The Bat that Flits (10 page)

The lady's footprint interested me a great deal. Dr. Mann had very small feet, rather like castors on a comfortably built armchair. And he had certainly been wearing gym-shoes when he came back. I didn't wonder that he was jittery,

I discovered afterwards that there was another piece of evidence that had confirmed the police in their belief that they were looking for a woman. The evidence was a small embroidered handkerchief with traces of what seemed to be scent still on it. Only it wasn't scent at all, really. It was NASOL, one of W.D.P.'s products, with which Dr. Mann had been trying to fight back a common cold. And the handkerchief had been intended for his elderly female relative in the East Zone. It was simply that Dr. Mann had run through his own stock that had made him take his old Grossmutter's along with him.

But by then I had decided that perhaps the Inspector's I.Q. wasn't so very high after all. And that was because he was so ingenuous about his reasons for wanting a blood specimen from each one of us.

“The county pathologist will be over in the morning, sir,” he said. “It won't take a moment and it's quite painless.”

“But don't tell me that there was blood all over the money orders and things,” I exclaimed, clasping my two hands together. “Good gracious, how terrible! Why, they'll have to cancel them.”

“There were traces of blood,” he admitted.

“And if you find a trace of blood can you really say who it came from?” I asked.

I was leaning right forward by now like a gallery first-nighter.

The Inspector nodded.

“There are groups. We work that way,” he said with the simple pride of a Cornishman speaking of something where Cornwall was so obviously leading the rest of the world. “Then if the blood in the stain and the blood in the specimen are found to belong to different groups we know that we're on the wrong track. It's more a method of eliminating the innocent than finding the guilty party, if you follow me, sir.”

“It's difficult,” I said. “But I think I do. And are you sure it's really painless—getting the blood, I mean?”

“Just a pin-prick.”

“You don't actually
see
the blood, do you?”

The Inspector brought out his iced-gimlet look again.

“It isn't the size of a dewdrop,” he said pityingly.

“Well, thank you, Inspector,” I replied. “You've explained it very nicely. I want to help you all I can, and I'm quite ready to consider it. I'll speak to my doctor this evening. If he thinks I can give that much with safety you're welcome.”

But I don't think that the Inspector was really an understanding kind of man. Either that or he was in a hurry. This
time it wasn't simply the ice squirt that he gave me. It was the whole berg, hurled hard and hammered home.

By now, however, the Inspector was already on his way out. M.I.5 had decided to take over from him. Their own men, a colonel and a couple of captains, had come straight down from London the day the missing culture was reported.

The two captains didn't amount to very much. They were mere note-takers and coffee-carriers. But I must say that I was more favourably impressed by the head of the mission. He was a chain-smoker like myself, and he had bags under his eyes that would have roused the suspicions of any Customs officer.

Wilton, his name was, and I found out afterwards that he had been in the Egyptian drug-control racket for over twenty years. He was a B.Sc. London. But somewhere in the Courts of the Pashas, he had acquired a kind of unconcealed boredom that made him indistinguishable from the genuine Cambridge article. And thank God, when it came to cloak-and-dagger stuff in a research laboratory, he spoke our language.

The Director had made over his breakfast-room for temporary Gestapo headquarters. And Wilton sent across almost straight away to say that he would like to see me. But compared to the ice-eyed Inspector, Wilton might never have conducted the interrogation of a witness before. He simply stretched his long, thin legs in front of the fireguard, wriggled his shoulders like a camel settling itself, and said: “Well, tell me all about yourself.”

I grinned. “There isn't much to tell beside what's in the dossier,” I said.

“Isn't there?” he asked.

While he was speaking he lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of his old one, and dropped the butt into an open ashtray without even troubling to stamp it out. There was a whole lifetime of excessive smoking in that single gesture. But he didn't press the point. Didn't even give the impression of being the sort of man to press anything.

“Where do you suppose the stuff's gone?” he asked at last.

I paused.

“Russia, I suppose.”

“And do you think it got there?”

“One of us must have sent it.”

“Any idea which one?”

I shook my head.

“Not a clue,” I told him.

“That's my trouble, too,” he said.

While he was speaking, he uncrossed those long legs of his. And now that he was standing I could see how tall he was. He wasn't camel-type any longer. It was definitely somewhere in the giraffe series that he belonged.

“Have a drink,” he asked.

Considering that it was only makeshift, he had got the place remarkably well equipped in no time. There was a bottle of Scotch and two of Gordon's in the corner cupboard, that up to last week had contained nothing more exciting than a few pieces of Crown Derby and old Rockingham.

When I said, “Gin,” he poured me out a glass that even I looked at respectfully. And I found myself hoping for his sake that M.I.5 took a generous view of his expense accounts. Then we both had the other half. We didn't say very much
while we were drinking. And Wilton spent most of the time simply staring out of the window.

“Mind if I go on asking you a few questions?” he inquired, still with the same general air of vagueness.

It occurred to me then that, perhaps the Egyptian sun had got at the poor fellow. Either that or he'd taken to sampling some of the choicer drugs that he had confiscated. Because in the real sense of the word, he hadn't so far asked me anything. We'd just been gossiping.

“Carry right on,” I invited him.

“If the stuff's gone to Russia, I suppose that means a sympathiser here in Bodmin, doesn't it?” he said.

He seemed to be thinking aloud. And the thought didn't strike me as particularly brilliant either.

“That's how I see it,” I agreed with him.

“Noticed any signs of Communist activity since you came here?”

I shook my head.

“Not a hint.”

It was a silly question, anyhow: Communists aren't all that dumb.

“Happen to know if any of the people you're working with are Commies?”

Again I shook my head.

“Nobody tells me anything,” I answered.

“Or ex-Commies?”

“Not so far as I know.”

He continued to stare out of the window as though sunlight and white clouds were something new to him. And I wondered if the cross-examination was now over.

“That was an awful lot of tripe you told the Inspector,” he said at last. “What made you?”

“Just shyness,” I said.

“D'you often go into Plymouth?”

“Who says I was in Plymouth?”

Wilton had closed his eyes by now. From the peaceful expression on his face he might have been ready to doze off at any moment.”

“You were, weren't you?”

This time I was the one who paused.

“As a matter of fact, I was,” I said simply.

There was another pause.

“Would you like me to make a fresh statement?” I asked. Wilton blew his lips out.

“Not worth it,” he said. “Besides you probably don't remember the details by now.”

We didn't seem to me to be getting along very fast. And the same thought must have crossed Wilton's mind. He straightened himself like one of those Angle-Poise lamps returning to the upright, and got up.

“I'd much rather you forgot about it and helped me to find a Commie or an ex-Commie here on the staff of the Institute,” he went on. “That's your job.”

“But why me?” I asked.

“Only because I thought you might be able to help me,” he replied. “But don't lose any sleep over it. If you can't, somebody else will. The facts are bound to turn up sooner or later.”

With that, he shook hands with me. And I noticed then what a limp, feeble sort of handshake the man had. My own grip seemed rather bad form by comparison. But I didn't like the turn the conversation had just taken. And he seemed rather to be harping on it.

My trouble was that I had joined the Communist Party right back in 1926. And I didn't want to have anybody nosing his way around me.

I wasted a lot of time wondering how much Wilton really knew. And, in the end, I decided that it couldn't be very much. Otherwise, he would have pounced. Not that I was alone in wondering. There seemed to be an unconscionable amount of speculation going on up at the Institute.

Alone among us, it was our great Dr. Smith who showed brave by publishing his conclusions.

“Looked at dispassionately,” he said with irritating slowness, “it might appear that some person or persons”—here he stared hard at Kimbell and Swanton while he was speaking—“had an interest in preventing, or at least delaying, any positive outcome of the experiments. Now that the work is over, the accidents have ceased entirely, and the law of averages can apply again. That is a characteristic of all sabotage.”

“Thank God for that,” Bansted said devoutly, before either Kimbell or Swanton could get their little forked tongues into the forward position. But a split second later Kimbell cut in like a radio comedian.

“So it was sabotage, was it?” he asked. “Have you told the
Sunday Express
about it?”

“Sabotage, or rather the fear of it,” observed Swanton, taking the cue up perfectly, “only occurs during a decline. Any society that is expanding never gives a thought to it. But once the whole bloody thing starts crumbling then the word begins to crop up. Look at the papers. Ammunition train blows up—sabotage. Naval turbine breaks down—sabotage.
You never even hear the word ‘strike' nowadays; it's
industrial
sabotage every time.”

By now Kimbell was talking again.

“As for these accidents having stopped,” he asked, “isn't it a bit early to speak? How about your theory, if something happened to-morrow? Gremlins do sometimes return, you know.”

And to-morrow was precisely when the next accident did occur. One of us, Gillett's own girl-friend Una, very nearly went up to heaven in gauge oo pieces.

I don't expect laymen to know what an anaerobic jar is. But if you're working on the anaerobes you have to simulate their normal living conditions, and exclude the oxygen. To do this you take a large glass jar, seal it hermetically and begin pumping the air out. Then when most of it has gone you add a little hydrogen to taste.

So far, it's mere nursery stuff. But just to make sure that all the oxygen has really gone and that you're giving the anaerobes a sporting chance, you begin heating the mixture. This brings on condensation and leaves room for more hydrogen. By the time you're through, it's a thoroughly hydrogen-happy little jar that you have with you. But the heating bit can be tricky. There is an element of palladium black right inside the jar to lay on the heat. Naturally the little capsule is all wired off, like the Davy safety lamp that miners use. That's because hydrogen when mixed with even the remains of oxygen and brought into contact with a naked flame makes one big Brock's benefit. And it's easy enough to monkey about with the element to make it lethal.

It was the demure one who was working the jar. And the two of us were the only people who were in the lab. at the time. Young Mellon, who had just located a new ash-blonde
in the St. Austell area, had slipped off rather early to reconnoitre, and Gillett had taken Bansted out to gloat over a pregnant guinea-pig. I was aware somewhere at the back of my mind of the hum of an electric motor which told me that the demure one was using the vacuum pump on the anaerobic jar, and I heard the faint clink of metal on metal as she fitted the spanner into the hydrogen cylinder. Nothing on earth could have been more normal so far.

But it didn't stop that way for long. The demure one bent down for a second to pick up a pencil or something that she had dropped, and at the same instant the jar exploded. There was a bright white flash like a pocket atom-bomb, a bang like Judgment Day, and no more anaerobic jar.

And no more demure one—that was my first thought. I made my way as quickly as I could across the litter of busted plates and smashed-up bottles, and found her. She was lying in a heap on the floor right up against the side of the opposite bench. There was blood on her forehead where one of the little slivers of glass had cut it, and her legs were twitching. She might have been dead or she might not. I couldn't say.

I bent down to pick her up. And, while I was still holding her, Gillett came bursting in.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I told him. “It's just the way friend Kimbell said it would be.”

“Is she all right?”

I nodded.

“You'd better have her,” I said.

And, with that, I passed her over from my arms into his. Then I paused. Gillett was so pale that I thought for a moment that he was going to faint, too.

Then something happened that made the whole thing seem odder still. What's more, the oddity came from quite the most unexpected quarter. It came from Hilda. And when she asked me if I would go for a walk with her on the moor, I knew that there was really something up.

She was an uncompromisingly open-air kind of girl, and she walked rather faster than I did. If I had attempted even to hold her hand I should have had to start running just to make sure that I didn't have to let go of her again. Then, about a mile from the Institute, Hilda got to the point.