The Mind Readers (17 page)

To her surprise he became completely wooden.

‘That's one thing I never have to consider,' he said fiercely. ‘If I allowed myself to think of the utter uselessness of the secrets which half the villains I deal with pass on to the enemies of the Realm, I'd go mad. All I need to worry about is the man and his evil intent; they're the two things that keep me sane.' He flashed a genuine smile at her to show that he felt the better for the outburst and half-rose politely as she went out.

Mr Campion sat down in the chair and stretched his long legs.

‘What about the chap with the cat?'

‘The Superintendent's people are checking with the Electricity Board now.'

‘I think he called.'

‘Of course he did, Mr Campion. Someone came walking in just as the old woman and the little boy said he did. He can have been a sneak thief or a genuine inspector of any one of the dozens of machines people clutter up their homes with nowadays, but in my opinion he wasn't any customer of mine.'

‘You know all your customers, do you?' It was a friendly question but the Deputy Commander laughed abruptly and turned colour.

‘You are thinking of that new leak of information from that blessed island,' he said. ‘Your people aren't satisfied that there isn't a small patch of fungi we've missed up here, which has a contact down there. Perhaps so, but as for an agent calling and asking for information, I just can't see it. I can't see the importance of the cat either. This city is infested with cats!'

‘What about the question he put to the kid?' Luke suggested. ‘The “toy telephone”?'

‘Perhaps he was a post office engineer talking about a real telephone and the child jumped to a guilty conclusion.'

‘You almost convince me that any foreign agent to be genuine should have a Special Branch man on his tail, as at Liverpool Street Station yesterday.' Mr Campion continued to look and sound serenely affable.

Sydney took the remark as a compliment.

‘I admit we don't get many surprises,' he confessed. ‘There's a pattern in these things and once you've seen it you've seen it.'

Mr Campion sighed and became direct.

‘Tell me, Commander, what is putting you out so in this particular business? I thought it was the E.S.P. element at first but now I'm wondering if it could be the presence in it of children?'

‘Oh, I'm disregarding the children as children,' Sydney exploded. ‘A child one knows is so important to one that one doesn't see anything else. I'm merely giving these two youngsters their proper weight. I see that they may have been used in some sort of experiment. Certainly, one minor foreign official I could name thought so, and wanted to have a chat with them, and employed an earnest female member of the submerged army of fellow-travellers to try to pick them up at the station. We know all about him. You can take it from me that he won't interfere again, simply because he won't get a chance. His superiors haven't considered that performance very clever. In fact it was typical of the sort of melodramatic mistake a certain foreign power has to look out for in its people. Imagine anybody taking two British schoolkids in for questioning in this day and age, and expecting nobody to believe them when they got back. That's what he had in mind, you know! You can write him off. He went home this morning on the noon flight.'

‘Fair enough.' Luke ducked his chin in a gesture of acceptance. ‘So you think young Edward is just out shopping?'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘Didn't you? Are you changing your ground?'

Sydney hesitated. ‘I saw no point in alarming the lady unnecessarily, or arguing with her. Damn it Luke! Surely you see he could be
in
it? He's a person like anybody else. He could have been told some story and offered a chance of a brave new life of scientific adventure in the far romantic East. His father is dead, isn't he?”

Luke's jaw dropped. ‘That kid? You're talking like a boys' comic!'

‘The world I live in is very
like
a boys' comic,' Sydney said mildly. ‘That suggestion isn't off the cards, believe you me.'

Mr Campion stirred uneasily. ‘You think that Mayo has defected?' he enquired.

‘It's the thing that's under my nose. That's the item one usually misses. Also, I don't want to believe it, naturally. As I've just told you, the island's security has only just had our “full works”. It was a top priority job and all personnel were re-screened.'

‘Which was followed smartly by this fresh gusher at the beginning of the week?'

‘Exactly!' Sydney was nettled and showed it. ‘I am staggered by the idea that there could be an
unknown
development on that island. I shouldn't have thought anything unknown to Security could have come out of that damn place for the next twelve months. You're a Security man. You should know what was done.'

‘Wait a moment,' Luke put in. ‘We don't say the amplifiers came from
Godley's
or that Mayo invented them.'

The deputy Commander smiled his secret smile again but did not comment and Luke's dark face grew a shade darker still.

‘You don't know what's coming to you, mate, when that little lot reaches perfection! Mayo didn't make those things. They took him by complete surprise.'

‘Possibly.' The Deputy Commander made it clear he did not want to quarrel. ‘He certainly came through the probe and so did Mrs Mayo. All her nonsense was explained in lucid medical detail in the report I read.'

Campion gave up fencing.

‘My dear chap,' he said, ‘you're the real expert. Put us in the picture.'

Sydney relaxed visibly. ‘It's not what I
want
to think,' he began. ‘But take a look at it like this: we had just closed the files on our investigation into the island personnel when the foreign propaganda press came out with the story you know. I thought the tale about the experiments on kids at school was so ridiculous that I never even had it checked.'

‘Understandable,' Luke mumbled.

‘It was,' Sydney said defensively. ‘Or at least I thought so, considering that we knew that a schoolmaster who was a suspect had put in five weeks at the school last summer and the place had been watched ever since!' He laughed bleakly. ‘Now, while I'm still biting my nails, Mayo stages a typical scientist's walk-away. He goes in the accepted manner, whilst out with his wife, but this time Mrs Mayo has been chivvied into repeating her disclosures in front of two witnesses whose very job it is to take any such dangerous talk seriously. Moreover, when he goes, he takes with him secret appliances which have been actually obtained by these same responsible and interested witnesses—I am talking about you two—from two children who have come from the very school mentioned in the propaganda report. Mayo has all night to get out of the country and the next day one of his guinea-pigs wanders off after him. All ports and airfields are being watched
now
, naturally. But we're too late and our precautions mean that sooner or later the tale will break. Believe me,
that is what is intended.
It's all propaganda.'

Luke, who had listened to the recital with mounting dismay, suddenly exploded.

‘Too subtle by half!' he protested. ‘That's as involved as the old comic story! “You swine, you tell me you are going to Prague to make me think you are going to Warsaw while all the time you are going to Prague!” Who's going to be bothered with that rigmarole?'

‘Parliament,' said Sydney placidly. ‘Haven't you read of them at it? “Is it true that a senior member of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police was warned by Mrs Mayo of her husband's intended flight, and did the officer in question stand by while the secret device was handed to Mr Mayo after it was taken from a pupil from
the school mentioned by the Propaganda Press only four days previously
?” A very reasonable question from the right kind of honest mutton-head. That's how I read it.'

Luke was absolutely quiet for a second or so. Mr Campion rose to his feet and wandered down the room to the window and back again. His hands were in his pockets and his chin down.

‘I suppose you must be right five times out of nine,' he said at last. ‘If you ignore the human factor and most of the details absolutely, you gain a certain advantage, but in a case like this surely the method fails. I've met Mayo and seen him under stress. He's a most familiar type, afraid of the “porpoise close behind him” perhaps, but you couldn't bribe him. If you looked into his soul I should say you'd find that what he really wants from life is a knighthood!'

‘This porpoise he's afraid of? Which is that?'

‘The one who's treading on his tail. Anybody coming up behind him. The cleverer chap.'

‘Oh.' Sydney lowered his ball point. He seemed disappointed. ‘If I'm ignoring the human factor,' he said, ‘you're overlooking the characteristics of dry rot. One day a floor board looks as solid as ever it was. Then you put your weight on it and suddenly it crumbles like pie-crust. That's what fungus is. I don't accuse Mayo yet, but I say he is behaving in a very characteristic way and according to a pattern we know. Also, and get this right, I think that what he is doing has much more to do with backing up a piece of propaganda than with getting a bit of secret equipment out of the country.'

Campion turned back to the window and Luke took over. He was considerably shaken and it was making him belligerent.

‘Talking of significant behaviour, Chum, was there any mention in that security survey of yours of a lad called Fred Arnold?'

‘The bartender? He was the natural suspect.'

‘I should have thought so. What's he doing down there? A man with his qualifications could earn so much more anywhere else.'

‘Exactly what we all thought, Superintendent.' Sydney was pleased. ‘Actually there
is
a little mystery concerning him and it took us a long time to tease it out. What do you think it was? He's the Boss's man—Lord Ludor's own personal spy. I can show you his dossier. He led us a dance because he's most discreet and so is Ludor, the old fox. I understand your people are now considering the man themselves.'

He broke off. Campion, who had smothered an exclamation, threw up the window and leaned out. They were on the top floor and the wide grey street which ran beside the shining steel of the river was busy and a long way below. It was already misty and the angle of vision was abrupt. Campion drew back and, closing the window turned round, dusting his hands.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I appear to have hallucinations. I thought I saw Edward scurrying down to the corner. He was wearing a beret, though, which isn't in the Pontisbright tradition. Those flames of theirs are seldom hidden under any pot! Forgive me, Commander. Luke and I are both ordered down to the Island then?'

‘That was what I understood, sir.' Sydney had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Doubtless you'll be informed but I understood that both the Director and the Commander felt that Mayo should be given until the end of the working day to show up or at least to report the devices and, after that, the whole thing should come out into the open—but only as far as the experts down there are concerned. It is felt that the sources of the “secret items” which Mr Mayo has with him must be down there even if they are largely his own, and must be located.'

Mr Campion's pale face was betraying interest. ‘Someone has to talk to Professor Tabard?'

‘I gathered that was the idea. The minister is being kept in touch and Lord Ludor will be there. You actually tried one of the secret gadgets on, I hear, Superintendent?'

Luke's reply was forestalled by the arrival of a clerk with two messages, one for each of the senior men. Sydney sat looking at his own for some seconds before he cleared his throat and glanced across the room.

‘This is the “off the cuff” answer to our Rubari enquiry,' he said shortly. ‘The mother is away travelling on business but the boy is at home in the care of an
au pair
girl. Also staying with them in the apartment is the young son of the mother's close friend, Maurice Gregoire Gregoire of Daumier et Cie.'

Mr Campion was staring at him.

‘Is that the Daumier of the Electronics Group?'

Sydney nodded and decided to look at him. ‘I suppose they're Godley's chief competitor in Europe. Gregoire is Mayo's opposite number, isn't he?' He threw the chit down on the desk before him. ‘Now I don't know
what
to say!'

‘What about this?' Luke passed over his own message. It was on the back of a telegram form as obtained from the public desk in a post office and was neatly written in a precise if youthful hand.

‘Dear Mr Luke: Could I trouble you to telephone my Aunt Amanda to tell her not to worry even if I have to
stay away all night
? I have to wait for a friend who may be very late indeed. I shall certainly be back tomorrow. I have had to bother you because I am afraid you may have had the Rectory line tapped to catch me. Telephoning is awkward, because I cannot think how to make it obvious that I am not being
made
to do anything. I will give this note to the man on your door. As he is a Trained Observer he can describe me to you and guarantee that I am not being ordered about. Many thanks in anticipation of your kindness. Sincerely yours. Edward Longfox. P.S. It is all
most
important or I would never worry you. You will know all about everything on Tuesday.'

As Sydney passed the note to Campion, his comment was unexpectedly human: ‘Well,
he
seems to know what he's doing next,' he said. ‘It's more than I do!'

‘
I NEVER TOOK
to Sydney and his blasted toadstools,' said Luke. ‘He was trying to put the wind up me with his propaganda nonsense and he did, which is unforgivable. Wait till I get my iggy-tube. That'll make his outfit look a bit passé!'