The Bat that Flits (15 page)

“Christ! Where are you?” he said.

I liked Gillett best when he forgot to use his brown suède voice. There was not even a trace of it at this moment. He might have been a paper boy, the way he was yelling.

And I replied in the same kind.

“Follow your bloody nose,” I said. “I've had enough of this.”

“My God,” Gillett exclaimed when he saw us. But even at that moment he still remembered to do the decent thing.

“You might give another yell,” he said. “The whole Institute's out looking for her.”

It was really Gillett's vindication, that revolver shot. Ever since Gillett had come back with the story about having been fired at, I wasn't the only person who hadn't believed him.

Quite a lot of people would have been delighted to see Gillett caught out when spooning up a handful. And Gillett was quite intelligent enough to realise this. He seemed, therefore, genuinely glad to know that people believed him once more. It's always rather nice to have your spotlessness recognised, but it's a rather high price to pay when you very nearly have your fiancée murdered in the proving process.

And Gillett was certainly becoming more human. When he wasn't over at the Clewes's finding out how Una was getting on, he was down in the bar with me. And naturally
there wasn't very much that he could refuse me. Contrary to his whole nature, he sat there drinking level. Only of course I was having doubles.

Even without the drinks, however, I think that the events of the day had been just a bit too much even for him. He was wearing a dazed, rather dopey sort of look. And all that he wanted to do was to hear about the shooting over and over again.

That didn't suit me. I had already told the Inspector. And Wilton. And left to myself, I would rather have forgotten it for the next couple of hours.

“You're dead certain you didn't catch a glimpse of him?” he asked.

I yawned.

“He could come into this bar now and I shouldn't know it,” I replied.

Gillett edged his chair up closer towards mine.

“Is that just a manner of speaking?” he asked, dropping his voice almost to a whisper and giving his head a little backward jerk as he said, ”Or d'you mean anything special by it?”

I looked in the direction of his nod. There in the doorway Dr. Smith was standing. His small piggy eyes were narrowed up, and he was staring at us.

“The only one who didn't turn out to help us look,” Gillett added, under his breath.

“Perhaps because he was there already,” I said.

But at that moment I wasn't thinking about Dr. Smith. I was back on to Dr. Mann again. I had just remembered that he was the last person I had seen as I left the Institute. He had been walking, rather rapidly for him, in the direction of the Director's office.

But it wouldn't have been in the least difficult for him
to double round the back and get on to the moor ahead of me.

That night I'd taken quite enough of the Institute's gin to be able to dispense with the dormital. And I regretted it. The kind of sleep that you get after gin isn't dreamless. They were the worst kind of dreams, too, with a wild and crazy logic that was horribly convincing. The one I liked least was the one in which Hilda confessed to me that it was she who had fired the shot.

“I'm sorry if I hurt her,” Hilda had said quietly, in her prim, rather precise way. “I only wanted to kill her outright. I shall try to do better next time. There'll be a next time of course. That's because no one suspects me. I'm quite sure the Inspector would never think of looking for a woman.”

My respect for Wilton had never been greater than at this moment. Everyone else was in a flap. The Inspector, assisted by half a dozen extra policemen from Plymouth, was going round the Institute interviewing everyone. Gillett and Bansted and Rogers had constituted themselves a special branch of the Bodmin Beagles and were combing the moor in search of spent cartridge cases and that kind of thing. But Wilton did precisely nothing. With the circles under his eyes showing up like half-crowns, he just locked himself away and remained invisible.

The only piece of violent and dramatic display from his whole department was when one of the cub captains suddenly shot off to Bodmin in the staff car, driving as though he
would have used the siren if there had been one. But that turned out to be only because word had just reached Wilton that a fresh supply of Players had just arrived, and he wanted to snap up a couple of hundred while they were still going. He seemed extraordinarily unconcerned about attempted murder.

All the same, I wasn't too happy about Wilton's behaviour. When a man orders two hundred cigarettes and promptly shuts himself away from everyone it usually means that he is thinking about something. And I didn't like it any better when he suddenly asked me to drop over and see him.

What I wasn't prepared for this time as I went inside was to find that Wilton had other company there. And of all extraordinary choices he had picked on Dr. Smith for a drinking companion. Moreover, from all the signs, Dr. Smith had apparently just succeeded in being clever. The smirk that was on his face might have been applied with a builder's trowel.

“ . . . Around the turn of the century,” he was saying, “the best brains in the chess world grew tired of the limitations imposed by the conventional game. Any number of variants have been tried out at one time or another. But it was Capablanca who took things furthest. He introduced the Marshal and Chancellor. It proved too difficult. The Emperor game was more successful. With nine pieces aside and the Emperor himself combining the moves of Queen and Knight while leaving those pieces themselves with their full powers, the new combinations were practically limitless. Indeed . . . ”

Dr. Smith was in full flood by now. Since the death of Macaulay the world can hardly have seen anything like it. The sheer bad taste was simply appalling.

“So there could be an ‘E,'” I said, turning to Wilton.

“And there could be squares that don't seem to exist on a chess-board. It must have been Emperor Chess or whatever it's called that Kimbell was playing.”

Wilton, however, was still only uncoiling himself after the interruption. And even when he was right way up, with his various limbs in approximately their correct places, he still didn't reply immediately.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “Dr. Smith here doesn't know anything about the game that Kimbell's been playing.”

“Sorry I spoke out of turn,” I answered.

I wouldn't have upset Wilton for anything. Not just at present, that is. But Wilton wasn't all that easily upset.

“Let's ask Kimbell to come over,” he suggested very casually. “You and I can have a drink, while he and Smith play chess together.”

This proposal, however, brought the great Dr. Smith as near to open panic as I have ever seen him. He actually blushed.

“If you don't mind I'd rather not,” he said. “You see, I don't actually play chess, I'm only interested in the mathematical theory. That's quite different. Also”—here he began pawing the ground a bit—“Kimbell and I haven't really got very much in common.”

This didn't seem to put Wilton out in the slightest. Indeed, he hardly seemed to be listening. He was pouring out another drink for Smith while he was still speaking, and obviously couldn't care less who were Dr. Smith's little play-chums and who weren't.

“Oh, well,” he said, “just say good evening to him and slip away quietly. No one'll notice.”

I admired Wilton for the way he had got in that last bit.

But already I was busy admiring Wilton for something else. The suggestion that Kimbell should come over had
evidently not been quite the afterthought that it had sounded. Because at that moment there was a knock at the door, and Kimbell and the Captain arrived with the bond of invisible handcuffs between them.

I have never seen anyone quite so ill at ease as Kimbell. He kept his eyes to the carpet, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other as though he had on a pair of very tight new shoes. It was his palest duck-egg blue complexion that he was wearing this evening.

Simply judging from his appearance I'd have been ready to suspect him of anything. And I noticed that when Wilton thrust a glass into his hand he promptly put it down again. Evidently he wasn't going to risk getting talkative.

But what was even more marked was the episode of the cigarette case. It was a rather nice plain gold one that Wilton carried about with him. And he offered Kimbell a cigarette along with the drink. But Kimbell, who was naturally a thirty-to-fifty-a-day-man, refused it out of hand. I may have been imagining things, but I got the impression that he did not want to touch that plain gold cigarette case for fear of leaving fingerprints.

But Wilton was an expert as a society hostess in not noticing when one of the guests is behaving a bit queerly. He just went straight on in his tired, dreary-sounding voice as though the whole idea of counter-espionage was a frightful sort of bore that fortunately had its funny side.

“We had a warrant out for your arrest last week,” he said. And he dropped his voice so low while he was speaking that Kimbell had to ask him to repeat what he had just said.

“Your arrest,” Wilton repeated. “We had a warrant out.”

Kimbell drew in his lower lip, and began biting at it. There was a long pause.

“Did you?” he asked. He sounded about as casual as a man who has just been told that the house is on fire.

“All because of those chess games of yours,” Wilton went on.

Kimbell's particular shade of egg-shell went about two tones paler.

“How d'you mean?” he asked lamely.

Wilton was lighting another cigarette. And that always took a little time because he didn't seem to know about things like matches and petrol lighters. His idea of the sacred fire was a wisp of smouldering tobacco at one end of a sodden and discoloured butt about quarter of an inch long.

“It was all a mistake,” he said. “Rather a silly one come to think of it. Only nobody in the department plays chess, you see. It was Smith here who solved it for us.”

But Wilton's last remark seemed to have annoyed Kimbell. It was the first thing that had roused him in the slightest. You could now see more than a hint of a yolk beneath the shell.

“Have you been discussing my affairs with Smith?” he asked.

Wilton nodded.

“Expert witness,” he said. “Cleared things up in a moment.”

“And is Hudson here supposed to be an expert in something?” he asked.

“He reached the eighty-first square before we did,” Wilton answered. “De-coding could make nothing of it.”

“De-coding?” Kimbell asked sharply.

“Naturally,” Wilton answered. “If you can't read anything, you send it to De-coding. It's what they're there for. They've had a strip torn off them this time.”

“And what are you doing about it now?” Kimbell asked.

“Playing the game right through,” Wilton answered.

“We've got someone from headquarters staff to help us. Used to play second board at Hastings. He's rather good.” Wilton paused. “I'm afraid I've got some rather bad news for you,” he added.

“Bad news?” Kimbell asked. There was no attempt to keep the anxiety out of his voice.

Wilton nodded. “Received his report this morning,” he said. “Takes a very poor view of your position. Advises you to resign. More dignified.”

The inspector hadn't been doing too well lately, and he knew it. All that his posse of policemen had discovered in their last search of the moor had been a perfectly good thermos flask, a watch glass and a lady's compact. The thermos remained untraced but was obviously unimportant anyway—very few murderers are the picnicking type. The watch glass belonged to Bansted and had come out of the case when he was on the moor looking for Una
after
the shot had been fired—he was able to prove that one. And the compact had Hilda's initials inside it. She identified it immediately and said thank you. I was probably the only person who thought twice about it. But that may have been because I was the only person to have had my dream.

So far as suspicion went there were two of us who were not entirely in the clear—Dr. Mann and myself. In Dr. Mann's case, it was rumour. The whole characteristic of rumour is that you can't pin-point it. It is atmospheric
rather. And I was conscious of the way it was closing in on Dr. Mann. The evidence admittedly was so negative as not to amount to evidence at all—simply that things had been entirely quiet while Dr. Mann was away, and then had broken out again at their most sensational almost immediately after his return. By now it was pretty general knowledge that Dr. Mann really had pinched the penicillin. And, in minds like Bansted's and Rogers's, theft is one of the really awful things, like travelling first with a third-class ticket or seeing if the other end can hear you before you finally push button A. It meant that he was a bounder and outsider, as well as a foreigner. And if there had been rape or arson, let alone attempted murder, anywhere in the neighbourhood it was clear that they would both of them have been ready to pin it on to him.

I, on the other hand, was the Inspector's suspect. And he was keeping me all to himself. Admittedly the ice-cold eye was getting a bit chipped round the edges. But it could still focus. And I must have retold my version of the shooting at least a dozen times. What made it so peculiarly trying was that I made no attempt at improvements, and told the plain truth every time. It seemed safer that way. Safer, but more boring.

Dr. Mann had been telling the truth, too. He really was having an interview with the Old Man at the time when the shot had been fired.

But that was only part of the truth about Dr. Mann, and he wanted me to have the whole and nothing but. In consequence, he began turning up at all hours whenever he
couldn't sleep. It was like having an owl about the place. I used to lie there after lights out, thinking longingly of the dormital bottle and wondering whether at any moment the familiar scratch and flutter would indicate that another visit was impending.