The Satan Bug (21 page)

" Talk to you?" It's no easy feat to sneer and shout at the same moment, but Hartnell achieved it. " By God, never!"

" Time is indeed short," Hardanger agreed sombrely. " Ten minutes, Cavell." He nodded to Mrs. Hartnell. She hesitated, looked at her husband, then walked out, followed by Hardanger and Wylie. Hartnell made to follow but I swung across and blocked his way.

"Let me past" His voice was low and ugly. "I've nothing to say to people like you." He gave a short description of what he thought people like me were like, and when I showed no signs of stepping aside he swung back his right fist for a clumsy round-house swing that a blind octogenarian could have parried or avoided. I showed him my gun and he changed his mind.

" Have you a cellar in your house?" I asked.

" A cellar. Yes, we-----" He broke off and his face was ugly again. " If you think you're going to take me-----"

I swung my left fist in' imitation of his own cumbersome effort and when he lifted his right arm in defence I tapped him with the barrel of the Hanyatti, just enough to take the fight out of him, caught his left arm up behind his left shoulder and marched him down towards the rear of the house where a flight of steps led down to a cellar. I closed the door behind us and shoved him roughly on to a rough wooden bench. He sat there for some seconds, rubbing his head, then looked up at me.

" This is a put-up job," he said hoarsely. " Hardanger and Wylie—they knew you were going to do this."

" Hardanger and Wylie are hampered," I said coldly. " They're hampered by regulations concerning interrogation of suspects. They're hampered by the thoughts of careers and pensions. I have no such thoughts. I'm a private individual."

" And you think you'll get away with this?" he said incredulously. "Do you seriously think I won't talk about it?"

" By the time I have finished," I said impersonally, " I doubt whether you will be able to talk. I'll have the truth in fifteen minutes—and I won't leave a mark. I'm an expert on torture, Hartnell—a group of Belgian quislings gave me a course of instruction over a period of three weeks. I was the subject. Try hard to believe I don't care much if you are badly hurt."

He looked at me. He was trying hard not to believe me but he wasn't sure. There was nothing tough about Hartnell.

"Let's try it the easy way first, though," I said. "Let's try it by reminding you that there's a madman on the loose with the Satan Bug threatening to wipe out God knows how much of England if his conditions aren't met—and his first demonstration is due any hour."

" What are you talking about?" he demanded hoarsely.

I told him what Hardanger had told me and then went on, " If this madman wipes out any part of the country the nation will demand revenge. They'll demand a scapegoat and public pressure will be so terrific that they'll get their scapegoat. Surely you're not so stupid as not to see that? Surely you're not so stupid that you can't visualize your wife Jane with the hangman's knot under her chin as the executioner opens the trap-door. The fall, the jolt, the snapping of the vertebrae, the momentary reflex kicking of the feet—can you see your wife, Hartnell? Can you see what you are going to do to her? She is young to die. And death by hanging is a terrible death—and it's still the prescribed penalty for a guilty accessory to murder for gain."

He looked up at me, dull hate and misery in the sick eyes. In the half-light of the cellar his face was grey and there was the sheen of sweat on his forehead.

I went on, "You realize that you can retract any statement you make to me here. Without witnesses, a statement is valueless." I paused and dropped my voice. " You're deep in this, aren't you?"

He nodded. He was staring at the floor.

" Who's the killer? Who's behind all this?"

" I don't know. As God is my judge, I don't know. A man rang me up and offered me money if I'd cause this diversion. Jane and myself. I thought he was crazy and if he wasn't something stank about it... I refused. Next morning £200 arrived by post with a note to say there would be £300

more if I did what I was told. A—a fortnight went by and then he came on the phone again."

" His voice. Did you recognise his voice?"

" It was deep and muffled. I've no idea who it was. I think he was talking with something over the mouthpiece."

" What did he say?"

" The same as his note. There would be this other £300 if I did as he asked."

"And?"

" I said I would." He was still looking downwards. " I—I had already spent part of the money."

"Received the extra £300?"

" Not yet."

"How muct have you spent of the £200 you received?"

" About forty."

" Show me the rest of it."

" It's not here. Not in the house. I went out last night after you had been here and buried the remainder in the woods."

" What was the money in? Denominations, I mean."

" Fivers. Bank of England fivers."

" I see. All very interesting, Doctor." I crossed to the bench where he was sitting, screwed my hand into his hair, jerked his head savagely upwards, jammed the barrel of the Hanyatti into his solar plexus and, as he gasped in pain, brought up the barrel and thrust it between his teeth.

For ten seconds I stood like that, motionless, while he stared up at me with eyes crazy with fear. I felt slightly sick.

" One chance is all you get from me, Hartnell," I said in a low voice. "

You've had that chance. Now the treatment. You rotten contemptible liar. Expect me to believe a crazy story like that? Do you think the brilliant mind behind this would have phoned asking you to make a diversion knowing very well that the chances were high that you would at once go to the police, put them and the Army at Mordon on their guard and so ruin all his plans? Do you think this man, in an area where automatic exchanges are not yet installed, would have spoken to you when any operator with time on her hands could have listened in to every word he said? Are you so naive as to imagine that I would be so naive as to believe that? Do you believe this man, with a genius for organization, would leave everything, the success of all his plans, dependent on the last-minute factor of the strength of your greed? Do you believe he would pay in fivers, which can as often as not be traced and which could also have, if not his prints, then those of the cashier issuing them? Do you expect me to believe that he would offer £500 for the job when he could get a couple of experts from London to do it for a tenth of that.

And, finally, do you think I'd believe your yarn about burying the money in the woods at night—• so that come the dawn if you were told to dig them up by the police you would be unable to find them again?" I stood back, taking the gun from his face. " Or shall we go and look for that money now?"

" Oh, God, it's useless." He was completely crushed, his voice a moan. "

I'm finished, Cavell, I'm finished. I've been borrowing all over the place and now I'm over two thousand in debt."

" Cut the sob-story," I said harshly. " It doesn't interest me."

"Tuffnell—the money-lender—was pressing me hard," he went on dully.

He wasn't looking anywhere near me. " I'm mess secretary at Mordon.

I've embezzled over six hundred pounds. Someone—God knows who or how—found out and sent me a note saying that if I didn't co-operate he'd lay the facts before the police. I co-operated."

I put the gun away. The ring of truth is far from having the bell-like clarity some innocents would believe, but I knew Hartnell was too beaten to prevaricate further. I said, " You have no clue at all as to the identity of the man sending the note?"

" No. And I swear I don't know anything about the hammer or the pliers or the red mud on the scooter."

My leg was now hurting so badly that they'd given me a police car and police driver but even so I didn't enjoy the trip across to Dr.

MacDonald's house. Time was running out and all I could see was a brick wall. That evening there would appear in all the evening papers a carefully worded account of how two Mordon scientists had been arrested and charged with murder and that the final solution of the theft of the Satan Bug was only hours away, and while it might, we hoped, lull the suspicions of the real killers, it wasn't advancing our cause very much.

Blind mob in a fog at midnight. And no leads, just no leads at all.

Hardanger was going to open an intensive investigation in Mordon to find out who might have had access to the mess accounts: probably, I thought bitterly, only a couple of hundred people or so.

I was met at the door of Dr. MacDonald's house by his housekeeper.

She was in her middle thirties, more than passably good-looking and gave her name as Mrs. Turpin. Her face was like thunder, the face of the faithful retainer powerless to defend her master's property against ravage and assault. When I showed my false credentials and asked to be allowed in she said bitterly that another prying nosy-parker more or less couldn't do any harm now.

The house appeared to be alive with plain-clothes policemen. I identified myself to the man in charge, a detective-sergeant by the name of Carlisle. " Found anything interesting yet, Sergeant?" " Hard to say. Been here over an hour, starting from the top, and we've found nothing that strikes me as suspicious in itself. Dr. MacDonald does seem to do himself pretty well, I must say. And one of my men, Campbell, who'd dead keen on all this art rubbish says that a lot of the pictures, pottery and other junk about the place is worth a fair bit of anyone's money. And you ought to see the dark-room he has in the attic: there's a thousand quid's worth of photographic equipment there if there's a penny's worth."

" Dark-room? That might be interesting. Never heard that Dr.

MacDonald was interested in photography."

"Lord bless my soul, yes. He's one of the best amateur photographers in the country. He's the president of our photographic club in Alfringham.

There's a cabinet through in his study there that's fair loaded with trophies. He makes no secret of that, I can assure you, sir."

I left him and his men to their search—if they couldn't find anything neither could I—and went upstairs to the dark-room. Carlisle hadn't exaggerated any, Dr. MacDonald did himself as well in the way of cameras as he did in the other material things of life. But I didn't spend much time there, I didn't see how cameras came into the business at all.

I made a mental note to bring an expert police photographer down from London to check the equipment in the one in a thousand chance that something might turn up, and then went downstairs to see Mrs. Turpin.

" I'm really most sorry about all this upset, Mrs. Turpin," I said pleasantly. " Just pure routine, you know. Must be a pleasure for you to look after a beautiful place like this."

" If you've got any questions to ask, ask them," she snapped, " and none of your smart-alecky beating about the bush."

That didn't leave much room for finesse. I said, "How many years have you been with Dr. MacDonald? "

" Four. Ever since he came here. A finer gentleman you wouldn't find anywhere. Why do you ask?"

" He has a great deal of valuable stuff here." I listed about a dozen items, ranging from the magnificent carpeting to the paintings. "How long has he had those?"

"I don't have to answer any questions, Mr. Inspector." The helpful type.

" No," I admitted. " You don't. Especially if you wish to make things unpleasant for your employer."

She glared at me, hesitated, then answered my questions. At least half the stuff MacDonald had brought with him four years ago. The rest he had bought at fairly regular intervals since. Mrs. Turpin was one of those formidable women with a photographic memory for all the more monumental irrelevancies of life, and she could more or less quote the date, hour and the weather conditions at the time of the delivery of each item. I knew I'd be wasting my time even trying to confirm her statements. If Mrs. Turpin said such and such was so and so, then it was and that was all there was to it.

This certainly helped to set MacDonald in the clear. No sudden suspicious influx of wealth in recent weeks or months, he'd been buying on this lavish scale over a period of years. Where he got the wherewithal to buy on this lavish scale I couldn't guess, but it hardly seemed important now. As he'd said himself, as an independent bachelor without relatives, he could afford to live it up.

I moved back into the sitting-room and saw Carlisle coming towards me with a couple of large files in his hands.

" We're giving Dr. MacDonald's study a thorough going-over now, sir.

Listing everything, of course, but I thought these might interest you.

Seems to be some sort of official correspondence."

It did interest me, but not in the way I expected. The more I turned up about MacDonald, the more innocuous he seemed. The file contained carbon copies of his letters to and replies from fellow-scientists and various scientific organizations throughout Europe, mainly the World Health Organization. There was no doubt from these letters that MacDonald was a highly gifted and highly respected chemist and microbiologist, one of the top men in his own field. Almost half of his letters were addressed to certain affiliations of the W.H.O., particularly in Paris, Stockholm, Bonn and Rome. Nothing sinister or unpatriotic about that, this would be unclassified stuff and the frequent co-signature of Dr. Baxter on the carbon was guarantee enough of that. Besides, although it was supposed to be a secret, all the scientists in Mordon knew that then- mail was under constant censorship. I glanced through the file again and put it aside as the phone rang.

It was Hardanger and he sounded fairly grim. What he had to say made me feel grim, too. A phone call to Alfringham had stated that if police investigations weren't suspended for twenty-four hours something very unpleasant was going to happen to Pierre Cavell, who, as they would be aware, had disappeared. Proof that the caller knew where Cavell was would be forthcoming if police investigations were not halted by six o'clock that evening.

It wasn't the first part of it that made me feel grim. I said, " Well, we were expecting something like it. With all the threats I was dropping at the crack of dawn to-day they must have thought that I was making too much progress for their comfort."