stench of cyanide filled the room. As Mr. Calder watched, the body arched, clung for a moment with hands braced to the chair back, then emptied itself into a black pool on the floor.

Before he left, Mr. Calder removed the microphone and the headset. The wiring he left. It would attract no notice. London clubs are full of aged and inexplicable wiring.

He was in bed by three, and asleep ten minutes later; His influenza seemed to be better.

Squadron-Leader Leopold, late of the RAF, but now attached to the Foreign Office, took the early-morning flight from London Airport to Frankfurt on December 24th. This Christmas Eve flight had been totally booked for several weeks, and Leopold had to use his priority rating to get a passage. Technically this meant that he occupied the spare seat kept for such emergencies, the prerequisite of the off-duty air hostess. In fact, he spent most of his time on the flight deck talking to the pilot, an old friend of his.

Leopold was carrying his operational passport, which was made out in the name of James Bellingham and described him as an insurance broker. His complete luggage was a flight bag into which he had thrust a few overnight necessities when he had received the emergency call at eleven o’clock the night before.

At Frankfurt he transferred himself and his bag into the small two-seater craft which was waiting for him and which landed him, in a heavy shower of sleet, at an old Army airfield seven miles outside Bonn at eleven-thirty. Here he was met by Captain Massey, military attaché at the embassy. Massey hurried Squadron-Leader Leopold straight out to the car, which he was driving himself, and started off with him down the little-used secondary road which joins the airfield to the city.

These facts were all established beyond reasonable doubt and on the evidence of reliable witnesses, in the inquiry which followed. What was less certain is exactly what happened next.

The car was spotted by a farm worker at midday, upside down in a drainage culvert. There were long greasy skid-marks on the surface of the road and a gap had been torn in the fence guarding the fifteen-foot vertical drop over the culvert.

The sergeant of police, who was on the scene within ten minutes, was an intelligent man. He spotted the diplomatic badge on the car and telephoned the embassy to report that its two occupants had broken necks.

The first secretary himself took the call. Martin Seccombe was a diplomat of the old school. He was not fond of the military attaché, nor had he approved of the undercover activities which seemed to be part of his job. Nevertheless he had categorical instructions which came from too high up to be flouted and he knew precisely what steps had to be taken.

He therefore personally encoded and dispatched a message which was received in London at one o’clock and was passed immediately to DI6 with a copy to Mr. Fortescue, Controller of the External Branch of the Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee.

At midday on that same day, Josef Bartz, a clerk in the dispatch section of the Bonn office of the Great Polish Electrical Combine, which was known throughout Eastern Europe simply as “PD” and was a world pioneer of electronic computers, closed his ledgers and locked them in his desk. The firm knocked off work at midday on Christmas Eve and it was customary, at this point, for the annual bonus to be handed out, with a personal good-will message to each of his workers from the head of the firm in Warsaw. It was gestures of this sort which inspired PD to describe themselves as “a happy family.”

On this occasion the bonus was a large one, and the happy family atmosphere was particularly marked. Executives who had bought Christmas presents for their secretaries took this opportunity of presenting them personally; people called on friends in other departments; a sprig of mistletoe appeared over the door of the ladies’ lavatory, and the whole interior of the PD building, which normally presented an appearance of smooth and decorous efficiency, bubbled over for the space of a single hour with life and high spirits.

Josef seemed to have a great many friends. He visited almost every department in the building.

One of these was in the basement and the notice on the door said head of messengers. A particularly riotous party was going on here and Josef was invited to join it. He was only in the room for five minutes but during this time he managed, unnoticed in the scrummage, to reach out with his foot and kick over a switch under the head messenger’s desk.

When he left he took a lift straight up to the managerial floor and made for the office of the communications manager. He knocked on the door and receiving no answer looked into the room and found it empty. This can hardly have been a surprise to him since he had watched the communications manager, a quarter of an hour before, going into the boardroom.

Josef walked across quickly to the desk under the big turret window. It was a massive affair of steel, bolted to the floor, with a nest of small drawers on either side of the knee-hole. Josef said quietly to himself, like a child memorising a lesson, “Fourth drawer from the top on the right-hand side.”

The drawer was, as he had been told it would be, locked. He felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out a curious set of keys. Some had triangular shafts, some had a series of small wards no larger than pinheads, some had hollow shafts and no visible wards at all.

Josef was sweating now. A prickle of sweat stood out on his forehead and the palms of his hands were wet. In his haste he dropped the ring of keys and scrabbled for them on the carpet. It seemed to his strained senses to be an eternity before he knew that he had found the right one. It went easily into the tiny aperture and engaged the matrix of the lock with a reassuring click. Josef turned the key and the drawer slid open.

This was the crucial moment.

If anyone had discovered that the switch in the messengers’ room was off and had switched it on again, an alarm would sound, emergency doors would close the staircases, the power in the lifts would be disconnected and the street doors would be locked. Everyone would be not only a prisoner in the building, but immobilised on the floor on which they happened to be when the alarm went off.

Josef ran to the door, opened it and listened. Life seemed to be continuing normally. He could hear the hum of the lifts going up and down and shouts of laughter from a room on the floor below. No alarm.

He ran back to the drawer and extracted from it a flat grey metal box, about the size of a book but much heavier. The box went into his briefcase which was already bulging with papers. He slammed the drawer shut, wiped the front of it with his handkerchief and remembered to wipe also the front edge of the desk, where his left hand had rested. A moment later he was out of the room and descending the staircase to the floor below. He was calmer now. The worst was over.

Controlling his impatience, he joined a party in the dispatch department and spent five minutes with them. Then he made his excuses, strolled to the cloakroom to pick up hat and coat and overshoes from his locker, wished the giant doorman a “Happy Christmas” and walked out into the street.

It was a quarter to one, and the sleet which had fallen earlier in the day had turned to snow.

At five minutes past one, Mr. Fortescue, in London, was talking on a private line to Mr. Calder’s cottage in Kent.

He said, “Get your car, and drive straight to London Airport. I’ll meet you there. You’ll be away for two or three days.”

At ten past one Mr. Calder’s car was rolling out of its garage. At half-past two he was seated in the VIP lounge at London Airport.

“Fortunately,” said Mr. Fortescue, “there’s an extra mid-afternoon flight for Dusseldorf. I’ve booked you on it. It’s about the only fortunate feature of the whole business. Behrens should be down here by this evening. I had to get him back from Leamington. I’ll put him on the evening plane to Cologne-Bonn.”