Lonely Road (7 page)

“Pretty fit physically,” I replied. “Mentally—perhaps not quite so good.”

He grinned. “You’re looking very well.”

“Lunatics often do,” I said. “You should know that. Now, what I’ve come about is this. I want you to tell me all about that injury to my head.”

He frowned in perplexity. “Tell you about it?”

I nodded. “I want to know exactly what sort of condition I was in when first you saw me, after the crash.”

He raised his eyebrows a little and reached for a ledger on his desk. I watched him with some amusement while he adjusted his eyeglasses. He turned a few pages, and then stopped.

He coughed. “I saw you at seven-forty-five a.m.,” he said. “Well, you were quite unconscious … blanched appearance.” He scanned the page. “A lacerated and contused wound in the occipital region. Slight hæmatoma—that’s bleeding under the scalp, you know. No hemiplegia. Reflexes sluggish. Pupils equal, slightly dilated. Smell of alcohol.”

He glanced at me. “Is that what you want to know?”

I sat for a little time in thought. “I suppose it is,” I said at last. “There’s just one thing. You told me that you saw my car before it was repaired. You said it had a hole in the roof. Would you say that that injury is in keeping with the hole?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well,” I said, “the car’s got a fabric roof. From the inside, there’s first a soft cloth ceiling, and then a layer of felt, and then a few small laths, and then the outer fabric. There’s nothing very hard. You say I rammed my head through the lot. Is that the sort of injury that you’d expect?”

He smiled. “I really couldn’t say,” he replied. “I’ve never seen it done before. But it’s the sort of injury you got.”

There was nothing to be gained by staying on. I got up and picked my hat and stick up from the chair. “Oh, well,” I said, “it’s interesting to know. Just one thing more. I suppose that injury could have been caused by any sort of blow? Of course, actually it happened in the crash. But you wouldn’t have to be in a car to get an injury like that?”

“Oh, no. It could happen in a great variety of accidents.”

I laughed. “It would be just like that if some kind friend had slugged me on the head from behind?”

He laughed with me. “I should think so. Just like that.”

I nodded. “That’s all I wanted to know. Put it down to the concussion if you like, or drink.”

But he got to his feet, his brows contracted in a frown. “You weren’t speaking seriously?”

I moved towards the door. “It doesn’t pay to be serious,” I said. “It only means that people laugh behind your back, instead of to your face.” And so I went away, and back to my own house to dine.

That evening I wanted above everything to have a talk with Fedden. I rang up his house as soon as I got home, but they didn’t know when he was coming back. He was staying at his club in town. I went up and dressed for dinner, as I always do when I’m alone, and went down to the dining-room to eat. I cut it short and had coffee and my cigar in the model room;
I can remember wandering restlessly about the house all evening, unable to settle down to anything.

Finally I put in a call to Fedden at his club. I was lucky in getting on to him there, and I made an appointment to dine with him on the following night.

I drove up to London on the next day. Looking back upon that time I am surprised that I should have gone to London upon such a whim; I think it would take more to stir me now. For many men, I suppose almost any excuse would serve for a few days in town, but not for me. I hate the place. I don’t go there more than once in six months, and then only when I can’t avoid it. When I have to go, I get into my club and stay there as much as possible; it’s a rotten town unless you’ve got a pack of womenfolk about. The best solution is to go and stay with Joan.

Fedden dined with me that night. I told him that I had come up upon business. He told me that he had spent both days between the Home Office and Scotland Yard; I found him worried in his manner, and a little tired. In my club there is a little smoking-room at the top of the house, that looks out over St. James’s Park; I took him up there after dinner because I knew that we should have the room to ourselves at that time of night, and we settled down with our cigars before the fire.

I forget what we talked about. I only remember that he was reticent, very reticent about the business that he had been engaged on up in town. I tried once or twice to edge the conversation in the direction of the gun, but he sheered off most adroitly; Fedden is a bit of a diplomat in a quiet way. Till at last I got fed up with it. I took advantage of a pause, dropped the ash of my cigar carefully into an ash-tray at my side, and said to him:

“About that gun you showed me the other night.”

He turned a very cold, grey eye upon me. “Well?”

I said: “You’ll think it’s none of my business, and perhaps you’re right.” I passed my hand absently across my hair—what Dixon had described as the occipital region. “At the
same time, I think I’ve got something to tell you about it which may help, if you want to hear it. In fact, that’s what I came up to town about.”

He shifted in his chair and turned to me, frowning a little in perplexity. “You mean that you’ve come up about the gun?”

“You’ll think me a damn fool,” I replied, “but that’s exactly what I have done.”

He lay back into his chair again. “If you’ve got any evidence which will help us in the matter, we should be very glad to have it,” he remarked. It amused me to notice his retirement behind officialdom.

“You mustn’t credit all I have to say,” I said. “I don’t know that I really credit it myself. You must form your own opinion.” The darkness fell slowly in the room as I sat there with him, telling him my groundless little tale of disconnected incidents. I told him my memories of the night before my crash, so different from the official story of the accident, when I thought that I had gone across the field till I had met a girl and seen a vessel on the beach. I told him about my apple, and the carpet-sweepers, and the foreigner, and the man called Peter, and I described the boat to him.

A servant came to draw the curtains of the room and take away our coffee-cups, and when he had gone we sat on in the light of the fire and the one soft reading-lamp behind our heads, and I told him of the girl who had been kind to me in Leeds, whose brother owned a motor-lorry and took carpet-sweepers by night from the boats to the factory inland, away somewhere in the south. Over the park we heard a bugle blowing the Last Post, and I told him how Stenning had been in Rotterdam and had seen or heard of carpet-sweepers being shipped in little boats for export into England. I reminded him of the label on the packing-case that had contained the gun.

And finally, I told him how I had come to find my apple in the sand, and how somebody had had a nasty accident among the dunes.

Then he sat quiet, until at last he said: “It’s none of it evidence.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said.

“It may give us a line to go upon. I should like you to give it us again at Scotland Yard to-morrow morning, if you will?” He paused for a minute, and then he said: “There are certain features in this thing which make it very difficult.”

I didn’t know what comment I could make on that, and so said nothing at all. And after a little time he said: “So much depends on where those guns were going to. Until we know that, our hands are tied … most damnably.” His tone was strained and worried. “If we could get the lorry-driver, he might tell us that. The dancing-girl’s brother—if there’s anything in what you say.”

I smiled. “There may not be,” I put in quietly. “I’ve had concussion recently, you know.”

He turned and eyed me for a moment. “Yes, I know.” And then he said a damn queer thing. He said: “Do you believe in God?”

I knew Fedden to be a deeply religious man—many soldiers are. I had had this sort of thing from him before, but that didn’t prevent it coming as a fresh surprise. “Well,” I said, a little awkwardly, “I don’t go to church much. But I’ve been to sea a lot. I’m a master mariner, you know.”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, I know.” And then he said: “Personally, I believe every word you’ve said, but I’m not so sure that Carter will. I believe God sent you to help us clean up this affair.”

I couldn’t keep my end up in a conversation conducted upon theological lines, and so I asked:

“Who is Carter?”

“Sir David Carter,” he replied, “the Chief Commissioner.”

Better than God, I thought, and to direct his mind into more mundane channels I asked how he had spent the last two days. It seemed that he had been most of the time in consultation with the sleuths at the Yard. Some aspect of the matter that he had learnt there had upset him seriously, but what it was,
he would not say. Finally, at about midnight, he went back to his own place to sleep, having secured me for the following day.

I went to Scotland Yard with Fedden next morning after breakfast, and for a time I sat in a lobby waiting for him while he went about his business. Presently a sergeant came to fetch me, and I was ushered down long stone passages till we stopped before an office door.

It was a fair-sized, decently furnished room in the government style; very high and rather bare, strewn with heavy mahogany desks and furniture, with mournful leather chairs and a settee belonging to a bygone age. Fedden was waiting for me there with two other men. One of them was a keen-faced, youngish man of about my own age; this was a Major Norman. The other was a serious, white-haired man, not very old. I shouldn’t say that he is more than fifty, though he is quite white. That was Sir David Carter.

I told my disconnected little tale again in reply to a sort of questionnaire from Fedden, and this time it seemed thinner, more unlikely than it had ever seemed before. I was ashamed to tell it. It seemed to have lost the quality of realism here; what was clear and definite at home, in sound of the sea and almost within shouting distance of the sandhills, seemed no more than the wildest guesswork and hypothesis in Scotland Yard.

Fedden came to an end at last, when he had extracted from me all that I had to say. The other two had listened to us in perfect, disconcerting silence; it was impossible to tell how they were taking it. At the end the man called Norman glanced at his chief, stirred, and took up the task of questioning me, and for a further quarter of an hour took me backwards and forwards over the story till he was satisfied that I could tell him nothing more. And then there was a silence in the room.

Sir David Carter, sitting behind a very massive desk, tilted back his chair and sat staring up at a cornice of the ceiling, immersed in thought. At last he said:

“This is a very unusual story, Commander Stevenson. I must thank you for coming up to give it to us so readily.”

I cleared my throat. “You must understand that I can vouch nothing for its truth. Colonel Fedden will have told you that I’ve recently been ill.” I paused. “Each time I tell this story it seems more likely that I may be wrong about it all—that I’m imagining things.”

He tilted his chair forwards till it rested on its legs again, and faced me steadily across the desk. “On the contrary,” he said courteously, “we are very much afraid it may be true.”

I did not know what to say to that, and presently he went on:

“It fits very closely with information that has come to us from other sources.” I wondered what the other sources were, but he did not enlighten me. He was quiet for a little then, but presently he spoke again.

“Commander Stevenson,” he said, “I must tell you that it is not our custom here to take witnesses into our confidence. So much you will appreciate. In the normal course of affairs I should now thank you for your courtesy in coming to us, and I should send you home. If I do not follow that procedure now, it is exceptional.”

He paused for a minute, and went on: “Sometimes a witness becomes so deeply involved in the investigations which we carry out that it becomes necessary for us to break our rule. In such a case, we demand the most complete discretion. Colonel Fedden has told us that he regards you as a discreet man, not much given to talk.”

I stirred in my chair. “I don’t go gossiping about the place,” I said. “I don’t particularly want to be mixed up in anything, but having this evidence, I thought somebody ought to know about it. If I can give you any further help I should be very glad to do so. Otherwise, I’m quite ready to go home.”

He nodded slowly. “We appreciate your attitude very much.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, and
began to talk to me in very general terms. I sat there listening to him, puzzled. I couldn’t imagine what he was driving at, why he was talking to me in that way. He was giving me a little discourse on gun-running and its objects, couched in the most general terms.

“In this instance,” he went on, “the problem cannot be very difficult to solve. If a rising, or revolution, were contemplated in this country to-day, the source from which it emanated would not be very difficult to trace. So many sources may be discounted that the field becomes narrow. For example, it would be difficult to imagine an armed revolt in this country for the purpose of overthrowing the monarchy—to-day.”

I was beginning to understand. “I see what you mean,” I said. “There’s only one revolutionary agency in England today—or only one obvious one. You mean Russia, I suppose. Communism.”

He inclined his head. “I think it very likely that if these arms are really smuggled in we should find such an agency in the background.” He paused for a moment, and then he said:

“I should not have indicated this conclusion to you if it had been merely speculation on our part. Unfortunately, we have had other evidence, apart from this affair, that something of the sort might be in train.”

I stared at him. “Do you know where those guns were going?”

The man called Norman stirred by the fireplace. “We know no details,” he replied. “We only knew that something of the sort might be on foot.”

I nodded. “Stenning may be able to tell you some more about where the guns came from,” I observed. “But as for where they were going to, you want the driver of the lorry.” I was silent for a minute then, thinking of that painted, kindly girl serving her profession to the beating rhythm and the changing lights.