Operation Pax (40 page)

Jane stared. ‘Why – well, it was at breakfast.’

‘Then come and have some tea.’

Jane hesitated. She was coming to believe that she had misjudged Mark Bultitude. ‘Thank you very much. But John said I was to go back to college and wait.’

‘He hopes to have news?’

‘Yes – before midnight.’

‘That is rather a long time off – and tea can be consumed with a moderate approximation to civilized custom in something less than half an hour. I should like to hear a little more of your day’s adventures – and tell you a little more of my own. Incidentally, I have some quite good Orange Pekoe.’

Jane decided to go. Bultitude puzzled her. He seemed to have his own slant on the affair. Perhaps if they pooled what knowledge each possessed something really helpful would emerge. It was a long shot, but a shot worth taking. And the invitation was certainly an entirely harmless one. It was also subtly flattering. For Mark Bultitude was commonly reputed not to care for young women at all. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘I’d like a cup of tea.’

‘Then come along. There is only the breadth of Beaumont Street to negotiate, and we can walk straight into my parlour. I need hardly tell you that the rooms I keep in Bede’s are on the ground floor. My philosophy of life, such as it is, is nothing if not
ventre à terre
.’

The apartment into which Jane was presently ushered by her host would have been described by an unfriendly critic as overwhelming. It was large, and everything in it had the appearance of being very valuable. Bultitude, dispensing his Orange Pekoe from an equipage that had appeared with miraculous speed, gave his young guest a charming smile. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you are looking at my Battle of the Centaurs.’

‘Oh – yes.’ Jane was not aware that she had been looking at anything in particular.

‘It is, in fact, a Caravaggio. I bought it off the Gräfin Szegedin – you know the dear old Gräfin? I was speaking of her to somebody only last night – a good many years ago. It gave the poor old dear a helping hand.’

‘That was very nice of you.’ Jane took her tea and spoke without much enthusiasm.

‘And the little hunting scene is by Uccello. Dear Bernhard – you know Berenson? – prefers it to the one in the Ashmolean. The Rembrandt was picked up for me by Bredius – or was it Borenius? I really forget – just before the war.’ Bultitude looked about him with what was either complacency or a good imitation of it. ‘Nothing but odds and ends, of course, but I think they hang together not too badly.’

‘I suppose it’s a very nice room.’ Jane, who was much depressed again, realized that this was not altogether a happy choice of words. ‘I mean–’

‘They tell me that my pupils call it Toad Hall. Undergraduates have an extraordinary faculty for hitting the nail on the head.’

Jane stared. Bultitude, she divined, was rather a complex person.

‘And the name is the more apposite since I bought a very large car. Perhaps it was the pleasure of driving it that really drew me out to Milton this morning.’

He plunged back to the point. For some reason it was not easy for him. He was pausing, as if searching for words, and Jane had suddenly the impression of being in the presence of some large, masked anxiety. ‘But you really knew something,’ she asked, ‘before that?’

‘I wonder if I did?’ Bultitude frowned. ‘But won’t you have a muffin?’

Jane suspected that the fat don was going to be evasive, after all. His attitude was coming to puzzle her very much. There was something baffled in it – as if he was helpless in knowing where to begin with her… But now he was trying again.

‘This place in Milton is in the hands of the police?’

‘Yes.’

‘So far, so good. I suppose you already know the things your brother told me?’

‘John said very little. Our talk was hurried – no more than a scrap. I think he was anxious to get me out of the place and begin clearing up in a professional way. I’d meddled, I’m afraid.’

‘If you did, the circumstances make it very natural.’ Bultitude had one of his odd drops into simplicity. ‘Then you don’t know – no, your brother told me you didn’t – that last night this gang of criminals was hunting a man – a little man with a scratched face – about Oxford?’

‘I know that they were hunting him this morning. I saw them at it in the upper reading-room, when I was reading there.’

‘Sir John told me something of the sort. Who else was working there at the time?’

‘I don’t think I noticed them, very particularly. But I was sitting between old Dr Undertone and Miss Butterton.’

‘They actually chased him about the reading-room? It seems unbelievable. Surely they’d have been stopped?’

Jane shook her head. ‘It wasn’t quite like that. There was only one man in chase. The little man kept edging away from him. He came quite close to me. And then his pursuer seemed to force him out of the room by something like sheer will-power. It was rather horrible… But not so horrible as what happened later, at – at Milton.’

Bultitude laid down an unbitten muffin and again frowned. He appeared to have less and less liking for a conversation which he had himself insisted on initiating. ‘That happened…to the same little man?’

‘Yes. They got him, you know. And – and I think he knew something they wanted to know. When I arrived there – with the young man to whom that taxi really belongs–’

‘A young man?’

‘His name is Remnant. I don’t really know him. He’s in the Radcliffe. He got hurt – not badly. He’s just had to go to Casualty. But I was saying that when we got there, and broke in–’

‘You broke in?’

‘Well, this Mr Remnant did, and I followed. We found that these people had – had maltreated the little man very badly. He’s dead now. But that’s rather another story. He saved a child.’

‘Saved a child – from these people who were conducting abominable experiments?’

‘Yes.’

Bultitude – who did so many things with ostentation – slipped a handkerchief from his pocket and gave a covert dab at his brow. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘that everything has been worse even than I thought. It is quite wrong to make you talk about it so soon. I apologize.’

‘That’s all rot.’ Jane did not know at all whether she was grateful or impatient. ‘And I thought perhaps that you had something to tell me?’

‘There are one or two things that I can mention.’ Bultitude – and the action, it occurred to Jane, was as incredible as that of the man in the circus who ties himself into knots – Bultitude had stooped down to the lowest of an elaborate system of trays by which he was flanked and grabbed a plate of excessively creamy cakes. But the action had not absolutely excluded from her view a look of swift calculation such as she imagined herself to have seen on his face before. He raised himself, puffing and blowing. ‘Won’t you have one of these?’

Jane took a cake. She was young, and could eat automatically and unknowingly when her body required it. ‘You can mention– ?’ she prompted.

‘I can mention – well, that during the war I had a good deal to do with one or two rather special lines of inquiry. The physiology – and also the psychology – of fear and bravery, endurance and the liability to crack up, aggressive and passive responses to stimuli – things of that sort. For instance, I knew a man called Cline. Later I heard that he had taken a place in the country and was developing new ways of treating drunks. It was a laudable but not very exciting activity. And it didn’t quite fit in with what I remembered of Cline. Naturally, I didn’t think much more about it. Then I gathered that he had associated with him – ostensibly in this blameless species of social medicine – several people whom I knew. The question of why they came together again as crusaders of scientific temperance was a real one, which I found myself turning over from time to time… Those little ones with the cherry on top are excellent.’

‘No more, thank you.’ Jane had set down her cup and was leaning forward on her chair. ‘And then?’

‘I believed myself to have found the explanation. It was an explanation which meant that the whole affair was no business of mine. And so I put the matter out of my mind. It was only yesterday, when the sinister nature of your fiancé’s disappearance was brought home to me, and I learnt from his uncle that he had been seen near Milton, that I saw I must make a crucial inquiry. As you have doubtless heard’ – and Bultitude gave a brilliant if rather strained smile – ‘I have a great talent for knowing all the right people. I rang up a friend in town and learnt confidentially that my explanation of the holding-together of Cline and his group was wrong. I had supposed that they were doing work on a secret list; and that the drunks’ home, and the researching into alcoholism and so on, were genuine and reputable activities serving at the same time as measures of secrecy – secrecy dictated by national security. Now I learnt that nothing of the sort was in question. What they were up to, they were up to on their own account. And I didn’t like it. For some of them had quite patently been persons of altogether impaired moral perceptions.’

Bultitude as he produced this orotund phrase again mopped his brow – but this time openly. There was a moment’s silence. ‘And…about Geoffrey?’ Jane asked. ‘Can’t you say anything about him?’

‘I can say this – that as soon as his uncle said something connecting his disappearance with Milton Porcorum I recalled an element in the conversation of one of these people I have been talking about.’

‘Cline’s friends?’

‘Yes. He was not a scientist but an administrator; an able – and yet again in some ways rather stupid – person, called Squire. This fellow used to praise’ – Bultitude hesitated – ‘used to praise those civilizations, if they are to be called that, which delivered over felons, captives, slaves and the like, alive, to the uses of science. He used to say that it was the way to get results. And there were others who used to back him up. I thought of it as idle talk without substance. But now we must–’

‘Mr Bultitude – tell me.’ Jane had sprung to her feet. ‘Were they – when you knew them – mad as well as bad? If things go wrong with them, and their plans crash, and there are – are people who are no more use to them, will they…would they–’ Jane found herself unable to finish her sentence.

‘No.’ Bultitude had also risen. ‘In my opinion – not.’

‘They won’t… kill Geoffrey?’

He looked at her strangely, and for a moment was silent. She suddenly saw that he, too, was indeed a scientist. The fat poseur, the University Worthy, the celebrated snob had all faded out of him. Instead of these – little estimable but yet human and intimate – there was only something aloof and very cold. He made as if to speak, and then hesitated again. She believed that – out of the sheer instinct of the scientist – he was seeking for words which he could believe an exact representation of the truth as he saw it. ‘Miss Appleby, Geoffrey Ourglass is in grave danger. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. Yet I think I see something which would mean that he is safe from them. But I may be very, very wrong… You must go?’

Jane nodded. She was very pale. ‘I think I’d better go. John may come.’

Bultitude bowed, moved to the door and opened it. ‘Thank you for coming to tea,’ he said gravely. ‘I hope you will come again – not alone, but in very much happier circumstances. Let me walk with you to the lodge.’

‘No – please no!’ Jane was agitated. ‘I am going to hurry. I mean –’

Very faintly, Bultitude smiled. ‘And hurrying is not my line? But you are perfectly right. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’ Jane stepped into the open air, and turned to reach the lodge. As she did so, her eye went uncalculatingly to the window of the room she had just left. Level evening sunlight was pouring into it, and in this illumination she had a final glimpse of her late host. He was in movement – very rapid movement – across his gorgeous room. Then he stopped. She saw his face unnaturally large, framed in the centre of Caravaggio’s struggling Lapithae and Centaurs. He was talking urgently into a telephone.

There was no message from John. Jane took from the shelf that notebook in which her aunt had bequeathed to her the lectures of the Stockton and Darlington Professor, efficiently abridged. But this afternoon the volume had no charm. Recognizing that she was unable to work, she fell to pacing her room. But this was not very satisfactory either; there were too few paces to take, and too many things to step over in taking them. Presently she discovered that her restlessness had a more specific cause than the general anxiety under which she lay. In her encounter with Mark Bultitude there had been something missing. He had failed to say something that he ought to have said. Or
she
had failed –

One of her immediate neighbours was giving a polite tea party to relations and dons. The murmur of talk from this reminded her that she had been invited. She paused, oddly seized in the midst of her grim situation by purely social dismay. It was frightfully uncivil to have forgotten all about the thing. She had better still appear, with whatever apology she could think up… As she moved to the door she remembered – remembered something which, either by inadvertence or some wholly obscure design, she had not told Bultitude. And as she remembered this she forgot about the tea party; it vanished into the oblivion from which she had fished it a moment before. She left her room and once more hurried out of college. She had told Bultitude something of the affair in the upper reading-room which had been the first occasion of her adventures that day. But she had missed something out – and until a moment before she had missed it out of her own thoughts too. The little man who now lay dead at Milton Manor had
hidden
something in the upper reading-room. He had thrust something into a book on old Dr Undertone’s desk. And what he had there hidden must surely be what his captors had sought. Moreover, there was something further that could safely be said. The hidden paper – for it had been that – if it at all came into the picture in this way, was important. The unrelenting manner in which the pursuit of the hunted man had been carried out was surely proof of that. Only the fantastically rapid series of events in which she had been involved could have made so significant a point slip her mind. Emerging into the Woodstock Road, Jane turned right and set off hurriedly for the Bodleian Library. The paper, whatever it was, must be retrieved and given to John. As she gained St Giles’, she almost broke into a run. It had become her accustomed way of moving, that day. But Oxford people are often in a hurry, and nobody paid any attention to her. Had they done so, they might have remarked that something like a procession was involved. An unobtrusive person was, in fact, following Jane Appleby down the street. But this was not all. A second unobtrusive person was following the first.