N Or M? Part 24

"Yes." He stared.

"A fast one? We must get to Sans Souci at once. If only we're in time. Before they telephone here, and get no answer."

Two minutes later they were in the car, and it was threading its way through the streets of Leatherbarrow. Then they were out in the open country and the needle of the speedometer was rising.

Mr Grant asked no questions. He was content to sit quietly whilst Tuppence watched the speedometer in an agony of apprehension. The chauffeur had been given his orders and he drove with all the speed of which the car was capable.

Tuppence spoke only once.

"Tommy?"

"Quite all right. Released half an hour ago."

She nodded.

Now, at last, they were nearing Leahampton. They darted and twisted through the town, up the hill.

Tuppence jumped out and she and Mr Grant ran up the drive. The hall door, as usual, was open. There was no one in sight. Tuppence ran lightly up the stairs.

She just glanced inside her own room in pa.s.sing, and noted the confusion of open drawers and disordered bed. She nodded and pa.s.sed on, along the corridor and into the room occupied by Mr and Mrs Cayley.

The room was empty. It looked peaceful and smelled slightly of medicines.

Tuppence ran across to the bed and pulled at the coverings.

They fell to the ground and Tuppence ran her hand under the mattress. She turned triumphantly to Mr Grant with a tattered child's picture book in her hand.

"Here you are. It's all in here -"

"What on -"

They turned. Mrs Sprot was standing in the doorway staring.

"And now," said Tuppence, "let me introduce you to M! Yes. Mrs Sprot! I ought to have known it all along."

It was left to Mrs Cayley arriving in the doorway a moment later to introduce the appropriate anti-climax.

"Oh dear," said Mrs Cayley, looking with dismay at her spouse's dismantled bed. "Whatever will Mr Cayley say?"

Chapter 15.

"I ought to have known it all along," said Tuppence.

She was reviving her shattered nerves by a generous tot of old brandy, and was beaming alternately at Tommy and at Mr Grant - and at Albert, who was sitting in front of a pint of beer and grinning from ear to ear.

"Tell us all about it, Tuppence," urged Tommy.

"You first," said Tuppence.

"There's not much for me to tell," said Tommy. "Sheer accident let me into the secret of the wireless transmitter. I thought I'd got away with it, but Haydock was too smart for me."

Tuppence nodded and said: "He telephoned to Mrs Sprot at once. And she ran out into the drive and lay in wait for you with the hammer. She was only away from the bridge table for about three minutes. I did notice she was a little out of breath - but I never suspected her."

"After that," said Tommy, "the credit belongs entirely to Albert. He came sniffing round like a faithful dog. I did some impa.s.sioned Morse snoring and he cottoned on to it. He went off to Mr Grant with the news and the two of them came back late that night. More snoring! Result was, I agreed to remain put so as to catch the sea forces when they arrived."

Mr Grant added his quota.

"When Haydock went off this morning, our people took charge at Smugglers' Rest. We nabbed the boat this evening."

"And now, Tuppence," said Tommy. "Your story."

"Well, to begin with, I've been the most frightful fool all along! I suspected everybody here except Mrs Sprot! I did once have a terrible feeling of menace, as though I was in danger - that was after I overheard that telephone message about the 4th of the month. There were three people there at the time - I put down my feeling of apprehension to either Mrs Perenna or Mrs O'Rourke. Quite wrong - it was the colourless Mrs Sprot who was the really dangerous personality.

"I went muddling on, as Tommy knows, until after he disappeared. Then I was just cooking up a plan with Albert when suddenly, out of the blue, Antony Marsdon turned up. It seemed all right to begin with - the usual sort of young man that Deb often has in tow. But two things made me think a bit. First, I became more and more sure as I talked to him that I hadn't seen him before and that he never had been to the flat. The second was that, though he seemed to know all about my working at Leahampton, he a.s.sumed that Tommy was in Scotland. Now that seemed all wrong. If he knew about anyone, it would be Tommy he knew about, since I was more or less unofficial. That struck me as very odd.

"Mr Grant had told me that Fifth Columnists were everywhere - in the most unlikely places. So why shouldn't one of them be working in Deborah's show? I wasn't convinced, but I was suspicious enough to lay a trap for him. I told him that Tommy and I had fixed up a code for communicating with each other. Our real one, of course, was a Bonzo postcard, but I told Antony a fairy tale about the Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured saying.

"As I hoped, he rose to it beautifully! I got a letter this morning which gave him away completely.

"The arrangements had been all worked out beforehand. All I had to do was to ring up a tailor and cancel a fitting. That was an intimation that the fish had risen."

"Coo-er!" said Albert. "It didn't half give me a turn. I drove up with a baker's van and we dumped a pool of stuff just outside the gate. Aniseed, it was - or smelt like it."

"And then -" Tuppence took up the tale - "I came out and walked in it. Of course it was easy for the baker's van to follow me to the station and someone came up behind me and heard me book to Yarrow. It was after that that it might have been difficult."

"The dogs followed the scent well," said Mr Grant. "They picked it up at Yarrow station and again on the track the tire had made after you rubbed your shoe on it. It led us down to the copse and up again to the stone cross and after you where you had walked over the downs. The enemy had no idea we could follow you easily after they themselves had seen you start and driven off themselves."

"All the same," said Albert, "it gives me a turn. Knowing you were in that house and not knowing what might come to you. Got in a back window, we did, and nabbed the foreign woman as she came down the stairs. Come in just in the nick of time, we did."

"I knew you'd come," said Tuppence. "The thing was for me to spin things out as long as I could. I'd have pretended to tell if I hadn't seen the door opening. What was really exciting was the way I suddenly saw the whole thing and what a fool I'd been."

"How did you see it?" asked Tommy.

"Goosey, goosey gander," said Tuppence promptly. "When I said that to Commander Haydock he went absolutely livid. And not just because it was silly and crude. No, I saw at once that it meant something to him. And then then was the expression on that woman's face - Anna - it was like the Polish woman's, and then of course, I thought of Solomon and I saw the whole thing."

Tommy gave a sigh of exasperation.

"Tuppence, if you say that once again, I'll shoot you myself. Saw all what? And what on earth has Solomon got to do with it?"

"Do you remember that two women came to Solomon with a baby and both said it was hers but Solomon said, 'Very well, cut it in two.' And the false mother said, 'All right.' But the real mother said, 'No, let the other woman have it.' You see, she couldn't face her child being killed Well, that night that Mrs Sprot shot the other woman, you all said what a miracle it was and how easily she might have shot the child. Of course, it ought to have been quite plain then! If it had been her child, she couldn't have risked that shot for a minute. It meant that Betty wasn't her child. And that's why she absolutely had to shoot the other."

"Why?"

"Because, of course, the other woman was the child's real mother." Tuppence's voice shook a little.

"Poor thing - poor hunted thing. She came over a penniless refugee and gratefully agreed to let Mrs Sprot adopt her baby."

"Why did Mrs Sprot want to adopt the child?"

"Camouflage! Supreme psychological camouflage. You just can't conceive of a master spy dragging her kid into the business. That's the main reason why I never considered Mrs Sprot seriously. Simply because of the child. But Betty's real mother had a terrible hankering for her baby and she found out Mrs Sprot's address and came down here. She hung about waiting for her chance, and at last she got it and went off with the child.

"Mrs Sprot, of course, was frantic. At all costs she didn't want the police. So she wrote that message and pretended she found it in her bedroom, and roped in Commander Haydock to help. Then, when we'd tracked down the wretched woman, she was taking no chances and shot her... Far from not knowing anything about firearms, she was a very fine shot! Yes, she killed that wretched woman - and because of that I've no pity for her. She was bad through and through."

Tuppence paused, then she went on: "Another thing that ought to have given me a hint was the likeness between Vanda Polonska and Betty. It was Betty the woman reminded me of all along. And then the child's absurd play with my shoe-laces. How much more likely that she'd seen her so-called mother do that - not Carl von Deinim! But as soon as Mrs Sprot saw what the child was doing, she planted a lot of evidence in Carl's room for us to find and added the master touch of a shoe-lace dipped in secret ink."

"I'm glad that Carl wasn't in it," said Tommy. "I liked him."

"He's not been shot, has he?" asked Tuppence anxiously, noting the past tense.

Mr Grant shook his head.

"He's all right," he said. "As a matter of fact I've got a little surprise for you there."

Tuppence's face lit up as she said: "I'm terribly glad - for Sheila's sake! Of course we were idiots to go on barking up the wrong tree after Mrs Perenna."

"She was mixed up in some I.R.A. activities, nothing more," said Mr Grant.

"I suspected Mrs O'Rourke a little - and sometimes the Cayleys -"

"And I suspected Bletchley," put in Tommy.

"And all the time," said Tuppence, "it was that milk and water creature we just thought of as Betty's mother."

"Hardly milk and water," said Mr Grant. "A very dangerous woman and a very clever actress. And, I'm sorry to say, English by birth."

Tuppence said: "Then I've no pity or admiration for her - it wasn't even her country she was working for." She looked with fresh curiosity at Mr Grant. "You found what you wanted?"

Mr Grant nodded.

"It was all in that battered set of duplicate children's books."

"The ones that Betty said were nasty," Tuppence exclaimed.

"They were nasty," said Mr Grant drily. "Little Jack Horner contained very full details of our naval dispositions. Johnny Head in Air did the same for the Air Force. Military matters were appropriately embodied in 'There Was a Little Man and He Had a Little Gun.'"

"And Goosey, Goosey Gander?" asked Tuppence.

Mr Grant said: "Treated with the appropriate reagent, that book contains, written in invisible ink, a full list of all prominent personages who are pledged to a.s.sist an invasion of this country. Amongst them were two Chief Constables, an Air Vice-Marshal, two Generals, the Head of an Armaments Works, a Cabinet Minister, many Police Superintendents, Commanders of Local Volunteer Defense Organizations, and various military and naval lesser fry, as well as members of our own Intelligence Force."

Tommy and Tuppence stared.

"Incredible!" said the former.

Grant shook his head.

"You do not know the force of the German propaganda. It appeals to something in man, some desire or l.u.s.t for power. These people were ready to betray their country not for money, but in a kind of megalomaniacal pride in what they, they themselves, were going to achieve for that country. In every land it has been the same. It is the Cult of Lucifer - Lucifer, Son of the Morning. Pride and a desire for personal glory!"

He added: "You can realize that, with such persons to issue contradictory orders and confuse operations, how the threatened invasion would have had every chance to succeed."

"And now?" said Tuppence.

Mr Grant smiled.

"And now," he said, "let them come! We'll be ready for them!"

Chapter 16.

"Darling," said Deborah. "Do you know I almost thought the most terrible things about you?"

"Did you?" said Tuppence. "When?"

Her eyes rested affectionately on her daughter's dark head.

"That time when you sloped off to Scotland to join father and I thought you were with Aunt Gracie. I almost thought you were having an affair with someone."

"Oh, Deb, did you?"

"Not really, of course. Not at your age. And, of course, I know you and Carrot Top are devoted to each other. It was really an idiot called Tony Marsdon who put it into my head. Do you know, mother - I think I might tell you - he was found afterwards to be a Fifth Columnist. He always did talk rather oddly - how things would be just the same, perhaps better, if Hitler did win."

"Did you - er - like him at all?"

"Tony? Oh, no - he was always rather a bore. I must dance this."

She floated away in the arms of a fair-haired young man, smiling up at him sweetly. Tuppence followed their revolutions for a few minutes, then her eyes s.h.i.+fted to where a tall young man in Air Force uniform was dancing with a fair-haired slender girl.

"I do think. Tommy," said Tuppence, "that our children are rather nice."

"Here's Sheila," said Tommy.

He got up as Sheila Perenna came towards their table.

She was dressed in an emerald evening dress which showed up her dark beauty. It was a sullen beauty tonight and she greeted her host and hostess somewhat ungraciously.

"I've come, you see," she said, "as I promised. But I can't think why you wanted to ask me."

"Because we like you," said Tommy, smiling.