Marazan (8 page)

I was afraid to stay in the hotel; it was becoming clear to me what a nerve-shaking thing it must be to be a genuine fugitive from justice. I didn’t quite consider myself as that yet, though I must say the Abingdon affair had turned me into something remarkably like it. I went out again into the street, and up the town, and presently I turned in to a picture-house.

I like the pictures. It’s the only place where I can enjoy myself when I’m at all tired. I never was one for reading much, and most theatres nowadays seem to require that one should be a little drunk to appreciate them properly. But the pictures are different; I turned in to this show with my pipe, sat down in the darkness behind a pair of couples and began to think what I was going to do next. I thought it pretty certain that I had thrown off any pursuit from Abingdon; at the same time I had managed to lay a good fat red herring there in the approved desperate character style. My next move must be calculated to bring discredit on the fair name of Gullivant.

This was Thursday evening. By this time Joan Stevenson would be in Salcombe fixing up the vessel for me—it seemed incredible that it was only that morning that I had left her and Compton. She would be clear of Salcombe by to-morrow afternoon; I could go down there to-morrow evening if I wished and get to sea at once. I knew that I could trust her to have everything ready for me.

There were two girls in front of me sitting together and flanked by their attendant swains. Suddenly one of them turned to the other:

‘He’s bitten me!’ she said indignantly.

This sent me into a paroxysm of subdued laughter and put a stop to any further planning for the moment. I laughed so much that they heard me and broke away
from the clinch; it was evident that I had spoiled their evening and presently they got up and went out, not without dignity. I was sorry then. It has always seemed to me that one should live and let live; after all, one never knows when one may want to bite a girl in the pictures oneself.

I stayed in there till the end of the show and then strolled back to my hotel. There was nobody about in the hall and I got up to my room without meeting a soul; a circumstance for which I was thankful. I was getting very nervous; I was half sorry that I hadn’t spent the night in the fields somewhere. It was a warm night; I could have done so quite well.

I undressed slowly, pondering my plans. I came to the conclusion that I must lay two more red herrings before I got away to sea—good smelly ones. One I would leave next day in Exeter or the neighbourhood; the other I would lay in Salcombe itself on the Saturday morning, so that there should be no difficulty in connecting me with the departure of the
Irene
. I cannot remember that at any time I worried very much as to what would happen when eventually I brought the
Irene
back to Salcombe and took up my ordinary life again. That didn’t worry me at all, oddly enough. I think that even then I must have realised that things were unlikely to go exactly to plan. For one thing, I thought that Compton would be caught by the police long before I landed to pick him up on the little beach at the entrance to the Helford River.

Still pondering deeply, I got into bed and snuggled down beneath the clothes. Then I swore, more in astonishment than in pain, because it was clear that somebody had been being damn funny with my bed. There was something in it, down at the foot. I lit my candle again and groped about at the bottom of the bed,
and presently fished up a small china candlestick ornamented with a wreath of blue roses and the legend: ‘A Present from Plymouth.’ And then I saw that it had a little china ring for a handle, and through this ring there was stuffed a piece of notepaper, rolled up into a little cylinder. On the paper was the direction, scrawled carefully in pencil:

‘Mr. Compton.’

‘Good God!’ I said weakly, and sat staring at it for a moment. Then I pulled myself together, took the paper from the candlestick, and unrolled it. It was quite a short note.

Short, snappy, and probably very much to the point. It wasn’t signed.

I must have lain in bed staring at the ceiling for fully half an hour, the paper in my hand and the candle guttering by my side. At last I roused myself, blew out the candle, and tried to summarise my conclusions before I went to sleep. The note I placed carefully in the pocket of my coat. I would have burned it there and then but for the reflection that if I did so I should think in the morning I had been under the influence of alcohol.

First of all, my unknown correspondent was in touch with a pretty efficient intelligence bureau of some sort. This bureau was evidently illicit or it would hardly be priming me with information of that sort. They knew
all about Compton and were well disposed towards him. There was the information that Mattarney was to do something on the 15th, ‘and goes on with the boat’. Compton’s important day had been the 15th, and he had spoken about Mattani to the girl. I wondered who Mattani was and whether he was Irish or Italian. Lastly, it was evident that the bureau didn’t know everything, because they hadn’t tumbled to the fact that I had changed places with Compton.

I hoped most devoutly that the police would prove a shade slower at the uptake than this lot.

One thing was clear; that some organisation was keeping a benevolent eye on me in the belief that I was Compton. Whether they would continue to do so when they learned the truth was another matter. I began to feel that I was not the important person that I thought I was; that I was a mere pawn in some game that Compton was playing which I knew nothing about. This worried me. It seemed to me that the best thing I could do was simply to carry on as I had intended, to lay my red herrings to the best of my ability, and to get away to sea as soon as possible. At the moment the only thing I could do was to go to sleep.

I turned over on my side and began to drowse. There was one point in the note that struck me then, and the drowsier I grew the more important it seemed, till it seemed to me that it contained the whole essence of the affair. Mattarney … goes on with the boat. What boat was that? Surely not a liner; the phraseology seemed all wrong for that. A merchant vessel of his own? A yacht? And where was she going to?

Then, just before I went to sleep, my mind went off at a tangent. Private intelligence bureaux with a fatherly interest in criminals might be assumed to be criminal themselves. What grade of criminal was likely to need
the services of such an organisation? Secret societies have never had a very great vogue in England unless for definite purposes of gain. What sort of illicit gain? Coining? That didn’t seem very likely. It would be something more easily concealed, some business in which the risk of detection was small, the profits large, and with a necessity for numerous agents. Possibly the boat was connected with it. Could it be some form of smuggling? That didn’t seem to fit in with modern conditions.

And then, quite suddenly, I remembered what Compton had said when I asked him what he was imprisoned for. He had told me.

‘Embezzlement,’ I had said. ‘Well, that’s a nice clean sort of crime. So long as it wasn’t anything to do with dope or children.’

He had looked at me curiously and had asked rather a curious question considering that he was pressed for time.

‘You don’t like dope?’ he had said. And I had cut him short. I wished now that I hadn’t.

I slept well in spite of everything. I woke at about seven o’clock, got out the note, and read it again. Then I lay for a long time trying to make a plan. The essentials weren’t difficult. I had registered in the hotel in the name of Gullivant. Gullivant had to be firmly identified with Compton, the convict, in such a way as to bring the police hot on the scent. I didn’t think I ought to do that too early in the day. Salcombe was not so very far away from Exeter; I didn’t want my Exeter reputation to follow me there before I was ready for it. I must have a bit of a start.

I dressed thoughtfully and went down to breakfast. It seemed that I was the only person in the hotel, which was very little more than a pub in point of fact. I ate
my breakfast under the eye of the waiter, lit a pipe, and turned into the commercial room. Idly I picked up a paper, and there it was.

It shrieked at me in headlines on the front page:

There was a lot more of it; Grigger had evidently made the most of his opportunity. To every man, I suppose, there comes the chance of fame of one kind or another, and one would be a fool not to make the most of it. At the same time, it looked like being very awkward for me if it ever came out who I was. He had fairly let
himself go. As I read the account I began to get a little indignant; he hadn’t played fair. He said that I had struck him with a loaded stick. I hadn’t; I struck him with my own strong right arm—as he knew perfectly well. My knuckles were still sore.

A waiter passed through the room and saw what I was reading. ‘Shocking thing about this convict, sir,’ he said.

‘Perfectly appalling,’ I said gravely. ‘I can’t think what the police are about, letting this sort of thing go on.’ I was pleasantly conscious that I was providing him with the sensation of his life.

I finished my pipe and went out to the post office. My letter was there, an envelope with thirty pounds in notes in it. I looked for some letter with the notes; it seemed to me that it would have been an improvement if there had been a line or two of encouragement with the money. However, there wasn’t. It was safer so, anyway.

I went back to the hotel and asked for a Bradshaw, asking at the same time if they knew anything about the trains for Liverpool. They didn’t, so I settled myself down with the Bradshaw to map my route to Salcombe. There was a train to Kingsbridge, the station for Salcombe, at 3.30, changing at Newton Abbot. I traced it back; it left Taunton at 2.45. There was a train from Exeter to Taunton at 1.56, arriving at 2.33, and this went on to the Midlands. I could get to Taunton and catch the train back again through Exeter to Kingsbridge with twelve minutes to spare at Taunton. The only thing I should have to be careful about was that nobody recognised me as I passed through Exeter again on my way west.

I got hold of a copy of
The Times
then, tore out that part of the shipping intelligence that covered the sailings from Liverpool, took the rest of the paper upstairs and
left it in my bedroom; I could imagine the delight with which it would be greeted by some amateur detective later in the day. Then I went out into the town again and bought a long green rain-coat and had it made up into a brown-paper parcel. In another shop I bought a deer-stalker hat; this I put in my pocket. Finally, I went back to the hotel and told them that I should be leaving after tea.

There was about a quarter of an hour before lunch. I went upstairs and opened my suitcase; there was the rucksack, the convict clothes, and one or two personal odds and ends of my own that I had stuffed into the pockets of my flying coat before leaving the aerodrome—a razor, shaving-brush, etc. I put these in my pockets. Then I took the convict underclothes, a rough grey shirt and vest with the initials of His Majesty splashed all over them with a stencil, and made them up into a parcel with the rain-coat. The rest of the clothes I put back into the suitcase and left there, a handsome present for the owner of the hotel.

I went downstairs and lunched heavily; I didn’t know exactly when my next meal would be. Then I took my parcel and walked out of the hotel without paying my bill, but leaving my suitcase in the bedroom. They would realise when I didn’t turn up in the evening that all was not as it should be, and presumably would look inside the suitcase to make sure there was security for the debt. I wished them joy of it.

I walked to the station; at the booking office I asked the price of a ticket to Liverpool. I retired without doing any business, came back again and asked the price of a ticket to Birmingham. The clerk looked at me askance this time, particularly when I questioned his information and asked if there was any way whereby I could get to Liverpool any cheaper. Having impressed myself
sufficiently on his memory, I bought a ticket for Birmingham, asked the collector which was the train, and got in. From the train I was intensely gratified to see the clerk come out of his office and start gossiping with the ticket-collector, evidently about me.

Then we started. As soon as we were well under way I left the compartment I was in and walked along the corridor till I found an empty one. Here I unpacked my parcel and put on the rain-coat and hat, making up the convict underclothes into a smaller parcel. Then I tore up my ticket for Birmingham and threw it out of the window. Presently a ticket inspector came down the train; I explained that I had had no time to book at Exeter, and took a ticket to Taunton.

At Taunton I went out into the town, made a rapid circuit round the station, and reached the down platform in time to book a ticket for Plymouth and to catch the train. Remembering the geography of the platform at Exeter I got into a compartment in the front of the train that would pull up well clear of the booking office, my chief hazard. But all went well. At Exeter I remained snuggled up in the far corner of the compartment, and after a five-minute halt the train pulled out of the station without any untoward incident having occurred to mar the even tenor of the afternoon.